Ho hmm, this was a good read up to half way but then the thinking derailed.
Silicon chips due to become too expensive due to energy costs and rare earth material shortages! Economic expansion depends on population growth??
I will try to explore the second half of the essay tomorrow but I am increasingly getting the impression that Unherd authors are being allocated too many column inches that get filled with fanciful expanded theories way beyond the author’s core idea.
“Economic expansion depends on population growth??” Haven’t you noticed that the economic elites in the West are allowing mass immigration in order to maintain or increase population?
Its a classic ponzi scheme – without improvements in productivity the only way to grow GDP is by having more people, who’s retirement will ultimately be funded by future generations who need ever more people to fund the scheme.
The bit about silicon chips is nonsense. He simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Another generalist out of his depth.
Creating the pure silicon ingots is not that expensive. It’s the processing equipment in the fabs (factories) that is expensive.
Wafer fabs producing the chips do not use the fantastic amounts of energy he claims.
Chips don’t need rare earth metals.
Drones don’t need advanced microprocessors. As per his earlier point – the whole point of drones is that they are cheap and don’t need super-advanced expensive technologies. He’s arguing against himself here.
Getting back to the military side. Modern militaries are not obsolete. The low cost, insurgent techniques he seems to think are the future can be adequate for a defensive operation or wearing down the patience and resources of an aggressor. But they are no solution if you need to invade or occupy a country. You need real armies for that.
Drones need 32 bit microprocessors (usually ARM CPUs or microcontrollers) and dozens of other chips, all from different companies, made in different fabs, with different processes. They are the product of multinational design and fabrication companies, with staff in many countries. Design in the USA, Israel, Singapore, Japan or the UK or wherever you can find bright, suitably trained, hardworking people. Fabricate in South Korea or Taiwan or the USA or Germany or Japan etc. where another team of very patient, very meticulous, but not so imaginative people run and maintain the extraordinary electro-optical and chemical gear which actually makes the chips. Production testing requires exotic equipment too.
Each fab costs billions of dollars and needs to be run by a very highly trained and capable workforce, in an environment of safety, economic and political stability, with good transport arrangements and global marketing.
This would become impossible due to social breakdown, religious fanatics, drug addicts and drug gangs long before we run out of energy, base metals and the more exotic elements and oil-based products which go into finished semiconductors, all other electronic components and fully assembled, tested, electronic circuit boards and pieces of equipment.
I would be very interested to see how Russia builds the electronics for its actual weapons (not just where it gets the CNC machines to make the metal bits). My guess is that Iran and Russian drones, missiles and weapons systems are full of Raspberry Pi (32 bit ARM) computer boards, which can be bought en-masse as consumer items in China or eBay or whatever in the West. Neither country has semiconductor fabs, or much of an electronic component industry. I am sure they can design and make PCBs. But all or almost all of the components and many whole sub-assemblies for all their drones surely come from the same factories everyone else in the world uses. Likewise their design software, since there are plenty of open source PCB and CAD design programs. This is not the case for semiconductor design, but Russia, Iran and North Korea don’t make semiconductors.
This is the real limitation for semiconductor manufacture and the only thing required to solve it is common sense and political will to develop those resources nationally and guard the technology from enemies. The US took far too long to do this thanks to the entrenched globalists profiting from the world as it was, but have started moving in the right direction with the CHIPS Act to develop semiconductor self-sufficiency. The US has tacitly set the limits of the globalist system it created, effectively attempting to prevent China from reaching parity. How well it’s working depends on who you ask, and it remains to be seen if America’s allies will continue to toe the line. I have no idea what Japan and the Netherlands were offered to get on board with the US China export ban or if fear of China was sufficient. Everybody recognizes at this point that access to the most advanced chips conveys significant economic and military advantages. We’re looking at the beginnings of a semiconductor arms race. The foundations of a post-globalist reality are already being quietly laid down in a way that the public and media simply haven’t yet caught up with.
And in Afghanistan not even real armies, Russian, American or British did well; as we Brits should have known from our first attempts back in Queen Victoria’s time.
Part II.
“3000 years of feudalism”. Well I suppose when a writer in North America simplifies European history that is an understandable error.
“Explosive shells instantly made wooden warships obsolete.” The transition from the wooden wind powered battleship of the line to the Dreadnought took 60 years.
At the end of the day author’s central theory is sound. The world is entering a transitionary era and the west is likely to be the biggest looser. Twenty years ago when an Apache ground attack helicopter pilot eliminated Iraqi combatants observed through his night vision heads up display, he was using an immense technical advantage. Today a rebel drone looking to zap a NATO outpost might be running some AI object identification software downloaded from Github for free.
The critical issue we no face is how long do we have to wait for the western military leadership to comprehend the new reality and abandon their reckless attempts to provoke WWIII
Rob Griffin
3 months ago
I think his magic mushroom potion kicked in around the mention of archers & cavalry. I couldn’t make it any farther without psychedelics either.
The first half was very interesting, however, The lessons of the Ukraine and Gaza fighting do indeed suggest that at present land warfare is going through a phase of small squads with homemade drones rendering obsolete expensive tanks and other expensive kit – and strengthening defence more than offence.
But technology moves fast and within a few years we may be in yet another phase with different characteristics. Perhaps we will see vast coordinated and centralised – and possibly AI directed – networks of drones, mines and missiles displacing the current configuration. Naval warfare is probably heading that way already.
I think he is conflating the idea of existential wars and the kind of low level policing type actions we invariably see these days. Obviously, one realises why the bigger, richer nations can’t just send in thousands of cruise missiles or whatever but extrapolating from a non globalised world of centuries ago into some steam punk concept applied to today’s ever more integrated world (whether we like it or not) seems, to use the great Philosopher football manager Peter Reid’s phrase about Arsenal in the 1990s ‘As weak as piss.’
According to Wiki we have 133 years of coal left at current rates of consumption. That is ignoring other ways of making steel and future scientific innovations.
After all, the Houthis’ $2,000 missiles have to be made in factories, and use silicon brains and refined metals of their own. The US is more capable of pivoting from expensive antimissiles to decentralized clouds of drones than the Houthis are of defeating said clouds of drones.
Meanwhile, Israel could destroy Hamas immediately by pumping fuel-air mixture into the tunnel system at as many entry points as it can find, then detonating it. This would light off all the munitions that Hamas has been buying over the years with our aid money. The secondary explosions alone would demolish every scrap of infrastructure in Gaza. Israel is holding off on doing so only while it still hopes it can rescue more of the hostages.
That’s one Netflix pitch I won’t be tuning into if it ever gets made.
T Bone
3 months ago
Early on, I was thinking it was the most practical article ever written by a Druid. Then it turned into a Sci-Fi novel. Any elite Sci-Fi novel needs a time traveling hero to defeat the impenetrable army of darkness! 3/5 for creativity.
ChilblainEdwardOlmos
3 months ago
Cosplay “Druid” reveals prophecy. Ugh.
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Great stuff as usual John Michael Greer, speculative and outside the box.
Fully agree. Great stuff. Demographics is the biggest thing people do not talk about and the demographics particularly of the west today are bad and getting worse. This is civilisation changing. Luckily it works very slowly so we have time.
Julian Farrows
3 months ago
This sounds so much like the backstory of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
”All hail the God-Emperor!”
While the scenes described in the article may seem implausible, we truly have no idea what the year 2,400 will look like. This scenario is as good as any other.
Samuel Ross
3 months ago
Israel is moving slowly out of mercy, since it does not want to wreak a bloody slaughter amongst the Philistines. I can’t believe I just said that sentence. It sounds like it came from the Bible.
But The Yahoo identifies the Palestinians as Amalek,look it up in the Old Testament or just ask Richard Dawkins. It’s a case of telling you in plain sight and hearing without telling you.
Christopher Hickey
3 months ago
“we’re burning the last scraps of the necessary coal reserves right now.”
This is pure balderdash. The EIA estimates coal reserves in the US would last for nearly 450 years. Even if that estimate was off by an order of magnitude, the author’s assertion would still be false.
