Hey all, we’re doing a Fireside this week!
For this week’s musing, I thought it might be worthwhile – this being a frequent space for military history – to offer a brief outline of professional military education (PME) in the United States, which is to say the various stages by which US officers are academically prepared for their jobs. There’s a bit of a necessary caveat here at the outset: I am a lifelong civilian who hasn’t taught at a PME institution, so this is a schematic ‘view from outside,’ and I am sure I will miss some things. Nevertheless, a lot of my colleagues in military history teach in PME and it is a significant part of the military history job market, such that I had to familiarize myself with the ‘lay of the land.’ Particularly I’m focusing here on the staff and war colleges, but the term PME is sometimes applied a lot more broadly to any sort of career-related education for military personnel.
And I also think it is useful to discuss from that outside perspective, because while most Americans are at least vaguely aware of the service academies, most know little, if anything, about the rest of the system. So I thought it might be worth outlining the stages, when in a military career they happen, and the institutions responsible for them. Naturally, I should also note, this is a description of the United States’ system; other countries have different systems.
PME is technically split into three(-ish) levels – primary, intermediate and advanced – but in my experience in a lot of cases when folks say ‘PME’ they are referring specifically to the intermediate and advanced levels and their institutions. We’ll cover all three stages, but with that focus on the latter two. A final note before we get started: PME expectations cut across service branches (they are ‘joint’ and thus JPME), which do not all have the same names for ranks, but they do share a set of pay-grades, which correspond to the PM-relevant career stages, so I’ll be using those below. Officer pay-grades are expressed as O-# (O-1, O-2, etc) and enlisted pay-grades as E-# (E-1, E-2, etc). I’ll include the relevant rank titles in the footnotes.
The first step in the system is pre-comissioning training consists primarily of education designed to prepare a prospective officer to commission as an O-1;1 it technically also encompasses any continuing education through O-4.2 This is thus the jump either from cadet or midshipmen3 or for senior enlisted NCOs (E-7 through E-9)4 making the jump from officer to enlisted. For the public, when they think of this stage, they mostly think of the service academies – the US Military Academy (West Point), Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, along with the two not run by the Department of Defense (the Coast Guard Academy, run by DHS and the Merchant Marine Academy, run by the DOT).
But of course that’s not the whole of this system, or even most of it. Instead by far the largest component of pre-comissioning training are the nation’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs, offered through civilian universities, which provide around 35% of the US military’s commissioned officers at any given time. The next largest chunk is actually still not the service academies, but rather the programs for senior NCOs or civilians (typically with some college education) to become officers (OCS/PLC/OTS) at around 22% and only then the service academies at around 19% (with the remainder mostly being directly commissioned officers). Note that those are the ‘steady state’ figures at any given time (calculated out of the figures for 2019), but because officers commissioned through ROTC often leave the military earlier in their careers, the comparison actually understates the number of newly commissioned officers who have gone through ROTC.
Then most officers are going to spend about a decade moving from O-1 to O-4.5 Additional education in this period – before reaching O-4 – is referred to as Primary PME, though I’ve also seen that term used for programs preparing senior NCOs for OCS/PLC/OTS and as far as I can tell different reports sometimes group pre-commissioning and primary PME together as a single category and others break them out as separate (neither are part of JPME). But the next major step is at O-4, preparing for O-5, which is JPME-I.
The key institutions for JPME-1 (and thus intermediate PME) are the Air Command and Staff College (at Air University, for the Air Force), the Army Command and General Staff College (at Army University, for the Army), the Marine Corps Command and Staff College (at Marine Corps University, for the Marines) and the College of Naval Command and Staff (at the Naval War College, for the Navy); collectively these institutions are often referred to as the ‘staff colleges,’ as distinct from the ‘war colleges.’6 Now, while each of these programs is associated with a specific service branch, that doesn’t mean that everyone in an incoming PME class is an O-4 of that specific service branch. Instead, my sense from colleagues that teach in PME is an incoming class is likely to be mostly officers from the relevant service branch, with a few officers from the other service branches, a small number of civilians either working for the government or for American defense industry and some foreign officers attending American PME as a way for the US to build links between our militaries and for their countries to build their own leadership capabilities.
In structure, intermediate PME is effectively an accelerated master’s program (where primary PME is, in most cases, just straight-up an undergraduate program), though whereas your typical master’s program might consist mostly of folks in their early-20s coming more or less fresh from undergraduate, generally O-4s looking to advance to O-5 are 10-15 years into their military careers (so mid-30s). And accelerated means accelerated: the in-person version generally runs one academic year (there are distance and hybrid versions). Curricula differ based on institution, but generally focus on staff planning and operational art, basic strategic theory and leadership, the idea being that this is preparing officers to handle larger units in more complex operations where they need to be able to see the big picture a bit more clearly.
The last step is advanced PME (JPME-II), which is attended by officers at the O-5 and O-6 pay-grades7 moving upwards towards the general officer ranks (O-7 and up).8 There are five-ish institutions for this stage (in the same way I have five-part-ish posts): the Air War College (part of Air University), the Army War College, the Marine Corps War College (part of Marine Corps University), the College of Naval Warfare (part of the Naval War College) and finally National Defense University (NDU). Except NDU has a half-dozen different sub-units doing advanced PME, which I suppose we needn’t get into here. Collectively, these programs and institutions are often called ‘the war colleges,’ to distinguish them from the staff colleges and their larger parent ‘universities.’
Advanced PME is also generally structured as an accelerated (in-residence 10 months) master’s programs. Once again, curricula differ and the NDU’s half-dozen programs all specialize in different aspects of security policy, but the focus in advanced PME is strategic, ideally preparing already very experienced, senior officers progressing into the upper levels of the military to understand how their large areas of responsibility fit into the national strategic ‘biggest’ picture. The ‘students,’ as mentioned, for advanced PME are O-5s and O-6s, so these are often officers with around two decades of experience.
Finally, for newly promoted O-7s,9 there is also the National Defense University’s CAPSTONE program (mandatory since the mid-1980s). I confess, I don’t have as clear a sense of the curriculum for the CAPSTONE program (which compared to the rest of the system is very small and quite focused); I’ve mostly gotten to know the curricula for various JMPE-I and II programs as preparation for job interviews there and CAPSTONE features guest speakers, discussions and exercises rather than instructor-led coursework, as far as I know.
All of this ecosystem is fairly important for the United States defense establishment. The fact is, initial officer training and early experience is understandably focused on small group leadership and the required technical skills, meaning that the two levels of JPME are often the first time rising officers are engaging in a serious, sustained way with strategic theory and the pantheon of great strategic thinkers. That training structure, the historian in me must note, is a product of the 19th century and efforts to institutionalize senior officer training beginning in Prussia with the kriegsakademie (‘war academy’). So while the public is not particularly aware of the staff and war colleges, they’re quite important in producing the military leadership the United States needs.
At the same time, the PME ecosystem is very important for military history as a discipline. Most of the PME institutions above have teaching roles split more or less evenly between civilian academics and military officers. The result is that a significant proportion of historians (and political scientists, I might add) working on war and conflict are employed by these institutions, pairing research into warfare with leading seminars of officers whose lessons will inform future commands. As the academic job market in history has collapsed, for historians focused on conflict, the Department of Defense has become an increasingly important employer, because demand for PME (and service academy) faculty remains relatively constant.
