Jeffrey Hill
In 1571, at the Battle of Lepanto, Ali Pasha, the commander of Ottoman forces, was struck in the head by an arquebusier’s bullet. When he died, his hands were still holding a composite bow. Nearly thirty thousand Ottomans were lost that day, compared to the Holy League’s roughly ten thousand. Historians give several reasons why the seemingly invincible Ottomans suffered such a lopsided defeat, but one reason stands above the rest. The Holy League brought 1,815 guns, the Ottomans 750. Ali Pasha still believed the composite bow would bring them victory, but instead his fleet was literally blown out of the water. The Ottomans had failed to capitalize on the firearm revolution that had started five hundred years before. The Ottoman Empire would never truly recover from Lepanto, and Western Europeans began their ascent into global hegemony that would last well into the twentieth century.
At the time of the battle, the composite bow had a longer range and faster firing rate than the arquebus. Did Ali Pasha believe the firearm had reached its zenith and therefore had no need to equip more of his troops with a capability whose future was very much in question, or did he think that the weapon could simply not replace the tried-and-true bow? Did his lack of creativity prevent him from seeing its potential uses? If so, his error resulted with his head on a pike and his fleet at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
Despite the passage of four and a half centuries, this episode carries lessons for the United States today—not in the decisions it must make between military capabilities, but in the way it conceptualizes, plans, and conducts information operations. The US government must not underestimate the potential of rapid and revolutionary change, exemplified by focused modern information operations supported by artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies, lest we too suffer a similarly disastrous fate as that of the Ottoman commander.
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