Weapons technology sets the parameters of civilization, which might be a problem for the hyper-centralized order the World Economic Forum wants to drag us into.
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.
The scale of the society and size of the supply chain isn't necessarily the key issue; rather, it's cost per unit. A military paradigm based on 'small, fast, and cheap' is going to inherently require a greater degree of participation than one based on 'big and expensive'. In any case, I don't see any reason why a heavily networked economy composed primarily of small, independent producers can't produce high tech widgets in large quantities, so long as the necessary trading infrastructure is available to source raw materials. 3D printing will also have to be factored in to this analysis.
Regarding egalitarianism, it depends what you mean. Both the Greeks and the enlightenment Europeans were intensely meritocratic, prizing ability and achievement above all else. The same remains more or less true in STEM. Egalitarian doesn't imply equal outcomes; it's more accurate to say that it involves a greater per capita investment in resources towards education and access to opportunity, such that the average human quality of the populace is raised to the highest degree possible.
So far as the US goes, if history is any guide, as the legacy empire America will fail to implement the reforms to its social order necessary to optimize use of emerging weapons tech, and will rather choose to double down on its existing system. The result will be eventual defeat by a periphery power that does make the necessary changes. Then again, you never know - Americans are an innovative bunch, and a revolutionary challenge by an internal renegade elite may succeed in displacing the ruling class and opening the way for those necessary changes.
Valid points and essentially we are in agreement. If you have not already read it, in THE REVOLT OF THE ELITES the Christopher Lasch made the distinction between two types of modern society: those that aim to raise the level of ability amongst the people in general and those that give up on the masses and focus on developing excellence within the elite only. There is no question which one we have got.
As for STEM, I should have explained myself better. STEM is indeed intrinsically egalitarian: logic, mathematics and analytic thinking are great levellers and potentially socially disruptive, which is one reason why access to high quality education in STEM is so carefully rationed. The problems with STEM in the West today is the uneven distribution of ability as well as the difficulty involved in rebuilding what has been destroyed or neglected.
The neglect of industry and manufacturing and the concurrent mismanagement of education has weakened the US military no end. This is the central point that Andrei Martyanov makes endlessly.
"Christopher Lasch made the distinction between two types of modern society: those that aim to raise the level of ability amongst the people in general and those that give up on the masses and focus on developing excellence within the elite only. There is no question which one we have got."
Glancing at our so-called elite, I'm extremely skeptical that they're systematically cultivating anything remotely approaching excellence within their own circles.
That's the fatal weakness of the sort of elitism that seeks to push down rather than lift up. By depressing the human quality of the masses, a ruling class can afford a lower level of quality itself. Eventually it loses the mandate of heaven and is brushed aside by an elite that is fit to rule.
On the other hand, an elite that seeks general improvement of the population - in the sense of making the average man as smart and strong as is possible given his genetics - will be forced by circumstance to be smarter and stronger still. They'll have a harder time retaining power, but having developed the virtues will also use it more effectively, and can furthermore call upon a pool of far more capable men when their society is challenged by outsiders.
"Glancing at our so-called elite, I'm extremely skeptical that they're systematically cultivating anything remotely approaching excellence within their own circles."
I'd say that much of the elite simply assume their own excellence. Many confuse excellence with intellectual/ethical/social conformity, while others understand it in ways that would make little or no sense to anyone reading POSTCARDS FROM BARSOOM. One of the key problems with this approach is that social distance enables illusions of this kind to get established and to persist. The US elite is certainly becoming dumbed down to a point that will compromise the viability of the US as a superpower.
This: "Glancing at our so-called elite, I'm extremely skeptical that they're systematically cultivating anything remotely approaching excellence within their own circles."
The utter corruption of the "leaders" will spell their downfall, and I'm hopeful that it's coming soon. The system is much too easily gamed, and much too reliant on sociopaths. Currently the self-proclaimed elite are stealing as much as they can, with little concern for concealment, because they know the opportunities for doing so are going to disappear real soon.
If America goes through anything resembling post-Soviet Russia (the most relevant point of comparison), it will be exceptionally grim. Russia had several advantages that America does not: intact families, a highly socialised population, a coherent national culture and a well-educated professional class.
Also many Russian families had allotments which they could use to grow food and rent was pretty cheap. Finally, the Soviet collapse allowed Russia to rid itself of a periphery that was supported or subsidised financially by Russian industry and natural resources (especially energy).
The USA, by contrast, has an atomised society, traditional familial structures are stressed or decayed, a weakened common culture and a dumbed down professional class. Worse still, food supply chains are extended across a continent and additional economic burdens (in the form of illegal immigrants) exist in vast and rapidly growing numbers.