At the same time, as I write this, the future direction of this ecosystem seems uncertain. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – whose career capped out at O-4 and who thus never attended any of the intermediate or advanced JPME institutions – has been aggressive in announcing cuts to DoD programs, the number of general officers, etc., but plans for JPME remain unclear. I know there is a fair bit of concern that an administration generally hostile to civilian academics, realizing that the DoD employs large numbers of civilian academics in officer training, might seek to cut or remove those positions. Under Hegseth’s leadership, the DoD is moving quite aggressively to cut large numbers of civilian positions in the department, so the concern is not entirely empty.
I think this would be a significant mistake. The presence of civilian academics (many, but by no means all, of whom are veterans themselves) in PME and the service academies plays an important role in introducing an ‘outside’ perspective and linking those institutions closely with current and developing scholarship. It is also the most significant way – arguably really the only significant way – that Uncle Sam provides for the sustained, academic study of war and conflict, which is particularly important given how hot-and-cold military history can run in civilian universities.10 And of course the infrastructure of academic work – things like journals, professional associations, conferences and reviews – can only survive when there is a critical mass of scholars to support them both by doing work but also by paying dues or keeping libraries subscribed to new issues; a sudden sharp drop in the number of employed military historians would potentially permanently destroy many of these academic structures, as they’d be unable to meet operating costs. Hard cuts to this ecosystem would thus threaten to significantly undermine the study of war and conflict in the United States, potentially for decades.
On to recommendations!
First off, my second episode on Tides of History with Patrick Wyman, this one covering the Carthaginian military and political systems and why Carthage was so much better able to oppose Rome than other potential opponents, is out. We’re going to be going into Carthage in a lot more depth later this summer in a blog series I have planned, but you can get a bit of a preview here.
We also have a new Pasts Imperfect this week, with a keynote essay by Lexie Henning on the place of the humanities in the ever expanding gaming space. Also via Pasts Imperfect, Gregory Aldrete explains quite a bit about Daily Life in Ancient Rome in a neat illustrated video that goes into a fair bit of detail, including a short discussion of one of my favorite things to note about ancient Rome, which is Monte Testaccio – the hill in Rome made up almost entirely of discarded Roman ceramics, the remains of the industrial-scale trade in wine and olive oil entering Rome.
Meanwhile on YouTube, Drachinifel has a fascinating video from about a month ago going through the ‘Great Ships’ – the royal warships that formed the core of English fleets – in the Tudor navy. And indeed, as I went to grab a link to this video for this post, I see that he’s just uploaded the second part, focusing on some of the smaller ships, which I haven’t watched yet but still feel pretty confident in recommending. The great virtue of the first video is how tightly linked it is to the source material and how carefully Drach walks you through some of the difficulties in decoding a difficult primary source, a good example of the challenges historians face when dealing with documents that were not, after all, produced for us.
For this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend A.S. Burns, Infantry in Battle: 1733-1783 (2025). The book is focused on exactly what the title implies: how infantry fought on the battlefields of the (short) 18th century. The book covers the whole period, opening with a vignette of combat in 1734 at Parma and Guastalla in Northern Italy (as part of the oft-neglected War of Polish Succession, a ‘general’ European war pitting France, Spain, Parma and Savoy against Russia, Saxony, Prussia and Austria, with Polish factions on both sides) all the way to fighting in North America during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). This is one of those books that successfully strikes the difficult balance between making a scholarly intervention and at the same time providing a useful entry-point for the new reader into the topic.
Burns’ core argument is that we ought to understand infantry tactics in this period (and presumably, many other periods) as a ‘negotiation’ between officers and their soldiers. I should note here, this is ‘negotiation’ in its academic sense: these fellow aren’t sitting down and drawing up terms in the middle of battle. Instead, what Burns is focused on is that conduct in battle was a two-way street: officers might want their soldiers to produce the ideal of the ‘clockwork’ or ‘mechanical’ soldier, but soldiers were not automatons and had their own ideas about what tactics would be best (for victory or survival). Officers could, in turn, try to motivate their soldiers, persuading them with words or acts of conspicuous gallantry, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But the key here is the two-way ‘negotiation.’ That negotiation means that, as Burns argues, the complex tactical systems we see in elite writing (like military manuals) wasn’t useless but it was often aspirational, achieved only incompletely in a process of negotiation.
Instead, Burns presents a model of combat that builds on recent movements in the field such as Spring, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only (2008), which older readers may remember being a recommendation back in 2022. Burns notes that, while the popular image of warfare in this period continues to be shoulder-to-shoulder close-order musket formations, often quite a few ranks deep, on the continent armies were already experimenting with thinner formations and ‘open order’ formations even before the American Revolution; in this sense Infantry in Battle works really well as a sort of developmental history explaining how one gets the tactics of With Zeal and With Bayonets Only. Moreover, Burns notes, even as officers and military manuals extolled the value of bayonet charges in this period, soldiers often preferred to exchange fire instead and utilized cover, firing from behind fences, ditches or buildings where such cover was available. Thus the tension of negotiation emerges between officers trying to get soldiers to engage in decisive bayonet charges and soldiers who might prefer to position in the relative safety of cover. Thus actual battlefield behavior and tactics were as much a product of enlisted soldiers – often quite experienced men – as they were the ideals of officers and tactical manuals.
At the same time, this book is just really handy as an introduction to infantry combat in this period and as a corrective for the ‘Hollywood’ vision that still dominates popular culture, which tends to view the tactics of this period as foolish and counter-productive (which is an odd thing to say about a military system that was globally dominant to an almost absurd degree in the 18th century!). Burns writes clearly and with a gift for making the complex understandable by drilling down to, say, the action in a single field or with a single unit, to follow how they respond to combat conditions. Now I should note, the book is not written to treat entire battles and does very little with cavalry and artillery, save for how infantry responded to them: this is a book about infantry in battle, not about any one battle or armies generally. Likewise, there’s some discussion of what campaigning life and the conditions of these soldiers would be like – actually rather more complete and well done than I expected, given the title – but this is not a ‘face of battle’ or ‘face of campaign’ approach. This is a book fundamentally about tactics and the men who executed those tactics and it succeeds remarkably well at that, while still being a solid entry-point into the topic.
The book itself, in hardcover comes in a compact, nice little volume and features a number of very good battle maps and a few graphs. What I did feel was a bit missing were images, showing the reader a bit of what these soldiers looked like and perhaps diagrams showing exactly how certain tactical maneuvers discussed would be executed (although I didn’t find Burns’ written descriptions at all hard to follow). Of course, the realities of publishing being what they were, I can imagine that lots of nice pictures were never in the budget for this volume; the author can hardly be faulted for that. But for someone looking to get a sense of the tactics of this period – or to come up to date on the debates about them – this is the book to read and is going to be my standard recommendation for students looking to grasp infantry tactics in the ‘Age of Reason.’
- Second Lieutenant or Ensign
- Major or Lieutenant Commander
- Which don’t have pay-grades for me to use
- These grades are various forms of senior sergeants and chief petty officers.
- From Second Lieutenant or Ensign to Major or Lieutenant Commander
- There is also a JPME-I program at National Intelligence University.
- Lt. Colonels, Colonels, Commanders and Captains
- Those are the ranks with the words ‘general’ or ‘admiral’ in them: Brigadier General (O-7), Major General (O-8), Lieutenant General (O-9) or General (O-10) or Rear Admiral RDML (O-7), Rear Admiral RADM (O-8), Vice Admiral (O-9) and Admiral (O-10).
- Brigadier generals and rear admirals
- By which I mean some schools have strong programs, many schools have almost nothing or actually nothing. As a research field, military history is healthier and more sophisticated than it has been in a long time, but for students, their access to that is very uneven, from one university to the next.
