Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  One is simply the logistical capability of the two armies. If it were a private corporation, the Defense Logistics Agency, which buys and tracks all of the U.S. military’s basic supplies, would rank number 50 on the Fortune 500 list, right above Intel. The agency operates the Defense Supply Center, in Philadelphia, which grew out of the Schuylkill Arsenal, the group that outfitted Lewis and Clark. In one recent year the supply center distributed 2.5 million pairs of new boots, 4,000 different kinds of prescription drugs, and 285,000 bottles of sunscreen. The mobilization for an overseas posting of an American brigade is a thing of organizational beauty, a martial symphony of cranes and flatcars, scored in bar codes and conducted by sergeants with clipboards. Even a small deployment—4,000 people to, say, the Balkans, the old Roman diocese of Pannonia—is a taxing and complicated event, unacknowledged by the op-ed strategists who treat force projection as if it were essentially a very large game of Risk. And yet the U.S. military turns impressive feats into the stuff of routine: an Army Ranger battalion, 600 strong, ready to deploy in eighteen hours; a 3,500-man armored Stryker brigade, capable of moving from America to Anywhere in ninety-six hours. This is the grist of propaganda—but it’s not merely propaganda.

  In terms of logistics, the world had never before seen anything like the Romans—and once the Romans were gone it would not again see a fighting force as complex and well managed until the rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the globe-circling Royal Navy, with its supremely competent and logistically sophisticated Victualling Board. It has been estimated that a single Roman legion—about 5,000 men—required a thousand horses and other pack animals just to transport baggage, plus more to haul food and fodder. The U.S. military is often criticized for its enormous fuel consumption. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle, for instance, gets only two miles to a gallon; the Ml Abrams tank gets only one. A mobile Roman army was also in the energy business. In meat alone a single legion in a single day ate the equivalent of a dozen oxen or ten dozen sheep. Vast herds were driven behind the fighting men. An army on the move might try to live off the land, and to that end a sickle was standard equipment for every soldier. But a stationary army on the Rhine or the Danube needed, and got, a steady stream of supplies from throughout the empire. Amphorae from the Mediterranean world turn up all over the German frontier. Excavated Roman latrines in northern Britain yield the seeds of figs from the Middle East.

  The road system was the structural underpinning of Rome’s power, and engineers traveled with the legions to repair bridges and roads or build new ones. They brought along everything they would need. Excavations at the site of one legionary fortress, guarding access to the Highlands of Scotland, uncovered a cache of 750,000 nails. The ancient sources brim with tales of logistical and engineering feats, recounted as matter-of-factly as news of an American airlift of medical supplies to Fiji or Belize. In 55 B.C. Julius Caesar, facing the Suevi across the Rhine, built a wooden bridge so that his legions could march into Germany, deeming it “unworthy of his own and the Romans’ dignity to cross in boats.” Then, after marching back, he ordered the bridge destroyed, as if to demonstrate to the barbarians that such marvels were as nothing to Romans. During his own, later campaigns against the tribes across the Rhine, the Roman general Germanicus twice built from scratch a new riverine fleet, a thousand ships strong.

  The Romans excelled at training—the second great similarity. Americans are accustomed to thinking of their armed forces as “the best trained and best equipped” in the world (to use the stock locution of presidents). Not long ago, when critics pointed out that almost no units of the Iraqi army approached anything like American standards of readiness, administration officials sought to soften the charge by pointing out that most NATO units don’t approach American readiness either—it’s just too high. In the imperial military’s prime, Roman skill, esprit, and group identity rivaled that of Americans. Arduous drilling in peacetime was continual. A military handbook from the second century A.D. explains, “Trained by sweating, puffing, and panting, exposed to summer heat and bitter cold under an open sky, the soldiers become accustomed to the future hardship of real fighting.” The Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, who witnessed and chronicled the brutal Roman campaign against the Jews in the first century A.D., offered an assessment of Roman conditioning: “One would not be wrong in saying that their manoeuvres are like bloodless battles, and their battles bloodstained manoeuvres.” The legionaries remained tightly knit and self-contained even when all was quiet on the far frontiers; careers in the military spanned generations, as in the American South. “All professional armies form, to some extent, closed communities with their own customs and standards of behavior,” one historian has observed, “but the Roman army more than most, effectively formed its own society.”

