If a particular type of state is better at waging war, maybe you want to become that kind of state rather than lose the war.
This is something I've been hearing a lot more in recent years, and it's a broad historical trend. We have Democracy because, in Ancient Greece, war involved elite heavy infantry that were expensive to train and could thus demand that their governments give them a stake in how things are run. In Ancient Egypt, governments were significantly less democratic because chariots can be assembled by largely-interchangeable slaves. The longbow was great for enlightened values, because longbowmen needed to be trained from childhood, and that made them a class that could negotiate on even terms with the power structure. The rifle, not so much, because anyone off the street could very quickly become a rifleman.
I think there are two futures that could lie ahead of us.
- The first is the one the U.S. has been planning for militarily, in which humans in the line of fire become much rarer, and a small group of engineers (who can be hired at above-market rates to quell any moral concerns they might have) are all you need to exert military force.
- I'd expect that this looks broadly dystopian, especially as the governments involved in this can look for the 'lowest bidder' on an international scale. American engineers won't build killbots? Someone on a visa will do so if it means he gets to live somewhere nicer than where he came from. American voters won't support their deployment, or want their interests addressed? Plenty of people with lower living standards can be informed that their admission to America is contingent on their doing so. There are enough bad places to live that the race to the bottom can reach a pretty low bottom.
- The second is the one that gets hinted at when Russia and Ukraine talk up the idea that the operators who have learned to navigate frontline drone warfare are the future of the national leadership class. In this world, nations need a large supply of intelligent, agentic, and brave young men to risk their lives for them in an environment full of killing machines, and such men are going to demand that their governments provide them appropriate compensation for doing so.
- I would expect that this involves generous pensions, an opening of the political and economic systems to the ambitions of young men, and, more broadly, increased influence for the political factions associated with younger male voters. Probably more right wing than the current status quo, but also broadly liberal by historical standards, with more social mobility than we have right now.
I think peaceful use of technology will also affect this divide. Will (closed) frontier LLMs empower companies, governments, and well-connected NGOs over ordinary people? That moves you towards World 1. Will (open) LLMs allow agentic individuals to confront established power structures with more parity than they'd otherwise have? That moves you towards World 2.
I will say that the examples in this post read as a bit biased and a bit jingoistic. A lot of claims made by sources on one side are taken as unambiguous facts about the other.
The longbow was great for enlightened values, because longbowmen needed to be trained from childhood, and that made them a class that could negotiate on even terms with the power structure. The rifle, not so much, because anyone off the street could very quickly become a rifleman.
I would have expected the opposite. Or, at least... If 10% of the population becomes longbowmen, then it makes sense to have a democracy among the longbowmen, while everyone else need not be given a vote. I guess that's a step in the direction of democracy if you're starting from monarchy. But if the military power is held by everyone who could pick up a rifle, then I would expect voting power to go to everyone who could pick up a rifle—hence something much more democratic.
The bottleneck to regime change is coordination, not armament. An armed citizen can certainly protect his rights better than an unarmed one[1], and the right to bear arms thus provides valuable inertia in an already-free society, but to negotiate for rights, you need a class of people who are both irreplaceable and essential. If any random peasant can become a rifleman, or be conscripted as an Aztec warrior, then a handful of malcontents can be killed and replaced with the next poor guy. If your military requires a rare cadre of men who have to be professional soldiers, learning the trade over years or decades, you've got to appease those lads, because they're your keys to power, and they talk to each other.
In general, a larger market means a race to the bottom, though this isn't limited to warfare. The Black Plague is regarded as one of the big causes of the Enlightenment, for this reason.
- ^
At a minimum, it makes governments afraid to make any impositions that citizens might rather die than tolerate, because someone with nothing to lose might decide to make a statement by taking a shot or two at whoever he deems responsible.
