School of War - Ep 59: James Lacey on Roman Strategy

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

James Lacey, the Major General Matthew C. Horner Chair of War Studies at Marine Corps University and author of Rome: Strategy of Empire, joins the show to discuss the grand strategy of the Roman Empire. ▪️ Times  • 01:33 Introduction • 01:59 A lover of history • 05:12 The “Plato to NATO” historian  • 08:40 Edward Luttwak  • 13:20 The Romans “obviously had a strategy” • 21:02 Speaking from historical silence • 26:27 The Republic vs the Empire   • 32:50 Cost benefit analysis in Rome • 35:57 Three moments of “muscle change”  • 41:33 Unable to adapt militarily   • 46:55 Lessons for America

Today, we are going back to ancient history. We're going to talk about the deep connections between high politics, military strategy, and economics. The story of the Roman Republic's approach to strategy was one of expansion, rapacious expansion. New additions to the territory under the Republic's control needed to generate revenue that offset their costs. The story of the Roman Empire strategy, on the other hand, was one of maintenance. How could this vast enterprise now under monarchic control be maintained?

And most importantly, how could it be kept profitable for its masters? It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm joined today by Dr. James G. Lacey, who serves as professor and course director for war policy and strategy as well as political economy at the Marine Corps War College. He's the Marine Corps University's Major General Matthew Seat-C. Corner Chair of War Studies. and he's the author of numerous books, most recently Rome, Strategy of Empire. James, thanks so much for joining the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. Before we get into your book and the subject, I just wanted to ask you maybe to tell us

a little bit about yourself. I obviously gave the top lines of the bio there, but you've had a long and interesting career to include time in uniform, time as a journalist. Tell us a bit about yourself. Real wasn't expecting that question. Every time I give my short resume, it just sounds like I can't. can't keep a job. I started out, you know, I've always been a lover of history, so I've, I started substantial readings when I was young and never ended, but professionally wise, I was a

army infantry officer on active duty for a dozen years, and then I retired out of the reserves. I worked a number of operations jobs on Wall Street. My last office was on the 8th Second Florida World Trade Center, and I went home at the end of the event of the day. in 9-11 and said, you know, I think I'm going to go in a different direction, started writing, got a column in a New York Post, a New York Sun following week. Then, Time Magazine offered me a job, made me an embedded journalist for the invasion of Iraq. I embedded back into a company. I bet brigade that I'd been a company commander years before.

So that was an interesting arrangement. The brigade commander was actually a company commander with me at the same time. And then I went to the Institute of Defense Analysis for seven years. got my PhD on military history, switched from there to Marine Corps University. And I'm currently been there about a dozen years and been the chair of war studies, you want to chair of war studies and writing books. That's the quick summary. And there's some interpretations in between. It is quite the journey. Tell us actually a second sort of related question. I feel like there's any number of listeners who are going to hear the phrase Marine Corps University

and thinks it sounds a little odd. Like, what is the Marine Corps University? What is its place in the sort of ornamental professional military education? All the military, all the militaries have a massive professional military education program. And that starts with training and then it goes into education really at the command staff level. And the Command Staff College, which is part of Marine Corps University, has a few hundred students each year. And it gives an accredited master's degree. And then they go back out to the fleet.

Hopefully some of that knowledge has put to good use. A certain percentage of them will come to the War College. And this is the Marine, the Army, and Navy War College. That's where I actually teach. And that's where they're supposed to learn the higher levels of strategy and how to think about the context of war, as opposed to how to do your day-to-day job better. And that also gives an accredited master's degree.

So it's an interest in asylum. What makes it different from other programs where you can get degrees in international relations and things like that? Is it a high percentage of my students are going to be general offices? When you get somebody in international relations, they may or may not rise to a level where they're going to be using that for decision-making purposes. An incredibly high percentage of the people I teach go on to be generals, congressmen, senators.

The impact of the war college is far beyond. and they, all the one college is far beyond the other programs that are probably more famous. Yeah. And so given then the sort of the weight of your work and its importance, why Rome? You've written about any number of subjects. What's the reason for this one? It's, I call myself a plato or a NATO historian and there's a military historian. And I think the, I think the system is running out of those as we'd become more and more hyper-specialized. So I have consistently tried to writing different areas from Greece, Rome. You know, my previous book before this was World War II.

