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The future is barbarian The world's armies will adapt to the new Dark Ages

'There is no one route to the future.' (Euan Cherry/Getty Images)

'There is no one route to the future.' (Euan Cherry/Getty Images)


February 6, 2024   11 mins

The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been on many minds recently, not least because neither has been working out the way our politicians and pundits insisted they would. As a result, a genuine revolution in military affairs is now taking place — and no, it’s not the one that was so loudly ballyhooed in intellectual circles a couple of decades back.

During the Nineties, there was much excitement about computer technology opening the way to a new kind of warfare. Information, we were told, would flow from the battlefield to headquarters and back, giving commanders total control over hypercomplex, hugely expensive militaries that would overwhelm more poorly equipped forces with ease. That has, however, not come to pass.

On the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, the single most effective force the Ukrainian army has consisted of little independent units huddled in bunkers just behind the lines, equipped with cheap drones. Right now, Russia has the upper hand by every conventional measure; it has more troops, more tanks, more artillery, more ammunition and other expendables, and a vastly superior air force. Its missiles pound Ukrainian targets hundreds of miles behind the lines — and yet, it is also restricted to slow, gruelling, trench-by-trench advances, because any attempt at a general assault in open country gets chopped to pieces by drones.

The same thing mediated by a different set of technologies is also taking place in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military is so much larger and better armed than Hamas that, in a conventional struggle, there would be no contest at all. But the Hamas commanders aren’t stupid enough to meet the Israelis in a conventional struggle. Instead, their network of tunnels allows Hamas forces to pop up, ambush Israeli detachments, and vanish again. It’s the same strategy Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon used against the Israeli army in 2006, and it’s proving just as effective this time around.

Then there’s the Ansarullah militia in Yemen, drawn mostly from the Houthi ethnic group. Their approach to messing with the industrial West is just as cheap and effective. You don’t need a permanent installation to launch a drone against a ship passing through the Red Sea — the back of a truck is quite adequate — and so the US and British forces on the scene have nothing useful to bomb. Yes, some Ansarullah drones get shot down. But so what? It takes a missile costing $2 million to down a drone that only costs $2,000.

The Ansarullah strategy is particularly clever because they don’t have to defeat the US and British navies. All they have to do is make the Red Sea too costly for commercial shipping to Israel and its allies, and they can do that by adding the risk of a drone strike (and the insurance premiums that follow from that risk) to the other costs and dangers shipping companies have to face. If Israel and its allies produced most of their goods and services at home, that wouldn’t be any kind of problem. But it turns out that one of the many downsides to economic globalisation is that it holds every nation’s economy hostage to shipping disruptions in the major sea lanes.

In all three cases, then, what has happened can be described very simply: the spectacularly overpriced armed services of the industrial world have passed their expiry date. They no longer yield military power commensurate with their overwhelming expense: quite the contrary, cheaper ways of fighting wars can now overwhelm them. And as history shows, this is something that happens routinely in the declining years of a civilisation.

The example I have in mind is the battle of Adrianople in 378, when seven Roman legions led by Valens, emperor of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, faced a somewhat smaller force of barbarians led by the Gothic king Fritigern. The Romans lost catastrophically — two-thirds of the Roman force was slaughtered on the battlefield and the rest fled. Valens was among the dead. Before Adrianople, there was still some hope that the Empire could recover from its 4th-century crisis; afterwards, the barbarians had the upper hand and kept it.

There has been a vast amount of speculation about what happened at Adrianople. None of it matters for our present purpose, however. The point that’s relevant is the crucial difference between the two armies that defined the consequences once one of them lost. The difference in question? The cost of fielding an army.

The late Roman military was a sprawling, top-heavy bureaucratic structure divided into many specialised units. Training, equipping, supplying and commanding the ordinary Roman legionary was a complex process demanding huge amounts of money and resources. Much of that cost came from the pervasive corruption and bureaucratisation of late Roman society, in which all economic activity was loaded to breaking point with fees and regulations, and a vast amount of graft also bled every economic sector white. But there was also the simple fact that a complex, specialised, and hierarchically structured army is always going to cost a lot.

The barbarian force, by contrast, wasn’t even an army. Instead, it comprised all the able-bodied men of a couple of Gothic tribes and a few other allied barbarian peoples. Every “soldier” provided his own weapons and armour, and had learned how to use them as a child. They were flexible and resilient precisely because it was unspecialised.

The Roman army was appallingly brittle by contrast. Until Adrianople, the tremendous costs of maintaining the military had been met by raising taxes to sky-high levels, But by 378, the tax burden in the empire was so crushing that economic activity was breaking down under the strain. Thus the destruction of two-thirds of Valens’s army, and an even larger fraction of its officers and staff, was a financial blow from which Rome never really recovered. The barbarians didn’t have that problem, because Fritigern didn’t have to raise money to train, equip, pay and manage his force — he just had to lead it to plunder and be reasonably successful as a general. This was well within his abilities, and equally within the reach of later barbarian kings. The fall of Rome followed in just under a century.

We haven’t yet had an equivalent of the battle of Adrianople. The fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East echoes the struggles of the decades before Adrianople, when Roman politicians and military officers could still convince themselves that the military machine they had inherited from their ancestors was still the most powerful in the world. The US military is in that condition now, lumbering around the planet with its aircraft carriers and high-tech weapons systems, flailing helplessly at drone strikes and trying to pretend that the carnage in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip hasn’t just shown that the entire American way of war is hopelessly obsolete.

There is, of course, an alternative to Adrianople. The United States could withdraw its troops from the 100-odd foreign countries where it has military bases, focus on defending its own borders, and retool its military to adapt to the ongoing revolution in military affairs. That would, among other things, save billions of dollars a year. Yet given the billions would no longer be flowing into the pockets of defence corporations, with a good bit sticking to various fingers on the way, such a change would sure be unpopular with a number of powerful individuals, and probably won’t get put into place until some ghastly military debacle or other forces it. Still, the option’s worth mentioning.

One way or another, however, over the next half century, the massive military forces and hugely expensive defence technologies that have ruled the world’s battlefields since 1939 will be replaced by leaner, less expensive, and less centralised forces. Then that process will go further — propelled forward by two principal compulsions.

