31–40 of 41 posts
the first two parts of this blog post series absolutely blew my mind and changed how I think about an army in the real world. Can't wait to read this post.
The "tyranny of the wagon equation" is so good.
Interesting, although having most stuff in miles is not helping me. I don't understand why he keep making "what if we double the size of the army" explorations. Isn't his 20k+ army already big enough ? And if it is just to say we double everything (food, etc), well I can do the maths myself. It is also repetitive.
Amazing work from Bret as usual, but very sad that this kind of popular/actually useful history is completely unrewarded in academia. This is far more valuable than whatever top university press book most historians write.
This has been one of my favourite of his series. I've been thinking about making a game with some of my friends to model the complexity of moving an army around.
Interesting, although having most stuff in miles is not helping me. I don't understand why he keep making "what if we double the size of the army" explorations. Isn't his 20k+ army already big enough ? And if it is just to say we double everything (food, etc), well I can do the maths myself. It is also repetitive.
But from Devereaux's studies on logistics, it seems that the premodern empires, after reaching a certain size, were "almost equal" when it came to military capability, and a lot of the (dis)advantages were on the quality side, such as good maneuvering and an ability to join two armies at precisely the same time.
It surely explains why the Romans never managed to crush the Persians, even though the Roman empire had a lot more resources to draw from. The logistics of running a really massive campaign against the East were too daunting.
Have enjoyed this series a lot. His whole blog is great and you can easily spend hours reading through his lengthy, well-researched posts if you have an interest in premodern military history or topics that brush up against it (i.e. strategy video games, fantasy literature, etc).
Absolutely, I was so proud of my Google skills for finding this blog three weeks ago, and now it's on top of Hackernews. The series about the decline of the Roman empire is amazing.