Rome: Strategy of Empire with James Lacey

Hello and welcome to World History Encyclopedia. My name is Kelly and today I am joined by author and professor James Lacey. James is a widely published defence analyst and is the Professor of Strategy at the Marine Corps War College. He has written many books including The Washington War, FDR's Inner Circle and the Politics of Power that won World War II, and The First Clash, the miraculous Greek victory at Marathon and its impact on Western Civilisation. Today though, we are going to be chatting to him all about his new book Rome, a Strategy for Empire, which is being published by Oxford University Press. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's so great to be able to talk to you about your new book. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Sometimes when people ask me for my background, it sounds like I can't keep a job, but I'll go through it from beginning to end. I spent about a dozen years in the United States Army as an infantry officer, active duty. That was the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, a lot of time in Germany after that at various senior Army headquarters, then got out when the Russians took all their toys and went home. I thought that was the end of things, but I didn't realise the amount of excitement we would have in the post-Soviet era. I did retire out of the Reserves, went and worked on various operations jobs in the Wall Street area, Wall Street for another dozen years. My office on 9-11 was on the 82nd Florida World Trade Center, and I got home that night and said, I'm going in another direction. So, I'd left the Army once, started in the business world, now I'm going to go to my first love, writing and history. Got pretty good. I got a job writing editorials for the New York Post and the New York Sun a week after, and then talking to the editor of the Time magazine at lunch, I said, I'd like to come to Time. He said, sure. So, I went over to Time magazine, which sort of seems to annoy a lot of journalists who spend their entire life trying to do something like that. And then 9-11, the war was starting, Operation Iraqi Freedom was gearing up. I said I wanted one of the in-bed jobs, and one of the in-bed jobs, they said all the in-beds were going to the Washington Bureau and they couldn't get any more. I said, well, I can get my own. So, I still had a ton of Army contacts and said, you know, if you can get your own, you can go. So, I embedded back into the brigade I'd been a company commander in. The brigade commander and me had been company commanders together. So, that was an interesting experience. Came back, decided to write a book on the war. Rick Atkinson beat me to it on the unit I was with, so I went to do some more research and that led me over to the Institute of Defense Analysis, a think tank that supports the military. Stayed there for about seven years doing research on a number of strategic topics and writing on a number of strategic topics. Got my Ph.D. while I was there in history and then decided, I only did it really for one reason, was to teach history. Job came up at the Marine Corps War College and my Ph.D. was all of eight days old and they hired me and I've been there for about 12 years. So, I've had an eclectic series of experiences. Now, for writing this book, it's great. It's a lot of people who studied Roman history, which is in most, in many regards, military history, who don't understand how militaries work, you know, how armies, how soldiers, officers think, strategists think. So, I had decades of that experience to bring into this. And then, you know, there's a lot more to strategy than just the military side, so I understand how the global economy works. That's part of my job, part research. My Ph.D. was actually on the economics of World War II, so bringing the economics to military and other things together lets me tell a story that really hasn't been told ever. I mean, Lutwak, Edward Lutwak, wrote The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, but he only went up to the third century and quit, didn't quit, just didn't cover anything after that. So, there was still another 200 years of the Roman Empire to go before the Western Empire collapses. So, when I'm doing this, I'm going to cover the whole thing. And all he covered was basically the military structure of the empire. Here's their military strategy. Whether he got it right or wrong is sort of immaterial right now, because there was so much more to it, you know, and Rome didn't lose its empire because its soldiers stopped fighting. It lost its empire because it took the eye off the, what truly mattered, its economic core, and they couldn't buy any more soldiers. There's plenty of soldiers out there to buy, Rome just couldn't afford them anymore. So, taking my varied jobs together gives me a perspective that I think is missing from the entire debate on whether Rome could have a strategy or not, and we'll probably go into that a lot more as we go forward. So, your book, Rome, A Strategy of Empire, you would say is focused on the strategy of their military for the whole history of ancient Rome? It's not limited to the military. You can't talk about Rome, Roman strategy, without, you know, having some focus on the military aspects, but I spent a lot of time on the economics to back it up, Roman diplomacy, which is very important, you know, the infrastructure of Rome that makes possible transitions of government. There's a whole bunch that goes into creating a strategy, you know, a simple solution, you know, ways and means, you know, what do you want to do, how do you want to do it, and then what do you have to do it with is important. Where I, the really crucial reason I decided to take this on, I've been