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James Lacey, "Rome: Strategy of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)
00:59:33
An interview with James Lacey
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the In Conversation podcast, a joint production of Oxford University Press and the New Books Network. I'm Mark Clobus and today I'm speaking with James Lacey, author of the book Strategy of Empire. Jim, welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Thank you, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
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B
Well, thanks for agreeing to be on our podcast. I was wondering if you could start us off by telling our listeners something about yourself.
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A
Sometimes I, I have to, I usually abbreviate this because if I get my full resume out, it turns it's, it tends to make it look like I can't hold a job anyway. I started off my career as an infantry officer on active duty, United States army. Did that for 12 years. Then I went into the reserves and retired out of there, worked in operations jobs in the, in New York City, Wall street area and then went to work for the Institute of Defense Analysis where I spent quite a while before moving over to teaching at the Marine Corps War College where I am the currently the Hornet Chair of War Studies. So I've been involved in military and strategic thinking for most of my career and when I'm not, when I wasn't doing that, I was doing finance and economic type stuff. So those are the two areas of concentration and that's the areas I tried to apply to my review study of my analysis of the Roman Empire and its strategy.
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B
The book definitely endless demonstrates that. It's interesting that you bring in that economics and element and I was wondering what led you to write a book on Roman strategic studies and, and, and why did you feel that that element needed to be part of that story?
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A
I read Luke Walks, as many people listening to this podcast probably did. Edward, look, Walkwalk's Grand Strategy, the Roman Empire, probably over four decades ago when it first came out and I was pretty astounded by it. I, you know, I read military history continuously. Roman history is like a sideline specialty at the time. And it, and many, many years later I, I started talking about it to a well known historian, ancient historian. He goes, you know, nobody believes that Lu Walk was right. And that stopped me for a second and I went and looked into the material and found out that the overwhelming opinion, and now this is not everybody. There are people who believe the exact opposite. But the overwhelming opinion of ancient historians, especially those who study Rome, is that Rome was incapable of doing any strategic thinking, never mind executing a strategic plan over a long period of time. And it just struck me as so obviously wrong. You know, they, they kept the legions along the Rhine and the Daniel river River for 500 years. Somebod had a plan. You know, if you, if the other alternative is that Rome spent 3/4 of its revenues, maintained 30 legions on, on a barren frontier for 500 years. And nobody ever said, why are we doing this? How, you know, is there a better way to do. Just. It was inconceivable to me. So I started looking at all their arguments and the history that they used to back it up. And the history was marvelous. I mean, there are some great Roman historians out there who have done tremendous work in the field and then. But when they apply it to strategic thinking, they get it absolutely wrong. Now. And remember, I'm not talking about everybody here. There's some very good Roman historians who believe that Rome did have a strategy they didn't execute for 500 years. They could at least do a decades at a time or a couple hundred years at a time. But what I decided was, you know, after 45 years or so, it's, it's time for somebody to end the debate. And, you know, that's a pretty. What's the word I'm looking for here? Arrogant thing to say that Jim Lacy is going to come in and, and 45 years of debate. But, you know, if I didn't think I could do it, it probably wouldn't be worth writing the book. So in the classical world of classical historians, this has been a, what, you know, a relatively vicious debate, as I believe Kiss had just said. You know, academic debates are so vicious because they're over so little. But, but in our world, you know, this, this is a big question. Could the Romans think strategically or could they not? If they were capable of thinking strategically, what a. Capable of executing the strategy over a prolonged period of time. In this case, you know, the empire lasted 500 years. You know, we got to get a, we got to get a idea of how long that is from our period. You know, Henry VIII is still on the throne. Copernicus is just beginning to think about the, you know, the Earth might not be the center of the universe. You know, 500 years is a incredibly long time to maintain a single empire. I mean, the Roman Empire took longer to fall than I believe any other empire even existed. So somebody to believe that somebody wasn't thinking about what had to be done to maintain that. Just big beggars, beggars this beggars belief. So I guess in a nutshell, it's a major debate in the field. I Thought I had something to add to it. And then I, so I undertook the, took, undertook the assignment. And I think I've done a pretty good job of addressing all of the criticisms and the of loat walks, work and everybody who says that the Romans are incapable of strategic thought. One by one I address their issues and then I spend the second half of the book telling you the through history narrative of Roman history, what their strategic choices were, what their options were, what they did and why they did it. Pretty much, pretty much certain it's gonna either end the debate or cause a war in the field of Roman history. And I, I, I, I'm not sure which one I prefer the most. You know, if there's a war, if there's a war, I get to fight. And that just sells tons of tons of extra books. If it ends the debate, everyone goes, well, that's over with now, let's move on.
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B
But they still need the book to have the final word of the subject.
