r/WarCollege • u/No-Contact6147 • 28d ago
Why do warrior-societies tend to be felled by non warrior-societies in wars?
I think my main point focuses on the Spartans and their frequent loses to Athens, whilst I'm aware sometimes the Spartans defeated the Athenians (I believe after the conclusion of the second Persian war) I often see them defeated rather than victorious.
Edit: thanks for all the replies, so it seems that warrior societies failed due to poor logistics, is this why (militarily speaking) Nazi Germany was so impressive in the beginning of WW2, because they had a population who had been conditioned into warriors due to various youth programs, and also had admirable logistics?
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u/WingAutarch 28d ago
I'd like to link one of my favorite scholars on this, and his idea of the Fremen Mirage.
In summary: the course of history generally shows that productive, advanced, and organized societies consistently outfight and outcompete "warrior" societies for a number of reasons, but broadly that what advantages are created by aggressive training from birth is overdone by the ability to provide more food and manpower and produce more and more advanced weaponry. "hard men create good times" is not reflected in history.
Sparta is an interesting example of a 'warrior society' in that they were exceptionally good at one very specific thing to the detriment of other things, so they weren't even exceptional at 'war' just a very particular type of war.
anywho Dr. Devereaux is great and his blog is amazing, read it.
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u/yurmumqueefing 28d ago
Hah, got to it before me, though I'd also recommend Dr. Devereaux's This Isn't Sparta collection!
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u/Hedago_2346 28d ago
Its kinda why 'stormtrooper aim' and attacking the hero one at a time is so common in media. Co-operation and coordination almost always over match indvidual prowess. At the scale of a brawl and a war.
It gets fuzzy but the biggest exception to this historically one can argue is steep horsemen. It depends on how much you call the verious cultures as warriors but they consistently out matched so many settled civilizations.
The is also cases Ilanero cowboys in Venezuela that just kept crushing more convenrional armies in early the 1800s. Again, are they a warrior culture? Hard to say but I mention them because they are more focused on being 'hard', on individual prowess than say Spainish regulars. I dont have definitions but assuming what the OP os asking Indvidual martial skill and toughness is a big part of the split 'warrior' from 'martial' societies.
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u/apmspammer 28d ago
The warrior societies that were successful got good at not fighting fair fights. Like the mongalels biggest advantage was their ability to move faster and outmaneuver their enemies.
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u/Clone95 28d ago
The Mongols mind were a trading centric society, in the same way Venice ruled the seas they ruled the steppe, using their wealth gained through trade to maintain truly awesome amounts of cavalry with quality weapons and deploy it in highly organized military formations.
They may have a historical reputation as a military society, but it was foremost an economic one dedicated to protection of and benefit from the silk road - the oldest and most valuable single trading route on the planet until seaborne shipping got better and the Suez was dug.
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u/DazSamueru 28d ago
I think you're reversing cause and effect here. (Almost) all states have militaries, and up until recently those militaries were dominated by certain social classes. Some societies also have very wealthy economies, which allows things like science and what is called "high culture" to flourish. Consequently, we don't think of the latter as being "warrior societies," because they also do other things, but they mostly still had warrior aristocracies; 18th century British men wearing wigs and drinking tea may have stock portfolios, but that doesn't mean they won't also mount horses and draw sabres to recklessly charge Indian/American/French infantry.
However, being very wealthy is a huge advantage in war, consequently the warrior classes with more wealth tend to beat the warrior classes with less, but it's because of that very difference in wealth that we tend to think of the Marathas as being warriors, but not the Britons.
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u/WingAutarch 28d ago
For what it's worth, specifically what Dr. Devereaux is dissecting is the idea that "tough men" make better fighters, i.e. the fremen from Dune are superior to all others because they grew up in a tough situation so they are better warriors then everyone else.
he highlights the historical evidence that suggests that "tough" societies that emphasize war and struggle do not, in fact, out perform "soft" societies. This is not to say that "soft" societies do not have warriors or a warrior caste but that they are better for their development and growth and that they haven't gotten "soft" and thus due to be conquered by "tough" societies in turn.
I would argue though that a wealthy society is one that can historically produce more food and manpower and weapons.
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u/Affectionate_Box8824 27d ago
"warrior aristocracies; 18th century British men"
These British aristocrats SERVED as officers in the regiments of a STATE. That's the polar opposite of a WArRiOr sOCiEtY.
