The end of the reign of Augustus (in 14AD) is a convenient marker for a shift in Roman strategic aims away from expansion and towards a “frontier maintenance”. The usual term for both the Roman frontier and the system of fortifications and garrisons which defended it is the limes (pronounced “lim-ees”), although this wasn’t the only word the Romans applied to it. I want to leave aside for a moment the endless, complex conversation about the degree to which the Romans can actually be said to have strategic aims, though for what it is worth I am one of those who contends that they did. We’re mostly interested here in Roman behavior on the frontiers, rather than their intent anyway.
What absolutely does begin happening during the reign of Augustus and subsequently is that the Roman legions, which had spent the previous three centuries on the move outside of Italy, begin to settle down more permanently on Rome’s new frontiers, particularly along the Rhine/Danube frontier facing Central and Eastern Europe and the Syrian frontier facing the Parthian Empire. That in turn meant that Roman legions (and their supporting auxiliary cohorts) now settled into permanent forts.
The forts themselves, at least in the first two centuries, provide a fairly remarkably example of institutional inertia. While legionary forts of this early period typically replaced the earthwork-and-stakes wall (the agger and vallum) with stone walls and towers and the tents of the camp with permanent barracks, the basic form of the fort: its playing-card shape, encircling defensive ditches (now very often two or three ditches in sequence) remain. Of particular note, these early imperial legionary forts generally still feature towers which do not project outward from the wall, a stone version of the observation towers of the old Roman marching camp. Precisely because these fortifications are in stone they are often very archaeologically visible and so we have a fairly good sense of Roman forts in this period. In short then, put in permanent positions, Roman armies first constructed permanent versions of their temporary marching camps.
And that broadly seems to fit with how the Romans expected to fight their wars on these frontiers. The general superiority of Roman arms in pitched battle (the fancy term here is “escalation dominance” – that escalating to large scale warfare favored the heavier Roman armies) meant that the Romans typically planned to meet enemy armies in battle, not sit back to withstand sieges (this was less true on Rome’s eastern frontier since the Parthians were peer competitors who could rumble with the Romans on more-or-less even terms; it is striking that the major centers in the East like Jerusalem or Antioch did not get rid of their city walls, whereas by contrast the breakdown of Roman order in the third century AD and subsequently leads to a flurry of wall-building in the west where it is clear many cities had neglected their defensive walls for quite a long time). Consequently, the legionary forts are more bases than fortresses and so their fortifications are still designed to resist sudden raids, not large-scale sieges.
They were also now designed to support much larger fortification systems, which now gives us a chance to talk about a different kind of fortification network: border walls. The most famous of these Roman walls of course is Hadrian’s Wall, a mostly (but not entirely) stone wall which cuts across northern England, built starting in 122. Hadrian’s Wall is unusual in being substantially made out of stone, but it was of-a-piece with various Roman frontier fortification systems. Crucially, the purpose of this wall (and this is a trait it shares with China’s Great Wall) was never to actually prevent movement over the border or to block large-scale assaults. Taking Hadrian’s wall, it was generally manned by something around three legions (notionally; often at least one of the legions in Britain was deployed further south); even with auxiliary troops nowhere near enough to actually manage a thick defense along the entire wall. Instead, the wall’s purpose is slowing down hostile groups and channeling non-hostile groups (merchants, migrants, traders, travelers) towards controlled points of entry (valuable especially because import/export taxes were a key source of state revenue), while also allowing the soldiers on the wall good observation positions to see these moving groups. You can tell the defense here wasn’t prohibitive in part because the main legionary fortresses aren’t generally on the wall, but rather further south, often substantially further south, which makes a lot of sense if the plan is to have enemies slowed (but not stopped) by the wall, while news of their approach outraces them to those legionary forts so that the legions can form up and meet those incursions in an open battle after they have breached the wall itself. Remember: the Romans expect (and get) a very, very high success rate in open battles, so it makes sense to try to force that kind of confrontation.
This emphasis on controlling and channeling, rather than prohibiting, entry is even more visible in the Roman frontier defenses in North Africa and on the Rhine/Danube frontier. In North Africa, the frontier defense system was structured around watch-posts and the fossatum Africae, a network of ditches (fossa) separating the province of Africa (mostly modern day Tunisia) from non-Roman territory to its south. It isn’t a single ditch, but rather a system of at least four major segments (and possibly more), with watch-towers and smaller forts in a line-of-sight network (so they can communicate); the ditch itself varies in width and depth but typically not much more than 6m wide and 3m deep. Such an obstruction is obviously not an prohibitive defense but the difficulty of crossing is going to tend to channel travelers and raids to the intentional crossings or alternately slow them down as they have to navigate the trench (a real problem here where raiders are likely to be mounted and so need to get their horses and/or camels across).
On the Rhine and the Danube, the defense of the limes, the Roman frontier, included a border wall (earthwork and wood, rather than stone like Hadrian’s wall), similarly supported by legions stationed to the rear, with road networks positioned; once again, the focus is on observing threats, slowing them down and channeling them so that the legions can engage them in the field. This is a system based around observe-channel-respond, rather than an effort to block advances completely.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part II: Romans Playing Cards”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-11-12.