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A
That's right, they should. Yeah. And you know, and buy a copy for 50 of their best friends. Wouldn't hurt my case. But.
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B
Now to answer the question about whether Romans could do strategy, you begin by looking at the ancient studies of strategy with which the Romans would be familiar. I was wondering if you could perhaps start off our examination of your book by talking a bit about how the ancient thinkers conceptualized strategy and how the Romans adapted those ideas or responded to.
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A
Those ideas in a very simplistic way. I'm going to say strategy in the modern error is always ends, ways and means. And you have to look at risk. And you know, it's, there's going to be one or two professional strategists on your podcast who are going to say that's ridiculous. There's a lot more to it than that. I'm like, okay, yes, there is, but let's, let's go to court. The core of the matter is those three words, weight, ends, ways and means. What do we want to do? How can we do it? And the means, what do we have to available to do it with? And Aristotle in his works actually wrote in almost those exact same terms. He lays out to govern a society, to govern a city, state, or even an empire, the ruler or whoever is politically in charge must know these things. And he lays out a series of, you know, must know something about the enemy, what your trade is, what your finances, what you're capable of bringing to into a fight or battle or war, how strong your military is, what your objectives are, and by any definition it's ends, ways and means and sometimes he even uses those exact words. The Romans read everything the Greeks wrote. There is no way the Romans did not read Aristotle. The learned Romans were very familiar with his works. But even if they didn't read Aristotle, Aristotle was just representing or writing about what everybody knew. He was not giving anybody some grand revelations. If you're in charge of a country, you better keep track of this stuff. He was, this is, this was just commonplace knowledge. And to think that between Aristotle's writing it and the Romans emp the rise of the Roman Empire that they just forgot this stuff seems a bit absurd to me because we do have Cicero writing in almost the exact same words in the Roman Empire. This is what you have to know when you look at Tacitus and he has a long report of the state of the state of the country and the state of the military and who was where and what were they doing when Augustus died. And probably part of Augustus report that he left to Tiberius when Tiberius took over. It is just a layout of all the information you need to set up a, to set up a strategic paradigm as a former strategy for the, for the future and what the empire has to do going forward. But you know, we, we have an example in Fucydides or Herodotus, confusing myself here of a Persian trying to talk the Spartan king into, one of the Spartan kings into marching deep into the Persian Empire and capturing the capital. And yes, he's looking at a map on bronze, goes well how long a march is this? The guy goes 90 days. He says you're out of your mind, it's Spartan, right? All army isn't marching 90 days from the coast. You know, bad things happen when the Spartan army leaves Sparta. But they were, the thing is they were discussing it over a map. And when Alexander the Great attacked the Persian Empire he had a serious geographical knowledge of where the royal roads were, how far each, each, you know, he, he could go each day what was a direct path to the most important economic areas of the empire and how, you know, the, what he had to capture to own the entire, to dissolve and then take over the entire Persian Empire. He wasn't guessing on the route, he knew it. But somehow along the way we've convinced ourselves that the Romans had no concept of geography and it, because it isn't like our normal day to day concept, we have accepted that, that, that's a, that, that is a truism. Now this gets a little, gets a little longer. The Romans had maps, they had pretty good maps at the site of the battles they, they would know the terrain where their armies were actually going to fight. In between they had what is called itineraries. Itinerary for to get a visual picture would be like a subway map. It's just a list of stops along the way. And if you, if you're in New York City and you want to go from Broadway to Flatbush Avenue in the, in Brooklyn, you, you just look at the subway map and it will tell you hey, there's 14 stops on the four number four line to get to where you want to go. You don't care about any of the geography in between. All you want to know is I'm at X. I want to go 14 stops that will take me to Y and that's my final destination. This is what the Romans had. They had. You want to march from Ravenna to Cologne. There's the, these are the six towns along the way. There's. It's a four day march between each town and you can. So you could get there in 24 days solid marching with good rest stops every four to six days and then you were there. This is the exact kind of analysis strategists do today. A strategist, you know, as Kissinger said in the last crisis over Taiwan and when Clinton was president a Aircraft carriers are hundred thousand tons of mobile diplomacy just like the Roman legions is A, is 6000 men of mobile diplomacy. As far as the Romans were concerned when a crisis happened, Kissinger said where is where? Or president when United States said where are my nearest carriers and how long will it take them to get to where I need them to be? He did not care one bit about any geography or the distances involved. It was, it was a point to point. When the United States military, if it wants to move to Poland, it's going to look at maps that are just point to point and it's going to be, it's called a nodal map. What ports can I use? Okay, I'm going to go out of Savannah, I'm going to go out of something on the tech, you know one of the ports of the Texas, Louisiana border. I'm going to take some things out of the New Jersey ports. Those are three nodes here. And where am I going to bring them in? Rotterdam, Hamburg, those are the nodes on the other end. And then they'll go on trains and these trains will go stop, stop, stop. And we can move things by plane from one airport to another airport. All of the intervening geography for a modern military strategist is not Worth, they don't care. They don't even need to have a map of it. All they need is the nodes and how long it takes to move from each node. This is exactly what the Romans had. And most of the Roman military history community, Roman historians have said no strategist in the modern era would use something like an itinerary to move to plan strategy. And I would argue, I don't have to argue. I know for a fact that that is exactly what his military strategists use in the modern era. If you're a Roman emperor, the geography between moving from Cologne to Vienna is of absolutely no consequence to you. All you want to know is how many days March it is along a specific route. And if you're the general who's moving, you want to know every, every major town along the way. So you could send messages out to bring food and other, other resources you might need to those key spots. So they're waiting for you when you get there. And interestingly, I found a map when I was doing a study on the American Revolution of Cornwallis, not Cornwallis. George Washington and Rochenbaus march from New York down to the Yorktown, down to the Yorktown vicinity of Yorktown. And it's exactly the kind of map we would use today. The underlying geography you can hardly see. It's just a point by point map of the entire march route. So, you know, with the number of days, you know, the points were usually one day marches or two day marches. And then they sent staff officers ahead to have food waiting. Here we are, that's, that's 1800 years after the Roman Empire and they're still doing it the same way. And it is the same way we're doing it today. And I found this to be.
