The Cannae Problem
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.
There's quite a bit about Fabius' tactics in TFA, actually.
Hannibal never marched on Rome because he knew he could never take it. Doing a siege in the area most loyal to Rome would have been suicidal for his force.
In case of siege, the Romans would not need to fight, they could simply wait until his army slowly died from attrition.
However, he 1) Failed to turn most of the socii to his side. 2) Ignored the western roman allies who were slowly eating away at Iberia.
The best example of the former is Gaius Flaminius, who was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. [0] Livy memorably describes Flaminius as "not sufficiently fearful of the authority of senate and laws, and even of the gods themselves." Hannibal took advantage of his rashness to lure Flaminius into an ambush in which he and his entire army were annihilated.
Furthermore you could argue--and may still do--that Hannibal didn't even completely win Cannae, because he failed to attack Rome after his victory. His commander of cavalry remarked at the time, "You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." [1] I'm personally inclined to think Maharbal was correct, but that's the advantage of hindsight.
These accounts are both based on Livy, who didn't let facts to get in the way of a good story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Trasimene
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae#Aftermath
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/season/5/?epPage=...
(cannae = cannot)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_Scottish...
She fails to consider specifically that so-called "tech" companies also operate via "orthodoxy". There are enormous "gaps" in their "mental models and reality". As such, there are similarly-sized opportunities for "disruption" and "innovation". But as we have seen through documentary evidence, sworn testimony, and Hail Mary tactics like deliberately destroying evidence and giving false testimony in federal court, these companies rely on anti-competitive conduct. This is not merely an "inability to adapt", it is an inability to compete on the merits. One could argue the ability to effortlessly raise capital coupled with the large cash reserves of these companies results in a certain "overconfidence".
This is of course not the frame she chooses to adopt.
Silicon Valley cannot break free from its surveillance, data collection and online advertising mental model of the internet.
"It's that their past successes created the conditions for these mistakes. Their expertise became their vulnerability. Their conventional wisdom became the instrument of their downfall."
Ad services have been highly profitable in the absence of meaningful competition or regulation. But how long will those conditions last. Silicon Valley's "conventional wisdom" comprises "products" and "services" priced at zero dollars, "normalised" anti-competitive conduct, relentless data collection and surveillance and finally, the sale of online advertising services as a "business model".
"Disruptors and innovators intuitively understand the Cannae Problem. They specifically look for gaps between established organizations' mental models and reality. These gaps represent enormous opportunities."
The established "tech" organisations' mental models are so weak they were never able to find a business model. They had to resort to internet intermediation for the purpose of surveillance and advertising services.
The failure was that Nokia made 20 products at a time where Apple made 1.
The effort to support the huge amount of variation was enormous and the low spec hardware made the software extremely difficult to get working at acceptable performance. So instead of 1 bug fixed once you'd have 20 sets of partially different bugs. The decision to save money by using low spec hardware also negatively affected the way application level software was designed and made it extremely effortful.
Building it took days and they insisted on using the RVCT compilers which though better than GCC were much slower. If they'd had enough RAM on the phone and enough performance to start with then it would not have been necessary to cripple development like this to eke out performance.
This is all about Nokia's matrix organisation which they created to optimise the model that was working for them - lots of phones at different price points. Apple made it obvious that this was unnecessary. One expensive phone that made people happy was better.
There were other aspects to their failure which they did try to fix - such as having an app store and addressing user experience issues. They just couldn't do it effectively because they insisted on building many phone models.
The modem had I found the highest mAh rechargeable batteries so I could use the internet in cafes. Never really got it to be a daily use device. But that is still one of my favorite keyboard designs ever. The double hinge on the clamshell was really cool.
"Symbian C++" used to be a great search term ... for clubkiness horror stories. Or at least warnings that "don't expect this to be your pal's C++". Nevermind the kernel actually used a more crude form (a C++ "standard library" for kernel code is ... challenging). Definitely not "easy to read".
Symbian (and Nokia) recognised this to a degree; hence the "posix environment" or the Qt purchase. Symbian 9 was a great step towards scaling it. It only got into a phone ... with the last Symbian phone ever made. Bit of a pity - it could never really show what might have been.
They were steamrollered. Things just happened too fast for non-unix-kernel based systems to take the then-imminent multicore and 64bit ARM. Nevermind other misses like keyboard vs. touchscreen (Symbian UIQ was rather nice to use but nokia's S60 was not). Or in Nokia's case, not going all-in on Maemo/Meego.
(yes, been there. Only at its tail end, and only stayed as long as I did because in 2009, the job market wasn't great. Nonetheless, I remember a few things - great, sad and stupid. Symbian had all of that and then some. And definitely, Nokia also had a few "Varros").