December 2, 2022
QotD: Rome’s legions settle down to permanent fortresses
November 28, 2022
QotD: The Carolingian army
But below that in the Carolingian system, you have the select levy, relatively undistinguished (read: not noble, but often reasonably well-to-do) men recruited from the smaller farmers and townsfolk. This system itself seems to have derived from an earlier social understanding that all free men (or all free property owning men) held an obligation for military service; Halsall notes in the eighth century the term arimannus (Med. Lat.: army-man) or exercitalis (same meaning) as a term used to denote the class of free landowners on whom the obligation of military service fell in Lombard and later Frankish Northern Italy (the Roman Republic of some ten centuries prior had the same concept, the term for it was assidui). This was, on the continent at least, a part of the system that was in decline by the time of Charlemagne and especially after as the mounted retinues of the great magnates became progressively more important.
We get an interesting picture of this system in Charlemagne’s efforts in the first decades of the 800s to standardize it. Under Charlemagne’s system, productive land was assessed in units of value called mansi and (to simplify a complicated system) every four mansi ought to furnish one soldier for the army (the law makes provisions for holders of even half a mansus, to give a sense of how large a unit it was – evidently some families lived on fractions of a mansus). Families with smaller holdings than four mansi – which must have been most of them – were brigaded together to create a group large enough to be able to equip and furnish one man for the army. These fellows were expected to equip themselves quite well – shield, spear, sword, a helmet and some armor – but not to bring a horse. We should probably also imagine that villages and towns choosing who to send were likely to try to send young men in good shape for the purpose (or at least they were supposed to). Thus this was a draw-up of some fairly high quality infantry with good equipment. That gives it its modern-usage name, the select levy, because it was selected out of the larger free populace.
And I should note what makes these fellows different from the infantry who might often be found in the retinues of later medieval aristocrats is just that – these fellows don’t seem to have been in the retinues of the Carolingian aristocracy. Or at least, Charlemagne doesn’t seem to have imagined them as such. While he expected his local aristocrats to organize this process, he also sent out his royal officials, the missi to oversee the process. This worked poorly, as it turned out – the system never quite ran right (in part, it seems, because no one could decide who was in charge of it, the missi or the local aristocrats) and the decades that followed would see Carolingian and post-Carolingian rulers more and more dependent on their lords and their retinues, while putting fewer and fewer resources into any kind of levy. But Charlemagne’s last-gaps effort is interesting for our purpose because it illustrates how the system was supposed to run, and thus how it might have run (in a very general sense) in the more distant past. In particular, he seems to have imagined the select levy as a force belonging to the king, to be administered by royal officials (as the nation-in-arms infantry armies of the centuries before had been), rather than as an infantry force splintered into various retinues. In practice, the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire under his heirs was fatal for any hopes of a centralized army, infantry or otherwise, and probably hastened the demise of the system.
Beneath the select levy there was also the expectation that, should danger reach a given region, all free men would be called upon to defend the local redoubts and fortified settlements. This group is sometimes called the general levy. As you might imagine, the general levy would be of lower average quality and cohesion. It might include the very young and very old – folks who ought not to be picked out for the select levy for that reason – and have a much lower standard of equipment. After all, unlike select levymen, who were being equipped at the expense, potentially, of many households, general levymen were individual farmers, grabbing whatever they could. In practice, the general levy might be expected to defend walls and little else – it was not a field force, but an emergency local defense militia, which might either enhance the select levy (and the retinues of the magnates) or at least hold out until that field army could arrive.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle oF Helm’s Deep, Part IV: Men of Rohan”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-05-22.
November 24, 2022
QotD: Roman legionary fortified camps
It is probably not the camps themselves, but their structure which was exceptional. Polybius claims Greeks “shirk the labor of entrenching” (Plb. 6.42.1-2) and notes that the stakes the Romans used to construct the wooden palisade wall of the camp are more densely placed and harder to remove (Plb. 18.18.5-18). The other clear difference Polybius notes is the order of Roman camps, that the Romans lay out their camp the same way wherever it is, whereas Greek and Macedonian practice was to conform the camp to the terrain (Plb. 6.42); the archaeology of Roman camps bears out the former whereas analysis of likely battlefield sites (like the Battle of the Aous) seem to bear out the latter.
In any case, the mostly standard layout of Roman marching camps (which in the event the Romans lay siege, become siege camps) enables us to talk about the Roman marching camp because as far as we can tell they were all quite similar (not merely because Polybius says this, but because the basic features of these camps really do seem to stay more or less constant.
The basic outline of the camp is a large rectangle with the corners rounded off, which has given the camps (and later forts derived from them) their nickname: “playing card” forts. The size and proportions of a fortified camp would depend on the number of legions, allies and auxiliaries present, from nearly square to having one side substantially longer than the other. This isn’t the place to get into the internal configuration of the camp, except to note that these camps seemed to have been standardized so that the layout was familiar to any soldier wherever they went, which must have aided in both building the camp (since issues of layout would become habit quickly) and packing it up again.
Now a fortified camp does not have the same defensive purpose as a walled city: the latter is intended to resist a siege, while a fortified camp is mostly intended to prevent an army from being surprised and to allow it the opportunity to either form for battle or safely refuse battle. That means the defenses are mostly about preventing stealthy approach, slowing down attackers and providing a modest advantage to defenders with a relative economy of cost and effort.
In the Roman case, for a completed defense, the outermost defense was the fossa or ditch; sources differ on the normal width and depth of the ditch (it must have differed based on local security conditions) but as a rule they were at least 3′ and 5′ wide and often significantly more than this (actual measured Roman defensive fossae are generally rather wider, typically with a 2:1 ratio of width to depth, as noted by Kate Gilliver. The earth excavated to make the fossa was then piled inside of it to make a raised earthwork rampart the Romans called the agger. Finally, on top of the agger, the Romans would place the valli (“stakes”) they carried to make the vallum. Vallum gives us our English word “wall” but more nearly means “palisade” or “rampart” (the Latin word for a stone wall is more often murus).