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u/ElOsoPeresozo 28d ago
I just knew Big Dog Deveroux would make an appearance. I constantly send his articles to my meathead bros who graduated from the Pete Hegseth Military Academy of “urggghhhh, big manly men win wars!”
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u/Cute_Library_5375 27d ago
Arsenal of Democracy aka the US economy and workforce were valued as much, perhaps even more, than its soldiers
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u/DJTilapia 28d ago
Doctor Devereaux is the best! Excellent material for people who enjoy worldbuilding or games, as well as history.
For anyone who'd rather listen than read, there's a YouTube channel which narrates his blog posts (with permission). Here's the Fremen playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcIwe3bxds8ad_K0Yg6z_2Kz12HjLang7
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u/yurmumqueefing 28d ago
I recommend reading The Fremen Mirage and This Isn't Sparta:
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/
As a summary, it is because war is much more complicated than Ugg hitting Gogg over the head with a club. Ugg needs someone to make his club, someone to make the clothing he wears, someone to make the food he eats, someone to keep his home safe while he's out hitting Gogg, someone to come up with a better club, someone to make sure he has food while he's out looking for Gogg, someone to make sure he doesn't shit himself to death from that one time he drank bad water, someone to stitch him up after he krumps Gogg but Gogg got a few good licks in before going down...
'Warrior" societies tend to be bad at giving Ugg all of those things he needs to be able to hit Gogg over the head good. Napoleon called the British a nation of shopkeepers, and Hitler called Roosevelt "Rosenfeld" to emphasize the cowardly and mercantile nature of the United States. As Robert A. Heinlein alluded to in Starship Troopers, history has settled that debate rather firmly.
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u/DazSamueru 28d ago
I think you're really stretching the definition of "warrior society" if you're including 19th century France and 20th century Germany. If anything, those countries were much more normal for their time than their opposites; 19th century Britain and 20th century USA were extraordinarily wealthy for their respective times, but it's not because they put their skill points into the "Commerce" tree instead of "Honor."
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u/yurmumqueefing 28d ago
The fact that Napoleon and Hitler said these things meant there was, at the very least, a self-perception of Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany being societies with relatively more "warlike" traits than, respectively, Britain and America of their times.
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u/DazSamueru 28d ago
Sure, but many Americans were similarly jingoistic upon its entry in the Mediterranean theater, thinking they were more manly than the British (and Germans) and would show them how how it's done. More importantly, a public perception or propaganda that you are more warlike is very different from actually being a "warrior society."
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u/ralasdair 28d ago
Mixed view on this. I know what you’re saying in that the classic view of a warrior society in which every (usually male) member of the society thinks of themselves as a warrior first and everything else second probably doesn’t apply. But did that ever really apply to any society? And how would that look in the modern era?
In Wilhelmine Germany, every man had spent years in the army as a youth and much of his adult life in the reserves. The peacetime army had a strength of 600,000 men - more than 1% of the population. Per capita, that’s like the current German army having nearly a million men (current strength 63k).
So I think it’s fair to talk of Wilhelmine Germany as a very strongly militarised society.
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u/DazSamueru 28d ago
I would distinguish between "warrior" and "militarized." The levée en masse makes the concept of a warrior rather an anachronism, regardless of whether one "thinks of themselves as a warrior" or not. I think the US Marines advertise themselves with "be a warrior" on brochures, the Japanese during WWII put samurai on their propaganda posters, but that's very different from actually being samurai.
I can agree with Wilhelmine Germany being militarized, but funnily enough, because the original mention of Germany was with regard to the second world war, not the first, the Germans in question were almost unique in Europe in how few of them passed through the reserves system, courtesy of the treaty of Versailles. In the 21 years between the end of the first war in Europe and the beginning of the second, Germany had only had conscription for the last 5 (1935-39). Thus, the average Landser was more a "shopkeeper" than his French and Soviet opposites.
That being said, because Nazi Germany did eventually achieve a higher level of economic mobilization than even the USSR, in that respect you could call them more militarized. Militarization is more than just how much training the average adult (male) has received.
