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A revived form of civic militarism (military prowess sustained by egalitarian social forms, group cohesion and genuine efforts to develop human capital) has much to recommend it. But state of the art weaponry requires the fabrication of computer chips, the extraction and refinement of rare earths and the launch and maintenance of satellites. These would pose extraordinary difficulties for decentralised, egalitarian, systems.

Furthermore, the ability to develop and deploy advanced weapons systems requires the application of advanced STEM skills. There is nothing egalitarian about STEM.

In the long run military advantage will deservedly go to the side with the deepest reservoirs of quality human capital.

The ruling caste in the US currently thinks it can maintain planetary supremacy with a technocracy recruited from the Ivy League supplemented with Asian migration while it constrains the development of the legacy population through maleducation, infotainment, cannabis and austerity economics. This situation can’t go on forever. The latest Russian air defence systems are extinguishing Anglo-globalist air supremacy, rendering the standard NATO military model obsolete. Change is on its way.

The immediate future may see the US cut a deal with rival oligarchies, while attempting to maintain the present social system. A degree of latitude will be extended to those portions of the population needed to ensure sufficient loyalty and capacity to die for the state, but it will all be a matter of degree.

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I think some hugely important factors arise today that differ from the past:

1. Information warfare including propaganda & censorship makes organising efforts for those opposing an authoritarian state near impossible. Arguably this is completely new.

2. Nowhere on the planet is safe. This is new.

3. A very large proportion of people appear unaware that they’re under sustained attack.

4. More than at any time in the past, technology exists for the victors effectively to permanently enslave the defeated groups. I don’t see any way out once the “control grid” is installed & working.

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May 26, 2022Liked by John Carter

Carroll Quigley's "Weapons Systems and Political Stability" may be of interest to you, if it didn't inspire this post in the first place.

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Great piece. Lots more to think about! In Turchin's book he makes the point that Western Europe (not including the Mediterranean) was a latecomer to civilization. During the age of empires, they were still complex chiefdoms on the periphery (like Germania). So the first northern/western European states were basically archaic states, but in the 1st millennium AD, not the 5th BC. In that regard, the divine right of kings was like a remix of the god-kings of old.

One possible anachronism. According to my near-expert-level Wikipedia search skills, archaic states (3000 BC) arose BEFORE the chariot (2000 BCE). So maybe bronze was the big mover and shaker for those first 1000 years or so, spreading out from Mesopotamia.

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You might be better off considering whether technologies benefit the attacker or defender more, and the relationship between the state, the people and opposing states. The important part with the latter considerations is that opposing states are ok with leveling each other's cities and populations (generally) but a state fighting its own people is generally not. You can't rule dead people, or gain wealth from leveled cities after all, so you need to get the people to give up fighting without doing anything too destructive.

Drones benefit the offence more than defense for just the reasons you describe. Between opposing states the benefit is non-obvious if they both have them, but it is not obvious whether they benefit the state more than the people in a conflict between the two. On the one hand people can use drones to harass and damage the generally more expensive state military investments. On the other hand there are other fingers. Specifically, there are a lot of government employees whose only job is to keep drones flying around observing people and either reporting or actively attacking violators. They get paid to keep their fingers busy flying drones, while citizens are taking time away from their lives to do so.

Speaking of drones, shotgun based weapons are very effective against them. It is a move away from the normal round based rifled ammunition we see dominating today, but I suspect that if drones become a big issue active countermeasures such as are used by tanks to stop missiles today will become common place. Imagine an auto-tracking machine shotgun that can hold a few thousand rounds spraying down a swarm of drones (or infantry.)

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Sometimes I think the slate needs to be wiped clean so we have a big population bottleneck and go back to the stone age. I suspect that may have happened a couple of times in human history anyway. Maybe it's about to happen again:

https://themariachiyears.substack.com/p/covid-vaccines-as-the-aschen-agenda?s=w

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May 17, 2022·edited May 17, 2022Liked by John Carter

Another fantastic piece of writing, thank you. Very much in line with similar thoughts I've had about the relationship between new weapons technologies and the fluctuations of social organization.The only criticism is that I might add a few more historical anecdotes to seal the deal. For instance, I think the horsed Mongol armed with the composite bow was perhaps the single greatest example of the (relatively) low-input / wide-distribution tactical adaptation you are describing, and the one with the most wide-ranging impacts in its heyday. Actually, I'd like to hear some of your thoughts on that empire, which (depending on the account) seemed to include elements of both the alpha male "god-king" hierarchy and the neolithic warrior band structure.

