An Army Marches On Its ______

For millennia before Napoleon, armies marched on their stomachs. While the hunger or health of an army was only one among many factors predicting its success, it was probably consistently among the most important.

We might consider a battle like Culloden Moor in April 1746, wherein, perhaps, historical reconstructions might note superior numbers, training, tactics, or command for the British-Hanoverian army, and failing command, control, and morale in a Jacobite army that had been on English soil only a few months prior, before suddenly turning north and seeking refuge in the Scottish Highlands. All of these arguments have their merits, but it's also worth noting two data points from the week before the battle:

1. The city of Inverness was one of the last major supply sites for the Jacobite army by Spring 1746, necessitating its defense against the Duke of Cumberland's government troops. Cumberland's army, meanwhile, brought plenty of food stocks not only over land, largely on military roads constructed during and after the last Jacobite rising in 1715, but also by sea, courtesy of the Royal Navy. We can debate the wisdom of Cumberland's staff distributing brandy by the gallon to the regiments in celebration of his birthday, April 15, but the act of largesse also suggests strongly that this army was well-provisioned.
2. The Jacobites also anticipated the distribution of brandy, and some units notably had orders not only for a night march, but for attacking with melée weapons. Implements such as sword, spear, and bayonet were typically easy-to-hand for the pre-modern soldier on the march. No commissariat particularly necessary, beyond making sure they were sharp. Food was a different matter.

So too, by the early modern period, were the major necessities of firearms. A soldier might carry his gun and supplies for a few days at most, but the logistical train had begun in the early modern period to require more and more stores of powder and shot, in addition to foodstuffs. Even in the 1740s, and really for at least a century or two beforehand in Europe, armies moved on something more than their stomachs alone.

Move to the present, however, and the Institute for the Study of War (among others) notes terms like "defense-industrial base" (DIB) repeatedly in its reports and updates. One could add the term Logistical / Operational Train ("LOT" for our purposes) or any of its cognates, for how the products of a defense-industrial base make their way to a given theater of operations. Both are relevant for the story broken by Politico, that the Pentagon had suspended various forms of aid to Ukraine, including air defense assets, at a time of increasing Russian strikes.

One relevant consideration is the global supply situation in February 2022, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's famous line, "I need ammunition, not a ride." Checking ChatGPT's references to public sources, the Biden administration at the time may have boasted some 3,000 missiles with which to stock its global supply of Patriot air defense systems. Over the past three years, U.S. production might have topped out around 500 new units per year, while Ukraine alone fired about 1,000 at incoming Russian ordinance. Doing the math, the global supply would seem to have come out ahead, but this comes against the backdrop of a second consideration:

The DIB might be keeping up in some respects, but the LOT is imposing more demands. NATO allies, now including Finland, are maintaining a frontier with Russia that is longer and more dangerous in many respects than they have seen for a long time — Estonia wants some of those air defense assets, too! More than that, American-Israeli defense agreements reactivated in dramatic fashion after October 7, 2023, and while North Korean saber rattling has continued apace in Eastern Asia, the Chinese menace to Taiwan — not least by air — has become more evident and threatening.

Here then is the third consideration, by far my least favorite to share as a humanist and pro-Ukrainian. The cuts are unfortunate both in the fact and in the timing, and it's easy, not least for Ukrainian civilians, to feel hard done-by, all the more with promised stocks of weapons now apparently on the Pentagon's chopping block. But as of 2022, and all the more as of 2014, Ukraine was not a key U.S. ally, nor the regional icon of a vested, strategic interest of the United States. As of 1973, if not 1947, Israel has been. As of 1989, if not 1949, the same with Taiwan. Historical longevity only means so much, but historical longevity for these two particular recipients of American aid comes with geopolitical reasoning that is not hard to guess:

Whatever accidents of history informed the creation and rise of the Israeli state under British and French auspices, by the time of the October War it was pretty clear that the U.S. — home of the largest Jewish population outside Israel — had cultural, economic, and not least geopolitical reasons to support this unusual legacy of the era of national imperialism. Israel's marked contrast in political stability, liberal-elite culture, form of government, and military professionalism to its near neighbors also recommends it as an ally worth maintaining, even setting aside its current defense procurement agreements.