Ordinary coal is abundant, esp. if you do not care about quality (e.g., lignite) but coking coal: the highest grade, is not and JMG pointed out without coking coal there is no metallurgy.
Excellent riposte. You’re right, I made the same mistake as so many do when speaking about oil, i.e. not paying attention to the molecular differences that make it more/less suitable for various applications. That being said, I still believe describing the current market as “the last scraps” is vastly overstated.
Christopher Chantrill
3 months ago
The question is whether the “avowed Nazis” on Substack that The Atlantic worries about will be able to take down the FBI and its pals in AntiFa with drones and stuff. You never know.
Chris Maille
3 months ago
In order to win a war, one needs to truly understand what war is actually about: the winner convinces the looser that accepting the winner’s conditions of surrender is better than continuing to fight. (von Clausewitz, ‘Vom Kriege’).
Not understanding this principle is exactly what has produced 80 years of suffering in the Palestinian situation. Sending humanitarian aid may alleviate immediate suffering, but it perpetuates a state where the Palestinians find it preferable to continue fighting rater than to surrender.
That’s where intelligence comes into play: find out under which conditions the opponent is willing to surrender, and subsequently determining whether oneself is willing to inflict enough damage to the opponent to meet his criteria for accepting defeat.
Nothing of that seems to happen both in Ukraine and the middle east, at least on the side of the west. That’s appalling.
Putin very clearly does understand this principle…
Much of the west’s failure in warfare since Vietnam is political, not military. It’s not so much a lack of military capability that holds us back but a lack of a willingness to use it to its fullest extent. Some of that is due to the nuclear threat from Russia/USSR, but a lot of it is just poor leadership and lack of foresight.
True. I listen to people like Douglas McGregor, Daniel Davis or Alexander Mercouris a lot these days, who also have said this in one form or another.
Then something extraordinary is currently happening: Tucker Carlson in Moscow interviewing Vladimir Putin. The entire planet will be watching. I am also curious how the western political establishment will react to it.
The Palestinians who I am angry at seeing subjected to a genocide on our tvs,I don’t have a tv now but I’ve seen it in other people’s houses,at least the Nazis tried to keep it secret,now we all have to KNOW so we’re all complicit,the Palestinians are very stupid and have proved it over 80 years of rubbish negotiating,getting offered a poorer and worse deal every time. And when getting Gaza territory returned to them going on a blowing up spree of destruction. They needed to feel at home so they recreated an environment of rocks and rubble.
Charles Stanhope
3 months ago
Adrianople is much exaggerated. By 378 AD* Constantinople was by far the most important city in the Empire, and a mere 140 miles from the battlefield of Adrianople. Did it fall? NO! .**
Rome by contrast was an anachronism but did it fall? NO, not for another 32 years in fact.
32 years was plenty of time to grow another Army, in fact nearly two. Sadly this ‘army’ was again to be dissipated by internecine strife amongst the ‘Romans’. We have been warned.
(* For the fanatic 1131 AUC.)
(* it didn’t in fact fall for another 826 years!)
Dylan Blackhurst
3 months ago
Okay. The post industrial armies sound a lot like the planet of the apes movies!
Nell Clover
3 months ago
Where to begin. Well, let’s start with this. “Economic growth depends ultimately on population growth.. Once demographic decline sets in, each business will on average have fewer customers than the year before, each property will have fewer people to bid on it, each investment vehicle will have fewer people investing in it. Thus, the average business, the average asset, and the average investment vehicle will all lose money.”
The B___k Death of the 14th century caused a European demographic decline of at least 30% and perhaps 50%. This was a Europe before the age of exploration, where it was essentially its own little world. The population didn’t start recovering until the late 15th century.
We can safely say that aggregate (all added together) economic output collapsed, but why does this matter, and why do we care about economic output at all? Well, economies only exist to serve people and so we really only care about goods and services supplied per person. Money too is irrelevant, it is just a measure of goods and services and very a poor measure at that since it provides no constant measure at all.
So what happened during and after the demographic calamity of the b___k death? Goods and services per person increased slightly, living standards increased modestly thanks to general deflation. Serfdom was irreparably broken in many European societies due to the lack of serfs and abundant demand for paid labour. The nobility of Europe did not take too kindly to this. Only by extremely repressive measures by monarchs like Edward III was the social mobility of the peasantry suppressed and the existing economic status quo maintained. It was this suppression that caused the eventual economic stagnation, not the population fall.
Lets be clear, the 14th century population fall was a bad economic outcome for one group in society: the nobility. Edward III and his peers across Europe justified suppression of peasant material wealth as a Good Thing for the greater good to prevent a Godly doomsday that would wreck the climate with plagues and failed harvests. The nobility persuaded itself that it was balancing a self-evident natural order, keeping the peasants poor to stop them from being poor.
Today’s ultra wealthy at the WEF have exactly the same concerns and beliefs as their medieval forebearers, and for the same reasons. And they too are terrified of generalised deflation. The middle class population is peaking, and the wealthy economies of the West are facing absolute population declines. This *is* calamatous for the existing economic elite and radical controls are needed to preserve the existing economic order and wealth structure. It’s going to need a gargantuan greater good argument to justify the severe impositions needed to keep the economy inflated.
But the vast majority of us are not the economic elite. Like the peasantry of medieval Europe we ordinary people stand to gain from population decline and generalised deflation. For at its most simple level, wealth buys you space: larger airline sears, bigger gardens, less busy beaches. An industrial, automated economy with fewer people competing for material wealth and physical space means higher living standards for more people. We should welcome population decline. It is telling that the elite demand we fear it.
Won’t Global Big Money Inc. simply hoover up (for example) residential housing stock, as it becomes cheaper due shrinking demand and then rent it back to what remains of us?
I doubt it why invest in a declining asset with a declining market? Many investment properties are owned by private investors who are themselves just 6 months away from financial difficulty if their property is empty.
Post the Black Death the English government tried to use legislation to force serfs to remail loyal to their local Lord but a fundamental economic imbalance could not be controlled.
Agreed. There’s a reason things cost so much more in the cities than in the rural countryside. My parents’ modest 200k dollar home built in the late 90’s would fetch multiple millions of dollars if it could be magically transported to Los Angeles or Chicago. This is also why elites love open borders and immigration. Gotta hold down those wages. The elites problem is they’ve made too many mistakes in too obvious a way and they’re now hated for one reason or another. They’ve triggered a backlash that spans the entire political spectrum. They’re holding onto the left for now, but that probably won’t last. If populist parties start winning big, the grassroots progressives will jettison the elites in order to broaden their appeal for the same reason the conservative right did. The elites have lost. They just don’t know it yet.
That decline is certainly not happening here in the UK, and there is no prospect of it unless we get very serious about massively reducing immigration.
A D Kent
3 months ago
Amusing and interesting article, especially regarding the potted historical analysis. The author should note though that there is now only one officially accepted lesson from history, one which renders all previous and subsequent lessons null and void. It is the one involving Neville Chamberlaine waving a piece of paper.
Quick military point – it’s not just drones that are proving to be ‘game-changing’ in Ukraine – it’s the hundreds of thousands of mines. These now have all sorts of devilish fuse mechanisms and can be laid remotely by shell, missile or drone, within minutes of a path being cleared.
it’s the fact that they can now rapidly be re-laid remotely that has made the difference. Also the mix of materials and sometimes networked triggering systems that can be activated by pressure, vibration, acoustically and all sorts of electromagnetic sigals make them very difficult to clear in the first place and almost impossible when under fire. You can’t just line-up behind a flail or plough anymore. The RF learned this in 2022 – the AFU re-learned if last summer, both at large cost.
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
This is a fun article. In fairness , any exploration of the future is bound to be incorrect. There are a few clangers here, the biggest of which is ” resouce depletion”. The earth is full of raw materials and as prices rise, it becomes economic to mine the slightly more expensive stuff and supply increases. The point on population is clumsy. Real estate, gov bonds and stocks will all collapse soonish anyway , probably against bitcoin but definately in real terms as money continues to lose its value. The big danger really with falling population is falling ingenuity in an ageing population. The West ( and china, japan, Russia) will almost certainly decline against India and Africa as the 22 year old brain is more creative and ambitious than the 44 year old brain.