Unless something changed recently, OCS is not exclusively for senior NCO’s. It’s open to any college graduate who meets the requirements. Nate Fick’s memoir *One Bullet Away* describes the process he went through. (You may recognize the name; he was the platoon leader in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill.)
Fair point, I’ll change the text to reflect.
I’m not familiar with the mechanics of this website so it’s easier to reply to a comment than post one. Regarding military education. I was a career military officer, retiring at the 05 level. My highest military education was AJPME taught at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, VA. IMO military education is important, but unfortunately it is often irrelevant. This is because military decision making in the U.S. is made by politicians, rather than well trained and educated generals and admirals.
As an example, note that General Eric Shinseki estimated that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq after a successful invasion. This clashed with Secretary Rumsfeld’s decision to only use 140,000 troops. Shinseki retired shortly thereafter.
The same was true in Vietnam. The JCS told President Johnson in early 1965 that fighting a counterinsurgency war in South Vietnam would require about 500,000 troops and take 10 years to be successful. Johnson didn’t want to hear this and limited the number of troops initially sent to Vietnam.
So while it’s important to have a well educated officer corps, when their advice is ignored for political reasons, then military education becomes largely irrelevant.
ever heard of primat of politic
I don’t know how well-taken these examples are. A number of commentators (e.g., Edward Luttwak, Max Boot) have argued that it was Westmoreland’s methods, not lack of manpower, that led to failure in Vietnam. And Iraq has turned out to be, ultimately, our most successful foreign adventure of the past quarter-century. Neither the Trumpniks nor the liberals want to hear that, but compared to Afghanistan, Libya, Syria etc., Iraq is relatively stable, relative peaceful, relatively free, and relatively friendly to the US.
Credit where credit is due, this is actually relatively true.
Strange to see you criticize Trump’s supporters, though.
I am thinking for a moment about everything that has happened in Iran, Iraq, and Syria since 2003 because of Bush’s great mistake. I am thinking of the hundreds of thousands of lives ended, the millions of refugees, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent. And while I don’t want to use unparliamentary language, I don’t think anything that resulted could be seen as in any way a US success. Even if we ignore the experiences of actual Iranians, Iraqis, and Syrians!
“but compared to Afghanistan, Libya, Syria etc., Iraq is relatively stable, relative peaceful, relatively free, and relatively friendly to the US.”
Uh, that’s an extremely low bar, isn’t it?
That Iraq is, arguably, our greatest foreign policy success in the past 20 years is a testament to how badly thought out all our other major foreign policy initiatives have been. Nevertheless, point taken.
The Biden withdrawal almost, but didn’t quite, ruin that. My uninformed impression is that most Iraqis hate Iran so much, they would rather work with us.
> As an example, note that General Eric Shinseki estimated that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq after a successful invasion. This clashed with Secretary Rumsfeld’s decision to only use 140,000 troops. Shinseki retired shortly thereafter.
This is a popular, but inaccurate, summary of events. you can see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_xchyIeCQw
He’s very clearly saying that the forces already mobilized were of the correct order of magnitude.
Point of order (pedantry, anyway) 100,000 up to 999,000 (a bit less would be less arguable, but technicalities remain) are all the same order of magnitude.
The next order of magnitude after the hundred(s) of thousand(s) is million(s).
/notserious
Same applies for Air Force OTS. Prior-enlisted officer trainees were a minority of my class. The big distinction between OTS and ROTC/USAFA is that OTS trainees already have a degree (at least a bachelors but sometimes higher for chaplains, medical, etc.). Thus OTS can be a lot shorter than ROTC/USAFA (4-12 weeks vs. 4 years), and since OTS is so much shorter, it can increase or decrease class sizes to adjust for demand much faster.
I’d also add that there’s huge benefit to the “distance” programs offered at the Intermediary stage of PME beyond the military itself. For example, I just completed my first semester of the Naval War College’s Fleet Seminar Program. FSP is basically JPME-1 spread out over 2-4 years, with the normal expectation being a course a year for three years. The class I took (Strategy & War) was offered in a variety of locations, and I ended up having to take one lecture with a class in DC which was comprised almost entirely of Congressional staffers from both parties. (the expectation being these folks will one day run for office on their own or be senior advisors to Senators/Congresspersons) Most of them had never heard of Clausewitz, Mahan, Galula (or anyone else!) and were *wildly* unfamiliar with even the most “common” case studies such as WWII or the American Revolution. By giving people like that an understanding of how the military functions at the strategic/operational level and how clear political aims (or lack thereof) can significantly impact the results of conflict you get a much more informed civilian leadership. As S&W shows, all to often wars are lost because political actors have no real concept of how military conflict “works” and therefor either set unrealistic goals or are bamboozled by generals with their own agenda. Alas, as the purse strings tightened this year quite a few of our traveling guest lecturers turned into “multi-class zoom lecture with Q&A.” From discussions with my Professor and talking to classmates who were further along than I was most FSP classes are at least 50% “non-miliary” contractors/OGA outside of sessions specifically offered at places like the Pentagon.
“making the jump from officer to enlisted” –> enlisted to officer.
I was wondering if there was some meaning there that I was missing, or if it was just a typo.
A point possibly worth considering, too, is that only a small minority of officers attend IDE or SDE in-residence. 80% or so will complete them via distance learning; some of the distance learning programs are accredited master’s degree programs and some aren’t. Some count for JPME-I credit and some don’t.
A second point: direct commissioned officers, in the USAF at least, also attend OTS for a shorter, post-commissioning training course.
Funny story, I was a Teletype Repair person in the Air National Guard, E-6 in an E-7 slot, when the Air Force, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they no longer needed teletype machines (maybe fifteen years after the commercial world made that transition). So I needed to cross-train. My first choice was Telephone Inside-plant, another very complex career field with high prestige. The Training NCO said I easily qualified, however it was 40 plus week school and I couldn’t take 40 weeks off from my civilian job (simulation engineer). How about Outside-plant (cable dawg)? 22 weeks. What about Admin clerk? 14 weeks. Got anything less that that? The Training NCO said with a grin “We can make you an officer in six weeks!”
A periodization of 1733 to 1783 as the “short 18th century” is new to me. I think I’ve seen 1715-1789 used in a specifically British context, but not more generally.
Presumably the last 6 years don’t really “matter” as there wasn’t a significant European war between Yorktown and the Bastille, but I would think what conflicts there were (Russian-Swedish and Russian-Turkish, according to Prof. Wikipedia) were broadly fought in the pre-Revolutionary model. Similarly, there was a lull between 1720-21 (Quadruple Alliance and the end of the Great Northern War) and 1733 (Polish succession?), but I’m not quite sure of the significance of starting then.
I suspect this very specific choice of a time period aims to achieve two things; to end with the American War of Independence as its climax, and to completely exclude the Great Northern War. Sure, the latter, which began in 1700, had practically ended by 1721, when Sweden signed a peace treaty in Nystad (modern-day Uusikaupunki) – a document which had effectively ended the Swedish Empire and started the Russian Empire. However, the formal end of the entire war occurred in 1732, when Sweden (now a constitutional monarchy after a litany of defeats discredited the Emperor and provided impetus for the Instrument of Government in 1719) had formally signed a peace treaty with the final participant, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. (The 1721-1732 period was apparently similar to the present-day state of the Korean War, which had practically ended in 1953, yet is still considered only paused with a ceasefire, and won’t formally end until there is a complete peace treaty – a massive political poison pill, since any realistic text will formally bury any hopes of reunification.)