The best case scenario is that the US will survive with a ceremonial and powerless national government, but with a renaissance of power and autonomy in the states. Those states with sufficient capacity (food, energy, low levels of public debt) will manage OK, provided that they have the resolve to face facts and make tough decisions.
Unsentimental regional and local oligarchs with an interest in maintaining a viable society will be self-interested, but, hopefully, an improvement on the present national oligarchy.
All true. Another factor is consumer goods. Soviet goods were hard to get, but durable and easy to repair. American goods all suffer from planned obsolescence, and are often deliberately manufactured to be impossible to repair. A few years during which it is impossible to replace broken appliances will severely impact the American standard of living.
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.)
All excellent points. The relative offense/defense advantage also has a big impact on social forms, of course.
I wasn't necessarily thinking of people vs. state, which usually only goes one way, but more state vs. state. Whichever society adopts an organizational pattern that best harmonizes with the capabilities of available technology will tend to outcompete the ones that don't.
A few things shift the populace vs state, or populace vs nobility, balance so that it doesn't go all one way.
Armor technology definitely shifts things towards the state/nobility, as it is expensive and difficult to make properly so difficult to get lots of it. Even hoplites often only had the shield and helmet.
The long bow (or other high poundage, relatively easy to manufacture bow) tend to push things back towards the populace as it negates some of the benefits of armor (at least armor less than fully encasing armor).
Guns tend to push towards the populace as well, because the ceiling of performance is pretty low. You can make a pretty functional gun at home, and at least in half free countries civilian accessible arms are not much different than military small arms.
Machine guns push the other way, but they are not a "give everybody one!" sort of weapon.
Tanks, bombers, cruise missiles, those all do very little to swing things between state and populace. As Afghanistan has been reminding the rest of the world for the past 200 odd years, if you aren't willing to just level cities, towns and villages, you aren't going to do much with those sorts of weapons off the formal battlefield. Some modern states are going to be willing to murder citizens with tanks (I can think of at least two...) but using them against a city basically says you are engaging in all out war against your own people, which... well it matters more for some states than others.
I bring that up because state vs people determines a great deal of what sort of governments obtain, not just state vs state. Note that the Greek states were relatively egalitarian (relatively) but were surrounded by hierarchical societies. Even the Athenian empire never got that large; the citizen phalanx was a defensively strong technology, but not well suited to occupying enemy nations long term.
The better comparison is the citizen infantry phalanx compared to the relatively light noble cavalry of the time. Small horses and light armor meant that a spear and shield formation that could reliably stand and receive the charge was going to win every time. (Which was largely true throughout history, even with heavier cavalry. The Roman maniples could absorb and repulse cavalry charges, although it was less than optimal.)
Good point but how many in the military (even if they could all be conscripted against the populace) vs. us?
Further, war is a matter of resources, so there needs to be a tax base for that. What if people stop paying because that is what is the war is about?
Another thought: division of labor. Some can farm, some can mine bitcoin, and some can play drone games.
In general government employees aren’t as smart as private sector workers. We’re all familiar with the phrase “ good enough for government work” I first became familiar with it as an employee of the USFS 25 years ago.
That's true, the populace almost always has numerical superiority. Certainly when dealing with the civil authorities. However, the populace has a bit of a hard time maintaining a full on revolt for long. People eventually go back to working, taking care of their kids, whatever, with only a small portion dedicating themselves to fighting.
Now, you can get some division of labor, but it is a little spotty because you have to have an active war going on for people to put up with their brother living at home, not working and fucking around with the drone all day. If it drags on too long, the guys resisting the state forces start to look a lot like a separate mob taking from the people, so that gets unpopular. Not impossible, but not obviously going to benefit one side or the other.
Now, the resource thing is the key the populace holds, and that is why the state cannot get nuts an just nuke a city to restore order. The state needs to have a very split and antagonistic populace before the rest of the populace is ok with killing a big chunk of another part. Otherwise people stop paying taxes, stop being willing to do much of anything the government needs, such as supplying soldiers. Without that significant split, the state vs populace conflict has to stay low intensity, men with guns on the ground sorts of conflict. That is very hard for the state to win decisively if there are a significant number of dissidents.
If you really want to interrogate that, the role of supply, resources and logistics is arguably more important than just weapons. Supplying the war effort determines a lot about what weapons are even viable, how many men you can keep in the field (elites vs multitudes), that sort of thing.