The first of those forces is the economic impact of resource depletion. Today’s high-tech weapons systems require fantastically complex and precise inputs of energy and materials, many of which have to be sourced from abroad and then processed in extraordinarily complex ways. Consider the microprocessors that make an ordinary drone capable of doing its job. Silicon is one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust, but silicon pure enough to make into computer chips has to be refined at considerable cost, and then doped with monoatomic layers of rare-earth elements and etched in almost unimaginably fine patterns. Huge factories full of expensive gear, using gargantuan amounts of energy and an equally huge list of raw materials have to be built, powered and maintained so that microprocessors can be produced.

So complex a system won’t be sustainable indefinitely. More to the point, so complex a system won’t be affordable indefinitely. As easily accessible deposits of the raw materials get used up, the price of chips will rise. Rising energy costs will have the same effect, and as microprocessors get more expensive, the economies of scale that briefly made them cheap will work in reverse, and simpler technologies will outcompete them. If it costs less to hire a file clerk than it does to buy and operate a computer, most businesses will hire the file clerk — and as this same equation works through society as a whole, the economic basis for computer industries will shrivel away.

That’s one factor. The other, closely related to it, is the economic impact of population decline. Today, every continent but Africa is producing children at a rate too slow to sustain its current population, and African population curves are moving in the same direction. There’s still a little population increase in the pipeline, in the form of young people who haven’t yet reached reproductive age, but sometime in the next decade or two, the earth will reach its peak human population and begin to see sustained demographic contraction.

Next to nobody seems to have thought through what this implies. Economic growth depends ultimately on population growth; it’s because nobody alive today has ever experienced sustained demographic contraction that we all assume as a matter of course that businesses will increase their sales, real estate prices will go up, and investments will earn profits. In an era of population contraction, none of this is true. Once demographic decline sets in, each business will on average have fewer customers than the year before, each property will have fewer people to bid on it, each investment vehicle will have fewer people investing in it. Thus, the average business, the average asset, and the average investment vehicle will all lose money.

This is one of the unnoticed factors driving the decline of civilisations. If businesses, assets, and investments yield losses rather than profits, few people will be interested in owning them, and economic activity will contract even faster than the population. You can see this dynamic play out in the history of every falling civilisation. A radical simplification of the economy sets in. Market-based economies collapse and are replaced by customary economies, in which money drops out of use and the basis for economic activity is a handful of productive assets that meet real human needs: above all else, farmland capable of raising food crops.

All this makes a convoluted military establishment impossible to sustain. That’s why feudalism is the default setting for human society after the collapse of complex societies. In a feudal system, productive farmland is parcelled out among local warlords, who pass it on to their vassals in exchange for military service. It’s the same system Fritigern knew, adapted to the needs of a settled population: every able-bodied man in a feudal society is a warrior, and can expect to be called out to defend his village from the warriors of rival communities at any moment. It’s only when a feudal system becomes decadent that peasants no longer fight in the infantry.

Some similar system is likely to play a significant role in the deindustrial age. It won’t be identical to the feudal systems of the last 3,000 years, though, for a simple reason: those systems were all shaped profoundly by the revolution in military affairs that followed the domestication of the horse by Indo-European tribes on the sweeping plains where Russian and Ukrainian troops are currently doing battle. From that point on, the feudal aristocrat was a master of horses — on a chariot early on, before horses had been bred large enough to carry riders in battle, and mounted on horseback thereafter. That gave warlords immense advantages over the people they ruled, resulting in a deep schism dividing society into noble and peasant classes.

That age is over, because a different revolution in military affairs swept the planet in the 16th century. During this period, gunpowder became as overwhelming a force in military affairs as horses were, not least because an armoured warrior on horseback is dead meat in a pitched battle involving firearms; a spray of bullets fired by half-trained peasants can easily kill his horse and punch holes in his armour. That’s why cavalry after the 16th century ended up repurposed as a force for scouting and raiding, while infantry took over the hard work of winning pitched battles. It’s also why aristocrats turned into a disposable commodity in most societies.

Yes, archery can also limit the effectiveness of cavalry — the French found that out the hard way at Crecy and Agincourt — but it takes many years of practice to master the longbow, and even so, it’s not as lethal as a gun. An untrained recruit can learn to use a firearm effectively in a matter of weeks. Firearms are also no great challenge to make with hand tools; the famous Kentucky rifle of the early American frontier was made by hand. Doubtless famous gunsmiths in the deindustrial future will be just as legendary as famous swordsmiths in the past, but most guns in the future will be turned out by ordinary craftspeople, just as most swords were back in the day.

With this in mind, it’s not hard to glimpse the warriors of the deindustrial dark ages 400 years from now. They’ll be armed with guns, probably semiautomatic rifles like the ones carried in the two World Wars — and if they have any armour, it’ll be steel helmets. Some of them will ride horses, but most won’t, for the reasons just described. They’ll be a good deal less subservient to the local warlord than their equivalents 1,000 years previously, because of the equalising effect of firearms. But they’ll doubtless have some version of the classic feudal ethic of loyalty and courage to guide them in the rough-and-tumble of an age of chaos.

They may have some unexpected technologies to help them out. Shortwave radios aren’t hard to make by hand — there’s a whole subculture of amateur radio enthusiasts these days who make their own vacuum tubes from mason jars and the like — and having the ability to communicate at a distance is worth an extra army in wartime. It’s also far from impossible that ultralight aircraft made of wood and fabric, powered by alcohol-burning engines will be available in at least a few of the more prosperous areas for aerial scouting. (Larger and more complex aircraft will probably be off-limits for centuries due to hard limits on resources.)

Thus, I imagine an army on the march somewhere in the Ohio valley in 2400 or so, a long column of infantry with little detachments of cavalry scouting ahead and on the flanks, using bulky but functional radios to keep in touch with their commanders, while a couple of ultralights circle overhead to scout at a greater distance. There will doubtless be cannon drawn by horses in the column, too, and just possibly a few simple machine guns as well, but most of the fighting power will consist of young men shouldering rifles. Aside from a few bits of technology, it’s not that different from the armies that marched through that same region six centuries earlier.

That’s the army of a relatively large and stable dark age state, of course. Far more common will be smaller and poorer communities, in which warfare is carried out by relatively small groups of young men without the benefit of cavalry, canon or ultralight planes. In mountainous areas they’ll be all but unconquerable — firearms make guerrilla warfare far more powerful than other weapons systems — so we can expect the political structures of the deindustrial dark ages to feature relatively large states in the lowland river basins and small, defiantly independent communities up in the hills. It’s an old song, given new verses by gunpowder.