As far as the next fluctuation, I find your thoughts on drones interesting. My caveat lies more with the physical resources (i.e. "rare earths") required for them to have a sustained and compelling battlefield effect. It is true that massed, offensive "suicide bomber" type drones would be difficult to counteract. But it's also true that they are by their very nature assets that are impossible to redeploy, and it's not yet clear (though admittedly, not impossible) that the number required for dominance is more cost effective than conventional bombardment. As with most aspects of war, I suppose it depends on the size and shape of the theater, and the strategic goals of the belligerents.

A nightmarish thought that haunts me (particularly given the events of the past several years) is that the current theater of military tech isn't reliant on violent coercion at all, but rather on the courtly and traditionally feminine weapon of "poison." Whether deployed in its biomedical or social forms, this seems to be the predominant threat of the age, and by its secretive nature is immune to the sorts of asymmetrical revolutions that have produced past swings between authoritarianism and freedom.

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There is one technological wonder you didn't mention here which gives the big countries a massive advantage.

And no I'm not talking about the big city busting nuclear warheads, but the small nuclear neutron warheads, there is even evidence of these being used in Fallujah, and they obviously would be the best anti-drone weapon short of a rapid fire AI laser gun, or the CHAMP non-nuclear EMP weapons.

Publicly, very little is known about them, but perhaps that is why the Russian or Chinese don't plan to fight with the tactics we see Western armies use in "conventional combat" because against peer enemies they plan on no conventional combat at all.

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Gorgeous Article.

Beautifully written.

Taught me a lot, thank you.

Reminds me of a similar essay, by George Orwell, "You and the Atom Bomb"

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/

Orwell argues that the rifle is a decentralized weapon of Democracy, while tanks, planes, and the Atom Bomb favor a centralized tyranny.

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May 19, 2022·edited May 19, 2022Liked by John Carter

I love this SubStack, especially the stuff on the DIEing academy, since I work in a (UK) university. But please sort out the bizarre link color, orange, or the green background, or ideally both. Please. It's not readable.

https://pasteboard.co/LwDpuKwqogNr.jpg

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May 19, 2022Liked by John Carter

Surprised there's not much mention here of javelins and stingers. I'm no expert on these weapon systems, but the example in Ukraine right now seems to make a case that, even if a civilian household doesn't have the expertise or resources to make these weapons, they could be supplied easily en masse by a foreign adversary. It also seems like they do a good job at negating the advantages of tanks and aircraft flying low to the ground. Again I don't know how realistic it would be, but I could imagine a world where two superpowers in conflict with one another are both covertly supplying stinger and javelin analogues to each other's populations, such that neither can rely on tanks and aircraft to re-conquer territory lost to insurgency. Thus you would have this pressure on each state to maintain the loyalty of citizens not by force but by actually being a state they'd want to live in.

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Another thought provoking piece, but I think a little too distilled and generalised. I’m a medievalist by training and I would just like to give a couple of examples from that era where the military tech equals social structure hypothesis doesn’t fit. Flemish peasants with long spiky sticks taking out the cream of French knights aka heavy cavalry at Courtrai (1306 I think), and the,mainly Welsh, longbow archers devastating yet again the French at Agincourt. Both examples boasting so-called ‘feudal’ societies, although the Flemish were tending towards sort of proto-democratic city states mixed with traditional aristocratic domination…. All rather too complex to put in a comment right now but I just wanted to point out a few counter examples to your theory.

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Dec 29, 2023Liked by John Carter

Hey, love your work. Just reading through your back catalogue.

An interesting ananomaly: here in New Zealand, the indigenous Maori (who were, dare I say - at risk of being cooked in a hang - neolithic) practised war like their national sport. But they had NO projectile weapons. I haven't heard a convincing explanation for this.. As soon as europeans brought the musket, they couldn't get their hands on enough of them - greatly diminishing their own population via their intertribal wars augmented by lead and powder.

This doesn't particularly reinforce your thesis here, but is an interesting side note from the bottom of the world.

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Cheap toys that make little noise & can be put together in under 30 minutes for less than 200 USD are FANTASTIC to play with.

Can confirm! ;-)

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Cost of industrialized murder: decreases

Cost of having and raising a child: increases

peak Clown World.

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One complication is that the microchips drones need are only cheap due to increasingly massive economies of scale. Thus even as drones get cheaper, worldwide production of microchips gets increasingly centralized in a few massive fabs.

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