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B
And yet no one, and yet no one would argue that George Washington didn't know strategy or that he didn't try to apply strategy.
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A
Right? Think of Napoleon sitting on the, lying on the ground, literally crawling over these large maps and he's got a protractor in his hand and he's bumping into his geography and you know, maybe one of his staff officers with him. And all he's measuring is the distance along the roads that he knows about between one town and the next town, planning out his entire campaign. What's under that geography, if it's rivers, road, rivers, woods, whatever, at the operational level of war is of no consequence to him. It's how many days will it take me to march one corps from X to Y to Z until they get to Their objective. He does, he has no, he has no concerns on the underlying geography. It's a point by point system and in between each point he'll have to know a number that, that takes, that's a one day march, a two day march or a three day march. And he's using maps probably not much better than what the Romans had because we don't really get good maps of Europe until the Austrians gave them to. It went all out to make good maps of Europe in the end of the 19th century.
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B
Now making strategy is not just about ends and means. It's also about assessing the threats that the Roman Empire faces. And you spend a chapter addressing this question about how dangerous or how formidable was the barbarian threat. I was wondering if you could perhaps elaborate upon that bit in terms of how did the Romans assess the barbarian threat and how did that shape their strategy?
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A
Okay, I thought it was very necessary to put that chapter in there because there's been some very serious works lately and I'm not going to point fingers and name names. It just said the Roman, the barbarian freight just was not that dangerous. We're only talking a couple of thousand barbarians at any one time crossing the Rhine, no match for legions or anything like that. And that's not anywhere. The Romans never considered the barbarians a minimal threat. It's, it's burned into their history. When the Celts came down and you know, burnt and raised Rome in, in relatively huge numbers, you could see from Caesar's campaigns how big a tribal grouping could be, even if exaggerating. When the Helvid eye march out of the Swiss area and numbered in the hundreds of thousands even, even if you cut that by 4/5, that's a large mobile force moving. And we've had some exaggerations of what of their military capacity could tribes band together to fight? And I, I start that chapter with an example going back to the early Bronze Age where thousands of warriors were brought together from all over Europe, central Europe, to try and seize a section of northern Germany to dominate the amber trade. That amber was very popular as decorations and jewelry in the Mediterranean. That until we made these scientific and historic finds along that in that battle area, most people assume that the Germans were incapable, the German tribes were incapable of that level of sophistication and mobilization. But they did it and they were, you know, we're talking a thousand years before the Roman Empire. These aren't vast wastelands out there and then, you know, these are the same truck, not the same tribes exactly, but same area that brought the Dorian invasions down that basically wiped out the entire Bronze Age except maybe Egypt. That went into near terminal decline in the old empire. Took 200 years for it to recover. Was all done by barbarian tribes arriving from the north. Wiped out the Bronze age in about 50 years. The, you know, even at the very start of the empire, Arminius, who's trained in the Roman, Roman way of fighting because he was a, he was an auxiliary to the Roman legions, manages to get many or even most of the tribes in, in central Germany to rise up against Rome. They destroy four legions. These are not insubstantial threats. Could they hold those tribes together for any length of time? That's, that's doubtful and dubious. But they could hold them together long enough to cause Rome serious amounts of trouble. And the fact, you know, when Rome took its eye off the ball fighting civil wars and denuded the frontiers, they came across a mess because the, the barbarian tribes got progressively more dangerous when Tibet, when Tacitus lists all the tribes of Germany, he's listing dozens of tribes and some charismatic leader might be able to hold many of them together for a little while, but they eventually break up. But by the third, you know, late fourth century, definitely by the early fifth century, there's major tribal amalgamations as the Goths is the Franks, the Alamans, Alamani and then these, these vast groupings of smaller tribes, some of them that capable of putting tens of thousands of warriors across the field. They, they're not that they are not an insubstantial threat. So Rome is incredibly justified in maintaining, you know, probably 15 of its legions at all time on the Rhine and Danube, unless it's a civil war and then, then all bets are off. Every everyone goes to fight the civil war. But remember this gets progressively cheaper for the Romans. The romans averaged about 30 legions. Sometimes it goes up a few, sometimes less. You know, if you look at the end of the empire, there's a lot more legions, but they've only got a thousand men in them each. So until Diocletian, there's no great increase in the number of Roman soldiers out there, even including auxiliaries. But the Roman economy is good, has to have grown leaps and bounds because of the prolonged peace during the 200 years at a principate making let's say the Roman economy doubles in wealth but the number of legions stays the same. That means it's costing Rome half as much to maintain the legions as it was when Augustus was there. So you're getting the same levels of protection for a comparatively much cheaper Price. If Rome did not fall into long periods of prolonged and vicious civil wars, we might all still be talking Latin.
