Ben Landau-Taylor discusses Carroll Quigley’s thesis on how weapons systems shape political order—how military technology determines whether a society ends up democratic, authoritarian, or something else entirely.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: Welcome to The Students. I am your host, Wolf Tivy. This is my colleague, Ben Landau-Taylor. We’re going to discuss “Weapon Systems and Political Order,” another work by Quigley, Carroll Quigley. He was a American historian developing an important historical thesis, basically, on how the balance of violent power affects the political orders that we see the structural shape of them.
So Ben, you’ve been a reader of Quigley for a long time. Why don’t you start out with an introduction of him and his work and this book to get us started?
Ben: Yes. So Quigley was an academic historian, probably most famous as one of the mentors of Bill Clinton. And he did a lot of work on these big, grand, what shapes history over the scale of centuries? So he’s not the type who’s going to go super deep into a particular, this phase of the Thirty Years’ War. He’s the type who’s going to look out over many cases and try to synthesize the grand understanding of why did things change in this way between 900 AD and 1300 AD?
What was the general direction that things were going in so that things changed in this way from 600 BC up to 300 BC? Or—what are the big things that lead to the very macro changes? So this book is about weapon systems and political stability. It’s about what are the weapon systems and the thesis is that these are the primary upstream determinant of the type of political system that you can have. So I would consider his other book, “The Evolution of Civilizations,” to be his most complete masterpiece, and then this one he was shaping up to also, I think, get it into masterpiece form.
So he wrote his theory chapters explaining the general thesis. And then he was going through the history of all of recorded history, basically. So he goes up from pre-history, I guess, as far as the Middle Ages, and then he keels over dead.
Wolf: Oof.
Ben: And his followers and students put together his notes and published this book. Which is the core theory and then a bunch of worked examples, which was probably about half or two-thirds of what he intended to put into there, but we’ll never know. So this is what we’ve got.
Wolf: Right. And we hope the theory wasn’t going to face too many revisions, that he’d had already solidified the theoretical core, which is really what we’re focused on.
Ben: Yes. And so he ended up making some interesting claims, which—so he died in 1977. And at the time, he claimed that democracy in the West was declining because of these structural reasons around the weapons systems. Which I think in 1977 was a pretty bold and surprising claim. But I think now, 50 years later, we can look back and be like, “Maybe that guy was onto something.”
Wolf: Yeah. It does look that way. It does.
Ben: So yeah. Let’s get into the theory, and then we’ll talk through some of the examples, including our own time. And see how that theory holds up. So first of all, this is weapon systems and political stability. I think we know what political stability is.
What is a weapons system? (03:37)
Ben: But let’s briefly say what is a weapons system as he’s using it here. We know what—a weapon is. A weapon is a spear. Then a weapons system is the combination of the physical objects and the social organization that produces a pattern of violence, a system of how militaries are structured. So you can have spears and then use them in a bunch of tribes that run at each other and make themselves all big and throw spears, and then one side runs away.
That’s a weapon system.
Wolf: Right. It’s the pattern of usage, the training—the logistics, the whole social apparatus of actually—how it’s used.
Ben: You might take the spears and then combine it with bronze armor and big old shields and train your guys to stand in ranks, and now you have a phalanx, which is a different—weapon system. So that’s the general type of thing we’re talking about. What is the pattern of how the people use the tools that they have? And then weapon systems will face off against each other in different ways, and some societies will be able to maintain some, and others won’t. But that’s basically what we’re talking about here.
Politics is downstream of force (05:00)
Ben: So with that as this is what we’re talking about, let’s get into the core theoretical claim here, which is to start with, that there is just a fact of the matter of violence, of when you’ve got a couple of groups or—you can’t know exactly the future, but there’s generally a, if these people get into a fight. He uses the analogy of starting from you are kids, and you’re both 11 years old. You and your friend start pushing each other around. Probably one of you is generally stronger and is going to win most of the time.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, it’s especially stark with kids when they go up against an adult in any kind of way.
Ben: Yeah. Or when I would go up against my older brother. That was—
Wolf: Basically, there is decisive advantage in violence. It’s not the case that it’s totally random. Anyone can win.
Ben: Right. Maybe my brother would let me win sometimes, but—until we were both fully grown, there wasn’t really a question.
Wolf: Yeah. Or you could have a military genius can turn the tide of war against a larger enemy or something. But it’s usually the... The military historians have looked at this, and the ratios of how much they can tilt things are not very big.
Ben: Right. And even if you’re looking at Napoleon going up against Wellington, they’re using basically the same weapon system. And if you are a world-class genius tactician and you are leading a bunch of Zulu spearmen, then like—
Wolf: Good luck
Ben: maybe you’ll get a couple of battles in that way, but you are not going to defeat the Redcoats. Because their weapon system just demolishes yours.
Wolf: Right. And so because what this does is there’s the fact of the matter of basically who’s going to win. There can be these decisive advantages where one side with the upper hand, in terms of the weapon systems and general violent power, is able to be assured of their victory. And then so that, I guess the thesis is that downstream of that, we get the formation of—
Ben: Of internal political order not just the—the cases are clearest when it comes to wars between different states. But also when it comes to internal political order. If you have a system where the knights are basically invincible—that’s going to get you one set of social structures, and you will occasionally get peasant rebellions. And then the things that happens is that the knights will just murder them. But—this is pretty rare because the peasants know that if they rebel—
Wolf: Yeah, the peasants
Ben: then—
Wolf: The knights actually can totally outclass them.
Ben: Right. And so this is sort of upstream of all of the general negotiations and people arguing over taxes. It very rarely comes to, “Okay, we’re just going to have a big Jacquerie and get murdered.” But the fact that people know that’s where it would go if it came to it—and then to stick with this particular case, later on, once the cities and towns start being able to organize competent militias that actually can kind of stand up to the knights and at least give them some trouble, that’s when you start seeing them able to negotiate different deals for their cities and so on.
Wolf: So I guess there’s two different ways that this can apply, and I wonder how the theory or how he applies the theory in these two different ways. So way number one is let’s call it interstate warfare, where you have two political entities vying for sovereignty, and they go up against each other. They may have some difference in the weapon systems that they’re deploying. And for example, Napoleon kind of comes out with this new mass army doctrine. And so at first, he’s kind of deploying a new weapon system against his rivals.
And so in the interstate warfare he gets an advantage, and so you get more places ruled by guys like Napoleon. But then very rapidly, I guess the other side adopts the same weapon systems. And so then you also have the question of, let’s say, inter-class conflict, like the matter of the knights and the peasants. There’s not just knights fighting each other or lords fighting each other with knights. There’s also knights fighting peasants, or at least hypothetically there’s knights—
Ben: There are conflicts between knights and peasants which usually don’t become open violence.
