How Armies Fall Before Empires

Sometime in the early fifth century, an aristocratic Roman thinker with no first-hand experience of war sat down to write what would become the most important military rulebook in history. The short tract, Concerning Military Matters, ripped up conventional ideas about military affairs and the art of war, casting a long shadow over the following millennium of fighting. Its lessons ranged from instructions on how to manage raw and undisciplined troops to notes on legionary musical etiquette. But many of them were timeless. In the Middle Ages the rulebook was still treated as gospel by a rogue’s gallery of despots and their generals.

Its author, Flavius Vegetius Renatus, regarded his work as a clarion call to an empire that had awesome power but was beset by an array of problems — particularly, Vegetius believed, with its military. He addressed his preface for the first book directly to Emperor Valentinian with typical coyness: ‘I do not presume to offer this work to Your Majesty from a supposition that you are not acquainted with every part of its contents.’ Yet this faith in the leader’s intellect would prove wrongheaded. Over the next century, Vegetius’ wisdom on running a successful military machine would be spurned, and the Roman colossus would fall from its unrivalled global dominance. 

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon describes the empire’s pinnacle in glowing prose: ‘In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind,’ he writes. ‘The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour.’ Yet three centuries later in 410, Rome, the imperial capital, the symbol of all that was great and good in the empire, was sacked by the ‘barbarians’ who had once been its slaves. Historians have spent the last millennium trying to work out how this happened with such speed. ‘Although the topic has been popular, and myriad reasons have been offered to explain Rome’s fall, no consensus has emerged, and historians of the twentieth century have multiplied the variety of explanations many times over,’ writes one historian. Explanations range from the insidious influence of Christianity from the first century on to a tear in the moral fabric of Roman society.

But one strain of thought stands out — the military explanation. Here Vegetius was a pioneer. In his book, he observed that ‘so many defeats’ as the Romans suffered at the time can ‘only be imputed’ to the ‘careless choice of our levies.’ He feared that the careless attention paid to stocking the fighting force with upright and well-trained warriors could prove the death of the empire he loved. He was further alarmed at the ‘inclination so prevalent among the better sort in preferring the civil posts of government to the profession of arms.’ At the Battle of Châlons centuries before, Rome’s military had already been shown up as a shadow of its former self. The enemy commander Attila had the gall to inform his troops that Rome’s warriors were nothing but a ragtag army of nonentities. It was an unthinkable charge. ‘The dust of battle overwhelms them while they fight in close formation under a screen of protective shields,’ he taunted as his soldiers laughed. The descent culminated when the imperial city was sacked for the first time in 800 years, as one of the barbarian Germanic tribes that had been tormenting the empire, the Visigoths, stormed into Rome and looted for three days.

As he looked back centuries later, Gibbon saw the same trajectory as Vegetius. ‘In the purer ages of the Commonwealth,’ he wrote, ‘the use of arms was reserved for those ranks who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain.’ Gradually, though, things changed. ‘The common soldiers, like the mercenary troops of modern Europe,’ writes Gibbon, soon became ‘drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate, of mankind.’ The Roman military had also opened its doors to the conquered enemies — a process referred to in the field as ‘barbarisation,’ which allowed mercenaries to receive Roman largesse in exchange for fighting the elite’s increasingly avaricious wars.

The new additions created endless problems for a military that had been the envy of the world. As historian Arthur Ferrill, author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation, writes, ‘Despite the impact of barbarisation, Roman forces continued to fight according to traditional Roman tactics, yet those tactics, previously so superior, seemed absurd to the barbarians of the fifth century.’ It had a significant and detrimental impact on the ability of the army to do its job. ‘To fight effectively in close order, troops require intensive drill and rigorous discipline,’ says Ferrill. ‘Romans of the fifth century apparently maintained the old formations but abandoned the necessary training. As a result they combined the worst features of the Roman and barbarian styles of fighting.’ The importance of the ‘careful choice of levies’ has continued to occupy all the most renowned military thinkers. Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that one of the ways ‘in which a ruler can bring misfortune upon his army’ is by ‘employing the officers of his army without discrimination’, while Nicolo Machiavelli warned that ‘If a prince bases the defense of his state on mercenaries he will never achieve stability or security. For mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined, and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy.’ Both books were apparently favorites of American military planners before and during the War on Terror. 