Naval power, however, is another matter. Wooden ships became instantly obsolete once explosive shells replaced solid shot in naval cannon, but steel armour in any quantity is only an option if you’ve got ample supplies of cheap coal to turn into coke; our descendants won’t have that. (For the same reason, they won’t have railroads, since you can’t make steel in sufficient volume for rails without coke, and we’re burning the last scraps of the necessary coal reserves right now.) Since shells aren’t difficult to make, and rockets with explosive warheads are even easier, naval flteets of any size may be a thing of the past until some other form of naval armour becomes possible. Piracy will doubtless flourish on the high seas of the deindustrial future, and it will be very hard for maritime nations to control it the way the British navy did.

And beyond the deindustrial dark ages? That’s impossible to predict, because the successor cultures that build on our ruins will have their own ideals, goals, and dreams, which will not be ours. They will favour some technologies and reject others for reasons we can’t anticipate and probably can’t even understand. Our civilisation invented clockwork and steam power and used them to reshape the planet, while the Roman world also invented both these things and did essentially nothing with them. Why? Because there is no one route to the future. Every civilisation follows its own path, and what we call “progress” is simply the temporary trajectory that our civilisation took in pursuit of its dreams.

That trajectory is winding up around us right now, having gone as far as it can. It’s a safe bet that future civilisations will choose their own paths instead. What goals they will seek, and how those will shape their ways of making war, we cannot know.


John Michael Greer is the author of over thirty books. He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.


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Flibberti Gibbet
Flibberti Gibbet
8 months ago

Ho hmm, this was a good read up to half way but then the thinking derailed.
Silicon chips due to become too expensive due to energy costs and rare earth material shortages! Economic expansion depends on population growth??
I will try to explore the second half of the essay tomorrow but I am increasingly getting the impression that Unherd authors are being allocated too many column inches that get filled with fanciful expanded theories way beyond the author’s core idea.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
8 months ago

“Economic expansion depends on population growth??” Haven’t you noticed that the economic elites in the West are allowing mass immigration in order to maintain or increase population?

Andrew Wise
Andrew Wise
8 months ago

Its a classic ponzi scheme – without improvements in productivity the only way to grow GDP is by having more people, who’s retirement will ultimately be funded by future generations who need ever more people to fund the scheme.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
8 months ago

The elites want a slave population. The productive middle class stands in their way.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
7 months ago

May I suggest Kenneth Minogues’s The Servile Mind? He explains this phenomenon brilliantly.

jane baker
jane baker
7 months ago

I’m guessing the right sort of population not just random people.

Peter B
Peter B
8 months ago

The bit about silicon chips is nonsense. He simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Another generalist out of his depth.
Creating the pure silicon ingots is not that expensive. It’s the processing equipment in the fabs (factories) that is expensive.
Wafer fabs producing the chips do not use the fantastic amounts of energy he claims.
Chips don’t need rare earth metals.
Drones don’t need advanced microprocessors. As per his earlier point – the whole point of drones is that they are cheap and don’t need super-advanced expensive technologies. He’s arguing against himself here.
Getting back to the military side. Modern militaries are not obsolete. The low cost, insurgent techniques he seems to think are the future can be adequate for a defensive operation or wearing down the patience and resources of an aggressor. But they are no solution if you need to invade or occupy a country. You need real armies for that.

John Tyler
John Tyler
8 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

I think he’s hoping countries disappear along with most of civilisation as we know it.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
8 months ago
Reply to  John Tyler

That is one way to achieve a borderless world I suppose.

Robin Whittle
Robin Whittle
8 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

Drones need 32 bit microprocessors (usually ARM CPUs or microcontrollers) and dozens of other chips, all from different companies, made in different fabs, with different processes. They are the product of multinational design and fabrication companies, with staff in many countries. Design in the USA, Israel, Singapore, Japan or the UK or wherever you can find bright, suitably trained, hardworking people. Fabricate in South Korea or Taiwan or the USA or Germany or Japan etc. where another team of very patient, very meticulous, but not so imaginative people run and maintain the extraordinary electro-optical and chemical gear which actually makes the chips. Production testing requires exotic equipment too.
Each fab costs billions of dollars and needs to be run by a very highly trained and capable workforce, in an environment of safety, economic and political stability, with good transport arrangements and global marketing.
This would become impossible due to social breakdown, religious fanatics, drug addicts and drug gangs long before we run out of energy, base metals and the more exotic elements and oil-based products which go into finished semiconductors, all other electronic components and fully assembled, tested, electronic circuit boards and pieces of equipment.
I would be very interested to see how Russia builds the electronics for its actual weapons (not just where it gets the CNC machines to make the metal bits). My guess is that Iran and Russian drones, missiles and weapons systems are full of Raspberry Pi (32 bit ARM) computer boards, which can be bought en-masse as consumer items in China or eBay or whatever in the West. Neither country has semiconductor fabs, or much of an electronic component industry. I am sure they can design and make PCBs. But all or almost all of the components and many whole sub-assemblies for all their drones surely come from the same factories everyone else in the world uses. Likewise their design software, since there are plenty of open source PCB and CAD design programs. This is not the case for semiconductor design, but Russia, Iran and North Korea don’t make semiconductors.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
8 months ago
Reply to  Robin Whittle

This is the real limitation for semiconductor manufacture and the only thing required to solve it is common sense and political will to develop those resources nationally and guard the technology from enemies. The US took far too long to do this thanks to the entrenched globalists profiting from the world as it was, but have started moving in the right direction with the CHIPS Act to develop semiconductor self-sufficiency. The US has tacitly set the limits of the globalist system it created, effectively attempting to prevent China from reaching parity. How well it’s working depends on who you ask, and it remains to be seen if America’s allies will continue to toe the line. I have no idea what Japan and the Netherlands were offered to get on board with the US China export ban or if fear of China was sufficient. Everybody recognizes at this point that access to the most advanced chips conveys significant economic and military advantages. We’re looking at the beginnings of a semiconductor arms race. The foundations of a post-globalist reality are already being quietly laid down in a way that the public and media simply haven’t yet caught up with.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
7 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

And in Afghanistan not even real armies, Russian, American or British did well; as we Brits should have known from our first attempts back in Queen Victoria’s time.

