I recently read a fabulous history of WWI (G.J. Meyer's _The World Undone_). What struck me is that if you modeled Europe in 1914 as a distributed system, you'd

I recently read a fabulous history of WWI (G.J. Meyer's _The World Undone_). What struck me is that if you modeled Europe in 1914 as a distributed system, you'd see incredible latencies between decisions being made and decisions being carried out. Kaiser Wilhelm and King George (first cousins!) were negotiating to stave off the war long after Germany's decision to mobilize, and might very well have succeeded were it possible to reverse the mobilization decision. The German generals insisted it wasn't. And even before then, Germany's decision to mobilize was based on reports of Russia's decision to mobilize, which also took weeks to carry out. If communication and military latencies were shorter, maybe the war could have been avoided. It was like the world's worst race condition.