I've done a couple of volumes that stretched across the time span on battles, campaigns, generals. I've always wanted to do this as a passion project ever since I ran Lou Wach's Grand Strategy to Roman Empire. I have another take on that. Not necessarily. He has the wrong take. I don't think he does. Just think he left out a lot of stuff. And there's been a tremendous amount of historical revision or knowledge in the last 40 years, 45 years since Lutwock's book came out. So I wanted to, yeah, it's just something I want to address. Now it's done. I'm actually going to move on from here. I've got another book to deliver. It's my first non-military history book, 33. AD, year God died. What was the big picture, the Yerda G? They crucified Jesus. A little bit different take from all the thousands of books on the historical Jesus, which are all focused precisely on Himman and Palestine. There was a Roman Empire to contend with. So it's building on this, and then I'm probably going to go back to World War II and looking at it, and then a lot of

looking at where future wars going to look like. So, you know, it's played on a NATO story. I don't want to get locked down. It also means I have to look at things from a different perspective. So when you talk about Rome strategy of empire, and as I lay out in my introduction, I am building on the work of great Roman historians. And I list them in there. I don't want to list them here because I'll be afraid to miss somebody.

I'm not debating there. This fundamental historical work, which is absolutely awesome. What I'm doing is saying, let's look at this from the point of view. as a strategist or as a military historian or somebody with military experience, some of what you historians have put out there in your interpretations just cannot be correct. Let me fix those interpretations for you. But without the fundamental, the foundational work these historians have done, particularly in the last 30, 40 years, David Potter, Chris Wickham,

Peter Heber, I would have had nothing to work with. So you raised Ever Lookback, and I wanted to ask. ask you about him, some of our listeners will know that I think, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think the first book to deal squarely with this subject, that is to say, the strategy of Rome or the grand strategy of Rome was written by Lovac, as you say, about 40 years ago, grand strategy of the Roman Empire. And, you know, there's nothing controversial in how you just described, you know, contributing another book. I mean, it's been 40 years. There's more information. There's new information. People think about things differently. There's nothing necessarily

strange at all. It's even normal to contribute with a new book on the same subject after that kind of passage of time. But you did and you published the book and then Mr. Lippec wrote a kind of sidewinding attack on the book and the pages of the Washington Free Beacon. You had a little response to that. I just wanted to ask you about that. What was behind all that? What was behind it was easy. For 40 years, Luke walks books, but I'm under attack by a large number, almost all of the Roman historians and said he absolutely got this wrong. Now, having said that, I think there's a large group today that said, you know, he didn't get it all wrong. He's got an interpretation we have to take account of. But for 40 years, there's been numerous books,

numerous works, magazine articles, the Cambridge ancient history volumes specifically laid out. Here's what the Romans could do strategy-wise. Here's what they can. And without mention in his name, It's a direct assault on Luke Walk's work saying everything he wrote is absolutely wrong. So there's a man who has, it was his first book, I'm almost positive, and it was his PhD thesis. And he put it out there. And he hit a critical topic that Roman historians had never wrote about before and never talked about or never fought on. I think there's a little bit embarrassment on there as an outsider. And by the way, I'm an outsider.

and I'm hoping to get attacked as much as Lou Walk was because, you know, fighting, that kind of fight sells a lot of books. The worst thing that could happen is they ignore my book, and I'm like, but I think he's just gotten so used to his book being attacked. When he saw another book out on Roman strategy or a first book really since his 40, you know, 40 years ago, he just assumed he was going to be attacked. And he put out this review, which has, if you read, it says absolutely nothing about my book in there. It seems like he looked at the title and then looked at the index and then said, this is another book attacking me. I'm the first book, first thing that I know of in decades that has actually supported his major contentions. I'm supposed to debate him soon. And I'm like, what are you going to debate me on?

I backed up your main points. I'm the only one who did it. And I present a lot. You know, he put out his points. I'm presenting the evidence for it. You know, some of the mistakes, not mistakes that he made was he wrote in the language of strategists with perclusive defensive strategies and things along that, which, yeah, that's a specialized language that shouldn't be moved into the academic world. Then I'm expanding on what Lutwark did. You know, you can leave Lutwark, but it's a military analysis of strategy.

If he's going to actually write grand strategy, he's got to put diplomacy in there, it's got to put the economics of this. He's got to put the political state of the empire of certain times, a total neglect of naval power. None of that makes sense Luke's work. So even as I assume, Luke got the foundational idea right, I've just added to that and taken it fervid because he ends at the third century crisis. Where a Roman empire still had another 150 plus years left to go in it. And, you know, you lose Diocletian, you lose Constantine, you lose, why did the Roman Empire? or even fall, doesn't make it into his book. So I've added all of that. Got it. My reply in the Fried Beacon, that was basically, this is the first time I've ever been

reviewed by In Wellfa, who obviously did not read my book. The knowing book reviewers, as I do, I feel like obviously is doing a lot of work in that sentence. But I take your point. I take your point. Well, we can use this then to kind of transition into substance. So I read the look back book many, many years ago and was fascinated by it. And I think I was a young officer at the time, actually. And among his big contentions, right, that was then subsequently attacked was a sort of simple, straightforward one, which I take you to agree with it. But I'm curious to know what the nuances are here, that the Romans did, in fact, have a grand strategy, right? And that this is something that critics attack, that we are