False Prophet

History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it often resonates. In the American psyche, 9/11 seemed to echo the sacking of Rome. It wasn’t a verdict on the military weakness of the country — the US still had hundreds of bases around the world and its defense budget was nearly as much as that of the rest of the world combined. But it did precipitate the War on Terror which saw the decline and so-called barbarisation of the US military, with the inclusion of domestic ‘undesirables’ on a scale comparable to the twilight of the Roman imperium. In fact, the American military’s deterioration was considerably quicker and more dangerous. And the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq could well foreshadow the diminution of American power along Roman lines. Since these debacles and the subsequent financial crisis, the concept of ‘American Decline’ is now invoked across the media and academia.

In Vegetius’ second address to the Empire he made a plea: ‘The expense of keeping up good or bad troops is the same,’ he wrote, ‘but it depends wholly on You, most August Emperor, to recover the excellent discipline of the ancients to correct the abuses of later times. This is a reformation the advantages of which will be equally felt by ourselves and our posterity.’ He could easily have been addressing US President Barack Obama in January 2009. Like the Roman Emperor, Obama was inheriting a military broken by the ‘abuses of later times’ — or, more specifically, by the Bush administration. Its troops were scarred, many mentally unstable and untreated, ravaged by two wars and the subsequent occupations for which the Pentagon was ill-prepared. Countless families across the nation were (and are) dealing with loved ones who have changed forever, while the military had reached the lowest point in its history.

‘We’re on the brink,’ said Thomas White, former Secretary of the Army, earlier in the War on Terror. ‘We are in a situation where we are grossly overdeployed, and it is unlike any other period in the 229-year history of the Army. We have never conducted a sustained combat operation with a volunteer force, with a force that we have to compete in the job market to hire every year.’ It was a task without historical precedent, and it fell to Obama to fix for posterity what had been so disastrously broken. ‘I thought by the end of Vietnam . . . we had broadly destroyed the US Army,’ White added. ‘The non-commissioned officer leadership had vanished. Indiscipline rates were way, way up. We needed a complete rebuilding of the force from bottom to top. And that’s precisely what we engaged ourselves in for the next 20 years or so.’

Obama had been forceful in denouncing the use of veterans as guinea pigs to test new drugs on. He had come out equally strongly against the discriminatory ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. He had backed the post-9/11 GI Bill, which would pay out $78 billion in education benefits to veterans who had served in the military after September 11. ‘What this new generation of veterans must know is this,’ he declared. ‘Our nation’s commitment to all who wear its uniform is a sacred trust that is as old as our republic itself. It is one that, as President, I consider a moral obligation to uphold.’ Obama announced a new twenty-first-century Veterans Health Administration which would make it easier for veterans with PTSD to receive the medical benefits they deserved, while the GI Bill would also open up educational opportunities and job training to those coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed he was aware that if the government continued to get the reintegration of its soldiers back into civilian society wrong, it would have disastrous effects for America for decades to come. 

But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear. Obama had originally opposed the war in Iraq and his campaign had been built partly on his ironclad commitment to end the war. ‘As a candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war. As President, that is what I am doing.’ But in reality, many of the Bush administration’s most destructive policies were simply kept in place. The final 50,000 non-combat US troops were brought home in 2011, but many called it the privatization of the occupation, as security contractor numbers continued to rise. At the same time, Obama ratcheted up operations in the other front in the War on Terror: within a year of his inauguration he announced a ‘surge’ in Afghanistan which would increase troop levels by 30,000, keeping up the pressure on the broken military. In 2011, just 34 percent of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan believed the wars had been worth fighting. At the same time, both veterans and active-duty personnel were less likely to approve of Obama than the rest of the population. 