The Roman empire stopped using lorica segmentata partially because the damned brass bits kept breaking, so required a great deal of repair infrastructure. Mail might not be quite so protective, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper to maintain, which is a big deal a few thousand miles from home.
Another fun example is the English in the 100 years war. There is a convincing argument that the extent of their conquests followed the extent of their arrow supply chain. Thousands of people back in England were engaged in making packets of arrows to send to the front, via the channel and overland routes. The archers could blow through a ton of arrows per battle, and if the supply chain couldn't keep up the English just stopped winning. Always a problem for warfare focusing on missile weapons, and even more so mechanized weapons.
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.
Psywar is really just the extension of mind control techniques that go back to ancient times. That was always the role of the priest class in authoritarian regimes. That said I agree it's a factor; but on the other hand, the meme warriors of the Internet have demonstrated that even with far fewer resources and while fighting on unfriendly terrain, their organizational model is far superior to the centralized message control of the technocratic state. The resources it takes to suppress us are insanely expensive compared to their effectiveness at suppression.
My argument in this piece wasn't so much that a technologically enabled peasant revolt would overthrow the ancien regime. That might happen but it's historically rare. Rather, I'm arguing that whichever society(ies) successfully organize themselves to make optimal use of distributed technology, will outcompete societies that continue to operate on an industrial/managerial model - in particular, on the battlefield. Of course that only works if there ARE other societies. A year ago I'd have wondered about that, but with recent events I've reevaluated the ability of the WEF et al. to successfully consolidate control globally.
He's simply wrong about the obsolescence of infantry. See: Ukraine, where both sides have advanced drones, including at the squad level, and the result has been something akin to WWI trench warfare, except with a distributed front rather than trench lines.
If anything, I expect low-cost drones to swing the balance of power back to the individual soldier, rather than the highly trained specialist.
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.
If the archaic states arose previously to the chariot, then indeed bronze would be the one remaining weapons technology of note and the only candidate to support the hypothesis. Unless of course there's one I've missed: I'm not a military historian so my broad strokes picture of that era could well be missing something important.
Actually come to think of it, it might have been the domestication of the horse. It stands to reason that must have pre-dated the invention of the chariot.
I just read your piece, so I'm still catching up on the comments, but it caught me while I was reading that you had "skipped" the domestication of the horse as one of the technological innovations. That's just an intermediate step to the chariot, but it could explain the difference in timeline.
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:
I think the arguments in favour of the stone age having featured rather larger and more complex societies than are currently assumed to have been possible without agriculture or metallurgy are very convincing at this point, in light of all the evidence that has been emerging e.g. weathering of the Sphinx, Gobleki Tepe, etc. In that case though, my favoured hypothesis to explain their destruction is the Younger Dryas Impact event (or events, really). Something similar may have been responsible for the Bronze Age collapse and may even have been related to the collapse of the Roman empire - certainly two cases in which a bit of slate-wiping is much less controversial.
All of which is to say that I have very little doubt that our own civilization will ultimately follow the same path. History is cyclical, or at least a spiral. Technology does seem to improve over time, even through dark ages, but collapse is a very real thing.
Sure. Our world is very fragile. In our case everything digital could be wiped out by an EMP and then we're back to the 1800s pretty quickly. Soon after that, things descend into a *very* dark age.
One EMP wouldn't do it, but a large enough CME probably would, at least over large swaths of the planet. It's likely that pockets of modern technology would survive - e.g. military facilities - from which industrial civilization could be gradually re-established, but it would take long enough that a huge fraction of the population would succumb to starvation long before refrigeration and long-distance transport could be revived.
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.
The Mongol angle actually connects to the Proto-Indo-European angle. Both were very egalitarian inside the warrior band, but brutally hierarchical for the subjugated peoples. So the authoritarian/egalitarian axis has some important nuance to it.
Suicide drones are just the easiest implementation. There's no reason more sophisticated designs couldn't be developed that deliver detachable payloads and then return to base to reload. That would lower the unit cost-to-kill ratio dramatically.
Your final para points to fifth-gen warfare, psyops and the like. That's a big topic, and an important one, but in passing I'd only point out that the barrier to entry for memetic warfare is extremely low, and agile, distributed networks have so far demonstrated a profound advantage over top-down messaging so far. Hence all the censorship: even with a vast resource asymmetry, centralized media is getting sandbagged.
"Both were very egalitarian inside the warrior band, but brutally hierarchical for the subjugated peoples."