Wolf: Yeah, because everyone knows where it’s going to go. But there’s the latent conflict. And so do you think that which of these mechanisms is sort of more dominant? So in the first mechanism, you have the kind of Darwinian advantage of states that use a certain mechanism of power of political orders that uses a certain set of weapon systems versus in internal politics, who kind of is forced to back down and who wins those engagements is obviously also affected by the weapon systems. But so there’s two different mechanisms there, but they could be quite different in how the weapons work.
Weapons might be good against an army while being not necessarily that useful against the kinds of internal political conflicts that a regime faces. And so I wonder how the thesis deals with that question. I’m not sure if I’m being entirely clear, but basically—for example, subduing a city. An air force is not that useful for subduing a city. You need sort of door-to-door policing and various things like this.
Ben: Right. And this was somewhat of a surprise to the military theorists of the First and, well, I suppose largely the Second World War. They kind of expected that you could just bomb a city into submission and—
Wolf: Yeah. It turns out that doesn’t work very well.
Ben: Right. You just—
Wolf: You can kill them all, but that’s about the limit of your ability to project force into that.
Ben: Yeah. So basically, the way that I would say this works is essentially that you need to put together a total system that can locally function—internally and not just immediately fly apart because you armed all of your slaves or something. And then within that constraint—then the who wins the interstate conflict is largely the mechanism by which that internal order spreads, often not by conquest, but as with the Napoleon example, by people imitating what you did in order to not get totally creamed by you. By imitating your military structure, they also end up imitating a lot of your class structure because the military is upstream of a lot of the political and class dynamics. And so if you’re like, “Oh, crap. We need to field our knights to take on their knights,” well, now you’re going to have a social structure that has knights in it.
And that’s going to have all sorts of effects. If you’re like—”Oh, man, we need to raise a mass citizen army to face Napoleon,” okay, well, now you’ve got a mass citizen army, and that’s going to push things in a much more democratic direction.
Wolf: Right. One obvious illustration of the democratic nature of Napoleon’s style of fighting is that almost any of those guys could’ve shot Napoleon. Unilaterally almost.
Ben: And especially you have the very cinematic thing with his return from exile when he dares them to.
Wolf: Yeah. Right. He says, “Any of you.” Right.
Ben: Yeah. “Will any of you shoot your emperor?” They’re like, “Actually, no, we won’t.”
Wolf: Right. In other words—
Ben: But one guy could’ve just done it
Wolf: in other words, there’s this enormous social aspect, which is he’s giving them something that they want. He’s not extracting from them. Like you say, you can’t arm your slaves. You can’t have a slave army that works like that. They would shoot you.
And so it shows that basically Napoleon had enormous democratic legitimacy among the military class.
Ben: Right. Which gets—
Wolf: And any such leader contending on that level with a massed army needed that kind of legitimacy.
Ben: Yes, and this is getting into some questions of what exactly is a democracy, which I think we should get to a bit later. But yeah.
You’ve got the power of force, you’ve got the political structures built around that, and the thing is that the real power structure, the real balance of force, is always changing. All the time. Your general dies and the replacement is better or worse, or a new technology is invented and it hasn’t really been used much yet.
Wolf: We’ve got drones coming out. We haven’t quite seen how that affects internal political order yet.
Ben: Right. And then the sort of legal political structure on top of that mostly stays the same. Except when conflicts reveal. So you’ve always got this real thing under the structure, which is sort of drifting, but people have their different theories. You can ask, well, how have drones changed the internal political order?
Are they a mass democratic weapon or not? People will have strong opinions on this. But eventually there’s a conflict in which it gets revealed and you sort of have similar to the punctuated equilibrium models of evolution where you have—sort of large periods of continuity, then there’s a big open conflict and people, after the American Revolution, a lot of people start looking around and being like, “Maybe we should renegotiate our position with respect to these kings.” Because they saw that something new had happened and the balance—was maybe not what it had previously been.
Wolf: Right. It was possible for free yeomen with muskets and rifles to basically take on a national army.
Ben: Right. And so very frequently you will see there be about a generation, sometimes two, between the change in the raw facts of power—and how it gets implemented in the political structures and the legal structures. Partly because it’s not immediately obvious, and partly because it’s not like you’ve got a bunch of maximally cartoon Machiavellis who launch a coup the instant it happens. They don’t really want to get into a war and start shooting their uncle. They want to—come to a negotiation and work out something and you get a somewhat better deal without setting everything on fire.
Wolf: Yeah, and I guess that brings up this question. So you get these kind of renegotiations. Some of those may even be ongoing negotiations over time with these sort of less spectacular but still decisive engagements on the margin, just in terms of how well the police are able to find someone, how well is some gang able to operate. These little things on the margin can cause... Or even just perceptions, right?
People’s perceptions of all this can, on the margin, change things through time. But then, I guess you get the big breakdowns, the punctuated equilibrium events, when you have a major disagreement. People actually expect something different. And—
Ben: When people mostly agree about what the underlying power is, they’re going to be able to reach an agreement without fighting. And when they just both think that they are, in fact, going to win, that’s when they are both going to be like—
Wolf: That’s when they’re going to try
Ben: “Let’s go.”
Wolf: That’s when they’re going to try it. Yeah, they think the other guy’s wrong about something. And so, yeah, and we see a lot of this. War always comes kind of as a surprise for everybody because you sort of go into it thinking it’s going to be easy, and your special military operation that’s supposed to last three days actually turns out to last three years or more.
Ben: Yeah. In the late ‘30s, a couple of years before the start of the European theater of World War II, the Japanese were like, “Yeah, we’re just going to do a quick punitive operation into China, in and out in six months.” And then it ends eight or 10 years later with the nukes being dropped.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. It’s not always so simple. But yeah. And so there’s this matter of uncertainty.
The uncertainty gets resolved through warfare. War is this kind of empirical process of revealing the actual underlying facts about power. And then all the social order is flowing from that because it’s certain classes, certain types of organization are favored in those conflicts—or disfavored.
Ben: Yes. And then within this, every weapon system is different, every social system is different, every period in history is unique. That said, there’s two big distinctions that you can draw throughout history and be like, “Here are two ways that you can sort the types of weapon systems that are dominant at any given time.” And see a bunch of downstream effects on what that’s going to do to the political situation. Which are basically offensive versus defensive—and amateur versus professional weapons systems.
Offense, defense, and the natural scale of empires (19:18)
Ben: So to start with the first of them, because it’s the simpler topic of the two. If you have an offensive dominant weapon system where generally the attacker is able to win and overcome the defenses, then this lends itself to large political units. And big countries, empires stretching large distances. Whereas when the advantage is with the defensive, then that tends much more towards small political units, low central control. You can’t necessarily tell each local leader what to do because they have strong defensive capabilities, and maybe they could win, maybe they’d just be very hard to overcome them.