Polybius (18.18) notes that Greek camps often used stakes that hadn’t had the side branches removed and spaced them out a bit (perhaps a foot or so; too closely set for anyone to slip through); this sort of spaced out palisade is a common sort of anti-ambush defense and we know of similar village fortifications in pre- and early post-contact North America on the East coast, used to discourage raids. Obviously the downside is that when such stakes are spaced out, it only takes the removal of a few to generate a breach. The Roman vallum, by contrast, set the valli fixed close together with the branches interlaced and with the tips sharpened, making them difficult to climb or remove quickly.
The gateway obviously could not have the ditch cut across the entryway, so instead a second ditch, the titulum, was dug 60ft or so in front of the gate to prevent direct approach; the gate might also be reinforced with a secondary arc of earthworks, either internally or externally, called the clavicula; the goal of all of this extra protection was again not to prevent a determined attacker from reaching the gates, but rather to slow a surprise attack down to give the defender time to form up and respond.
And that’s what I want to highlight about the nature of the fortified Roman camp: this isn’t a defense meant to outlast a siege, but – as I hinted at last time – a defense meant to withstand a raid. At most a camp might need to withstand the enemy for a day or two, providing the army inside the opportunity to retreat during the night.
We actually have some evidence of similar sort of stake-wall protections in use on the East Coast of Native North America in the 16th century, which featured a circular stake wall with a “baffle gate” that prevented a direct approach and entrance. The warfare style of the region was heavily focused on raids rather than battles or sieges (though the former did happen) in what is sometimes termed the “cutting off way of war” (on this see W. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America” in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)). Interestingly, this form of Native American fortification seems to have been substantially disrupted by the arrival of steel axes for presumably exactly the reasons that Polybius discusses when thinking about Greek vs. Roman stake walls: pulling up a well-made (read: Roman) stake wall was quite difficult. However, with steel axes (imported from European traders), Native American raiding forces could quickly cut through a basic palisade. Interestingly, in the period that follows, Lee (op. cit.) notes a drift towards some of the same methods of fortification the Romans used: fortifications begin to square off, often combined a ditch with the palisade and eventually incorporated corner bastions projecting out of the wall (a feature Roman camps do not have, but later Roman forts eventually will, as we’ll see).
Roman field camps could be more elaborate than what I’ve described; camps often featured, for instance, observation towers. These would have been made of wood and seem to have chiefly been elevated posts for lookouts rather than firing positions, given that they sit behind the vallum rather than projecting out of it (meaning that it would be very difficult to shoot any enemy who actually made it to the vallum from the tower).
When a Roman army laid siege to a fortified settlement, the camp formed the “base” from which siege works were constructed (particularly circumvallation – making a wall around the enemy’s city to keep them in – and contravallation – making a wall around your siege position to keep other enemies out. We’ll discuss these terms in more depth a little later). Some of the most elaborate such works we have described are Caesar’s fortifications at the Siege of Alesia (52 BC; Caes. B.G. 7.72). There the Roman line consisted of an initial trench well beyond bow-shot range from his planned works in order to prevent the enemy from disrupting his soldiers with sudden attacks, then an agger and vallum constructed with a parapet to allow firing positions from atop the vallum, with observation towers every 80 feet and two ditches directly in front of the agger, making for three defensive ditches in total (be still Roel Konijnendijk‘s heart! – but seriously, the point he makes on those Insider “Expert Rates” videos about the importance of ditches are, as you can tell already, entirely accurate), which were reinforced with sharpened stakes faced outward. As Caesar expressly notes, these weren’t meant to be prohibitive defenses that would withstand any attack – wooden walls can be chopped or burned, after all – but rather to give him time to respond to any effort by the defenders to break out or by attackers to break in (he also contravallates, reproducing all of these defenses facing outward, as well).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part II: Romans Playing Cards”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-11-12.
November 20, 2022
QotD: The Maginot Line worked
As an aside, the purpose of the Maginot Line was to channel any attack at France through the Low Countries where it could be met head on with the flanks of the French defense anchored on the line to the right and the channel to the left. At this purpose, it succeeded; the failure was that the French army proceeded to lose the battle in the field. It was not the fixed fortifications, but the maneuvering field army which failed in its mission. One can argue that the French under-invested in that field army (though I’d argue the problem was as much doctrine than investment), but you can’t argue that the Maginot Line didn’t accomplish its goals – the problem is that those goals didn’t lead to victory.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
November 16, 2022
QotD: Did Sparta actually aspire to supremacy in Greece?
Given Sparta’s inherent resources, the goal was not unrealistic: Sparta was by land area, if not by population, the largest polis in Greece. But Spartan hegemony lasted less than a decade, primarily because of the ineptness of Spartan diplomacy. While victory over Athens in 404 BC made Sparta the preeminent Greek state, the mistakes started almost immediately: the occupation/collaboration government (the “Thirty Tyrants”) in Athens was so cruel and unpopular that Sparta was forced to acquiesce to its removal after just eight months. Meanwhile, Spartan imperiousness – including a refusal to share the spoils of victory, as well as military activity against little Elis and big Persia unsanctioned by the Peloponnesian League – turned Sparta’s allies against them. Sparta’s efforts to restore their alliance militarily led to the Corinthian War in 395, which would prove that while Sparta was still strong, it was not strong enough to enforce its alliances by force of arms. If any of the Spartans ever aimed for hegemony or preeminence among the Greeks, it is safe to say they failed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
November 11, 2022
QotD: WW1 was the first war where the artillery was destructive enough to change the landscape
This kind of terrain – with so much of the ground-cover blasted away – would turn into mud-soaked pits the moment it rained – particularly where water collected in the shell-holes.