It must be noted that the book (published in December 2024) is apparently quite short – according to Amazon’s page counter, it’s a brisk 244 pages, so making it cover the entire century would have hardly blown it up to doorstopper levels. It might be cynical of me, but its choice of a timeline seems even more motivated by “narrative” reasons than is usual for retail history books. The author and/or the publisher appears to have concluded that the reader most likely to pick up a book written in English about “infantry tactics in the ‘Age of Reason’” in 2025
a) would not want to start the volume with a recounting of Russia gradually yet comprehensively winning a war of attrition against a Western European power;
b) would not want to learn/be reminded of the time Poland (as Rzeczpospolita) explicitly sided with Russia against Sweden;
c) would not be especially eager to learn the reasons why it made such a decision, so inexplicable from the 20th-21st century lens, yet completely obvious at the time, given the so-called Deluge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(history)
d) would consider the American Revolutionary War to be the most important conflict of the 18th century anyway, and moreover, would find a book ending with its outcome uplifting and inspiring. On the contrary, a book which ended with the fighting of the French Revolution would likely leave this intended reader with rather more mixed feelings. A book which ended with the colonial defeats of Dutch and Spanish vs. Selangor (part of modern-day Malaysia) and Algeria, or with the Russian Empire defeating the Ottomans to formally claim Crimea and then defeating Rzeczpospolita the year after its 3rd of May Constitution, formally ending the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth over the Second and Third Partition, risks coming across as alienatingly downbeat and depressing to the very same reader.
Of course, Alexander S. Burns had every right to write the book he wanted to write, but I find this abridged timeline to be a pity, particularly when considering just how influential the Great Northern War was for the next several centuries of history. Suffice it to say that the pivotal battle of the war took place in 1709 in Poltava – that is, Swedish troops ventured into Central Ukraine, ~2000 km away from Stockholm. The following year, they lost Riga, a “mere” 300 km away from the same. Just the fact Sweden used to be able to perform this kind of logistics seems important for the book’s thesis and its (apparent) aim to depict “campaigning life” of the infantry – as well as to describe the kind of “negotiation” required by the officers to motivate soldiers to fight and die up to 2000 km away from home in the pre-motor era.
Likewise, the Ottoman military appears conspicuous by its absence in both the description of the book provided here, and in its blurb in Amazon. Maybe the book does include them (seems like only Dr. Devereaux could confirm or deny this at this point) and the previews simply did not mention that explicitly (itself a choice filled with implications). Or perhaps Burns did not want to write about them while relying on translated material only (recalling all the posts on here about historians being expected to read primary sources in about their topic in original language). If so, that is still a strange choice, considering that the military of the Russian Empire in 17th century primarily fought the Ottomans and the Persians, and consequently, its tactical and operational planning was shaped by these opponents to much a greater degree than by the armies (presumably) covered elsewhere in the book.
The Swedish Empire has a grand martial reputation (and certainly punched far above its weight) but even by the standards of 17th century warfare it seems to have been an unpleasant visitor. Worst part of the 30 Years War. And less said about the Deluge the better…
The deadliest events in Polish history as % of the population are:
1) Deluge (~33%)
2) World War II (~19%)
3) Great Northern War (~18%)
The Great Northern War incidentally is greatly underestimated because no academic has comprehensively calculated its death toll. But Sweden suffered 200,000 military dead (plus a much smaller number of Holstein, Polish, etc) while the anti-Swedish alliance’s loses were probably roughly double that. Lithuania lost perhaps 1 million people (there actually is a detailed study for that part!), Poland maybe similar. Combined with civilian dead in the Baltic and Ukraine and military losses, death toll may well have neared 4 million (excluding indirect death more broadly in Russia, Russia’s population seems to have declined during Peter ‘the Great’s reign (he’s rather overrated)).
Geopolitical importance is of course huge also. It broke one great power and left Poland-Lithuania under Russian influence which would have a lot of implications for the rest of the century.
To be fair to Burns though, in a lot of ways the Great Northern War was the last war of the long 17th century. In the way a lot of armies lived off the land, the mass civilian death, and its interminable nature.
Swedish army was also distinctive compared to Western ones. It was still using pikes throughout the Great Northern War. It had a much higher proportion of cavalry. These I both suspect are connected to it being an *extremely* aggressive army tactically. Probably the best army of the era in terms of being able to most of the time defeat even much larger armies. Of course this is a reflection its strategic situation sucked. To be fair to the Swedish kings this was hard to fix. Its finances were heavily dependent on revenues from controlling the mouths of rivers on the south side of the Baltic. It needed them to be a Great Power. Unfortunately Russia, Poland, Prussia, etc didn’t really like this…
Sweden had a near-monopoly on copper production in Europe from the introduction of bronze cannon-making, when copper prices in Europe really went up; and that basically all came from one giant mine. Trade control was important for the general prosperity of people in the Swedish Empire (and consequent political stability), but the money that built the royal militaries that created the empire derived mostly from revenue from that single copper mine (possibly the largest underground mine complex ever built anywhere, but still a single point of failure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine
Production in ~1710 was down to a third of peak, right when Sweden started really losing the Great Northern war. It is also the case that the Swedish Empire operated with a per-soldier equipment cost that was relatively high, because it always had an easier time finding money than it did finding Swedish recruits.
The other point was that Swedish army had a rather odd personnel makeup. The allotment system made, in peace-time, and even during wars, military service very attractive. All military members of ordinary regiments were paid in kind: officers and NCOs received an official residence, the proceeds of which they enjoyed as their salary. A colonel’s residence was a mansion, a corporal’s residence a smallish farm. An ordinary private was hired by a few farms who then provided him with a croft, some land and a uniform. In peacetime, the soldier would farm the land of his croft, and drill every Sunday, and when in active service, the hiring farms would toil the land and make sure that the soldier’s family survived.
The NCO career was attractive enough that you mostly needed to be a nobleman to become a corporal. To get enlisted as a soldier in peacetime, you usually needed to work as a “one-third man” for several years. (A “one-third man” was a sort of reservist who was usually hired by three sets of farms to stand in for a fallen or sick soldier, and who got a uniform, trained every Sunday after church but worked otherwise as a farm-hand without a croft.)
This system worked pretty well even during Great Northern War. For example, a certain Finnish regiment was destroyed and re-raised seven times during 1700-13.
Interestingly, one of the oldest stock certificates in existance is from 1288 and grants a 12.5% share on the Great Copper Mountain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock#History
was the eastern european theater not more cavalry dominated than the rest of europe
Great comments, and a lot of highly informative discussion!
I would argue that even if we do consider the Great Northern War as the last war of the long 17th century, then its inclusion could still be more than justified for the sake of contrast, as the sort of baseline 18th century way of war moved away from.
I also just wanted to point out that the idea here
“Russia’s population seems to have declined during Peter ‘the Great’s reign (he’s rather overrated)”
Has been known to be a myth for a while. I.e. Wikipedia claims a doubling of the Russian population from 1678 to 1710, citing a 1976 demographics work by Yaroslav Vodarsky. One might be wary of Soviet scholarship on such a matter, but just a few years ago, a publication from a Western university also affirms population growth in that period.