So.
Wolf: And so an example of defense dominant would be the Middle Ages, where castles basically allow some rebel lord or someone who wants something different to basically hole up in their castle. And even a larger army outside can’t do much to stop them. They’re going to sit out there and siege until they get bored or—or something. And so that’s defense dominant because you can basically retain sovereignty against a larger force.
Ben: Right. You have what we think of now as England, not even the main British Island, but just the kingdom of England was—cut up into what? Four or five different kingdoms, and within each of those—the king couldn’t just roll over his dukes if they didn’t want to do what he said.
Wolf: Yeah. They have castles and—
Ben: And if you look at any individual siege, it’ll be like, and then the king surrounded it, but then they had to scatter in order to forage. But then one of the duke’s allies brought up a much smaller army, and so the king had to concentrate, and then he couldn’t keep foraging, so they ran out of food, so they had to fall back, and the castle didn’t fall. And it’s just this period where partly because of the physical technology, but partly because of the social technology, the Romans had wonderful offensive tech largely because of their social organization, not because they had better tools—than the guys in 1000 AD or whatever. But like—
Wolf: So I’m curious to dig a little bit further into why or how the sort of offense, defense dominant balance affects the sizes of political orders. What actually determines kind of the scale there? Because it seems intuitive, but I can’t quite think it through. It’s like, okay, we’ve got the guy in the castle holed up in the castle. But why not the guy in the bigger castle or the guy in the smaller castle?
Because really what we’re talking about is a continuous scale here, right?
You could imagine some ultimately defense dominant situation by which we simply mean that the individual is able to be sovereign, or you could imagine some ultimately offense dominant system and by which we mean no one is basically able to be sovereign except some global system altogether.
Ben: Yeah. Your hypothetical everyone has the bomb implanted in their neck, which the guy—
Wolf: Yeah. And not only the bomb implanted in their neck, but also a surveillance system able to kind of—police everyone’s thoughts and all. It would take a lot, obviously. But I’m wondering, the idea that offense dominant or defense dominant produces larger or smaller political entities kind of feels like a tautology to me in the sense that you’ve defined offense and defense dominant in terms of almost the scale of political entities that are able to defend themselves. And so what is it in a world where we have artillery and industrial armies and nuclear weapons and so on, that they give us we seem to have an equilibrium around kind of continent sized empires right now.
Ben: Yeah. And then—
Wolf: And so what is it that prevents someone from going further? What is it that prevents something from collapsing down? So for one example, it seems to be quite difficult for a smaller country, what we might call a country today, just your typical large country of 50 to 100 million people or something.
Ben: Canada or Portugal or something.
Wolf: Yeah. They can’t seem to fully defend themselves against one of these larger blocks. You get something like China or the United States coming after that. Mind you, China’s not done any offensive operations, so we don’t really know. But if we imagine the previous times these things have happened, Germany, Japan, Soviet Union, America, going after one of those smaller ones, you get these big grinding attrition wars where the smaller one gets rolled by the bigger one.
And it’s because the bigger one’s economic output and artillery systems and so on are able to just blow up all the stuff that the smaller country has and roll them over. But what’s the limit of that? Why not just take the whole world, right? What is it that sort of—Forces the stop in that there must be some kind of cost of scale—and advantages of smallness that produce a non-linear curve in advantage with size.
Ben: There is a bunch of that, and then you will generally see the most important break point on that curve. It depends on what is the weapon system. So in the 1800s, the equivalent of your Portugal, or I guess in the 1800s was literally Portugal. They generally were much more sovereign entities—they could field something using the best weapon system on their own. Because the best weapon system, you needed guns, you needed artillery, and these were the sorts of things that a medium, small nation could just make all on its own.
Modern weapons require continent-sized economies (25:26)
Wolf: I see. So at some point, there’s the matter of the scale necessary to wield a given weapon system.
Ben: Right. Because the current weapon systems, you need fighter jets. So the three hardest things to produce in our current industrial system that we nevertheless do—is aerospace—computer chips—and refined uranium. And two of those are basically happening just because of the military size. But these are all things that you cannot do in an economic unit the size of Portugal.
It just doesn’t work.
Wolf: You can’t get together with a couple of your buddies and produce a nuclear arsenal and ICBMs.
Ben: Right. You need a continent-size block—in order to have the economic base to produce—the dominant weapon system.
Wolf: Yeah, and I guess we get test cases like North Korea, right, where they’re... I don’t think they’re continent-sized, but they are nonetheless able to go all in on producing those necessary defensive weapons—and able to produce a certain amount of sovereignty on that.
Ben: My sense is that they are doing bits of it, but that without a lot of technology from China, they would not have—
Wolf: You think they’re piggy—
Ben: the complete system.
Wolf: Yeah, they could be piggybacking a lot on China.
Ben: That is my sense of it. And so you can see the European Union is basically—an attempt to take a bunch of national scale things and—fuse them into a continent block. Which they have, in fact, okay, you can’t do an aerospace company at the size of France, but you can do Airbus with Europe.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Well, France does have aerospace stuff. There’s other considerations, right? There’s things like how well your economy is able to mobilize industrially and all these things. France in the past maybe was able to do aerospace.
Maybe these days they need to do it through Airbus.
Ben: And my sense is that there are a bunch of countries that have, and to some degree, subsidize their own aerospace things. But these tend to not be world-class and have to sell outside of their own country—in order to make it economically viable because in the same way that a lot of the US industrial base, it’s not just being used by the US, it’s also going to Portugal and Saudi Arabia who are not building—their own fighter jets.
Wolf: Right. That’s a good point. Even the US is actually not necessarily at the scale. The US alone may or may not be actually at the natural scale of a state these days. It’s an—
Ben: An interesting question, which—if we got a World War causing autarky and closing off the seas, we would find out the answer to.
Wolf: Yeah. Which—
Ben: I would prefer to remain ignorant.
Wolf: Yeah. Let’s remain ignorant of that one. Mind you, we might find out. We’re testing this problem currently in Iran. Let’s see.
They’re able to launch ballistic missiles quite far, but not intercontinentally. They aren’t able to produce their own fighter jets, I think, but they do have fighter jets from a lot of other people. They’ve not been able, for a variety of reasons, to produce their own refined uranium and all of that.
Ben: Yes. And with the Ukraine War, I think we are going to learn a lot about what the real balance of power is. But it’s not going to be as revealing as a actual all-out war. So ignorance perhaps is bliss.
Wolf: Yeah. And so I wonder, is it then simply the scale of technology or the level of sophistication of the technology involved? You need a larger economy to have more sophisticated technology, or they sometimes get more sophisticated technologies that actually shrink the size necessary to produce it. An example I have in mind is the Bronze Age collapse, where some combination of new weapon system of highly skilled infantry and the production of iron disrupted the natural scale of states involving bronze and chariot warfare. And very suddenly, you didn’t need to be one of these big trade block super states with big amounts of chariots and access to long-distance trade for bronze.
