New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Horticulture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across five chapters and ten sections, this book examines computer vision for crop diagnosis, harvesting robots and autonomous field systems, smart greenhouses and digital twins, precision irrigation and supply-chain quality control, high-throughput phenotyping, and predictive breeding.
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Food Crop Agriculture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across six chapters and eighteen sections, the book examines digital agricultural infrastructure, remote sensing, crop diagnosis, yield forecasting, precision irrigation, genomics, molecular breeding, agricultural robotics, climate-smart agriculture, and global food security.
New English Edition
The Future of Forestry and Agroforestry
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Driven by Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows satellites, drones, LiDAR, digital twins, forest-specific language models, wildfire and pest forecasting, forestry robotics, agroforestry, timber traceability, and forest carbon markets.
New English Edition
Smart Livestock Farming: AI Enters the Barn
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Sensors listen, cameras watch, and artificial intelligence helps farmers decide.
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows precision livestock farming from animal health and reproduction to robotic milking, virtual fencing, digital twins, methane reduction, welfare, and data ownership.
Table of Contents
Han Dong-hoon, Busan Buk-gu Gap: A Record of the 100 Days Before and After the Election (Mar. 26-Jul. 3, 2026)
Kim Kyung-jin
Table of Contents and 13 sections
From March 26 to July 3, 2026, this record follows the spring after expulsion, the Busan Buk-gu Gap by-election, victory as an independent, and the first bill submitted in the National Assembly.
Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence and Medicine
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI in clinical care, hospitals, education, and research
AI in medical imaging, risk prediction, treatment planning, hospital operations, education, and research, with patient safety, privacy, and accountability.
[AI Library] Chapter 1: From Fire and Muscle to Coal
The 2026 U.S.-Iran War and the Global Energy Crisis
Chapter 1: From Fire and Muscle to Coal
Kim Kyung-jin
The 2026 U.S.-Iran War and the Global Energy Crisis
Chapter 1: From Fire and Muscle to Coal
1.1 Mobility More Important Than Manpower
In the spring of 334 BCE, when Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont, his army numbered sixty-five thousand. It was a vast human procession mixing cavalry, infantry, physicians, prophets, poets, prostitutes, harp players, Babylonian astrologers, and Phoenician merchants. The problem that confronted this procession the moment it opened its eyes each dawn was not the armies of the Persian Empire. It was grain. Approximately 122,000 kilograms of grain consumed daily by soldiers, horses, and mules combined. Water was another matter. Before these numbers, the genius of tactics and the superiority of weaponry became secondary concerns.
The energy that dominated warfare before the Industrial Revolution was 'muscle'. Human muscle, horse muscle, ox muscle. To operate this biological energy required calories, and calories meant food. A single Roman legionary required approximately three thousand calories daily to carry out a day's march and combat. An amount equivalent to about eight hundred thirty grams of wheat. To feed a single Roman legion of forty-eight hundred soldiers for just one week required about six kilograms of grain per soldier, or approximately twenty-nine tons for the entire legion. Adding water, wine, and olive oil only increased the weight immeasurably.
Here a fatal contradiction was embedded. The animals that transported food consumed food themselves. A military horse's daily fodder consumption was eight to twelve kilograms. Far more calories than a human. Hay was bulky, spoiled easily, and was difficult to transport in large quantities. Since the draft animals pulling supply wagons had to put a portion of their cargo into their own stomachs every day, the longer the supply line, the less food arrived for the soldiers. In logistics, this is called the 'Tyranny of Distance.' Beyond a radius of roughly one hundred fifty kilometers from a supply depot, the amount consumed by the animals begins to consume the amount the animals carry. No matter how large the supply unit grows, this arithmetic does not change.
That is why the armies of antiquity plundered. Graced with the genteel name of 'Foraging', the reality was stripping the farmland along their path bare. Armies were like locusts. If they lingered in one place, they exhausted all the food in the surrounding area, so to survive they had to move constantly. This is why Alexander's army, marching twenty-two thousand kilometers, could never remain in any place for more than a month. Behind the brilliant exterior of a conquest campaign lay the ecology of a large predator pack, moving in search of food.
The supply innovation that Philip II, Alexander's father, introduced to the Macedonian army was precisely the optimization of this energy mathematics. He reduced slow ox carts and made horses and mules the mainstay of supply transport. He required each soldier to carry his own equipment and several days' provisions. By reducing the tail, he increased the mobility of the teeth. Alexander added one more element to this. He moved a fleet in parallel along the coastline to bring grain from the sea. He had combined wind, a free energy, with supply transport. Water routes and maritime transport were overwhelmingly more energy-efficient than overland transport. What took dozens of carts to move overland, a single barge could carry.