That also explains why these post-battle scenes often lack any kind of local terrain features. Powerful explosive shells could annihilate terrain features like forests, roads, hedgerows, fences, fields – even hills and entire villages – with extended bombardments. And without any ground-cover left, almost any rain at all will then reduce the local terrain into a mud-soaked bog, especially if the local soil drains poorly (as it did so famously in Flanders).
The problem with depicting medieval, or even early modern battlefields this way is, of course, that these armies do not possess any weapons which can deliver this kind of destruction. Even as late as the American Civil War, field artillery – even massed field artillery – was simply not that powerful (although some heavy naval and siege guns were beginning to come close). Post-battle photography of Gettysburg – even in the approaches to Cemetery Ridge and around the Wheat Field – areas of fierce fighting – shows not only trees and ground-cover, but even fences and buildings largely intact.
Field artillery firing solid shot from 6 to 20lbs to is simply not strong enough to tear apart the terrain in the way that we often see in popular depictions of historical or fantasy battlefields; as pictured above, the guns doing that in WWI were often firing 1,000+ pound shells, 100 times the weight of shot of a normal ACW cannon (lighter artillery, like the famed French 75 (Matériel de 75mm Mle 1897) still fired lighter shells – the French 75 fired a c. 12lbs shell – but still had far more explosive power due to improvements in explosives; that said, the French 75, a capable field gun, was famously too light for ideal use in the trenches). Massed musketry won’t do it either and so massed arrow or crossbow fire, catapults or whatever else certainly won’t.
(This, as a side note, may go some distance to explaining why First World War commanders were so unprepared for the challenges the new terrain they were creating in turn inflicted on them. Doctrine said that the solution to well-entrenched infantry was to mass artillery against them – blast them out of position. It had never been the case before that such massed artillery would render the ground itself impassible, because the artillery had never before been powerful enough to do so.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collection: The Battlefield After the Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-18.
November 9, 2022
QotD: Was Temujin (aka Genghis Khan/Chinggis Khan) a “great man”?
What had been missing for all that time was Temujin. To buy into the strongest form of “cliodynamics” is to assume that the Steppe always would have produced a Temujin (in part because his impact is so massive that a “general law” of history which cannot predict an event of such titanic import is not actually a functional “general law”). And to be fair, it had produced nearly Temujins before: Attila, Seljuk, etc. But “nearly” here isn’t good enough because so many of the impacts of Chinggis Khan depend on the completeness of his conquests, on a single state interested in trade controlling the entire Eurasian Steppe without meaningful exception. The difference between Temujin and almost-Temujin (which is just basically “Jamukha”) is history-shatteringly tremendous, given that both gunpowder and the Black Death seem to have moved west on the roads that Chinggis opened and the subsequent closure of those routes after his empire fragmented seem to have been a major impetus towards European seaborne expansion.
Moreover, it is not at all clear that, absent Temujin in that particular moment – keeping in mind that Temujin hadn’t appeared in any other moment – that there would have inevitably risen a different Temujin sometime later. After all, for two millennia the steppe had not produced a Temujin and by 1158, the technological window for it to do so was already beginning to close as humans in the agrarian parts of the world (read: China) had already begun harnessing chemical energy in ways that would eventually come to rob the nomad of much of his strength. If Temujin dies as a boy – as he very well might have! – it is not at all clear he’d be replaced before that window closed; his most obvious near peer was Jamukha, but here personalities matter: Jamukha was committed to the old Mongol social hierarchy (this was part of why he and Temujin fell out) and was so unwilling to do the very things that made Chinggis Khan’s great success possible (obliterating clan distinctions and promoting based on merit rather than family pedigree). Jamukha could have been another Seljuk, but he could not have been another Chinggis Khan and in this case that would make all of the difference.
To get briefly into a bit of historical theory, Chinggis is an individual whose actions in life fundamentally altered many of what the “Annales School” of history would call the structures and mentalités of his (and subsequent) times. The Annales school likes to view history through a long duration lens (longue durée) and focus on big shaping structures like climate, geography, culture and so on. The difference between this and cliodynamics is that Annales thinkers propose to describe rather than predict, so it is not fatal to their method if there are occasional, sudden, unpredictable alterations to those underlying structures – indeed those are the moments which are most interesting. But it is fatal to a cliodynamics perspective, which does aim for prediction since “our prediction is absolutely right unless it is completely wrong” hardly inspires confidence and a “general law” of anything is only a “general law” in that it is generally applicable not merely to the past but also to the future.
In short, Chinggis Khan wasn’t a commodity; he couldn’t be replaced by any other Mongol warrior. And figures like that abound through history (for Roman history, it matters greatly for instance that Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar and Octavian had very different personalities when they found themselves in a position to dominate the Republic with military force). Moreover, the figures like that who we think of, generally capital-g “Great Men”, are hardly the only such individuals like that. They’re only the ones we can see. What of, for instance, the old Argive mother – her name lost to history – who killed Pyrrhus of Epirus, considered the greatest general of his generation, with a lucky throw of a roofing tile, both ending his career but also setting in motion a chain of events where the power vacuum left by Epirus would be filled by Carthage and Rome in a way that would bring those former allies (allied against Pyrrhus, in fact) into a shattering conflict which would then pave the way for Roman dominance in the Mediterranean? History must be full of innumerable such figures whose actions created and closed off courses of events in ways we can never know; how do we know that there wasn’t some would-have-been Temujin on the steppe in 100AD but who was killed in some minor dispute so very minor it leaves literally no evidence behind?
