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Yes: geostrategy is a huge defining factor in the organization of the planet, the movement of people and the evolution of society. It is a primary factor, inclu

Yes: geostrategy is a huge defining factor in the organization of the planet, the movement of people and the evolution of society. It is a primary factor, including resource extraction technologies, agricultural capability, and more. I think rounding that up to "drove the rise of civilizations" is a crude way to put that. For example, the simulation pits "agriculture plus military" against "agriculture". Then they found that including both food security concerns and physical security concerns more closely predicted known outcomes. Had they put "agriculture plus military" against "military" and found that including both was better than just simulating physical security we would have gotten the title "Computer Simulations Suggest Food Drove the Rise of Civilizations". I think the takeaway (besides how not to model and report on models) is that geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it. A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more. Unfortunately the layman instead is fed a steady diet of "good versus evil" narratives, informing him instead about how he should feel about each case to emotionally and financially support his military.

mc32 10y ago
Wouldn't the "military" only group be able to terrorize the agriculture only as well as the ag plus military ones? Something akin to the Danes at one point? They could just build it up so that they could go pillaging indefinitely, so long as they don't outright destroy their target civs.
- rmchugh 10y ago
  I'm not sure the Danes were ever military only, Denmark was also an agricultural society during the viking period. As I understand it, the viking raids were in fact organised around the agricultural calendar, with the two raiding seasons taking place after the harvest and after the sowing. And of course the Vikings were interested in acquiring farming land and often settled and farmed in their places of conquest. A more apt comparison might be pastoralist raiders as mentioned in Turchin's War and Peace and War, whose nomadic lifestyle led naturally to the development of military skills that could be applied in raids on settled communities. Turchin wrote a lot about the Tatars and the Mongols could also be a good example.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I didn't mean for the imperfect example of the Danes to take it off tangent, it was only to illustrate a people I could think of for whom raiding was integral but your examples or any other is just as well. I think someone (civ) could have taken it further and been sociopathic and only relied on military force for survival. Obviously there are benefits in diversifying, but I think while not ideal, it's possible and could work, in some circumstances.
    - jandrese 10y ago
      You mean like the Mongols? They didn't stop and farm. Their entire society was built around conquest and pillage.
      - mc32 10y ago
        I suppose so, I forgot western civ was one battle loss away from not existing as a continuous entity. So yeah, military only seems to be possible, even if the Mongols were not 100% faithful to this strategy, I think someone could have been successful.
      - jwtadvice 10y ago
        Until they established city centers, trade routes, spread religious freedom to among their subjects, developed population centers and their agricultural output, standardized exchange rates and quality bars, created systems of news and material delivery, and all that other stuff. Their empire was, of course, extremely short, as it collapsed with the death of their Great Kahn soon after it established itself and its following leaders abandoned the previous inroads in the West to focus on the prize of capturing China (that ultimately failed). Our history tends to focus on the expansion of their empire rather than its subsequent administration, I think in part for that reason.
        mc32 10y ago
