Hey folks! Year is coming to a close, so once again I’m going to offer a bit of an end-of-year reflection on the state of the project, along with a brief ‘what’s on the stove’ coverage of what may be coming up. Also, here’s a cat picture:
In terms of the project itself, 2024 was, in terms of views and viewers, basically the same as 2023 (technically a bit better), but a bit less than 2022 (but still wildly more than any year 2019-21). As I noted last year, I tend to benchmark my project against Eidolon (2015-2020)’s five-year run of c. 2m views as a bar for a successful public scholarship project. WordPress says we had 3.74m page views this year (up from 3.6m last year); Google Analytics is a bit more aggressive in filtering and says 3.42m year-to-date (cf. 3.34 last year). So the audience hasn’t grown much, but it’s pretty steady at what is still, for a public history project, a quite high level. I’m especially pleased with that result given that we were on hiatus for two full months.
The most popular post series this year was the Phalanx-Legion series (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, V) with a bit more than a quarter-of-a-million views split over all of its various parts. The Sci-Fi Body Armor post also was quite popular, as was the series on Alexander III of Macedon. Annoyingly, WordPress has changed the back-end analytics to make it annoyingly hard to see what the least well performing posts were, but it looks like of the Collections posts, it may have been the Imperator series (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb). And yet, my campaign to bully Paradox into green-lighting Imperator II continues. A Philip II of Macedon once said, “We aren’t running away, only backing up that, as a battering ram, we can hurl back and hit again harder” (Polyaenus, Strat. 2.38.2). Expect my eleven-part five-part series on Imperator next year (I’m kidding; I think the next Teaching Paradox series should probably be Hearts of Iron IV, although I still haven’t quite pulled my thoughts together on it yet).
As for trends in the metrics, Twitter is still a major source of readers, but its decline – which I noted last year – continues. Twitter-based traffic is down by about a third from 2023, and in the last few months Twitter, which was typically the solid second-place of my traffic sources (after Google) has been fighting with Bluesky, Reddit and Hacker News for that top spot. Right now, I’m still splitting my time over Twitter and Bluesky (and trying to at least get all new post announcements on Mastodon) but as Twitter becomes both a less pleasant place1 and less useful for finding readers, I may de-prioritize it further. Overall, the fragmentation of the social media space is probably bad for me; I’m not a full time ‘social media influencer’ who has time to ‘foster engagement’ over multiple channels. It’s fortunate I established the core audience I did when I did.
Speaking of which, the ACOUP amici over on Patreon continue to grow: we had 1,183 folks supporting the project in January, 2023; 1,368 in January 2024 and right now we’re at 1,502. That support has enabled me to both continue this project and continue working on my scholarship. The book project (Of Arms and Men), which you’ll recall we had just gotten under contract this time last year is now further advanced: I have the full manuscript very nearly done (I’ll hit ‘feature complete’ in the next week or two). I think we’re hoping to have the book out sometime in 2025 (probably late in the year) and I’ll be sure to keep everyone posted. In addition, some time in the next year I’ll be putting up a sort of ‘roll of honor’ backer page, listing everyone who supported the project on Patreon over the years that Of Arms and Men was in the works.
As you may have gathered, Of Arms and Men is not a small project. I argue that Roman success was in more than just mobilizing men, but that instead a Roman mobilization advantage appears across the other costs of warfare (supplies, (very briefly) ships, non-battlefield kit, arms and armor) suggesting a more comprehensive mobilization advantage which was due to Rome’s unique system for mobilizing the resources of Italy, in contrast to the traditional explanations which foregrounded either raw Italian manpower or assumed exceptional Roman bellicosity. Making that argument stick requires covering what we know of the logistics, equipment, arms and armor and mobilization systems for not just Rome, but also Carthage, the three Hellenistic great powers (Antigonids, Seleucids, Ptolemies) and non-state peoples in pre-Roman Spain and Gaul. At last count, the running bibliography alone has more than 700 works in it (and still feels woefully incomplete in some areas).
In any case, as noted the whole thing should appear in print probably late next year. As a fair warning, while I have endeavored to make a book that is broadly legible (no untranslated passages, all terms defined, dates for events listed, maps to help you figure out where things are, as little jargon as possible), this is first and foremost a research work rather than a popular one and so is written a bit differently than the blog. Nevertheless, I know a fair number of you have been waiting on this one and you must wait a bit longer, but I will be sure to keep you informed as we get closer.2
Naturally, with all of that work going into the book project, I had relatively fewer works of note off the blog. I wrote a review of Gladiator II for Foreign Policy, as well as another piece on the crisis of academic history’s implications for national security. I also wrote a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education on inexpensive ways that departments could be less cruel to their fixed-term/adjunct/visiting professors. Finally, I wrote a grumpy piece in The Dispatch taking apart the Heritage Foundation’s annual “Index of U.S. Military Strength.”
For this coming year, I have a few things currently on the queue to do. I have a few specifically Roman historical topics I’ve seen come up that I want to treat: ‘On the Gracchi,’ a discussion of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus taking a somewhat (but by no means entirely) negative view of figures that I think are often treated a bit too uncritically in how they tend to be taught in survey courses. I also want to treat the question of if Roman emperors were unusually likely to be crazy or insane (spoilers: no). For the worldbuilders out there, I want to put together a brief precis on ancient Mediterranean currency, in the hopes of giving folks a sense of how a pre-modern currency might work and just maybe to get more settings to move away from assuming that day-to-day transactions happen in a unit called ‘gold.’3 I also think it might be fun to look at some of the armor styles in DragonAge: Veilguard (which I haven’t quite yet finished), because they’re an interesting mix of reasonable and what I can only describe as ‘terminal DeviantArt armor’ – a product of concept art whose only referents are other concept artworks.
- It’s not that everyone left on Twitter are awful, but that the normal-to-awful ratio tilts in the direction of the latter with each exodus. As a result, the conversations on Bluesky are already mostly better, even if the numbers aren’t there yet. That said, Bluesky is not without its problems; it is self-selected to a significant degree and so has a noticeable ideological tilt (as Twitter does these days too) and that can create echo chamber problems.
- I rather hope we can surprise the press and sell out the first run, but no word yet on how they’re going to price it. My hope is that if we can get the initial print run (typically in hardcover and more expensive) to go quickly we can get a more affordable softcover run, but on these things, I can make no promises.
- Even state expenses in antiquity were calculated in silver.
Last year Rogue Trader and Trading companies were teased, are they still in the cards?
Yes, but I have to stop playing Rogue Trader long enough to talk about them in more depth.
Hmmm… Iconoclast or Dogmatic, I wonder? Or – dare I say it – Heretic?
Iconoclast is the “I’m not evil, I just want the Imperium to stop being fascist assholes” route, and Bret has written quite a lot about how fascism makes a country weaker.
Ah, but have you considered that the Imperium, made and ordained by the most holy God-Emperor of Terra, is already and obviously perfect and shouldnt be changed or challenged in any way?
So clearly, the Imperium being an inefficient, fascist theocratic hellhole with no hope or future is just as the Emperor wanted it!
Checkmate, heretic!
Love that game, have fun!
Why not ask Abelard to talk about them in your stead?
Y’all leave Abelard alone. That man is doing too much already, and he needs a mai tai and a damned beach. Make Idira do it – it’ll be more entertaining.
Yes, but that’s not quite a first cause. It’s that way in D&D because it derives from classic pulp fantasy, Gygax’s shaky hold on economic theory, and his love of the gold standard.
Have you finished the elden ring expansion yet
I would like to re-iterate my request that gap week be officially renamed to “Cat week”. And then onto serious business, glad to see that the project is doing well, and I’m anxiously waiting for the book to come out. And very much looking forward to ones of ancient Mediterranean currency. At least in my own casual studies, when reading the Gemara, mostly talking about individual or household expenses, things are often calculated in terms of “שכר/שכרים” (Shacharim is the plural form) which is basically one day’s wage for an unskilled urban laborer. Is that a common unit of measurement elsewhere?
I’ve been meaning to say this the last few times you brought it up but:
> WordPress says we had 3.74m page views this year (up from 3.6m last year); Google Analytics is a bit more aggressive in filtering
I suspect the WordPress number is the more accurate one. Your audience skews very techy and a signifigant number of them will be using ad blockers / privacy extensions that block GA. The WP stats I would expect are first party (ie. from your actual server) and wouldn’t be blocked.