  Americans are familiar with places like Twentynine Palms and Fayetteville, where major bases have given rise to sprawling “civilian” towns beyond the gates, with their tattoo parlors and fast-food boulevards, their ticky-tacky apartments and strip-mall evangelical ministries. Roman garrisons were much the same; there was a civilian vicus, or settlement, around Vindolanda, as there was around any significant outpost. (A tent city of merchants even grew up next to the Roman army laying siege to Masada, out in the desert.) And if a soldier was lucky enough to live until retirement—typically after service of twenty-five years—then he, like his American counterpart, might very well settle alongside other retired comrades, collecting praemia, or bonuses, in the form of land or money. York, Lincoln, and Gloucester were all coloniae for veterans—the San Antonio and San Diego and Norfolk of their day. The word colonia survives—hidden in plain sight—in the name of one well-known German city: Cologne. In modern America it is not unusual for a military professional to put in twenty years and then, having earned retirement and a comfortable pension, leverage that experience into a private-sector job with one of the defense companies. Consider this Roman tomb inscription: “With good fortune, Flavius Zenis lived for fifty years; having served in Legion XI Claudia, he enrolled in the fabrica of Marcianopolis for twenty years’ service as a centenarius.” He went to work, in other words, as an executive at the shield factory—he went to work for the equivalent of Point Blank Body Armor.

  Too Big, and Too Small

  ONE OF THE POINTS of comparison often suggested between Rome and America has to do with the notion of “imperial overstretch”—the idea that one’s security needs, military obligations, and globalist desires increasingly outstrip the resources available to satisfy them. This suggestion frequently carries the implication that the strategic situations of America and Rome are in essential ways comparable. Three decades ago Edward Luttwak began his influential monograph The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by citing “Roman imperial statecraft” and “the fundamentals of Roman strategy” as touchstones for “our own disordered times.” He was taken to task by one prominent reviewer, who called Luttwak a creature of the “lessons of history” school, and went on: “By suggesting that his reader should see similarities between the strategic problems of Jimmy Carter and those of Marcus Aurelius, he turns this interesting—if flawed—history into an enigmatic allegory.”

  Well, any argument can be taken too far, though Luttwak, in fairness, invoked the contemporary comparison only in passing. But some parallels do stand out. Both Rome and America develop high-maintenance militaries far more skilled and expensive than those of any competitor. Both put great stock in battlefield ferocity—“shock and awe”—and both regard “making a commitment” as sacrosanct, for reasons of honor and credibility. Both Rome and America, at their most adroit, have understood the influence of “soft” power—the power projected on the wings of language, culture, know-how, luxury goods. Both Rome and America, again at their most adroit, benefit from the psychological impact of military strength: how the mere perception of power begets additional power, and makes unnecessary the actual use of force. In 1995, at an air base in Ohio, as belligerents from the Balkans
argued stubbornly over the details of the Dayton Accords, American negotiators fostered the cooperation of the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, by seating him directly under a U.S. cruise missile. Once, to encourage a spirit of mature reflection among a delegation of barbarians, the emperor Hadrian ordered a unit of mounted cavalry—in full armor, in perfect formation—to swim across the Danube and back. The barbarians, writes Cassius Dio, “stood in terror of the Romans, and turning their attention to their own affairs, they employed Hadrian as an arbitrator of their differences.”

  At the most expansive strategic level of all, that of historic purpose, both Rome and America have considered their way to be the world’s way. As early as the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville described America as “proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived.” America believes that the Western creed of political democracy and free-market economics is applicable to everyone. That these ideas no longer have significant competition—and won’t ever again—is the whole point of Francis Fukuyama’s argument about our having reached “the end of history” (though Fukuyama did not argue that every place on the planet would get there immediately, or even soon, much less be force-marched at the point of a gun). Virgil, a poet in a political scientist’s role, gave the Romans an explicitly imperial destiny. So did Pliny the Elder, in an evocation of Rome that combines equal measures of Ronald Reagan and Emma Lazarus: “A land chosen by divine providence to unify empires so disparate and races so manifold; to bring to common concord so many rough, discordant voices; to give culture to mankind; to become, in short, the whole world’s homeland.”