The Mongol Empire represents another case where the efficiency of biological energy was pushed to the extreme in a different direction. Mongol warriors did not pull slow supply wagons. Instead, each warrior led three to five horses. The Mongol pony could survive on nothing but the dry grass of the Central Asian steppes, an organism with extraordinarily high energy conversion efficiency. The warriors drank mare's milk, and in urgent circumstances, stabbed horses' neck veins and drank their blood. Horses were a means of movement, a combat platform, and a mobile food storage unit. With no need for supply lines from the rear, Mongol armies could strike the enemy's rear at a speed that settled peoples' armies could not imagine. Records indicate that daily maneuvers of more than one hundred kilometers were possible, a figure comparable to twentieth-century mechanized units.
The common point in all these examples is one: the outcome of warfare was determined not by valor on the battlefield but by the ability to reach the battlefield. No matter how elite an army, if it starves before arrival, it is finished. The extreme evidence is Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign. Leading a force of six hundred thousand toward Moscow, Napoleon's supply line stretched approximately nine hundred kilometers from its western end to its eastern end. The Russian army, as it retreated, burned the grain in the fields and poisoned the wells. Scorched Earth tactics. Napoleon's army died more from hunger and cold than from enemy bullets. Of the six hundred thousand who entered, fewer than one hundred thousand returned alive. What defeated Russia was not the Russian army but Russia's winter, and the essence of winter was the depletion of energy, food and heating fuel.
That is why, when you reread the military history of antiquity and the Middle Ages from the perspective of energy, a larger picture hidden behind the scenes of combat becomes visible. The Roman legions could conquer the Mediterranean world not because their swordsmanship was superior but because they possessed a logistics system capable of transporting grain ceaselessly through maritime supply routes. Hannibal, though he ravaged Italy for fifteen years while crossing the Alps, could not capture Rome because supplies from the Carthaginian homeland were cut off. Genghis Khan's Mongols conquered Eurasia not merely because their archery was superior but because they possessed a self-contained energy system that moved without supply lines.
War was ultimately mathematics of energy. How efficiently could one produce, transport, and consume calories? The side that won this mathematics won on the battlefield as well.
1.2 War That Devours Forests
In July 1588, the sails of the Spanish Invincible Armada unfurled across the English Channel. One hundred thirty ships, thirty thousand men. The collapse of this vast armada before the English Channel winds and Francis Drake's fire ships is widely known. There is a lesser-known story: what happened in the forests of the Iberian Peninsula to build the Invincible Armada.
An entire forest enters into a single warship. The construction of one One Hundred Ten-gun First Rate Ship of the Line in eighteenth-century British Navy required approximately six thousand oak trees. A forest equivalent to thirty to forty hectares. And not just any oak, but mature oak trees over eighty to one hundred twenty years old. To create the curved surfaces of the hull required wood that had grown naturally bent at specific angles, and the masts required pine trees over thirty meters tall and perfectly straight. The six thousand oaks that went into HMS Victory alone, a single Victory was an entire great forest.
In 1790, the British Navy possessed approximately three hundred warships. The construction of this fleet consumed a minimum of one point two million oak trees, according to estimates. Considering the average twelve-year service life of a vessel, tens of thousands of new oak trees were needed annually. In the late eighteenth century, the British Navy's annual consumption of oak was fifty thousand loads. An amount that amounted to nearly one quarter of England's entire timber demand.
From the Age of Exploration to the Napoleonic Wars, timber occupied the exact position that oil occupies today. It was both a building material and an energy source. To melt iron and cast cannons and gun barrels required charcoal, and producing one ton of wrought iron consumed approximately fifty cubic meters of timber. An amount matching the annual growth of about ten hectares of Northern European forest. The dual demand of naval construction and weapons production gnawed at Europe's forests from both sides.
That England's forests began to decline was not the Navy's fault alone. Several factors combined: expansion of farmland, livestock raising, and tannin extraction for leather tanning. Historical ecologists like Oliver Rackham pointed out in a 1990 publication the exaggeration in the traditional claim that shipbuilding destroyed England's forests. Trees regenerate. England's forest management was more systematic than one might think. Yet at the same time, eighteenth-century documents record that England's oak supply capacity was gradually declining and import dependence was rising. One indisputable fact is that it became increasingly impossible for England to meet the timber demands of its Navy from within the British Isles alone.
The geopolitical reverberations created by this timber shortage were enormous.