One way to observe this effect might be to compare stats by referer – I would expect the Hacker News hits to be higher in WP vs GA than other sources.
Another grand year for the blog and congratulations on having an actual fire in your fireplace. That’s easily the feature I miss the most about my current home.
Would there be a chance for an electronic release of your book? I don’t tend to read a lot of physical books these days, both for cost and portability reasons.
I think the plan is to have an ebook version, but I’m not sure how obtainable it will be.
I’m thankful that I have enough disposable income to be able to afford a copy of the book no matter how they price it (assuming they don’t price it, like, two orders of magnitude higher than a typically expensive academic tome). So I’ll be putting in my order on day 1.
Here’s my wishlist for Collections (or maybe just Firesides) in 2025:
* The daily activities of some example Roman Republic citizens (a rural farmer; a city laborer; a senator; a merchant; a slave; a soldier).
* A detailed view of the economic system of the Roman Republic, in terms of things like who controlled capital, how money flowed, how trade worked. This could tie into your planned piece on currency, maybe be part of a series on the economics of antiquity.
* A discussion of how (or even if) America’s vast overexpenditure on the military (being equivalent to something like the military budgets of the next 10 spendiest nations combined) has contributed to the overall level of stability in the post-WW2 era (in the sense that we’ve had no more world wars since then, only smaller-scale conflicts). I’ve seen arguments on both sides of this and am interested in Bret’s take.
[ ” The daily activities of some example Roman Republic citizens (a rural farmer; a city laborer; a senator; a merchant; a slave; a soldier).” ]
But, slaves were all of the above, except senator, and a citizen. Plus a thousand and one other things, that slaves were.
Yes, I am aware that former slaves could and were able to become citizens.
(in the sense that we’ve had no more world wars since then, only smaller-scale conflicts).
I think the fact that we’ve had no more world wars seems pretty strongly overdetermined (i.e. there are many factors that cause it, simultaneously, and even if one or more were absent you’d probably still get the same result). International trade, international agreements and institutions, changing norms, and most of all (as has been discussed on this blog before) the fact that modern armaments are so destructive they make most international wars a negative-sum proposition. So, I’d hesitate to credit America’s bloated military with the fact that there have been no more world wars (or really with much of any other good outcome).
America wasn’t the *sole* superpower between 1945 and 1989, for one thing, and there were no world wars then either.
People noted, at the time, that we had all those things before WWI and therefore confidently predicted no more wars.
Perhaps when men say “dynamite has made war so destructive that virtually no one would fight it,” they are wrong, but when men say “H-bombs have made war so destructive that virtually no one would be mad enough to fight it,” they are right.
Yet we have had many wars since the H-bomb came along. Merely changed.
Also the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
“Also the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
this doesn’t really solve the question when you have an overdetermined situation, it’s like saying “what makes the pudding good, the walnuts or the raisins?” i’d say that the pudding would be equally good if you left out either the walnuts or the raisins, since I really like both in isolation,
There’s no law declaring that all questions can be solved.
Yes, but I think it took a while (at least a generation or two, and maybe the exceptional destructiveness of WWII) for the lessons to really sink in.
Like I said, the “long global peace” dates from 1945, not from 1991 (which is when America became the unchallenged hegemon).
I was under the impression that the globalization of the economy since the war had more to do with it.
To be pedantic: wars had always been negative-sum. What they used to be but aren’t anymore is “winnable”; that is to say, potentially profitable for the winner.
Somewhere between “changing norms” and “destructive weaponry” is that the economy has also become more vulnerable. If a Roman army drops a hundred kilotons of explosives on an area, killing all people, animals, and even crops, leveling all buildings, they nonetheless gain most of its economic value, because they establish a colonia there. The value of the area is the soil and rainfall. Whereas if they take an area with a modern economy at spearpoint, they get next to nothing. The value of the area is in a combination of physical capital (some of which is fragile enough to break when taken, even if with spears), human capital, and social structures (org charts — don’t laugh).
I think people still often perceive civil wars, and so called “wars of national liberation”, as ‘winnable’ (or maybe more accurately, perceive the stakes in a civil war or a liberation war as existential, so that even a huge amount of physical destruction and devastation is still preferable to losing). Which is maybe why most wars since 1945 have been civil wars. But yes, I think you’re right that the vast majority of *international* wars between sovereign states aren’t winnable any more, even when they used to be.
And yet, we still see countries engaging in wars of choice – Russia invading Ukraine (albeit not winning), Azerbaijan vs Armenia (seems like they straight up won that one), US vs Iraq (not really a win, but the US also wasn’t going for straight conquest…), etc.
Now, these also tend to be wars that look very one-sided to the initiator, so things changing might have altered the balance, but they are definitely still happening.
Describing the recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan as an Azeri war of choice may be accurate if the term is used broadly. Still, I do wonder what would your reaction be if Ukraine were to accept a ceasefire freezing current lines of control, but then break it themselves years down the line with a major offensive aimed at reclaiming their internationally recognized territory? Would you also describe it as a “war of choice” or use a different term?
After all, the status of the late “Nagorno-Karabakh Republic” was functionally identical to that of the “People’s Republics” in East Ukraine in the eyes of international law. Just about every argument in favour of supporting Ukraine on international law grounds was equally applicable to supporting Azerbaijan. In that sense, the only difference between the conflicts was that the side in breach of the international law (Armenia) was the more democratic of the two, and that is generally not considered an exemption from international law.
(Obviously, the hypothetical above assumes that Ukraine would be more capable of using a ceasefire to rebuild its military for future conflict than Russia would – an assumption which was true for Azerbaijan, and also true for Ukraine itself between 2014 and 2022, but is far less clear now, since so much of this hypothetical rearmament would have to depend on the Western political will.)
Also in the one-sided category would be the US vs. Afghanistan, which was successful in that the al-Qaeda training camps were broken up and bin Laden was killed, although obviously nothing useful was achieved subsequent to 2011. (Really the period since 2011 was an amazing display of incompetence from both political parties, several administrations, and both the State Department and the Pentagon.)
If it was a true peace with a similar status, then yes, that would be a war of choice in the sense I mean – I am not making a moral judgement (though it does of course tend to shade as being bad, because, you know, war.), I am simply saying “one side elected to initiate a war when they reasonably had the option to not engage in hostilities”; such things are things that a “war is not winnable” theory would claim will not happen, or will only happen by mistake. (Though, to be clear, it would also depend on how the peace was broken; if it was escalating skirmishes that would likely not be a war of choice, while if it was opened with a significant offensive that would be.)
I actually am not counting US vs Afghanistan as a war of choice by this metric, because reacting to 9/11 was politically forced, and Afghanistan’s inability and/or unwillingness to turn over Bin Laden made war largely inevitable – again, this is not a moral judgement (the US invasion of Afghanistan was pretty miserable, morally!), merely an observation of the effective political necessities.
Or, to put it another way – WW1 was not a war of choice but it was also a moral disaster for many belligerents, while WW2 was a war of choice (and… well, also a moral disaster for the aggressor, obviously).
I guess to identify a war of choice that is generally considered “good”, maybe I’d cite the American Revolution?
All I’m contrasting here is “wars that are engaged in upon deliberation and reflection” vs “wars that are stumbled into” – a theory that “weapons are so terrible that people will no longer engage in war” or “war can no longer be won, only less-lost”, or what have you, should imply the elimination of the first category but not the second. And then I observe that it seems that, actually, that first category is still happening, so that hypothesis doesn’t really seem to hold up in the face of reality. (Though maybe nukes are actually terrible enough to even prevent stumbling into war between nuclear-armed states? Certainly many very sober people are putting a lot of effort into that…)
@Sotek:
as YARD suggests below, I think the Azeris may have seen the Karabakh war as a “war of national liberation”, or maybe as completing the partially unfinished independence struggle that started with the fall of the Russian empire in 1917 and then picked up again in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Even if to an Armenian, or maybe to you or me, it might look more like an irredentist war of choice.
“I am simply saying “one side elected to initiate a war when they reasonably had the option to not engage in hostilities”; such things are things that a “war is not winnable” theory would claim will not happen, or will only happen by mistake.”
Hmm. Seems to me that your theory would predict that a the perceived probability that the most destructive of modern weapons would actually be used should be a factor. That is, how likely do the aggressors think it is that the war will become extremely destructive, which translates into how likely it is that the most powerful weapons available to nations today will be used?