reading about Rome my entire life. I'm a professional historian, but I'm an amateur Roman historian. I've read tons of books, I've read almost all of the classic material, but there's a huge number of professionals, ancient historians who have specialized on Rome since the very beginning, who know every bit of the material perfectly, and when Luke Wark wrote his book, he hit a topic that none of them had really ever thought about before, did Rome have a strategy, and it seemed like to me that Luke Wark was like a virus, you're a strategist, you do military advising and consulting, you don't know anything about Rome, and you therefore got it all wrong. And that is the incredible consensus opinion of a large number, consensus opinion of ancient Roman historians. There are exceptions, and some very big exceptions, David Potter, Peter Hever, really big names who said, we may have gone a little overboard, I'm beating up on Luke Wark here. But you know, the Cambridge ancient histories have been all redone in the last couple of decades, and they basically have a chapter saying Rome was incapable of strategic thought. Not only didn't they have a strategy, they couldn't even think strategically. And that just bothered me, because to say that, when you realize Rome spent over half its revenues on its military establishment, its navies, its legions, all the fortresses, all along the perimeter of the frontier, it means they were expending 50% of their GDP, or close to it, every year on a strategy to keep what was on the other side of the frontiers on that side. You know, not letting them into the empire. And nobody in 500 years stopped and said, why are we doing this? Or are we doing it right? From just a common sense perspective, that struck me as wrong. And I had a chance to look at it, to write a chapter in a book. Someone said, can you write a chapter on Roman strategy? And that really got me, you know, that chapter was almost as hard to write as a book, because I hadn't dug deeply. I just assumed Luke Wark got it wrong, because everybody had told me he did. Then I started researching the chapter, and I was like, Luke Wark got a lot of this right. Now, his book, Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, is 40 years old. In my opinion, he over-systemized his analysis. And he doesn't tell you why they did things. He says, here's what they did, and that's strategic, and they must have had a strategy. But you really don't get what was driving that strategy. Why did they make these decisions this century, new decisions the next century? What was changing over time? I mean, 500 years of empire, it wasn't an empire in stasis. Things didn't move as fast as they move in the 21st century. But 500 years, if you go back 500 years from today, Henry VIII is still on the throne of England. Copernicus is just discovering that the sun might be the center of the universe. You know, that is a lot of time for change. And Rome changed, the empire changed, the strategy changed over time. But the Roman historians themselves say, hey, Rome didn't even understand the geography of the world, or its empire. So, if you don't understand geography, how can you think about strategy? And this became, this has probably been over-analyzed to death. The fighting and the warring back and forth, what they knew about geography, what they didn't know about geography. It may have gone too far, that analysis, that debate. But they seem to have come to the conclusion that they didn't understand much geography and what parts they did was not enough to form a strategic conception that they could execute on an empire-wide basis. And the basis of that was the maps that we currently have for them are what they call itineraries. They look like train maps. A subway, if you've been to a New York subway, London train maps. It's stop, stop, stop. You don't know anything about what's in between. It's just a series of stops. And historians have said that you can't plan a strategy based on how many days it would take to go from Rome to Ravenna, Ravenna to Vienna, Vienna to wherever you want to go. Because that's all this was. They were like travel logs. If you leave Rome today to walk to Ravenna, it will take you 16 days. And there'll be a little line from Rome to Ravenna, which may be half an inch away or 10 inches away. They didn't care about that space. And they would just write the number on the side of the line, 16. And you knew it took 16 days to walk that distance. Roman historian Consensus and Susan Maturin, in an absolutely wonderful book, Rome and Its Enemies, put, lodged this into the system. Those itineraries, this is where Susan Maturin went wrong. Everything else about the book I absolutely loved if she happens to watch this. You can't use itineraries to do strategy. And I said, oh, well, then you better tell U.S. 21st century strategists to stop doing that. Because that's exactly what we use. They call it nodes now instead of points on a map. It's various nodes, railroad nodes, seaports. One of the examples I use in the book, Kissinger called American aircraft carriers a thousand tons of mobile diplomacy. When any trouble happened anywhere in the world during the 80s and 90s, the first question politicians in the U.S. asked is, where's the nearest carrier and how long it would take to get there? Nobody cared anything about the geography in between. When we had to deploy to Operation Iraqi Freedom for the first invasion or Desert Storm, all that anyone was looking at was nodal maps. We're going to go into these five ports. Each port could hold this many men and it takes this many days to move from Hamburg to that port, this many days to move from Savannah to that port, wherever the men and equipment were coming from. All the geography in between was