The iron smelter was much—
Ben: Right. You just need the iron—
Wolf: smaller logistic. Even if it’s higher technology, it’s smaller.
Ben: Right. You just dig the iron out. Iron is everywhere. You don’t have to be importing tin from Britain into Egypt.
Wolf: Yeah. And likewise, suddenly the trained infantryman, they got good enough against chariots that the chariots were no longer a decisive weapon system. And now these smaller bands of trained infantrymen could tear down these whole civilizations. And so you’ve got the Sea Peoples and the Trojan War and the Bronze Age collapse.
Ben: Yeah. So the physical tech is probably the largest single input into it. But it’s not the only thing going on. There’s also just the sophistication, the competence, the state capacity of the organizing entities. And the Bronze Age collapse is kind of hard to reason about because the historians are still arguing about how did they actually use the chariots in fighting.
Wolf: Yeah, we don’t know all the details. I mean, people have—written great scholarship on a bunch of this stuff, but—
Ben: Right. The Roman collapse is a much clearer case for us to look at, just because we understand what happened a lot better. And that one was less a case of, oh, there’s some new technology which obsoletes the old way of doing things—and more that it collapsed. They just lost the ability to mobilize the weapon system around the Roman legion. And they just—
Wolf: Because the social basis kind of fell out.
Ben: Right. And so they just internally lost the ability to field what had previously been the advanced weapon system. It wasn’t that the weapon system was defeated in the field by a superior one, it’s just that it ceased to exist. And then they just had an inferior weapons system of whichever barbarians they had most recently bribed. And then as this sort of larger scale, more organized thing kind of disintegrated, then the dominant weapon system was a barbarian tribe.
One of these big peoples that would migrate from the Black Sea through Italy, burn Rome, settle in Iberia. That was the dominant weapon system. It was a much smaller type of object. It didn’t require the sort of dominance over the entire middle sea.
Wolf: Right. And I guess to your point about there being something of a lag between the change in the underlying facts about the weapon systems and the change in the political order, Rome started to heavily rely on these barbarian mercenaries sort of long before it was gone. It didn’t—
Ben: And the disintegration—
Wolf: Doesn’t mean—
Ben: of their weapons system was a gradual process which took centuries, and—which wasn’t immediately acted upon at every moment—when the opportunity presented itself. And you have after the Visigoths and everyone have carved up Rome and just have de facto totally independent kingdoms, they’re still saying on paper that they are subject to the Roman Emperor and minting coins with the emperor’s face for hundreds of years afterwards, which is very common in an imperial dissolution.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. So to get back to the matter of sort of how do we solve that equation for the natural scale of an empire, I guess what we’re proposing is that there’s some point at which you kind of reach the point of diminishing returns with the further scale. And then—
Ben: And then you are no longer getting qualitative changes in a new type of weapons system that you can maintain on your own. You’re just having more of the same weapon system, which is an advantage, but it’s not as much as going from—we have the logistical base to be making our own fighter jets and rockets to—well, we can specialize and make some good rockets, but we can’t do that and the drones and refine the uranium, so we’re going to have to have a patron. Once you get to the minimum size to do all of the critical parts internally, that is a qualitative difference, and further scale from that is only linear.
Wolf: Yeah. Right. So further scale from that is like, okay, they’re a little bit bigger, but maybe we can still impose unacceptable costs and hold out relative... If we’re simply more obstinate, then it’s worth to kind of come after us. We’re able to hold up.
A relatively smaller country like Ukraine can hold up against a relatively larger country like Russia, though of course the international participation in that makes it a little bit less clean of an example.
Ben: Yes. There is no perfectly clean example because there’s always stuff like that going down.
Wolf: Yeah. And, but North Korea can, despite being relatively small because they have the capacity to nuke Japan or something, that no one really wants to get in there. It’s not worth it to conquer them anyways.
Ben: Right. So, and then we’re in a interesting situation now where it’s generally offensively dominant weapons, and there’s a sense where if people were using nukes all the time, they would be an offensive dominant weapon. But we have this reasonably stable taboo against using nuclear weapons—which causes them to be a defense favoring weapon for the subset of states that have them. So it’s, nukes themselves are kind of don’t fit super cleanly into this categorization.
Wolf: Yeah. And I wonder... So yeah, certainly we’ve had this perception that if anyone starts a nuclear war, it’s not going to go well for anybody, so no one wants to get into it. And so anyone who’s able to demonstrate nuclear capacity suddenly is able to get much better terms. I wonder if we actually did started engaging in nuclear warfare, what would...
It’s an interesting question. What would change? Probably we might discover, for example, that, well, nuclear war is a lot more survivable than we thought, or it’s a lot worse than we thought, and we go right back into the taboo, or if it’s a lot more survivable than we thought, or the missile defense systems work well enough, then that breaks the taboo, is people start actually using them much more often.
Ben: For one thing, I probably wouldn’t be living in San Francisco if we didn’t have the nuclear taboo.
Wolf: Yeah. There’s enough sort of military bases close by and just the value of strategic bombing of cities that you don’t really want to be in these sorts of places.
Ben: So, regardless of what happens to the overall balance of power, I personally would be vaporized. So.
Wolf: Yeah. Or would choose to leave before being vaporized.
Ben: Yes. And I have thought of... Anyway, that’s a tangent I won’t get into—but I do think that if you start seeing Cuban missile crisis headlines, it’s time to—
Wolf: Go live in the woods
Ben: take a vacation up in the mountains for a week or two. Anyway, yeah. That’s offensive versus defensive.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Yeah, which I’d love to dwell on that more, not necessarily now, but it feels like there’s a rich vein of theory there in terms of understanding exactly what we mean by that—in terms of these thresholds of scale and ability to—produce the weapons and—
Ben: And this—
Wolf: When it actually... At what scale do you become defense dominant? That’s really the question.
Ben: Right. And this is why 90% of the bulk of “Weapon Systems and Political Stability” consists of him working through these examples and—talking about the development of the trireme and how many guys they have on each oar at what period. Because—
Wolf: That’s where those details matter.
Ben: Right. And you have to just get super intense on them and work through a bunch of them, as with most theories, in order to—really think it through. So that’s what the bulk of the book is about, and I found it very helpful.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. So, you said there were two major distinctions, one of them being defense and offense dominance.
Whoever can afford the weapons holds the power (38:20)
Ben: Yes, and the other is the amateur weapon—versus the professional weapon. Where what is meant here is a professional weapon is something where the weapon system, because of the combination of the physical objects and the training you need to use them ends up being very expensive and has to be pursued by professionals, by specialists who this is what they do. So, the knight being the one that looms largest in our cultural imagination, you need this incredibly expensive suit of armor. You need three or four incredibly expensive horses. You need to spend most of your life practicing.