England turned its eyes toward Scandinavia and the Baltic coastline. In the eighteenth century, the British Crown dispatched diplomats to the timber-rich nations of the Baltic to secure stable supplies of naval stores, timber, pitch, tar, and hemp for rope, while simultaneously blocking access by competitor nations like France. Between 1800 and 1815, during the Napoleonic Wars, three military clashes erupted over these naval materials. In 1801 alone, England imported one thousand one hundred eighty-six masts from the Baltic and one hundred ninety-eight masts from North America. A maritime empire that could no longer build warships from its own trees waged diplomacy and war to secure forests on the opposite side of the globe.
North America became the central stage of this 'timber geopolitics'. The White Pine of New England was the mast material the British Navy craved. Straight, tall, light yet strong, this wood was superior in quality to Baltic pine. The 1691 Massachusetts Bay Charter included a 'Mast Preservation Clause'. All pine trees with a diameter of twenty-four inches or larger were declared royal property. This clause, which prevented colonial subjects from cutting trees that grew on their own land, would later become one of the sparks of the American Revolution.
Looking at the structure of this contest over timber, it bears a striking resemblance to the geopolitics of oil that would revolve around petroleum in the twenty-first century. When one's own resources are depleted, they must be secured from abroad. Military force is needed to protect supply routes for overseas resources. One must block competitors from accessing the same resources. If resource supplies are cut off, military power itself becomes paralyzed. An empire that lost the forests lost the seas, and an empire that lost the seas lost the world.
Wind was the hidden power of this era. Sailing fleets used wind, a free energy, to cross great oceans. Distances the human muscle or animal strength could never traverse were opened by wind. Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England could pioneer colonies across the globe because they possessed sailing vessels, wooden structures that captured wind energy.
Yet wind had a fatal limitation: it did not always blow. Wind does not blow at human will. When headwinds blow, navigation is impossible, and when trapped in a windless area, one must drift on the sea for days or weeks. In naval combat, the side that secured the windward position first held advantage, and this natural variable could not be fully controlled even by an admiral's tactical genius. Wind granted freedom, but that freedom always bore the shackle of nature's capriciousness.
Coal shattered this shackle.
1.3 How the Steam Engine Changed the Battlefield
In June 1866, war broke out between Prussia and Austria. Helmuth von Moltke, Prussia's Chief of Staff, had already created the conditions for victory before the war even began. With railroads.
Moltke was someone who grasped the military potential of the railroad early. He was an early investor and director of the Berlin-Hamburg Railway and published a paper in 1843 on 'What to Consider in Choosing a Railroad Route.' Before Prussia even built its first railroad, he urged the General Staff to support railroad construction militarily, and later established a 'Railway Section' within the General Staff itself. According to one contemporary account, Moltke always consulted a German railroad timetable when making important decisions.
In the war with Austria, Moltke activated five railroad lines running simultaneously from various Prussian provinces toward the southern border. The time it took for each corps to move from their peacetime stations to the border was merely days. Approximately two hundred thousand soldiers and fifty-five thousand military horses were loaded onto railroads and transported to the front. While the Austrian army had not yet completed its concentration, the Prussian army was already in battle formation.
Four years later, in 1870, in the Franco-Prussian War, this railroad mobilization system became even more refined. Moltke moved thirteen corps along nine Prussian and German railroad lines. On each line, a committee with military and civilian administrators was positioned to oversee transport. Civil train service was suspended, and following a complex timetable, approximately five hundred thousand soldiers, military horses, cannons, and equipment arrived at concentration areas within eleven days. France, too, possessed more railroads and more locomotives than Prussia. According to military historians, France was not behind in physical infrastructure. What France lacked was what Moltke possessed: a General Staff system that integrated railroad operation into comprehensive mobilization and operational plans. The combination of a machine, railroad infrastructure, and the system, software, to operate it according to war needs. This was Prussia's decisive advantage.
Changes on the sea were equally significant. Steam-powered ships began replacing sailing vessels from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The Naval Battle of Navarino in 1827 was the last major naval engagement fought purely with sailing vessels. In the Crimean War (1853-1856), steam warships demonstrated the mobility freed from the variables of wind and tide. Steam engines operated regardless of wind or absence of wind, regardless of headwinds. The centuries-old axiom in naval tactics, 'seize the windward', became meaningless overnight.
Yet the steam ship imposed a new shackle: coal. Sailing vessels used infinite wind energy, but once a steamship ran out of coal, it became a heap of scrap metal. Unlike the self-sufficient sailing vessel, a steam warship had to be regularly resupplied with coal to stay afloat. The geopolitical change this fact created was enormous.
