Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
Does anyone here know about that Seshat Databank? It looks fascinating, and I ran into it someplace else too. What is its scope? Who actually uses it and for what?
About Us Seshat: Global History Databank is a large, international, multidisciplinary team of evolutionary scientists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, economists, and other social scientists. Our team includes scholars from various backgrounds, policy makers, and enthusiastic volunteers. Seshat is governed by an editorial board, who oversee work done by postdoctoral researchers, collaborators and consultants, and research assistants all over the world. We are a nonprofit organization housed by the innovative Think-Tank the Evolution Institute. Our mission is to gather information from historical societies in order to rigorously test different hypotheses about the rise and fall of large-scale societies across the globe and human history.
The Seshat: Global History Databank is an umbrella organization for numerous research projects that examine different facets or themes of human life. Each project is headed by various members of the Seshat Team along with a group of consultants and contributing experts. Support for our research comes from a variety of private donors, academic, and governmental funding sources. The Seshat (project) Wikipedia page provides some additional information about how the project is organized and funded.
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I was most surprised that the authors had no strong theories about the role of "agricultural productivity". In addition to building armies from agricultural surplus, the ability to feed horses, people, elephants, etc was key to large military campaign. A common defensive technique against large army campaigns included burning agriculture.. for instance Hannibal's invasion of Rome. ie, the agriculture supply-chain itself seems to be a necessary pre-requisite to military campaigns with thousands of troops.
[1] https://unrealfacts.com/napoleon-bonaparte-role-canned-food-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documenta...
I think emp warfare (actually already quietly a thing) is going to be the in between for stuff like drones...
I hope the new generations of children are being taught old school survival skills, because they are probably going to need them.
One of the best books on the post nuclear world that I reference often is The Shield of Achilles, and one of the conclusions that sticks with me is that there will be a rise in corporate power and a fall of nation state power.
Fight club was right after all... "planet Starbucks" indeed.
At some point, some group is going to need to have a monopoly on violence. It doesn't matter if two groups of power don't have complete dominance over a geographic region, they are still two groups with power that look after their own kind and perform diplomacy.
Drone warfare is pretty clearly in this camp. Not a lot of people followed the Armenia / Azerbaijan war last year, but Armenia was fighting a war from 10 years ago (trench + urban warfare), and they got slaughtered by armed drones. It was a wipeout.
Nobody wants to be the Armenians in the next war... and often that means wasting a lot of money figuring out what the next breakthrough is.
The US spent 20 years fighting goat herders with AK-47s, and lost. The CCCP did the same and also lost, albeit they left actually left when they realized is was a mess (with a little help from CIA, sure). There are other obvious examples.
Economic might is a major determinant in how well you can prosecute a war but it is by no means the only thing that matters.
they lost because they never really intended to win at all costs, like in WW2.
There's no doubt that the US can win any war currently. You can't even really call afganistan a real war, since the other side is so hopelessly outgunned that they resort to guerilla warfare. It is the same in the vietnam war - the US could've spent more nukes, more severe firepower and more man power - it's just politically infeasible to do so - the technology and capability is there.
Calling them goat herders is either ignorance, racism, or pushing whatever agenda you're trying to push.
Unless you're specifically speaking of the lowest caliber grunts of their infantry, in which theirs are nearly the same as ours. Mostly uneducated cannon fodder.
But yes, the US completely intentionally drew out the 20 years of war to put money in the military industrial complexes pockets. The Taliban tried to surrender 2-3 months after we first attacked them IIRC, and we said no.
>Calling them goat herders is either ignorance, racism, or pushing whatever agenda you’re trying to push.
I’m accurately describing the people I personally fought in this war. Good to know it’s racist to accurately describe them.
> Unless you're specifically speaking of the lowest caliber grunts of their infantry, in which theirs are nearly the same as ours. Mostly uneducated canon fodder.
I actually laughed out loud at this.
I'm saying that today's Taliban receive training by yesterday's Taliban/whatever tribal spinoffs came from that who were trained by the CIA.
Is that anything like the direct US Military/CIA training? No, but the tribal knowledge of what was learned doesn't just disappear, it gets passed down.
Do you think it wasn't at all passed down? I too have more than one friend in the marines that went on multiple deployments mid 2000's-2010's. They seem to think it's a fairly reasonable argument.
I see no point in the goat herders comment. We don't refer to our basic infantry as former "factory laborers", "retail workers", "hamburger flippers", or "highschool dropouts" - all occupations I've seen go into the army, and end up as actively deployed infantry.
I don't know though. If you want to say the hamburger flippers got blown up by the goat herders IED, feel free.
Dude I was there, on the ground, house to house and village to village. These guys were laughably incompetent as a fighting force. They were hungry, dirty, poorly trained and equipped, couldn't shoot, and often killed themselves or their buddies unintentionally.
We lost because of political factors, especially within the higher echelons of the military command structure. We had the tactical victories in spades but our leadership (military and political) could not translate tactical dominance into strategic momentum.
The problem with fighting people who may have wronged you but have not seized any of your territories, yet whose values and principles are far from your own is that you can only accept unconditional surrender.