And this takes a couple hundred guys to support you, basically. So this is a professional weapon system. Versus, on the other hand, you have amateur weapon systems where fairly regular dudes can afford to get the best weapon system—and have the time to train with it. So the clearest example here being the single shot gun, the rifle—the musket. Where, so when they first were invented, if you’re looking at the 1500s, these are very expensive things that are quite hard to use.
But by the 1800s, they’re very cheap. You can buy them if you’re in America, in Germany, you can buy them for maybe a week’s wages. You practice with them for a couple of afternoons, and you’re okay with them.
Wolf: Good enough. Yeah. Good enough that you can cause a lot of trouble.
Ben: And so this is an amateur weapons. And so, if you look at the American Civil War, they just grab a bunch of guys. They give you a gun, they march you around for a couple of weeks, and they send you off to the front. And maybe you’re not as good as the veterans who have been there for two years, but if you send two green regiments against one veteran regiment, then the veterans are probably losing.
Wolf: Right. It’s not like knights where you can send 100 peasants against a knight, and there’s sort of an even chance what happens.
Ben: Right. So, and then the difference that this makes is that when you have a professional weapon system—power is in the hands of the professionals. Or whoever is organizing the professionals and telling them what to do. And when you have an amateur weapons system, then power—is fundamentally in the hands of the amateurs. And how far this is going to spread power depends on the specifics.
Like if you compare the hoplite is a weapon system where medium-rich landowners or craftsmen who are equivalently wealthy can afford to just get the armor, and then they’re like, “Okay, great. Now you are drafted into the hoplite formation, and now we kind of have to cut you in on this.” Whereas if you look at the musket is an even cheaper weapon that is distributed even more widely than that. And so you get these, the urban poor start becoming a factor in a way that even in the previous classical period of democracy around the hoplite, you weren’t seeing. So there’s like—degrees of all of this, but the question is: Given the expense of acquiring and training with the weapons that are used in the weapon system—who has the weapons?
Because those are the people who fundamentally hold the power.
Wolf: Right. And you mentioned... So, well, I guess the first thing is to apply this to our time, which is that since the 19th century when we had the dominance of small arms, we’ve had the development of a number of almost exclusively professional weapons. The machine gun, the tank, the airplane, the bomber—and so on.
Ben: Especially the nuclear bomb.
Wolf: Yeah. The nuclear bomb, obviously. All sorts of these things. The surveillance system, the kind of integrated signals intelligence.
Ben: Yeah. I don’t own any spy satellites.
Wolf: Right. For example. Yeah. And so we would expect then quite a dominant shift away from democratic norms towards the kind of modern bureaucracies that are able to order about the use of these things.
Democracy does not mean voting (42:50)
Ben: Right. Which is why in the ‘70s, Quigley was saying, “Yeah, we’re going to see a decline of democracy.” And it’s notable we still have all of the elections. So have we in fact become less democratic? I would argue yes.
And so here we’re going to get into what exactly is a democracy. Where—
Wolf: So let’s talk about that. Why is it not the case that we’re more democratic than ever? Because of course we recognize the rights of all sorts of people to vote. We get out larger vote counts than ever before. Clearly we’re more democratic than ever.
Ben: Right. And then the word democracy does not mean voting. It does not mean elections. It means the demos, the people, are in charge. And so the reason things happen is because the people want that thing to happen.
And if you look throughout the 1800s, which was I would say very roughly the high watermark of the amateur weapons system built around the small arms—you will generally see that a lot of the social changes are made because the people want those changes. And even throughout the first half of the 20th century, the first two-thirds of the 20th century, when you’re looking at why are the social changes made, generally because they’re quite popular, and then the people vote for legislators who are going to enact those policies. And then the legislators enact those policies. And then you just get—the people are like—
Wolf: And if the—
Ben: “I do think that women should vote.” “So I’m going to vote for the guy who says he’s going to make that change,” and then they make that change.
Wolf: Yeah. And I guess the crucial thing with democracy, what separates a democracy from whatever it is that we have is if the legislators are persistently unpopular because they’re not in fact doing the thing that they say they’re going to do, or not carrying out the will of the people, do the people have some recourse? Can they rise up and—
Ben: Yeah. Like in 1848—
Wolf: make change
Ben: in like many countries in Europe, they just rose up and the people in arms just fought against the army—and won. And threw out the government and put in some new guys. And in other places, the guys were like, “Man, I’m really worried that we’re going to get the people just rising up and kicking our ass, so maybe we should make some of those changes that they’re talking about.”
Wolf: Right. And so then you see things like, in our time, let’s say the January 6th protests in the US Capitol, the truckers’ protest in Canada. You have similar kind of mechanized protest in I think the Netherlands. There was the—
Ben: Right. But they don’t—
Wolf: Yellow Jackets in France. The people are able to rise up, but they’re notably very non-violent.
Ben: Yeah. These are—
Wolf: These people don’t even bother to bring weapons because they know they’re going to get creamed if they do.
Ben: Right. These are riots. They’re not like—this is not the people in arms trying to defeat the army. You only see that happen in places like the Congo or Syria, where—the state has basically just totally disintegrated—and it exists in one office in the United Nations building.
Like—
Wolf: And the outcome of these confrontations is, in the case of the truckers’ protest in Canada, well, the government systematically identifies everyone involved, everyone who donated, and unplugs all their bank accounts. Turns out everyone’s totally vulnerable to their participation in the system being turned off. Which means they’re totally vulnerable to bureaucratic power.
Ben: Right. And many people have noticed it seems like Congress in the US isn’t really doing anything. It seems like the elected legislatures in Europe aren’t really doing anything. And the claim here is the fundamental reason—is that the legislators’ power—comes from being elected by the people, and that the people have guns. And if the people having guns doesn’t matter—then you have cut off the source of the legislature’s power.
Wolf: Right. Because the legislator comes, he says, “I’m a popular guy. I have a lot of people with me. You better allow me to legislate in a meaningful way or something bad’s going to happen.” And well, it turns out actually, no, nothing bad’s going to happen—because his people don’t matter.
Ben: And so for the last half century at least—we have seen the sort of progressive march of various different groups, the appointed regulators, the judges, the executives usurping the powers from the legislatures. And if you’re looking at the last legislation that was arguably significant in the United States that was passed by the Congress was the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank. Those were both 2010. And there’s just nothing since then that’s really mattered. The president has been like, “Can you write a big check?”
And they’ve been like, “Yes.” And that’s all of the laws that are even worth reporting on.