Flibberti Gibbet
Flibberti Gibbet
8 months ago

Part II.
“3000 years of feudalism”. Well I suppose when a writer in North America simplifies European history that is an understandable error.
“Explosive shells instantly made wooden warships obsolete.” The transition from the wooden wind powered battleship of the line to the Dreadnought took 60 years.
At the end of the day author’s central theory is sound. The world is entering a transitionary era and the west is likely to be the biggest looser. Twenty years ago when an Apache ground attack helicopter pilot eliminated Iraqi combatants observed through his night vision heads up display, he was using an immense technical advantage. Today a rebel drone looking to zap a NATO outpost might be running some AI object identification software downloaded from Github for free.
The critical issue we no face is how long do we have to wait for the western military leadership to comprehend the new reality and abandon their reckless attempts to provoke WWIII

Rob Griffin
Rob Griffin
8 months ago

I think his magic mushroom potion kicked in around the mention of archers & cavalry. I couldn’t make it any farther without psychedelics either.

D Glover
D Glover
8 months ago
Reply to  Rob Griffin

.

Alex Carnegie
Alex Carnegie
8 months ago
Reply to  Rob Griffin

I had a similar reaction.

The first half was very interesting, however, The lessons of the Ukraine and Gaza fighting do indeed suggest that at present land warfare is going through a phase of small squads with homemade drones rendering obsolete expensive tanks and other expensive kit – and strengthening defence more than offence.

But technology moves fast and within a few years we may be in yet another phase with different characteristics. Perhaps we will see vast coordinated and centralised – and possibly AI directed – networks of drones, mines and missiles displacing the current configuration. Naval warfare is probably heading that way already.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
7 months ago
Reply to  Alex Carnegie

I think he is conflating the idea of existential wars and the kind of low level policing type actions we invariably see these days. Obviously, one realises why the bigger, richer nations can’t just send in thousands of cruise missiles or whatever but extrapolating from a non globalised world of centuries ago into some steam punk concept applied to today’s ever more integrated world (whether we like it or not) seems, to use the great Philosopher football manager Peter Reid’s phrase about Arsenal in the 1990s ‘As weak as piss.’

Ron Kean
Ron Kean
8 months ago
Reply to  Rob Griffin

It was a little Mad Max to me after a while.

peter lucey
peter lucey
8 months ago
Reply to  Rob Griffin

I stopped at “and we’re burning the last scraps of the necessary coal reserves right now.”
??? The UK alone has cartloads of coal.

William Murphy
William Murphy
7 months ago
Reply to  peter lucey

According to Wiki we have 133 years of coal left at current rates of consumption. That is ignoring other ways of making steel and future scientific innovations.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
7 months ago
Reply to  peter lucey

Centuries worth of it. But never mind.

chris sullivan
chris sullivan
8 months ago
Reply to  Rob Griffin

MADE GOOD SENSE TO ME – and i have not had psychedelics for many years !

Alan Gore
Alan Gore
8 months ago
Reply to  Rob Griffin

After all, the Houthis’ $2,000 missiles have to be made in factories, and use silicon brains and refined metals of their own. The US is more capable of pivoting from expensive antimissiles to decentralized clouds of drones than the Houthis are of defeating said clouds of drones.

Meanwhile, Israel could destroy Hamas immediately by pumping fuel-air mixture into the tunnel system at as many entry points as it can find, then detonating it. This would light off all the munitions that Hamas has been buying over the years with our aid money. The secondary explosions alone would demolish every scrap of infrastructure in Gaza. Israel is holding off on doing so only while it still hopes it can rescue more of the hostages.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
7 months ago
Reply to  Rob Griffin

That’s one Netflix pitch I won’t be tuning into if it ever gets made.

T Bone
T Bone
8 months ago

Early on, I was thinking it was the most practical article ever written by a Druid. Then it turned into a Sci-Fi novel. Any elite Sci-Fi novel needs a time traveling hero to defeat the impenetrable army of darkness! 3/5 for creativity.

ChilblainEdwardOlmos
ChilblainEdwardOlmos
8 months ago

Cosplay “Druid” reveals prophecy. Ugh.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
8 months ago

Great stuff as usual John Michael Greer, speculative and outside the box. 

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
8 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Just the sort of thing I subscribe to UnHerd for.

Mark Melvin
Mark Melvin
7 months ago

Fully agree. Great stuff. Demographics is the biggest thing people do not talk about and the demographics particularly of the west today are bad and getting worse. This is civilisation changing. Luckily it works very slowly so we have time.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
8 months ago

This sounds so much like the backstory of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
”All hail the God-Emperor!”
While the scenes described in the article may seem implausible, we truly have no idea what the year 2,400 will look like. This scenario is as good as any other.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
8 months ago

Israel is moving slowly out of mercy, since it does not want to wreak a bloody slaughter amongst the Philistines. I can’t believe I just said that sentence. It sounds like it came from the Bible.

jane baker
jane baker
7 months ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

But The Yahoo identifies the Palestinians as Amalek,look it up in the Old Testament or just ask Richard Dawkins. It’s a case of telling you in plain sight and hearing without telling you.

Christopher Hickey
Christopher Hickey
8 months ago

“we’re burning the last scraps of the necessary coal reserves right now.”
This is pure balderdash. The EIA estimates coal reserves in the US would last for nearly 450 years. Even if that estimate was off by an order of magnitude, the author’s assertion would still be false.

Olivier Lefevre
Olivier Lefevre
8 months ago

Ordinary coal is abundant, esp. if you do not care about quality (e.g., lignite) but coking coal: the highest grade, is not and JMG pointed out without coking coal there is no metallurgy.

Christopher Hickey
Christopher Hickey
8 months ago

Excellent riposte. You’re right, I made the same mistake as so many do when speaking about oil, i.e. not paying attention to the molecular differences that make it more/less suitable for various applications. That being said, I still believe describing the current market as “the last scraps” is vastly overstated.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
8 months ago

The question is whether the “avowed Nazis” on Substack that The Atlantic worries about will be able to take down the FBI and its pals in AntiFa with drones and stuff. You never know.