of zero relevance to the U.S. military. The only time the military cares about the geography on a map is at the point of the spear where they're actually fighting. So all the Romans cared about was, all right, I got 30 legions, eight of them along the Rhine River. I'm going to pull four out from these four cities, Cologne, Mainz, whatever, and I'm going to move them to Antioch. And then they take out the itinerary. It's a 10-day march from this city to that city, six days to this city. And immediately they knew exactly how long it was going to take to march one legion from that city. And the only execution thing you now have to do is send messages ahead to the governors of the provinces. The Roman legion will come by on the following days, have food ready. Because the Romans weren't going to carry, they're not going to carry a thousand tons of food with them. The itineraries, rather than being something you would never use to do strategy, turned out to be exactly what you need to do military strategy. That alone throws out 90% of the argument that the Romans couldn't do strategy. Everyone has to go back and re-look it. And the people who have pre-read the book, who know Rome, they're like, oh, we use this today. There's war games out there you can buy for $50 or $100 that are based on the Roman Empire. And every one of them is point-to-point. It's like a hub-and-spoke network. Because that's how you think about strategy. But if you are the best Roman historian in the world and you've been trading the classics from 18 years old to you've finished your PhD, done some field studies, and now you're going to look deeply into some aspect of Roman history, no one has sat you down and said, well, here's how strategists think. So, what I'm adding to the field is, wait a minute, you guys have done an excellent job telling me what happened in Roman history. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. And I list them in my book. Here's all the guys and gals, women, men, that I have read that know the history of Rome and the Roman Empire better than me. I'm taking all of your knowledge that you have built up over 200 years and now I'm going to overlay upon it the stuff I do know about. Strategy, the economics of war, and how we think about these things in the current era. Because strategy never changes. I have a portion of one of the chapters where Aristotle says what's important for politicians to know about. I literally now take that and hand it to my class and say, here's how to think about strategy. If I don't tell them it's Aristotle, it looks exactly like what we would teach in the war colleges, US military and British, Australian war colleges today. Ways and means, by and of it, he actually calls it that at certain points. Who today reads Aristotle? I'm sure there's a small group of people that still enjoy it. None of them I run into on a day to day basis. It's incredible that even just one facet of modern strategy, modern military, that you know already, could make such a huge difference to your understanding of strategy in the Roman Empire. I wasn't doing this as a lessons learned book, but strategy doesn't change. If you are deeply imbued in strategic thought, what the Romans did, what Napoleon did, and what we do today can all be summed up into certain categories. They always say the nature of war never changes, the character of war may change. The character, the technology may change. Here's an interesting thing. Rome, if it went beyond the edges of its empire, which I've actually called the edges of empire, it could send out about 50,000 troops and maintain them for a bit of time. If it wanted to make a major push, it could get 150,000 or 200,000, but it couldn't sustain that. The economy of Rome could not sustain that level of force outside of the empire for an extended period of time. Those numbers never change. The United States of America wants to deploy somewhere in the world. We can send 200,000 to 250,000 or even half a million to Saudi Arabia for Desert Storm and launch it, but we couldn't sustain the cost of that. For Desert Storm, we asked all our allies to pay a share. It became a profit-making expedition, actually, for the U.S. military. World War II, yes, we mobilized 14 million and probably sent 7 million overseas. It was a major effort that had to end. We were reaching our culminating point in how much this would cost and how much longer we could afford. We made it a little easier since we were going to England. We could draw on a lot of English resources in-country. We don't have to ship them all from the United States. You see the war in Japan as an example. By the time you get to Okinawa, we're ready to throw 50,000 men ashore for a hard fight. Japan gets stronger because it's getting closer to the core of its empire and we're getting weaker as we get further away from the core of our empire. If we wanted to put more than that, let's say a quarter of a million men into Japan if we didn't use the nuclear weapons, we would have to spend probably up to a year, a year and a half building that force, getting it ready, preparing it, and then we could not have kept it there for an extended period of time. The number of troops at the front end of the sphere has not changed since ancient times. The cost has gone up, but relative to GDP, it's about the same. During the Cold War, we were spending a percentage of our GDP, the Soviets definitely were, similar to what Rome was putting out there. Very little changes over time. If you're looking at Roman strategy and you understand it, you can use that context to think about US strategy or Chinese strategy or anybody's strategy today. There are certain overriding lessons. Keep your eye on what's truly important. Rome never lost its core principle. Everything