Bret Devereaux

This is a war fought at the apogee of Spartan strength; it was quite literally all downhill from here.

Ah! That does it thank you!

Also, while Bret is very right to stress the limits of Spartan ability, there is one thing at which they were undeniably better than other Greeks: maintaining cohesion in pitched battle. All 3 of the victories I mentioned directly resulted from this one thing.

Indeed, the Spartan failure is in translating that cohesive advantage into durable strategic results. It's a Ends-Ways-Means problem: they have some means (cohesive hoplite battle) but no sense of how to connect that to a set of ways which result in the ends they want.

This is, of course, not an uncommon problem, c.f. the USA trying to bomb countries into friendship; bombs traditionally have the opposite result. But Sparta failed to learn their way out of that mismatch for about as long as the USA has been a country.

Although the fact that the US is on course to spectacularly lose a war later this year in exactly the same way they lost the Vietnam War less than 50 years ago does suggest that *both* places had/have a problem learning from history.

Sure, although one has to square that with the, in the end, successful counter-insurgency in Iraq. Also, to give the USA credit here, US-Vietnamese relations are now quite friendly and Vietnam is sometimes listed as a potential future US ally. A meaningful strategic shift.

I guess I was thinking here of the way that in both cases (as well as Iraq) there was much focus on 'kinetic' & logistic capabilities and seemingly limited focus on factors of social & moral cohesion in the client state military (cohesion of the kind you often discuss)