(The fancy way of putting the influence of all of those factors, both the big structural ones and the little, subject-to-chance ones, is to say “history is contingent” – that is, the outcomes are not inevitable but are subject to many forces large and small, many of which the lack of evidence render historically invisible.)
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: October 15, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-15.
November 5, 2022
QotD: The use of chemical weapons after WW2
Both Cold War superpowers stockpiled chemical weapons, but seem to have retained considerable ambivalence about their use. In the United States, chemical weapons seem to have been primarily viewed not as part of tactical doctrine, but as a smaller step on a nuclear deterrence ladder (the idea being that the ability to retaliate in smaller but still dramatic steps to deter more dramatic escalations; the idea of an “escalation ladder” belongs to Herman Kahn); chemical weapons weren’t a tactical option but baby-steps on the road to tactical and then strategic nuclear devices (as an aside, I find the idea that “tactical” WMDs – nuclear or chemical – could somehow be used without triggering escalation to strategic use deeply misguided). At the same time, there was quite a bit of active research for a weapon-system that had an uncertain place in the doctrine – an effort to find a use for a weapon-system the United States already had, which never quite seems to have succeeded. The ambivalence seems to have been resolved decisively in 1969 when Nixon simply took chemical weapons off of the table with an open “no first use” policy.
Looking at Soviet doctrine is harder (both because I don’t read Russian and also, quite frankly because the current epidemic makes it hard for me to get German and English language resources on the topic) The USSR was more strongly interested in chemical weapons throughout the Cold War than the United States (note that while the linked article presents US intelligence on Soviet doctrine as uncomplicated, the actual intelligence was ambivalent – with the CIA and Army intelligence generally downgrading expectations of chemical use by the USSR, especially by the 1980s). The USSR does seem to have doctrine imagine their use at the tactical and operational level (specifically as stop-gap measures for when tactical nuclear weapons weren’t available – you’d use chemical weapons on targets when you ran out of tactical nuclear weapons), but then, that had been true in WWII but when push came to shove, the chemical munitions weren’t used. The Soviets appear to have used chemical weapons as a terror weapon in Afghanistan, but that was hardly a use against a peer modern system force. But it seems that, as the Cold War wound down, planners in the USSR came around to the same basic idea as American thinkers, with the role of chemical weapons – even as more and more effective chemicals were developed – being progressively downgraded before the program was abandoned altogether.
This certainly wasn’t because the USSR of the 1980s thought that a confrontation with NATO was less likely – the Able Archer exercise in 1983 could be argued to represent the absolute peak of Cold War tensions, rivaled only by the Cuban Missile Crisis. So this steady move away from chemical warfare wasn’t out of pacifism or utopianism; it stands to reason that it was instead motivated by a calculation as to the (limited) effectiveness of such weapons.
And I think it is worth noting that this sort of cycle – an effort to find a use for an existing weapon – is fairly common in modern military development. You can see similar efforts in the development of tactical nuclear weapons: developmental dead-ends like Davy Crockett or nuclear artillery. But the conclusion that was reached was not “chemical weapons are morally terrible” but rather “chemical weapons offer no real advantage”. In essence, the two big powers of the Cold War (and, as a side note, also the lesser components of the Warsaw Pact and NATO) spent the whole Cold War looking for an effective way to use chemical weapons against each other, and seem to have – by the end – concluded on the balance that there wasn’t one. Either conventional weapons get the job done, or you escalate to nuclear systems.
(Israel, as an aside, seems to have gone through this process in microcosm. Threatened by neighbors with active chemical weapons programs, the Israelis seem to have developed their own, but have never found a battlefield use for them, despite having been in no less than three conventional, existential wars (meaning the very existence of the state was threatened – the sort of war where moral qualms mean relatively little) since 1948.)
And I want to stress this point: it isn’t that chemical munitions do nothing, but rather they are less effective than an equivalent amount of conventional, high explosive munitions (or, at levels of extreme escalation, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons). This isn’t a value question, but a value-against-replacement question – why maintain, issue, store, and shoot expensive chemical munitions if cheap, easier to store, easier to manufacture high explosive munitions are both more obtainable and also better? When you add the geopolitical and morale impact on top of that – you sacrifice diplomatic capital using such weapons and potentially demoralize your own soldiers, who don’t want to see themselves as delivering inhumane weapons – it’s pretty clear why they wouldn’t bother. Nevertheless, the moral calculus isn’t the dominant factor: battlefield efficacy – or the relative lack thereof – is.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-20.
November 1, 2022
QotD: Spartan strategy during the Persian wars
The hammer Sparta has, of course, is hoplite battle. Sparta seeks to solve almost all of its issues by applying a hoplite phalanx to the problem, regardless of if the problem can be solved by a hoplite phalanx. Spartan strategic thinking is thus marred by both a failure to consider military solutions that did not consist of traditional hoplite battles, as well as an inability to consider or execute non-military solutions at all.