  At the same time, the differences are considerable. Nuclear annihilation was not a source of concern (or an option) for the Romans. And then there’s the empire question. The larger goal of American foreign policy for half a century has been to create a stable international regime that gives America’s version of free-market capitalism as much latitude as possible. According to this logic, as one analyst observes, America must “protect the interests of virtually all potential great powers so that they need not acquire the capability to protect themselves”—because the possession of such a capability has in the past always led to trouble. Ask the experts whether this form of American hegemony is tantamount to empire, and they’ll never stop arguing; it doesn’t quite fit either of the classic models, the “territorial empire” or the “overseas empire.” Whether it’s sustainable remains to be seen. But America, unlike Rome, hasn’t set out very often on deliberate missions of imperialistic conquest. It still prefers (as Rome did at first) to leverage the capacities of client states and the local ruling class, as opposed to administering distant domains from the center—an approach that the historian Charles Maier describes as a “consensual empire” or an “empire of invitation.” American presidents don’t embark on military adventures mainly for purposes of personal glory, as Caesar did in Gaul and Claudius did in Britain. Only metaphorically does America exact tribute. It tends not to pillage other countries, at least not in the form of a destructive rampage, though in economic terms it may suck them dry. It has treated many of those it defeated in war (Germany, Japan) in a manner the Romans could not have imagined. There was no rehabilitative Cato Plan for a conquered Carthage.

  The default presentation of Roman “grand strategy” during the empire remains Edward Luttwak’s. It has plenty of critics, who take issue with one aspect or another, and there are many who support Luttwak’s general scenario but dispute how conscious the strategy was—in other words, whether it was actually “grand.” Still, friend and foe alike keep returning to Luttwak as a baseline, the place to begin the argument.

  To give a radically simplified version of his schema, Roman strategy went through three stages. In the early years a continually expanding empire operated with mobile armies and a system of client states, which acted as buffers along the imperial fringe. During the second stage, which lasted for about two centuries, the client states became an integral part of the empire; Roman legions could be deployed almost exclusively along a static defensive perimeter because the interior was mostly at peace. This has sometimes been called the “eggshell strategy”—hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Then, in the third century A.D., came the disruptions caused by decade upon decade of civil war. There were about twenty-five emperors from 211 to 284; only two died natural deaths, and even those deaths would not be called happy ones. (Claudius II succumbed to the plague. The emperor Valerian led an ill-fated expedition into Mesopotamia, and was captured and used as a living footstool by the Persian ruler Shapur, who made Valerian kneel so that he could step on his back when mounting his horse.) This “sanguinary turmoil,” as Luttwak calls it, proved catastrophic for Rome’s defenses, and occurred at a time when for many reasons outside pressures from barbaricum, the surrounding barbarian world, were on the rise anyway.

  Thus stage three: defense in depth. Rather than attempt to keep the whole frontier membrane intact, Rome accepted penetration as inevitable and simply sought to cope with it. Strategic points in the interior were fortified. Cities everywhere began walling themselves in; Rome’s Aurelian Walls, the ones you see now, date to this time. The legions, no longer a reliable deterrent, became powerful roving armies designed to meet individual incursions as they arose. Defense in depth meant acknowledging that some parts of the empire would become battlefields, and that some parts might even have to be amputated. Defense in depth was not preventive but reactive, like antibodies; when it was triggered, the barbarians were already inside.