Chris Maille
Chris Maille
8 months ago

In order to win a war, one needs to truly understand what war is actually about: the winner convinces the looser that accepting the winner’s conditions of surrender is better than continuing to fight. (von Clausewitz, ‘Vom Kriege’).
Not understanding this principle is exactly what has produced 80 years of suffering in the Palestinian situation. Sending humanitarian aid may alleviate immediate suffering, but it perpetuates a state where the Palestinians find it preferable to continue fighting rater than to surrender.
That’s where intelligence comes into play: find out under which conditions the opponent is willing to surrender, and subsequently determining whether oneself is willing to inflict enough damage to the opponent to meet his criteria for accepting defeat.
Nothing of that seems to happen both in Ukraine and the middle east, at least on the side of the west. That’s appalling.
Putin very clearly does understand this principle…

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
8 months ago
Reply to  Chris Maille

Much of the west’s failure in warfare since Vietnam is political, not military. It’s not so much a lack of military capability that holds us back but a lack of a willingness to use it to its fullest extent. Some of that is due to the nuclear threat from Russia/USSR, but a lot of it is just poor leadership and lack of foresight.

Chris Maille
Chris Maille
8 months ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

True. I listen to people like Douglas McGregor, Daniel Davis or Alexander Mercouris a lot these days, who also have said this in one form or another.
Then something extraordinary is currently happening: Tucker Carlson in Moscow interviewing Vladimir Putin. The entire planet will be watching. I am also curious how the western political establishment will react to it.

Kat L
Kat L
8 months ago
Reply to  Chris Maille

They are already calling him a tool of Putin…utterly predictable

jane baker
jane baker
7 months ago
Reply to  Chris Maille

The Palestinians who I am angry at seeing subjected to a genocide on our tvs,I don’t have a tv now but I’ve seen it in other people’s houses,at least the Nazis tried to keep it secret,now we all have to KNOW so we’re all complicit,the Palestinians are very stupid and have proved it over 80 years of rubbish negotiating,getting offered a poorer and worse deal every time. And when getting Gaza territory returned to them going on a blowing up spree of destruction. They needed to feel at home so they recreated an environment of rocks and rubble.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
8 months ago

Adrianople is much exaggerated. By 378 AD* Constantinople was by far the most important city in the Empire, and a mere 140 miles from the battlefield of Adrianople. Did it fall? NO! .**
Rome by contrast was an anachronism but did it fall? NO, not for another 32 years in fact.
32 years was plenty of time to grow another Army, in fact nearly two. Sadly this ‘army’ was again to be dissipated by internecine strife amongst the ‘Romans’. We have been warned.

(* For the fanatic 1131 AUC.)
(* it didn’t in fact fall for another 826 years!)

Dylan Blackhurst
Dylan Blackhurst
8 months ago

Okay. The post industrial armies sound a lot like the planet of the apes movies!

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
8 months ago

Where to begin. Well, let’s start with this. “Economic growth depends ultimately on population growth.. Once demographic decline sets in, each business will on average have fewer customers than the year before, each property will have fewer people to bid on it, each investment vehicle will have fewer people investing in it. Thus, the average business, the average asset, and the average investment vehicle will all lose money.”

The B___k Death of the 14th century caused a European demographic decline of at least 30% and perhaps 50%. This was a Europe before the age of exploration, where it was essentially its own little world. The population didn’t start recovering until the late 15th century.

We can safely say that aggregate (all added together) economic output collapsed, but why does this matter, and why do we care about economic output at all? Well, economies only exist to serve people and so we really only care about goods and services supplied per person. Money too is irrelevant, it is just a measure of goods and services and very a poor measure at that since it provides no constant measure at all.

So what happened during and after the demographic calamity of the b___k death? Goods and services per person increased slightly, living standards increased modestly thanks to general deflation. Serfdom was irreparably broken in many European societies due to the lack of serfs and abundant demand for paid labour. The nobility of Europe did not take too kindly to this. Only by extremely repressive measures by monarchs like Edward III was the social mobility of the peasantry suppressed and the existing economic status quo maintained. It was this suppression that caused the eventual economic stagnation, not the population fall.

Lets be clear, the 14th century population fall was a bad economic outcome for one group in society: the nobility. Edward III and his peers across Europe justified suppression of peasant material wealth as a Good Thing for the greater good to prevent a Godly doomsday that would wreck the climate with plagues and failed harvests. The nobility persuaded itself that it was balancing a self-evident natural order, keeping the peasants poor to stop them from being poor.

Today’s ultra wealthy at the WEF have exactly the same concerns and beliefs as their medieval forebearers, and for the same reasons. And they too are terrified of generalised deflation. The middle class population is peaking, and the wealthy economies of the West are facing absolute population declines. This *is* calamatous for the existing economic elite and radical controls are needed to preserve the existing economic order and wealth structure. It’s going to need a gargantuan greater good argument to justify the severe impositions needed to keep the economy inflated.

But the vast majority of us are not the economic elite. Like the peasantry of medieval Europe we ordinary people stand to gain from population decline and generalised deflation. For at its most simple level, wealth buys you space: larger airline sears, bigger gardens, less busy beaches. An industrial, automated economy with fewer people competing for material wealth and physical space means higher living standards for more people. We should welcome population decline. It is telling that the elite demand we fear it.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
8 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

The best we can hope for is BLACK DEATH II.

Flibberti Gibbet
Flibberti Gibbet
8 months ago

Bill Gates and Pfizer have a plan.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
8 months ago

Eat bugs is what I hear.

Caroline Ayers
Caroline Ayers
8 months ago
Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
8 months ago

That’s in the works. It’s been in the works for some time. The only holdup is the execution.

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
8 months ago

It’s not for want of effort…

Flibberti Gibbet
Flibberti Gibbet
8 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Indeed. Population contraction might end modern-day serfdom, namely life long renting and surviving in the Gig Economy.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
8 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Won’t Global Big Money Inc. simply hoover up (for example) residential housing stock, as it becomes cheaper due shrinking demand and then rent it back to what remains of us?

Flibberti Gibbet
Flibberti Gibbet
8 months ago

I doubt it why invest in a declining asset with a declining market? Many investment properties are owned by private investors who are themselves just 6 months away from financial difficulty if their property is empty.
Post the Black Death the English government tried to use legislation to force serfs to remail loyal to their local Lord but a fundamental economic imbalance could not be controlled.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
8 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Agreed. There’s a reason things cost so much more in the cities than in the rural countryside. My parents’ modest 200k dollar home built in the late 90’s would fetch multiple millions of dollars if it could be magically transported to Los Angeles or Chicago. This is also why elites love open borders and immigration. Gotta hold down those wages. The elites problem is they’ve made too many mistakes in too obvious a way and they’re now hated for one reason or another. They’ve triggered a backlash that spans the entire political spectrum. They’re holding onto the left for now, but that probably won’t last. If populist parties start winning big, the grassroots progressives will jettison the elites in order to broaden their appeal for the same reason the conservative right did. The elites have lost. They just don’t know it yet.