[Here followeth the guff]
IMO the asyncronous API on Symbian was elegant and simple whereas on Linux it's a confusing messy disaster and to make async keywords work in a modern browser one has to use libraries like libuv to fake bits of it or insulate you from the many 1/2 useful event or polling APIs. I thought the Symbian file server had threads but I admit I'm not a great expert on any of that. I do think that you could have fixed those problems and every app would have continued working but better whereas in Linux you can do whatever you want and most software still won't benefit from it.
Symbian C++ was just C++ with an active object model to handle asynchronous events and the insistence that a program must not crash just because it runs out of memory (which made 2-phase constructors a thing and caused the reimplementation of the new operator to return NULL if memory allocation failed rather than raise an exception). Those 2 constraints alone made it a nightmare. One has to ask oneself why it was so critical to not fail when memory allocation fails - how many programs can realistically continue to do useful things when there's no memory for them?
The Active Object thing which turned your program into one big series of event handlers was a misery IMO. The whole platform was crying out for co-routines.
I never looked at Apples approach to memory allocation failures but I think they probably just decided to add enough memory to the phone and boo-hoo if something went wrong. They saved state and let you restore so it looked almost as if the thing hadn't crashed.
All the other things you mention are true but there are root causes for it and one of them is the attempt to develop too much software for too many hardware types leading to too many bugs and then architecting the build system such that it could not scale.
I was on the team that rewrote the build system (a huge mistake BTW because it took too long). The Nokia build produced 85GB of output. After a lot of effort we got it down to 12h with a huge build cluster of 100s of machines and on a good day where nothing broke. A large part of that build was the same code getting recompiled with different options for alternate phone models. Most of the build was only able to build with RVCT. Compiler updates were very risky because all compilers have bugs and on a large codebase they get exposed somewhere or other. Compare to android where a 16core machine can build it in the order of an hour or even less perhaps - and most of that build is compiling Java to bytecode so it never has to be done more than once.
I have forgotten a lot but IIRC we really crushed the compilation and linking phase but packaging was done in a stupid way - into huge packages that are nothing like Linux ones and a couple of the largest ones of these tied up the build on one cluster node for a long time
In fact the whole linux packaging system itself offered the possibility of NOT recompiling the whole system repeatedly, but I worked on OBS after this and total rebuilds were more common than one might wish to believe. I still think it would have been better than the lunacy we were engaged in.
The clusters were still overburdened because there wasn't just one build to run on them - older versions of the OS still had to be rebuilt for updates for example. Also adding language support required a rebuild - IMO if one wants to consider design mistakes this and the use of the DLL format rather than .SO were the biggest unrecognised balls-ups.
DLLs are very unpleasant for compatibility because if you change the number of methods in a class it can destroy compatibility. the schemes for getting around this were horrible and just seemed to be unreliable (freezing).
The rest of the technical problems - almost all of them - were very adversely affected by this constipated system and it existed because of the decisions:
1) To make a lot of models with different hardware in them and more/less RAM.
2) To reduce component count - saving 50c here and there which had worked extremely well for Nokia in the past before those StrongARM and similar chips came out that created a big jump in ARM performance.My understanding of the story is Fabius was running the Roman strategy before Cannae and had identified all the lessons of that battle in advance. It was clear that in a pitched battle Hannibal was going to do extremely well. It is a fascinating historical example about how being right is not enough in politics, but Fabius got a unique opportunity to demonstrate that he told them so. It was clearly foreseeable and foreseen, so the entire problem the Romans had was that their leadership operating foolishly.
That said, in the defence of romans, they were also open to learning and integrating others ideas into their own. Scipio africanus absolutely learned from hannibal, and was able to layer aggressiveness, deception, and delay into his strategy. Every metaphor is imperfect, and cannae is absolutely an example of being blind / stubborn, but my quibble with the OP would be that romans didn't _really_ change their aggressive identity in the long term, and that identify continued to serve them well for 100's of years after hannibal.
And then let's strain the comparison, when even overcoming a genius general like Hannibal is no longer enough, and you shift from a strategy of "who cares how many losses it takes, Rome has more men" to the crisis of the third century, and barbarian coalitions coalescing into what would become the huge tribes and proto-states of the Migration Period, when that strategy wasn't even viable for any day-to-day conflict, given the severe military manpower constraints Rome faced, and destroying your enemy in an attritional battle made way for hurting them just enough that they were amenable to a tolerable negotiated settlement. One could imagine the widespread adoption of smartphones as the point where the original market strategy of ignoring digital photography as much as economically feasible would end, and the digital photography era would finally start.