Wolf: Yeah. There’s been a few of those. Yeah. The infrastructure bill, the big beautiful bill, essentially amount to—Congress writing a fat check.
Ben: Like at the specific, particular direction of the president. And so everything important that has happened legally and politically, even in the late 20th century, you would have the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Important changes in sort of the tail end of Congress being real and meaningful—were often passed by the Congress. In one of these cases where it seems like it’s had a bit of a lag, the thing hasn’t fully played out—but it’s still persisting for a while. And then now our Senate just looks as ceremonial as the late imperial Roman Senate.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. And it’s interesting to apply this to the presidency as well. The president is also somewhat ceremonial, but maybe the people have, by virtue of it being a more concentrated position, they’re able to have more influence or in Donald Trump’s case in particular, he seems much more willing to actually mobilize the people in you know, quasi-violent ways, like with January 6th and so on, and maybe that counts for something. And so you get a somewhat stronger presidency than, say, Joe Biden. Or maybe he’s just not senile.
But, I wonder how you would apply this framework to the difference that we seem to see between the power of the presidency and the power of the legislature.
Ben: So, this is an area where I’m not 100% solid, and I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts as well. But it looks to me... So, we have a specialist weapon system. So, in Quigley’s theory, the difference is that amateur weapons lead to democratic political systems, specialist weapon systems yield authoritarian ones, but this doesn’t distinguish which type of authoritarian system. Are you going to get a monarchy?
Are you going to get an oligarchy? Are you going to get a bureaucracy? All of these are things which can command a specialized weapons systems. And so it looks to me like a lot of the difference here between the US and Europe is that, just sort of contingently, America was initially set up with a very deliberate mixture of what we consider the classical three forms of government: democracy, monarchy, aristocracy. This was the extremely deliberate intent of the founders.
Wolf: Yeah. And that being the presidency, being the monarchic faction, the Senate being the aristocratic faction, and to some extent the judiciary, and then the lower house being the democratic.
Ben: Right. And then in the 1910s, I forget the exact year, we made the Senate also be popularly elected. There was the constitutional amendment, so we got rid of the aristocratic house. But we still have the presidency, which just is meant to be what we call a strong executive because we don’t like the word monarchy. Which is itself a euphemism for what the Greeks called a dictatorship—which we like even less.
So the United States, let’s say, was built deliberately with a strong executive.
Wolf: Or that was the Romans’, dictators. The Romans.
Ben: Which was, yes. Sorry.
Wolf: The Greeks called it a tyrant.
Ben: No. So, the Greeks called it monarchy when it was legitimate and a tyranny when it—was illegitimate, because the Greeks were like, “The three fundamental forms all come in legitimate and—illegitimate variants, and monarchy is—the legitimate one.”
Wolf: And there are technical distinctions there with respect to whether the king is under the law or not.
Ben: Right. But, we can do Polybius in a different video.
Wolf: Right. So carry on.
Ben: Yes. So the European systems were largely put together in the 20th century. When it was the same, oh, we love democracy ideology that got rid of the Senate as an aristocratic institution. And so they were deliberately set up to lack, let’s call it strong executives—and just be purely a combination of it was like, “All right, we’re going to have this elected body, and then a bunch of appointed bureaucrats.” And so—as it was the power of the legislatures evaporated, that has left only the bureaucrats and judges.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. And the interesting thing about the judges, the power of the judges relative to the president, I think the president in theory could actually pull in the people to come in and wield their specialist sort of weaponry in the trenches of the bureaucracy, as we saw with DOGE. Right? So you get a bunch of people who came from outside the government who come in and are doing—
Ben: That was—
Wolf: this highly technical kind of smash and grab
Ben: that was an attempt to set up a parallel bureaucracy. That was not—calling in the mass of the people.
Wolf: Not quite the mass of the people, but the president able to sort of call in—outside forces against the entrenched bureaucratic ruling class. But these things, that ultimately did not work for internal political reasons. But I think there’s also kind of taking not just DOGE, but that general genre of things that a president could do, where he’s bringing in people and legitimacy from outside the government against the entrenched government. That tends to get blocked by the judges. And the judges are important because their rulings, and the law, in general, is what legitimates the president’s control or anyone’s control over the guns.
And—
Ben: I consider them basically a subtype of bureaucrat who has a—basically religious legitimacy to them.
Wolf: Right. And okay, yeah. So they’re a type of bureaucrat, but crucially, their power to kind of challenge the system. Like the reason the president can’t just tell the judges to piss off and replace them with some other system, is that all the professional violence that the president is able to draw on is he’s able to draw on that through the vehicle of law.
Ben: Right. That’s how you go from being a monarch to being a tyrant. Which—
Wolf: Right. Yes. Yeah. And so because it’s monarchy and not tyranny, the judges have this decisive say in the matter. And if they start to become more politicized, it’s an interesting question to see how far these things can escalate.
Can the bureaucrats always out-escalate a president, or will the president be able to—out-escalate the bureaucrats?
Ben: And now this is one of those cases where, okay, so the real fundamentals have been drifting underneath the sort of—obscuring surface of this political order, and it’s very unclear.
Wolf: Yeah. And we see these sort of peripheral examples of things going one way or the other, like in El Salvador, Bukele is somehow able to overcome the judges with some legal tricks. I think he declared an emergency or something and basically got the country cleaned up before the judges could stop him. And I think we may see similar things going on in Argentina. I’m a little bit less familiar with the details, how he actually got around these problems and started doing major reforms on the state.
And so this is maybe where a lot of the active contention is, is between the sort of strong executive principle and the entrenched bureaucracy.
Ben: Yeah. And this is one of the areas which I don’t think that actually depends on the weapons systems qua the weapons systems because the important thing from the weapons systems perspective is that it’s a specialist weapons system where the question is who can command the specialists.
Wolf: Yeah. Right. So the sort of second-order weapons system is the kind of types of legal machinations and political machinations that get you control of those keys.
Ben: Right. And in the Roman case, we saw a lot of the machinations around that be a big factor in how, over a long period of time, it disintegrated as people made moves to secure their own power and try not to get stabbed by the Praetorians. That ended up disintegrating, weakening the ability of... Constantine made a bunch of reforms that really helped with the internal political stability—but weakened them against the barbarians, and—was that good, was that bad? Who knows, but that was the trade-off that he ended up making while he was in that chair.
And so you can see, as these conflicts start really getting out there, this can be one of the things that puts you on the track of—
Wolf: Of terminal decline eventually. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. Our friend Samo Burja talks about the problem of local focus where—if you are still fighting internally, you just can’t care about the fight that’s happening one sphere out, because you first have to make sure you win in here.
Wolf: Yeah, and if you don’t win in there, there’s nothing for you anyways.
Ben: Right. And this is a constant throughout all human social systems.