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B
I was wondering if you could perhaps elaborate upon that point a bit further because you're bringing in something that you make. A good case is absent from a lot of strategic studies and that's the financial component. And this is where the background that you've described I think really comes in handy. How does finance, in particular, Roman finance, influence their strategy? And how do we see that influence reflected in their strategy?
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A
Okay, first thing is to remember is the, the there's a lot that when I first started looking at Roman economics, a very well known historian says it's all guesswork, don't. We can't take any of it seriously. And I, you know, I was told that maybe 35 years ago or longer, but there's been incredible amount of fantastic work and I list the historians by name who have been doing it in my book. It gives us a pretty good idea of what Romans and the improvements of technology, improvements of farming. But most of all, the Mediterranean is a war zone. For a thousand years there's constant fighting between city states and proto empires, or whatever we want to call them. The, there's not a time when the Mediterranean is not beset by war. And if you're a poor peasant farmer or a village or town of poor pet, relatively poor peasant farmers and you build a mill which allows, you know, gives you much greater productivity and allows you to bring crops to the cities and make some money and an army comes by and destroys your mill, it's going to be a long time before you make that investment again. And even if you do make another mill, you're not getting richer, you're just getting back to where you were before an army destroyed it. And then, you know, there's a very good chance another army marching a few years later will come and destroy your mill again, or destroy your irrigation trenches or destroy anything you've done to enhance your ability to make a few dollars. Well, we'll call them dollars since that's what everyone knows, a few dollars in the marketplace and improve you a lot. And then comes the Roman empire and there's 200 years apiece. You could build a mill, could build irrigation, you could, you know, if you're one of the bigger farmers, you could test new ways of farming. You could add a second mill without risk that an army is going to come by and ruin it just with that and normal population growth. You had to have seen a massive growth of wealth within the core of The Roman Empire. Rome understood this. Rome understood that there was an economic core that was slowly but continuously expanding towards the frontiers and that had to be protected. So even when you get the third century crisis and Gaul separates from the empire for a while, and Zenobia leads much of the eastern Empire out of, out of the, out of the, out of the big, big picture empire, Rome still went all out to protect its central core. One, they, they move very quickly to regain Egypt, which is the, one of their two major grain growing areas and the key to Roman economic stability. From Zenobia, Two, they never lost North Africa, their second big grain area. They held on to Spain, which was still producing minerals and, and excess food. Sicily, Italy, these were never threatened. That provided the economic strength that Aurelian, the restorer of the world used to bring Gaul back into the empire to bring, to bring, you know, to defeat Zenobia and regain control of the Eastern Empire. As long as Rome focused on the protection of the economic core of its empire, its strategy that it, the empire, the empire could maintain itself against all comers. There was nobody near as economically powerful as Rome. So towards the end, when Rome takes its eye off the ball, there's a lot of civil wars. There's a lot more tribes battering their way into the empire. Not to destroy the empire, but to take apart, you know, to participate in the empire's richness. Small group of Vandals, probably in terms of warriors, no more than 15 or 20,000, nothing Rome couldn't dispatch very quickly sneaks across at Galta into North Africa. And the Romans paid him virtually no attention because they're focused on things like the Huns to the north. It would have been much better for them to let the Huns overrun all of G and Rome to concentrate its forces in North Africa to hold that economic center. But instead they let these 15,000 warriors virtually, virtually completely overrun North Africa. The Egypt was no good to the Western Empire because it was focused on supplying the Eastern Empire, which survives another thousand years. But in Peter, as Chris Wickham has said, that broke the tax spine of the Roman Empire. If there's any one single thing you want to say meant the early demise of the empire, it's when they took their eyes off the ball of economics and let their core province, North Africa, fall to the Vandals, who actually captured most of the Roman fleet because it was in Roman ports, cut off the wheat to north that wheat supplies to. Italy had a fleet to dominate the western Mediterranean. And Rome went to great lengths, even getting help from the Eastern Empire to regain this. They, they saw the mistake they had made almost as soon as it, they all, as soon as it was made. But they were never able to get the resources to, to take that from the Vandals until the Western Empire had collapsed and Justinian sent his great general Parisis to, to retake the Northern empire. But by then