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Notes -
To be fair, there was a point in history where it took a village to raise a militia. It was certainly true as late as the Hundred Years’ War, when an English longbowman took a lifetime to reach the point where he could kill a knight in full plate. Even as firearms decisively outpaced armor, men grouped together en masse, because humans working as a team were exponentially more deadly than a lone gunman. (Until it wasn’t.) It took a powerful state to muster entire regiments, train them to march and fight together, and feed them since they weren’t working the fields.
This extended to equipment—especially metallurgy. It takes a lot of fuel to smelt iron, a lot of horsepower to transport it, a lot of well-paid craftsmen to make it into useful shapes. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences chipped away at that advantage. Now a single, motivated member of that 30% could do more of that process than ever before. Cut out (by trade) the mining and maybe smelting and I think you’ve got a surmountable task.
This is extremely unusual by historical standards! It’s not that the technology is arcane, or even that the skills are so hard. Rather, the total man-hours needed to bring iron from ore to a finished, near-modern weapon is just immense. It is proof of our insane economic and technological growth.
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