Yes, I expected that would be at least part of the answer. Ironically, it reminds me of what the Comanche did when they swiftly adapted to the Spanish horse, and became absolute terrors to rival tribes and Euro settlers alike. Or perhaps it isn't ironic at all; light cavalry with projectile capabilities seems to have been a phenomenal force multiplier in any age prior to mechanized warfare. I would even include the "pike and shot" era in this category, although the tactics were limited by the era's dependence on massed troop formations in clearly defined battlegrounds. Not so the Mongol or Comanche, who carried their battlefields with them.
To that extent, I think the notion of multi-use drones could maybe become the next iteration of that ranged, light-cav role. The difference would lie in the unit's ability to subjugate, which I am skeptical of. At the risk of being too graphic: a quadroter drone cannot "steal" your wife before your very eyes, or humiliate you before your offspring, or manipulate your friends to rat you out. While the threat the drone army represents can reorder your priorities (in much the same way a pack of maneating lions or a string of hurricanes might) I don't think it can reorder your mind for subjugation to conquest the same way that an occupying force of human bodies, faces and minds can. Traditionally, that has always meant an angry and horny infantry, reeking of the mud and blood of combat (though I'm open to alternate suggestions).
Infantry is now, always has been, and always will be the only way to actually take and hold territory. I really can't imagine any technology that will change that as a basic truth of warfare.
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.
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.
That's an interesting point. MANPADs and RPGs satisfy the requirement of being usable at an individual level and being highly lethal to more expensive systems. They fail on ease of manufacture, though.
I suspect as drone warfare comes into its own such systems will become less important. Drones will be able to accomplish much of what these systems can, at a fraction of the cost.
Great writing, JC! Late on this one. Sorry. (Merry Christmas, all!)
At ROTC in the late 80's we had to take a course called "History of Warfare." Our instructor was a Marine pilot and history major and it largely tracked what your hypothesis is here, though the course certainly didn't make the connection to political organization that you do so well. S.L.A. Marshall's "A Soldier's Load: the Mobility of a Nation" is a pretty good piece of support for your thesis, and there
have been many other such tomes and tracts discussing the relationship b/w a Nation's adaptation of military technology and tactics and its survival and success.
There's one other aspect to this that always gets missed - and I think you missed in your original premise about the Alpha male who dominates and gets to keep a harem. That's really not how it works in the most primitive of societies because there is one great leveller everyone always forgets about: Sleep. I don't care how tough you are, even the alpha male has to sleep. No one can stay awake indefinitely - hell, most people can't go more than 40-50 hours before they start coming unglued. So, you can't just demand everyone bow to your alpha male awesomeness unless you've got enough bros to watch over you while you sleep - and they have to have the same if they're going to be able to function. Because someone can just slit your throat, or poison you, or otherwise carry out all kinds of mischief while you sleep.
And if this seems a trivial point, it's the reason why our Army - every Army - has to build walls: in order to sleep behind them when in foreign territory...This same thing also applies to our govt's ardent desire to use the military on the population. Where are the pilots who bomb us going to sleep at night? Who's going to repair the aircraft...? Where will they source the parts? Same goes for the tanks. How about the National Guard, whose Commander is the governor?
There are a LOT more aspects to this than any of even the military expertocrats have given sufficiently deep thought, which is fine.
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.
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.
In fact, I think both these examples support the hypothesis. Take the English longbowmen. Their ownage of French knights on the battlefield led naturally to a strong emphasis on archery in the British force disposition. At the same time, one observes that the English yeoman enjoyed a higher status in society than his French equivalent, and that English society was decidedly more egalitarian when compared with the French.
I know essentially nothing about the Flemish, but it sounds like their internal politics are also consistent with the hypothesis. I'd also point to Swiss pikemen, and the fact that Swiss society adopted a much more democratic, distributed governance model than that of most of Europe.
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.
The scale of the society and size of the supply chain isn't necessarily the key issue; rather, it's cost per unit. A military paradigm based on 'small, fast, and cheap' is going to inherently require a greater degree of participation than one based on 'big and expensive'. In any case, I don't see any reason why a heavily networked economy composed primarily of small, independent producers can't produce high tech widgets in large quantities, so long as the necessary trading infrastructure is available to source raw materials. 3D printing will also have to be factored in to this analysis.
Regarding egalitarianism, it depends what you mean. Both the Greeks and the enlightenment Europeans were intensely meritocratic, prizing ability and achievement above all else. The same remains more or less true in STEM. Egalitarian doesn't imply equal outcomes; it's more accurate to say that it involves a greater per capita investment in resources towards education and access to opportunity, such that the average human quality of the populace is raised to the highest degree possible.