The best point here is the brittleness of the conventional army and our industrial civilisation and the possibility of global collapse. But it wont happen because of ” resource depletion”. It could happen for other reasons however
John Tyler
3 months ago
In a hundred years time we’ll either laugh condescendingly or nod our heads knowingly.
Just like Greer’s taken a kg of magic mushrooms, I read this article with a kg of salt. Nothing ages worse than a prediction of the future, especially predictions about ‘decline’ and ‘rebirth’ from men who are part of strange religious orders. It was a rather interesting article up until the 7th to last paragraph – then it just read like a strange fantasy of his, rather than a serious prediction of the future.
Fascinating article and fascinating comments. Clearly some of what Greer says everyone agrees with. I found it a perpective refreshing read. Made me think.
R S Foster
3 months ago
…the West chooses to hold the line rather than win because we are extremely squeamish about civilian casualties and massive destruction. When it gets existential, we won’t be…we will “…make a desert and call it peace”…as the US readily could with Yemen, by flattening everything and killing everyone there.
In fact, if they and their Allies did that and encouraged the Israelis to do the same in Gaza…the long term cost in “innocent” lives might well be less.
Alex Lekas
3 months ago
The United States could withdraw its troops from the 100-odd foreign countries where it has military bases, focus on defending its own borders, and retool its military to adapt to the ongoing revolution in military affairs.
I among several Americans in agreement with this line. But understand – this is not a solution, it’s a tradeoff. The countries that have depended on US protection to the point of taking it for granted will now have to fund their own defense. NATO, by definition in this scenario, goes away, which is just as well as its original purpose is no more. The impact of our far-too-many posts and bases on local economies will also go away.
Relocating some of these troops along the southern border is a great idea. Want to see development occur? Plop a federal installation onto a piece of land somewhere and watch a town spring up around it. As a bonus, this would stop the flow of illegals that threatens to drown society. This plan, however, is unlikely because too many of our overlords are invested in the continued trafficking of illegals and drugs. There is no other explanation for their ignoring the border for years and only now pretending that it’s an issue.
It’s obvious they’re not serious about addressing it just by looking at the ridiculous bill that’s been proposed, the one that allows 5K illegals to enter every day before govt feels compelled to respond. But that aside, I endorse our resignation from being the world’s cop. If people want to kill each other, let them so long as those attacks do not involve us or our interests. Part of me wants to add “our allies” to that group but you can’t have it both ways.
The point about ‘retooling’ the American military is on point. It has become a hollowed out social petri dish that is still fighting the Cold War. Those days are done. The nature of warfare has changed and the nation has failed to adapt. Military leadership has focused more on the boogeyman of white supremacy than on readiness. It has created the conditions in which recruiting targets go unmet, meaning standards have to be lowered further, which amounts to a jobs program rather than a defense force. It’s been a good run. I hope the people who slept peacefully under the blanket of freedom that was provided appreciate it. Either way, good luck on your next steps and the same wish as we embark on ours.
Brian Lemon
3 months ago
Applying the lessons of ancient history to current and future events has its limits. Those limits have been vastly exceeded here.
Nanda Kishor das
3 months ago
Greer’s writing is so much better when he stays away from matters of the spirit, where he is clearly beyond his depth. This, on the other hand, is clever, well informed and imaginative.
Russell Sharpe
3 months ago
The author’s killer historical parallel around which he builds his essay, the debacle of the Battle of Adrianople in 378, which the author says ensured that the Roman Empire never recovered from its 4th century crisis, is rather undermined when one recalls that it was it was the Eastern Roman Empire which lost that battle, and which then recovered well enough to utterly destroy the Goths in Italy two centuries later, dominate the East Mediterranean for several centuries more, and sustain itself in existence for more than a millenium. It was the Western Empire which folded within a century of Adrianople, a battle it had of course nothing to do with.
Ron Kean
3 months ago
It’s not the dog in the fight. It’s the fight in the dog. When a military is being judged online all over the world it’s understandable to use caution so as not to offend the sensibilities of armchair military critics. When the world wide web is flooded with pictures of little children with blood on their faces it might make most people in the sensible western world pause.
Where are the good old days of bombing Tokyo, Berlin or Dresden? It doesn’t have to be atomic to kill enough of the enemy to make him surrender. Israel is close to flattening Gaza but somebody’s sending a hundred trucks every week or two to give the enemy the luxury of succor.
Many in Israel would like to do enough damage to anybody that moves if it would help bring back the hostages and destroy the whole Hamas movement. It’s not the weapons. It’s the will to use them fully.
Rafi Stern
3 months ago
Correct about the Houthi group, totally off mark as far as Gaza is concerned and I think also so with regards to Ukraine.
If you were to argue that the Gazan incursion of 7th October had outwitted Israel who put all their bets on their enormously expensive high-tech fence, then yes I would agree with you. They proved again that some guys in white Toyota pick-up trucks can swiftly overpower state of the art Western defenses, then yes. If you were to say that Gazan cheap knock-off missiles were out-pricing Israel’s ingenious Iron-Dome system which can blast home made missiles that cost just tens of dollars out of the sky at a cost of 10s of thousands a dollars a pop (until the promised introduction of laser Iron-Beam system which will level the playing field vis-a-vis marginal cost of use), then yes.
However the choice of Gaza’s hugely expensive tunnel network built with billions of dollars of Western humanitarian aid money and Qatari free cash, is not a good example of the success of small-budget asymmetric warfare. Israel has developed strategies to overcome the threat of the tunnels and is clearing and destroying them at a rate never imagined previously. Hamas thought that the tunnel network would be impenetrable and that Israel would fear entering it, but Israel has shown just the opposite using lots of high-tech kit and trained soldiers. So tunnels was a bad example and shows that the writer doesn’t really know what is going on in Gaza at all.
Over half the Hamas fighting force has been destroyed or put out of action, their command structures are inoperative and they have lost all their ground (and underground). They still hold 140 Israelis hostage and they are still negotiating as if they have the upper hand to dictate the terms, but they are well on the way to defeat.
Steve Jolly
3 months ago
An interesting article. The author makes a decent case and there are enough parallels to acknowledge the possibility that the factors mentioned lead to some sort of second dark age, but on the other hand, the author makes a lot of assumptions to dismiss alternative possibilities.
First, the author assumes that what we’ve seen in Ukraine and Gaza is the limits of military capability. It isn’t. There hasn’t been a ‘total war’ fought by a western power since 1945. We can’t know what a whole of civilization level of warfare would look like now because we haven’t seen it. These regional wars are fought with a mind to political and economic limits that the author fails to consider. Some of the inability to eliminate resistance in places like Yemen and Gaza has little to do with military ability and everything to do with domestic politics and media. When the horrors of war can be broadcast back home by anybody with a phone, it makes war harder to sustain politically. If the west used it’s full military might without so much regard for collateral damage or civilian casualties, I suspect a very different picture would emerge. On a second note, I think he overstates the case for a revolution in military tactics. The machine gun was a simple technical advance that resulted in the bloody grinder that was WWI, but by the end of the war militaries had adjusted. The tank was basically invented to counter the machine gun nests that had proved all but impenetrable in WWI. I can easily imagine some weapon system attached to tanks or carried by individual soldiers that destroys drones. The Pentagon is probably already on the task.
My next issue is that the fall of the Roman Empire was complex and historians still debate the many reasons. The author presents one theory on the fall of Rome as fact when historians don’t agree. As per usual with modern thinkers, the author seems to boil everything down to economics, citing the expense of Rome’s military and the high taxation rate required to sustain it, but economics isn’t the sole determinant modern dogma would have us believe. Political, social, and cultural factors also play a role. Rome was, by that point, held together by the military and little else. The US is not quite that far gone. In another half century perhaps after an ineffective federal government has ceded authority to the states and been reduced de facto to a manager of the currency and the military, the analogy might fit better.