In actual history, I think that when military technology is such that a peasant and/or citizen army can't stand up to a professional warrior class that spends their life training to fight instead of doing nonmilitary productive work, what you get is that the warrior class rules everyone else. It's only when the support of non-soldiers can be turned into military power that you get democracy instead of aristocracy.
I couldn't quite remember the sources I'd read, so I asked Claude...
I'm in an online discussion and I'm looking for some details to back up my argument that I can't quite remember.
Me: In actual history, I think that when military technology is such that a peasant and/or citizen army can't stand up to a professional warrior class that spends their life training to fight instead of doing nonmilitary productive work, what you get is that the warrior class rules everyone else. It's only when the support of non-soldiers can be turned into military power that you get democracy instead of aristocracy.
Responder: could i trouble you to give some examples? my own history knowledge is spotty.
I vaguely remember reading about a number of times a ruler tried to set up an army that would be loyal to himself directly rather than needing to rely on theoretically subordinate lesser power centers (such as "lesser nobility") that had their own agendas, with the result that, in the long run, the new army became its own power center that ended up ruling the nation/empire...
Claude's response:
Your memory is of a real pattern, and there's a good set of examples for both halves.
Loyal armies that became the ruler's master (the "palace guard" pattern):
Abbasid caliphs and Turkic slave soldiers. Al-Mu'tasim (r. 833-842) built a guard of purchased Turkic soldiers to avoid reliance on Arab and Persian factions. Within a generation, those commanders were murdering and replacing caliphs (the "Anarchy at Samarra," 861-870).
Mamluks of Egypt. The Ayyubid sultans relied on slave soldiers. In 1250 the Mamluks killed the last Ayyubid sultan and took over, ruling Egypt until 1517. Praetorian Guard. Augustus created it as a personal bodyguard. It later killed Caligula, installed Claudius, and in 193 auctioned the throne to the highest bidder (Didius Julianus). Constantine disbanded it after 312.
Janissaries. Recruited to be loyal to the sultan alone, they became a self-interested power bloc that deposed and killed Osman II in 1622. Mahmud II destroyed them in 1826.
Ghaznavids. The Samanids used Turkic slave soldiers, and one commander's line (Sebuktigin, then Mahmud) ended up founding its own empire.
Your original thesis, with documented sources:
Aristotle (Politics, book 4) makes nearly your argument: states whose strength was cavalry tended toward oligarchy, hoplite-based states toward a broader constitutional rule, and states relying on light troops or navies toward democracy. The Athenian democracy's link to its navy, with poor citizens (thetes) rowing the triremes, was noted by contemporaries like the "Old Oligarch."
Medieval Europe. Mounted knights were expensive to equip and train, so military power and political power stayed with a landed class.
Stanislav Andreski (Military Organization and Society, 1954) formalized this as the "military participation ratio." The more of the population that is militarily useful, the more the rulers have to share. Charles Tilly and Bruce Porter make related arguments about mass armies and state-building.
Where your argument needs care:
The causation is contested. Historians like Hans van Wees argue the hoplite-to-citizenship link was slower and messier than the tidy "Hanson thesis" suggests.
Mass armies don't guarantee democracy. Prussia, Napoleonic France, and the Roman Republic (citizen-legions, yet oligarchic) all show that a broad army can serve a narrow elite.
Sparta had citizen-soldiers but was a professional warrior caste ruling a helot majority, which fits your thesis in one way and complicates it in another. I'm confident of the broad outlines and most dates above, but check specifics (especially Samarra and Ghaznavid details) before citing them.
I think before I get to the point you are claiming I would want to look at investment costs of the time. How expensive are long bows and good arrows? Same with rifles.
I don't really see that shooting a rifle well is any less skillful than shooting a long bow so would think the need to learn from childhood might be more to do with social status and wealth (so the ability to be learning rather than working) than the complexity of shooting a longbow.