So far as the US goes, if history is any guide, as the legacy empire America will fail to implement the reforms to its social order necessary to optimize use of emerging weapons tech, and will rather choose to double down on its existing system. The result will be eventual defeat by a periphery power that does make the necessary changes. Then again, you never know - Americans are an innovative bunch, and a revolutionary challenge by an internal renegade elite may succeed in displacing the ruling class and opening the way for those necessary changes.
Valid points and essentially we are in agreement. If you have not already read it, in THE REVOLT OF THE ELITES the Christopher Lasch made the distinction between two types of modern society: those that aim to raise the level of ability amongst the people in general and those that give up on the masses and focus on developing excellence within the elite only. There is no question which one we have got.
As for STEM, I should have explained myself better. STEM is indeed intrinsically egalitarian: logic, mathematics and analytic thinking are great levellers and potentially socially disruptive, which is one reason why access to high quality education in STEM is so carefully rationed. The problems with STEM in the West today is the uneven distribution of ability as well as the difficulty involved in rebuilding what has been destroyed or neglected.
The neglect of industry and manufacturing and the concurrent mismanagement of education has weakened the US military no end. This is the central point that Andrei Martyanov makes endlessly.
"Christopher Lasch made the distinction between two types of modern society: those that aim to raise the level of ability amongst the people in general and those that give up on the masses and focus on developing excellence within the elite only. There is no question which one we have got."
Glancing at our so-called elite, I'm extremely skeptical that they're systematically cultivating anything remotely approaching excellence within their own circles.
That's the fatal weakness of the sort of elitism that seeks to push down rather than lift up. By depressing the human quality of the masses, a ruling class can afford a lower level of quality itself. Eventually it loses the mandate of heaven and is brushed aside by an elite that is fit to rule.
On the other hand, an elite that seeks general improvement of the population - in the sense of making the average man as smart and strong as is possible given his genetics - will be forced by circumstance to be smarter and stronger still. They'll have a harder time retaining power, but having developed the virtues will also use it more effectively, and can furthermore call upon a pool of far more capable men when their society is challenged by outsiders.
"Glancing at our so-called elite, I'm extremely skeptical that they're systematically cultivating anything remotely approaching excellence within their own circles."
I'd say that much of the elite simply assume their own excellence. Many confuse excellence with intellectual/ethical/social conformity, while others understand it in ways that would make little or no sense to anyone reading POSTCARDS FROM BARSOOM. One of the key problems with this approach is that social distance enables illusions of this kind to get established and to persist. The US elite is certainly becoming dumbed down to a point that will compromise the viability of the US as a superpower.
This: "Glancing at our so-called elite, I'm extremely skeptical that they're systematically cultivating anything remotely approaching excellence within their own circles."
The utter corruption of the "leaders" will spell their downfall, and I'm hopeful that it's coming soon. The system is much too easily gamed, and much too reliant on sociopaths. Currently the self-proclaimed elite are stealing as much as they can, with little concern for concealment, because they know the opportunities for doing so are going to disappear real soon.
Case study: Kamala Harris.
Things are definitely coming to a head.
If America goes through anything resembling post-Soviet Russia (the most relevant point of comparison), it will be exceptionally grim. Russia had several advantages that America does not: intact families, a highly socialised population, a coherent national culture and a well-educated professional class.
Also many Russian families had allotments which they could use to grow food and rent was pretty cheap. Finally, the Soviet collapse allowed Russia to rid itself of a periphery that was supported or subsidised financially by Russian industry and natural resources (especially energy).
The USA, by contrast, has an atomised society, traditional familial structures are stressed or decayed, a weakened common culture and a dumbed down professional class. Worse still, food supply chains are extended across a continent and additional economic burdens (in the form of illegal immigrants) exist in vast and rapidly growing numbers.
The best case scenario is that the US will survive with a ceremonial and powerless national government, but with a renaissance of power and autonomy in the states. Those states with sufficient capacity (food, energy, low levels of public debt) will manage OK, provided that they have the resolve to face facts and make tough decisions.
Unsentimental regional and local oligarchs with an interest in maintaining a viable society will be self-interested, but, hopefully, an improvement on the present national oligarchy.
All true. Another factor is consumer goods. Soviet goods were hard to get, but durable and easy to repair. American goods all suffer from planned obsolescence, and are often deliberately manufactured to be impossible to repair. A few years during which it is impossible to replace broken appliances will severely impact the American standard of living.
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.)
All excellent points. The relative offense/defense advantage also has a big impact on social forms, of course.