  The drain on Roman coffers of military spending was immense. “It is impossible that our present revenues should suffice for the support of the troops, not to speak of other expenses,” wrote Cassius Dio, who put this “swords or bread?” observation into the mouth of Agrippa, during the early empire; he might just as well have been speechwriting for any modern American politician wrestling with the balance between guns and butter. Luttwak observes of Rome, “The provision of security became an increasingly heavy charge on society, a charge unevenly distributed, which could enrich the wealthy and ruin the poor.” He goes on: “The machinery of empire now became increasingly self-serving, with its tax collectors, administrators, and soldiers of much greater use to one another than to society at large.” If you leave out the checks that Washington automatically writes to fulfill programs like Social Security and Medicare, running the military is the most expensive single thing the American government does; and as was the case in Rome, it is easily the most labor-intensive and complicated. Even as the Cold War was winding down, in the early 1990s, some three quarters of the federal government’s research money was consumed by the Pentagon. Half of America’s scientists and engineers were employed by military-related companies. The needs of the Pentagon skew entire industries. They cause communities to arise out of nowhere, and as suddenly to collapse. Economists argue endlessly, and inconclusively, about the impact of military spending on the American economy as a whole. Is it a depressant? A stimulant? A hallucinogen? The countless variables and their interactions defy precise sorting. The effect of military spending on government budgets is plain enough, though: investments of one kind diminish investments of another. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” That’s not George McGovern whining in 1972. It’s Dwight D. Eisenhower just stating the facts in 1950.

  The United States military divides the entire world into five segments, or area commands, and it maintains basing rights (and more than seven hundred bases) in about sixty countries. In a typical year the Pentagon may conduct operations of some kind in 170 nations—“operations” that run the gamut from a handful of advisers doing drug interdiction in northern Thailand to 150,000 men and women fighting a full-fledged war on the Tigris and the Euphrates. The military’s direct payroll includes almost three million active-duty soldiers and members of the reserves.
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  America’s European Command incorporates all of the Roman Empire except Egypt and the Middle East. In school I was entranced by those sequences of maps showing the origins and growth of the Roman state from its smudge of a beginning on the plains of Latium. The last of them always depicted the empire “at its greatest extent.” Mussolini affixed a four-panel marble version of this sequence to the walls of the Basilica of Maxentius, in Rome. (There was once a fifth panel, showing Mussolini’s own Italian “empire,” which comprised Italy, Albania, Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somaliland; it was taken down after the war.) Rome at its greatest extent, in the second century A.D., had a perimeter of about 6,000 miles. It took in Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall, followed the course of the Rhine, jumped over to the Danube, took a detour to absorb what is modern Romania, encompassed Asia Minor to the banks of the Euphrates, ran along the edge of the Sahara across North Africa, and used the Atlantic as a boundary all the way back to Britain. Little of this territory needed continual defending, any more than Kansas or Kentucky does. But the Roman military establishment left a noticeable footprint. Some three hundred military sites, mostly forts, have been identified in Britain alone.

  During the civil war after the assassination of Julius Caesar, in 44 B.C., the warring commanders went into battle against one another leading armies of up to 150,000 men, a size not reached again until the Napoleonic Wars. The drain on manpower was unsustainable—one reason Augustus took advantage of the “peace dividend” to downsize the army. Augustus set the number of Roman legions at twenty-eight, and though legions might be added or subtracted, consolidated or reorganized, and supplemented with auxiliaries, this would remain roughly the size of the military for centuries, until the numbers jumped upward dramatically to deal with crises on the frontier. In practice Rome must have had something similar to U.S. military commands: Tacitus writes that at one point during the reign of Tiberius, early in the first century A.D., there were eight legions on the Rhine, two in Dalmatia, four on the Danube, three in Spain, two in North Africa, two in Egypt, and four in Syria. (That makes twenty-five; the missing three had recently been wiped out in a catastrophic encounter with a tribe called the Cherusci, in Germany.) It is customary now for military units to bear honorific names. The U.S. 4th Armored Division is known as the “Iron Horse.” The 3rd Infantry Division is the “Rock of the Marne.” The Roman legions anticipated this practice. There was XII Fulminata, “Thunderbolt,” which served with Caesar in Gaul; XX Valeria Victrix, “Valiant and Victorious,” which put down the Boudican rebels in Britain; XXI Rapax, “Grasping,” like a bird of prey, formed by Octavian. The names scan like poetry—Gemina, Apollinaris, Claudia, Augusta—marching down the centuries toward an oblivion they will never reach.