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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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When I see people say this... People have been saying this forever. Last century had 2 world wars, several nuclear close calls, ethnic strife, political assassinations, riots, race riots, hollowing out of urban cores, the dust bowl, the great depression, a bunch of other wars, mass immigration, existential cold war tensions, the list goes on. The world is always like this, it isn't worse now or something. The can will be kicked forever, and I always feel like people who say things like this really don't hope they are wrong, they are hoping for the collapse. For some great reset where their chosen ideology will rise to the top, or just that their lives will be more exciting! (I want to explicitly point out that I don't think that is what is happening here, just that I have seen that be the case in many forums discussing similar topics!)

We didn't start the fire

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2LkVKCWL0U4

The world is always like this, it isn't worse now or something. The can will be kicked forever

This assertion is a perfect representation of the type of thinking I suggested I found cargo cultish.

The Romans had somewhere in the realm of 1,000,000 men in the field at any given time. Recruiting, training, equipping, paying, housing, feeding, dealing with waste, disciplining, etc. From Scotland to Syria. For centuries.

The next time a European power could field a million men for any amount of time was the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century

The next time the state capacity existed to successfully garrison a million men across the continent for an extended period of time was the American/Soviet involvement in WWII/Cold War in the middle of the 20th century

People always talk the fall of Rome like it means something. We are not Rome, the rest of the world also kept on spinning, China fielded larger armies that whole time yah know. in 300 BC they had armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands facing off. So no, WWII was not the first time a state could garrison a million men. Number of people in your army is not the measure of a state.

This is a slight exaggeration - the actual legionary army (i.e. excluding locally recruited auxiliaries who weren't available for service outside their own province) peaked at 400-500k in the 2nd century. And Byzantium was still able to field 300k men until they lost most of their high-quality agricultural land to the Islamic conquests. The first European monarch to field an army of that size is Louis XIV. Louis XIV's army was better equipped than the legions, but worse trained.

But the big picture is correct. In terms of social technology, Western Civilisation didn't recover from the Fall of Rome until the Early Modern Era (In terms of physical technology, we had overtaken Rome by the High Middle Ages - the Romans couldn't have built a Gothic cathedral and didn't have spinning wheels).

Could it be, perhaps, that a few things changed about the warfare meta since the Roman times? Something that would make equipping and coordinating a competitive soldier/combat unit more expensive?

We're not fighting in phalanxes with spears anymore.

Neither were the romans? Yes they achieved some gains with triarii but they thrived primarily after the Marian reforms and the move to manipular formation and legionary standardization with gladius, scutum, etc.

Were you aping on Obama being so catastrophically wrong in '12 about horses and bayonets? Could you explain why you chose to share that thought?

I chose to share that thought because I don't believe you can compare largest army in the Roman times to largest army in modern times (or even in the 1800s) and conclude that modern states are worse at fielding armies purely because they have fewer soldiers. I'm not convinced that I'm wrong just because I got some minutia of Roman logistics wrong. The core of the argument is that the Romans are apples and WWII soldiers are oranges. "You don't know your apples" is irrelevant.

Okay :)

Avoid low effort responses, please.

This is probably backwards. The equipment for a Roman Legion probably represented a greater relative investment of manufacturing and material compared to modern arms.

I'm less certain on how much training was actually done. But I can more or less bet that a middlingly and quickly trained rifleman is much better than a middlingly and quickly trained Legionary.

I suppose it's true. The amount of farmers to feed one warrior was higher in the ancient era, so fielding a lot of warriors was more impressive - if you only care about that part of state capacity.

The conclusion seems to be that the ancients squeezed their people harder, but are they more glorious because of that even though they'd get far less out of their million Romans than we could get out of 100k WWII soldiers?

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