From that point the author goes pretty far afield to paint a dystopian picture. The fact is we have a decent idea what a society experiencing population decline looks like. Japan’s low fertility and low immigration has resulted in a consistent decline for a couple of decades now. They have problems but one disembarking from a plane in Tokyo would probably not think ‘dark age’ or even ‘civilization in decline’. Would a universal population decline look different? Maybe, and maybe not. Nobody really knows, and that’s the point. Even historical examples aren’t perfectly comparable because of differences in technology, culture, etc.
The author also makes a bunch of assumptions about resource depletion that we’ve all heard before. Yes, it’s possible to run out of fossil fuels. People were terrified of that back in the 70’s but technology advanced and they found more. Who’s to say in a hundred more years we won’t be drilling in the middle of the Atlantic, pulling hydrogen out of water, manufacturing methane (natural gas) through some biological process, or building fusion power plants? I don’t know which way technology will turn, and neither does this author. Assuming stasis though is usually a bad bet. Further, a significant majority of the world’s fossil fuels are used not for generating electricity, but for transportation. Telecommunications will save energy by several orders of magnitude, if human behavior ever catches up with it. We could also save on transportation by distributing manufacturing more evenly, making things close to either where the materials to make them come from or where they’ll be sold. Right now we have a system where raw materials are shipped to China to be made into things that are then sent all the way back to be sold. Globalism may be efficient in terms of profit. I question whether it is efficient in terms of resource usage.
Overall, I would say that a second dark age is a non-zero possibility. I just don’t think its the only possibility or even the likeliest. The author’s gravest error is his basically assuming that technology and tactics won’t solve any of these problems in any satisfactory way. I’ll grant the possibility, but not the inevitability. Instead of ‘barbarism’, the future I see is one of localization, nationalism, decentralization, and technological adaptation.
That is a really good post Steve, a lot of interesting points, where do we subscribe?!
Rafi Stern
3 months ago
The issue of demographic decline and economic contraction is an important one, but all the talk of feudal soldiers with horses and homemade rifles rather obscures the real points.
Jae
3 months ago
OK, Unherd, we don’t have the attention span of a gnat on here, but we also don’t need to be stultified. Too long articles don’t equal greater intellect.
Plus the photo of the author in his garb had me taking him less seriously. A Druid head honcho in weirdy clothes, what? And we laugh at the Masons?
Jürg Gassmann
3 months ago
Overall, an enjoyable read, but some historical correctives:
The Battle of Adrianople was devastating and may have been a harbinger of the demise of the Roman Empire … of the WEST. The Roman Empire of the East, i.e. Byzantium, weathered the 4th and 5th centuries in fine fettle, as a highly centralised state with a very sophisticated, centrally financed, and devastatingly effective army. Remember the in Ukraine as well, Ukraine is losing against such a highly-organised army. The US is militarily fragile not because its armed forces are centrally organised, but because they chose to build their military around colonial adventures and punitive expeditions, not peer competitor wars.
Also, Fritigern’s warriors were not feudal tenants; the Goths at the time were on the move, not based on land tenure. Feudal tenure as a concept was a result of the upheavals of the “Migration Period”, not its driver.
I could expatiate at length about the mounted nobleman of the High Middle Ages – suffice it to say that the militarily very powerful Northern Italian city-states, as well as later e.g. the Swiss, the Scots, or the Hussites, did not depend on a nobility, mounted or otherwise. Again, very complex.
As for economic expansion, two critiques: First of all, schoolbook economic expansion is related to volume and speed of circulation of money; growth in population will increase volume of money in circulation, all other things being equal. But: It is not the only dynamic that will lead to expansion, and population increase will not lead to economic expansion if impoverishment outpaces population growth, as it is currently doing in the “rich” economies (long story, and thanks to neoliberalism and financialisation). Also it is our choice to so define economic expansion; we can easily define a different metric, a metric more related human happiness.
David Butler
3 months ago
It’s long past time to correct the narrative on economic growth. GDP per capita is the measurement that truly matters, not total GDP. Our economy has been a Ponzi scheme for years and the house of cards will collapse as all Ponzi schemes do.
The global population didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804, having taken 200 to 300 thousand years to do so. It only took another 123 years to double to 2 billion. In 2022, only 95 years after that, we reached 8 billion.
Virtually all of the world’s major problems can be attributed to overpopulation. If, as and when the population peaks and begins to decline, this will not be a catastrophe. It will be reason for hope.
I agree that the demographic evolution is the best indicator for hope rather than a problem. The two most consistent and reliable brakes on runaway population growth have been rising living standards and female empowerment, so the inversion of the population growth rates is a ringing testament to civilisational success.
You are not seeing the threat, not all populations will decline at the same rate. Women who don’t birth enough doctors policemen or soldiers will be reaping the benefit of others conquering their nations. Also the author doesn’t address the cultural impact of mass migration on all of it.
B Davis
3 months ago
A much more entertaining version of this essay can be found in Poul Anderson’s 1960 work, The High Crusade:
“It is 1345, and in the English town of Ansby (in northeastern Lincolnshire), Sir Roger, Baron de Tourneville, is recruiting a military force to assist king Edward III in the Hundred Years’ War against France. Suddenly, an enormous silver spacecraft lands outside the town. It is a scouting craft for the Wersgorix Empire, a brutal dominion light years from our solar system. The Wersgorix hope to take over Earth and are testing the feasibility of colonization. However, the aliens, having forgotten hand-to-hand combat since it was made obsolete by their advanced technology, are caught off-guard by the angered Englishmen, who mistake the craft for a French trick. The villagers and soldiers in Ansby storm the craft and kill all but one Wersgor, Branithar.
Sir Roger formulates a plan that with the captured ship, he can take the entire village to France to win the war, and then liberate the Holy Land. The townspeople, with all of their belongings, board the ship at the baron’s instruction, and prepare to take off. The people of Ansby are mystified at the advanced technology aboard the ship, which they come to call the Crusader. Being unable to pilot the Crusader Sir Roger directs the surly Branithar to pilot them to France. Instead, the alien wrecks the baron’s plan by throwing the Crusader into autopilot on course to Tharixan, another Wersgor colony.”
Great little story; lots of fun; highly recommended.
Mike MacCormack
3 months ago
Nothing new here, he’s quite right – empires always grow to the point where it costs more to maintain/defend them than they can afford, either in taxes raised or plunder looted. The only major civilisation that realised this in the past was the Chinese in the 14th century – they turned their backs on the rest of the world and burnt their ocean going fleets, it became a capital offense to build a boat with more than one mast. As a rule of thumb each successive world power reaches this point of military overstretch in about half the time that the one before did, the rapidly collapsing Americans are the new record holders. As for his vision of post apocalyptic civilisations making flying machines out of household bits and bobs, I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Good read though.
Alan Hawkes
3 months ago
I wonder if the author has read Joseph Tainter’s, “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”
jane baker
2 months ago
I’m not an expert on military tactics or wartime economics,in fact I know nothing and don’t really want to find out but I learned at that time when Mr Prizhogin marched on Moscow,that much of the conflict around the world is being carried out on behalf of first world countries with regular paid armies by groups of mercenary soldiers under a leader,often the leader is colourful and charismatic,as is often the way. These war lord led groups are often highly professional (ex regular military), competent,au fait with tech and effective but they operate much as dark age warlords did.
Bret Larson
2 months ago
“Instead, their network of tunnels allows Hamas forces to pop up, ambush Israeli detachments, and vanish again.”
Yes, its very convenient using your civilians as meat shields. It achieves two ends, tactical advantage and excellent propaganda potentials.
No drawbacks!
As to, large militaries being obsolete. I dont think your examples say what you think they do. The Ukraine military is 900k+ and they want to grow it. And the US is pushing for NATO to get to 2% GDP spending.
And this time convincingly.
As to the edifice the US military has become. Its a tool meant to project power and authority and win large battles. Unfortunately, the US is also adapting alot of covert mechanisms. Obamas drone assassination’s are obviously on your checkmark list.
I think such things sap the legitimization out of united actions.
Its always been more expensive to protect something then to destroy it. You just have to make sure those paying the price feel it is worth it.
Ho hmm, this was a good read up to half way but then the thinking derailed.
Silicon chips due to become too expensive due to energy costs and rare earth material shortages! Economic expansion depends on population growth??