it was, it was too late for the, at least for the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire, because it has the great fortress of Constantinople, was always able to defend its core from the barbarians. Only when the Arabs came out of the south and didn't have to go past Constantinople did they lose their economic core around Syria and Egypt and went into, and then the Constantinople goes into a long but terminal decline. So at the very core of strategy, very core of Roman strategy is always economics. And I remember going to a conference in Navy War College at Newport for strategists and probably 150 people in the auditorium and the first speaker, a very well known strategic thinker today gets up and he goes, if you're going to talk about strategy, particularly grand strategy, you have to focus on talking about economics. And it was the only thing that got a prolonged and even standing applause during that entire three day conference. And that was the last time I heard economics mentioned because it's a very complex and arcane topic and you know, historians generally do not study economics. I just was at a small conference of ancient historians and they were wondering how come we have this economic growth and we do not have a large increase in the amount of coins that we have found. And I found myself talking about, you know, it's, you don't actually need a lot of coins if the velocity of the exchange of coins is going up. I mean even today that is a core economic formula. Price equals the amount of money times the velocity of money, how fast you're spending it and how fast it's changing hands. And none of them were familiar with that. No reason they shouldn't be, that they're not economically trained or educated. But it is the core of strategy in the Roman Empire and the core strategy even today. So not having any. Great. Yeah. And I don't, and I don't spend a lot of time on explaining the economic. I don't spend any time in the book explaining economic theory. I just explain the, hey, here's the economics of the period, here's how they are rich and here's what they did to protect it. And when they stopped protecting it, everything went wrong.
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B
That integration of finance is a key aspect of your Analysis of Roman strategy. Yet, as you also point out, you've already used this phrase, the core of Roman strategy. It's just one element. Now you make this point, and I think it's one that, that bears repeating here, which is that anybody who seeks a strategy for the 500 years that you've described is embarking upon a fool's errand. Yet you do find that strategy is shaped by these enduring elements. And I was wondering if you could perhaps elaborate upon the elements in addition to finance that are shaping Roman history throughout those 500 years.
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A
I mean, part of that is geography. Geography and demographics is still, even today, destiny. So the Romans have two great natural rivers, the Danube and the Rhine. These are formidable barriers. There are numerous Roman historians out there that say rivers really aren't barriers to movement. And then, you know, read this stuff a chapter or two later and they talk about how they were barriers to the Romans entering the German Teutonic world in the Slavic world. I'm like, wow, there are only barriers one way. These are, these are tremendous barriers because you're not, you know, they. One historian makes a big thing that the Batavians trained professional swimmers to swim the Rhine River. I'm like, well, you know, you know, you're not going to take down the Roman Empire with a couple of hundred specially trained swimmers. You have to bring, you have to bring thousands of people across, sometimes even the families. You have to bring wagons, you have to bring horses. Besides, what's pulling the wagons? I mean, you don't, you don't do this on a lock unless you're only going to go 10 miles in and then run back as fast as you can. But the Romans knew what we know today. An obstacle is not an obstacle. You know, you get this as a second lieutenant in any training course for a combat arms officer. It's only an obstacle if it's covered by fire. Otherwise they'll just take your obstacle apart or move the mines or do. And they'll come right through it. The Romans knew this. The Ryan is over a course of 200 years. The principators increasingly fortified and even that even when they have good fortifications. There's still 15 legions along the Rhine Danube frontier. And I'm averaging it. It's one thing to bring, to have a few thousand warriors cross crossing the Rhine river, that's. That's fantastic. It's quite another if there's a Roman legion waiting on the other side to hack them to death as they come ashore. And Rome is never really unaware of what's going on 50 or 60 miles beyond its borders. There's, they have traders out there, they have patrols, they had, there's, there's numerous Romans wandering well beyond the frontier. They can give them lots of alert time. There's a lot of people in the German tribes that like to get a bag of coal for coal gold for saying, you know what, there's a big amalgamation of tribes 200 miles to the east here, and they're coming, okay? And Roman normally form its legions up and go get them before they got to the border. So that part is geography. Second part, you know, is the deserts in this, in the, in Africa, a formidable barrier to anybody who wants to come north. So this really