kind of inaccuristically, we being the modern, modern analysts are inaccuristically imposing back things that we are familiar with in terms of the state craft of our modern days where we have, you know, a kind of multi-stage, multi-layered strategic process that, you know, there's a military defense strategy nested within a national strategy and so forth and so on. And we're assuming that the Romans, or we are going and looking for and finding indications that Romans had the same thing. But really, it's just not the case. They just didn't think that way. They didn't have the maps to think that way. They didn't have the idea of borders to think that way. no record of them debating strategy in the ways that we debate strategy. And I take it to you,

you reject that. And also, as you point out, you're not necessarily in a disagreement with Lutvac. Lvac rejected that. Right. I think Lutvac was the first one to bring everyone's attention to the fact that there was a strategy. And then those things that you listed there, that they didn't have the maps, they couldn't think of strategic terms, that's the counterattack. and it was some of the biggest names in the Roman history field. I don't want to say them right now because many have passed on, and it just doesn't seem right. But they got it wrong.

And there was a professor Wheeler who wrote two articles in Journal and Military, cited military history, journal military history magazine soon after Luke Walk's work came out. And I'm going to paraphrase him. we have not been able to find in Rome this, this, this, this, the, that, what you're talking about, that they had a Roman national strategy and it was nested into blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way down. But the fact, to say that they don't have a, couldn't have a strategy at all means that, and I'm paraphrasing this a bit, but, you know, for 500 years Rome spent two-thirds of its national wealth,

the empire as well for its tax revenues to build thousands of miles of roads for military purposes, 3,000 miles of frontier fortifications, maintained 30 plus legions of strength of 400 to 500,000 men, a similar number of exorries, two major fleets to the Mediterranean, and nobody once ever stopped and said, hey, why are we doing this? They obviously had a strategy. But I go back and I'm looking at the writings of Aristotle, and I'm seeing here's what a rule should know and think about, and it literally spells out ends ways and means, which is how we think of strategy today.

To assume in the process between Aristotle's death and the Romans taken over, they lost that type of thinking is ridiculous, especially since the Romans spent a ton of their time reading the Greek works and that would have read this Aristotle's thing. Could they do maps? Yes. Now, let's talk about what you actually need for strategy. Susan Matern came out with a book, Rome and its enemies, which laid out. The Romans didn't have maps. They had itineraries. I would argue that they had certain maps, but they didn't have the kind of geographical

understanding of Europe we had. But they had a understanding that was perfect for strategic thinking. And it's, it's, these itineraries are maps. There's a couple still an extent, the Antonine itinerary and the pewter, and I'm sure I pronounce that wrong, itinerary, which are highly graphical. And let's say you're looking at Rivetta on that map and you want to get to Colon. It has all the towns in between, how many days march it is from each town along that route. And it has that for the entire Roman Empire.

So what you have is, if you're a Roman emperor and the southern Danube, Burma, East and Danube Moesia, is being invaded by Goths, and you need to move legions from Rome. You could pick up an itinerary or legions from the Rhine frontier. You could pick up an itinerary and say, hey, I want to get from here to here. That's going to watch me for these ten cities. I'm going to have to make stops at each of these locations, and here's how many days march it could be. The itinerary tells you everything you need to know. The geography underneath it is of zero importance when you're doing strategic planning. This is literally how we do strategic planning today.

If the United States hopefully won't do this, but it gets involved in the Ukraine war, our plan is going to look at, I'm going to allow the ship at Savannah. With half the ferret ID and several ships, I know we're going to move them. All I care about is what's the next stop? It's Rotterdam or one of the big ports along the northern European coast. And then all I care about is the getting them on trains and how many train stops between the port and the where I'm going to mobilize for the fight. Then I need a tactical map, which the Romans have plenty of those.

They've had reconnaissance parties going out in Jerusalem. But all of that geography between the United States and the final rail stop, we're going to reorganize the forces for the fight, is of zero importance. When our military strategy today is putting together a plan, he doesn't need a map. He needs to collect the nodes and the hubs, you know, hubs nodes. It's a nodal map. Where am I going to land? This is exactly what the Romans had.

Did they have an idea of borders? Of course they did, or else all those lines. the legions that lined up on the Rhine and the Danube might as well, could have just as easily have lined up in the Riviera and sun themselves. If they didn't know borders, why do they build 3,000 miles of frontier fortifications? Now, other historians come in and say, you know, it really wasn't a border. It was a zone. It was a zone. I'll give you that. All right, it's a zone. It's 10 miles on either side, but it doesn't negate the military, you know, that this is a military frontier.

