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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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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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