Likewise Taiwan: I suspect that few observers in 1894-95 would have missed the significance for Chinese shipping, such as it was, of losing the island of Formosa as it was then called to the rising empire of Japan. The Portuguese and Dutch had contested the island centuries earlier for much the same reason, and we can easily imagine, not only symbolically but also logistically, what Taiwan might mean in Chinese hands for prospects of future influence peddling, if not kinetic operations, in the larger Asia-Pacific region.

Put this all together in the age of anti-missile-missiles, fiber optic drones, and a million other pieces that make up the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), and we see that the Pentagon really does have hard choices to make. Even with one of the most expansive and reliable LOT systems in human history, the American DIB possesses neither infinite stocks nor infinite production capacity. Supplies of food are the least of its concerns. Without ramping up a whole lot more than it has done, and without passing along more costs for that defense-industrial expansion to mere rhetorical supporters of Ukraine (like me!), the U.S. will indeed struggle to support even the most obvious and salutary causes beyond its core strategic interests. Israel and Taiwan really are essential to American security in key regions of the globe. Ukraine makes a strong and impassioned case, and, just speaking as a man, one that appeals to my heart as well as my head. But if, as I hope would never happen, Zelenskyy's government faces its own showdown at Culloden, it's asking for a lot more than food stocks and hand weapons. Let's hope their Russian adversaries are even more strongly supplied with vodka than Cumberland's regiments were with brandy.

History repeating

The Western World awoke this morning to the somewhat expected news of American strikes against Iranian nuclear sites.(1) As widely anticipated across global media, and as forecast months or even years ago by people closer to the world's intelligence communities, the strikes represent a seismic shift in the international landscape of the early 21st century.(2) None of this, however, is without historical precedent, and the precedents generally do not look especially favorable for American ambitions around the globe.

First, a note on Iran. The past ten days, or, if we like, roughly the past ten months, represent a pretty dramatic turn of fate for the Persian state.

• Start on September 17, 2024, with the devastating attacks — via pager! — on the leadership of Lebanese Hezbollah, and both asymmetrical and conventional Israeli attacks on the Iranian proxy thereafter, pretty much eliminating a leading Iranian proxy in a matter of weeks.
• Continue on to December 2024, and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. Again, in just a few weeks, Iran's entire western flank unravelled.
• Cap this off with Israeli and now American strikes on Iran itself over the past ten days, revealing in stark terms just how poor the Islamic Republic really is, not only in terms of projecting power and influence across the Middle East, but even acting in its own self-defense.

This is not new territory for a Persian state. The defeats of the past ten months are probably about as embarrassing for the regime as the battles of Issus and Gaugamela against Alexander the Great, or facing Heraclius' Nineveh campaign in 627-628 CE. It's for good reason that some commentators have started to anticipate the end of the Islamic Republic, though Iran itself may yet survive — not least thanks to Western norms known as the Westphalian system that frown pretty harshly on the idea of disestablishing sovereign states.(3) What form a new Iran may take is open to speculation, though in the current security environment, Iranian revival under a figure like Nader Shah seems extremely unlikely. (4)

Meanwhile, the geopolitical consequences for the U.S. and the rest of the world might be just about as shocking, and as long-lasting. Recalling my earlier "Cardinal Directions" posts, we're now broadly into the last era of Cardinal Fleury's influence in France, trying to limit French involvement in what became the War of the Austrian Succession and hold onto whatever prestige and reputation France had as an honest broker. In that event, surely some French ministers and diplomats remained on the level, and indeed James Pritchard's excellent study of the d'Enville Expedition (5) illustrates a pretty high degree of French professionalism in general, even amid some catastrophically corrupt high-level politics. There is little doubt that the American military and diplomatic corps today remain highly professional and highly capable, though top level leadership, again, may be leading them down a rather tortuous path where thinking minds among them may prefer not to go.