We can see the former weakness in Spartan planning in the Persian Wars. Spartan planning is both direct and unrealistic: find a choke-point, fortify it and hold it indefinately with a hoplite army. Attempted at Thermopylae this plan fails; the Battle of Thermopylae is often represented in popular culture as an intentional delaying action, but it was nothing of the sort – Herodotus is clear that this was supposed to be the decisive land engagement (Hdt. 7.175; Cf. Diodorus 11.4.1-5). The Spartans then attempt to recreate this plan at the Isthmus of Corinth and have to be rescued from their strategic stupidity by the Athenians, who threaten to leave the alliance if the plan isn’t abandoned (Hdt. 8.49-62). A blockade at the Isthmus would be easy for the Persian army to bypass – assuming it didn’t simply defeat it with generally superior Persian siegecraft – and worse yet was a diplomatic disaster given that it meant essentially writing Athens off as a loss, when the Athenian navy provided the bulk of the ships protecting the Isthmus.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
October 28, 2022
QotD: “Cliodynamics”, aka “megahistory”
Attentive readers will have already sensed that I have issues with these kinds of arguments; indeed, for all of my occasional frustrations with political science literature (much of which is perfectly fine, but it seems a frequent and honestly overall positive dynamic that historians tend to be highly critical of political scientists) I consider “cliodynamics” to generally take the worst parts of data-driven political science methodologies to apotheosis while discarding most of the virtues of data-driven poli-sci work.
As would any good historian, I have a host of nitpicks, but my objection to the idea of “cliodynamics” has to do with the way that it proposes to tear away the context of the historical data. I think it is worth noting at the outset the claim actually being made here because there is often a bit of motte-and-bailey that goes on, where these sorts of megahistories make extremely confident and very expansive claims and then when challenged is to retreat back to much more restricted claims but Turchin in particular is explicit in Secular Cycles (2009) that “a basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems” in the pursuit of discovering “general laws” of history.
Fundamentally, the approach is set on the premise that the solution to the fact that the details of society are both so complex (imagine charting out the daily schedules of every person one earth for even a single day) and typically so poorly attested is to aggregate all of that data to generate general rules which could cover any population over a long enough period. To my mind, there are two major problems here: predictability and evidence. Let’s start with predictability.
And that’s where we get to Isaac Asimov, because this is essentially also how the “psychohistory” of the Foundation series functions (or, for the Star Trek fans, how the predictions in the DS9 episode “Statistical Probabilities“, itself an homage to the Foundation series, function). The explicit analogy offered is that of the laws that govern gasses: while no particular molecule of a gas can modeled with precision, the entire body of gas can be modeled accurately. Statistical probability over a sufficiently large sample means that the individual behaviors of the individual gas molecules combine in the aggregate to form a predictable whole; the randomness of each molecule “comes out in the wash” when combined with the randomness of the rest.2
I should note that Turchin rejects comparisons to Asimov’s psychohistory (but also embraced the comparison back in 2013), but they are broadly embraced by his boosters. Moreover, Turchin’s claim at the end of that blog post that “prediction is overrated” is honestly a bit bizarre given how quick he is when talking with journalists to use his models to make predictions; Turchin has expressed some frustration with the tone of Graeme Wood’s piece on him, but “We are almost guaranteed” is a direct quote that hasn’t yet been removed and I can speak from experience: The Atlantic‘s fact-checking on such things is very vigorous. So I am going to assume those words escaped the barrier of his teeth and also I am going to suggest here that “We are almost guaranteed” is, in fact, a prediction and a fairly confident one at that.
The problem with applying something like the ideal gas law – or something like the population dynamics of beetles – to human societies is fundamentally interchangeability. Statistical models like these have to treat individual components (beetles, molecules) the way economists treat commodities: part of a larger group where the group has qualities, but the individuals merely function to increase the group size by 1. Raw metals are a classic example of a commodity used this way: add one ton of copper to five hundred tons of copper and you have 501 tons of copper; all of the copper is functionally interchangeable. But of course any economist worth their pencil-lead will be quick to remind you that not all goods are commodities. One unit of “car” is not the same as the next. We can go further, one unit of “Honda Civic” is not the same as the next. Heck, one unit of 2012 Silver Honda Civic LX with 83,513 miles driven on it is not the same as the next even if they are located in the same town and owned by the same person; they may well have wildly different maintenance and accident histories, for instance, which will impact performance and reliability.
Humans have this Honda Civic problem (that is, they are not commodities) but massively more so. Now of course these theories do not formally posit that all, say, human elites are the same, merely that the differences between humans of a given grouping (social status, ethnic group, what have you) “come out in the wash” at large scales with long time horizons. Except of course they don’t and it isn’t even terribly hard to think of good examples.
1 Yes, I am aware that Gat was consulted for Better Angels and blurbed the book. This doesn’t change my opinion of the two books. my issue is fundamentally evidentiary: War is built on concrete, while Better Angels is built on sand when it comes to the data they propose to use. As we’ll see, that’s a frequent issue.
2 Of course the predictions in the Foundation series are not quite flawlessly perfect. They fail in two cases I can think of: the emergence of a singular exceptional individual with psychic powers (the Mule) and situations in which the subjects of the predictions become aware of them. That said Seldon is able to predict things with preposterous accuracy, such that he is able to set up a series of obstacles for a society he knows they will overcome. The main problem is that these challenges frequently involve conflict or competition with other humans; Seldon is at leisure to assume such conflicts are predictable, which is to say they lack Clausewitzian (drink!) friction. But all conflicts have friction; competition between peers is always unpredictable.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: October 15, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-15.
October 24, 2022
An overview of strategic airpower
Bret Devereaux wants to provide a basic idea of what we mean when we use the military term “strategic airpower”:
USAF B-52 Stratofortress near the North Pole on 31 July, 2016 during the Polar Roar exercise.
