"We should have murdered an awful lot more people to achieve victory, we just didn't kill enough and destroy enough of a foreign country to achieve the peace of the grave we needed." What is wrong with people.https://twitter.com/GrayConnolly/status/1402166591588945926 …
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Rome always gets used an example for the 'make a desert' method and as
@GabrielDBaker notes, Roman mass violence did further their strategic objectives. But in COIN it was far more important that the Romans committed long-term. Time-limited COIN is very difficult, it turns out.
I should say *sometimes* furthered strategic objectives. But mass violence wasn't a shortcut to what we'd call COIN and the Romans just called 'governance.' If you want to do COIN, assume it will take 75 years. If you don't want to spend 75 years, come up with a new strategy.
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Yeah, definitely a big "sometimes" for Rome. Plenty of backfires (e.g., preemptively massacring the maybe-disloyal population of Enna in the 2PW and pushing a bunch more communities towards Carthage), and violence "works" best when they're also winning militarily.
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Absolutely. And also its important to keep in mind, in terms of strategic objectives, that the Romans want to control those people, not simply kill them all. Pace Josephus, but Roman Judaea is not a success story, even if Rome keeps control of the territory.
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Working on a chapter now re: Roman turn to mass violence in Jugurthine + Lusitanian wars (sometimes COIN-ish campaigns). Spoiler: it doesn't work great, it certainly doesn't produce victory, & can create resentment that allows someone like Viriathus to fight for a very long time
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Oooh. Where will this chapter hopefully appear?
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