Catherine Farrar
Catherine Farrar
8 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

In the 14th century there wasn’t a large elderly population to support, however.

Jon Barrow
Jon Barrow
8 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

That decline is certainly not happening here in the UK, and there is no prospect of it unless we get very serious about massively reducing immigration.

A D Kent
A D Kent
8 months ago

Amusing and interesting article, especially regarding the potted historical analysis. The author should note though that there is now only one officially accepted lesson from history, one which renders all previous and subsequent lessons null and void. It is the one involving Neville Chamberlaine waving a piece of paper.  

jane baker
jane baker
7 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

That’s not so black and white simple either.

A D Kent
A D Kent
8 months ago

Quick military point – it’s not just drones that are proving to be ‘game-changing’ in Ukraine – it’s the hundreds of thousands of mines. These now have all sorts of devilish fuse mechanisms and can be laid remotely by shell, missile or drone, within minutes of a path being cleared.

Peter B
Peter B
8 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

Not sure there’s anything particularly new or game changing about mines.

A D Kent
A D Kent
8 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

it’s the fact that they can now rapidly be re-laid remotely that has made the difference. Also the mix of materials and sometimes networked triggering systems that can be activated by pressure, vibration, acoustically and all sorts of electromagnetic sigals make them very difficult to clear in the first place and almost impossible when under fire. You can’t just line-up behind a flail or plough anymore. The RF learned this in 2022 – the AFU re-learned if last summer, both at large cost.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
8 months ago

This is a fun article. In fairness , any exploration of the future is bound to be incorrect. There are a few clangers here, the biggest of which is ” resouce depletion”. The earth is full of raw materials and as prices rise, it becomes economic to mine the slightly more expensive stuff and supply increases. The point on population is clumsy. Real estate, gov bonds and stocks will all collapse soonish anyway , probably against bitcoin but definately in real terms as money continues to lose its value. The big danger really with falling population is falling ingenuity in an ageing population. The West ( and china, japan, Russia) will almost certainly decline against India and Africa as the 22 year old brain is more creative and ambitious than the 44 year old brain.
The best point here is the brittleness of the conventional army and our industrial civilisation and the possibility of global collapse. But it wont happen because of ” resource depletion”. It could happen for other reasons however

John Tyler
John Tyler
8 months ago

In a hundred years time we’ll either laugh condescendingly or nod our heads knowingly.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
8 months ago
Reply to  John Tyler

I’d say you’re about 99 years over the mark.

George Locke
George Locke
8 months ago

Just like Greer’s taken a kg of magic mushrooms, I read this article with a kg of salt. Nothing ages worse than a prediction of the future, especially predictions about ‘decline’ and ‘rebirth’ from men who are part of strange religious orders. It was a rather interesting article up until the 7th to last paragraph – then it just read like a strange fantasy of his, rather than a serious prediction of the future.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
8 months ago
Reply to  George Locke

Dunno. The walking heart attack known as Alex Jones has been right about a lot of stuff I previously laughed at. That scares the sh*t out of me.

George Locke
George Locke
7 months ago

Greer ain’t no Alex Jones.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
8 months ago

An enjoyable read.

Caroline Ayers
Caroline Ayers
8 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Fascinating article and fascinating comments. Clearly some of what Greer says everyone agrees with. I found it a perpective refreshing read. Made me think.

R S Foster
R S Foster
8 months ago

…the West chooses to hold the line rather than win because we are extremely squeamish about civilian casualties and massive destruction. When it gets existential, we won’t be…we will “…make a desert and call it peace”…as the US readily could with Yemen, by flattening everything and killing everyone there.

In fact, if they and their Allies did that and encouraged the Israelis to do the same in Gaza…the long term cost in “innocent” lives might well be less.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
8 months ago

The United States could withdraw its troops from the 100-odd foreign countries where it has military bases, focus on defending its own borders, and retool its military to adapt to the ongoing revolution in military affairs. 
I among several Americans in agreement with this line. But understand – this is not a solution, it’s a tradeoff. The countries that have depended on US protection to the point of taking it for granted will now have to fund their own defense. NATO, by definition in this scenario, goes away, which is just as well as its original purpose is no more. The impact of our far-too-many posts and bases on local economies will also go away.
Relocating some of these troops along the southern border is a great idea. Want to see development occur? Plop a federal installation onto a piece of land somewhere and watch a town spring up around it. As a bonus, this would stop the flow of illegals that threatens to drown society. This plan, however, is unlikely because too many of our overlords are invested in the continued trafficking of illegals and drugs. There is no other explanation for their ignoring the border for years and only now pretending that it’s an issue.
It’s obvious they’re not serious about addressing it just by looking at the ridiculous bill that’s been proposed, the one that allows 5K illegals to enter every day before govt feels compelled to respond. But that aside, I endorse our resignation from being the world’s cop. If people want to kill each other, let them so long as those attacks do not involve us or our interests. Part of me wants to add “our allies” to that group but you can’t have it both ways.
The point about ‘retooling’ the American military is on point. It has become a hollowed out social petri dish that is still fighting the Cold War. Those days are done. The nature of warfare has changed and the nation has failed to adapt. Military leadership has focused more on the boogeyman of white supremacy than on readiness. It has created the conditions in which recruiting targets go unmet, meaning standards have to be lowered further, which amounts to a jobs program rather than a defense force. It’s been a good run. I hope the people who slept peacefully under the blanket of freedom that was provided appreciate it. Either way, good luck on your next steps and the same wish as we embark on ours.

Brian Lemon
Brian Lemon
8 months ago

Applying the lessons of ancient history to current and future events has its limits. Those limits have been vastly exceeded here.

Nanda Kishor das
Nanda Kishor das
8 months ago

Greer’s writing is so much better when he stays away from matters of the spirit, where he is clearly beyond his depth. This, on the other hand, is clever, well informed and imaginative.

Russell Sharpe
Russell Sharpe
8 months ago

The author’s killer historical parallel around which he builds his essay, the debacle of the Battle of Adrianople in 378, which the author says ensured that the Roman Empire never recovered from its 4th century crisis, is rather undermined when one recalls that it was it was the Eastern Roman Empire which lost that battle, and which then recovered well enough to utterly destroy the Goths in Italy two centuries later, dominate the East Mediterranean for several centuries more, and sustain itself in existence for more than a millenium. It was the Western Empire which folded within a century of Adrianople, a battle it had of course nothing to do with.