Since the aggressors probably believe that they determine the destructive potential of the war they are starting with a less powerful opponent, many wars of choice could still occur. Russia invading Ukraine, for instance, probably believed that mass destruction (in Russia) was rather unlikely.
But that is because they were attacking Ukraine, a relatively weak nation militarily. They are much less likely to attack a Nato member, for this very reason.
@Hector Well, sure. I’m roughly dividing wars into two categories, and perhaps ‘war of choice’ is loaded with connotations I should avoid for my category labelling.
My categories here are, like, ‘an immediate result of inflamed passions or sudden events’ and ‘the result of sober reflection and careful planning’.
I placed Azerbaijan/Armenia in the second category, in the sense that it seems like they absolutely could have delayed the war for years if they thought they would not win – there was no specific inciting incident, etc.
There are a lot of wars throughout history that land in the first category, many of them quite evil. But such a war is not evidence that people thought it winnable, merely unavoidable. It’s wars that are begun after sober reflection with no inciting incident that are evidence that those who began the war believed they could “actually win” the war, and that refutes the claim that modern war is perceived as so unwinnable that it’s unthinkable. Though, @Demarquis’ point is also well-taken; all of the recent examples of planned wars I can think of had significant disparities (at least in perceived power, hi Ukraine) so the logic seems to suggest that peer conflicts are in fact viewed as unwinnable, at least post-WW2.
“A discussion of how (or even if) America’s vast overexpenditure on the military (being equivalent to something like the military budgets of the next 10 spendiest nations combined)”
I’d bet good money that is not true now, and was not true during the Cold War. I suspect you may be half-remembering a factoid. Which is admittedly something that happens to us all.
A quick look at Wikipedia indicates that the U.S. spends more on its military than the next 9 nations combined.
A lot of that depends on how you define military spending.
Put another way: the US does not outgun China 10 to 1.
Depending on who you ask, it’s pretty close to true. (In particular, what counts as “military spending” is somewhat fuzzy.) According to the 2023 numbers from SIPRI, the US spends more than the next 9 nations combined (China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, UK, Germany, Ukraine, France, and Japan). The US really does spend far more than any other nation.
Interestingly, the same The Dispatch to which Our Gracious Host contributed this year also published this piece which suggested A LOT more of that figure comes down to wage and labor cost disparities than one might think.
https://thedispatch.com/article/in-defense-of-defense-spending/
> How can America’s military be falling behind when it outspends the next nine largest nations combined? Even if those defense spending figures are accurate—and there is reason to think they aren’t—they are not determinative of military capabilities. A significant portion of the spending gap reflects that America’s troop compensation costs far exceed Russia, China, and others. Troop personnel and compensation costs (salary, pension, health care, housing) now absorb more than 40 percent of the defense budget, and exceed $110,000 for the median enlistee and $180,000 for the median officer. To adjust for compensation and other divergent prices and unit costs between nations, economist Peter Robertson adjusted cross-national defense spending figures by purchasing power parity. By that standard, Russia and China combine to nearly equal American defense spending.
> Even those figures may overstate America’s advantage. When Mackenzie Eaglen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, examined China’s true military budget (rather than the communist government’s self-reported figures), she found vast off-the-books expenditures that—after adjusting for purchasing power parity—pushed China’s true defense spending to nearly equal that of the United States.
The same piece also cites the CBO assessment which suggests that cutting the U.S. defence spending by 10% is likely to result in “laying off 400,000 active military members (25 percent of all active personnel) and essentially abandoning America’s ability to repel a powerful aggressor’s military forces with a full-scale counterattack—instead relying on deterrence, limited counterattacks, and diplomatic and economic sanctions in hopes of persuading the attacking nation to back down.” That assessment is an extensive PDF, and I will not vouch for the accuracy of the authors’ interpretation of it, but it’s clearly worth mentioning regardless.
From Eaglen’s own article:
> All countries count and report their defense spending in different ways. Authoritarian nations provide little more than annual amounts to the United Nations. Since these regimes offer no transparency, they are able to choose what they disclose in order to hide investments in key military capabilities. China’s self-reported military budget, which comes directly from the Chinese Communist Party, is no more than a lone topline figure released through state media each year. This is a far cry from the thousands of pages of public budget documentation released annually by the Pentagon —one of the most transparent military budgets in the world.
> A brief examination shows why China is dead-last in transparency worldwide. Its budget excludes essential expenditures such as paramilitary organizations, funding for defense research and development, and its illegal South China Sea island building campaign.
Many experts believe China’s public defense budget does not include other military relevant expenses such as space activities, construction, and research. China’s state-sanctioned practice of military-civil fusion further blurs the lines between military and commercial investments, resulting in spending on combat power and paramilitary forces that is hidden within civilian ministries.
Now, I think one can rightly question of how much of that REALLY counts as “essential military spending” – i.e. the so-called Maritime Militia of hundreds of thousands largely unarmed fishing boats would count as “military spending” according to Eaglen’s logic, even though its value outside of “cold” disputes over the “Nine Dash Line” is clearly extremely limited.
The point below, however, appears far more solid.
> Labor costs are demonstrably cheaper in China, where soldiers are paid just one-sixteenth the wage of a U.S. Army infantryman. This is how China is able to maintain a military twice the size for a fraction of the reported cost.
> This phenomenon also extends to the purchase and operations of military weapons, including munitions, tanks, planes, and warships. Chinese advantages in shipbuilding manufacturing, cheaper access to raw materials, and the lower costs of industrial labor all allow for Beijing to reap more yield for each yuan. It is for this reason that economies are often measured on purchasing power parity in order to conduct relevant comparisons. This principle holds when paying soldiers just as much as it does when purchasing military hardware.
Another article from the National Interest (which was linked to in Bret’s piece at The Dispatch) claimed that a U. S. Marine private with two years of experience is paid slightly more than a PRC colonel. The piece argued that this disparity in pay is a great strength of the U.S. military, but I wouldn’t be so sure. After all, in his blog on Gladiator II, Bret admits that real-world Caracalla’s “lavish payments to the soldiers” were a mistake which drained the Roman treasury. Specifically, he hiked their pay by 50% – almost certainly making them the best-compensated military force in the entire world at the time.
Yet, being well-paid clearly didn’t make them the best soldiers in the world, since Caracalla’s campaign against Parthia was failing at the time Macrinus orchestrated his assassination – in large part BECAUSE he got Rome into an unwinnable war. * Would it be uncharitable to wonder if the remuneration enjoyed in the U.S. military today echoes the post-Caracalla’s Roman military? ** I think this could even be a subject for a whole blog post.
* (Notably, it Macrinus’ attempts to phase out those unsustainable payments which in turn led to him dying in a coup. The decision to let the already enlisted keep pay hikes but remove them from subsequent recruits must have seemed cautious to him, but the troops still got restless and backed the teen Severans and their mothers – until it all collapsed into the Third Century Crisis anyway.)
** It’s true that there is no realistic way to meaningfully reduce troop pay in the U.S. without making the recurring complaints about insufficient enlistment even worse. The alternatives would be either returning to conscription or fielding a large non-citizen force, and we all know either proposal is going to be politically caustic.
“Another article from the National Interest (which was linked to in Bret’s piece at The Dispatch) claimed that a U. S. Marine private with two years of experience is paid slightly more than a PRC colonel. The piece argued that this disparity in pay is a great strength of the U.S. military, but I wouldn’t be so sure. ”
I think you could argue it was a strength or a weakness, whichever you liked. Very simplistically, yes, if you could leave everything else unchanged and pay your marines $1000 a month instead of $2000, that would be good for the USMC, because they could afford more marines, or more kit, for the same budget. So paying the marines $2000 a month is a weakness.
But they don’t pay their marines $2000 a month for fun, or because (like Caracalla) they need to ensure their loyalty in the event of a coup by the ambitious senator commanding the 1st Armored Division. They pay their marines $2000 a month because that’s what you have to pay to get enough people to become marines.
And that in turn represents a strength of the US: that the US economy is so productive that there are employers out there who will be happy to pay a healthy unqualified 18 year old $2000 a month* to work, because they can make money by doing so. The USMC is competing with those employers and must therefore match their offers.
If you cut USMC pay, they wouldn’t stage a coup to put Senator Severus in office; they just wouldn’t enlist or re-enlist, because they would be able to do better elsewhere in the thriving US civilian economy. That’s the real strength.
*for simplicity I am ignoring the fact that a USMC private also gets housing, etc as part of his compensation. Doesn’t affect the overall argument.
