Hey folks! I was traveling this week to give an invited talk at Western Michigan University, so I don’t have a blog post ready for you. That’ll also probably be the case for next week (where I will be at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History), though at least there I will have an abstract to let you see.

Now I am always reticent to post up the text of talks that are intended to be delivered live, because the genres are different, they rely on different kinds of delivery and they often aren’t footnoted and such for written publication. But in this case, I can do something a bit different, because the main parts of my talk for Western Michigan University were based around things that I’ve written (and in one case, something someone else has written) which you can read. So this is a chance to plumb the archives, in a sense and in so doing, basically ‘read along’ a version of the talk I gave which is rather ‘meatier’ than what I could have said in the 45-or-so minutes I had to speak.

The core of my talk was the concept of ‘historical verisimilitude‘ that I’ve riffed on here: the use of the appearance of historical accuracy, or a claim to historical accuracy in the absence of the real thing to market or promote something, be that something a film or show or game or what I have begun terming a ‘history influencer’ who makes history-themed social media content.

My initial example of this at work was the disconnect in Assassin’s Creed:Valhalla between the emphasis on visual accuracy and the catastrophic fumbling of other forms of historical accuracy, which you can read about in my “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications.” I then expanded on this example with a broader one from 2000’s film Gladiator and its initial battle scene, arguing that once again what was prioritized was visual accuracy because that gave the viewers the – incorrect! – assumption that ‘the research had been done’ on the rest, which you can read about in our series on “Nitpicking Gladiator‘s Iconic Opening Battle.”

I then jumped to example of this as a rhetorical strategy deployed by marketing, grounded in a critique of how George R. R. Martin (and the marketing team for Game of Thrones) has framed historical accuracy, using the Dothraki as an example of how this can go badly wrong and perpetuate quite nasty stereotypes about real peoples through the supposedly ‘realistic’ (in fact, deeply flawed) depiction of a fantasy stand-in for those people. You can read about that in our series on the Dothraki, “That Dothraki Horde.”

From there I transition into talking about this strategy used by the aforementioned ‘history influencers,’ with a contrast between how differences in platforms between YouTube and Twitter produced very different environments: where YouTube’s long-form video nature pushed a lot of content creators towards more carefully researched historical content which was often actually quite valuable (I particularly focused, and again this was very brief, on arms-and-armor and historical dress channels), Twitter’s emphasis on ultra-short micro-blogging produced a very different environment.

For the part focused on Twitter, I leaned quite heavily on T. Trezevant’s “The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline” published in Working Classicists in 2024, which I think is one of the most revealing investigations of this particular space and the incentives that the post-Musk Twitter algorithm, which appears to openly and quite strongly prefer frankly bigoted or xenophobic content, created. From my own observations, while some of the accounts that push this particular, generally badly historically misinformed, version of the ancient past emerged in the pre-Musk period of Twitter, Classics Twitter largely held its own until the algorithm was slanted against them, making it all but impossible for a lot of good Classics accounts to compete for eyeballs.

And then I closed with a plea for greater engagement by historians in these online spaces, albeit with a caution that picking your platform is important. The fact that historical verisimilitude, the pretense of historical accuracy or knowledge, is so frequently used as a marketing tool speaks to the public’s desire for an accurate knowledge of the past. Folks want to know what the past was really like, but of course regular folks often do not have the tools to tell what is reliable, rigorous and careful history vs. what is not. So as historians, we need to be more present in these kinds of spaces (though we ought to pick our platforms; there is little point ‘competing’ on Twitter if the deck is stacked against you) to help folks find the accurate historical knowledge they are seeking.

And that, in an abbreviated form (or an enlarged form if you read all of the links as you went!) was the talk! Very grateful for WMU for inviting me out to give it. Until next week!

This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.

I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress.

And this war is dumb as hell.

I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.

Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.

But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.

Post-Publication Edit: Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the discussions in the comments got quite heated, while I was off at a conference and not able to do as moderation as I normally might. It is fine to have strong views, but one ought to present and defend those views, not engage in empty personal attacks. I have removed significant chunks of the discussion which I viewed as unproductive. If the personal attacks resume, bans will follow.
Doubtless in the process I have removed some comments which could have stayed or missed some comments that should have been removed, but at the end of a three day conference and a five hour drive home, this was all the patience I had.

The Situation

We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.

First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.

More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.