Ron Kean
Ron Kean
8 months ago

It’s not the dog in the fight. It’s the fight in the dog. When a military is being judged online all over the world it’s understandable to use caution so as not to offend the sensibilities of armchair military critics. When the world wide web is flooded with pictures of little children with blood on their faces it might make most people in the sensible western world pause.
Where are the good old days of bombing Tokyo, Berlin or Dresden? It doesn’t have to be atomic to kill enough of the enemy to make him surrender. Israel is close to flattening Gaza but somebody’s sending a hundred trucks every week or two to give the enemy the luxury of succor.
Many in Israel would like to do enough damage to anybody that moves if it would help bring back the hostages and destroy the whole Hamas movement. It’s not the weapons. It’s the will to use them fully.

Rafi Stern
Rafi Stern
8 months ago

Correct about the Houthi group, totally off mark as far as Gaza is concerned and I think also so with regards to Ukraine.
If you were to argue that the Gazan incursion of 7th October had outwitted Israel who put all their bets on their enormously expensive high-tech fence, then yes I would agree with you. They proved again that some guys in white Toyota pick-up trucks can swiftly overpower state of the art Western defenses, then yes. If you were to say that Gazan cheap knock-off missiles were out-pricing Israel’s ingenious Iron-Dome system which can blast home made missiles that cost just tens of dollars out of the sky at a cost of 10s of thousands a dollars a pop (until the promised introduction of laser Iron-Beam system which will level the playing field vis-a-vis marginal cost of use), then yes.
However the choice of Gaza’s hugely expensive tunnel network built with billions of dollars of Western humanitarian aid money and Qatari free cash, is not a good example of the success of small-budget asymmetric warfare. Israel has developed strategies to overcome the threat of the tunnels and is clearing and destroying them at a rate never imagined previously. Hamas thought that the tunnel network would be impenetrable and that Israel would fear entering it, but Israel has shown just the opposite using lots of high-tech kit and trained soldiers. So tunnels was a bad example and shows that the writer doesn’t really know what is going on in Gaza at all.
Over half the Hamas fighting force has been destroyed or put out of action, their command structures are inoperative and they have lost all their ground (and underground). They still hold 140 Israelis hostage and they are still negotiating as if they have the upper hand to dictate the terms, but they are well on the way to defeat.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
8 months ago

An interesting article. The author makes a decent case and there are enough parallels to acknowledge the possibility that the factors mentioned lead to some sort of second dark age, but on the other hand, the author makes a lot of assumptions to dismiss alternative possibilities.
First, the author assumes that what we’ve seen in Ukraine and Gaza is the limits of military capability. It isn’t. There hasn’t been a ‘total war’ fought by a western power since 1945. We can’t know what a whole of civilization level of warfare would look like now because we haven’t seen it. These regional wars are fought with a mind to political and economic limits that the author fails to consider. Some of the inability to eliminate resistance in places like Yemen and Gaza has little to do with military ability and everything to do with domestic politics and media. When the horrors of war can be broadcast back home by anybody with a phone, it makes war harder to sustain politically. If the west used it’s full military might without so much regard for collateral damage or civilian casualties, I suspect a very different picture would emerge. On a second note, I think he overstates the case for a revolution in military tactics. The machine gun was a simple technical advance that resulted in the bloody grinder that was WWI, but by the end of the war militaries had adjusted. The tank was basically invented to counter the machine gun nests that had proved all but impenetrable in WWI. I can easily imagine some weapon system attached to tanks or carried by individual soldiers that destroys drones. The Pentagon is probably already on the task.
My next issue is that the fall of the Roman Empire was complex and historians still debate the many reasons. The author presents one theory on the fall of Rome as fact when historians don’t agree. As per usual with modern thinkers, the author seems to boil everything down to economics, citing the expense of Rome’s military and the high taxation rate required to sustain it, but economics isn’t the sole determinant modern dogma would have us believe. Political, social, and cultural factors also play a role. Rome was, by that point, held together by the military and little else. The US is not quite that far gone. In another half century perhaps after an ineffective federal government has ceded authority to the states and been reduced de facto to a manager of the currency and the military, the analogy might fit better.
From that point the author goes pretty far afield to paint a dystopian picture. The fact is we have a decent idea what a society experiencing population decline looks like. Japan’s low fertility and low immigration has resulted in a consistent decline for a couple of decades now. They have problems but one disembarking from a plane in Tokyo would probably not think ‘dark age’ or even ‘civilization in decline’. Would a universal population decline look different? Maybe, and maybe not. Nobody really knows, and that’s the point. Even historical examples aren’t perfectly comparable because of differences in technology, culture, etc.
The author also makes a bunch of assumptions about resource depletion that we’ve all heard before. Yes, it’s possible to run out of fossil fuels. People were terrified of that back in the 70’s but technology advanced and they found more. Who’s to say in a hundred more years we won’t be drilling in the middle of the Atlantic, pulling hydrogen out of water, manufacturing methane (natural gas) through some biological process, or building fusion power plants? I don’t know which way technology will turn, and neither does this author. Assuming stasis though is usually a bad bet. Further, a significant majority of the world’s fossil fuels are used not for generating electricity, but for transportation. Telecommunications will save energy by several orders of magnitude, if human behavior ever catches up with it. We could also save on transportation by distributing manufacturing more evenly, making things close to either where the materials to make them come from or where they’ll be sold. Right now we have a system where raw materials are shipped to China to be made into things that are then sent all the way back to be sold. Globalism may be efficient in terms of profit. I question whether it is efficient in terms of resource usage.
Overall, I would say that a second dark age is a non-zero possibility. I just don’t think its the only possibility or even the likeliest. The author’s gravest error is his basically assuming that technology and tactics won’t solve any of these problems in any satisfactory way. I’ll grant the possibility, but not the inevitability. Instead of ‘barbarism’, the future I see is one of localization, nationalism, decentralization, and technological adaptation.

Carl Valentine
Carl Valentine
8 months ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

That is a really good post Steve, a lot of interesting points, where do we subscribe?!