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Russian-Economic-Growth-During-the-Eighteenth-Century_Korchmina_Broadberry.pdf
There, their first table shows population levels at key dates across nearly two centuries (1646, 1678, 1719, 1744, 1762, 1782 and 1796) relative to 1815 – as well as including two columns for “expanding territory” and “constant territory”, thus aiming to separate natural population trends from territorial acquisition. According to it, in 1646 (2nd year under Peter’s father, Alexei Mikhailovich “The Quietest” (“Тишайший” – loose translation of “clementissimus” honorific occasionally used by Western royals), the population at “constant territory” was 24.5% of 1815 levels. In 1678 (two years into the brief reign of Peter’s sickly elder brother Feodor III), it was at 33.6%. In 1719, near the end of Peter’s reign, it was at 47.6% of 1815 levels – i.e. anything but a decline. Their figure 9 also shows a graph of population that is continually growing, and where the slowest, nearly flat growth seems to be in 1730-1740 – Anna Ioannovna’s* decade in power. Likewise, that decade is also the period of flat GDP (total and per capita), in contrast to growth under Peter, or the next ruler, his daughter Elizabeth.**
Probably worth noting that the idea of population decline under Peter the Great is believed to date to 1910, to a work by…Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov – a historian by training, sure, but justifiably far better-known as the founder and leader of the “Cadets” – the Constitutional Democratic Party in the Russian Empire’s final decade as a sorta-parliamentary monarchy. (One which dissolved its first two directly elected Dumas a month into either term’s and then adopted an indirect electoral system where 0.3 million landowners had the same representation as 100 million peasants, to be fair.) Milyukov even got to be the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government. Suffice it to say, his scholarship can itself be hardly separated from politics.
*Peter’s niece and the daughter of his other elder brother, Ivan V – known for delegating many of her duties to her lover, Courland (Latvian) German Biron, for being the first Russian ruler to exile significant numbers of opponents to Kamchatka, at the northeastern edge of Russia, and for demoting an influential noble Golitsyn (his grandfather was the most powerful man in the country when Peter’s elder sister Sofia ruled before she grew up) to a court jester because before ascension, he converted to Catholicism to marry an Italian abroad, which she strongly disapproved of. People really did believe their own religion! (And it really was religion which was at fault rather than the spouse’s origin – after Anna declared that marriage of Golitsyn null and void, she eventually got him to marry her favourite jester, an ethnic Itelmen (one of Russia’s North Asian peoples from the aforementioned Kamchatka) whose “civilized last name” Buzheninova referred to her traditional habit of using lard for hygiene instead of bathing (effectively impossible in borderline-polar climate she grew up in). The lavish ceremony notoriously involved an ice palace with burning oil fountains – the sort of an expense which certainly didn’t endear her and Biron to either the contemporaries or the successors.
** Elizabeth reign was almost immediately followed by Catherine the Great’s. Interestingly, the latter’s reign displays significant population growth (even the early 1770’s plague did not seem to affect it) paired with zig-zagging GDP during the two final decades of it, and a clear per capita GDP decline in that period. Though, in the words of the authors
> This pattern of a period of positive economic growth followed by a period of negative economic growth is typical of most pre-industrial European economies for which we have data
covering the period between the late middle ages and the mid-nineteenth century. The only exceptions identified so far are the British and Dutch economies, which began to experience a
pattern of episodic growth, interspersed with periods of remaining on a plateau rather than experiencing negative trend growth of GDP per capita, suggesting that the key to modern economic growth had more to do with reducing the rate and frequency of shrinking rather than accelerating the rate of growing.
Interesting on the population figures! I was already aware Catherine the Great’s reign seems to have been fairly poor economically. My understanding is it was pretty corrupt (even keeping in mind Imperial Russia was rarely peachy in that regard). She was very successful at holding on to power, but that required being very careful to keep nobles, etc happy as a non-Romanov foreigner.
citing a 1976 demographics work by Yaroslav Vodarsky. One might be wary of Soviet scholarship on such a matter,
What was the Soviet view of the Great Northern War and of Peter the Great, in general? (My general sense is that it changed over time, particularly because Stalin was a fan, but I’m sure you know more than me).
The reason 17th century Sweden was a great power, despite having a rather minuscule population, was good government: Sweden had a working tax system, relatively fair courts and lots of state legitimacy. On the military side, they had the best logistics of the time: the taxes produced by the efficient government were used effectively to support the military, and the military logistics system of war commissars organised foraging and looting with great efficacy.
For local populations, this meant that a passing Swedish army would “forage”, that is, loot, worse than most other armies, even when they were not purposely destroying localities. The Swedes had the administrative capacity to reduce whole regions to starvation by efficient looting, and they did this occasionally, when they wanted to prevent an area from being passed by the enemy.
The Swedish great power era ended about the same time it’s larger neighbours improved their governments. The 2 million Swedes could not really compete in the same series with their neighbours when they reached the same socio-technological level.
Great topic on PME, and let me expand a bit from a service perspective as an Army officer who has attended and graduated from every course you’ve mentioned (plus others to expound on). I’ll touch a bit on the use of military history in each as well.
I’m an ROTC graduate myself, so on pre-commissioning education that shapes y perspective. The common training among all commissioning sources is leadership and officership, though the Army uses light infantry tactics and small unit patrolling as a vehicle to teach and evaluate leadership. The last quarter/semester of the senior your of ROTC is (or was) Military History, examining not only range of applied military history topics but teaching the basics of battle analysis — I remember my own semester paper on the Battle of Ap Bac in Vietnam selected as it was a first major application of Armor as the US was entering the Vietnam conflict, and I was commissioning as an Armor officer. Well funded schools may also do a staff ride to a battlefield, typically Civil War-era but some lucky cadets do staff rides to Normandy or other distant battlefields.
Subsequent PME which you’ve categorized as “primary, intermediate, and advanced” (the Joint definitions) I’d characterize in the Army as “tactical, operational, and strategic”.
New Second Lieutenants straight from commissioning attend a branch specific (i.e. infantry, armor, artillery, etc) Basic Officer Leader Course (BOLC) (4-6 months duration) which teaches the tactics, techniques, and equipment of their basic branch assignment along with common leadership and officership topics and skills (marksmanship, land nav) that are a refresh of pre-commissioning training. BOLC is branch-pure, but will include international officer of similar rank, and in some cases USMC LTs (I went through Ft Knox when the Marines still had tanks, and had Marine Corps Armor officers in my classes). BOLC is heavy on practical application and field problems. Instructors are almost 100% uniformed outside of certain specialists. Military history is used often to illustrate specific tactical and leadership examples, plus there’s typically a battle analysis paper and/or staff ride requirement.
New Captains or promotable Lieutenants coming out of their first tactical assignment attend the Captain’s Career Course (CCC, 6-8 months duration) designed to teach the skills to be a company commander and perform as a staff officer at the battalion and brigade level. This introduces combines arms — most courses will be about 70% common basic branch officers (e.g. infantry and armor for the Maneuver Captain’s Career Course), but will have other branch Army officers, international officers, and some other-service officers. It’s less applied field and tactical training, and more theoretical, planning, simulation, and staff work. Instructors are almost 100% uniformed, though my Armor course had retired Battalion- and Brigade Commander “mentors” that advised the small groups and acted the art of the commander for large scale battalion and brigade staff exercises. Military history content is again in both specific example application throughout instruction, plus a battle analysis paper and staff ride (when the Armor School was still at Ft Knox, almost 100% the Civil War battle of Perryville, KY, which happens to be a great Cavalry battle in addition to proximity to Knox).
Tactical-level PME also includes a wide variety of specialist qualification courses – everything from skill qualification courses like Airborne and Air Assault, to leadership schools like Ranger school, to position specific courses (Scout Platoon Leader, Battalion Motor Officer, Air Load Planner as examples from my branch). All of these tend to be highly tactical and technical; no military history content.
