Bret Devereaux

Now, the answer I suspect @ezraklein expected to highlight is that we invest more time and energy into killing each other than in a collective-good work like pandemic protection. But I don't actually think that's the answer. I think the simple answer is... 2/14

...that we are better at practicing for war because we have spent literal millennia getting better at it - time during which we weren't practicing for pandemics because we couldn't *do* anything about them yet. Let me outline the history of that... 3/14

I think people assume that modern war preparation - at both the individual/unit and staff level - is simply something humans have always done, but it isn't. It is a learned, organizational trait. 4/14

Classical Greek armies didn't drill very much if at all (there's some debate about late-classical/hellenistic 'military dances'). Xenophon indicates that no practice or training was necessary for the hoplite (Xen. Cyrop. 2.1). We first start to see drill - albeit dimly... 5/14

..with the Macedonians. And we really only see evidence for the sort of well-regulated, consistent drill that we think of today with the Romans during the imperial period (post-31 BCE); it then drops away and reemerges in the late medieval/early modern. 6/14

(Note that unit drill also was a thing during the Warring States period in China and remains a thing in Chinese armies subsequently). So individual/unit drill - that kind of 'practice' for battle - is a fairly late development; it post-dates cavalry, catapults, h. inf., etc 7/14

But that's not really the kind of practice I suspect @ezraklein means. I suspect he's thinking about the development of war plans and play-books from the top level down. The sort of "we have a plan to go to war with Canada" sort of thing. And that comes even later. 8/14