Wolf: Right. Okay, so then we have amateur versus professional weaponry, amateur weaponry giving us more democratic systems, professional weaponry giving us more authoritarian systems. We live in an increasingly authoritarian age despite its protestations otherwise.
Ben: Yes, and it’s rituals which don’t do as much to affect the deeper structure as they once did.
Wolf: Yeah, right. The democratic kind of principle has been relegated to a sort of symbolic role, somewhat similar to the monarchy in—Japan or—
Ben: We have this—
Wolf: England
Ben: in the United States and in lots of Latin America, we have this interesting fusion where the big democratic lever is the selection of the monarch—who then just has his term to do what he’s going to do.
But Europe doesn’t really have that.
Wolf: So where do we go from here? What’s the big lesson of this—
Democracy is not an ideological process but a military one (59:17)
Ben: Yeah. So for me, I think the—
Wolf: line of thought
Ben: so the big line of thought here for me—is you’ve got a lot of people being like, “Oh, we need to get back democratic norms and values by some sort of ideological project.”
Wolf: Right, as if it’s an ideological thing.
Ben: Right. Whereas the thing here is you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Wolf: It’s not an ideological process, it’s a military process.
Ben: Right. And so that if you are to be like, “We need to bring back democracy,” which—you can get into whether we should be doing that or not. But—if one should be doing that, then what you should be doing is trying to put together a coherent weapons system—that is an amateur weapons system. And so we have seen Bitcoin was a big effort to make technology itself more democratic, to take a lot of the financial power—out of the hands of the conglomerates that the modern banking technology does, and do something that is, by its nature, going to be the financial version of an amateur weapons system. And it didn’t really work.
It maybe pushed things a couple of notches in that direction, but that was the thing it was aiming at. Some people have said, “Oh, drones can be the thing that’s going to make it a amateur weapons system because anyone can go and buy a couple of drones.” I don’t think that’s true. We’ll see, but it seems like they have thus far been—just a matter of marshaling industrial might to make them by the thousand.
Wolf: Yeah. We’ll see if some insurgency manages to actually impact their government by the use of amateur drone weaponry. I’m not seeing it.
Ben: I don’t think so. It looks to me like it doesn’t really seem like an improvement over the Russian anarchists—who did in fact disrupt their government a lot by shooting them, and they didn’t do it by having—some crazy thing where you couldn’t catch them afterwards.
Wolf: But what the—
Ben: They were just caught after, and they were fine with that.
Wolf: But the interesting thing is maybe the other dimension, which is offense versus defense, or scale of engagement size. Because you get things like the Houthis in the Middle East, where they are, in fact—able to use drones to cause quite a bit of trouble for a much larger political order, and somehow not able to be easily defeated, or no one can quite muster the will to defeat them.
Ben: My suspicion is it’s the will rather than the ability, and it’s just the guerrilla problem of you can’t actually stop—distributed guerrillas without just also killing lots of civilians, and people don’t want to do that.
Wolf: Yeah. And so this brings us to something of the what we might call irregular warfare, and I wonder how that fits into this model. There are, in fact, these other dimensions of conflict and other dimensions of defense, right? If you can mount a successful moral defense where you can prevent the enemy from undertaking the kind of physically possible but morally innovative—let’s say, actions to stop you.
Ben: So, using the school as your strong point becomes a defense favoring weapon—exactly to the extent that they’re like, “Well, we can’t shoot them. He’s in a school.” But if they are just like, “Well, we’re shooting where the guy is,” then it doesn’t work.
Wolf: Yeah, exactly. And so the question though is whether are all political orders always subject to some kind of internal taboos that can be exploited in this way? Is that a particular feature of the particular taboos that we have inherited from the 20th century, where we have a general taboo against ever shooting sort of vaguely third-world insurgents, when they do things like that, where they hold populations hostage or whatever. We’ve had a lot of asymmetric taboo around these kinds of conflicts. Or is this something that you might wonder, could people in Britain pull that off, right?
Or is the taboo kind of geographic or culturally specific? And how do these matters of taboo and irregular warfare kind of intersect with the Quigley thesis of the actual physical power of the weapons systems? Because it seems like there’s this whole other dimension to the sort of shape of possible conflicts, which is what we might call the moral dimension, that seems to be actually quite decisive in some of these cases.
Ben: Yeah. So, to put it within the weapons systems framework—which this looks to me like it’s largely a separate phenomenon, and I don’t know how illuminating this lens is going to be. It looks to me like it’s basically a matter of ideologically fighting for control over the specialists. Of if you deploy the weapons system against the guy who’s putting his arms depot in the hospital, it will work. And then you’ve got these different claims that people are making about what we should be doing.
This is right, this is wrong, this balance is against that, which is basically—ideological wars for control over the decision-making around where we’re going to deploy these things.
And this is basically a question of politics and ideology, rather than a question of the underlying facts of violence. So I don’t think that this theoretical lens is going to be the super illuminating one.
Wolf: Yeah. So, well, let me propose an additional place where they might actually intersect to some degree. So, which is the matter of, let’s say, privacy or free speech, from a technical perspective. So, in those ideological conflicts over these specialized weapons systems, you have various factions wielding the internal powers of state to try to find and root out dissidents of various stripes. And whether those dissidents are able to be found and prosecuted, or whether they’re able to evade the system, either...
Now, there’s two ways they can evade. One is they evade sort of purely by kind of cloaking themselves ideologically in some form, but there’s also technical evasion, where the system is simply, it tries, but it’s unable to stop them because actually the cryptography or they’re piggybacking on widely used protocols or something, just makes it impossible to stop the spread of certain ideas. And that seems like a case where it’s not quite weapons systems in the sense of being maximally escalated weaponry, but there are nonetheless these kinds of conflicts that happen within the system that are mediated by physical possibility and technical possibility. Another good example of this is cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, censorship resistance, where these systems are able to kind of assert themselves into existence despite people maybe not liking them, simply because there’s no way to stop them.
Ben: I think people often overestimate the degree to which they can’t be stopped. I think Ted Kaczynski is actually a really useful case study here. Because this was a extremely clever guy who put together this very sophisticated system of how he was going to mail his bombs and his essays out in a way that couldn’t be traced back. He was using the mail system. There was this massive nationwide attempt to trace back where the bombs were coming from, where the manifestos were coming from.
They couldn’t do it because he was in the middle of nowhere. He’d drive in, he’d drop it off. Sometimes they got a recording of him putting it in the mailbox, but he covered his face. Eventually, they got him because a guy who knew him was like, “That looks like Ted’s writing.”
Wolf: Yeah. He was recognized from the writing.
Ben: And with Bitcoin, it’s like, oh, all this stuff is immutable, but like at some point, you have to interface with the regular system if you want to use it for anything. You’ll like, who did you turn it to dollars with? Who did you buy your—tank from?
