Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  When you consider the expanse of the territory to be defended, and the poor communications and sluggish pace of travel, Rome’s military doesn’t seem extravagant. In fact, though, it eventually had to confront a problem with a very American feel to it. “Given the worldwide array of military liabilities which the United States has assumed since 1945,” the historian Paul Kennedy has written, “its capacity to carry those burdens is obviously less than it was several decades ago”—less than it was when its economic prowess was unchallenged. The Roman military was caught in the very same vise: too large to be affordable and too small to do everything it was asked to do.

  A Roman Culture War—and Ours

  AT SOME MOMENT in the mid to late fourth century A.D. a concerned Roman citizen sat down and began to write a long letter to his emperor. We do not know the man’s name, and can only guess at the year from various internal clues. The document bears the title De Rebus Bellicis (A Tract on Defense), and it seems to have found its way to the imperial precincts and into the hands of a courtier, where it survived by a lucky fluke.

  What we know about Anonymous, the author, we have to infer from the writing itself. He is educated in Latin, knows some Greek, displays a wonkish familiarity with government and policy jargon, and probably isn’t a Christian. He is deeply troubled by the condition of the empire, which he considers to be in a state of material and spiritual decline. In this he is hardly alone: the late empire has given rise to plenty of such commentary. Observers wring their hands about the growth of inequality, about the way taxes fall heavily on the poor even as the rich escape, about poor administration and widespread corruption. In this instance Anonymous is writing about national security in its broadest sense, and he makes the very modern point that security isn’t just a matter of raw military power but also derives from a society’s overall health.

  He’s also worried about something very specific: the empire does not have enough people to do the work that needs to be done. In the fourth century labor shortages are a problem throughout the imperial economy—laws are passed to bind families to essential jobs, such as farming, mining, weaving, and weapons making, generation after generation—but nowhere more than in the military, which is now bigger than ever, and for which recruits are harder to get even as threats from the outside are obviously growing. What’s the solution? Like some strategists in our own time—those who have invested hope in air power as a partial substitute for ground forces; those who propose walled and wired borders as a response to immigration—Anonymous seeks a technological fix. Most of De Rebus Bellicis is given over to a description of the new weapons of war that he is promoting. There is a warship powered not by sail or oarsmen but by oxen turning paddle wheels, which propel the ship with “a wondrous and ingenious effect.” There is a chariot with whirling scythes on its axles, like the one used by Massala in the chariot race in Ben-Hur. There are several new types of artillery pieces, or ballistae.

  De Rebus Bellicis has long attracted special notice because it’s a rare example of Roman technological precocity. For all their applied engineering skills in some areas, especially military ones, the Romans came up short in others, and have little place in technology’s annals under the heading “original ideas.” “The Roman empire was technologically as backward as medieval Europe, and in some important aspects more so,” writes the historian A.H.M. Jones. “Pottery was turned on the wheel, metalwork hammered out on the anvil.” Measuring distances in open country was done in primitive (but surprisingly accurate) fashion: to keep track of how far they had traveled on the march, Roman armies relied on men whose job it was to walk in equal paces and count the number of steps they had taken. The technology of waterpower was understood, but more widely used for sawing marble than for industrial processes that might sustain an economy or relieve a labor crunch. It’s as if America used electricity to power Disney World but not U.S. Steel. A famous study from many decades ago, by the historian Lynn White Jr., suggests that the barbarians—“far too little understood”—would have garnered a lot more patents than the Romans, maybe because they were so much less reliant on slaves to do their work for them. (And in fact the Germans today are number 3, after the Americans and the Japanese, in the number of U.S. patents granted annually.) It was the barbarians, not the Romans, who came up with such things as the making of barrels and tubs; the cultivation of rye, oats, and hops; the heavy plow; the ski; trousers; and the stirrup, which revolutionized warfare on horseback. So it is understandable that the inventions of Anonymous, colorfully rendered in thumbnail illuminations, have captured attention. Whether any of the devices would actually have worked as advertised is another matter. But they wouldn’t have solved the larger military-manpower problem, any more than technology today can solve America’s.

  Rome’s situation was acute even before the Battle of Adrianople, in 378 A.D., where a professional Roman army of 20,000 was annihilated by the Goths in the course of one hot August afternoon. When the battle was over, the emperor Valens and two thirds of his men lay dead on the field. In its aftermath the Romans had no choice but to reconstitute their lost legions the only way they could. Barbarians had for centuries been assimilated into the military in large but digestible numbers. Now, for the first time, they were invited en masse to fight under the imperial banners—and allowed to stay intact as peoples, and to occupy territory, and to be led by their own leaders. These foederati would turn out to be a devil’s bargain. Yes, the barbarian forces often proved their mettle. At the same time, they were prone to independence and loyal to their own commanders. Their level of training did not match that of the Romans. They behaved according to different cultural standards. The chronicler Ammianus Marcellinus tells the story of one barbarian recruit who shocked his peers by drinking the blood of an enemy he had just killed. Not surprisingly, some barbarian units became free agents. The Visigothic leader Alaric rose to the rank of general in the service of Rome, fighting under the emperor Theodosius. Only when his further advancement in the hierarchy was rebuffed did he turn on the empire he had served. The historian Ramsay MacMullen writes that when Alaric and the Visigoths sacked Rome, “he and his men were the Roman army, and had been for decades.”