It can't be a military frontier. Trade crossed it. I'm like, oh, trade crossed the Iron Curtain, too. It was a military frontier. Every one of their examples just blows up as soon as you think about it. And there's a famous picture of showing a building,

large building in the middle of the desert and said, we had papers from here, papyrus that they found and said that this was an administrative center. All we too quick to think about this as a Roman fort. And you look at the picture and there's granulated, there's accrenelated battlements on it. I mean, you show it to a second grader and say, what is this? They'll go, that's a fort.

Of course, forts had other uses. A medieval castle was a fort, but it was also the economic center of that region. It's where the trade fair is set up outside. It's got a number of diplomatic and political functions. But historians for too long just wanted to forget about the military side of it. You know, forget that Rome was a military empire built, built on the back of allegiance and maintained on allegiance. That's not popular. War is icky. The way you lay it out is so, you know, compelling and makes it sound so commonsensical

that I kind of, I sort of want to ask you, you know, what, what is really the alternative explanation then for the phenomenon as phenomena as they exist? I mean, I would add to your list there. You know, there are documentary, there are documents that suggest that ancient political actors were perfectly capable of strategic thinking, I can't name any off the top of my head in the Roman context. In the Greek context, you know, you have a whole speech of Pericles and Thucydides that very clearly explains a naval strategy for the Peloponnesian War, not in terms of operational plans, but that's not what we're talking about. But anyway, we're talking about a strategic concept. It is as clear and crisp, and as we would be pleased to have a position paper like that today, outlining the strategic concept.

I mean, I starve to the Roman Empire. And I give a couple of quotes of like here, Tacitus said when Augustus died and Tiberius took over, he was given certain documents. One of them was the state of the empire. And it reads like a strategic document. Here's your fleets. Here's your legions. Here's what they're doing. These legions are looking at the Rhine, have two jobs.

They're, you know, keep the barbarians on the other side of the Rhine River, and be prepared to march into Gaul at a moment's notice. These two legions of Pinonia are a strategic reserve. It spells it out in literal strategic terms. The problem is so much of Roman history is lost. You could probably take everything the Romans wrote, put it on a stack, and it would come up to about chest time. You could read, that survives.

You can read, and that includes the plays and, you know, artistic poems and things like that. You can read everything the Romans left us in two months of dedicated reading time. So much has been lost that, you know, we have to speak from silence. We've got to, you know, but the historians that have talked to us have talked to us in strategic terms or have given us, Hey, Roman is looking at this in strategic terms. You know, one of the things they, you know, and you brought it up, how could they? They didn't have a system or to think strategically. Well, no one did until the Germans, you know, the Prussians built the German general staff, great general staff.

But no one says Napoleon did not think in strategic terms. He had his advisors. He had his counselors. And Roman Empire had the same thing. They had their conciliums. and they had archives that they could look at and they could see how people had done things before. It doesn't mean that, you know, you don't do ad hoc strategy.

We have, you know, the United States of America has a national strategy. And it seems like day to day we're doing ad hoc strategy because, you know, you have to adapt. A grand strategy is, you know, on the military side is very simple. But there's bad people on the other side of those frontiers keep them out. You know, and the diplomacy is keep the internal, keep the, and the politics is keep the internal empire stable, deal with whoever we have to on the other side to keep them peaceful, let's get some awareness that we're about to be attacked. And then the economics is so simple as to be simple. I need a strong economic foundation to maintain my military power. Rome in the third century.

And Ed Lutwark does a very good job showing how their strategy almost fell apart. I mean, they were pushed on all sides. The empire was split up. Guaul and Spain had broken away. Zinobia had broken away Egypt and a lot of the Eastern Empire. But what remained was the economic core, Italy and North Africa. And that core would eventually move. and eventually moved eastward.

But as long as that core was protected, Rome had the revenues for a comeback. Rome doesn't fall until they lose their economic corps. The vandals, probably 15,000 or less warriors, sneak into North Africa across the straits of Gibraltar. In practical terms, they're sort of ignored. And that's good reasons for that. There's hundreds in northern Europe.

The answer was ignore the hunts. Let them take gall, protect your, the economic center, the strongest economic position in the empire was North Africa. It's what a wheat was. It's everything. Send everything you have, wipe out the Gauls. When they lost North Africa, Chris Wickham is the first one to say this that I know of. It broke the tax spine of the Roman Empire. And without that foundational tax spine, those foundational revenues, The empire was on a fixed timeline of its rapid demise. They realized this. They sent multiple armies, and the Eastern Empire sent multiple armies to try and retake that, but weren't able to do it until too late. Now, the Eastern Empire survives because their tax spine is Egypt, Syria, Palestine, with Constantinople, God in the straits, the Straits, the barbarians were never able to cross.

