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Resources, War, and the Night King’s Deadly Arithmetic

Andrew A. Hill

“Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can / The odds are on the cheaper man.”1

Thus runs a verse of Rudyard Kipling’s “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” a poem that beautifully and starkly conveys an enduring characteristic of war—namely, that the ability to create military forces more rapidly and cheaply than one’s adversaries is itself a powerful strategic advantage. Kipling’s poem brutally concludes,

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.

The troopships bring us one by one,

At vast expense of time and steam,

To slay Afridis where they run.

The “captives of our bow and spear”

Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

In this stanza, Kipling brilliantly captures the huge disadvantage in military force generation of the British, relative to their local opposition—in this case, Afridis of the Pashtun, but it could just as easily be the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, or even Chinese antiship missiles. Precious British troops arrive “one by one” and at “vast expense,” while the Afridis literally sprout from the hills, endlessly supplying a resistance that can afford to lose men.

The painful consequences of a disadvantage in military force production is vividly illustrated in Game of Thrones, which features the “home-bred horde” to beat all hordes: the White Walkers’ Army of the Dead (or wights), reanimated corpses under the command of the Night King, a spectral, blue-hued demon who was once a man. One of the series’s most memorable scenes clearly demonstrates the cheapness of the wights. Near the conclusion of season 5, Jon Snow travels north of the Wall to visit Hardhome, the haven of the Free Folk, who have long been enemies of the Night’s Watch, which Snow commands.2 Seeking to form an alliance with the Free Folk and bring them to the safer side of the Wall in preparation for the zombie war Snow knows is coming, Snow convinces a minority of the Free Folk to trust him and follow him on the ships he brought. While the refugees are boarding the boats that will take them south, the Night King attacks Hardhome with a massive horde of wights. Hardhome’s defenses are quickly overwhelmed. Only those already in the boats escape slaughter at the hands (or teeth) of the wights. Standing in the last boat to depart, Snow watches as the wights kill everyone left behind. Then the Night King emerges, striding through the mayhem and walking to the dock. Looking at Snow, the Night King raises his arms. Snow watches in appalled horror as thousands of dead Free Folk begin to jerk to life, rising from the earth as new members of the Night King’s awful army.

Jon Snow understands the significance of the Night King’s demonstration of the power to mobilize a population simply by willing it. Snow commands the Night’s Watch, a professional military force. In fighting, an individual, ordinary wight does not rival a good ranger of the Night’s Watch. But that sort of misses the point. Rangers are recruited—either by force or by choice—“one by one,” to echo Kipling’s phrase, from the various cities of Westeros, and their effectiveness is the result of years of discipline, training, and fighting. The Night King can create a wight in seconds. All he needs is the will to do it and a dead body. He has an abundance of the former, and the war against humanity will provide plenty of the latter. Collectively, the wights’ sheer numbers and their mindless commitment to fight and kill pose a terrible threat to even the best-trained military force, and the Night King can produce them by the thousands simply by wishing it. Not only that, but every dead enemy of the Night King (even a dragon) is a potential recruit to his Army of the Dead. The “cheaper man” indeed.

Of course, zombie hordes are a fiction, as is all of Game of Thrones. It is, as yet, impossible to reanimate the dead and transform them into single-minded killing machines utterly obedient to the whims of some blue monster with a vendetta against humanity. Yet the mobilizing power of the Night King underscores an important aspect of strategy in war that has become all too obscure in American military thought—the ability of a society to produce military forces cheaper and faster than its adversaries. This is a pity, because in many respects the quick production of military force (usually infantry of some kind) is the oldest, simplest, and most reliable of all military strategies—“Git thar fustest with the mostest,” in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s (almost certainly apocryphal) words.

This problem is not new. For the military theorist Antoine-Henry Jomini, force generation was a minor detail of strategy. He wrote, “Strategy decides where to act; logistics brings troops to this point.”3 John Shy commented that for Jomini, armies appeared as “faceless masses, armed and fed in mysterious ways.”4 The historian Michael Howard lamented the effect of Clausewitz in leading military strategic thinkers to ignore logistical considerations.5 Strategy, he argued, has operational, logistical, social, and technological dimensions.6 Modern military strategic thought has tended to emphasize the first and last of these, with little attention to the middle two. Yet as Howard wrote, “No campaign can be understood, and no valid conclusions drawn from it, unless its logistical problems are studied as thoroughly as the course of operations.”7

The Roman and Mongol Empires were largely built through innovations in force development, and the United States developed and exploited an advantage in force generation to its benefit in the three crucial wars of American history. Indeed, concerning the victory of the U.S. Civil War, for example, Michael Howard observed, “Fundamentally, the victory of the North was due not to the operational capabilities of its generals, but to its capacity to mobilize its superior industrial strength and manpower into armies which such leaders as Grant were able . . . to deploy in such strength as the operational skills of their adversaries were rendered almost irrelevant.”8 Put differently, in Clausewitz’s arbitrarily precise formulation, “The skill of the greatest commanders may be counterbalanced by a two-to-one ratio in fighting forces.”9 This is a key point. The generation of force is not just a support to strategy; it is strategy. And we in the developed world ought to give it more thought.