Detail of original USAF photo by Senior Airman Joshua King via Wikimedia Commons.
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for this post has been Russian efforts to use airpower coercively in Ukraine, we’re going to focus more broadly on the topic: what is strategic airpower, where did the idea come from, how has it been used and does it actually work? As with nuclear deterrence, this is a much debated topic, so what I am going to present here is an overview of the sort I’d provide for an introductory class on the topic and then at the end we’ll cover some of the implications for the current conflict in Ukraine. That said, this is also an issue where I think most historians of the topic tend to part ways with both some things the public think they know about the topic and some of the things that occasionally the relevant branches of the military want to know about the topic; in any case I am going to try to present a fairly “down the middle” historian’s view of the question.
Before we dive in, we need to define what makes certain uses of airpower strategic because strategic airpower isn’t the only kind. The reason for the definition will emerge pretty quickly when we talk about origins, but let’s get it out of the way here: strategic airpower is the use of attack by air (read: bombing) to achieve “strategic effects”. Now that formal definition is a bit tautological, but it becomes clarifying when we talk about what we mean by strategic effects; these are effects that aim to alter enemy policy or win the war on their own.
Put another way, if you use aircraft to attack enemy units in support of a ground operation (like an invasion), that would be tactical airpower; the airpower is a tactic that aims to win a battle which is still primarily a ground (or naval) battle. We often call this kind of airpower “close air support” but not all tactical airpower is CAS. If you instead use airpower to shape ground operations – for instance by attacking infrastructure (like bridges or railroads) or by bombing enemy units to force them to stay put (often by forcing them to move only at night) – that’s operational airpower. The most common form of this kind of airpower is “interdiction” bombing, which aims to slow down enemy ground movements so that friendly units can out-maneuver them in larger-scale sweeping movements.
By contrast strategic airpower aims to produce effects at the strategic (that is, top-most) level on its own. Sometimes that is quite blunt: strategic airpower aims to win the war on its own without reference to ground forces, or at least advance the ball on winning a conflict or achieving a desired end-state (that is, the airpower may not be the only thing producing strategic effects). Of course strategic effects can go beyond “winning the war” – coercing or deterring another power are both strategic effects as well, forcing the enemy to redefine their strategy. That said, as we’ll see, this initially very expansive definition of strategic airpower really narrows quite quickly. Aircraft cannot generally hold ground, administer territory, build trust, establish institutions, or consolidate gains, so using airpower rapidly becomes a question of “what to bomb” because delivering firepower is what those aircraft can do.
As an aside, this sort of cabined definition of airpower and thus strategic airpower has always been frustrating to me. It is how airpower is often discussed, so it’s how I am going to discuss it, but of course aircraft can move more than bombs. Aircraft might move troops – that’s an operational use of airpower – but they can also move goods and supplies. Arguably the most successful example of strategic airpower use anywhere, ever is the Berlin Airlift, which was a pure airpower operation that comprehensively defeated a major Soviet strategic aim, and yet the U.S. Air Force is far more built around strategic bombing than it is around strategic humanitarian airlift (it does the latter, but the Army and the Navy, rather than the Air Force, tend to take the lead in long-distance humanitarian operations). Nevertheless that definition – excessively narrow, I would argue – is a clear product of the history of strategic airpower, so let’s start there.
And once again before we get started, a reminder that the conflict in Ukraine is not notional or theoretical but very real and is causing very real suffering, including displacing large numbers of Ukrainians as refugees, both within Ukraine and beyond its borders. If you want to help, consider donating to Ukrainian aid organizations like Razom for Ukraine or to the Ukrainian Red Cross. As we’re going to see here, airpower offers no quick solution for the War in Ukraine for either party, but the recent Russian shift to air attacks on civilian centers sadly promises more suffering and more pressing need for humanitarian assistance for Putin’s many victims.
Finally, a content warning: what we’re discussing today is largely (though not entirely) the application of airpower against civilian targets because it turns usually what “strategic” airpower ends up being. This is a discussion of the theory, which means it’s going to be pretty bloodless, but nevertheless this topic ought to be uncomfortable.
On with our topic, starting with the question of where the idea of strategic airpower comes from.
October 23, 2022
QotD: Sparta’s military reputation in the Peloponnesian War
That reputation was already deeply held even by the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, such that Thucydides notes that “Nothing that happened in the war so shocked the Greeks so much as” the surrender of 120 Spartiates at Pylos/Sphacteria, instead of dying with their weapons in their hands (Thuc. 4.40.1). The Athenians had, in the event, managed to trap a force of Spartans – Spartiates and other Laconians – on an island and harassed them with arrow fire from a distance, never closing with them, until the Spartans surrendered. This is, I must stress, in the context of a war that obliterated entire poleis, shredded the diplomatic fabric of Greece and was by far the largest war between Greeks that any of them knew of. But this, the shattering – if just for a moment – of the Spartan reputation, that was what shocked people. The image of Sparta – whatever the reality – was that deeply set.
Thucydides, amusingly, relates that some Greeks were so shocked that they couldn’t believe it, and one ally of Athens inquired to the Spartiates – then held as captives in Athens – if perhaps what had happened was that all of the brave men (you know, the real Spartiates) had been felled by the arrows, to which the Spartans responded, “an arrow would be worth a great deal if it could pick out noble and good men from the rest, in allusion to the fact that the killed were those whom the stones and the arrows happened to hit” (Thuc. 4.40.2).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
October 19, 2022
QotD: Ritual change over time in pre-modern polytheistic religions
With the benefit of the strange sort of historical vision that lets us view multiple centuries at the same time, we can see that this is not so. Cult (by this term I don’t mean “creepy religion” I just mean “a unit of religious practice”, which is what it actually means) expands in importance or contracts. Certain gods that were seen as very important become less so and vice-versa. New practices move in, or arise seemingly out of nowhere, old practices pass out of use. And I find that also often befuddles students: so much is obviously changing, so how can these folks believe they’ve been doing everything the same since forever?