I will try to explore the second half of the essay tomorrow but I am increasingly getting the impression that Unherd authors are being allocated too many column inches that get filled with fanciful expanded theories way beyond the author’s core idea.
“Economic expansion depends on population growth??” Haven’t you noticed that the economic elites in the West are allowing mass immigration in order to maintain or increase population?
Its a classic ponzi scheme – without improvements in productivity the only way to grow GDP is by having more people, who’s retirement will ultimately be funded by future generations who need ever more people to fund the scheme.
The elites want a slave population. The productive middle class stands in their way.
May I suggest Kenneth Minogues’s The Servile Mind? He explains this phenomenon brilliantly.
I’m guessing the right sort of population not just random people.
The bit about silicon chips is nonsense. He simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Another generalist out of his depth.
Creating the pure silicon ingots is not that expensive. It’s the processing equipment in the fabs (factories) that is expensive.
Wafer fabs producing the chips do not use the fantastic amounts of energy he claims.
Chips don’t need rare earth metals.
Drones don’t need advanced microprocessors. As per his earlier point – the whole point of drones is that they are cheap and don’t need super-advanced expensive technologies. He’s arguing against himself here.
Getting back to the military side. Modern militaries are not obsolete. The low cost, insurgent techniques he seems to think are the future can be adequate for a defensive operation or wearing down the patience and resources of an aggressor. But they are no solution if you need to invade or occupy a country. You need real armies for that.
I think he’s hoping countries disappear along with most of civilisation as we know it.
That is one way to achieve a borderless world I suppose.
Drones need 32 bit microprocessors (usually ARM CPUs or microcontrollers) and dozens of other chips, all from different companies, made in different fabs, with different processes. They are the product of multinational design and fabrication companies, with staff in many countries. Design in the USA, Israel, Singapore, Japan or the UK or wherever you can find bright, suitably trained, hardworking people. Fabricate in South Korea or Taiwan or the USA or Germany or Japan etc. where another team of very patient, very meticulous, but not so imaginative people run and maintain the extraordinary electro-optical and chemical gear which actually makes the chips. Production testing requires exotic equipment too.
Each fab costs billions of dollars and needs to be run by a very highly trained and capable workforce, in an environment of safety, economic and political stability, with good transport arrangements and global marketing.
This would become impossible due to social breakdown, religious fanatics, drug addicts and drug gangs long before we run out of energy, base metals and the more exotic elements and oil-based products which go into finished semiconductors, all other electronic components and fully assembled, tested, electronic circuit boards and pieces of equipment.
I would be very interested to see how Russia builds the electronics for its actual weapons (not just where it gets the CNC machines to make the metal bits). My guess is that Iran and Russian drones, missiles and weapons systems are full of Raspberry Pi (32 bit ARM) computer boards, which can be bought en-masse as consumer items in China or eBay or whatever in the West. Neither country has semiconductor fabs, or much of an electronic component industry. I am sure they can design and make PCBs. But all or almost all of the components and many whole sub-assemblies for all their drones surely come from the same factories everyone else in the world uses. Likewise their design software, since there are plenty of open source PCB and CAD design programs. This is not the case for semiconductor design, but Russia, Iran and North Korea don’t make semiconductors.
This is the real limitation for semiconductor manufacture and the only thing required to solve it is common sense and political will to develop those resources nationally and guard the technology from enemies. The US took far too long to do this thanks to the entrenched globalists profiting from the world as it was, but have started moving in the right direction with the CHIPS Act to develop semiconductor self-sufficiency. The US has tacitly set the limits of the globalist system it created, effectively attempting to prevent China from reaching parity. How well it’s working depends on who you ask, and it remains to be seen if America’s allies will continue to toe the line. I have no idea what Japan and the Netherlands were offered to get on board with the US China export ban or if fear of China was sufficient. Everybody recognizes at this point that access to the most advanced chips conveys significant economic and military advantages. We’re looking at the beginnings of a semiconductor arms race. The foundations of a post-globalist reality are already being quietly laid down in a way that the public and media simply haven’t yet caught up with.
And in Afghanistan not even real armies, Russian, American or British did well; as we Brits should have known from our first attempts back in Queen Victoria’s time.
Part II.
“3000 years of feudalism”. Well I suppose when a writer in North America simplifies European history that is an understandable error.
“Explosive shells instantly made wooden warships obsolete.” The transition from the wooden wind powered battleship of the line to the Dreadnought took 60 years.
At the end of the day author’s central theory is sound. The world is entering a transitionary era and the west is likely to be the biggest looser. Twenty years ago when an Apache ground attack helicopter pilot eliminated Iraqi combatants observed through his night vision heads up display, he was using an immense technical advantage. Today a rebel drone looking to zap a NATO outpost might be running some AI object identification software downloaded from Github for free.
The critical issue we no face is how long do we have to wait for the western military leadership to comprehend the new reality and abandon their reckless attempts to provoke WWIII
I think his magic mushroom potion kicked in around the mention of archers & cavalry. I couldn’t make it any farther without psychedelics either.
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I had a similar reaction.
The first half was very interesting, however, The lessons of the Ukraine and Gaza fighting do indeed suggest that at present land warfare is going through a phase of small squads with homemade drones rendering obsolete expensive tanks and other expensive kit – and strengthening defence more than offence.
But technology moves fast and within a few years we may be in yet another phase with different characteristics. Perhaps we will see vast coordinated and centralised – and possibly AI directed – networks of drones, mines and missiles displacing the current configuration. Naval warfare is probably heading that way already.
I think he is conflating the idea of existential wars and the kind of low level policing type actions we invariably see these days. Obviously, one realises why the bigger, richer nations can’t just send in thousands of cruise missiles or whatever but extrapolating from a non globalised world of centuries ago into some steam punk concept applied to today’s ever more integrated world (whether we like it or not) seems, to use the great Philosopher football manager Peter Reid’s phrase about Arsenal in the 1990s ‘As weak as piss.’
It was a little Mad Max to me after a while.
I stopped at “and we’re burning the last scraps of the necessary coal reserves right now.”
??? The UK alone has cartloads of coal.
According to Wiki we have 133 years of coal left at current rates of consumption. That is ignoring other ways of making steel and future scientific innovations.
Centuries worth of it. But never mind.
MADE GOOD SENSE TO ME – and i have not had psychedelics for many years !
After all, the Houthis’ $2,000 missiles have to be made in factories, and use silicon brains and refined metals of their own. The US is more capable of pivoting from expensive antimissiles to decentralized clouds of drones than the Houthis are of defeating said clouds of drones.
Meanwhile, Israel could destroy Hamas immediately by pumping fuel-air mixture into the tunnel system at as many entry points as it can find, then detonating it. This would light off all the munitions that Hamas has been buying over the years with our aid money. The secondary explosions alone would demolish every scrap of infrastructure in Gaza. Israel is holding off on doing so only while it still hopes it can rescue more of the hostages.
That’s one Netflix pitch I won’t be tuning into if it ever gets made.
Early on, I was thinking it was the most practical article ever written by a Druid. Then it turned into a Sci-Fi novel. Any elite Sci-Fi novel needs a time traveling hero to defeat the impenetrable army of darkness! 3/5 for creativity.
Cosplay “Druid” reveals prophecy. Ugh.
Great stuff as usual John Michael Greer, speculative and outside the box.
Just the sort of thing I subscribe to UnHerd for.
Fully agree. Great stuff. Demographics is the biggest thing people do not talk about and the demographics particularly of the west today are bad and getting worse. This is civilisation changing. Luckily it works very slowly so we have time.
This sounds so much like the backstory of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
”All hail the God-Emperor!”
While the scenes described in the article may seem implausible, we truly have no idea what the year 2,400 will look like. This scenario is as good as any other.
Israel is moving slowly out of mercy, since it does not want to wreak a bloody slaughter amongst the Philistines. I can’t believe I just said that sentence. It sounds like it came from the Bible.
But The Yahoo identifies the Palestinians as Amalek,look it up in the Old Testament or just ask Richard Dawkins. It’s a case of telling you in plain sight and hearing without telling you.
“we’re burning the last scraps of the necessary coal reserves right now.”