Intermediate Level Education (ILE) as pointed out is the Command and General Staff Officer’s Course (CGSOC), which is actually delivered in a couple of mechanisms, both a 10-onth resident, a more focused two-part resident, and a distance learning course. This is operational in nature – training new Majors to be Division and Corps staff officers and do planning at the upper tactical and operational echelons of war. The cadre include a larger number of civilians; the small croup seminars will include a mix of basic branch Army officers, other service officers, and international officers. Military history plays a role in curriculum through examples, multiple battle analyses, and staff rides – and there are specialty seminars that do even more depending on the particular Master’s program a student might participate in.
Select students can extend from CGSOC to attend the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) which is the course that trains our operational planners, the famed “Jedi Knights” who planned Operation Desert Storm and our subsequent conflicts. I’m not a SAMS grad so I can’t speak to the history content of the curriculum but I expect there’s a fairly large dose – military professionals, after all, should at least be amateur military historians at least within their primary specialty.
The Major years may also include other broadening education assignments – Advanced Civil Schooling, getting a Master’s or PhD at a civilian institution is one of those options (and one I pursued for an advanced engineering degree), as are fellowships in various places (Congressional, White House, Joint).
Lieutenant Colonel is the one rank with really no dedicated PME, as those selected to attend the advanced JPME have been selected for Colonel (or are already promoted).
I did my Senior Service College tour at the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, PA – the strategic rung of the education ladder. This includes a compressed Master’s program in National Security Studies. It’s taught in small seminars of about 16 students with a range of backgrounds – Army officers about 60-70% with a mix of branch backgrounds; typically one officer from each of the other Joint services in a seminar, plus a couple of international officers and at least one civilian from the Interagency (State, DNI, Commerce, treasury, etc). The instructors are overwhelmingly civilian; as an example, the five core instructors assigned to my seminar included one active duty Air Force Colonel, two Department of the Army Civilians (both retired Army Colonels), one civilian instructor from the interagency (ours was from State), and a visiting civilian military history professor (shout out to Bill Allison!).
AWC instruction has the JPME core, then a bunch of tailored electives, some of which focus on regional specialties. There are some special seminars that might focus more on strategic planning, but everyone gets a dose of that. The curriculum is heavy on both contemporary strategic government and Joint/Interagency function – I’d argue that more is taught at AWC and the other war colleges about how the totality of American government works than exists elsewhere. Military history is presented more in the mechanism of teaching the history of military theory as well as the theory and strategy of making war (vice warfighting). At the center of the AWC military theory curriculum is the study of Thucydides’ treatise on the Peloponnesian War, followed by the classic Western theorists – Clausewitz-centric (drink!) but also Jomini, Douhet, and Mahan, as well as non-Western – think Sun Tzu, Indian Mandala theory, and other strategic models. Though if anything, most of my seminar thought we should have more military history and analysis content, not less – as the best training for war at the strategic level short of actual practice is studying military history.
I don’t know DOD plans, but I don’t see how a practical reduction of civilian instructors is possible at the War Colleges without compromising the educational value; but I should also acknowledged that I’m not a military schooling professional – I’ve taken the courses, but never resourced or run them.
At the General Officer level, CAPSTONE is the common Joint requirement (more on that in a moment) but the Army maintains an entire program of general officer education call the Army Strategic Education Program (ASEP) which is a whole series of courses aimed at strategic leadership and operating at the highest level of the Army and Joint Enterprise. Two ASEP courses are common for all Army GOs – a Basic course (“Charm School”) which is the entry for promotable Colonels, and an Advanced Course at the two-star level – the latter with a center on both Army strategic issues and enterprise leadership, but also on advising civilian leaders as a senior military professional; one of the ASEP-A graduation exercises requires the student to roleplay as the CJCS advising the President, SECDEF, and SECSTATE in a complex geopolitical crisis and shape how military options are offered. ASEP includes a huge curriculum of courses designed to be tailored to particular GO assignments, whether for installation commanders, division commanders, three- and four-star Joint commanders, or other billets.
CAPSTONE, in comparison, is aimed at a common Joint education for all General and Flag Officers, will have a mixed audience of all services in more or less proportionate numbers of one star officers. The five week course spends a lot of time on the road to get a total picture of Joint operations and requirements – starting from the National Defense University campus but spending several days on Joint operations planning in Norfolk, visiting each of the Combatant Commands, and then breaking up to do overseas visits to multiple countries in smaller seminar groups that focus on Europe, Asia, Africa, the Indo-Pacific, or Western Hemisphere regional partners. Not much military history content by this point, though – reading and writing requirements tend to focus on contemporary issues and Joint/Interagency operations.
The DOD invests a massive amount in professional leader education for its leaders (there are similar education ladders for NCOs and Warrant Officers, if less time-intensive). In a more than 30-year career, I’ve probably spent about the equivalent of four years in various resident core PME courses, plus fifteen months getting a master’s at a civilian university, plus another year-plus equivalent of Defense Acquisition University education for my own career field as an acquisition professional.
Hope that added to the discussion.
“I don’t know DOD plans, but I don’t see how a practical reduction of civilian instructors is possible at the War Colleges without compromising the educational value”
The issue here isn’t how you reduce civilian instructors without compromising educational value, but what are the goals and concerns of the current administration.
And, well, the current administration’s goals seem to have little to do with maintaining educational value and the strong military it leads to.
p.s. Thank you for providing your insight from the inside.
It’s also worth noting many officers go to civilian colleges in the middle of their career to obtain the technical skills for their functional area. For example, an officer might be assigned to Syracuse to get a civilian MBA and government comptroller certification in preparation for handling finance responsibilities for their branch. Not strictly military education, but it is education for the military that follows a similarly regimented path.
A very minor and painfully pedantic remark:
Nouns in German (“Kriegsakademie”) are spelled with an initial capital letter.
How does something like the Air Force Institute of Technology fit into the system?
AFIT is an accredited graduate school, but they don’t run any of the PME programs.
I had a college professor who’d previously taught at one of the military academies as a civilian. He specialized in water and wastewater management – how to get a basic drinking water and sewage system set up. It’s not something everyone needs to know, but it’s pretty important to have someone who knows it!
(He’s also the only college professor I ever had go on an actual political rant in the middle of class. His subject, predictably, was the importance of sewer systems. He believed they were the greatest technological advance in the history of humanity. Fun guy.)
Username checks out.
He’s not entirely wrong. I mean, look back at how often dysentery comes up in historic documentation. I’ve read (though cannot confirm) that it was considered bad form to kill someone who was having an attack of the squirts in the Middle Ages because, well, even enemy combatants have some sympathy and shared experiences. The Typhoid issue is another that comes up. Even something like washing cloths has been radically changed by sewer systems. Water management (how to get it, how to make it safe, and how to get rid of it) is a drastically under-rated thing in society.
I’ve got a list of rather cynical statements about field geology, and one of them is “The person who cares about latrine placement is the one who actually cares about your safety.” I have the days away from work data to show that this is still an issue today!
For my part, I list artificial refrigeration as the greatest technological advance in human history. But I like beer (Americans drink a style of beer that requires cold temperatures to brew, so they were HEAVILY involved in the development). But I have nothing but respect for sewage systems and the people who build and maintain them!
If you’re into this sort of thing the YouTube channel “Practical Engineering” is a fantastic one. The guy is super passionate about everyday engineering, and does a great job of presenting what could be very dry, boring information in a way that gets you to share his passion.