They had to fight off the assassinate's coming from the east, but if they were capable of doing that, the economic core of the Eastern Empire held until, you know, the Muslim invasions overtook it in the 7th Veritas. Even then it made us a couple of good comebacks. Can I ask kind of a double-barreled question that takes us back to the start of the period that you're covering? So you are covering the grand strategy of the Roman and,

empire, but there's, of course, a republic before that. And I guess my question is, one, and I've not made a survey of the literature here. So maybe I'm just, there's just stuff out there that I don't know about, but why all this attention to the imperial strategy? And I think, based on superficial analysis of what I've seen out there, less attention to Republican military strategy. But maybe I'm wrong about that. So that's question A and then related question B is, you know, what are the continuities and discontinuities between the Republican period? in strategy and the imperial period that you are covering? I don't know, you know, there's not been a book that I am aware of on Republican,

the strategy of the Roman Republic. Did they have a strategy? In the early days, the Republic, it's survival. Second, then after that, it's expansion into Italy, and then expansion to Sicily, which leads to the Punic Wars. So there's a lot of number of works on those specific periods where you have books on the early Roman Empire, and then you have, you know, Livy's histories, and you have Polybius who comes in and talks and gives us a pretty good account of what remains of his work of the Punic Wars,

and that's the beginning of Rome's great expansion. It destroys its only real rival in the Western Mediterranean. It gets Northern Africa from the Carpurgitians. It takes Spain, the Carpherjilians, it takes Southern Gulf from the Carpurgeneans, it becomes odd-rivaled master of Italy. And during the Punic Wars, it also starts getting involved over in the Eastern Empire.

And that Rome seems reluctant to do that, but there's a number of books that cover the topic, you know, the Roman expansion period of fighting the Macedonians and the Seleucidens and there's great stories. But that Rome is all about expansion and that expansion and she paying for itself. I mean, the money that they extracted from Carfair,

the money they extracted from the Eastern Empire, money and grain, they extracted from Egypt. Rome, that those, it made war in a very profitable enterprise. And then you get to the period of the instability, starting with Sola, the Grakai brothers and Marius, and Rome failed to make an adjustment. And I'm not sure they ever got the justice as much as they needed to. I guess Diocletian set them on the right path, but not even sure that.

It was still a city-state now trying to rule an empire. And they never changed their foundational administrative or political infrastructure to handle a very different situation from what those institutions were created for. And then when these constant wars meant you had to have a military in being all the time, that military became very dedicated to their generals. The generals are the ones that got them paid. The generals are the ones that got them booty if they won great victories. And when these generals returned with their armies,

the armies were political, with their political power. It's a great line in the movie Cleopatra, where Rex Harrison is playing Caesar. And he goes to Mark Anthony. He goes, when I'm away, Mark Anthony speaks for Caesar in Rome. and the generals saying, and as always, Caesar's word is law.

And they go to walk away, Rex Harris, and Caesar calls him back and says, make sure Mark Anthony keeps the legions intact. They make my law legal. Now, one sentence, he captures everything. The legions take over, and now you have a Roman Empire. I don't know that you could write a strategy because, you know, when they say the Romans didn't have a grand strategy, they really don't in the Republic because the situation was changing so rapidly. Here you go from city state to empire. You know, they had several.

You could say they had several strategies. Survival expand when the Punic War built the Eastern Empire. That could be done. That probably has been done as history, not as strategic. narrative. Now, the difference to, if I get this right on your last part of that question was the Republic was expanding. Oh, in the Roman Revolution, by the way, I'll draw people's attention to it. There's an older book by Professor Symes, S. Y. M.S. on the Roman Revolution. I don't think it's ever been done better sense. It's one of the great books on Roman history out there,

and go look at where am I going to start my readings? Start with signs, well, start with my book and then go back and read something. But what happens is, you know, supposedly Augustus tells Tiberius and his final statements, be happy with what you got. Do not, you know, solidify the empire,

don't try and grow it. But you always have this impetus the Roman Empire is to be glorious to add some. And if you add Britain, you add Dacia, Dacia, and they eventually give that both out, England, much later,

but Dacia pretty quickly. written in historical terms, you've got a stated empire. The vocabulary is always out there that we rule the world or thing and that changes to, we rule what we own and we influence the world. But after a while, Tiberius quickly realizes Germany is not worth the cost. And we conquer Germany, probably. But, you know, we lost three legions and the Tutankberg-Vaul. We march in there every couple of years.