I wasn't necessarily thinking of people vs. state, which usually only goes one way, but more state vs. state. Whichever society adopts an organizational pattern that best harmonizes with the capabilities of available technology will tend to outcompete the ones that don't.
A few things shift the populace vs state, or populace vs nobility, balance so that it doesn't go all one way.
Armor technology definitely shifts things towards the state/nobility, as it is expensive and difficult to make properly so difficult to get lots of it. Even hoplites often only had the shield and helmet.
The long bow (or other high poundage, relatively easy to manufacture bow) tend to push things back towards the populace as it negates some of the benefits of armor (at least armor less than fully encasing armor).
Guns tend to push towards the populace as well, because the ceiling of performance is pretty low. You can make a pretty functional gun at home, and at least in half free countries civilian accessible arms are not much different than military small arms.
Machine guns push the other way, but they are not a "give everybody one!" sort of weapon.
Tanks, bombers, cruise missiles, those all do very little to swing things between state and populace. As Afghanistan has been reminding the rest of the world for the past 200 odd years, if you aren't willing to just level cities, towns and villages, you aren't going to do much with those sorts of weapons off the formal battlefield. Some modern states are going to be willing to murder citizens with tanks (I can think of at least two...) but using them against a city basically says you are engaging in all out war against your own people, which... well it matters more for some states than others.
I bring that up because state vs people determines a great deal of what sort of governments obtain, not just state vs state. Note that the Greek states were relatively egalitarian (relatively) but were surrounded by hierarchical societies. Even the Athenian empire never got that large; the citizen phalanx was a defensively strong technology, but not well suited to occupying enemy nations long term.
The better comparison is the citizen infantry phalanx compared to the relatively light noble cavalry of the time. Small horses and light armor meant that a spear and shield formation that could reliably stand and receive the charge was going to win every time. (Which was largely true throughout history, even with heavier cavalry. The Roman maniples could absorb and repulse cavalry charges, although it was less than optimal.)
Good point but how many in the military (even if they could all be conscripted against the populace) vs. us?
Further, war is a matter of resources, so there needs to be a tax base for that. What if people stop paying because that is what is the war is about?
Another thought: division of labor. Some can farm, some can mine bitcoin, and some can play drone games.
In general government employees aren’t as smart as private sector workers. We’re all familiar with the phrase “ good enough for government work” I first became familiar with it as an employee of the USFS 25 years ago.
That's true, the populace almost always has numerical superiority. Certainly when dealing with the civil authorities. However, the populace has a bit of a hard time maintaining a full on revolt for long. People eventually go back to working, taking care of their kids, whatever, with only a small portion dedicating themselves to fighting.
Now, you can get some division of labor, but it is a little spotty because you have to have an active war going on for people to put up with their brother living at home, not working and fucking around with the drone all day. If it drags on too long, the guys resisting the state forces start to look a lot like a separate mob taking from the people, so that gets unpopular. Not impossible, but not obviously going to benefit one side or the other.
Now, the resource thing is the key the populace holds, and that is why the state cannot get nuts an just nuke a city to restore order. The state needs to have a very split and antagonistic populace before the rest of the populace is ok with killing a big chunk of another part. Otherwise people stop paying taxes, stop being willing to do much of anything the government needs, such as supplying soldiers. Without that significant split, the state vs populace conflict has to stay low intensity, men with guns on the ground sorts of conflict. That is very hard for the state to win decisively if there are a significant number of dissidents.
If you really want to interrogate that, the role of supply, resources and logistics is arguably more important than just weapons. Supplying the war effort determines a lot about what weapons are even viable, how many men you can keep in the field (elites vs multitudes), that sort of thing.
The Roman empire stopped using lorica segmentata partially because the damned brass bits kept breaking, so required a great deal of repair infrastructure. Mail might not be quite so protective, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper to maintain, which is a big deal a few thousand miles from home.
Another fun example is the English in the 100 years war. There is a convincing argument that the extent of their conquests followed the extent of their arrow supply chain. Thousands of people back in England were engaged in making packets of arrows to send to the front, via the channel and overland routes. The archers could blow through a ton of arrows per battle, and if the supply chain couldn't keep up the English just stopped winning. Always a problem for warfare focusing on missile weapons, and even more so mechanized weapons.
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.
Psywar is really just the extension of mind control techniques that go back to ancient times. That was always the role of the priest class in authoritarian regimes. That said I agree it's a factor; but on the other hand, the meme warriors of the Internet have demonstrated that even with far fewer resources and while fighting on unfriendly terrain, their organizational model is far superior to the centralized message control of the technocratic state. The resources it takes to suppress us are insanely expensive compared to their effectiveness at suppression.