most of the, most of the, most of the rum time in the empire. There's only one legion in Africa holding down the thing. The same for in the east, Mesopotamia. There's, there's great deserts between the Persian, Parthian or Sassanids and, and the core of the Roman Empire around Antioch and the rest of Syria, they only could be approached, that could only be approached over three or four major roads which the Romans fortify cities at the, at the edge of those highways and then deep into the interior. Completely different strategy from the Danube, which is a frontier strategy over that to one based on cities and a defense in depth, all of it being driven by geography. But there are serious Roman historians who say, look, they're doing different things at different places, so they obviously don't have one single coherent strategic plan. To which I said well that, that's just nonsense talking because the fact that they have a different strategic plan and execution for every, for every major enemy on every accounting for the geography of the entire region shows a very sophisticated amount of strategic planning. If they use the same strategic paradigm against the Parthians that they were using against the barbarians on the other side of the Danube or the Rhine, the Rome would collapse. Second is the financial, which we just went over. Maintain the core of your core finances of the empire, core economic strength, so you could pay for everything that needs to be bought. Third is population. Rome always has a large, you know, a larger population than anybody except the Parthians and the Sassonids. They, they, they, they, they could always rebuild their armies. This is a strength of Rome.
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B
For.
- [38:39]
A
During the Republic also. I mean the, the when what's his name, Hannibal defeats the Romans Kanai and kills tens of thousands of their best legion at the time. He expects Rome to just negotiate a peace Rome just because it's got a deep reservoir of military age men just Rebuilds allegiance. It says, let's, let's do it again. You know, the number, you know, guessing the population of Roman Empire is always a point of issue with 50, 60, 65 million. That's a lot of troops on hand. Now all through the second half of the Roman Empire you see them having large recruitment problems. There's hardly any legionnaires coming out of Italy in the last couple hundred years. They're recruiting out of the Balkan provinces and those Balkan leaders are becoming generals and then emperors very quickly. But compared to any other anybody else they're fighting, they've got a significant population advantage in every, you know, and it's not how strong they are, it's how strong they are to relatively anybody else. So as long as they maintain, you know, the population, maintain their economics, keep their all eye on the geographic ball, Rome's in pretty good shape. It's when they lose their recruiting poles a lot of barbarians into the empire fighting, you know, as armed barbarians. It's the empire, I should say, and begin fighting civil wars that very destructive. I think we, I think as a, in a general rule, we tend to underestimate the destruction of a, of a civil war would cause because, you know, basically, hey, the legions march from X to Y. They meet legions of the other guy's side, they fight it out. It's all over. How, how destructive could that be? First, these are prolonged. There's a lot of destruction of property that goes on. Whole provinces get burnt in many of these things. You know, all that economic growth that we had during the, the Pax Romana is disappearing because of civil wars. But not only that, but there's two other things. One, they denude the frontiers to get the troops to fight these, which opens all sorts of gaps for barbarian invasions. And two, and this is probably even more crucial and often overlooked, people in towns and cities in these civil wars have to take sides or they do take sides. And there's a great example of this in Thucycles, where he shows the damage done to Kocyra's internal politics, its societal relations because of a prolonged civil war in that city. The murders, the, you know, the destruction of property. When one side wins a civil war that's open, everybody who was in a town or a city that was on the other side is now an open target of retribution. See, these civil wars in a large way cause tremendous amounts of internal damage and decay to the Roman Empire. The society of the Roman Empire that we've, that really deserves a much more study than we've given it, because it's, it in no small way, it literally tears away the societal fabric of the empire. When you do this continuously, one civil war after another, the amount of internal decay is incredibly weakening.
- [42:31]
B
And yet as you detail, one of the remarkable things about the 500 years is the fact that they undergo so many of these. And I was wondering if you could take us a bit into the strategic history proper of the Roman Empire. And I don't want to get too much into the details because there is a lot that goes on in your book in terms of the five centuries that you cover. But I was wondering if you could perhaps condense it for us a little bit by talking about some of the strategic themes that come out during the height of power. How the Romans adapted to the challenge they faced and then what changed changed to bring about the dissolution of the empire, the partial dissolution of the empire and the collapse in the west.