Wolf: And they can control those things to some extent. I’m not saying it can sort of be fully military grade against—
Ben: Yeah. You can make—
Wolf: a fully agitated state.
Ben: Yeah. You can—
Wolf: But nonetheless, I think there’s something to the thesis that they have forced themselves on the world to some degree. And there’s always—
Ben: No. It’s raised the cost of finding them quite substantially
Wolf: which is really like when we were discussing earlier that the offense versus defense dominant really is about the kind of cost ratios—in the end. And if you can impose costs such that it’s not worth to shut you down, then that gives you this additional operating space. So there’s all these ways in which within the umbrella of the professional violence of the system, there comes to be, let’s say, these secondary layers of conflict internally where I would say a lot of the same or similar dynamics play out, where technical means can change the relative costs of—whether a dissident group is able to operate or not, for example.
Ben: And in particular, what we’ve seen with a lot of these free speech technologies is that they let you evade the freelance panopticon, even if they don’t let you evade the FBI.
Wolf: Right. Which, yeah. Or even escalating all the way to the NSA or true intelligence agencies. You’re probably not going to be robustly defensive against them, but you can be defensive against the more amateur—yeah. Less well-run enforcers
Ben: The people who go around looking for folks to try to organize mass letter-writing campaigns to get them fired. It can protect you substantially from that.
Wolf: Yeah.
Yeah. So that’s an interesting kind of additional dimension. It’s a little bit out of how Quigley scoped the question, but I find it interesting because I think, actually, it becomes especially interesting if we expect kind of further professionalization of the dominant weapon systems.
Ben: Right. And if he had lived another 20 or 30 years, I imagine he would’ve agreed with you about the connection there.
Wolf: Yeah. And I would love to see how he would elaborate it, because I’m sure he’d have more interesting ideas than we are able to with our more limited engagement with the subject. But, I guess this is an interesting question is where do we expect these things to go in the future, and how do we expect this to change the balance of power, if anything, from where we are right now? Because it sure feels like right now, okay, we’ve all sort of realized the system has this decisive power to mess with us. We saw this in COVID.
We’ve seen this a variety of ways where people have tried to go up against the powers that be, and sort of in any kind of direct confrontation have just been utterly crushed. So we see absolute dominance, apparently, of professional weaponry. It seems to be getting even maybe more like that with these extremely heavyweight space technologies. We’ll see what happens with Starship. We’ll see what happens with drone production.
Drones is a little bit closer to an amateur technology, but the wielding, the supply lines is maybe a lot closer to professional technology. So we’ll see kind of which of those things becomes decisive. And so maybe we’re moving in the direction of professionalization. Are we moving in the direction of more larger scale, which is to say so-called offense dominant? That one’s maybe a little less easy to see where we’re going from here, but we seem to be quite far in that direction currently, at least.
Ben: It seems like it’s been fairly stable in terms of the size of the blocks and the offense dominance for the last several decades. Perhaps that will continue. Perhaps it will change.
Wolf: Yeah. And so do you see any projection of ways that we’re out of sync with the underlying state of the weapon systems? Is there any remaining overhang or has that, since Quigley’s time, kind of been arbitraged out?
Ben: So I think there’s a lot of overhang, and I don’t consider myself an expert on just the weapons that have been developed in the last 10 years, the weapons that are going to be developed in the next two or three. There are people who know a lot about those. I don’t consider myself one of them. So the general pattern with every time, all the time, there’s just a huge amount of new weapons being built. There’s always a lot of drift.
I don’t know where it will go. I can say that the last time we’ve had a big all-out war with the best weapon systems in the world being really put up against each other was the Second World War, and so that’s a lot of time for overhang to develop. There’s going to be a lot of surprises, and I just do not think I’m clever enough. I don’t think anybody’s going to know all of them. Some guy is going to be able to get a fifth of them right, and that’s going to give him a big advantage.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. And so this—
Ben: Yeah. And I don’t consider myself to have special knowledge there other than a lot of people will be very surprised, as they are with every big—war that brings new weapon systems to bear.
There has never been an all-out war between first-rate industrial powers that knew what a computer was (1:13:43)
Wolf: Yeah. This is a good point. The last time we had a major all-out confrontation was over 80 years ago now and—
Ben: We didn’t even have—
Wolf: There’s been—
Ben: jet fighters then. No one had ever gone to space.
Wolf: There’s been a lot of development since then, and so even though it may look like we’ve responded to the nature of these new weapon systems, they haven’t actually been tested in the limit.
Ben: Right. There has never been an all-out war between first rate industrial powers that knew what a computer was.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. That’s an interesting claim. Yeah, so we should expect quite a lot to change through the next major conflict. And also, we are on the cusp of perhaps a lot of changes in the underlying weapon systems as well.
Not only the weapons that we’ve already seen developed, but the new things like whatever happens with AI, whatever kind of drones evolve into autonomous weaponry, whatever cyber warfare evolves into, the supply chain kind of financial, economic attacks, terrorism—attacking key nodes of infrastructure.
Ben: I think many of those—
Wolf: We don’t know where that goes
Ben: things are overrated, but there’s only one way to find out.
Wolf: Yeah. There’s just a lot of stuff going on there that, and someone has to press those buttons in the next war before we’re going to—know where we really stand. So let’s hope we put that off for a while.
Ben: Yes. I would prefer not to find out anytime soon, so. Perhaps on that note.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s a good place to stop. It’s been an interesting discussion. Very important thesis, obviously. I think Quigley’s not alone in putting this idea forward.
I think I’ve also seen it in Robert Drews’ account of the end of the Bronze Age, which I mentioned. But definitely this is decisive theory within a realist framework of looking at the world. That, yes, actually the fact of the matter of who has the upper hand when it comes to a violent confrontation trickles down into everything else and determines the shape of our polities both internally and externally. And I guess one final thing I would say is that in whatever shape, whether it’s democratic or authoritarian, whether they’re large or small, you can get a virtuous version or a dysfunctional version.
And so I think, while you might be able to change the system to be more democratic by developing more amateur weaponry or something, that’s not necessarily a good idea. It’s certainly not an effective strategy to get to good government. I think more practically, what we have to do with this kind of knowledge is notice what kind of time we actually live in and use that to inform how we form our ideals. If we do not live in a democratic time, if we live in the time of professional weaponry, large states, offense dominance, then we have to be forming our ideals in terms of what can you do with that.
Ben: Yes. The point is—
Wolf: How should that work
Ben: to make a functional government and the degree to which democracy is a necessary piece of that is just a separate empirical question, which does in fact depend on things like the weapon systems.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. All right. So with that, let’s wrap it up. Thank you so much, Ben, for coming on and discussing this with me.
Ben: Yeah. Always a pleasure.
Wolf: Thanks for watching.