I’ve had long conversations with my best friend, an avid Hearts of Iron IV player, on why I feel it doesn’t tell the history of the wars of the mid-20th Century well. And that’s largely because the game tries so hard to avoid the darker aspects of 20th century war. Bombing doesn’t technically kill people, populations don’t go down in any meaningful way and Germany can exploit Europe through conquest in a way that was never on the cards for the actual Third Reich and its pillaging policies. And of course there is the endless debate on the fact the Holocaust is completely ignored and whited out despite the fact that it was very much a contributing factor in Germany’s defeat and leaving it out distorts any kind of accurate rendition of how systemic genocide helped cripple Hitler’s war machine. I know just how thorny the Holocaust and Hearts of Iron is, but completely cutting it out is a form of historical amnesia that does not do the game any good as a historical lesson in WWII. If you’re playing the Nazis and trying to conquer Europe having so many of your resources diverted away towards a senseless extermination campaign that gives zero benefit to the wider war effort should be something the player has to grapple with. That could be a good lesson on the Holocaust for players. Though in this day and age, it’s unsurprising such a thing isn’t on the cards. Either way I really look forward to a Hearts of Iron IV and History article, and I hope like me it does ask ‘what does it mean for Hearts of Iron IV to pretend the Holocaust doesn’t exist?’
“And of course there is the endless debate on the fact the Holocaust is completely ignored and whited out despite the fact that it was very much a contributing factor in Germany’s defeat and leaving it out distorts any kind of accurate rendition of how systemic genocide helped cripple Hitler’s war machine.”
The idea that the Holocaust was a major drain on the Nazis’ war effort is incorrect. As Peter Hayes notes in “Why: Explaining the Holocaust”, the amount of resources the Nazis devoted to the exterminations was miniscule compared to how much they devoted to the war. In fact, the Holocaust was largely self-financing, due to the valuables looted from the victims.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying that the Holocaust created a massive brain drain that lost Germany irreplaceable skilled workers (like literally Einstein) who could have provided a massive boost to their war effort. This is not to say that if there was no genocide, the Nazi’s would have had a nuke, but rather that America’s development of the nuke would have been severely disrupted.
The anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis prior to 1941, i.e., civil disabilities imposed on Jews, encouragement of Jews to emigrate, boycotts of Jewish merchants, etc., did indeed cost the Nazis considerable brainpower, including Albert Einstein, but those policies are not “the Holocaust.” The term “Holocaust” refers to the mass murder of Jews (and some others), a program which began in eastern Europe in 1941 and was eventually expanded to the conquered countries in the West and Germany itself. It’s not so clear that the Holocaust in that sense really hurt Germany militarily.
Now I know some people will instantly accuse me of defending the Holocaust, denying the harm caused to the victims of Nazi anti-Semitic policies before 1941, being privileged and insensitive, etc. Stop.
I don’t think you’re defending anything, but you are drawing a line. I think you’re wrong to create a ‘real Holocaust’ category and a ‘merely Holocaust-adjacent Nazi antisemitism’ category. In general people don’t think of the early, careful phases of a genocide as being somehow not a part of the genocide; I caution you that if you are reading a lot of people who are making that distinction, you will be consuming work by some who want to minimize genocide.
And it’s not necessary for your point, I think. While certainly the complete slate of Nazi antisemitic policy made Germany weaker, each step benefited the regime in the short term either militarily or politically.
Wikipedia date the Holocaust to 1941-1945, so ey81 appears to be following common usage in describing pre-1941 acts as not being part of the Holocaust.
Certainly, this seems to be a reasonably common usage.
“Self-financing” is a bit of a red herring though, if we’re talking about war economies. The point is not so much whether the numbers of RM spent and gained looked good, but whether the mass killing used appreciable amounts of war resources; rail freight ton-miles, manpower, steel, fuel and so on. The resources spent building a camp and moving thousands of people to it to be murdered were resources not available to be used building, say, an aero engine factory or a barracks. The people thus murdered, or worked to death, were people who could otherwise have been employed building or indeed crewing tanks – as of course were the people murdering them. Even the people worked to death on war-relevant projects – like Primo Levi’s companions building the Buna synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz – would have been better workers if they’d been free and properly treated.
I haven’t read Hayes so I don’t know if he addresses this, but it seems obvious that of course the Holocaust was a drain on the war effort in this sense. It couldn’t not have been. What is more debatable is whether it was a significant drain on the war effort. Define “significant”.
Six million people would be 1-2% of the population of occupied Europe and ~ 10% of the people killed in the war, so I am not convinced the economic hit need have been that large compared to everything else going on.
To some extent, the Holocaust (and other Nazi atrocities, like the mass starvation of Soviet POWs) were a response to the problem facing any conqueror: you need to feed the conquered population. (Unless, of course, you murder them.) The Nazis perceived the conquered populations of eastern Europe as drains on the food and resources they wanted to supply to Germans. They were determined to prevent a recurrence of the widespread hunger in Germany during WWI as a result of the British blockade. It’s not clear that the populations of eastern Europe (remember, this was the origin and primary site of the Holocaust) who were mostly poor and uneducated, would have made a significant net contribution to the Reich economy.
If you want, I’m defining “significant” as “produces an economic surplus substantially in excess of the cost of administering the production and expropriating the surplus.”
ajay makes a good point – those sent to the gulag had higher productivity than the forced labourers in Germany. They did not need to mistreat those people – they wanted too. On the reverse side, the consciousness of what they (a large swathe of Germans) had done was certainly one reason why they fought so hard to the end – they rightly feared revenge.
Hayes does address this point. One comparison he makes is the number of train cars the Nazis used in deporting Jews for murder vs. how many they used in supplying the Eastern Front. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but the difference was several orders of magnitude.
On the currency issue: Do you know if the use of generic “gold” in pop culture stems from the use of the gold standard in modern economics or has it another source?
I’m almost certain it derives from Dungeons and Dragons. (All the early instances I can think of are influenced by DnD or by things influenced by DnD.) Early DnD used gold because treasure in the mid-twentieth century fantasy fiction the authors read was gold when it wasn’t gemstones.
An early DnD sourcebook tries to explain the absurdly inflated prices by supposing that adventurers put enough ancient treasures into circulation to distort the economy.
Explicitly comparing it to a gold rush.
I think gold is just so commonly used as the definitive example of a precious thing that people make money or treasures out of that “gold” is just a metonym for “money” in the minds of a lot of modern people thinking about the past. People have been making currency out of gold (or gold alloys) for as long as currency has existed, and they were using gold as a medium of valuable exchange for much longer than that.
Just about the only thing that could replace gold in pop culture descriptions of fantasy currency would be silver.
We could forgive the French for getting silver and money confused, but there’s no excuse for English-speakers confusing gold and money.
for the first two millennia currency was an IOU, on clay in Mesopotamia or papyrus in Egypt, denoted (after a few starts) in weight of silver. Most currency still is, only now as an electronic record.
Interesting that fantasy does not pick up on the reality of high medieval exchange – if you mugged a rich merchant you were likely to find a small amount of coin and a number of credit notes on his counterparts.
At least some roleplaying games in the 1974-1985 period which defined a lot of modern fantasy fiction described their monetary system in terms of real-world gold standard or bimetallic standard currency, though the only one I can remember in detail, 1978’s Runequest, used a silver standard and compared its silver coins to US silver dollars and the rarer gold coins to the $20 Eagle coin.
The Fantasy Trip (from 1980) also used a silver standard (with gold pieces defined as 10 silver pieces) and even used “$” in price lists. (“The commonest type of coin is a ‘silver piece,’ about like a silver dollar… you may think of it as being worth a dollar, when a dollar was still worth something”.)
The sci-fi colony builder game RimWorld (set a few centuries in the future) also uses silver as its currency. Gold exists, but its main uses is as a material to build things out of to make them fancier and more pleasing to your colonists; you can’t buy things with gold directly (though you can sell it for silver to then buy things with).
It comes from the place that Spanish doubloons have in the popular conception of ‘buried treasure’ in the American mind, but also from the weird origin of the American Dollar as a fractional currency. Originally the US$ was minted with copper 100ths (“cent” from ‘hundred’) and a similar-sized silver 10th (“dime” from ‘ten’) as the common coins, with half and quarter and whole dollars as standards that were not always everyday use but were weights of silver that matched the Spanish 8-real coin. Because the two common coin weights were chosen to be a value ratio instead of and exact weight match, Americans not familiar with actual precious metal working tend to think that’s how relative metal value works, and that the next-most important metal must be worth ten times a weight of silver. Thus gold becomes the ten-dime equivalent (and platinum the 100-dime equivalent).