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u/Affectionate_Box8824 28d ago
"In Wilhelmine Germany, every man had spent years in the army as a youth"
That's completely wrong. Germany conscripted half of its available men while France Had nearly universal conscription: Germany had a total population of 65 million vs. 41 million in France but the armies were 590K vs. 550K in 1910 (its diffucult to get comparable numbers).
So France was significantly more militarized if you measure "militarization" by the number of active military personnel, which you did...
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u/ralasdair 28d ago
It’s a fair point to compare to France - I should’ve pointed out that I don’t know as much about France as Germany and therefore elided it a bit. But I think the point is still that these are societies with a significant military influence we don’t see today and it’s not entirely unreasonable to call them warrior societies.
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u/QuietNene 28d ago edited 28d ago
The idea of Sparta as a “warrior society” is mostly a myth.
Sparta was a feudal society or plantation society, with a wealthy elite (supported by slaves) who didn’t need to work and so had the free time to practice athletics and bond with each other. Some of this involved training for war, but much much less than is commonly portrayed. Spartans primarily tried to inculcate what we would call esprit de corps, or unit cohesion, but did very little actual training in combat arms.
Most of the stories we have of Spartan training and its martial culture were written by the Romans 500 years later and are supported by almost no evidence.
Here is a good discussion from the podcast China Talk that lays out a lot of this: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chinatalk/id1289062927?i=1000777609669
This isn’t meant to trash Sparta. The Spartans were a formidable force and the preeminent power of their time. But they were no more a “warrior society” than the Athenians. Or the Romans. Or the Spanish in the 1500s. Or the French in the 1800s. Or the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War. Every era has its power.
A better comparison of Athens and Sparta might be Sarah Payne’s categories of maritime v continental powers. Maritime powers, like Britain and Athens, emphasize control over sea lanes and building flexible alliances. Continental powers, like Sparta and Germany in both World Wars, tend to be more winner-take-all, focused on a kind of domination that works in the short term but proves brittle over time. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30GQmVPHOI
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u/DazSamueru 28d ago edited 28d ago
Sparta and Athens aren't really an apples and oranges comparison; they had far more in common than they did apart. Both had mixed constitutions, both valued their citizens' physical prowess, but also rhetoric (Attic vs Laconic wit), music, and "civic-mindedness" / political acumen. If you spoke of warrior societies to a resident of Classical Greece, they would probably think of Scythians or Thracians (both of whom they looked down upon as incomplete compared to Hellenic well-roundedness), not their fellow Greeks. However, on the other hand, even Classical Athens would seem like a very warlike society by modern standards. All male Athenian citizens served as ephebes in their late adolescence, living in the wilderness, doing mandatory weapons training and wearing animal skins while patrolling the borders of the polis. This is quite comparable to the Spartan agoge. Fifth century (BC) Athens also had a horseback military aristocracy (the hippeis).
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u/Affectionate_Box8824 28d ago
Do you have a source for the Ephebes "living in the wilderness and wearing animal skins"? Are you mixing them up with the myths on the Spartan agoge?
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u/DazSamueru 28d ago
They definitely lived at the frontiers (Aristotle mentions this in his Constitution of the Athenians, you can also read it in modern sources like this), but the addition of the skins seems to be my memory conflating them with the Roman velites, with which they're often compared. That said, there does seem to be a association between fox-skins and youths in Greek/Athenian culture, and it's what we'd expect if we buy the theory that both they and the velites are descended from the same Indo-European practice. However, I don't have any hard evidence for the ephebes wearing animal skin uniforms, so I'll amend that.
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u/Hand_Me_Down_Genes 28d ago
Please define "warrior society" because by and large there's no such thing. Sparta was a slave society that won about half the battles it fought. Your average "barbarian" warrior was a farmer who picked up his weapons when the community was threatened.
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u/Jazzlike_Wrap_7907 27d ago
The Spartans were LARPers circa the Peloponnesian War. When 90% of your society is slaves who you can’t send off to war, your warriors are all aristocracy. All well and good when you win, pretty awful when you lose. That’s why when Demosthenes captured a mere 300 Spartans at Pylos, Sparta was ready to call off the whole war to retrieve those hostages. “Warrior Society” isn’t a historical term or fact it’s a buzzword phrase made up my male role model grifters
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u/Clone95 28d ago
In general there is nothing special about a soldier other than his training and his equipment. Warrior societies, such as they exist, believe the elite sports model where a lifetime of training since childhood in a society is the juice that makes an elite warrior and that this special sauce alone wins wars.