  Adrianople made catastrophic a set of conditions that had long been dangerous and chronic. One part of the problem was more social than quantitative. In the days of the republic the Roman military had been largely a citizen army made up of Romans themselves, with its leadership drawn from the ranks of the upper classes. That continued into imperial times, but to an ever-lessening degree. Over the years, the number of soldiers with roots in Italy declined steadily—from about 65 percent at the beginning of the first century A.D. to about 20 percent at the end. Meanwhile, the ties between the military and the civilian elite became frayed. Roman historians like Tacitus and Cassius Dio had all served in the army, but after Ammianus Marcellinus, who was alive at the time of Adrianople, the chroniclers have no firsthand knowledge of military affairs. One modern historian describes the Roman army as, increasingly, “a society rather sealed off from the ordinary, that is, from the civilian,” and quotes from an ancient account of the reaction in Rome to soldiers returning from faraway frontiers: they were “most savage to look at, frightening to listen to, and boorish to talk with.” America’s Delta Force would fare no better in Saddle River, Brentwood, or Winnetka.

  In his 1957 study The Soldier and the State, Samuel Huntington identified what many now describe as a growing “two cultures” problem in America, with the military class and the professional and administrative class beginning to pull apart. This was a problem that a universal military draft had kept in check, and that an all-volunteer army—meaning a paid, professional army—would only accelerate. Some 450 out of 750 Princeton graduates in the class of 1956 served in the military, including Neil Rudenstine, a future president of Harvard, and R. W. Apple, the late New York Times correspondent; the figure for the class of 2004 was eight out of 1,100. Huntington, himself a veteran and a m
ember of the last generation of American scholars who did military service as a matter of routine, could as easily have written his book—Miles et Imperium, it would have been called—in the reign of Diocletian as in that of Eisenhower. In Great Britain the two-cultures divide is mitigated by the royal family, whose young men routinely enlist in the armed forces. But consider the Kennedy family: all four of the Kennedy brothers—Joe, John, Bobby, and Ted—served in the military; not one of the thirty Kennedy cousins has. I haven’t served in the armed forces either, though a brother and a sister are veterans: very unusual for a middle-class family from Greenwich, Connecticut, in the late 1970s, and nearly unheard of today.

  This phenomenon has consequences for everything from military recruiting to national leadership. At a recent convention of recruiters a distinguished scholar of manpower issues asked, “If you had a choice between tripling your advertising budget and having Jenna Bush join the Army, which would you take?” The overwhelming choice was Jenna. In terms of leadership, you can’t help wondering if a late-Roman model is starting to reassert itself. As a group, the most capable, well-rounded, and experienced public executives in America today are its senior military officers, not its Washington politicians. To be an American general in effect means that you know how to run a business, have earned a graduate degree in some serious academic subject, have gained diplomatic experience abroad, know something about managing large numbers of people, are comfortable negotiating within the imperial bureaucracy, and understand the infrastructure of managed violence. How many elected officials have a comparable résumé?

  The two-cultures divide has an even broader dimension: leadership aside, military society and the larger American society are increasingly dissimilar. Military society is orderly and disciplined; it grapples openly and pragmatically with tough issues of education, family life, poverty, and class. It’s the one social segment of America that has seriously confronted the issue of race. Only in the military do white people routinely take orders from black people. Military society is also deeply religious, and it’s far more conservative politically than the rest of America, and far more likely to vote. Its members look with dismay at what they see as the physical and spiritual softness of civilian society. A colonel writes in the Marine Corps Gazette: “It is no longer enough for Marines to ‘reflect’ the society they defend. They must lead it, not politically but culturally. For it is the culture we are defending.” There is something familiar about this colonel’s discomfort: it’s how Diocletian felt when he finally set eyes on Rome.

  Out of necessity Diocletian expanded the legions substantially, but of course this made the overall manpower situation even more acute. How much the Roman army grew remains a subject of great debate. Did it double? Triple? And how much of the growth was real, as opposed to on paper? What is known for sure is that the army grew. Quotas had to be levied on cities and on big landowners. Then as now, physical impairment was one way out, and potential conscripts sometimes maimed themselves to escape military service—by cutting off their thumbs, for instance. But even that could prove unavailing. One emperor ordered the thumbless ones to be burned alive; another decided to take the mutilated conscripts anyway—and then doubled the quota on the localities they came from. But the competition for labor was intense. The great landed estates, the main source of wealth in an agrarian economy, needed workers. So did the fabricae. An arrangement with the barbarians—land, power, and autonomy in return for military service—seemed like a good idea at the time.