In many non-Western languages such as the Sinosphere ones, the word for “money” is still “gold”.
Chinese 钱 (money) derives etymologically from “coin”, and 金 (gold) actually comes from the etymological chain copper -> metal -> gold, so the compound phrase 金钱 (money) arguably means “metallic coin” instead of “gold coin” (strictly speaking, gold is 黄金 (yellow metal)). I’m not familiar with the other Sinosphere languages, but I don’t think this is true for Chinese.
Chinese cash money was also mainly copper coins through most of Chinese history so 金钱 could also be “copper money”. 钱 was also a measure of weight, 1/10 of a 两, which is the main measure of gold and silver I see referenced in historical dramas, and are usually depicted in the form of yuanbao ingots rather than coinage. That said they are dramas, so I’m not sure how accurate that bit is.
It’s perfectly accurate. China never made precious metal into coins. They used a lot of nearly-worthless coins, but bullion was always ingots.
I know (sort of) an Austronesian language where gold and silver are “red money” and “white money” respectively, which says something interesting about how they perceive color.
I think money probably predates gold and silver in that part of the world, since the historic form of money used to be cowrie shells rather than coins. (they were historically considered even harder to counterfeit than coins, and like gold and silver also had aesthetic value).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money
Red’s an early basic color term, and once attached to things, it can stick. Witness that we still refer to red-heads and robin red-breast despite having acquired a term for “orange.”
Witness that we still refer to red-heads and robin red-breast despite having acquired a term for “orange.”
Yes, red seems to the earliest color that human languages distinguish, after black or white. Maybe because of blood, maybe because many edible fruits are red, but either way, red seems to have some deep visceral importance.
Some European languages too – German “Geld” comes to mind, and while I don’t know Slavic languages too well, I think Polish zloties are another example.
Strongly in favor of your Imperator II bullying campaign 🙂 It worked with Victoria, but I don’t have a lot of confidence on this one. Seemed like PDX dropped I:R as soon as they had the chance.
If you’re unsure about HoI IV, you could always just review March of the Eagles in the meantime.
… /tragically out of date “Vic III wen” memes
I really appreciated your series on Imperator, it’s unfortunate that it underperformed. It got me interested in trying out the game, and it was the first time a Paradox game clicked with me.
Bret’s plea for more funding for academic history departments is somewhat unpersuasive, given that:
1. Current academic historians are mostly not interested in political and military history. I don’t object to people studying gender and sexuality in 19th century America or whatever. (Indeed, my own interests are primarily in social history, though I approach it without the ideological preconceptions of the typical American academic.) I just don’t see why it merits significant government support.
2. Most academic historians are hostile to the American enterprise and those who have accomplished it to date.
3. It doesn’t make any sense to bemoan the number of unemployed history Ph.D.s and then turn around and say that the political and military establishment will not be able to find trained historians. Of course, given points 1 and 2, there may be a shortage of historians knowledgeable about political and military history and/or willing to work for the Pentagon or the State Department, but more funding for today’s history departments won’t solve that problem.
Do you have any evidence for claims 1 or 2?
Also, your example of gender and sexuality in the 19th century United States certainly affected how the United States military acted in the 19th century. I don’t know how one could understand cohesion in companies recruited from local communities without understanding how those local communities operated.
As Bret has said a million times, militaries always reflect the society from which they come. If one doesn’t understand the society, one cannot understand why their military functioned the way it did.
Military history cannot be split off from the study of history as a whole, thus, if as a society we want military historians, we must fund the training of all historians.
1. Go through the Harvard course catalog, and report back on how many history courses foreground political or military history.
2. Well, for example, read Richard White’s “The Republic for Which It Stands.” Once you have done that, find each favorable and each unfavorable reference to white pioneers and settlers, and see which there are more of. Then we can move on to Alan Taylor’s “American Colonies” and perform a similar exercise.
2 what is your problem with negative references about paticipants of a genocide
The fact that there wasn’t a genocide, for starters.
(To the comment below me) A lot of people disagree. In particular, Raphael Lemkin thought that it was in fact a genocide – and he came up with the term in the first place!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_the_United_States
I’m sure there are people who disagree with me, but the idea that the (to be clear, extremely poor) treatment of the North American natives was a genocide runs into the problem of organization (or the lack thereof) and intent.
Also, if you prefer argument from authority to research direction: “It is no real secret that as a discipline, military history is sometimes held in low regard by other historians.” Cite: https://acoup.blog/2020/11/13/collections-why-military-history/. My professor last year, Adam Tooze, said the same thing.
A couple of suggestions for your consideration re: your first two items:
1. I don’t know if you meant to imply that you approach social history with *no* ideological preconceptions or simply with different ones; but I would venture that the latter is probably the case (none of us are blank slates, after all).
2. As someone who is not American, allow me to mention the possibility that “most academic historians are hostile to the American enterprise” not because of their ideological preconceptions, but because they’ve actually taken a proper look at it. That is, of course, assuming that your assessment is correct.
1. Well, for example, I’ve been studying Scottish history lately, and have concluded that the Highland Clearances were a Good Thing, because (i) they permitted the rationalization and modernization of Scottish agriculture, which resulted in much greater production, (ii) they forced the crofters off the land and into the cities just in time before the potato blight arrived, allowing Scotland to escape the widespread starvation that affected Ireland, and (iii) they only facilitated what would have happened anyway, because Gaelic-speaking areas like Islay which were not subject to clearance experienced comparable levels of depopulation. Those are not conclusions congenial to the modern academy.
2. If Bret’s (or your) plan is to populate the State Department and the Pentagon with people hostile to the American enterprise, he should say so forthrightly.
Like I said, I’m not American. I have no intention (to say nothing of ability) to affect the staffing of any US department.
But I think you’ve answered my first point, if perhaps not in the way you meant to.
Forcing people off land they’d lived on was “a good thing?”
I can’t believe I read that, but I suppose it’s not an unusual thing for an unfeeling, privileged person to say.
By this reasoning, do you think that it’s a “good thing” so many black people were brought over as slave to the New World because it got them out of benighted Africa? And it’s a good thing that Israel is exterminating or dispossessing Palestinians today? It will all come out right in the end?
I’m of mainly Scottish and Irish descent and I very much doubt my ancestors felt they were having a good ol’ time on those refugee emigrant ships, or that it would all be worthwhile for MY sake.
I wonder if people like these ever realize that what we have just witnessed above was the literal mirror image of the logic deployed by Stalinists. Considering that these same people are typically the most hostile to describing the colonization of the Americas as a genocide, yet are also the most eager to declare the (objectively far less destructive) contemporary events in Xinjiang a genocide, one would have to assume no.
It should also go without saying that any argument justifying violent expansion, “population transfers”, etc. in the past – particularly fairly recent past – could potentially be applied to the present if the circumstances align again. Anyone espousing such arguments better be really certain they would not see themselves on the receiving end if such an alignment were to recur.
“Forcing people off land they’d lived on was “a good thing?””
Better the Clearances than the Famine.
The best option always depends on the other available options.
I wonder if people like these ever realize that what we have just witnessed above was the literal mirror image of the logic deployed by Stalinists
I was immediately thinking of the comparison to Stalin/Preobrazhensky and ‘primitive socialist accumulation’, yea.
that said, it’s not the kind of question where one side can be proved wrong, since it’s a normative question of values. But of course, it does suggest that @ey81 has an ideological perspective of his own, like all of us do- nobody is ideology free here.
I agree. On the plus side, maybe he’s leaving this blog forever after being given overwhelming opposition (I have not, btw; I just got my comments moderated out this past month).
It should also go without saying that any argument justifying violent expansion, “population transfers”, etc. in the past – particularly fairly recent past – could potentially be applied to the present if the circumstances align again. Anyone espousing such arguments better be really certain they would not see themselves on the receiving end if such an alignment were to recur.
I think most people who make those arguments are quite cognizant that they might be on the receiving end someday, and simply recognize that as the way the world works. Not only do I think it’s possible that my ethnic group might get kicked out of various countries in future (or at least encouraged to leave with varying degrees of pressure), I think it’s likely and almost inevitable. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Population transfers are quite common throughout history and I’m sure they’ll be quite common in the future as well- that doesn’t really address the question of if, and when, they’re ever a good idea.