A big part of the answer is that they do not see history the way we do. For someone taking, say, a Greek history survey, you are viewing Greek society from space – zooming over entire decades, sometimes whole generations, in a single paragraph, compressing vast amounts of granularity. Change that appears rapid and obvious to us was often so slow as to be unnoticeable to people at the time – something we should remember will seem true about us when we are viewed by future humans as well.
The other thing to note is that these religious systems do allow for the idea that the gods are known imperfectly – this is another one of Clifford Ando’s excellence observations – and so the system is both devoted to tradition (if it works, keep doing it) and open to change (if it doesn’t work, innovate!). The system is thus more able to incorporate change without it seeming like anything has changed than many modern religions which have fixed religious texts with strongly accepted meanings.
Note here: it is not that the gods change, but that information about how to keep them happy can be learned. That does not produce a “newer is better” mentality though: new rituals are untested, whereas a ritual that has been practiced for centuries beyond counting has clearly worked for centuries beyond counting – after all, our society still exists and functions, so clearly, it worked!
Consequently, old practices are seen by practitioners as the best practices, but in the event of an emergency – a sudden setback that might imply the goodwill of a god (or, worse yet, the gods generally) has been lost, innovation is possible. And if that new ritual sets things right – the crisis abates – then it gets added to the portfolio of rituals-that-work, to be repeated, step for step, precisely, for future generations.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part I: Knowledge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-25.
October 15, 2022
QotD: Spartan strategic and diplomatic blunders during and after the Peloponnesian War
It takes Sparta years of fighting Athens to finally recognize this – an effort in 413/2 to support revolts from Athens is pathetically slow and under-funded (Thuc. 8, basically all of it) and it isn’t until Sparta not only allies with Persia but entrusts its fleet to the mothax Lysander that they seriously set about a strategy of cutting Athens’ naval supply lines. This isn’t a one-time affair: Sparta’s inability to coordinate ends and means shows up again in the Corinthian war (e.g. in Argos, Xen. Hell. 4.7), where they are pulled into a debilitating defensive stalemate because the Corinthians won’t come out and fight and the Spartans have no other answers.
This is compounded by the fact that the Spartans are awful at diplomacy. Sparta could be the lynch-pin of a decent alliance of cities when the outside threat was obvious and severe – as in the case of the Persian wars, or the expansion of Athenian hegemony. But otherwise, Sparta consistently and repeatedly alienates allies to its own peril. Spartan leadership at the end of the Persian wars had been so arrogant and hamfisted that leadership of the anti-Persian alliance passed to Athens (creating what would become the Athenian Empire, so Spartan diplomatic incompetence led directly to the titanic conflict of the late fifth century). And to be clear, Athenian diplomacy does not score high marks either, but it is still a far sight better than the Spartans (Greek diplomacy, in general was awful – rude, arrogant and focused on compulsion rather than suasion – so it is telling that the Spartans are very bad at it, even by Greek standards).
In 461, Spartan arrogance towards an Athenian military expedition sent to help Sparta against a helot revolt utterly discredited the pro-Sparta political voices at Athens and in turn set the two states on a collision course. Sparta had ejected the friendly army so roughly that it had created an outrage in Athens.
During the Peloponnesian War, Spartan diplomatic miscalculations repeatedly hurt their cause, as with the destruction of Plataea – the symbol of Greek resistence to Persia. Later on in the war, terrible Spartan diplomacy repeatedly derails efforts to work with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, who has the money and resources Sparta needs to defeat Athens; it is the decidedly un-Spartan actions first of Alcibiades (then being a traitor to Athens) and later Lysander who rescue the alliance. After the end of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta promptly alienated its key allies, ending up at war first with Corinth (the Corinthian War (394-386) and then with Thebes (378-371), both of which had been stalwarts of Sparta’s anti-Athenian efforts (Corinth was itself a member of the Peloponnesian League). This led directly to the loss of Messenia and the breaking of Spartan power.
In short, whenever Sparta was confronted with a problem – superior enemy forces, maritime enemies, fortified enemy positions, the need to keep alliances together, financial demands – any problem which could not be solved by frontal attack with hoplites, the traditional Spartan leadership alienated friends and flailed uselessly. Often the Spartans attempted – as with Corinth and later Thebes – to compel friendship with hoplite armies, which worked exactly as poorly as you might imagine.
It is hard not to see both the strategic inflexibility of Sparta and the arrogant diplomatic incompetence of the spartiates as a direct consequence of the agoge‘s rigid system of indoctrination. Young Spartiates, after all, were taught that anyone with a craft was to be despised and that anyone who had to work was lesser than they – is it any surprise that they disdained the sort of warfare and statecraft that depended on such men? The agoge – as we are told – enforced its rules with copious violence and was designed to create and encourage strict, violent hierarchies to encourage obedience. It can be no surprise that men indoctrinated in such a system – and thus liable to attempt to use its methods abroad – made poor diplomats and strategic thinkers abroad.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
October 11, 2022
QotD: The debt we owe to the Carolingian Renaissance
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Dhuoda of Uzès (Carolingian Values)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-27.