Otherwise, why fight.
It was entertaining seeing how the CIA taught the 2021 Taliban proper trigger discipline compared to the fingers resting on the trigger of a machine gun photos of the early 2000s. Shades of Kipling there.
A friend of mine got his commendation medal in what I believe was Basic training (and this was just national guard), or training slightly after basic. This, from his understanding at the time, was fairly uncommon/unheard of.
Why he received the medal? He was the singular person in his platoon/training regiment that shot a perfect score/sheet in their rifle marksman class. For some reason, very few others came even close to perfect, most more towards the (lol) average of what was required, or worse than that.
He got a lot of questions from his peers as to what he was doing differently to have so seemingly easily scored perfectly. He said he wasn't really sure... asked "did you zero your rifles?"
By his account, he was quite literally the singular person, of a group of people all having military training and fucking around with firearms and live ammunition, that read the actual manual, instructions, and properly zeroed his rifle.
So, while you may perceive "comes from the most advanced civilian gun culture in the world" to be true, I somewhat disagree on its merits and propose that if the Taliban infantry are indeed goat herders, they may have more hands on experience in properly using firearms, as animal husbandry in areas like Afghanistan has some livestock preditors they must be wary about. That and the whole growing up in a completely unstable place constantly in some form of war/conflict.
I have however heard reports from the tales of General Butt Naked & Co, that down in West Africa and such, that the child soldiers know nothing other than the idea of "big number equal good"
And so, they set the windage sights on their AK's to the highest number, and end up shooting completely over the heads of people 20 feet from them. Perhaps these are the types you're thinking of when you say Afghani goat herder? No, you may be thinking of African child soldiers.
Your point is well taken, and I don’t know when your anecdote is from, but rural Americans definitely use guns as an agricultural tool. Hunting season laws don’t apply to wildlife that’s damaging crops or worrying livestock. In my neck of the woods everyone knows how to zero their rifle, because one shot is the most you’re going to get.
I don’t mean to say Americans are neo-Spartans or anything, just that I’m willing to bet the average Ame
> I have however heard reports from the tales of General Butt Naked & Co, that down in West Africa and such, that the child soldiers know nothing other than the idea of "big number equal good"
I heard that anecdote applied to the Bush War.
It is very likely that the USSR would not win if not for the US material support.
That isn't in conflict with what bpodgursky said - the country with the larger economy can iterate through technologies more quickly. If their opponents come up with an idea, a highly productive nation can copy and mass produce it. If they come up with an idea, their opponents may not have the industrial base to replicate it.
Although I do agree that based on the economy heuristic I'd expect China to do really well in any war. They're probably going to be better at drones than their opponents in a sustained conflict and it looks like drones win wars right now.
If that's a contribution to international peace, I hate to imagine what you'd think was a contribution to regional instability.
Even on a modern level, I think it's arguable that the 90's gulf war, and then the 2000's one, were the drivers behind a massive up-arming amongst states around the world that saw themselves as on the US's potential 'regime change' hitlist. It's often touted as a reason for China's massive arms buildup, for example.
Overall I’d say it’s probably done more good than harm.
I think the one thing east asian states tend to have in spades is pragmatism. The US, on the other hand, is very often engaging in the region for ideological reasons. For that reason, it has tended to engage in bloody, somewhat pointless wars that have often span out into civil wars in neighboring states (Cambodia, for example) or produced traumatized, basketcase states (North Korea, for example, or pre-revolution South Korea).
The country-years of war in the region between 1950 and 2010 could potentially have been in the order of 1000s, but has been in the low 100s.
I'm not saying US threat of war did actually prevent a lot of smaller wars in the region to occur.
I'm also not saying if it did, that it was a good thing. (Maybe like with forest fires, many small wars are better than a few big ones.)
But that's the argument used by people favouring this US threat of war.
It's more the promise of security. War comes from insecurity (or for a few among non-democratic countries, the desire to take something from someone). The US security guarantee for Japan, S Korea, etc. meant that they could act with security.
If you're the global superpower with an empire built on military might, you have to constantly practice your craft, and nothing beats the real thing.
And putting your capabilities on public display in a real theatre provides the entire world with the proof of violence (PoV) you are able to summon.
"Oscar Wilde issued a memorable prediction of the war of the future: "A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-t...
Memetic warfare.
Hell, this kind of war has been raging for decades.
Most people just don't know it.
Probably it's the only thing which can shift the power poles from the current nuclear states.
Mid-sized drones are an unkillable airforce, following the front-line, with very small logistic footprint.
This way, nuclear countries cannot simply nuke your few airfields, and deprive your force in the field of air cover, and then bomb you with impunity with cheap bombs.
It very much means, a big conventional army can now get a decent chance to reach your capital in case of continental conflict even if you nuke all their airfields, and supply caches.
In fact, a lighter force can now have much bigger chances to win than a heavier one, burdened by expensive toys, with huge demand on supplies, which will run out of fuel in a day if the supply chain is interrupted. A tank without fuel is just a bunker with 50 cal. on top.