Where are they going? Military adventurism. It didn't work out well for France in the 1740s, and with Chinese threats to Taiwan today, and plenty of other regimes around the world seeing whatever advantage they can find in their spheres of influence, the door is now more open than it has been in many decades to probe the limits of kinetic operations. Pandora's box may well be open as Iran's leaders have warned. Whether Iran itself does much in the short term remains to be seen; but American action in this instance also has consequences that are much larger in scope, global in scale, and could well shape international relations as a whole for decades to come.

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1. https://www.axios.com/2025/06/21/us-strike-iran-nuclear-israel-trump

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TU6-k1rgPA

3. Andreas Osiander, ”Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth” International Organization 55:2 (Spring 2001): 251-287.

4. https://archive.org/details/b30529967/page/n3/mode/2up

5. James S. Pritchard, Anatomy of a Naval Disaster: The 1746 French Naval Expedition to North America. McGill-Queens, 1995.

Quick Thoughts on Lion Rising (and which one that might be)

Overnight, Israeli forces conducted some two hundred airstrikes and a variety of intelligence, sabotage, and assassination plots across Iran — activities broadly grouped under the heading of "Operation Lion Rising".

Sometimes, a name is just a name, like the World War II-era Operations Cartwheel, Husky, Market Garden, and Mars, or the Vietnam-era Linebacker II. Many Israeli military activities have also had relatively innocuous names like Mole Cricket 19.

However, in a tradition dating back at least to the Six Day War in 1967, and perhaps to independence, the leaders of modern Israel have occasionally put themselves at pains to connect their polity with roots in Jewish culture, religious texts, and occasionally, its symbology.

"Rising Lion" could easily be a reference to the Lion of Judah.

There is also, however, a second lion to consider — for centuries and perhaps millennia, one of the staunchest, most favorable, most indulgent friends and benefactors of the first — and perhaps even with an older lion-based iconography than the first: The Lion (and Sun) of Persia.

• Traditions of Persian statehood going back to the Achaemenid period and perhaps beyond have drawn on the lion as a symbol, as does the Shi'a tradition of Islam — very prominent in Iran for many centuries at this point — tracing back to their founder, Ali ibn Abu Talib.
• Moreover, Isaiah 45:1-4 shows the exiles of Judah looking to Cyrus of Persia by name as their liberator in the sixth century BCE, and the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther all generally give a positive image of the Persian court — not least in contrast to Babylon.

So what does this have to do with the present?

• Until 1979, Iran's flag had the lion and sun iconography in it, with the Pahlavi dynasty drawing on both Persian and Shi'ite traditions.
• Israel's quarrel with Iran since that time has little to do with the people and overall civil society, and much more to do with the top-level government in Tehran.

So what does this mean for Lion Rising?

Perhaps it's just a name. And perhaps it's just an exercise of hard power against Iran's nuclear program. That is, of course, quite possible.

But suppose for a moment that it's something more. Naturally, Israel's government would be almost the last in line to make public statements in favor of Iranian opposition groups, for fear of undermining their legitimacy. And yet, while it's no mystery that the Ayatollahs' grip on power has always been more flimsy and historically contingent than their propaganda has historically suggested (see here, especially from 9:08), this might be a moment for Iran watchers, and maybe the regime itself, to look for Israeli assets at work beyond the hard power strikes.

With a few other circumstances intervening, it may not be surprising to see information and influence operations behind the scenes, promoting revolution. No doubt regime change would be to Israel's liking and short term advantage, but in and of itself it would not guarantee a new order with any higher regard for the Jewish state. Thus, if Persia's lion is set to rise again like a new day's sun, then perhaps the softer side of current Israeli operations — even down to their naming conventions — would help a new Iranian regime to pay a kinder regard to their fellow lion in Judah.