The big difference is the progressive need for physical strength, and strength in the right muscle groups -- that is more of what is being developed with the training from childhood. That is less an issue with rifles, not entirely absent. But the skills to be an expert marksman with either takes a lot of time and practice and to some extent just simple natural ability.
don't really see that shooting a rifle well is any less skillful than shooting a long bow so would think the need to learn from childhood might be more to do with social status and wealth (so the ability to be learning rather than working) than the complexity of shooting a longbow.
Being frank, this is just objectively not accurate. If you're interested, I'd encourage you to look into the process of training longbowmen, and try to fire one yourself.
The childrens' bone structure was actually warped by the training - it's very physically intensive, and very necessary to do the job well.
Did you mean to refer to some other civilization, like the societies of the late bronze age, when you mentioned how governments in pre-Spanish Mexico weren't democratic because chariots were assembled by slaves? If I recall correctly, the pre-Spanish civilizations of North America lacked the domesticated animals that would make chariots practical, so I don't think your reference to chariots in pre-Spanish Mexico is accurate. I should note that I otherwise agree with your point.
Good catch, there was a revision where I replaced Egypt with Mexico for reasons I don't remember.
This is something I've been hearing a lot more in recent years, and it's a broad historical trend. We have Democracy because, in Ancient Greece, war involved elite heavy infantry that were expensive to train and could thus demand that their governments give them a stake in how things are run.
Medieval knights war also very expensive to train. That's why mediavel Europe was a bunch of democratic republics. Have you heard about the prime minister Charles Martel?
I think that just another way of making the same point: if you're hard to replace you get treated well, given a say in how things are run, etc.
If the army is made up of large numbers of people who are all hard to replace, like the longbowmen, then large numbers of people get to have a say, and you have a vaguely democracy-ish sort of system.
If the army is made up of a small cadre of hard-to-replace knights along with vast numbers of replaceable peasants, only the small number of knights get to have a say whilst the large number of peasants don't, and you have a more feudal-ish sort of system.
Do you have a recommended resource for learning about the theory you present in the first paragraph?
I asked Grok and it suggested
- Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain, by John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth for a general overview of the theory (though it says it doesn't cover all your examples)
- The Western Way of War and The Other Greeks, by Victor Davis Hanson, specifically for the case of Classical Greece
- Though it also mentioned that there's a strong critique of it and recommended Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece as an overview of the discussion
- Institutionally Constrained Technology Adoption: Resolving the Longbow Puzzle, by Peter T. Leeson and Douglas W. Allen for a paper on the longbows example
Never before has any commenter uttered the words of that tongue here in this forum.
If meat waves confer an advantage on the battlefield, maybe Ukraine wants to become more like Russia, with a prostrate population easy to use as cannon fodder.
This is backwards from the current situation - right now it's Ukraine that actually has an easier time mobilizing its population.
For Ukraine the war is existential, so the people support using forced conscription to refill the front lines. For Russia the war is far from existential, and conscription to the front lines is politically destabilizing. They tried a round of conscription a while back, but since then they've relied on paying increasingly large signing bonuses for volunteers.
Russia takes more casualties not because they've deliberately chosen a more manpower-intensive style of warfare, but because they're generally the ones attacking at any given point on the front, and attackers generally take more casualties.
I agree with a lot here, but I do think the final bit is perhaps too narrow. I think if we're looking at an existing and on-going war this dynamic holds but I think the "objective of war is political not military" becomes less a point. (Ukraine's "political" goal is more national survival than political, and it was in many ways something of a bystander as Putin's war is not really against Ukraine but NATO and "the West") It can help understand why a peach settlement cannot be achieved but I think the basic theme of adopting external X means you have to become more like those that made X applies more strongly, or perhaps I should say is more illuminating, to why conflict arises to begin with.