I remember talking to a South Asian immigrant once, and he said something like, “I have a small savings account dedicated specifically for if/when I’m ever deported and have to start life over.” In light of history, I’d say that makes a lot of sense. (He wasn’t a US citizen, and I am, but in the long run I of course don’t think that’s ever going to make a difference).
Then leave, murderer.
I don’t Think anyone here have murdered anyone. Saying that an historical event would have been better than another event in the light of subsequent events, is not the same as taking part in actual murders.
Ah. but overheated rhetoric with a leftist valence doesn’t bother Bret.
I might have missed something, but why do you think he is a Russophile?
I understand that he is some kind of conservative, but the rest doesn’t necessarily follow from that. I have not seen it, but on the other hand, I don’t read every comment to the posts.
Be careful that you doesn’t become to fixated on him.
The truth is, of course, that he is because Highestsun says so. This is his second eruption on this blog and he’s actually a trifle more rational this time. Not much.
Okay, maybe.
What a peculiar choice to declare as the great offense.
What is the “American Enterprise” and why should historians be positive about it?
Honestly just just sounds like a slightly politer version of complaining that “academia is woke”
It would be an interesting historical exercise to poll people who care deeply about “the American enterprise” and figure out, just as an example, which of the following two things they consider more critical to the American enterprise:
1) America retaining the political structure of a republic and striking down any ambitious would-be tyrants who seek to undermine that structure, or
2) America being (or continuing to be, if you prefer) politically dominated by specific classes of its citizenry (rich over poor, white over brown, men over women, et cetera).
It is my belief that many of those who deploy rhetoric about “the American enterprise” in the modern era have essentially missed the important ‘detail’ that the American enterprise originated as a republic for a reason. Insofar as the American enterprise has a distinct meaning other than “a bunch of Europeans sawing up North America to add it to the geographic extent of their descendants’ home range,” and I should hope that it does… Well, the nature of the thing is to be a republic. And this matters greatly, in many ways.
For me, it is the former, which is why I hated the last election, because both candidates fit that description.
Surprisingly principled. Sadly, eyes81, and for that matter, Mr. X, or anyone who says that taking pride in one’s own culture means ignoring every historical misdeed and that there is no way to be critical of, yet ultimately supportive of that culture, are not only unconvincing, but come off as disingenious.
It’s the Whig ideology with an American (or if you will, Yankee) exceptionalist veneer. Freedom of religion and other forms of culture; opposition to hereditary nobility and other explicit legal nonequality (please remember how the New England states abolished slavery, and even miscegenation laws, way early); preferring “rule of laws over rule of men” (the very term “corruption” encodes the assumption that it’s bad, as opposed to normal, or indeed the way power should be exercised), etc.
Certainly it has never been an unblemished success; “no popery” is hardly a fitting slogan for freedom of religion; to name something relevant today, the practice of zoning is an abomination. But to a surprisingly large extent, it has been successful on its own terms (and indeed inspiring other societies), as well as economically and culturally. Americans (and Europeans, etc.) are better off — in many ways — for it. The above should be sufficient for the “positive about it”.
Yes, and it is people like eye81 who claim to love the American Enterprise that want to dismantle it the most and give it to Russia just because people criticize its very human mistakes (sometimes excessively, but people like him provoke such actions).
If anything, his hostility to any criticism of America is more destructive to the ‘American Enterprise’ than anything ‘the woke’ can do… because it actively provokes ‘the woke’.
“The American enterprise, and those who have accomplished it”
Do you imagine that to be a very exclusive group?
(He says as though the comment about white pioneers is not already giving the game away)
Proof eye81/eyes81 is a murdering Russophile White Supremacist trying to give the American Enterprise away to a Tsar, btw.
…has not been provided.
His criticism of Bret, as well as his ugly innuendo about anyone who so much as criticizes his personal interpretation of the ‘American Enterprise’, isn’t proof?
How can someone not be convinced by Bret’s facts and data and obvious commitment to America’s ideals as stated by its own founders?
Not being sarcastic here.
And while my own rhetoric is ugly, it is merely me biting back in kind.
Because you think that maybe he might be mistaken about the ideological leanings and research interests of his compatriots in the academy?
He has occassionally expressed frustration with some academics on the left plus ‘elite Ivy League colleges’ on Twitter, so that’s up for debate.
2. Most academic historians are hostile to the American enterprise and those who have accomplished it to date.
Do you have examples in mind? I mean, I had a history professor in college who was a Communist, and it would might fair to say he was hostile to the American enterprise. However, he was pretty upfront about the fact that his political views put him in a small minority in US academia, and it’s probably an even smaller minority now than it was then (he’s retired).
He was also, for what it’s worth, pretty good about keeping his own political views out of the course (and he was a fairly heterodox communist, at that).
Ad 2: the historiography changes over time; right now the issue of slavery is considered very important due to its impact on current race relations, and this has led to revisions in which historians of the US are less sympathetic to Jefferson than they used to be, but also more sympathetic to the Unionists, the Lincoln and Grant administrations, and the Radical Republicans. So if your complaint is that they’re more negative on the American state than they used to be, then the answer is that it really depends on the era.
As regards point 2, I’m very much hostile to the American enterprise personally (which does obviously not mean I dislike the country or the people- the people is distinct from the ruling ideology). I don’t see that my personal views are widely shared among US academia. Quite the contrary. This blog for example, is pro-US and supportive of the “American Enterprise” broadly, to an almost comical degree.
This blog is written by someone who is most definitely not part of the academic establishment, though he would like to be.
In regards to the treating visiting professors as the humans they are article, I thought you might be interested in Paul Campos’ latest post about academia: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/12/the-crack-up-4
> This is reminiscent of Mike’s description in The Sun Also Rises of how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
> I was thinking about these insights in the context of the economic future of higher education in this country. I’ve spent all but three years of my adult life in academia, first as a student and then as a faculty member. For the last quarter or so of that 47-year span, I’ve been wondering how much longer this thing of ours could keep going in the direction it’s been going, certain in the knowledge that the answer was “definitely not indefinitely,” but also unclear in my mind, or the back of my mind, when it would become clear to everyone that our methods were unsound.
Good piece linked there. But considering how long other powerful classes and institutions have survived (e.g., the Catholic church, the European nobility), I wouldn’t count on any imminent changes in American higher education. In an increasingly unequal society, its role as (i) a finishing school for the dull normal members of the UMC and (ii) a recruiting center finding and training promising young people for the corporate state will remain vital for years to come.
I did not know you had a subreddit; I’ll hop over there. I will say that I was not the biggest fan of the Teaching Paradox series, as I am not the biggest fan of Paradox titles (nothing against the developer, I just never got into them). One of the things I really loved was in the earlier days of the blog, when you would use media examples (Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones) to introduce and teach historical truths, especially the Fremen Mirage, and your series on Sparta, both of which were somewhat revolutionary for me.
I also want to say thank you for dropping by Historians at the Movies; I wouldn’t have found them without your commentary on Gladiator II, and they’re friggin’ great. Thank you so much and I hope you have a delightful 2025 (insofar as any of us are likely to have a delightful 2025).
I don’t have a subreddit (or at least, I am unaware of one), rather hits from reddit tend to be folks sharing my work in other subreddits on various topics.
Would you object to people starting an ACOUP subreddit?
how much sure one expect a hardback version of the book to cost? approximately
Is there any plan to release an ebook version? That would probably be much more affordable than a hardcover run, and it’s hardly like people who read a weekly blog would be unused to reading digitially
I worked in academic publication for a while, and I would not expect an eBook to be any more affordable than a hardcover. Very few of the costs involved in academic publication are about the physical creation of the books.
Very few of the costs for any book are physical.
Though it is disproportionately true of academic books.
That is probably so, but it is also interesting how many of the publishers reject the possible extra revenue. They only do a small print run and later the only circulation is in used copies or small amounts left in some warehouse. I assume those won’t bring any money for the publisher, so an ebook should be an obvious choice if they don’t have solid plans for another print run.
Is there any possibility of a Kindle offering for the book? I realize that this is another round of formatting and another distribution channel to manage.
Ave, Ollie Magnus!
Having all that wrapping to play in IS a gift for a Felis Felix!
I look forward to the book coming out (in physical form; I will buy a copy for my classics / ancient history library) but I’m not a vote for electronic editions, I’m sticking with paper, parchment, papyrus, or whatever I can hold and tote and not plug in. Space is always a consideration, but price is not. (I need to cull the shelf herd in any case.)