We slaughter a lot of Germans that we have to. march back in again. When are we going to make that a tax revenue, you know, a revenue-producing state? Probably a long, long time. He just says, stop. He ends the invasions of Germany. The Ryan and the Danube becomes settled frontier zones, I won't say borders, the frontier zones. The Parthians, periodically, they'll attack the Parfans, trying to expand the empire. That becomes considerably more difficult when the past Parfians are overthrown by assassinids who are a much more vigorous group. And now Rome is the first time trying to hold on to what it has instead of beating up on the

Parfans every 50 years or so and taking, you know, they march right to the Parfifian capital, and then they march back and they eventually build out to the Euphrates River. You know, Trajan gets out there and Hadrian, the next emperor gives it away. I make a good case that Adrian probably should have held onto it. I think I make a good case. but the main difference is the republic is expanding from day one and the empire is a mostly sated

political entity. It wants to protect what it has rather than add to it. And that question of satiation, that's basically an economic question, the way you put it. That's how you conclude you've got far enough is the cost benefit, the literal cost benefit analysis is turning against you? In many ways it has

because, you know, you take over the Slucian Empire, you take all their goals, you know, thousands of talents and treasuries plus all the revenues generate. Taking over Germany is just a core center. It's not going to generate anything near the revenues necessary to maintain peace and stability in the legions in that area. But the other side of that is, you know, the expansion was paying for itself and then suddenly you're not expanding. It's not paying for itself anymore. You now have to pay the legions out of, you know, you know, you now have to pay the legions out of,

your current revenues instead of what you're taken away from an enemy. I think people that have not realized how much wealthy at a Roman Empire would be than, or it was, than the Republic or even no states in the Republic. I mean, if you lived in Syria before the Roman Empire took over, you were a farmer. You got invaded every generation, maybe every decade. Farms were burnt, grain mills were burnt to the ground. Storage facilities were burned and destroyed. even if you rebuilt them, you only got back to where you were before the next invasion came and wrecked it.

So now the stability in the Roman Empire, you could build infrastructure with absolutely no fear that an army is going to march through any time in your lifetime and wrecked. So you're setting up an initial infrastructure, then you're building more, and you're putting more ground on this hurdle. You're building bigger warehouses. you're able to trade because the Roman Empire has made the Mediterranean peaceful. I don't think it's, you know, we don't capture that well enough in the statistics, and it's very hard to figure out the economies of the Roman Empire and the Rome Republic,

based on what little knowledge they have left to us. But I think as professors out there, and the bad name's not coming to my head, so I won't know them. But in the last three or four decades, there's been a couple of superb works on the Roman economy, And, you know, hey, this is a much more advanced economy than we originally gave it credit for. And it does have a lot of agricultural infrastructure and experimentation that is going on. So this is a much richer economy easily able to absorb the cost, the military cost of maintaining the empire. As long as you don't let that economy get fractured from the political center, which I was talking about earlier, when the vandals get in and crack.

the tax bind. If they'd wiped out the vandals, we might still be part of a Roman Empire. Do you see a change over, I mean, the empire obviously lasts for several centuries. Presumably they're not thinking about it being strategy. They're not thinking about how to preserve the empire using the tools to their disposal the same way at the start as they are at the middle as they are at the end. What are the big periods? What are the major muscle shifts over the course of the periods of recovery?

I mean, if I had to limit myself, I'd say three. The principal, the first 200 years, why change? Everything's working perfectly for all practical purposes. You know, after 69, the year to four emperors, you have the five good emperors. You've got over 125 years of stability. On allegiance fighting on the borders, yes, but that doesn't impact the Roman Empire. That's like, you know, I don't think we'd have an analogy today, but maybe, you know, You know, the U.S. forces are fighting in Korea, then they're fighting in Vietnam,

and then they're fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are expensive, but it barely touches the core of the United States. If it wasn't but newscast and videos, you would not know what was going on. Oh, he'd been the Roman Empire was made to, you know, fighting on the borderlines. So the principle is fine. And then everything changes. There's a climatic change. There's on the other side of the border that are on the other side of the border.

or amalgamatement, the bigger groups. The Papians disappeared. They were replaced by the assassins, much more dangerous enemies at Rome, and they all come at the same time. And there's also plagues. I mean, it's just horrible. The first 50 years of the third century.

So I call you the principal, and you have this horrible period where Rome is almost destroyed, the empire is almost destroyed. It comes back on the Diocletian and Constantine. and they put in an infrastructure that could have held for a very, very long time, except for civil wars. Rome kills itself. We get civil war after civil war after Constantine's death, his free brothers, his free sons go at it for over a decade.

And there's one civil war after another. Eventually, the Eastern Empire breaks off from the Western. People on the military side say, hey, the, I don't know what, a battle of Adrianople, is a changing point. The empire lasted another hundred years after that. The Romans maybe lost 15,000 soldiers. That would have just been a bad day for Julius Caesar. It shouldn't have impacted the empire,

except after that, the Eastern Empire and the Western Empire don't help each other. If the Eastern Empire got in trouble before Eugenople, the whole Western Empire was at its disposal with all of its wealth, troops and everything. You see less and less and less than that, and at towards the end. So you have three periods,

principle, everything works fine, why change anything? Then a crisis happens and you have the rebuilding period, Constantine Diocletian, and then you have the

just trying to maintain that but they can't because of civil wars. And this is where you can't adapt. They knew what they had to do to beat the barbarians coming across the border. They needed something