Much lower stakes, reminds me when I worked on app store optimization
Minor changes in your rating had a huge impact on organic registrations
Naturally is the obvious move is show everyone an in-app five-star picker, and only take them to the app store if they choose five stars
But app stores became wise so you're not allowed to do that
So what you do is run experiments to figure out the optimal moment to ask a user to rate you
This modeling can be taken to great extremes
So then all the apps have five stars, the ones with the most capacity to run these experiments and realize these things have the highest ratings
The rating system becomes useless
Every company who wins becomes more soulless builds weird grey pattern teams internally to facilitate this
The gray pattern teams then go do other grey pattern things etc etc
From the title, I thought this was going to be about using AI.
Mick Ryan describes the fast following loop in war.
Ukraine pioneered mobile teams to hunt drones. Russia copied it and incorporated it into its own defense. Russia came with unjammable fibre-optic drones but Ukraine quickly followed. After Ukraine developed uncrewed naval drones, Russia built its own.
The wheel of action and counteraction turns ever faster:
Extend that logic further, and eventually you’ll get to the level of grand strategy: If a particular type of state is better at waging war, maybe you want to become that kind of state rather than lose the war.
If meat waves confer an advantage on the battlefield, maybe Ukraine wants to become more like Russia, with a prostrate population easy to use as cannon fodder.
If Ukraine’s decentralized Brave1 kill market confers an advantage, maybe Russia wants to become less hierarchical and authoritarian, so that it can use that kind of military procurement.
You see the problem. Sometimes adopting the adversary’s strategy conflicts with who you are. When mistreatment of Ukrainian soldiers in regiment Skelya was reported earlier this year — brutal handling, beatings and likely killings — public outrage ensued. As Centre for Eastern Studies writes:
And that’s exactly what happened. After some political drama, the dismissal of the defense minister because of conflicts with Syrskyi and the subsequent street protests, Syrskyi was dismissed himself on July 21st.
The other way round: Russia recently tried to copy Ukraine’s Brave1 military procurement market, but the differences are telling. Where Brave1 works as a state procurement tool that rewards combat performance, Russian Roy.Market looks more like a closed, politically connected Amazon for soldiers and the donors. There are no points to be earned for successful strikes that the units would use to procure weaponry of their choice. That absence, in turn, breaks the market mechanism, the direct feedback loop from the front line to the armament producers, which lies at the very core of Brave1. In short, Roy.Market is likely to become just another point where those in power can siphon money from the system.
In adversarial settings, you can copy any innovation the enemy uses. Innovation happens in fast back and forth cycles as each side copies the successful moves of its rival. But then there’s asymmetric warfare. These are things that cannot be copied. Russia may rely on its larger population to overwhelm Ukraine. Ukraine may, in its turn, exploit the Russia’s size and the fact that it cannot be fully covered by air defense.
The ultimate asymmetric weapon, however, is one that the enemy cannot use without becoming more like yourself.
To put it in strictly autistic terms: If you are a defect bot, you may observe that tit-for-tat bots are doing better. You can switch to tit-for-tat algorithm yourself. But at that point you cease to be a defect bot. You are now a tit-for-tat bot.
A natural objection is: who cares? If becoming more like Ukraine is Russia’s path to victory, then why not? The institutions may become a bit different, but it would still be the same nation, the same people and now they win instead of lose.
But look at it from a practical perspective. If the winning move is to become less authoritarian and hierarchical, to become more decentralized and bottom-up, will Putin agree? Likely not. It would threaten his power. Neither would the elites. More of bottom-up is a threat to the patronage networks they benefit from. Even the general population may not like it. Less command-and-control in a society that’s based on it could collapse the state capacity and ordinary Russians have learned their lesson from the nineties well.
Another way to look at it is from a military perspective. Let’s repeat with Clausewitz: War is the continuation of politics by other means. And let’s not miss the corollary that usually gets forgotten: The ultimate objective of war is political, not military. You don’t fight to win. You fight to achieve a political outcome.
Russia can't win by becoming Ukraine, because preventing that kind of society is the point of the war. Ukraine can’t win by becoming Russia for the same reason.
Both sides are bound by what they're fighting for. The question is whose binding hurts more.