This is pure balderdash. The EIA estimates coal reserves in the US would last for nearly 450 years. Even if that estimate was off by an order of magnitude, the author’s assertion would still be false.
Ordinary coal is abundant, esp. if you do not care about quality (e.g., lignite) but coking coal: the highest grade, is not and JMG pointed out without coking coal there is no metallurgy.
Excellent riposte. You’re right, I made the same mistake as so many do when speaking about oil, i.e. not paying attention to the molecular differences that make it more/less suitable for various applications. That being said, I still believe describing the current market as “the last scraps” is vastly overstated.
The question is whether the “avowed Nazis” on Substack that The Atlantic worries about will be able to take down the FBI and its pals in AntiFa with drones and stuff. You never know.
In order to win a war, one needs to truly understand what war is actually about: the winner convinces the looser that accepting the winner’s conditions of surrender is better than continuing to fight. (von Clausewitz, ‘Vom Kriege’).
Not understanding this principle is exactly what has produced 80 years of suffering in the Palestinian situation. Sending humanitarian aid may alleviate immediate suffering, but it perpetuates a state where the Palestinians find it preferable to continue fighting rater than to surrender.
That’s where intelligence comes into play: find out under which conditions the opponent is willing to surrender, and subsequently determining whether oneself is willing to inflict enough damage to the opponent to meet his criteria for accepting defeat.
Nothing of that seems to happen both in Ukraine and the middle east, at least on the side of the west. That’s appalling.
Putin very clearly does understand this principle…
Much of the west’s failure in warfare since Vietnam is political, not military. It’s not so much a lack of military capability that holds us back but a lack of a willingness to use it to its fullest extent. Some of that is due to the nuclear threat from Russia/USSR, but a lot of it is just poor leadership and lack of foresight.
True. I listen to people like Douglas McGregor, Daniel Davis or Alexander Mercouris a lot these days, who also have said this in one form or another.
Then something extraordinary is currently happening: Tucker Carlson in Moscow interviewing Vladimir Putin. The entire planet will be watching. I am also curious how the western political establishment will react to it.
They are already calling him a tool of Putin…utterly predictable
The Palestinians who I am angry at seeing subjected to a genocide on our tvs,I don’t have a tv now but I’ve seen it in other people’s houses,at least the Nazis tried to keep it secret,now we all have to KNOW so we’re all complicit,the Palestinians are very stupid and have proved it over 80 years of rubbish negotiating,getting offered a poorer and worse deal every time. And when getting Gaza territory returned to them going on a blowing up spree of destruction. They needed to feel at home so they recreated an environment of rocks and rubble.
Adrianople is much exaggerated. By 378 AD* Constantinople was by far the most important city in the Empire, and a mere 140 miles from the battlefield of Adrianople. Did it fall? NO! .**
Rome by contrast was an anachronism but did it fall? NO, not for another 32 years in fact.
32 years was plenty of time to grow another Army, in fact nearly two. Sadly this ‘army’ was again to be dissipated by internecine strife amongst the ‘Romans’. We have been warned.
(* For the fanatic 1131 AUC.)
(* it didn’t in fact fall for another 826 years!)
Okay. The post industrial armies sound a lot like the planet of the apes movies!
Where to begin. Well, let’s start with this. “Economic growth depends ultimately on population growth.. Once demographic decline sets in, each business will on average have fewer customers than the year before, each property will have fewer people to bid on it, each investment vehicle will have fewer people investing in it. Thus, the average business, the average asset, and the average investment vehicle will all lose money.”
The B___k Death of the 14th century caused a European demographic decline of at least 30% and perhaps 50%. This was a Europe before the age of exploration, where it was essentially its own little world. The population didn’t start recovering until the late 15th century.
We can safely say that aggregate (all added together) economic output collapsed, but why does this matter, and why do we care about economic output at all? Well, economies only exist to serve people and so we really only care about goods and services supplied per person. Money too is irrelevant, it is just a measure of goods and services and very a poor measure at that since it provides no constant measure at all.
So what happened during and after the demographic calamity of the b___k death? Goods and services per person increased slightly, living standards increased modestly thanks to general deflation. Serfdom was irreparably broken in many European societies due to the lack of serfs and abundant demand for paid labour. The nobility of Europe did not take too kindly to this. Only by extremely repressive measures by monarchs like Edward III was the social mobility of the peasantry suppressed and the existing economic status quo maintained. It was this suppression that caused the eventual economic stagnation, not the population fall.
Lets be clear, the 14th century population fall was a bad economic outcome for one group in society: the nobility. Edward III and his peers across Europe justified suppression of peasant material wealth as a Good Thing for the greater good to prevent a Godly doomsday that would wreck the climate with plagues and failed harvests. The nobility persuaded itself that it was balancing a self-evident natural order, keeping the peasants poor to stop them from being poor.
Today’s ultra wealthy at the WEF have exactly the same concerns and beliefs as their medieval forebearers, and for the same reasons. And they too are terrified of generalised deflation. The middle class population is peaking, and the wealthy economies of the West are facing absolute population declines. This *is* calamatous for the existing economic elite and radical controls are needed to preserve the existing economic order and wealth structure. It’s going to need a gargantuan greater good argument to justify the severe impositions needed to keep the economy inflated.
But the vast majority of us are not the economic elite. Like the peasantry of medieval Europe we ordinary people stand to gain from population decline and generalised deflation. For at its most simple level, wealth buys you space: larger airline sears, bigger gardens, less busy beaches. An industrial, automated economy with fewer people competing for material wealth and physical space means higher living standards for more people. We should welcome population decline. It is telling that the elite demand we fear it.
The best we can hope for is BLACK DEATH II.
Bill Gates and Pfizer have a plan.
Eat bugs is what I hear.
That’s in the works. It’s been in the works for some time. The only holdup is the execution.
It’s not for want of effort…
Indeed. Population contraction might end modern-day serfdom, namely life long renting and surviving in the Gig Economy.
Won’t Global Big Money Inc. simply hoover up (for example) residential housing stock, as it becomes cheaper due shrinking demand and then rent it back to what remains of us?
I doubt it why invest in a declining asset with a declining market? Many investment properties are owned by private investors who are themselves just 6 months away from financial difficulty if their property is empty.
Post the Black Death the English government tried to use legislation to force serfs to remail loyal to their local Lord but a fundamental economic imbalance could not be controlled.
Agreed. There’s a reason things cost so much more in the cities than in the rural countryside. My parents’ modest 200k dollar home built in the late 90’s would fetch multiple millions of dollars if it could be magically transported to Los Angeles or Chicago. This is also why elites love open borders and immigration. Gotta hold down those wages. The elites problem is they’ve made too many mistakes in too obvious a way and they’re now hated for one reason or another. They’ve triggered a backlash that spans the entire political spectrum. They’re holding onto the left for now, but that probably won’t last. If populist parties start winning big, the grassroots progressives will jettison the elites in order to broaden their appeal for the same reason the conservative right did. The elites have lost. They just don’t know it yet.
In the 14th century there wasn’t a large elderly population to support, however.
That decline is certainly not happening here in the UK, and there is no prospect of it unless we get very serious about massively reducing immigration.
Amusing and interesting article, especially regarding the potted historical analysis. The author should note though that there is now only one officially accepted lesson from history, one which renders all previous and subsequent lessons null and void. It is the one involving Neville Chamberlaine waving a piece of paper.
That’s not so black and white simple either.
Quick military point – it’s not just drones that are proving to be ‘game-changing’ in Ukraine – it’s the hundreds of thousands of mines. These now have all sorts of devilish fuse mechanisms and can be laid remotely by shell, missile or drone, within minutes of a path being cleared.
Not sure there’s anything particularly new or game changing about mines.
it’s the fact that they can now rapidly be re-laid remotely that has made the difference. Also the mix of materials and sometimes networked triggering systems that can be activated by pressure, vibration, acoustically and all sorts of electromagnetic sigals make them very difficult to clear in the first place and almost impossible when under fire. You can’t just line-up behind a flail or plough anymore. The RF learned this in 2022 – the AFU re-learned if last summer, both at large cost.