that move faster than the legions moved. But if you get away of your legions and rebuilt the cavalry heavy force, like the common tensus, and went overboard, your opponent in the Eastern Empire may have kept his legions. So you built an army to fight the barbarians. It's useless fighting Roman legions in the open field. So they've got to stay with an antiquated military system, not adapted to the new threats that are coming out from across the border because the cardinal threat to any emperor is a civil war. And if he's adapted his entire military force to hold off the barbarians, and suddenly

six legions marched from the south, he does not have the right force for that. So they can never adapt. You see this with the Persians, too. Persians and Greeks, you look at battle after battle, you know, marathon, Plataia, Ranicus, Isis, or Gaglamyria, sometimes called Arabella. It's heavy Greek infantry shatters lightly on. armed Persians. Why didn't they learn? Why didn't they make a heavy, heavy armoured force, heavy Greek, you know, similar to Greeks? They would hire mercenaries to do that for them,

but they never developed it. Because their main threat, they never saw the Greeks as their biggest threat, was Skiffy and Raiders coming down by the tens of thousands. And this is their, this is their institutional memory, their historical memory. This has happened where they loot, destroy, wreck everything. and the only way you can keep up with them is fast-moving infantry, lightly armored, fast-moving infantry, and fast-moving cavalry. So that's what they do.

If we adapt for this, Matt, what appears in the early days, a minor threat from Greece, we can't fight the Skiffians. And if those come, we know what they can do. The Greeks don't seem to be much interested in going deep into our empire.

And then one day, Al Jand, the Great comes along and says, I am interested in doing that. and they never have the right army to match Alexander the Great Army. They have a big army, but it's never been adapted to fight the Greeks in a stand-up-sept-piece battle because they never sort of had as their threat. Rome's the same way. They could see the threats externally.

They know they have to adapt, but they can't because the internal threat forces them to keep the legions as they are to a large degree. And sorry, you may have said it, but I want to make sure I understand the point. So they have to keep things the way they are because of the internal civil threat. But what specific adaptations – talk a little bit about the threat that the barbarians pose. And maybe there's – I presume there is variation amongst the different kinds of barbarian threat and what specific military responses were needed but weren't pursued. When you fight us – okay, the barbarian threat becomes very different. If you read tacit, very different, if you read Tacitus, it's dozens of tribes. And now we're talking at the very

beginning of the empire. Then you get to Arminaeus, Arminius, Arminius. I only read these words. I never get to hear people saying. And he's got his history of the later period. And when you see these other histories in a later period, and they're few, all those German tribes have consolidated

into the Franks and the Alamani. All the tribes of the Danube seem to, you know, there's still remnants and pieces of here and there. But the goffs are everything. And then behind the goffs come the Huns. These are much bigger amalgamations. It's much easier, you know, if you're going, if you want to fight a small tribe sending 2,000 warriors,

that's no problem. But once they've amalgamated, and they've got a political system, they've got a high king, numerous sub-kings, and they come across that border with 40,000, men. And now, remember, it's a much wealthier society. They've been trading with Rome for centuries.

They've gotten rich trading with Rome. Thousands upon thousands of the German barbarians worked in the Roman army as auxiliary. Some of them is legionnaires. They are trained in the Roman methods. They are much better than the earlier barbarians. They're much more disciplined, that they can fight like a Roman army fights. You know, and you read about the goth heavy cavalry, that's armored cavalry they have out there. They're rich enough to do that, and they're much better trained.

This is a very, very different threat. Rome needs heavy cavalry, needs fast-moving light cavalry. It tries to do it as to a degree when it builds the field armies, the commentantius. There's other problems. One, you know, if the gops could have a heavy cavalry because they got the planes of Eastern Europe behind them and you could feed all those horses and take care of them. You can't do that in the Roman Empire. There's very few places where you could put down thousands of horses and feed them.

So there is that inability to maintain large cavalry forces. Now, if you built a large cavalry force and a large cavalry force meets an infantry force, it's unbroken infantry. Calvary can't do anything to it. You know, you see movies where cavalry charged into infantry. No, infantry has its spear points out. It doesn't matter how brave the Roman soldier, the barbarian soldier is on the horse, the horse will not impale itself.

It's not the soldier's bravery. It's not the horse's bravery. You cannot break a formation. So what the adoption needed is maintain the frontiers much stronger, pay for them. Zosbius basically says that Constantine lost the, weakened the empire because he weakened the frontiers to build field armies behind. I'm not sure as Ossmiss gets it absolutely correct. He likes to blame Christians for everything. He was a pagan historian. But there's some truth to that. I mean, if the field armies take a long time to move.