> Finally, I wrote a grumpy piece in The Dispatch taking apart the Heritage Foundation’s annual “Index of U.S. Military Strength.”
I followed it up – and then I followed across the links provided. I’ll have to say that while you are certainly correct to identify obvious distortions like the inconsistent application of “two major regional contingency” standard (clearly motivated by the whole “conservatives idolize the Marines” emotional support need and not anything objective), I don’t think all of your arguments were as strong as they could have been. To quote your writing directly:
> The Air Force’s “very weak” ranking reveals further issues with the Index. The branch’s rating is based on several factors, but the ones mentioned explicitly in the report summary are the supposedly “incredibly low sortie rates and flying hours.” Incredibly low compared to what? Given the 2MRC standard, the answer has to be pilot training compared to America’s top two adversaries, China and Russia. Yet the Index cherry-picks its figures, drawing flight time numbers from during the COVID-19 pandemic to complain that mission-ready fighter pilots received only 131 hours of flying time per year and arguing that such low figures put the Air Force at risk of falling behind peer adversaries. Though the Air Force itself has expressed concerns about declining time in the cockpit, American fighter pilots still average far more flight time than our adversaries—100 hours more compared to China’s Air Force, for example.
The literal reading of this paragraph would imply that PLAAF fighter pilots only fly 31 hours per year. Simply following the link to the National Interest piece you cite reveals something rather different.
> Last year, fighter pilots in the U.S. Air Force averaged between 228 and 252 hours of flight time in their aircraft. Chinese pilots, on the other hand, saw between 100 and 110.
So, if it is the 131-hour figure which is correct, then the two countries’ fighter pilots have FAR more comparable experience! From what I can tell, the reference provided for the 228-252 hour figure appears to be the then-Air Force chief of staff reporting in 2020 that monthly flight hours have been increased to 19-21 hours (“increased” meaning that they were smaller before). I am really dubious of that claim, because according to the 2022 article below, the flight hours for active-duty pilots are much smaller, and appear fairly comparable to the cited PRC figures.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-flying-hours-decline-again-after-brief-recovery/
> According to figures provided to Air Force Magazine, pilot flying hours across all types of aircraft in the Active-duty force averaged 10.1 hours per month in fiscal 2021, down from 10.9 hours in 2020. Flying hours had averaged just 6.8 per month in 2019, down sharply from 10.7 in 2018. Hours for 2022 so far were not provided. The service did not offer commentary on why hours had changed as they did.
“All types” means that it’s actually the SUPPORT aircraft pilots which drag up that average, while fighter (and bomber, and helicopter) pilots spent less than that average. That article has a very extensive table, “Average Pilot Training Hours Per Month By Aircraft Type”. For “Fighter, Active Duty”, those figures are 8.2 hours in 2018, 5.7 hours in 2019, 8.1 hours in 2020, and 6.8 hours in 2021. (Figures for Air National Guard and Reserve fighters are about 1 hour and 2 hours smaller in every respective year – down to 3.9 hours for Reserve fighters in 2019.)
I’ll let the others parse the implications contained in these figures, but at the very least, I think it should be clear that “American fighter pilots still average far more flight time than our adversaries” is by no means a straightforward conclusion.
To follow up on the above:
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/u-s-has-lost-conventional-overmatch-to-maintain-deterrence/
“US Has Lost Conventional Overmatch, Needs Investment to Maintain Deterrence” | Sept. 21, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak
> China has advanced so far and so fast in its air and space power that the Air Force’s ability to deter through conventional forces is at risk, Air Combat Command chief Gen. Mark Kelley said Sept. 21. He said the combat air forces are short 12 squadrons of multirole aircraft.
> “By any measure, we have departed the era of conventional overmatch,” Kelly said in a speech at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference.
> The combat air forces are less than half the size they were when the U.S. prevailed quickly and with relatively few casualties in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the size of the combat air forces is well below where various unclassified studies have said they need to be, Kelly said. The exact numbers are highly classified, he said.
> The age of the fighter fleet was 9.7 years in 1991, but is 28.8 years now, he noted.
> Readiness is also taking a dive, Kelly said, with fighter pilot flying hours hovering around 9.7 hours a month, versus 22.3 just before Desert Storm.
> “Some folks may surmise that I’m trying to make a case for 134-fighter squadrons or 10-year-old aircraft where pilots get over 20 hours a month,” Kelly said, and while that would be a good thing, “it completely misses the point,” which is that declining readiness of the fighter force raises the risk that an adversary will see an advantage, resulting in a failure of conventional deterrence.
So, this is the opinion of the U.S. Air Combat Command chief. Now, it is technically POSSIBLE that he significantly overestimates the adversary. After all, the infamous “Kyiv in 3 days” was actually a paraphrased opinion of Mark Milley himself (“Worst-case scenario will see the fall of Kyiv in 72 hours” was the quote – I seemingly can’t include more than one URL per comment without it going to spam filter, so anyone interested will have to look it up for yourself). A certain kind of cynic (usually one on the left) will note that no military official is ever going to claim they do not need more money and more toys, and so they have a direct interest in playing up any threat there is. (The so-called “UFO/UAP sightings by the military” have long been interpreted through such a prism.)
However, it really would appear quite prudent that if one is to make the case for a massive, ongoing U.S. military superiority over the most populous country in the world IN SPITE of the opinion of U.S.’ OWN TOP MILITARY OFFICIALS, then the supporting evidence should be ironclad. From what I know of military history, a common thread linking various disastrous wars is failing to know not just your enemy or yourself, but often both at once. It does no service to the general public to have an inflated understanding of the U.S. military power – particularly in regards to a conflict in the Pacific, which can easily grow to involve us here in Australia.
The purpose of the Heritage Foundation’s assessment is to direct investment into increasing base and weapons-system plant funding to states which have two Republican Senators and likewise direct it away from states with two Democratic Senators. It has no other function, unless you count plausibly denying it’s purpose as a kind of second purpose.
That might well be the case. There’s only so much I can know about those dynamics as an Australian. Even so, we ARE on a blog with “pedantry” in its title, so I considered it appropriate to point out what seemed like a substantial misinterpretation of the state of affairs regarding the two strongest air forces in the world.
In that spirit, I should point out your misapprehension about the “two strongest air forces in the world.” Gen. Kelley’s presentation is, as you surmise, about increasing the US Air Force’s resources to compete with the second largest air force. However, the second most powerful air force in the world is not the PLAAF, it is the US Navy’s air corps. The General is not asking for the strength to compete with China in an open warfare situation, he is asking for the strength to avoid having to talk to Admirals in the event of open warfare and ask for their help.
Let’s just call it a very optimistic interpretation of what we know to date! To me, it really sounds reminiscent of that infamous Global Health Security Index which ranked the U.S. and the U.K. as the most-prepared nations to handle a pandemic in 2019.
One thing which strikes me is that the categories in which the various U.S. air forces have the greatest overmatch over PRC are the hundreds of transport and tanker aircraft, which allow them to project power across the globe in ways PRC cannot. However, in a realistic great power conflict, the PRC would obviously not need those much on their own home turf. Similarly, a significant fraction of the U.S. Air Force would remain in Europe, while all of PRC’s air assets would be concentrated in one area – same as its hundreds of air defence assets, which would do a lot to even out the disparity in raw numbers and quality between their air force and the COMBINED USAF and the U.S. Navy aviation.
A note on that last bit – while things are not denominated in “gold” historically, it is quite common for “gold” or a close derivative to be the aggregate word for “money”. Though, admittedly, not quite as common as “silver”.
Historically, where daily commerce was monetized, silver coinage tended to be the preferred currency; gold coinage existed alongside silver but for transactions that were more like wealth transfers than like paying a day’s wage or buying dinner. You do generally see echoes of this in the modern world.
Speaking as a non-historian, non-gamer, non-movie-goer retiree, I have hugely enjoyed reading all the posts since being introduced to the site by my nephew seven weeks ago. Binge-reading cut deeply into my quilting time! (See above, retiree). Thank you for all the work and scholarship you have put into this, and for making it available and extremely readable for the general public. I look forward to the upcoming posts.
I’d absolutely love to see something on premodern currency. That would be fascinating.
Also: Since you’ve written so much about academia and the shortage of full-time positions, I’d be interested in your thoughts on universities using H1-B visas to fill professor positions. Does it exacerbate hardships we already see from the shift to adjuncts? Or is it largely necessary for some reason? Elon Musk & co. have focused the discussion on the tech sector, but I suspect university usage has different context. In our state, the main public university is one of the top H1-B users.
