The Pattern of Conflict That Never Stops

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]What if we are in the middle of a military revolution right now? We just don't know it. You know, uh that video game Fallout likes to say, "War war never changes." And it's a great line from the Fallout franchise. A great piece of advertising, too. Sounds profound. Feels true. Like, feel it in your bones. Mud, blood, fear, and violence.

[00:00:22]>> Charles Dickens walks into a bar and orders martini. The bartender turns to him and asks, "Lolive or twist?"

[00:00:31]>> War never changes. I I don't know why I sound like Clint Eastwood rather than uh Oh [ __ ] Who's the guy that it was? Um Oh, no. It was that guy. The guy he was in Hellboy and he was in uh Sons OF ANARCHY.

[00:00:45]OH GOD, why can't I remember this? I can like remember all the actors in Predator 2, but I can't remember a script that Ron Pearlman.

[00:00:54]Rod Pearlman. All right. What's this video about again?

[00:01:03]Um, you know, uh, the the Let me get back on script here. The the characters in this mud, blood, fear, violence drama, uh, they show up no matter what era you're in, right?

[00:01:19]Whether it's it's Brad Pitt in Thor Bronze Age kind of stuff or American Marines patrolling Helman Province um there is a fundamental pro uh pro process problem with that war never changes line and that it's if it's taken literally it is painfully and historically wrong because war changes constantly. Uh when it does it doesn't just change how people kill each other.

[00:01:46]It rewires how societies are organized and run. It wire it changes how states squeeze people for taxes, how governments flex on each other, right?

[00:01:54]The prehistoric hunter and the 17th century pikemen experience war in many different ways. Uh, and none of them can understand the whole scape of MG42s firing at Omaha Beach, saving Private Ryan style, right? My parents are getting older and I've been coming back to their house to spend the night and they had a mattress that was 25 years old. I mean, look at this thing. I'm not exactly a spring chicken either. Uh, after 20 years of riding in a Humvey, that'll do a number on your back. So, back in February, I got this mattress from Brooklyn Bedding. There's a couple of things you need to know. First off, it comes in a box, which makes it easy to maneuver into the house. When you unbox it, do it on the bed frame and look out, cuz the thing really wants to expand to full size. If you screw it up, don't worry. There's these grab handles on the side. It takes a little while.

[00:02:42]So, let me explain something. is expanding. Brooklyn bedding mattresses are designed, assembled, and shipped right from the Arizona factory. They build their own coils. They pour their own foam, so you're not getting some communist bed with crazy unsafe materials. And you know, my parents, for some reason, never turn the air conditioning on. So, this helps me sleep a little bit cooler at night. I am a back sleeper, and this mattress doesn't have the pressure points that the last one did. And more importantly, my back doesn't hurt when I wake up. You buy your mattress online. No middleman, no mattress store, free shipping to your door. Get a 120 night sleep trial and a limited lifetime warranty. This is actually something I didn't know. If you have an HSA, FSA, health savings account, or flexible spending account, you can use that to purchase your next mattress. So, if you have a genuine medical problem, chronic back pain, uh sleep apnea, which god knows every veteran has, this could be an option for you. Visit brooklynbetting.com/ryan mcbth. Use code ryan mcbth to get 30% off your order. I'm going to bed. When the tools change, the world generally changes with them. And at the heart of this is one of the military's greatest debates. Did early modern Europe undergo a military revolution or was it just a long slow grind?

[00:04:03]Too often military history has been treated as kind of like the white noise of the past like the static in the background of the real social progress.

[00:04:12]Um but what if inventions and military technology aren't just a byproduct of history but one of the drivers and this is kind of where the military revolution thesis comes into the picture. argues that innovation uh was just a byproduct of other things happening in history and military technology was really the engine for change. Now I want you to imagine like in early modern Europe like 1500 to 1700 AD Europe was a bad neighborhood man. It was not a collection of peaceloving kingdoms. It was a region of competing states with no real police or superpower to keep the peace between them. If you've played Crusader Kings 3, you know what I'm talking about. All these countries and duchies and kingdoms were constantly at each other's throats. It was an arena of pure unadulterated competition. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

[00:05:04]>> And this environment triggered a lethal arms race where the cost of staying in the game quickly outpaced what most states could afford to sustain. In uh 1955, military historian Michael Roberts threw a grenade into the whole historical establishment by arguing that between 1560 and 1660, uh there were four seismic shifts that fundamentally altered the DNA of the west. You know, first we have the tactical swap, the elegant lance and like the pike kind of thrown aside for the firearm. And firearms made sense for a whole list of reasons, right? You don't need a class of well-trained expensive knights with medieval equipment uh and charging into the enemy's ranks on horseback. You also don't need like well-trained like essentially from childhood archers, right, who when they die are really expensive or really impossible to replace. Firearms are easy to train folks on, meaning you don't need a specialized class of archers or knights to fire at your enemies. And then anyone can become a soldier and killing those shiny knights. and a few volleys of fire. Well, that becomes a heck of a lot easier than going after them with your own knights. And the second change came with army sizes. Armies of the past with some notable exceptions like King Xerxes or Hannibal were actually pretty small.