outside, on the edge of empire, we have this frontier. It's not a line, it's like a zone, but everything on the other side of that is probably very bad, and we should not let it in. If it gets in, the most important thing is we have to protect our economic core. Then we can win. No matter how many setbacks we have, if our economic core remains strong, we can make a comeback. Until the end, they never really lost sight of those principles. They did have one thing that actually got in the way over and over again, and if they could have figured it out, Rome might still be here, for all we know. Smooth government transitions. They never got it right. Some people would look at what's going on in American politics and Australian politics, Republicans, Conservatives, Boris Johnson is probably on the edge of losing his seat. Compared to Rome, we're still doing very nice transitions. Trump, let's take our last transition in the United States, did not even think or attempt to say, I'll just mobilize the U.S. Army to keep me in office. If he did, the Army would probably have said, we're not doing that, boss. What's plan number two? But in Rome, you don't have that. The Roman Republic collapses because the legions of Rome became loyal to the person who was paying them, which was their generals. They were no longer loyal to Rome itself. So you have Civil War, Caesar, Pompeii, Augustus, Anthony, bloody, brutal Civil War. And then we have the Empire. And the legions now swear loyalty to the Empire. The most dangerous thing you can be in the Empire, in my opinion, is a successful Rome in general. Because as soon as you were successful, you became a threat to the Emperor. You might get those legions behind you and march on Rome. And there was good reason for that, because over the course of 500 years, that happened on multiple occasions. And when a general rose up and said, I'm in revolt, it didn't matter what strategy Rome wanted to do, what threats were on the outside trying to get in. Everything else went to second place because the overriding strategic concern was, I have to beat the usurper. And the Roman legions would march and they would fight. If Rome could have avoided these bloody transitions, these bloody civil wars that happened on a recurring basis, there was no power outside the frontiers that could have taken on Rome. Even the Huns could not have taken on a Roman Empire that was solidified under one rule and ready to meet them in open battle. So, you know, the third century, with crisis after crisis, the beginning of a climate crisis as temperatures cool, there's plagues, the barbarians are moving on all fronts. The Persian Empire, which was the Parthian Empire for a number of years, the Parthians have been replaced by Sassanids, who are a lot more active, a lot more military-oriented, and they're looking to expand themselves. The easiest way to expand was into the Roman Empire. It looked like Rome was going to collapse. They lost all of Gaul, which is mostly modern-day France. Egypt was lost. The Empire was collapsing. But they maintained that core. Italy, North Africa, the Danubian provinces, the economic center, and the place where you do the best recruiting was in the Balkans. And they come back. They fight their way back. They have another 200 years of life. But then, you know, in the final crisis in the crisis of the early 400s, the early 5th century, they all come across the border and you finally have Attila bringing the Huns in. And the Romans sort of focus on Attila. And these Vandals, maybe 10,000 to 15,000 warriors at most, get into Spain, spring across the Gibraltar Straits there, and get into North Africa. And a couple of years later, they own all of North Africa. That is the economic center of the Roman Empire. Once it was lost, Rome finally looked up and said, oh, who cares about the damn Huns? We don't care anymore. We've got to get that back. They were not able to do it. The Byzantine Empire eventually got that back, but it was a wasteland by then. Rome has lost its grain. Rome's fleets were in North Africa. The Roman tax base was in North Africa. They couldn't, they lost everything. You don't see that in the Eastern Empire, which has a much longer life because the barbarians can't make the jump from Constantinople. The Eastern Empire's economic core, which is all of the Levant all the way down and into Egypt, which is the richest province in the empire, is never touched until the Arab invasions coming up from the south. As long as Rome could control its economic core, they were close to invincible. They took their eye off the ball and said, boy, these Huns look dangerous. We're going to focus on them. Then they lost North Africa. Their time was up. Chris Wickham refers to this as Rome broke its tax spine. The financial spine of the empire was cracked. We can't lose track of how important that was. The Roman Empire is incredibly rich compared to the Roman Republic because the Roman Empire gets richer almost every year. Prior to the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, the Mediterranean is just a war zone. Wars everywhere, city-states fighting city-states, small provinces and small states fighting each other. Rome came in and said, first you fight us, we win, you don't fight anyone anymore. Even when Rome wasn't conquering you, their power was so great. One of the Seleucid kings was marching into Egypt and the Egyptians said, help us, Rome, help us. Rome sends an ambassador and he goes in and says, don't march. The Seleucid king lost track of names here, Antiochus says, I've got to think about it. The Roman ambassador is great. He draws a circle around them in the sand. He goes, I'll have your answer before you leave that circle. If you decide on war, you're at war with Rome. He goes, well, in that case, I'll just go home. That's the power that Rome had. But think about this in economics terms. If you were a farmer and you built yourself a nice irrigation system and a nice mill and you were making some money from the farmers who brought their grain to your mill and a war happens, runs right over your territory, they wreck your mill, they ruin your irrigation system. War's over. Do you rebuild it in a state of constant warfare? You might, but even then, that great expansion rebuilt everything, but you haven't made any progress. You just got back to where you were before the war. Another 20 years later, you're like, wow, I'm starting to make progress. Maybe I'll build a second mill. Oops, now a war starts. Now you have the Pax Romana. 