The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.
It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:
a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;
and
b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]
It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.
The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.
The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.
Edit: It was called a raven or corvus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)
And if you came within 50 yards of an ROTC department in the 1980s, the staff there would drag you into a discussion of Cannae. It was one of the first battles young officers are taught. Like religious scripture, you can find something in the records to support just about any lesson (though obviously military instead of moral.)
It's good to see this tradition persist.
Even though leaders who attend boarding schools at West Point and Annapolis have a leg up politically, the US military has been open to good ideas coming from places other than service academies. Modern Maneuver Warfare came from a political rando. But he was a political rando with a decent idea and access to pentagon staff.
And no one seems to know who came up with the "lazy commanders" concept that is so often attributed to Moltke. It's a decidedly American concept that couldn't possibly have survived the Prussian Army of the 19th century. (The best source I've heard is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, which is a little surprising, but maybe he said it right after WWI.)
But yes... military boarding schools in Maryland and New York cast a long shadow over the US armed services.
Which is to say... I think you're onto a general rule, but like everything else there are exceptions.
It should be noted that this is the oldest trick in the book and not one of Hannibal Barca's innovations. Wikipedia cites the Battle of Marathon (490 BC, Greeks against Persian empire) and the Battle of Hydaspes (326 BC, Alexander the Macedon and the Greeks, except the Lacedemonians, against the Indian king Porus) as two examples predating Hannibal's victory at Cannae (216 BC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pincer_movement
Wikipedia also cites a pincer maneouver mentioned in the epic Mahabharata, possibly mythological.
NB: the wikipedia article on the battle of Marathon casts doubt on the deliberate use of a pincer maneuver in Marathon, following from what I cant tell from a single source, the historian Lazenby who claims it was all just the result of the bravery of the Greek hoplites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon#Conclusions
To be honest, though I'm Greek, far from feeling flattered about the high morale of my ancestors I just find the explanation hard to believe.
Some states can suffer tremendous losses and yet they can eventually prevail due to their stronger industrial capability in the long run.
That's what allowed the US to defeat the Japanese in WWII. Japan had a capable military apparatus at the start of the war but they were not able to scale their production at the same rate as the much larger US.
The only way for a smaller state to defeat a bigger one is to go all in and win quickly.
A defender who feels an existential threat can outpace an attacker that is fighting a war far away from home without any strong stakes.
In war time or emergencies there will be immense pressure to cut through inefficiencies.
However, if you're suggesting that that the U.S. is blind to the importance of small UAS (given the context of the article), that is fortunately not the case.
The U.S. started taking note of the importance of small UAS as early as the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where their use was prevalent. The continued appearance of small UAS (and their increased volume) throughout the war in Ukraine cemented the place of small UAS in future combat.
The recognition of how small UAS are changing the game is a big reason (but not the only reason) the Army cancelled the FARA program. Manned Aviation at the scale it is done in the past is not how wars will be won. It isn't going away, but it's roles/prevalance is changing.
If you're truly interested, see the DoD memos this week that include info about the Army's shift in focus with respect to aviation and unmanned systems.
I wonder if UAS include small FPV drones. The language of those announcements is necessarily vague.
At those prices, we will never have the kind of quantities that Ukraine and Russia have.
I don't think people would want to have to boot directly into WP to do word processing and into 123 to run spreadsheets, especially in the age of multitasking and embedding.
There wasn't some alternate strategy they could have pursued. Microsoft developed market power with DOS and Windows, which simultaneously means that productivity tools need to be offered on that platform or they can't make sales, and that Microsoft has the ability to priviledge its own productivity tools.
Maybe you could try to play hardball when Microsoft started their productivity tools and convince them to cancel it, but that would have been anti-competitive and also needs a lot of prescience to predict Microsoft's future actions.
The article strikes me as yet another shallow, masquerading as deep, insight you find in the business paperbacks at the airport shop.
- Hamilcar Barca raised his three sons Hannibal, Hazdrubal and Mago, to hate Rome from their early childhood, going so far as to make them swear an oath of eternal enmity (according to Livy). While competition in a free marketplace is much more rational and impersonal, the conflict between Hannibal and Rome was very much rooted in deep ideological hatred.
- Hannibal's strategy was to separate Rome from its allies in the Italian peninsula, which is why he did not march on Rome after Cannae. Perhaps there are realistic business strategy where the aim is to systematically dismantle any means of support that a competitor has, but they aren't well represented in the examples given.