- [43:19]
A
I mean the Roman Empire, the empire itself over 500 years has to I think gets broken easily broken up into two periods. The 200 years of the Principate, thankfully after the big fights of 69 AD, you know, when the Julian, the Julio Claudian clan is finally disappearing from the scene to be replaced by the next dynasty in line. And then you have what's called the five good emperors. You have a period where Rome fights the Parthians periodically. But it that's basically like military exercise of war games. Aparthism were never a real serious military threat to Rome as long as they were watched. And periodically, especially on the Trajan armies would march in and deal them devastating defeats. The, the barbarians on the other side of the Danube for the most part are much more interested until Marcus, you know, just around the period Marcus were earliest in trading with the empire and fighting the empire more true on the rind in the Danube. So rome has from 69 to the third century crisis in the early 230s to 260s I guess would be, you know, relatively peaceful. In the core there's fighting along the front frontiers, sometimes continuous, sometimes prolonged. But the core is the core of the empire is fine. And then, then the next period of the empire is the third century crisis where everything collapses. It is just a litany of disasters. Everything changed in that some of that is climate. The Roman, the Roman climate optimum where it was about probably 3 degrees warmer than it is today is going away and it's getting, it's getting colder, it's getting more rain, it's getting more rain that's reducing crop yields. And they, this is probably they, they know something bad's happening, but why and how bad it is is probably invisible to them because it happens over years and decades. Then the, you know, disease, you have the Antonine plague, which is probably, I think, more devastating than many historians have allowed, especially since it was, it was often centered on the, on the legions. The legions were hit by the plague, horrifically hit by the plague. And we have the appearance, appearance in large numbers of new tribal amalgamations. The Goths particularly, every, everything has become more dangerous. The, the Parthians have gone from the scene and they've been replaced by assassinates who are a lot more capable, a lot, a lot more militaristic than the Parthians ever were. So Rome is facing a whole new set of challenges and they're not prepared for it. It takes time for them to figure out how to, how to do this. The, you know, they've got, they've got to lead. The legions have gotten lazy to some degree. They've got to be rehabilitated. They, a series of soldier emperors take over and the last of them is Diocletian, who realizes the empire is too big for one person in control. And he definitively splits the empire into east and west. And there'll be a co. Emperor in the west and they'll have, each of them will have a spirit Caesar working for him. So there's four people actually running the Roman Empire. That breaks down almost as soon as he leaves the scene. And then, then there's Constantine and he unites the emperor empire. And we have a new political system too from Diocletian. We have a lot more focus on the administration of the empire up until Diocletian. You're trying to run the empire on a government that was working for when Rome was a small city state governing a few, you know, 50 miles in every direction from the Roman core. That, that, that, that administrative structure hardly changes at all throughout the Roman Empire into Diocletian. And we have a rise of, of an administrative state. And we have a rise, which I don't want to do a lot of talking about a parallel administration, administrative state, state in the Catholic Church, which is growing and getting stronger. Let's call it Christianity, That's, I call it Catholic, the Christianity throughout this entire period. And then they get hold of it and then we, we have the empire going for almost 70 or 80 years in good shape except for periodic civil wars. But those civil war wars get very, very wearing and they're unceasing and that, that in my, in my view it's the civil wars that made pot that so weakened the fabric of the empire that it became an easy target, particularly in the West. And then once they got broke, the taxpayer in North Africa, it was impossible to come back. So you bet, you got, you've got several eras of the Roman empire, the principal 200 years, the third century crisis which needs to be overcome. Diocletian Constantine, who rebuilt the empire and gave it a new administrative structure, and then the Constantine sons and the post Constantine until the great invasions of 406, 410, which are the prelude of an eventual total collapse.
- [49:22]
B
Now, we've talked in great detail about the Roman Empire and the strategies applied. And it's a great history that you go into considerable detail about. And yet it's a history that also has, as you note, some relevance for us today. What lessons can we draw from Roman experience that inform our concepts of strategy today and inform our understanding of strategy in the world today?