Rome’s rise was aided by the ability to produce military forces faster than they were consumed. Rome defeated Carthage in the First Punic War in large part because it could build and rebuild a navy. In the first five years of the war, Rome painstakingly learning how to build warships and conduct naval warfare against the much more experienced Carthaginians. Then, Rome lost three-quarters of its fleet—over 280 ships—in a storm in 255 BCE. Rebuilding its fleet, Rome suffered a similar disaster two years later.10 Rebuilding its fleet yet again, in 249 BCE Rome suffered a significant naval defeat, shortly followed by the loss of over one hundred ships in another storm.11

More than a century later, the Roman consul Gaius Marius changed the course of Roman history by introducing what came to be known as the Marian military reforms. Prior to his innovations, in times of war, Roman citizens joining the army had to equip themselves at great expense. Furthermore, the majority of the Roman public was restricted to serving as unarmored skirmishers. Marius changed this, supplying conscripts with weapons and armor provided through the state. He also reorganized the legions to standardize and professionalize them. Although Marius turned service in the Roman legions into a career (as opposed to a wartime calling), he drastically lowered the barriers to entry into the military, “throwing open the legions to proletarians on terms of voluntary enlistment,” in the words of historians M. Cary and H. H. Scullard.12 With the system of force production designed by Marius, Rome conquered the Mediterranean world.

The Mongol example is even more instructive, for the Mongols came closer than any people in recorded history of mimicking the Night King’s power of the spontaneous generation of military forces. If you imagine a Venn diagram in which two circles represent “qualities of an ordinary, adult male” and “qualities of a warrior,” in Mongol society these circles overlapped almost completely. Other people have attempted to build effective military forces through the normal activities of citizens, from the longbowmen trained in the forests and marshes of Britain to the “embattled farmers,” in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” inscribed on the base of the Minute Man Statue at the site of the Battle of Concord.13

Yet the Mongols seem to have exceeded all in matching civilian life to the development of military capability. Mongols began training for military service early in life, and many of the skills they acquired in learning to be effective hunters on the Asian steppe were equally useful in preparing for war. As the historian Denis Sinor writes, “For the men of Inner Asia military service was a natural occupation. . . . Fighting was a precondition of survival.”14 Sinor continues, “The combination of inborn courage and discipline acquired through constant training accounts for the excellence of the Inner Asian warrior.”15

The crucial war machine of the Mongols was the horse, which was also fully integrated into Mongol life and “the most formidable single factor of Inner Asian military power.”16 Sinor quotes the poet Sidonius Apollinaris, speaking of the Huns but equally applicable to the Mongols: “Scarce has the infant learned to stand without his mother’s aid when a horse takes him on his back. You would think the man and beast were borne together, so firmly does the rider always stick to the horse.”17

In the middle of the thirteenth century, the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini went on a mission to visit the Great Khan of the Mongols. John observed that Mongol men “hunt and practice archery, for they are all, big and little, excellent archers, and their children begin as soon as they are two or three years old to ride and manage horses and to gallop on them, and they are given bows to suit their stature and are taught to shoot.”18 Thus, Mongol man and Mongol warrior were almost synonymous, enabling the Mongols to generate military forces extremely rapidly. Furthermore, sustaining these forces required little of the mass of impedimenta that characterizes most other armies. Mongol warriors were astonishingly self-sustaining while on military campaign, living on a diet of dried meat and mare’s milk.19 The Mongols of the thirteenth century are the White Walkers of authentic history, for whom readiness for war and readiness for life were the same.

Building forces through rapid military expansion makes sense for the United States, a technologically advanced nation with tremendous natural, scientific, and industrial resources and geographic depth provided by two oceans and two friendly neighbors. Furthermore, with a population exceeding 300 million, few nations have a deeper reservoir of manpower. Given sufficient time, the United States can produce a military of immense size and capability.