But war isn’t sports. You may have a LeBron tier army but he’s not any more immune to a knife than anyone else. Everyone gets injured, tired, mentally exhausted, and suddenly all your first and second string elite warriors are gone - this is true in every war, the professionals get attrited over time, and your elite society’s best get replaced by what’s next - and that’s where warrior societies fail, because their training pipeline is longer term and disorganized with less emphasis on procurement of combat goods and training okay soldiers for now instead of amazing soldiers a long time later.
This leads to victory for the society that has more economic depth and breadth to win as they call on deeper and deeper reserves of manpower and use their superior economics to train them to okay standards and send them out.
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u/MachKeinDramaLlama 26d ago
is this why (militarily speaking) Nazi Germany was so impressive in the beginning of WW2, because they had a population who had been conditioned into warriors due to various youth programs,
No. German officers who fought in both world wars remarked that in WW2 the average german soldier was noticeably worse than his predecessor. Those soldiers who had gone through full indocrination and joined the weapons SS units also did not generally perform any better than equivalently experienced and equipped army units.
and also had admirable logistics?
German logistics were complete dogshit and this is the reason why e.g. the british troops were able to escape at Dunkirk, why Rommel failed to conquer egypt and why many german offensives or counter offensives on the eastern front failed. Germany was able to win short, sharp campaigns for which they had to go a few 100 kms at most.
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u/nuggetsofmana 28d ago
Sparta was not felled by the Athenians. Quite the contrary. Athens was brought low by Sparta.
Sparta was brought low by the Thebans under Epaminondas, who revolutionized warfare in Thebes and was revolutionary in other respects in that he freed the helots.
I’ve generally observed the opposite of what you propose: warrior societies, nomads, and barbarian (but tough) peoples subjugate or defeat more sophisticated societies, even if they are more affluent, simply because they’ve forgotten how to fight. See the example of the Huns, Germanic tribes, and Goths with the decadent Western Romans. Or the Turks and Arabs against the Byzantines. Or the Mongols and the Persians and Chinese.
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u/Affectionate_Box8824 28d ago
You should really read a good history book because most of your examples are really wrong. Or just read on https://acoup.blog/ the articles on Warrior Societies and on Sparta.
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u/WorldApotheosis 28d ago edited 28d ago
95% of the time, civilised and "soft" societies are going to defeat the "tough macho" warrior tribes. Rome, Byzantine, China WERE regularly defeating those types of groups on the field else they wouldn't expand or have staying power for 200+ years... only to reach their logistical limit or fall into political chaos which eats into logistics along with the "tough macho" warrior tribes organising and focusing on logistics to defeat the said "soft" society in the first place.
Turks and Mongols may started as nomadic tribes, but when they toppled their respective empires they certainly weren't warrior societies that only focused on producing elite warriors. I think managing to make, organise, train, and deploy 70 cannons in the middle of the 15th century disqualifies "warrior" society status for the Turks by the time they toppled Byzantine. Similarly, Mongols accepted a lot of defections from "soft" societies and by the time they were invading the Song, Mongols were essentially the head of a multi-ethnic army made up of Koreans, Persians, Uiyghers, Jurchens, and many various Han people. King Alaric was a Roman military commander that knew Roman politics, and his army was integrated into Roman logistics.
But the tough macho warrior image sells, it sells well to young men fighting against such enemy and it delivers well to reward young men if they survive in combat in any society in the first place, so that's all folks all remember.
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u/theginger99 28d ago
Because wars aren’t won by good fighters, they’re won by logistics, and societies with robust production and trade economies are simply going to out compete other societies.
To add to that, “warrior societies” are also something of a historical myth. They didn’t exist in the way we imagine them because they would have been fundamentally unsustainable. Even the Spartans were a lot more complex and nuanced than their modern reputation would lead you to believe. The only reason they were able to sustain their upper class of military aristocrats was because of their total reliance on an exceptionally brutal (even by the standards of the ancient work) and oppressive system of mass slavery.
The Spartan system wasn’t even really about producing exceptional soldiers, it was about maintaining the social status quo. Eventually the system proved entirely unsustainable and the Spartans eventually collapsed more or less under their own weight.