        True, but I think it tentatively proves it's possible, if not effective, long term.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Agriculture also comes with structure. Once you get past subsistence farming, you need markets, credit and social order. Once you have those you get specialization. A purely aggressive group eventually loses and vanishes. Remember the story of the Danes was told by the recipients of their raids, who had an interest from a religious standpoint to portray them as awful pagans.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  The longer you pillage, the more you raise the interest in being opposed. That's why the Mongol approach was so effective - you had a really short conquest period that happened once, then tribute was paid. The tribute was more than made up for by being on the Mongol trading network. IMO, all empires are small compared to the Mongols. They had it all. The Danes just had lousy farmland and good boats, especially during long cold spells. The Northmen in general had more impact as traders than as raiders. A similar pattern emerges in the Americas - the Apache word for the Comanche is Apache for "those a$$holes" because the Comanche were much more predatory of the Apache than the other way 'round.
- douche 10y ago
  This worked for nomadic steppe people effectively from the domestication of the horse to the invention of gunpowder.
- taneq 10y ago
  As production technology improves, producing your own resources becomes cheaper than the military action required to take it from others, which gives producing societies an unbeatable economic advantage. A tribe of pillagers could destroy a hamlet, but could never compete with the resources of a walled down.
phkahler 10y ago
>> geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it Age of Empires taught me that the key to world domination is control of the natural resources plus growing as fast as possible. To win a long game you must control the remote resources as well as those in your immediate area. Try to consume the non-local resources first.
- aswanson 10y ago
  Isnt there an associated penalty for consuming non-local resources first?
  - thatcat 10y ago
    Remote resources are hard to defend but unlikely to be occupied by an enemy early, by conserving resources in a local protected area you have more accessible reserves when the main settlement is under siege later.
    - EGreg 10y ago
      Basically describes the US oil reserves strategy
      - phkahler 10y ago
        Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner!
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Lessons from StarCraft: - if you're not spending as much as you're mining, you're losing - keep expanding to mine more and simultaneously, so you can spend more simultaneously - push, push, push
jordanlev 10y ago
> A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in... Any recommendations on good places to learn / keep abreast of this kind of info? I'd love to read news that was more high-level about what's really going on, but it's hard to find. Many years ago, Stratfor had a free weekly newsletter that had excellent info along these lines, but after they got hacked that went away (and with all the weird things leaked about them it got a little sketchy trying to understand where their biases lay).
- jwtadvice 10y ago
  Washington Thinktanks are a good start (though they still tend to 'flourish' things in nationalist language). I prefer their publications to their press events, though the latter is easier to consume. The press briefings at the State Department are pretty good from a reporting side, but you need to follow for a long time before you see the forest instead of the trees. A good direct source is the Strategic Studies Institute. They publish primarily academically minded geostrategy reports and assessments, and are mostly centered in the military War Colleges and a couple universities that offer Strategic Studies programs. Establishments that host pre-PRified documents from strategy organizations are a good source of mostly historic but sometimes current documents. Looking up, for example, the Pentagon Papers or pre-PR version of the Wolfowitz Doctrine are very clear. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) does a good job documenting some of these documents. Of course Wikileaks and others who have copies of documents (like the Stratfor docs you mentioned) is another. But let's put that out to Hacker News: what are your sources?
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    > But let's put that out to Hacker News: what are your sources? As a German reader, I was surprised about how good "Foreign Policy" is to get a coherent understanding of certain viewpoints in geostrategy. Such publications would be the exception here, because they are not very "journalistic". I think it doesn't necessarily satisfy parents question about "what really is going on", because what's going on is dependent on exactly those viewpoints. That's the nature of political discourse, and I find it more helpful to read about coherent versions rather than a holistic "truth".
Swizec 10y ago
> A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more. "never get involved in a land war in Asia" That about sums it up for Russia vs. USA.