Today, however, by both desire and design, the U.S. military generally focuses on maintaining a relatively small but highly effective force and ignores the significance and potential of rapid force generation. General Raymond Odierno, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Army, said in congressional testimony, “It takes approximately 30 months to generate a fully manned and trained Regular Army [Brigade Combat Team] once the Army decides to expand the force.”20 Thus, the modern U.S. Army needs two and a half years to create (in the case of an infantry brigade combat team) three infantry battalions and their support elements—about four thousand soldiers total. Why does it take so long? General Odierno cited the complex requirements of “policy decisions, dollars, Soldiers, infrastructure,” and the nature of “today’s highly technological, All-Volunteer Force” that is “much different than the industrial age armies of the past.”21

In a nutshell, the U.S. Army’s argument is that war is much more complex today, that it requires much more technological expertise, and that building this expertise requires a lot of time. This is highly suspect as both history and analysis. It oversimplifies the past and ignores an important characteristic of modern technology. Consider for a moment the thirty months the U.S. Army currently requires to build a brigade combat team. The United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, drawing it into the Second World War. Almost thirty months to the day later, on June 6, 1944, the U.S. Army and Navy led the largest amphibious invasion in history, employing almost seven thousand ships to land around 156,000 allied troops on the first day alone. One would have to be a tremendous egotist to think that such an operation was not extraordinarily complex and technological in the mere conception. Yet we are to believe that the U.S. Army today needs the same amount of time to create an infantry unit of four thousand soldiers.

Granted, from a global economic perspective, modern military service is fairly unique. Few occupational fields outside the military develop the human capital necessary to thrive in a combat environment. Militaries use unique technologies, and the work environment for combat units, with its requirements for physically courageous high-risk decision-making, high levels of mutual trust, willingness to sacrifice, deference to orders, and extremes of endurance in depraved conditions, is even more exceptional than the technology used in that environment. The U.S. Army, therefore, invests heavily in developing the ability of personnel to function in an environment that cannot be replicated outside the military. How can the U.S. Army reduce the required investment without lowering standards?

We can use technology to enhance the capabilities of the average person. This consists of investing in technologies that reduce the time it takes for new entrants to reach an effective level of military preparedness. Military modernization can be used to explain why creating civilian-soldiers is much harder than it used to be. A Sherman tank from the Second World War had more in common with heavy vehicles in the civilian world than an M1 Abrams tank does today. Fair enough. Yet other military technologies reduce the difficulty for an inexperienced, semi-intelligent trainee to achieve higher levels of competence. A well-designed rifle is just such a technology.

Game of Thrones also demonstrates another facet of the power of rapid force generation—winning the allegiance of opposing or neutral forces. The Night King’s most capable opponent, Queen Daenerys Targaryen, conquers the cities of Slaver’s Bay and builds the foundation of her invading army not through the power of her dragons but by converting the forces of her adversaries, be they the erstwhile masters of Slaver’s Bay or the chiefs of Dothraki (George R. R. Martin’s version of the Mongols). In fact, the real Mongols were similarly masters of transforming opposing forces into useful units under Mongol command. According to Jack Weatherford, the Mongols turned captive peasants into “an extension of their decimal organization of the military.”22 Captives performed menial but labor-intensive tasks such as getting food and water for the animals and soldiers and moving and operating siege engines. The Mongols also acquired highly capable engineering units by bringing defeated enemies under their banner. Weatherford explains, “More than merely using [siege] weapons, Genghis Khan acquired the engineering intelligence needed to create them. The Mongols eagerly rewarded engineers who defected to them and, after each battle, carefully selected engineers from among the captives and impressed them into Mongol service. . . . With each new battle and each conquest, [Genghis Khan’s] war machinery grew in complexity and efficiency.”23

The two greatest armies in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world are built by experts in force generation. The modern U.S. military should take a cue from this and focus on innovative approaches to building military forces.

The development of technologies that rapidly increase the lethality and military decision-making ability of relatively fit, intelligent Americans should be a major theme for U.S. Army modernization in the coming years. But it probably will be ignored, because modern, professional militaries want to preserve military competence as a special category of training and conduct. The more military effectiveness seems like the product of years of investment, the less likely the nation is to reduce standing military resources. The U.S. Army’s lack of imagination in force generation is therefore predictable and lamentable.

Alas, the subtleties of government resource allocation give an army in peacetime little incentive to become good at building forces rapidly. Standing military forces are expensive, and unused military capacity is highly inefficient. Civilian leaders will therefore tend to demand constant justification for peacetime military forces. A military that is capable of swift expansion will tempt civilian leaders to give it fewer resources when it is not needed. Given these dynamics, it is hardly surprising that the U.S. Army is so lacking in creativity and innovation when it comes to expansion.

