Prussian battlefield drill made armies an artificial machine three times more destructive.

Evidence

Discipline of this sort was a new invention, adopted in most European countries only a generation or so before the nizam jadid, following the dramatic Prussian victories in the Seven Years War (1756–63). The Prussians had introduced revolutionary techniques of precise timing, rapid signalling, and rigorous conformity to discipline, out of which an army could be manufactured as what the Prussian military instructions called an ‘artificial machine’. Other armies in comparison would now seem like collections of ‘idle and inactive men’, a perception that was to change the way not just an army but any human group was viewed – as the ordinary Egyptian was to discover. Such a ‘machine’ could fire with a rapidity three times that of other armies, making it three times as destructive, and could be expanded, wheeled, and withdrawn with mechanical ease. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 137

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of the army as an ‘artificial machine’ that fires three times faster is a crisp, memorable conversation nugget about military history.
• SHARE: One for a military-history or organizational-theory minded friend: precise Prussian timing techniques changed how all human groups, not just armies, were viewed.