mc32 10y ago

Wouldn't the "military" only group be able to terrorize the agriculture only as well as the ag plus military ones? Something akin to the Danes at one point? They could just build it up so that they could go pillaging indefinitely, so long as they don't outright destroy their target civs.

rmchugh 10y ago
I'm not sure the Danes were ever military only, Denmark was also an agricultural society during the viking period. As I understand it, the viking raids were in fact organised around the agricultural calendar, with the two raiding seasons taking place after the harvest and after the sowing. And of course the Vikings were interested in acquiring farming land and often settled and farmed in their places of conquest. A more apt comparison might be pastoralist raiders as mentioned in Turchin's War and Peace and War, whose nomadic lifestyle led naturally to the development of military skills that could be applied in raids on settled communities. Turchin wrote a lot about the Tatars and the Mongols could also be a good example.
- mc32 10y ago
  I didn't mean for the imperfect example of the Danes to take it off tangent, it was only to illustrate a people I could think of for whom raiding was integral but your examples or any other is just as well. I think someone (civ) could have taken it further and been sociopathic and only relied on military force for survival. Obviously there are benefits in diversifying, but I think while not ideal, it's possible and could work, in some circumstances.
  - jandrese 10y ago
    You mean like the Mongols? They didn't stop and farm. Their entire society was built around conquest and pillage.
    - mc32 10y ago
      I suppose so, I forgot western civ was one battle loss away from not existing as a continuous entity. So yeah, military only seems to be possible, even if the Mongols were not 100% faithful to this strategy, I think someone could have been successful.
    - jwtadvice 10y ago
      Until they established city centers, trade routes, spread religious freedom to among their subjects, developed population centers and their agricultural output, standardized exchange rates and quality bars, created systems of news and material delivery, and all that other stuff. Their empire was, of course, extremely short, as it collapsed with the death of their Great Kahn soon after it established itself and its following leaders abandoned the previous inroads in the West to focus on the prize of capturing China (that ultimately failed). Our history tends to focus on the expansion of their empire rather than its subsequent administration, I think in part for that reason.
      - mc32 10y ago
        True, but I think it tentatively proves it's possible, if not effective, long term.
Spooky23 10y ago
Agriculture also comes with structure. Once you get past subsistence farming, you need markets, credit and social order. Once you have those you get specialization. A purely aggressive group eventually loses and vanishes. Remember the story of the Danes was told by the recipients of their raids, who had an interest from a religious standpoint to portray them as awful pagans.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
The longer you pillage, the more you raise the interest in being opposed. That's why the Mongol approach was so effective - you had a really short conquest period that happened once, then tribute was paid. The tribute was more than made up for by being on the Mongol trading network. IMO, all empires are small compared to the Mongols. They had it all. The Danes just had lousy farmland and good boats, especially during long cold spells. The Northmen in general had more impact as traders than as raiders. A similar pattern emerges in the Americas - the Apache word for the Comanche is Apache for "those a$$holes" because the Comanche were much more predatory of the Apache than the other way 'round.
douche 10y ago
This worked for nomadic steppe people effectively from the domestication of the horse to the invention of gunpowder.
taneq 10y ago
As production technology improves, producing your own resources becomes cheaper than the military action required to take it from others, which gives producing societies an unbeatable economic advantage. A tribe of pillagers could destroy a hamlet, but could never compete with the resources of a walled down.

phkahler 10y ago

>> geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it Age of Empires taught me that the key to world domination is control of the natural resources plus growing as fast as possible. To win a long game you must control the remote resources as well as those in your immediate area. Try to consume the non-local resources first.

aswanson 10y ago
Isnt there an associated penalty for consuming non-local resources first?
- thatcat 10y ago
  Remote resources are hard to defend but unlikely to be occupied by an enemy early, by conserving resources in a local protected area you have more accessible reserves when the main settlement is under siege later.
  - EGreg 10y ago
    Basically describes the US oil reserves strategy
    - phkahler 10y ago
      Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner!
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Lessons from StarCraft: - if you're not spending as much as you're mining, you're losing - keep expanding to mine more and simultaneously, so you can spend more simultaneously - push, push, push

jordanlev 10y ago

> A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in... Any recommendations on good places to learn / keep abreast of this kind of info? I'd love to read news that was more high-level about what's really going on, but it's hard to find. Many years ago, Stratfor had a free weekly newsletter that had excellent info along these lines, but after they got hacked that went away (and with all the weird things leaked about them it got a little sketchy trying to understand where their biases lay).

jwtadvice 10y ago
Washington Thinktanks are a good start (though they still tend to 'flourish' things in nationalist language). I prefer their publications to their press events, though the latter is easier to consume. The press briefings at the State Department are pretty good from a reporting side, but you need to follow for a long time before you see the forest instead of the trees. A good direct source is the Strategic Studies Institute. They publish primarily academically minded geostrategy reports and assessments, and are mostly centered in the military War Colleges and a couple universities that offer Strategic Studies programs. Establishments that host pre-PRified documents from strategy organizations are a good source of mostly historic but sometimes current documents. Looking up, for example, the Pentagon Papers or pre-PR version of the Wolfowitz Doctrine are very clear. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) does a good job documenting some of these documents. Of course Wikileaks and others who have copies of documents (like the Stratfor docs you mentioned) is another. But let's put that out to Hacker News: what are your sources?
- elcapitan 10y ago
  > But let's put that out to Hacker News: what are your sources? As a German reader, I was surprised about how good "Foreign Policy" is to get a coherent understanding of certain viewpoints in geostrategy. Such publications would be the exception here, because they are not very "journalistic". I think it doesn't necessarily satisfy parents question about "what really is going on", because what's going on is dependent on exactly those viewpoints. That's the nature of political discourse, and I find it more helpful to read about coherent versions rather than a holistic "truth".

Swizec 10y ago

> A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more. "never get involved in a land war in Asia" That about sums it up for Russia vs. USA.