However, an explanation is not an excuse, and we need to do better. In a military expansion, the army is engaged in the production of soldiers. The raw material in this production process is the pool of manpower. The army takes human capital from this pool and invests time and energy into developing it into something fit for service in an operational unit. For the Mongols, the investment required was relatively modest. The modern U.S. Army, in contrast, sees the investment required as vast. Another writer on this topic asserts that all of that time is “essential for [soldiers] to develop reasonable expertise in increasingly difficult military skill sets” and that it is “required to develop even a modicum of expertise on the complex battlefield systems and network modalities of the 21st century.”24

This emphasis on technology as a barrier to the rapid creation of military force ignores a crucial point—the pattern of technological innovation globally is to reduce barriers to entry for normal people to do sophisticated things that used to be the domain of professionals and experts. Software allows business owners to manage financial accounting without the aid of an accountant. We have technology today that can help an untutored person make smart tactical choices on a complex battlefield. On a more mundane level, modern military rifles can turn a slightly overweight, middle-aged, nonlethal academic into a much more lethal version of himself.25

The ability to build military forces quickly also makes other things in war less important. The Night King does not need to be a tactical genius to win a battle. In the same way, the United States did not rely on tactical brilliance or individual (i.e., platform-to-platform or soldier-to-soldier) superiority for its victories in the Civil War and World War II. In Greek mythology, Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, slays a dragon and then, following Athena’s instructions, sows the dragon’s teeth in the ground. To his astonishment, warriors began to grow from the teeth, rising out of the ground like so many stalks of corn.26 In the Second World War, the United States reaped its own astonishing harvest from dragon’s teeth. The military’s total strength grew from 458,365 (all services) in 1940 to over 12 million in 1945, a twenty-six-fold increase.27

Conflict may not be the natural state of humanity, but it is a common occurrence and one that often surprises us, defying the expectations of even the most forward looking of military thinkers. An old adage asserts that “quantity has a quality all its own.” It provides resilience against the shocks that are an inevitable part of war. A society with the power to create military forces faster and more cheaply than its adversaries has a significant advantage in war.

Which brings us back to the where we began. White Walkers (or Mongol warriors or ISIS fighters) are produced cheaply and quickly, while the Night’s Watch (or the U.S. military) carries on building its forces, echoing Kipling, “one by one” and “at vast expense.” We should be careful about that, because the “odds are on the cheaper man.”

The U.S. military has lost one of its core strategic competencies—rapidly generating enormous numbers of soldiers, sailors, marines, and pilots through mobilization on a grand scale. This is not an argument for a peacetime draft. It is a call for innovation in how a nation builds military forces when those forces are needed. Unfortunately, instead of exploring how to prepare people and build equipment more rapidly in war, modern U.S. military leaders persist in a dubious, self-serving argument for maintaining the gold-plated military that the nation seems to need at all times, regardless of circumstances. This needs to change.

Notes

1. Rudyard Kipling, “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” in Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (London: Methuen, 1922), 95.

2. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, “Hardhome,” season 5, episode 8, dir. Miguel Sapochnik, Game of Thrones, aired May 31, 2015, on HBO.

3. Baron de Jomini, The Art of War, trans. G. H. Mendell and W. P. Craighill (Philadelphia PA: Lippincott, 1862), 69.

4. John Shy, “Jomini,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Pater Paret (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 160.

5. Michael Howard, “The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 57, no. 5 (1979): 976.

6. Howard, “Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy,” 978.

7. Howard, “Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy,” 976.

8. Howard, “Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy,” 977.

9. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 195, quoted in Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89.

10. Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization (New York: Viking, 2010), 189.

11. Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, 192.

12. M. Cary and H. H. Scullard, A History of Rome Down to the Reign of Constantine, 3rd ed. (London: Palgrave, 1975), 219.

13. Clifford J. Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years’ War,” Journal of Military History 57, no. 2 (1993): 241–78. According to Rogers, “England developed a pool of strong yeomen archers over decades of more-or-less constant warfare against the Scots and the Welsh—it is no coincidence that Cheshire archers, considered the best in England, came from the Welsh marches.”

14. Denis Sinor, “The Inner Asian Warriors,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 101, no. 2 (1981): 135.

15. Sinor, “Inner Asian Warriors,” 137.

16. Sinor, “Inner Asian Warriors,” 137.

17. Sinor, “Inner Asian Warriors,” 139.

18. John of Plano Carpini, The Mongol Mission, ed. Christopher Dawson (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 18.

19. Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2004), 86–88.

20. General Raymond Odierno, “Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2016,” U.S. Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations (Washington DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office, March 11, 2015), 9.

21. Odierno, “Fiscal Year 2016,” 9.

22. Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 92.

23. Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 94.

24. John Evans, Getting It Right: Determining the Optimal Active Component End Strength of the All-Volunteer Army to Meet the Demands of the 21st Century (Washington DC: Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Brookings Institution, 2015), 21.

25. The author of this essay once had the opportunity to shoot a modified variant of the U.S. Marine Corps’ M40 sniper rifle. With no instruction or practice, I bull’s-eyed a target two inches wide at one hundred yards. After achieving this feat, I remarked (only half in jest), “Even a monkey could do that,” and monkeys are cheap.

26. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 3.

27. Data from “Research Starters: US Military by the Numbers,” National World War II Museum, accessed February 27, 2019, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-us-military-numbers.