History is connected. “We tend to learn history in discrete chunks, carved up by area studies and chronology. The Protestant Reformation, the Thirty Years War, Queen Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada, the Sengoku, the conquest of the New World,… Read More »The Empresa de China & the Hapsburg Bid for World Supremacy
Reading Magna Carta is quite interesting. Most people, like me, think it is about freedom as such, but in the end it is a business contract. And war was necessary to have it written. “Neither we nor our officials will… Read More »Magna Carta, 1215 – The National Archives
Profesional military has its downsides. “an overweening executive that now most endangers the bargain, threatening to break the American civil-military bargain by dragging the military into politics. Remember, the civil-military bargain is not merely a pact of submission by the… Read More »Collections: The American Civil-Military Relationship
There is login in the madness. “Once balancing fails, everyone’s interests suddenly recalculate in a diametrically opposed way. So long as balancing was possible, it was in most state’s interests to oppose the leading power in an effort to contain… Read More »Collections: The Status Quo Coalition
Only Carthage really threatened Rome. “Carthage spends a combined forty-years at war with Rome in the third century, peaking at more than 160,000 men in the field, matching Rome on land and at sea, matching the Roman capability of fighting… Read More »Collections: Raising Carthaginian Armies, Part V: How a Carthaginian Army Fights
Carthaginians were badass. “The Carthaginians inflicted more casualties on the Romans in a single day than all of the successor states (a label which does not include Epirus, so no Pyrrhus here; worth noting the Carthaginians beat him too) managed… Read More »Collections: Raising Carthaginian Armies, Part I: Finding Carthaginians
You can loose a war while being technologically superior. “Wargame after wargame exploring a Taiwan scenario has reached the same conclusion: Most aircraft losses happen not in the air but on the ground. Airbases across the Western Pacific sit within… Read More »The F-35 Is a Masterpiece Built for the Wrong War
Rome had huge armies. “This is a common misconception in the public, that the ‘legion’ was essentially the Roman word for ‘army.’ It wasn’t (that word was exercitus); the legion was, by the Middle Republic, almost always a component of… Read More »Collections: Expeditions: Rome and the Perils of Verisimilitude
Sarah Paine explaining shit.
Rome has not fallen in a day. “Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central… Read More »Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words