  The New Barbarians

  ONE HISTORIAN has observed that the adequacy of Rome’s military “depended in fact on the success of Rome in avoiding having to face two major military threats to her frontiers simultaneously.” Officially, U.S. military doctrine calls for the ability to fight two large conventional conflicts at once—a capability that the Pentagon acknowledges America no longer possesses. Meanwhile, the American military is hemorrhaging young officers; in 2005 fully a third of the West Point graduates eligible for retirement chose to leave the service at the first opportunity (after five years), up from only about a fifth not long ago. The armed forces are also facing severe recruiting shortfalls. The Army, the Army Reserve, and the Army National Guard failed to meet their recruiting goals in 2005. This state of affairs has been profoundly exacerbated by the war in Iraq. Virtually all Army and Marine combat units are in Iraq or Afghanistan, on their way back, or preparing to deploy, and the pace of rotation is proceeding at unprecedented speed. At the same time, virtually all Army National Guard and Marine Reserve combat units have been mobilized. What would happen if a crisis elsewhere demanded a significant level of commitment? One analyst has characterized the military as being in “a race against time”: it must either recruit more or deploy less, or the result will be to “break” the armed forces.

  The words of a modern military classic, Colonel T. R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War, never lose their relevance: “You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.”

  The American military has responded to its manpower challenges in the only two ways possible—choices that would have been familiar to a Valentinian or a Theodosius. One is by trying to raise more indigenous recruits. The other is by trying to find outsiders to help. With conscription off the table—unacceptable politically—finding more Americans isn’t easy now and won’t become easier. One obvious method is to lower the entry threshold. The Pentagon tried this during the Vietnam War, in an experiment called Project 100,000—an attempt to “salvage” effective soldiers from the pool of so-called Category IV recruits, the ones who score lowest on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. The experiment succeeded mainly in introducing an Orwellian term into military parlance: New Standards Men. It was otherwise a robust failure. The New Standards Men were unfit for many specialties and therefore assigned to the infantry, making them far more likely than other recruits to die in combat. Performance was subpar in every way. They took longer to train. They were arrested more frequently. And once outside the military, their lives were no different from those of their peers who had never been in the service.

  No one in the Pentagon wants to revisit the post-Vietnam years—a traumatic era for the American armed forces. The draft had been replaced by an all-volunteer military, morale was low, and the quality of recruits was abysmal. Training manuals sometimes had to be translated into comic-book form. The Pentagon announced last year that in order to meet its recruiting goals, it was raising the maximum age for Army and National Guard recruits from thirty-four to forty, and then raised it again to forty-two. It also hopes to double the enlistment bonus (to $40,000), and it is offering a $2,000 “Quick Ship” bonus for recruits who agree to start basic training within forty-five days of signature. Some Special Forces personnel in high demand are receiving re-enlistment bonuses of up to $150,000. To lower the bar for new enlistees even further, the military has softened its educational requirements. In 2005 the military accepted more recruits without high school diplomas than it had in years, and it also accepted more Category IV recruits. In addition, the military has eased the ban on tattoos, relaxed its drug-testing policies, and waived the obesity cutoff if a potential recruit can pass a somewhat forgiving fitness test. One recruiting officer explains, “There’s just a lot of kids sitting around playing Xbox and eating junk food.” Niall Ferguson writes in Colossus that for Americans, “the white man’s burden is around his waist.” Overall, the recruits accepted into the military in 2005 were the least qualified in a decade.

  The military is also making it just plain harder to leave the service. A Pentagon memo in 2005 ordered commanders to reduce high attrition (“We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend”) by paying less attention to poor performance, bad behavior, and unruly body mass. Recruiters are looking beyond t
he traditional American heartland. A recent newspaper account began, “From Pago Pago in American Samoa to Yap in Micronesia, 4,000 miles to the west, Army recruiters are scouring the Pacific, looking for high school graduates to enlist at a time when the Iraq war is turning off many candidates in the States.” Another source that could be tapped is illegal aliens. A bill now in Congress targets the noncitizen children of undocumented immigrants: they would get legal status and become eligible for citizenship if they signed up for two years in the military. The military-affairs analyst Max Boot, taking a page from ancient imperial practice—Roman citizenship after twenty-five years in the army—has proposed conferring American citizenship in return for a period of military service: “We could model a Freedom Legion after the French Foreign Legion. Or we could allow foreigners to join regular units after a period of English-language instruction, if necessary.” (He went on to ask, “Anyway, what’s the alternative? $100,000 signing bonuses? Recruiting felons?”)