[00:06:26]And for the most part, um, they had to be because, well, some armies like the Romans had logistical trains. Uh, the fact is that most armies tended to be smaller because they had to live off the land. For most of history, there was no supply chain. Uh, armies ran off theft.

[00:06:43]In fact, uh, people think that Confederate General Robert E. Lee attacked Gettysburg because his army wanted shoes. In reality, Lee was kind of careening around Pennsylvania because his army had eaten everything in the south and the North was untouched for forage.

[00:06:59]So, armies increased in size because states were kind of locked in competition. And once they had the tools to field large armies like logistical networks, tax structure, they had no choice but to match each other. So as logistics got better and the bureaucracy and tax systems got better, the competing armies got bigger. Armies ballooned in size. Some states even saw like this 10-fold increase in their military forces in just two centuries.

[00:07:24]Armies just didn't get bigger because they wanted to get bigger. They got bigger because the competing kingdom kingdom was raising a bigger army.

[00:07:31]Third fundamental change was the development of strategy. Like you can't point a 100,000man army at a map and just wing it. Larger, more complex forces need complex, ambitious operational planning, engineering, artillery, logistics. Don't ever forget logistics. Good general study strategy, great general study logistics. Just saying. Finally, we have the societal burdens brought on by these changes.

[00:07:57]someone had to pay for the boats and the boots and the black powder. Uh this forces the creation of massive state bureaucracies forever changing the relationship between state and citizen.

[00:08:09]So what was Robert's big takeaway here was that firearms were the equalizers between waring states. Unlike the long bow which required like a lifetime of practice, any peasant could be taught to point a firearm in a few days or weeks.

[00:08:21]And as the pool of available killers grew, so did the state power. Robert's military revolution thesis was later expanded upon by Jeffrey Parker who extended the timeline to the year 1800.

[00:08:33]And he did this to kind of explain the rise of the west. What was his smoking gun? Uh it was the trace Italian 8.

[00:08:39]These these beautiful like star- shaped fortifications that were designed to resist artillery barges of all kind. According to Joffrey's analysis, these forts kind of changed the mathematics of war because you couldn't bypass them, but you couldn't easily knock them out either.

[00:08:53]This forced armies into these long, grueling, incredibly expensive sieges.

[00:08:58]So to win, you needed more men, more money, more time. Now, not just everyone is convinced by the label of revolution here. Critics like Jeremy Black argue that the military revolution thesis is a little too obsessed with technology. He suggests that we're ignoring smaller incremental changes made by soldiers on the ground in favor of like flashier inventions in tech. Meanwhile, John Lynn, another historian, points out that places like France, um, the math doesn't add up like in France, army growth may have been driven more by demographics and economics over fancy fort designs.

[00:09:31]And historian Clifford Rogers points out that uh, military revolution thesis is kind of borrowing a concept from evolutionary biology called punctuated equilibrium. In this view, military history isn't a smooth upward slope.

[00:09:46]It's long periods of boring stories. uh interrupted by short violent periods of radical change and yeah you know what that kind of tracks it's fact yes yes a similar event did take place and you take a look at uh operation Iraqi freedom like when we went in there none of our Humvees had armor so we added armor so the enemy started using explosively formed projectiles so we developed the rhino which would detonate these explosively formed projectiles And if there's no impetus to change, you just don't tend to change. So, yeah, I'm kind of buying that one a little bit.

[00:10:27]That whole spurts and starts like the infantry revolution of the 1300s, the artillery revolution of the 1400s.

[00:10:34]Um, so is this whole military revolution concept dead? I mean, some scholars think so. Revolution is kind of a dramatic word to describe a process that took like 300 years to unfold. But even if the term is flawed, the kind of the debate is kind of vital here because it's a conceptual scaffolding of how we understand how technology, violence, and state are locked in this perpetual dance. And we have seen the ghost of this debate in our own buzzwords like grayzone tactics, hybrid warfare, cyber kinetic kill shift. And honestly, drones, I mean, we've had militarized drones since the first Gulf War, although they really didn't come into their own until Ukraine started making it happen in 2022.

[00:11:21]So, some are experts kind of claim this is a new way of fighting. Others who are more cynical argue that we're just slapping some new labels on old blood and mud. But ultimately, these phrases like military revolution are just conceptual tools. like any tool, their value depends upon how we use them and how we make sense of the chaos around us. But yeah, I think that, you know, we are in a revolution of military affairs right now, especially with the rise of drones and it only took 30 years for us to figure it out. Hey, if you want to support the channel, head on over to Ryan Bethsubstack.com.

[00:11:54]You can also buy my Sea of America Sailing Club shirt at bunker branding.

[00:11:59]Thank you guys so much for watching.

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