This is a fun article. In fairness , any exploration of the future is bound to be incorrect. There are a few clangers here, the biggest of which is ” resouce depletion”. The earth is full of raw materials and as prices rise, it becomes economic to mine the slightly more expensive stuff and supply increases. The point on population is clumsy. Real estate, gov bonds and stocks will all collapse soonish anyway , probably against bitcoin but definately in real terms as money continues to lose its value. The big danger really with falling population is falling ingenuity in an ageing population. The West ( and china, japan, Russia) will almost certainly decline against India and Africa as the 22 year old brain is more creative and ambitious than the 44 year old brain.
The best point here is the brittleness of the conventional army and our industrial civilisation and the possibility of global collapse. But it wont happen because of ” resource depletion”. It could happen for other reasons however
In a hundred years time we’ll either laugh condescendingly or nod our heads knowingly.
I’d say you’re about 99 years over the mark.
Just like Greer’s taken a kg of magic mushrooms, I read this article with a kg of salt. Nothing ages worse than a prediction of the future, especially predictions about ‘decline’ and ‘rebirth’ from men who are part of strange religious orders. It was a rather interesting article up until the 7th to last paragraph – then it just read like a strange fantasy of his, rather than a serious prediction of the future.
Dunno. The walking heart attack known as Alex Jones has been right about a lot of stuff I previously laughed at. That scares the sh*t out of me.
Greer ain’t no Alex Jones.
An enjoyable read.
Fascinating article and fascinating comments. Clearly some of what Greer says everyone agrees with. I found it a perpective refreshing read. Made me think.
…the West chooses to hold the line rather than win because we are extremely squeamish about civilian casualties and massive destruction. When it gets existential, we won’t be…we will “…make a desert and call it peace”…as the US readily could with Yemen, by flattening everything and killing everyone there.
In fact, if they and their Allies did that and encouraged the Israelis to do the same in Gaza…the long term cost in “innocent” lives might well be less.
The United States could withdraw its troops from the 100-odd foreign countries where it has military bases, focus on defending its own borders, and retool its military to adapt to the ongoing revolution in military affairs.
I among several Americans in agreement with this line. But understand – this is not a solution, it’s a tradeoff. The countries that have depended on US protection to the point of taking it for granted will now have to fund their own defense. NATO, by definition in this scenario, goes away, which is just as well as its original purpose is no more. The impact of our far-too-many posts and bases on local economies will also go away.
Relocating some of these troops along the southern border is a great idea. Want to see development occur? Plop a federal installation onto a piece of land somewhere and watch a town spring up around it. As a bonus, this would stop the flow of illegals that threatens to drown society. This plan, however, is unlikely because too many of our overlords are invested in the continued trafficking of illegals and drugs. There is no other explanation for their ignoring the border for years and only now pretending that it’s an issue.
It’s obvious they’re not serious about addressing it just by looking at the ridiculous bill that’s been proposed, the one that allows 5K illegals to enter every day before govt feels compelled to respond. But that aside, I endorse our resignation from being the world’s cop. If people want to kill each other, let them so long as those attacks do not involve us or our interests. Part of me wants to add “our allies” to that group but you can’t have it both ways.
The point about ‘retooling’ the American military is on point. It has become a hollowed out social petri dish that is still fighting the Cold War. Those days are done. The nature of warfare has changed and the nation has failed to adapt. Military leadership has focused more on the boogeyman of white supremacy than on readiness. It has created the conditions in which recruiting targets go unmet, meaning standards have to be lowered further, which amounts to a jobs program rather than a defense force. It’s been a good run. I hope the people who slept peacefully under the blanket of freedom that was provided appreciate it. Either way, good luck on your next steps and the same wish as we embark on ours.
Applying the lessons of ancient history to current and future events has its limits. Those limits have been vastly exceeded here.
Greer’s writing is so much better when he stays away from matters of the spirit, where he is clearly beyond his depth. This, on the other hand, is clever, well informed and imaginative.
The author’s killer historical parallel around which he builds his essay, the debacle of the Battle of Adrianople in 378, which the author says ensured that the Roman Empire never recovered from its 4th century crisis, is rather undermined when one recalls that it was it was the Eastern Roman Empire which lost that battle, and which then recovered well enough to utterly destroy the Goths in Italy two centuries later, dominate the East Mediterranean for several centuries more, and sustain itself in existence for more than a millenium. It was the Western Empire which folded within a century of Adrianople, a battle it had of course nothing to do with.
It’s not the dog in the fight. It’s the fight in the dog. When a military is being judged online all over the world it’s understandable to use caution so as not to offend the sensibilities of armchair military critics. When the world wide web is flooded with pictures of little children with blood on their faces it might make most people in the sensible western world pause.
Where are the good old days of bombing Tokyo, Berlin or Dresden? It doesn’t have to be atomic to kill enough of the enemy to make him surrender. Israel is close to flattening Gaza but somebody’s sending a hundred trucks every week or two to give the enemy the luxury of succor.
Many in Israel would like to do enough damage to anybody that moves if it would help bring back the hostages and destroy the whole Hamas movement. It’s not the weapons. It’s the will to use them fully.
Correct about the Houthi group, totally off mark as far as Gaza is concerned and I think also so with regards to Ukraine.
If you were to argue that the Gazan incursion of 7th October had outwitted Israel who put all their bets on their enormously expensive high-tech fence, then yes I would agree with you. They proved again that some guys in white Toyota pick-up trucks can swiftly overpower state of the art Western defenses, then yes. If you were to say that Gazan cheap knock-off missiles were out-pricing Israel’s ingenious Iron-Dome system which can blast home made missiles that cost just tens of dollars out of the sky at a cost of 10s of thousands a dollars a pop (until the promised introduction of laser Iron-Beam system which will level the playing field vis-a-vis marginal cost of use), then yes.
However the choice of Gaza’s hugely expensive tunnel network built with billions of dollars of Western humanitarian aid money and Qatari free cash, is not a good example of the success of small-budget asymmetric warfare. Israel has developed strategies to overcome the threat of the tunnels and is clearing and destroying them at a rate never imagined previously. Hamas thought that the tunnel network would be impenetrable and that Israel would fear entering it, but Israel has shown just the opposite using lots of high-tech kit and trained soldiers. So tunnels was a bad example and shows that the writer doesn’t really know what is going on in Gaza at all.
Over half the Hamas fighting force has been destroyed or put out of action, their command structures are inoperative and they have lost all their ground (and underground). They still hold 140 Israelis hostage and they are still negotiating as if they have the upper hand to dictate the terms, but they are well on the way to defeat.
An interesting article. The author makes a decent case and there are enough parallels to acknowledge the possibility that the factors mentioned lead to some sort of second dark age, but on the other hand, the author makes a lot of assumptions to dismiss alternative possibilities.
First, the author assumes that what we’ve seen in Ukraine and Gaza is the limits of military capability. It isn’t. There hasn’t been a ‘total war’ fought by a western power since 1945. We can’t know what a whole of civilization level of warfare would look like now because we haven’t seen it. These regional wars are fought with a mind to political and economic limits that the author fails to consider. Some of the inability to eliminate resistance in places like Yemen and Gaza has little to do with military ability and everything to do with domestic politics and media. When the horrors of war can be broadcast back home by anybody with a phone, it makes war harder to sustain politically. If the west used it’s full military might without so much regard for collateral damage or civilian casualties, I suspect a very different picture would emerge. On a second note, I think he overstates the case for a revolution in military tactics. The machine gun was a simple technical advance that resulted in the bloody grinder that was WWI, but by the end of the war militaries had adjusted. The tank was basically invented to counter the machine gun nests that had proved all but impenetrable in WWI. I can easily imagine some weapon system attached to tanks or carried by individual soldiers that destroys drones. The Pentagon is probably already on the task.
My next issue is that the fall of the Roman Empire was complex and historians still debate the many reasons. The author presents one theory on the fall of Rome as fact when historians don’t agree. As per usual with modern thinkers, the author seems to boil everything down to economics, citing the expense of Rome’s military and the high taxation rate required to sustain it, but economics isn’t the sole determinant modern dogma would have us believe. Political, social, and cultural factors also play a role. Rome was, by that point, held together by the military and little else. The US is not quite that far gone. In another half century perhaps after an ineffective federal government has ceded authority to the states and been reduced de facto to a manager of the currency and the military, the analogy might fit better.