My argument in this piece wasn't so much that a technologically enabled peasant revolt would overthrow the ancien regime. That might happen but it's historically rare. Rather, I'm arguing that whichever society(ies) successfully organize themselves to make optimal use of distributed technology, will outcompete societies that continue to operate on an industrial/managerial model - in particular, on the battlefield. Of course that only works if there ARE other societies. A year ago I'd have wondered about that, but with recent events I've reevaluated the ability of the WEF et al. to successfully consolidate control globally.
Noah Smith had an excellent article on #4.
https://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in-a-way-we-havent-seen-in-700-years
He's simply wrong about the obsolescence of infantry. See: Ukraine, where both sides have advanced drones, including at the squad level, and the result has been something akin to WWI trench warfare, except with a distributed front rather than trench lines.
If anything, I expect low-cost drones to swing the balance of power back to the individual soldier, rather than the highly trained specialist.
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.
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.
If the archaic states arose previously to the chariot, then indeed bronze would be the one remaining weapons technology of note and the only candidate to support the hypothesis. Unless of course there's one I've missed: I'm not a military historian so my broad strokes picture of that era could well be missing something important.
Actually come to think of it, it might have been the domestication of the horse. It stands to reason that must have pre-dated the invention of the chariot.
There's probably a decent joke in here about "putting the car before the horse." But I'm on my third scotch, so someone else must do the honors.
Cute. I approve.
I just read your piece, so I'm still catching up on the comments, but it caught me while I was reading that you had "skipped" the domestication of the horse as one of the technological innovations. That's just an intermediate step to the chariot, but it could explain the difference in timeline.
There was a lot that I skipped.
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
I think the arguments in favour of the stone age having featured rather larger and more complex societies than are currently assumed to have been possible without agriculture or metallurgy are very convincing at this point, in light of all the evidence that has been emerging e.g. weathering of the Sphinx, Gobleki Tepe, etc. In that case though, my favoured hypothesis to explain their destruction is the Younger Dryas Impact event (or events, really). Something similar may have been responsible for the Bronze Age collapse and may even have been related to the collapse of the Roman empire - certainly two cases in which a bit of slate-wiping is much less controversial.
All of which is to say that I have very little doubt that our own civilization will ultimately follow the same path. History is cyclical, or at least a spiral. Technology does seem to improve over time, even through dark ages, but collapse is a very real thing.
Sure. Our world is very fragile. In our case everything digital could be wiped out by an EMP and then we're back to the 1800s pretty quickly. Soon after that, things descend into a *very* dark age.
One EMP wouldn't do it, but a large enough CME probably would, at least over large swaths of the planet. It's likely that pockets of modern technology would survive - e.g. military facilities - from which industrial civilization could be gradually re-established, but it would take long enough that a huge fraction of the population would succumb to starvation long before refrigeration and long-distance transport could be revived.
P.S. Your pic of stone age warrior looks exactly like Wes Studi who plays the bad guy Magua in Last of the Mohicans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okGQj644_Ds
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.
The Mongol angle actually connects to the Proto-Indo-European angle. Both were very egalitarian inside the warrior band, but brutally hierarchical for the subjugated peoples. So the authoritarian/egalitarian axis has some important nuance to it.
Suicide drones are just the easiest implementation. There's no reason more sophisticated designs couldn't be developed that deliver detachable payloads and then return to base to reload. That would lower the unit cost-to-kill ratio dramatically.
Your final para points to fifth-gen warfare, psyops and the like. That's a big topic, and an important one, but in passing I'd only point out that the barrier to entry for memetic warfare is extremely low, and agile, distributed networks have so far demonstrated a profound advantage over top-down messaging so far. Hence all the censorship: even with a vast resource asymmetry, centralized media is getting sandbagged.
"Both were very egalitarian inside the warrior band, but brutally hierarchical for the subjugated peoples."
Yes, I expected that would be at least part of the answer. Ironically, it reminds me of what the Comanche did when they swiftly adapted to the Spanish horse, and became absolute terrors to rival tribes and Euro settlers alike. Or perhaps it isn't ironic at all; light cavalry with projectile capabilities seems to have been a phenomenal force multiplier in any age prior to mechanized warfare. I would even include the "pike and shot" era in this category, although the tactics were limited by the era's dependence on massed troop formations in clearly defined battlegrounds. Not so the Mongol or Comanche, who carried their battlefields with them.