The British Empire possessed the world's highest quality Welsh steam coal. The British Admiralty tested coal from across the world and concluded that Welsh coal surpassed all other coal in heat per ton, combustion cleanliness, and storage durability. Possessing the finest fuel, Britain constructed a massive infrastructure that stockpiled this fuel in advance at strategic points across the world's oceans. Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said (Suez), Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bermuda, the Falkland Islands, Saint Helena. The British Empire's network of coaling stations wove the entire world together like a single chain. In the words of one maritime historian, the maintenance and management of coaling facilities was the hidden foundation of British global maritime supremacy.
The geography of coaling stations was the geography of empire. Losing a harbor with coaling capacity reduced a navy's operational range, and securing a coaling station opened the sea. One reason for fierce diplomatic contests over small islands or harbors of unclear strategic value in the late nineteenth century's scramble for colonies was the necessity of coal supply. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the worst hardship the Russian Baltic Fleet endured during its eighteen thousand nautical mile voyage from Europe to the Far East was not the Japanese Navy but the refusal of coal supply from ports in each country, mindful of Japan, Britain's ally. A fleet wandering in search of coal arrived at the Tsushima Strait already exhausted.
Coal's revolution on land was not limited to railroads. Coal powered factories, and factories stamped out weapons. Machine guns, rapid-fire rifles, multi-shot artillery, tens of thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. These weapons created by the Industrial Revolution could not exist without coal energy. Coal heated the furnaces of steel mills, steel from the furnace became gun barrels and artillery shells, and those guns and artillery were loaded onto trains and sent to the front. The entire process of war became an industrial chain connected by a single energy source: coal.
The complete form of this chain was the 'Total War' of World War I. Total War is a system that mobilizes not just soldiers on the front line but everything in the rear for war. Coal miners extract coal, coal moves trains, trains transport steel, steel becomes artillery shells sent to the front. Conscripted soldiers are loaded onto trains and arrive at the front, and when they fall, soldiers conscripted again in the rear are loaded onto trains to replace them. The defending side, transported by train faster than the attacker could replace losses, was reinforced more quickly. Both sides poured unlimited supplies and manpower by rail onto the Western Front, which became deadlocked, and millions died in the trenches.
The scene on the day the German mobilization order was issued in August 1914 compresses the essence of this total war. Kaiser Wilhelm II approved mobilization on August 1. From that moment, everything began to move according to the railroad timetable. The General Staff, led by little Moltke, the nephew of the original Moltke, mechanically executed mobilization plans prepared over decades. Millions of reservists received conscription notices and boarded trains at designated stations. When the Kaiser later asked whether the war could be limited to fighting Russia alone, little Moltke replied that the railroad mobilization system already in motion could not be halted. General Hermann von Staab, the Chief of the Railroad Section, later claimed it could have been technically possible to reverse course, but in the reality of that moment, the railroad timetable was stronger than diplomacy.
This is the ultimate change that coal and the steam engine brought to warfare. War began to operate by the inertia of machines rather than human will. Once a mobilization system is activated, neither politicians nor generals can easily halt it. The speed at which railroads transported troops exceeded the speed at which diplomats exchanged telegrams. In the words of one military historian, the extinguishing of the lights across Europe in 1914 was the result of the military-technological logic established by Moltke in 1866 encroaching upon the supremacy of politics.
In the age of muscle, what limited the scale of war was food. An army could only be as large as it could feed, and could only advance as far as food supplies reached. In the age of timber and wind, what expanded the scope of war was the forest and the wind, but the capriciousness of the wind and the slow growth rate of trees imposed constraints.
Coal shattered all these constraints. Suddenly, vast quantities of compressed solar energy from hundreds of millions of years underground could be extracted and used all at once. An age of industrial warfare dawned where coal powered railroads, railroads transported troops, and factories stamped out weapons. Wars became faster, larger, and lasted longer. Battlefields that once saw tens of thousands expanded to fields of hundreds of thousands, and battles that once lasted days transformed into years of attrition.
Yet the age of coal was already coming to an end. As the twentieth century opened, a new fuel appeared on the stage of war, one with higher energy density than coal, easier to transport, and capable of moving machines faster. In 1911, Britain's First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher and Naval Secretary Winston Churchill made the decision to convert the British Navy's fuel supply for capital ships from coal to oil. Britain possessed the world's finest coal within its borders, but not a drop of oil. This decision drew Britain toward the Middle East, toward the establishment of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), and into the twentieth century's greatest powder keg: the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf.
From muscle to timber, from timber to coal. Each time the energy source changed, the grammar of warfare changed. And the shift from coal to oil would shake the grammar of warfare once again, on a scale incomparable to anything before. That story begins in Chapter Two.
AI Expert Attorney Kyung-jin Kim
Expert in AI Legal Policy · Former Member of National Assembly · Author of Numerous Works
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Kim Kyung-jin
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