Rafi Stern
Rafi Stern
8 months ago

The issue of demographic decline and economic contraction is an important one, but all the talk of feudal soldiers with horses and homemade rifles rather obscures the real points.

Jae
Jae
8 months ago

OK, Unherd, we don’t have the attention span of a gnat on here, but we also don’t need to be stultified. Too long articles don’t equal greater intellect.

Plus the photo of the author in his garb had me taking him less seriously. A Druid head honcho in weirdy clothes, what? And we laugh at the Masons?

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
8 months ago

Overall, an enjoyable read, but some historical correctives:
The Battle of Adrianople was devastating and may have been a harbinger of the demise of the Roman Empire … of the WEST. The Roman Empire of the East, i.e. Byzantium, weathered the 4th and 5th centuries in fine fettle, as a highly centralised state with a very sophisticated, centrally financed, and devastatingly effective army. Remember the in Ukraine as well, Ukraine is losing against such a highly-organised army. The US is militarily fragile not because its armed forces are centrally organised, but because they chose to build their military around colonial adventures and punitive expeditions, not peer competitor wars.
Also, Fritigern’s warriors were not feudal tenants; the Goths at the time were on the move, not based on land tenure. Feudal tenure as a concept was a result of the upheavals of the “Migration Period”, not its driver.
I could expatiate at length about the mounted nobleman of the High Middle Ages – suffice it to say that the militarily very powerful Northern Italian city-states, as well as later e.g. the Swiss, the Scots, or the Hussites, did not depend on a nobility, mounted or otherwise. Again, very complex.
As for economic expansion, two critiques: First of all, schoolbook economic expansion is related to volume and speed of circulation of money; growth in population will increase volume of money in circulation, all other things being equal. But: It is not the only dynamic that will lead to expansion, and population increase will not lead to economic expansion if impoverishment outpaces population growth, as it is currently doing in the “rich” economies (long story, and thanks to neoliberalism and financialisation). Also it is our choice to so define economic expansion; we can easily define a different metric, a metric more related human happiness.

David Butler
David Butler
8 months ago

It’s long past time to correct the narrative on economic growth. GDP per capita is the measurement that truly matters, not total GDP. Our economy has been a Ponzi scheme for years and the house of cards will collapse as all Ponzi schemes do.

The global population didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804, having taken 200 to 300 thousand years to do so. It only took another 123 years to double to 2 billion. In 2022, only 95 years after that, we reached 8 billion.

Virtually all of the world’s major problems can be attributed to overpopulation. If, as and when the population peaks and begins to decline, this will not be a catastrophe. It will be reason for hope.

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
8 months ago
Reply to  David Butler

I agree that the demographic evolution is the best indicator for hope rather than a problem. The two most consistent and reliable brakes on runaway population growth have been rising living standards and female empowerment, so the inversion of the population growth rates is a ringing testament to civilisational success.

Kat L
Kat L
8 months ago
Reply to  David Butler

You are not seeing the threat, not all populations will decline at the same rate. Women who don’t birth enough doctors policemen or soldiers will be reaping the benefit of others conquering their nations. Also the author doesn’t address the cultural impact of mass migration on all of it.

B Davis
B Davis
8 months ago

A much more entertaining version of this essay can be found in Poul Anderson’s 1960 work, The High Crusade:
“It is 1345, and in the English town of Ansby (in northeastern Lincolnshire), Sir Roger, Baron de Tourneville, is recruiting a military force to assist king Edward III in the Hundred Years’ War against France. Suddenly, an enormous silver spacecraft lands outside the town. It is a scouting craft for the Wersgorix Empire, a brutal dominion light years from our solar system. The Wersgorix hope to take over Earth and are testing the feasibility of colonization. However, the aliens, having forgotten hand-to-hand combat since it was made obsolete by their advanced technology, are caught off-guard by the angered Englishmen, who mistake the craft for a French trick. The villagers and soldiers in Ansby storm the craft and kill all but one Wersgor, Branithar.
Sir Roger formulates a plan that with the captured ship, he can take the entire village to France to win the war, and then liberate the Holy Land. The townspeople, with all of their belongings, board the ship at the baron’s instruction, and prepare to take off. The people of Ansby are mystified at the advanced technology aboard the ship, which they come to call the Crusader. Being unable to pilot the Crusader Sir Roger directs the surly Branithar to pilot them to France. Instead, the alien wrecks the baron’s plan by throwing the Crusader into autopilot on course to Tharixan, another Wersgor colony.”
Great little story; lots of fun; highly recommended.

Mike MacCormack
Mike MacCormack
7 months ago

Nothing new here, he’s quite right – empires always grow to the point where it costs more to maintain/defend them than they can afford, either in taxes raised or plunder looted. The only major civilisation that realised this in the past was the Chinese in the 14th century – they turned their backs on the rest of the world and burnt their ocean going fleets, it became a capital offense to build a boat with more than one mast. As a rule of thumb each successive world power reaches this point of military overstretch in about half the time that the one before did, the rapidly collapsing Americans are the new record holders. As for his vision of post apocalyptic civilisations making flying machines out of household bits and bobs, I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Good read though.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
7 months ago

I wonder if the author has read Joseph Tainter’s, “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”

jane baker
jane baker
7 months ago

I’m not an expert on military tactics or wartime economics,in fact I know nothing and don’t really want to find out but I learned at that time when Mr Prizhogin marched on Moscow,that much of the conflict around the world is being carried out on behalf of first world countries with regular paid armies by groups of mercenary soldiers under a leader,often the leader is colourful and charismatic,as is often the way. These war lord led groups are often highly professional (ex regular military), competent,au fait with tech and effective but they operate much as dark age warlords did.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
6 months ago

“Instead, their network of tunnels allows Hamas forces to pop up, ambush Israeli detachments, and vanish again.” 
Yes, its very convenient using your civilians as meat shields. It achieves two ends, tactical advantage and excellent propaganda potentials.
No drawbacks!
As to, large militaries being obsolete. I dont think your examples say what you think they do. The Ukraine military is 900k+ and they want to grow it. And the US is pushing for NATO to get to 2% GDP spending.
And this time convincingly.

As to the edifice the US military has become. Its a tool meant to project power and authority and win large battles. Unfortunately, the US is also adapting alot of covert mechanisms. Obamas drone assassination’s are obviously on your checkmark list.
I think such things sap the legitimization out of united actions.
Its always been more expensive to protect something then to destroy it. You just have to make sure those paying the price feel it is worth it.