To that extent, I think the notion of multi-use drones could maybe become the next iteration of that ranged, light-cav role. The difference would lie in the unit's ability to subjugate, which I am skeptical of. At the risk of being too graphic: a quadroter drone cannot "steal" your wife before your very eyes, or humiliate you before your offspring, or manipulate your friends to rat you out. While the threat the drone army represents can reorder your priorities (in much the same way a pack of maneating lions or a string of hurricanes might) I don't think it can reorder your mind for subjugation to conquest the same way that an occupying force of human bodies, faces and minds can. Traditionally, that has always meant an angry and horny infantry, reeking of the mud and blood of combat (though I'm open to alternate suggestions).
Infantry is now, always has been, and always will be the only way to actually take and hold territory. I really can't imagine any technology that will change that as a basic truth of warfare.
Correct.
There's a base-level reason for this, but I'll save it for a comment in the main thread.
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.
It wouldn't surprise me if the bureaucratic oligarchy masquerading as a democracy got replaced by a democracy masquerading as a racist aristocracy.
We can hope.
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.
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.
That's an interesting point. MANPADs and RPGs satisfy the requirement of being usable at an individual level and being highly lethal to more expensive systems. They fail on ease of manufacture, though.
I suspect as drone warfare comes into its own such systems will become less important. Drones will be able to accomplish much of what these systems can, at a fraction of the cost.
Also, coincidentally, MANPADS was one of my military specialties. =)
Like this Will?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/05/stingers-benghazi-jim-geraghty/
This post aged spectacularly, seeing how drones revolutionalized warfare in Ukraine.
It really did, although the key point - the sociopolitical effect - has yet to manifest.
Cost of industrialized murder: decreases
Cost of having and raising a child: increases
peak Clown World.
Give it time. Decrease in the former will lead to decrease in the latter.
Great writing, JC! Late on this one. Sorry. (Merry Christmas, all!)
At ROTC in the late 80's we had to take a course called "History of Warfare." Our instructor was a Marine pilot and history major and it largely tracked what your hypothesis is here, though the course certainly didn't make the connection to political organization that you do so well. S.L.A. Marshall's "A Soldier's Load: the Mobility of a Nation" is a pretty good piece of support for your thesis, and there
have been many other such tomes and tracts discussing the relationship b/w a Nation's adaptation of military technology and tactics and its survival and success.
There's one other aspect to this that always gets missed - and I think you missed in your original premise about the Alpha male who dominates and gets to keep a harem. That's really not how it works in the most primitive of societies because there is one great leveller everyone always forgets about: Sleep. I don't care how tough you are, even the alpha male has to sleep. No one can stay awake indefinitely - hell, most people can't go more than 40-50 hours before they start coming unglued. So, you can't just demand everyone bow to your alpha male awesomeness unless you've got enough bros to watch over you while you sleep - and they have to have the same if they're going to be able to function. Because someone can just slit your throat, or poison you, or otherwise carry out all kinds of mischief while you sleep.
And if this seems a trivial point, it's the reason why our Army - every Army - has to build walls: in order to sleep behind them when in foreign territory...This same thing also applies to our govt's ardent desire to use the military on the population. Where are the pilots who bomb us going to sleep at night? Who's going to repair the aircraft...? Where will they source the parts? Same goes for the tanks. How about the National Guard, whose Commander is the governor?
There are a LOT more aspects to this than any of even the military expertocrats have given sufficiently deep thought, which is fine.
Obviously, a tribal chieftain will need to have allies, who of course get some of the sexual spoils ;)
But also: no chieftain stays on top forever....
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
Aw, I liked it - kinda worked with the green martian thing you know? But this being the first feedback on the new theme, I'll reconsider.
Thank you John. That has helped a lot!
I figured if one complained, multiple disliked.
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.
In fact, I think both these examples support the hypothesis. Take the English longbowmen. Their ownage of French knights on the battlefield led naturally to a strong emphasis on archery in the British force disposition. At the same time, one observes that the English yeoman enjoyed a higher status in society than his French equivalent, and that English society was decidedly more egalitarian when compared with the French.
I know essentially nothing about the Flemish, but it sounds like their internal politics are also consistent with the hypothesis. I'd also point to Swiss pikemen, and the fact that Swiss society adopted a much more democratic, distributed governance model than that of most of Europe.
What about the Scots owning the yeomen at Baugé? They took out the English pretty darn well there and at Bannockburn.
Just curious how that plays into your theory considering that the Scots used primariliy schilttroms and not archery or knights.
I don't really have any insight into that.