500 years of peace in the core of the Roman Empire. Legions may have been fighting all the time on the frontiers, but the whole core of the Roman Empire is at peace. There's no legions in there to keep the peace because the peace is everyone's interest and they know if Rome gets annoyed at you, horrible, horrible things are going to happen. And Rome never forgot. If you revolted against Rome, oh, they're in the middle of a civil war. This is a good time to revolt. Rome goes, eh, put it in the notebook, fight the civil war. As soon as the civil war's over, the legions are marching to the place of the revolt and everybody responsible better be hanging from a wall or Rome is going to kill everybody. They're not nice people. They're horrible, horrible people. We can't understand the Romans today. Us trying to think like Romans is literally impossible. Even their enemies, the barbarians, the savage barbarians would look at a Roman battlefield afterwards in disgust and sickened that savagery. Because the Romans didn't just kill you. They chopped you up, threw your entrails everywhere. It was a feast of blood and gore. What's the number one sport? Well, let's go watch the lions eat Christians or anybody else that the lions feel like eating this time of year. They have a completely different mentality from us. There's no sentimentality in a Roman family. A Roman husband, a Roman senator holding hands with his wife is reason to be banished from Rome forever. A Roman father has the power to kill anyone in his family and no one would question it. He is God in his family. This is the kind of mentality you're with. But it's a violent time and it takes that kind of a violent people to say everyone stops fighting. If you really want to have a fight, you've got to come through us. We don't want to go through them. But now think of you're a farmer. I'm going to build a mill. I'm going to build an irrigation system. I'm going to build storage facilities. They're going to last forever because no one's marching for to destroy it. This leads to a huge amount of economic growth. So the empire, the military side of the empire becomes easier and easier to afford because Rome has 30 legions under Augustus. 300 years later, it's still got about 30 legions. The Roman military establishment until the time of Diocletian is not growing. But the economic base support is growing. If the economic base doubles and the number of soldiers has not moved at all, then affording your military establishment costs half as much in real terms. Without that understanding of what was happening inside Rome and how it was changing things. And I never see that. One of the Roman historians I enjoy reading the most said, we don't understand the Roman economy. It's all guesswork. And 30 years ago I would have said he's probably right. But a lot of people have spent a lot of time and effort in the archaeology and there's a list of their names in my book. I'm like, wow, I think they know enough now that they can make some really good assumptions without fear of ever being proven wrong. And I don't have to do that work myself. I've just got to copy their work. As I said before, there's a lot of Roman history in the book, but I'm not figuring that out. I'm not looking at the sources and saying, can I trust this guy? Is this Herodian trustworthy? I don't think he is, but I don't know. But there is a consensus of Roman historians who have read every line every sentence, parsed it against everything else we know about Rome and said, probably telling the truth here this looks made up. Excuse me. That's thousands of hours of work I don't have to do. All I have to do is take what they have the best Roman historians in the world, take their consensus opinion and overlay Here's how you think about it in strategic terms. Hopefully I got it right. I think I did. I'm waiting for Edwin Lutwak to read the book and give me a phone call. No, Jim, you got it all wrong. I have a great Edwin Lutwak story I can share with you after you turn off the filming. It's a great read. It makes a wonderful gift for 50 of your best friends and family members. I've got bills to pay so I'm very serious about everyone buying 50 copies. Well, for anyone interested in purchasing Rome, a strategy of empire, you'll be able to purchase it with the link down below from Oxford University Press. Thank you so much for joining me, Jim. It's been brilliant talking to you. Very nice talking to you too. This video was brought to you by World History Encyclopedia. For more great articles and interactive content head to our website via the link below. World History Encyclopedia is a non-profit organisation and you can find us on Patreon, a brilliant site where you can support our work and receive exclusive benefits in return. Your support helps us create videos twice a week, so make sure to check it out via the pop-up in the top corner of the screen or via the Patreon link down below. Thank you so much for watching and we will see you soon with another video.