A French Center?

Geopolitics in Western Europe has been dominated by the United States since World War II. That happened for a variety of reasons, many of which are now well out of date. If and as the American presence in Europe recedes, who might step in?

The French, of course! But not just for reasons of capability and prestige in the present day. (1, 2)

Going back to World War II, one might dispute how well Americans were prepared for the hostile seas, skies, and beaches that awaited them, but there is much less question about U.S. supply, logistics, force projection, and financial and infrastructure roles in shaping the late war and postwar order all around the world. Proud societies understandably felt themselves eclipsed by American largesse, and it's reasonable to see the Gaullisme of mid-century France (wikipedia summary here) as partly a reaction to Western Europe's traditional premier land power being completely overshadowed by Germany and Britain in quick succession, and soon enough, the newcomer Americans.

Fast forward to 2025, and the perseverance of France as one of the leading regional powers — and the only nuclear power on the continent of Western Europe — leads fairly rationally to suggestions that France, today, should take a leading role in NATO's ongoing progress into Eastern Europe and beyond.

Rewind to 1725, however, and it's possible to see some fairly deep historical grounding for the role that France is now set to take — perhaps a fair counterpoint to Russia's withdrawal from the European concert. It's around this time that premodern French involvement in Eastern Europe reached its height, amid some curious, potentially informative historical footnotes.

Putting the Band (Barrier) Back Together?

Earlier today, May 28, 2025, Finnish President Alexander Stubb gave an interview with CNN, reproduced on YouTube, here.

I strongly suspect that Stubb's sense of geopolitics is not especially informed by George Friedman's book, The Next Hundred Years (2009, Wikipedia summary here), but both noted the rise of Turkey and Poland as regional powers, and Finland, especially if combined with Sweden and the Baltics, might fairly constitute a third player in that bloc.

But wait!

There was a time when one might identify a Finno-Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, and Turkey with some Balkan allies, as forming a bulwark against Russian ambitions in Eastern Europe. The three powers among themselves did not exactly form a coherent coalition, yet what brought them together on one side was, indeed, the ambition of Russian leaders like Peter the Great, and on the other, Western support. In particular, France was notable for lending subsidies, political support, and at least on occasion, arms — what we would today call foreign aid, diplomatic cover, and, still, arms! The French knew this combination of powers as the Barrière de l'Est, or eastern barrier, broadly intended to keep Russia out of the affairs of the rest of Europe.

There seems to be even more to the conversation, as the Guardian notes here, and not for the first time. Invoking Peter's endurance in the Great Northern War (1700-21), Russian diplomats in the recent Istanbul summit hinted at their intention simply to outlast Western aid to Ukraine. President Putin does correctly note Russia's victory in the Northern War, though this was also the major occasion, at least at times, when France, Sweden-Finland, Poland-Lithuania, and Ottoman Turkey came together most coherently.

Putin might also note that Peter (fl.1682-1725), and pretty much all the rest of Russia's leaders of the 18th and 19th centuries, and well into the 20th, all had their eye on penetrating this eastern barrier so that Russia could not only march west, but also, and rather, engage with the West. Carrying forward Peter's legacy, Russia as a state wanted to be Western, to fit into the European systems of commercial and intellectual exchange, as well as foreign relations!

I opened this blog post thinking that I would discuss the Eastern Barrier coming back together, which it may well do. I close it, however, thinking about Putin not as repeating or even emulating the achievement of Peter the Great, but rather profoundly reversing it, and undoing some 300 years of Russian strategic thought. Thinking on earlier generations, the Treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Kiakhta (1727, 1768) were all designed to define and stabilize the East so successive Russian leaders could turn their attention to the West. If Putin and his successors in the coming years put Finlandization to rest, and truly have a NATO-Russia border, then well might we see, not even so much the renewed rise of the old Barrier powers, but rather the return of Russia to what it was before Peter's time: primarily a power of the Eurasian steppe lands, largely excluded from the community of European states.