From that point the author goes pretty far afield to paint a dystopian picture. The fact is we have a decent idea what a society experiencing population decline looks like. Japan’s low fertility and low immigration has resulted in a consistent decline for a couple of decades now. They have problems but one disembarking from a plane in Tokyo would probably not think ‘dark age’ or even ‘civilization in decline’. Would a universal population decline look different? Maybe, and maybe not. Nobody really knows, and that’s the point. Even historical examples aren’t perfectly comparable because of differences in technology, culture, etc.
The author also makes a bunch of assumptions about resource depletion that we’ve all heard before. Yes, it’s possible to run out of fossil fuels. People were terrified of that back in the 70’s but technology advanced and they found more. Who’s to say in a hundred more years we won’t be drilling in the middle of the Atlantic, pulling hydrogen out of water, manufacturing methane (natural gas) through some biological process, or building fusion power plants? I don’t know which way technology will turn, and neither does this author. Assuming stasis though is usually a bad bet. Further, a significant majority of the world’s fossil fuels are used not for generating electricity, but for transportation. Telecommunications will save energy by several orders of magnitude, if human behavior ever catches up with it. We could also save on transportation by distributing manufacturing more evenly, making things close to either where the materials to make them come from or where they’ll be sold. Right now we have a system where raw materials are shipped to China to be made into things that are then sent all the way back to be sold. Globalism may be efficient in terms of profit. I question whether it is efficient in terms of resource usage.
Overall, I would say that a second dark age is a non-zero possibility. I just don’t think its the only possibility or even the likeliest. The author’s gravest error is his basically assuming that technology and tactics won’t solve any of these problems in any satisfactory way. I’ll grant the possibility, but not the inevitability. Instead of ‘barbarism’, the future I see is one of localization, nationalism, decentralization, and technological adaptation.
That is a really good post Steve, a lot of interesting points, where do we subscribe?!
The issue of demographic decline and economic contraction is an important one, but all the talk of feudal soldiers with horses and homemade rifles rather obscures the real points.
OK, Unherd, we don’t have the attention span of a gnat on here, but we also don’t need to be stultified. Too long articles don’t equal greater intellect.
Plus the photo of the author in his garb had me taking him less seriously. A Druid head honcho in weirdy clothes, what? And we laugh at the Masons?
Overall, an enjoyable read, but some historical correctives:
The Battle of Adrianople was devastating and may have been a harbinger of the demise of the Roman Empire … of the WEST. The Roman Empire of the East, i.e. Byzantium, weathered the 4th and 5th centuries in fine fettle, as a highly centralised state with a very sophisticated, centrally financed, and devastatingly effective army. Remember the in Ukraine as well, Ukraine is losing against such a highly-organised army. The US is militarily fragile not because its armed forces are centrally organised, but because they chose to build their military around colonial adventures and punitive expeditions, not peer competitor wars.
Also, Fritigern’s warriors were not feudal tenants; the Goths at the time were on the move, not based on land tenure. Feudal tenure as a concept was a result of the upheavals of the “Migration Period”, not its driver.
I could expatiate at length about the mounted nobleman of the High Middle Ages – suffice it to say that the militarily very powerful Northern Italian city-states, as well as later e.g. the Swiss, the Scots, or the Hussites, did not depend on a nobility, mounted or otherwise. Again, very complex.
As for economic expansion, two critiques: First of all, schoolbook economic expansion is related to volume and speed of circulation of money; growth in population will increase volume of money in circulation, all other things being equal. But: It is not the only dynamic that will lead to expansion, and population increase will not lead to economic expansion if impoverishment outpaces population growth, as it is currently doing in the “rich” economies (long story, and thanks to neoliberalism and financialisation). Also it is our choice to so define economic expansion; we can easily define a different metric, a metric more related human happiness.
It’s long past time to correct the narrative on economic growth. GDP per capita is the measurement that truly matters, not total GDP. Our economy has been a Ponzi scheme for years and the house of cards will collapse as all Ponzi schemes do.
The global population didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804, having taken 200 to 300 thousand years to do so. It only took another 123 years to double to 2 billion. In 2022, only 95 years after that, we reached 8 billion.
Virtually all of the world’s major problems can be attributed to overpopulation. If, as and when the population peaks and begins to decline, this will not be a catastrophe. It will be reason for hope.
I agree that the demographic evolution is the best indicator for hope rather than a problem. The two most consistent and reliable brakes on runaway population growth have been rising living standards and female empowerment, so the inversion of the population growth rates is a ringing testament to civilisational success.
You are not seeing the threat, not all populations will decline at the same rate. Women who don’t birth enough doctors policemen or soldiers will be reaping the benefit of others conquering their nations. Also the author doesn’t address the cultural impact of mass migration on all of it.
A much more entertaining version of this essay can be found in Poul Anderson’s 1960 work, The High Crusade:
“It is 1345, and in the English town of Ansby (in northeastern Lincolnshire), Sir Roger, Baron de Tourneville, is recruiting a military force to assist king Edward III in the Hundred Years’ War against France. Suddenly, an enormous silver spacecraft lands outside the town. It is a scouting craft for the Wersgorix Empire, a brutal dominion light years from our solar system. The Wersgorix hope to take over Earth and are testing the feasibility of colonization. However, the aliens, having forgotten hand-to-hand combat since it was made obsolete by their advanced technology, are caught off-guard by the angered Englishmen, who mistake the craft for a French trick. The villagers and soldiers in Ansby storm the craft and kill all but one Wersgor, Branithar.
Sir Roger formulates a plan that with the captured ship, he can take the entire village to France to win the war, and then liberate the Holy Land. The townspeople, with all of their belongings, board the ship at the baron’s instruction, and prepare to take off. The people of Ansby are mystified at the advanced technology aboard the ship, which they come to call the Crusader. Being unable to pilot the Crusader Sir Roger directs the surly Branithar to pilot them to France. Instead, the alien wrecks the baron’s plan by throwing the Crusader into autopilot on course to Tharixan, another Wersgor colony.”
Great little story; lots of fun; highly recommended.
Nothing new here, he’s quite right – empires always grow to the point where it costs more to maintain/defend them than they can afford, either in taxes raised or plunder looted. The only major civilisation that realised this in the past was the Chinese in the 14th century – they turned their backs on the rest of the world and burnt their ocean going fleets, it became a capital offense to build a boat with more than one mast. As a rule of thumb each successive world power reaches this point of military overstretch in about half the time that the one before did, the rapidly collapsing Americans are the new record holders. As for his vision of post apocalyptic civilisations making flying machines out of household bits and bobs, I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Good read though.
I wonder if the author has read Joseph Tainter’s, “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”
I’m not an expert on military tactics or wartime economics,in fact I know nothing and don’t really want to find out but I learned at that time when Mr Prizhogin marched on Moscow,that much of the conflict around the world is being carried out on behalf of first world countries with regular paid armies by groups of mercenary soldiers under a leader,often the leader is colourful and charismatic,as is often the way. These war lord led groups are often highly professional (ex regular military), competent,au fait with tech and effective but they operate much as dark age warlords did.
“Instead, their network of tunnels allows Hamas forces to pop up, ambush Israeli detachments, and vanish again.”
Yes, its very convenient using your civilians as meat shields. It achieves two ends, tactical advantage and excellent propaganda potentials.
No drawbacks!
As to, large militaries being obsolete. I dont think your examples say what you think they do. The Ukraine military is 900k+ and they want to grow it. And the US is pushing for NATO to get to 2% GDP spending.
And this time convincingly.
As to the edifice the US military has become. Its a tool meant to project power and authority and win large battles. Unfortunately, the US is also adapting alot of covert mechanisms. Obamas drone assassination’s are obviously on your checkmark list.
I think such things sap the legitimization out of united actions.
Its always been more expensive to protect something then to destroy it. You just have to make sure those paying the price feel it is worth it.