Because the US university system is generally larger and better funded than its international equivalents, we tend to pull talent on net. I think that is good, long-term, but to be honest it doesn’t have much impact in adjunctification and the humanities collapse. Nearly all of the H1-B hiring is professional or STEM fields that aren’t part of that collapse.
Academic H-1Bs are a different world from non-academic ones, in a bunch of ways:
1. They are not part of the H-1B cap; the cap specifically exempts universities and other nonprofit research organizations.
2. The conditions of the H-1B tethering the worker to a specific employer are dead letter, because people change jobs in academia on long notices and can transfer the visa between universities.
3. Hiring decisions are made by academic departments largely firewalled from central admin – at most, universities can tell hires that they will only sponsor H-1Bs if no other option is available, such as OPT for postdocs, but nothing that advertises on MathJobs is going to have a blanket no-H-1B rule except maybe the military and such.
As a non-professional, non-specialist reader, I make a plea for comprehensive maps in your upcoming book. Surely your publishers could manage something better than the mere sketches we are now seeing in many recently published books, which show no geographical features like rivers and mountains and only some of the major cities. Nothing is more frustrating to this reader than finding placenames in the text which are not shown on a book’s maps.
As for the American Enterprise, I have always supposed that to be the governing of a large territory by democratic, that is, non-monarchical, means. There had been large, multicultural polities in the world before the late 18thC, and there had been republics, but those tended to be city states. I think the notion of representative govt. was a new thing in the world.
As for the American Enterprise, I have always supposed that to be the governing of a large territory by democratic, that is, non-monarchical, means. There had been large, multicultural polities in the world before the late 18thC, and there had been republics, but those tended to be city states.
I think liberal democracy, large size/expansion, multiculturalism are all part of it, but cultural individualism and capitalism (as an economic system) are core aspects too. An America that wasn’t capitalist or was highly collectivistic in cultural terms wouldn’t be discernibly ‘america’ as we know it. And of course I don’t think you can really separate America as an enterprise from the things America as a state has done historically- at some level, the history shapes the state and what it is.
Bret has discussed the costs and process for the book elsewhere, but acquiring images and maps falls on the author. That means the cost for using someone else’s or having new ones made is paid by the author and not the publisher.
I’m coming in via RSS 🙂
Out of curiosity, do you know if RSS readers show up in your statistics?
Oh, Ollie, I have been with you there under the boughs, we two nestled among the flotsam. I make forst for my fur babies, and the Holidays make it so easy with all the trimmings! 🎄🐈⬛
I’m looking forward to the Gracchi brother piece. Also, was there (and i missed it) or will there be a post talking about Sulla and Marius? They feel key in understanding the late republic and are also undercovered in the internet realm and i would like to better understand how they changed Rome.
P.S. I love your blog. Thank you for another year of it. It helps me think of history in a more structural and grounded manner that is really helpful in reminding me that these are people we are learning about with their own viewpoints and structure and stories and needs that must be met (like the posts on bread and clothing).
I am tired of people – murderers – equating the American Enterprise with anti-democratic ideologies. They should just leave.
I’ll also elaborate: Academia does have a bad reputation for siding with Muslim Terrorists over ‘The West’ and that probably contributed to people like eye81 calling people who are not uncritical supporters of America and its foriegn policy ‘Anti-American’. Muslim terrorism, meanwhile, is a blight worsened, but not entirely caused, by bad Western realpolitik and Bret is right that the US should focus on China and Eastern Europe.
That said, The West and the American Enterprise are the best bet we have. Russia, who is eye81’s real master, is even worse. We should side with The West and America while calling out its mistakes. End of the flipping story.
“maps to help you figure out where things are” May I ask for an extra effort to make sure that each city or area references is listed on the maps, or have the text indicate the location? So many history books don’t, and it can make hash of me trying to quickly understand the campaign from Foo to Bar, especially if one place has been abandoned since then. (For example, in the 1st ed. hardcover Silmarillion, the fold-out map did not mention rulers, so I had to write “Thingol” in Doriath et cetera.)
As it is, I do not believe that pride in being White or American or any other race + nation requires putting down the achievements of other cultures or ignoring one’s country’s inevitable historical crimes. Yet clearly, eyes81/eye81 believes that it does – A Russian attitude and not an American one. This is a false zero-sum game where to be proud of one’s culture, you have to ignore the beautiful things in other ones. How Russian (or Putinist if you prefer that term).
1) X is now about 50/50 D/R in members. This is close to the results in the past number of elections. It more accurately reflects the “Vox populi” to a certain extant. I would suggest that the decrease in views from X is due to making ones electoral stance obvious. The last post prior to the election may have alienated a significant part of the possible market. (M Jordan- Republicans also buy shoes).
2) My SIL teaches history at 3 different universities as a permanent adjunct. When we were in a discussion about universities being leftist he denied it. His comment was that there were very few Maoists or Trotskyists left in the University. This was his definition of being leftist. When asked if he could identify any open Republican professors in any of the schools he said no. When asked if he would be rehired if he was an open Trump supporter (he is neither open nor hidden) he admitted he would not be rehired even though he wins teaching awards.
3) The market for military history and Roman/Classical history tends toward the middle and right side in American terms. I suspect the blog market would also slew middle to right. The popular book market clearly demonstrates this.
I cannot find any reference for the current X U.S. userbase split. I do know that when Reuters Thompson analyzed its global userbase a year ago, it found that it was split 20% left and 15% right (over 50% described themselves as in the center and the rest as disinterested in politics, same as on every other major platform). There’s little doubt that by now, the balance tilted much more to the right globally. Our host hasn’t shared how the views are split by country (if such information is available), but I recall hearing that many English-language websites that are not explicitly US-centric receive at least 30%-40% views from outside it.
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/heres-what-our-research-says-about-news-audiences-twitter-platform-now-known-x
One last example: I am not aware of the author of tankarchives (a Russian-Canadian military historian) taking a stance on contemporary U.S. politics within his blog, and yet he had also seen it fit to start posting on BlueSky. For what it’s worth, you can easily see it as an example of someone driven away by structural issues not directly related to politics. (Unless, of course, simply posting about WWII in a way contrary to “Wehraboo” imaginations is considered politics on “X” of today.)
Just read your Trump fascism essay. It’s hard to disagree with & I think you are right.
PS: I love Yarvin, I love you. Can we get a Yarvin-ACOUP debate?
I’d personally love to see your take on the animated LotR: War of the Rohirrhim movie, especially the battle scenes – I had a couple of, “hmm, is that realistic?” moments while watching, but I don’t have nearly the level of knowledge necessary to answer myself.
Love your blog and hope you have a great new year! Also, please pet the cat for me.
Hi Folks, A few years back I read a paper or thesis about Roman spice trade with the Indies. There were two major parts to the paper. 1. A discussion of what we know about Roman ship building for the Indian Ocean. Big ships that sailed once a year from current Somalia (?) to India, and then back again six months later based on the monsoons. 2. A discussion that all the silver in the Roman ‘area’ flowed to India and points east, as there were very few Roman products that were valuable in a two-way trade (glass, wine?). This silver drain caused economic stress (inflation?) in the Roman ‘area’. The author seemed to think the silver drain was fundamental in the collapse of the Western Empire. But I can’t find it anymore! Anyone got any clues?
A reduction in the amount of silver in circulation should cause deflation (which is even more painful than inflation).
Veilguard armors also have a couple varieties we only ever see on people standing around on city streets, for the lighter armors (especially the more unreasonable Crow armors in Treviso), which to me has another interesting suggestion that some of its armor is full blown intended as a *fashion statement* (and there’s an armor seller in Treviso who indicates that “looking good in a duel” is a cultural value, suggesting that faux armor probably is fashionable). The armors that we actually see on NPCs in combat (other than the Lords of Fortune + Antaam) skew to the reasonable ends, as are the “medium” and “heavy” armors that seem designed for actual combat use (their stats are significantly better). Looking forward to your analysis of them!
Also would love to see your take on LotR War of the Rohirrim, would be a good companion to the helms deep posts i think – the armor struck me as fairly solid, the siege/ battle tactics as basically taken from the live action (or even sillier), the combat as extremely anime, but I’m really curious about the worldbuilding/ cultural aspects too (i did like when Wulf’s soldiers threaten to revolt if they aren’t paid).