The Corporate Model

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the longest combat operations in American history. Millions of lives were destroyed in the process and whole societies traumatised. The project ended up as a humanitarian catastrophe for the occupied populations but, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t a failure for the ideologues who started the conflagrations. Rumsfeld’s vision of an eviscerated civilian military was, in the end, and at great human cost, realised. Trying to keep the army small when the wars demanded large numbers of troops meant the military acted more and more like a corporation; unfortunately it was a corporation without enough employees. Morten G. Ender at the Military Academy in West Point put it this way: ‘What’s new is the all volunteer force. The military now has to rely on the corporate model. If people don’t come to your business you have to compromise your standards or lower your expectations.’ In power, Obama ended up using more private security contractors than even the Bush administration had, despite promising to phase out what journalist Jeremy Scahill calls their ‘unconstitutional’ use. In truth it was impossible to do without them: the broken US military could not long stand on its own two feet. The fact that its armed forces have become US military Inc. should be extremely worrying for the American public, for the military planners whose concern is projecting power around the world, and for those who may be next on the receiving end of their bombs. 

It is clear that the military’s drop in standards unleashed a significant tranche of mentally unstable, extremist, and violent individuals upon the Iraqi and Afghan populations. Many of the most sickening of the atrocities committed by US service members — from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to the Mahmudiyah massacre — were directly related to the loosening of standards. It might be a felon who had received a ‘moral waiver’ but couldn’t shake off his criminal impulses, or a neo-Nazi granted a newfound freedom in the military. It could be a drunk soldier who picked up his weapon in the middle of a binge and went out to take pot-shots at the locals. This had profound implications for the pretext of the military interventions, which were billed as a moral crusade to bring democracy to the benighted Middle East.

For modern military occupations, destruction of the occupied society is usually de rigueur. But the evidence strongly suggests that a military rife with addicts and neofascists is even more likely to grievously harm the society it occupies. The Irregular Army also ended up as the largest anthropological experiment in history, with US service members as the guinea pigs. In 1992, as Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney had said ‘The military is not a social welfare agency . . . We aren’t there to run social experiments. We are there to fight and win wars,’ but under his administration’s watch a ‘social experiment’ is what it became.

Weird alliances were formed under these auspices. Neo-Nazis from Iowa broke bread with gang-bangers from Chicago in Baghdad, and alcoholics supped ‘hajji juice’ with the mentally ill in Fallujah. In November 2010, it was reported that Mexican drug cartels were enlisting white supremacists to smuggle illegal drugs across the border. Members of both of groups had been enlisted in the military in considerable numbers during the War on Terror. Did the relationship begin there? The military’s recruitment policy now bears much responsibility for America’s ongoing social degeneration. From the mentally scarred soldiers who are refused treatment (many of whom end up in the criminal justice system) to heavily trained gang-bangers stalking the streets of US cities, the barbarisation of the US armed forces will be a theme that returns again and again, touching on many of the ills that plague the country.

Over the coming decades, these veterans of the War on Terror, many of them with military training and easy access to weapons, will continue to stalk the streets of both the US and the Middle East. Indeed, the Trump administration now welcomes such people into government. America will pay for this in the blood of its own citizens, as will the subject populations of the countries its military occupies. A warning shot was fired in March 2011 when the FBI arrested Kevin William Harpham, a 36-year-old army veteran and member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, in Spokane, Washington, on suspicion of planting a bomb at a Martin Luther King Day celebration, which if detonated would have killed hundreds of people. How many more Harphams are out there? How many more lives will they take? And how will this affect America’s already precarious imperial power?

This is an edited extract from Matt Kennard’s book Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals, recently published by OR Books in a new and expanded edition.