Dysentery can be a tougher challenge than other GI diseases because some types of it are caused by an amoeba rather than a bacterium. Amoebas and some other eukaryotic parasites, like giardia, aren’t killed by chlorine treatment (unlike most bacteria).
Yes, and as a result there can be amoebas in tap water. That is why you should not use tap water to wash your contact lenses. (The amoebas get in your eye and eat it.)
Theoretically, chlorination *plus* filtration is supposed to render water completely safe (at least that’s what i was told in the Peace Corps). So you’re probably safe with most tap water, it’s more that if you’re in some area without access to clean water, and have to chlorinate it yourself, then be aware you still may get amoebic dysentery or giardia.
If and when chlorine-tolerant bacteria become a thing (they already exist to some extent, someone in my department studies them, but I guess they aren’t a major public health threat yet) then the world is going to have another monumental health challenge on its hands.
“His subject, predictably, was the importance of sewer systems. He believed they were the greatest technological advance in the history of humanity”
I don’t have much to add to Dinwar’s great comment – besides remarking that the term “sewer socialism” arose for a reason!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_socialism
P.S. As for “Water management (how to get it, how to make it safe, and how to get rid of it) is a drastically under-rated thing in society” – I suppose I can cite an example where neglecting the last part (“how to get rid of it”) had significant military implications. In the 1930s, a series of what the USSR itself described as fortified districts were constructed in key ares alongside its border at the time. In at least one of those, near the Northwestern city of Pskov (located about 3/4ths of a way between Moscow and St. Petersburg), otherwise decent concrete bunkers ended up flooded to about knee-height because groundwater levels were improperly measured before the start of construction! This was according to a 1939 NKVD report*; not sure if they ever managed to fix it before the invasion, since soon all the attention shifted to fortifying the “new border” formed after the 1939-1940 annexations.**
*Authored by no lesser man than Kobulov, Beria’s senior deputy – high enough up the ladder to get executed alongside the boss and half a dozen other deputies after the death of Stalin.
**Some WWII history enthusiasts might have heard of the old and new fortifications described as the “Stalin Line” and “Molotov Line”, but those names were given by the Western press, and never reflected reality. By one estimate, manning fortifications comparable to Majino Line alongside the entire 1930s Soviet border in Europe would have required ~2.5 million people – 5 times more than the entire Soviet ground forces at the time. (And the new fortifications simply could never have been completed in 1 year.) Large stretches of either border had no or minimal fortifications, and even where they weren’t outright flooded, they still generally had a number of deficiencies and could at best provide scattered resistance.
The Soviet military was based on a system of mobilising reserves, so using a mobilised strength of 2.5 million for static defence was not impossible. After all, the Red Army mobilised millions in the Second World War. In armies based on conscription, the standing strength is rather immaterial.
The main reason why the fortifications were relatively small was the fact that they had only tactical purpose. The Soviet doctrine of grand strategic defence, just like the current Russian one, has always been based on operational offensive. The 1930’s Soviet war planning was based on a massive counter-attack. The border fortifications were only for screening the troops being assembled for the offensive campaign.
Wastewater management is something the State Department should manage. But they don’t. In both Iraq and Afghanistan improving water and sewer systems got tasked to DOD. Even teaching Afghan soldiers to read (a job for civilian teachers) got tasked to DOD. The State Department is largely lacking in any practical skills. If the State Dept can’t find civilians with the guts to work in war zones, then the State Department should be vastly downsized.
This makes me wonder how that sewer systems compare with vaccines and antibiotics when it comes to how many human lives they save(d) from disease.
On an unrelated note, the geopolitical history of the Targaryen Seven Kingdoms makes no sense. The present situation ignoring shear geographical size is one thing. Relatively weak kings with a few over-powerful vassals. Not that different from pre-Philippe Augustus France or the Stem Duchies period of the Holy Roman Empire. Which is reasonable, dragonless Targaryens have a small demesne and are largely dependent on legitimacy.
But the Targaryens were not always weak! They during their Dragon Era will want to break these great vassals and definitely not create them in the first place (excluding cadet branches of course). Most of the Holy Roman Empire’s infamous fractalization happened *before* the Emperors became largely powerless. Later Emperors then had incentives to help protect smaller powers being gobbled by greater. Incidentally the Holy Roman Empire’s farceness is somewhat overstated, its institutions sometimes did things and it was a major source of Austrian Habsburg manpower up to the early 1700s.
Its clear why Dorne is a polity. But why the others? The various Wardens sort of make sense, except they are redundant. Lord Stark doesn’t need to be Warden of the North, because he already controls all the resources of the North (ditto the rest). Why impose the Tullys and Tyrells instead of promoting the Redwynes, Tarlys, Freys, Blackwoods, etc to direct vassals (in real life, imperial immediacy was often a prized reward!).
What would make much more sense if pre-Dance the Lannisters, Starks, Arryns, and Tyrells were merely first among equals. Usually, but not always, Warden of the applicable region (and thus why, like the Percys and Nevilles, the Starks and Boltons hate each other’s guts). Dorne has special status once it joins post-Dance (incidentally people compare the North to Scotland, but its *Dorne* who wins 2 wars of independence and is brought in by marriage). Stormlands are a cadet branch. The Dance and subsequent weakening of royal authority allows Wardens upgrade into consolidated realms. E.g. Cregan Stark used Visery’s weak rule to strengthen his position. Then during the Hour of the Wolf he forces the Iron Throne to as a ‘reward’ formally recognize the Starks as hereditary Wardens of the North. I would tend to guess the Riverlands would be the very last great vassal to form as there is no Wardenship or special status and it should be relatively easy for Targaryens to retain dominance until they are absolutely toothless. Presumably this is also when the Reach becomes so absurdly big.
Something similar happened with the decline of the Karlings, formation of great vassals that are hereditary rather than appointed. For an example of the Warden dynamic, that didn’t get quite as far, the medieval Percy family in the North of England fascinates me. From 1327 the Percys were nearly continuously Wardens of the Marches. They seem to have gradually become considered the natural leaders of the North by the other great northern families, except the Nevilles. Their network could raise close to 10,000 men (eg 1403, 1454, 1570). You couldn’t just revoke their land because of their legitimacy. Henry IV revoked in 1405 (restored 1416) and Edward IV in 1461 (restored 1470). I could see the Wardens of Westros following a similar course. But while the Percys only briefly flitted with successionism, in Westros things get further in a larger, less centralized, less homogenous, and less nationalistic realm…
It is noteworthy that the process of breaking Westeros to their will rather than having to adapt to its customs (such as the Lords Paramount being established institutions) was one the Targaryens didn’t have all the time in the world to implement.
They spent the first 10-20 years just cementing their conquest on a basic military level and trying and failing to subdue Dorne (which cost them a lot of time and resources and one of their very few dragons they have at any given time). It took them until about the 40s AC to subdue the Faith of the Seven to the point where it would stop leading major rebellions against the culturally foreign and ‘weird’ Targaryens.
That gets you up through the end of Maegor the Cruel’s reign, which was followed by Jaehaerys’ very long reign (48-103 AC). Jaehaerys was known as ‘the Conciliator’ and ‘the Wise’ and codified a lot of the legal code and structures the Targaryens would lean on, but that kind of reputation doesn’t fit so well with constantly running around trying to break major noble houses over your knee.
After Jaehaerys you get Viserys (reigned 103-129), whose daughter and heir Rhaenyra immediately gets hit with the Dance of the Dragons, a succession crisis that turns into a civil war fought between dragonriders and ends with just about every adult Targaryen dead, and with the surviving population of dragons declined from twenty pre-Dance to four.