- Quintus Fabius was originally known as Cunctator ("the delayer") as an epithet, and only much later as an agnomen, partly due to his policy that they would not negotiate with Hannibal to exchange prisoners of war. Not only that, it was illegal for the family of a captured soldier to independently negotiate for their family member's release. It's hard to understand what public opinion was like at that time, and the most reliable source (Polybius) was a Roman prisoner-of-war himself!
- The Fabian strategy as it might be applied to management wisdom would not realistically be a "delaying strategy" (i.e. wait for your competitors to run out of resources while trying to limit them as much as possible) but rather a strategy of optimizing your workforce to be more nimble and self-sufficient. Rather than have one large army that represented a single point of failure, the Fabian strategy was to have many small armies that continuously harassed Hannibal's forces for many years.
If the author of this post is reading - I love your writing style and don't intend for this to be interpreted as criticism, I just thought it was an interesting analogy that warranted further exploration.
More broadly, I think that Americans have been too arrogant and have been prone to thinking that the only part of the world which matters stops at their own borders.
There are several similar stories from Europe where the putatively democratically elected leaders are working to save the demos from itself.
So #NotAllDemocracies, but more than there should be
- major oceans on two sides, very similar country on one side, and only one border with a truly different country
- 25% of the world's economy
- very easy to travel, work, and do business internally across the US
- some cultural and lots of climate diversity inside the US
All of which means you can live a very full and happy life without ever leaving the States or even thinking about what happens outside of it.
The first thing that comes to mind is StarCraft2 Stalker blink micro. They have shields that regenerate over time, so the front wave fights until shields are low then fall back to recharge.
The 2nd part is also covered by general SC2 tactics, concave fronts increase attacking numbers more than convex defenders'.
This feels like the core aspect of most bad leadership I've experienced.
Organizations can turn on a dime, even very large ones, if leadership allows themselves to recognize and adapt to the new terrain.
The central challenge with this is that the adaptation process is painful, often requiring a 1v1 contest to the death with one's own ego.
Hannibal put his strongest units on both flanks. Frederick the Great put more units on one flank, and when that broke they crushed sideways along that end of the formation. Unzippering the entire front line. It also, I suspect, put the opposing general in mortal danger sooner, since he now has to retreat when the battle is only half over.
Having your strongest on one end means you can’t get separated into two groups. Unlike a game with an omniscient general you risk losing communication with half your army if things go poorly.
But it’s more common in games, where the general is omniscient and fatigue does not exist (so running across the map takes time but not energy), to see the lines fall back at a diagonal, forcing the enemy to chase down the far end of the formation, while it falls back to the center and the center joins the flank. By the time the battle is fully joined, the overmatched flank is nearly defeated, and the formations can roll up on the enemy’s center within a turn or two, while the rest stalls for time.
The opposite of this is "knife the baby" which I first heard in a stage production of (I think) The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
The Macintosh would far supplant the cash cow of the Apple ][ (Apple 2).
Jobs did it anyway.
This appears to contradict both confirmation bias and groupthink (mentioned in the article).
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/theater/reviews/the-agony...
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/microsoft-asked-appl...
At least an attack on Hizbollah was out of the box thinking, which gives some credit to the establishment.
Also the author's knowledge of roman history seems to be to the level of a summary of an inaccurate youtube video.
As for military red teams, a more relevant example might be from Japan in the 1980's: when they did product development, they set up distinct groups that had to take different approaches and compete for the chance to be the ultimate product.
The difficulty with taking this too far is anxiety, undifferentiated fear, splitting focus and attenuating priorities. That drains you and makes you ineffective. Players too weak to confront you directly sow discord in your ranks. That brings us back to questions of loyalty and validating that the critical perspective is being adopted in good faith. (Sadly all at work today in the US.)
But with incompleteness theorem we have a far stronger statement, that no matter how expressive the model space, there are possibilities that it will eventually encounter in its use and that it won't let anticipate. Well it doesn't say exactly that in that terms, but that's a rather straight forward interpretation of it.
Did August exist before Augustus?
And BCE didn't exist before Jesus Christ (AD/BC was invented in 525). So the period-accurate translation is "Sextilis 2, the year of consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro".
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-expe...
Netflix had cutting edge marketing automation teams that sabotaged every single dollar and every sales initiative by dumping low and _negative_ value consumers (dorm IP addresses, etc.) onto every single loss leader marketing initiative Blockbuster launched. They had "independent" free signup marketing flows for "free stuff" etc, and if they identified good clients they would be sent to Netflix, predicted "bad customers" they would actively send to blockbuster.
Netflix's "counter marketing" team was extremely successful. Indeed is a good example of a company that has had similar expertise in their org as well.
Oddly enough the short hand lesson people learn about blockbuster is both true and a slight of hand.