- [49:50]
A
But it's a tough question which I address in a short chapter at the end of my book. The secret to. Success for any great power is to have a strategy which most of the population has accepted. So when we first really move on to the stage as a great power Post World War I, post World War I, we don't have a fundamental strategy on what we want to do as a great power. And then we go into a long period of isolation between the wars. And In World War II, we realize isolation isn't going to work. We are the world's only superpower left at the end of the war. We are the economic heartland of the corporate core of the world. And we have to stay out there in the world. And our biggest enemy at the time is the Soviet Union. And we develop a strategy we call containment. And for 70 years almost that had bipartisan support. Right left, center, Democrat, Republican, with changes and fixes on the margin. But the core of that strategy stayed the same. And then we, you know, the Soviet we, we, we win what was called the Cold War and we went into a strategic. What's, what's the hiatus? We, we have never, you know, the Cold War. We, you know, the X article and the long telegram written by George Kennan became the basis of a sustained strategy, the containment strategy. We, despite the number of strategists in the world multiplying by orders of magnitude, nobody has yet put out the X article for the current thing. Now there's thousands of articles out there. And now we're being tested by the rise of another great power and Russia that wants to be a great power. But if a economy of GDP is equal to about equal to Brazil or Spain, they're finding it hard to maintain their ambitions except for the fact that they have, excuse me, thousands of nuclear weapons. China on the other hand, is an economically great power. And how do we, how do we manage that? We manage it the same way we have. Strategy has worked for years and years. You engage a great power, you, you, you, you do not let it spread into areas that you, that, that are in your which backyard or not the backyard within your sphere of influence. For the United States that's considered most of the world, you maintain a strong economic center and you try and bring the party together. Not, not just on internal issues would not be nice. But even if you can't agree on internal domestic issues that there is some level of agreement on what you, what's going, what's what you want to do outside the borders. And thankfully I see good, long good term stuff in these areas. I, I see a common consensus now on how to engage China. China has become a real threat to the United States, America, America. We're doing what we're supposed to do in terms of building coalitions and working with allies. And China's, China's feeling a little bit encircled. You know, their, their system of government, especially under Z is not something everybody else wants to try. So we're making some progress in that area. Economically we're, we're in a rough patch now, you know, inflation and things like that. But long term, I see a lot of pluses in American industry. A reshoring of American industry, a reshoring of manufacturing towards our allies instead of putting, putting it in enemy countries or potential enemy countries. But we have to do a balancing act. We don't want to get into a shooting war of China. And that's, this is another area where military history or ancient history can inform us if we get it right. Graham Allison has pushed very strongly the idea of a few cities trap out there. He misinterprets the history in my opinion. I think Hal Brands does a much better job of interpreting what's going on. The danger is what how Brands calls a peaking power. You know, Germany in World War I and tried World War I. You know, the consensus or the most, the general consensus now is Germany wanted the war and Germany and if they did not, we could have, we could have avoided the fight. But Germany was looking around saying relative, if this war is coming anyway, relative to all the other powers around us, we will never be as strong as we are today. So if we're gonna, if this war is going to come, we have our best chance of winning it today. Let's do it. The same thing with cities. You know, the Spartans made every attempt to get out of that fight to, you know, if you just do this one thing, we'll call it even and quit. But Pericles is looking and say Athens will never be as strong against its enemies as it is today and will only get weaker over time. China's in the same boat. China's going to get old before it gets incredibly rich. 100 years from now, there'll be only half as many Chinese as there are today. It's built into the demographics. That is an incredible collapse of their population and will not, cannot help but cause a serious economic collapse, a prolonged and horrific economic collapse as their population is literally cut in half. China is looking at the world today and saying everything we want we have to get soon. We will never be as strong against our enemies as we are today. The America, America's got a lot of stuff coming in the pipeline for 2030 which is going to make us militarily much more effective than we are today. We've got a strong alliances that are going to get nothing but chance stronger as China becomes more threatening. So the real fucidities trap is a country that thinks it's, it's, it's got to get what it wants today or it will never get it. And that is the real danger of China right now. They, they see that they have a chance against, against all their competitors today that might not be there in 2030 and they're encouraged to make the best of it while they can. So. But if you're going to stop it, keep your economy strong, keep your military strong enough to deter any possible, you know, thinking like that on China's part that they could do something, a fade, a complete quickly and end as well. Keep close to your allies and maintain at least some modicum of societal support for your strategy, at least at least your external strategy and how you want to deal with the world.
- [57:29]
B
We appreciate the time that you've taken to speak with us, but before we go, could you tell us what you're working on now?
- [57:35]
A
My next book I'm doing this I'm about halfway through is because I did almost all the research while doing. The Roman Empire was what it looked like in the year 33 A.D. so the book will be called the Year the Year Jesus Died or When They Killed Jesus. And it's a big picture story of what, what happened in the time period right around when Jesus was crucified. It's not a book about Christianity or faith. It's a history book that will tell people what was going on. You know, we have more books than we count on the historical Jesus. And you wouldn't many of them. You wouldn't even know the Roman Empire existed when Jesus was is alive. So a bigger picture on that. And then I'm probably after that going to return to military history. And my previous book, the Washington War was all about all the big political fights that were going on in Washington D.C. during the, during World War II. That was well received. So now I'm going to look at a particular month. I hate I shouldn't even say this, someone might jump in ahead of me, but the month the book title will be the month to do them the access. And there'll be a big picture of the events up to leading to and the and then the events of that particular month in World War II history.
- [59:03]
B
Well, those both sound like very interesting projects. I look forward to seeing them when they come out.
- [59:07]
A
Okay, thank you, thank you for having me on the show. And I look forward to listening to the podcast as soon as it's up on the up online.
- [59:16]
B
And thank you very much for, again for, for sharing your wisdom with us today, Jim.
- [59:21]
A
Okay.