There is then a regency period (131-136) in which regular Westerosi nobles effectively ruled the roost, and even afterwards Aegon III (reigned 131-157) was a psychologically broken man due to trauma he experienced during the Dance. During this time, the only dragon eggs that actually hatched produced various stunted dragons, with the last Targaryen dragon dying in 153 (this being a stunted specimen whose sole clutch of eggs never hatched).
Then you have Daeron I whose reign was extremely short (157-161, killed by the Dornish via a false surrender gambit during a renewed war with Dorne). He was succeeded by his brother Baelor the Blessed (reigned 161-171, effectively a monk, had no kids), then his other brother, Viserys II, who only lived for like a year. Viserys’ son, Aegon IV (“the Unworthy”) then reigned from 172 to 184 and sired so many bastards who he then legitimized that the decades after 184 were basically one big slab of succession crises interspersed with prep time for same.
Taking all the commentary above in hand, we see that there were fairly limited opportunities for the Targaryens to do as you describe. The very early Targaryens of the first few decades had very, very few actual loyalists and their conquest was entirely the result of the dragons’ near-invincibility in battle; they did not have the state capacity to administer the conquered realms without support from the great noble houses.
Even there, it is noteworthy that Aegon the Conqueror and his wives DID replace a number of the former ‘petty’ kings they conquered. The powerful lord of Harrenhal was, famously, killed off and not replaced, with his power being shifted, as I recall, to the more tractable Tullys. The “Gardener kings” of the Reach and the previous Stormlords of the Stormlands were replaced, in the former case by the cooperative Tyrells and in the latter case by the Baratheons, descended from Aegon I’s bastard half-brother. These were, not coincidentally, the Lords Paramount of the two regions best placed to invade the Crownlands that formed the Targaryens’ desmesne on the continent.
The main timeframe in which the Targaryens plausibly could have decisively broken the Lords Paramount would have been during the reign of Jaehaerys. Maegor, after all, ruled under a cloud and spent much of his time subduing direct threats to his personal legitimacy, including the opposition of the Faith. And after Jaehaerys, we have a relatively weak king (Viserys I), followed by a crippling ‘War of the Westerosi Succession’ that effectively destroys the Targaryen dragon monopoly. After the Dance, the only one of the four surviving dragons who remains under the control of a member of the Targaryen family is Morning, who was bonded to Princess Rhaena, who was decidedly not in Aegon III’s line of succession, being his half-sister by his father’s previous marriage when Aegon III traced his own inheritance from his mother Rhaenrya. This means that the Targaryen political opportunity to break the Lords Paramount significantly basically begins in around 50 AC, and expires with their dragon advantage around 130 AC.
Though at least the Reach and Riverlands seem like it should have been simple enough to do during Aegon’s conquest. He replaced the top ruling family as opposed to abolishing it. This is doubly confusing because the Reach (the part drained by the Mender anyway) and Riverlands are both relatively flat, rich lands which should be easy for the Targaryens to manage without external threats. In practice those new families seem to have a weak grip and their vassals tend to do their own thing in periods of disharmony *anyway*.
Awwww! Ollie and Percy are so cuuuute!
May want to check your statement about OCS being for “senior NCOs”–Army OCS requires a college degree and no more than 6 years service if the applicant is a current member of the military.
https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/find-your-path/army-officers/ocs
At this rate we wouldn’t even win a war against Greenland.
The comment about primary-source work “dealing with documents that were not, after all, produced for us” resonated with me. A lot of my job starts with databases that were created for some other purpose (usually financial management) from which we have to infer operational effectiveness metrics. History/data-science cross-fertilization might be interesting. Of course, the historians might be envious of how we can just call someone on the phone who will tell us what actually happened during that anomaly.
Nitpick:
“This is thus the jump either from cadet or midshipmen3 or for senior enlisted NCOs (E-7 through E-9)4 making the jump from officer to enlisted.”
Should be “enlisted to officer”.
One more example. In Tora Bora in Afghanistan in the winter of 2002 the U.S. had Osama bin Laden cornered. Army commanders requested more troops to accomplish the mission. Rumsfeld and the State Department objected, saying the U.S. was going to maintain a “light footprint” in Afghanistan. As a result the eastern escape routes from Tora Bora were left to our Afghan “allies” to guard. bin Laden had no problem bribing his fellow Muslims to let him pass. It would be another nine years before we got bin Laden.
Nixonite gremlin and certified cartoon villain Donald Rumsfeld was nevertheless also an officer in the Navy and maintained his reserve status through the day when he orchestrated his own appointment as Secretary of Defense (and in fact did not formally retire for over a decade after that). As a undeniable ghoul, he was probably just leveraging his military service for personal credibility in politics, rather than letting his zeal for service lead him into blurring the lines of civilian control; nevertheless his is not an example that should be pointed to of civilian leaders not knowing how the military works. Many of us have believed for a long time that he generally achieved within the ballpark of what he intended to achieve. Which leads me to the other part…
State knew in the 1980s that local Afghan militias were easily bribed.
State knew in the ’90s that local Afghan militias were easily bribed.
State knew in 2001 that local Afghan militias were easily bribed.
State knew in 2003 that local Afghan militias were easily bribed.
If people are claiming that the State Department didn’t know in 2002 that our Afghan warlord allies could be bought off, then someone is lying. And again many of us have believed that the short small wars became long small wars because permanent war *was the mission*.
Having worked with State Department people, let me assure you that I find the idea that they would be ignorant enough of local conditions to not get that the locals could be bought off by bin Laden to be entirely plausible.
I don’t think individuals at the State Department have magical abilities to know about local circumstances from outside of their domain; I’ve met some too, it’s an institution that attracts people who value depth of knowledge over breadth. But I was speaking of a specific case. The State Department was looped in on (or responsible for) many of the bribes that secured those particular allies in the first place, and that effort was one of the biggest Cold War success stories (especially from State’s perspective). There were probably entry-level State people all over the world in 2002 who could tell you about the bribability of Afghan warlords.
Some interesting differences with the way things work in the UK.
Primary PME is a one-year course at Britannia Royal Naval College for the Royal Navy, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for the Army, and RAF College Cranwell for the RAF. This does not grant a degree of any sort, and while usually these days new entrants to these academies are university graduates, they don’t have to be.
(Historically those who had a degree when they entered the academy, at least in the Army and RAF, would commission at a higher rank, but I think this is no longer the case)
There is a short Professionally Qualified Officer course at each academy for specialists like doctors, lawyers and chaplains.
AIUI the academies are the *only* route to become a commissioned officer in the British military. British universities have cadet units (URNU, UOTC and UAS for the three services) but they are explicitly *not* aimed at producing officers- instead, the idea is to give future civilian leaders an understanding of the military, though AIUI many if not most people who end up becoming officers were in such a unit at university.
Intermediate and advanced PME in the UK seems to be run on a tri-service basis- the Joint Services Command and Staff College, which has existed since 1997 when the three services merged their staff colleges, delivers intermediate PME, while advanced PME is delivered by the Royal College of Defence Studies.
I enjoyed the video about daily life in ancient Rome. However the channel it was on has a serious issue with quality control since its history playlist includes a whole video claiming ancient civilizations had modern or even futuristic technology and were in global contact. The video is almost Ancient Aliens in its claims and has nothing but praise in the comments. https://youtu.be/3qXuAzzVOTQ?si=D1DSG-Hc7u5CxFiG
Thanks for the recommendation, Bret-I appreciate your kind words!