In the early days, the walls that found the fortifications on the frontier were expected to hold out for a while. Help would come and they didn't. If they broke through, limit to penetration. that the Strategic Reserve was not hidden a month's march away. It was a legion to your north, you know, because the barbarians can only hit one sector with one tribe. Maybe they can get several tribes together, but you're still only talking five, six thousand warriors. They break through one section of legions to the north and south,

are not under any pressure. And then in 406, it seems that the whole Ryan gets attacked at the same time, and they break. Roman, Roman, for me. became very artillery bound, lots of missiles, bolsters, catapults, all of that makes for slow moving. But if you do away with all that, and your internal enemy comes out with your army that has that,

you're not going to be able to stand up to them on a battlefield. So with Rome, if the Rome to have survived, two things had to happen. They had to put in a political infrastructure that ended civil wars, and they had to make sure that the economic core, the empire, which I would say in the west would be Spain, North Africa, and Italy were, would never fail to an enemy. You can lose, you can, you can, you can lose all the Danubean provinces. You would still have your economic core. About those two things, you're doomed. So what are the lessons, you know, imagine we're speaking to a room of your, your students,

these field grade officers, quite a few of whom will be generals, maybe some other future policymakers in other respects. What are the important lessons that your research here on Roman strategy has for us? You know, what's most applicable to America in the 21st century? Okay. I end my chapter with that. So I don't want to paraphrase it too much. I will talk about my thoughts now.

And one, the United States has to maintain a growth economy. If you wish to be or you wish to maintain yourself as, number one power in the world, then you need to focus your attention on economic power. And then the thing would be, oh, then we should cut the military. Well, the military is very inexpensive. You know, we grew our economy at incredible race to speed throughout the entire Cold War when we were paying 6 to 10 percent of our GDP on the military. Now we're paying a little over 2 percent, and our economy isn't growing near as fast.

The military is not the core center, not that. But that believes the second part of this, the U.S. has to be engaged. And that means militarily engaged very far forward. Where the United States retreats, people who do not have our best interest at all, we'll move in. That's the nature of great state rivalries. Another book I have on Great Strategic Rivalries by Oxford. When one retreats, the vacuum is filled by the other great power. So China, if we wish to, if we do not want to see a Chinese-dominated political, diplomatic, grand strategic environment, we have to stay forward, which means maintaining a strong military presence outside of the United States, our frontier zone, let's call it.

And it's, well, it's not as expensive as not doing it. So the way I say this to people to my students, and I haven't done it this year, but I'll get to it, is think of yourselves as international bounces. If you own the bar and there was fights every week, you get a certain type of clientele in that bar. What do? Beer drinking guys mostly who want their beer cheap and a lot of it. You're not going to sell a bottle of champagne for $400 over in the corner. Why there's fights going on? So you get the best two bounces in the world and you pay them a half a million dollars apiece.

You said, I need this place to be peaceful. And they do. They make it peaceful. And suddenly a higher class, a better class, people start coming at, not better class, a richer class, who don't want to get into fights every week. Women will come in and men will follow to spend their money, sometimes vice versa. At the other bus, now you sell your bar and you make $5 million on it, the new guy comes in, And he's like, wow, this bar is just producing all sorts of money. If this was a world of economy, it would show a tremendous amount of growth.

And he looks down and says, but I'm paying a million dollars to those two bounces down there. Why am I doing that? We haven't had a fight in this bar in five years. That's a core center. I'm getting rid of it. The bounces go away. And a month later, there's a fight. Two weeks later, there's another fight.

There's no bounces to stop them. The fights become more frequent. They get more dangerous and your rich clientele after fight number three. Doesn't want to spend that money there anymore. That's not what they came for. Suddenly you've got an economic ruin on your hand. What appeared to be your core center is literally what's making it possible for your economy to grow. Free trade, keeping the seas, the sea lanes open.

This is all done, not because everyone wants to get along. It's done because there's a U.S. military presence out there that makes it possible. And when you remove that presence, anarchy comes right behind it. If the British Empire and made it known early on in 1914, if you go to war with France, we are definitely coming in against you. Germany may have said, that might not be worth it. But the United States and data said, we are going to support Ukraine with an unbelievable amount of military power and announced that. Putin may have said, well, this might not be the right time to move.

When Taiwan becomes more threatened as the United States appears to pull back from Asia on a military basis, if you wish to be economically strong and have no political power or diplomatic power out in the world, become the European Union. But whatever power they have is only possible because they have shelter behind U.S. military power. So Rome knew this from the beginning. If you wish to maintain your strategic situation, as it as a strategic status quo, you have to have a military more powerful than any enemy that comes at you. And you have to have an economy that could support it. I mean, if you only have two lessons in grand strategy, that's it. A strong military, forward posted, and an economy that could support it. End the story.

James Lacey, author of Rome, Strategy of Empire. Really appreciate you making the time. Thanks for the great conversation. Thank you. And wonderful being here. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.