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The other interesting angle is if you measure it per population unit defended, on the basis the point of all the heavy equipment is the ability to win wars with
by notahacker 4y ago
The other interesting angle is if you measure it per population unit defended, on the basis the point of all the heavy equipment is the ability to win wars without having to call up a particularly large fraction of the population to fight in them (the Romans are also outliers in history for ruling a large population with a relatively small skilled standing army rather than mass conscription)
But still not convinced that comes out at lower cost than the Romans. Lucky we've got a bit more productive capacity not devoted to producing food and basic infrastructure than they did...
- jabl 4y agoIIRC there's a long series on the acoup blog referenced elsewhere in this discussion, that deals with the logistics of moving and feeding an army in pre-modern times. Tl;dr: When you're limited to beasts and wagons, the possible size of your army is severely curtailed. Also foraging for food (again, with beasts and wagons there's only so much food you can transport over any non trivial distance) puts a quite low limit on the size of an army you can have in an area. IOW, the modern mass army enabled by conscription is also dependent on a modern logistics system to supply them.