In practice, given that Iran did not and never has posed an existential threat to the United States (Iran aspires to be the kind of nuclear threat North Korea is and can only vaguely dream of being the kind of conventional threat that Russia is), that meant that a ground invasion of Iran was functionally impossible. While the United States had the raw resources to do it, the political will simply wasn’t there and was unlikely to ever be there.

Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.

Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.

In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal.

That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).

But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.

Which leads us to

The Gamble

The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.

In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.

But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on. These sorts of governments can collapse, but not often. It certainly did not help that the United States had stood idle while the regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its opponents, before making the attempt, but I honestly do not think the attempt would have worked before.

The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.

As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.

The problem is that once the gamble was made, once the dice were cast, the Trump administration would be effectively giving up control over much of what followed.

And if administration statements are to be believed, that decision was made, without knowing it, in June of last year. Administration officials, most notably Marco Rubio, have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing. Essentially, Iran would assume that the United States was ‘in’ on the attack.

That is notable because Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.

The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the last several weeks where things explode in Iran and there is initially confusion over if the United States or Israel bombed them. But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.

So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.

But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.

It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.

Which is the case here. Because…

The Trap

Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.

The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.

And the scale here is significant. 25% of the world’s oil (refined and crude), 20% of its liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz which links the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Any of those figures would be enough for a major disruption to trigger huge economic ripples. And even worse there are only very limited, very insufficient alternative transport options. Some Saudi oil (about half) can move via pipeline to the Red Sea and some Emirati oil can move via pipeline to Fujairah outside of the Strait, but well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely.

And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.

And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.

Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.

But the trap here is two sided: once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war without suffering its own costs. Doing so, for one, would be an admission of defeat, politically damaging at home. Strategically, it would affirm Iran’s control over the strait, which would be a significantly worse outcome than not having done the war in the first place. And simply backing off might not fully return shipping flows: why should Iran care if the Gulf states can export their oil? An Iran that fully controls the strait, that had demonstrated it could exclude the United States might intentionally throttle everyone else’s oil – even just a bit – to get higher prices for its own or to exert leverage.

So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.

The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.

Under these conditions, both sides might seek a purely military solution: remove the ability of your opponent to do harm in order to create the space to declare victory and deescalate. Such solutions are elusive. Iran simply has no real way of meaningfully diminishing American offensive power: they cannot strike the airfields, sink the carriers or reliably shoot down the planes (they have, as of this writing, managed to damage just one aircraft).

For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve. Since Iran could launch underwater drones or one-way aerial attack drones from anywhere along the northern shore the United States would have to occupy many thousands of square miles to prevent this and of course then the ground troops doing that occupying would simply become the target for drones, mortars, artillery, IEDs and so on instead.

One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.

Meanwhile escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising. For one, it would require many more ships, because the normal traffic through the strait is so large and because escorts would be required throughout the entire Gulf (unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the ‘zone’ of Houthi attacks was contained to only the southern part of the Red Sea). But the other problem is that Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait.

It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva, to account for the Arleigh Burke’s better air defense. Iran would pick their moment (probably not the first transit) and try to distract the Burke, perhaps with a volley of cheap Shahed-type drones against a natural gas tanker, before attempting to ambush the Burke with a volley of AShMs, probably from the opposite direction. The aim would be to create just enough confusion that one AShM slipped through, which is all it might take to leave a $2.2bn destroyer with three hundred American service members on board disabled and vulnerable in the strait. Throw in speed-boats, underwater drones, naval mines, fishing boats pretending to be threats and so on to maximize confusion and the odds that one of perhaps half a dozen AShMs slips through.

And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort.

But without escorts or an end to the conflict, shipping in the Gulf is not going to return to normal. Container ships are big and hard to sink but easy to damage. But while crude oil tankers are hard to set fire to, tankers carrying refined petroleum products are quite easy to set fire to, as we’ve seen, while tankers of liquid natural gas (LNG carriers) are essentially floating bombs.

The result is that right now it seems that the only ships moving through the strait are those Iran permits and they appear to have a checkpoint system, turning away ships they do not approve of. A military solution this problem is concievable, but extremely difficult to implement practically, requiring either a massive invasion of Iran’s coastline or an enormous sea escort operation. It seems more likely in both cases that the stoppage will continue until Iran decides it should stop. The good news on that front is that Iran benefits from the export of oil from the Gulf too, but the bad news is that while they are permitting some traffic, precisely because high energy prices are their only lever to make the United States and Israel stop killing them, they are unlikely to approve the transit of the kinds of numbers of ships which would allow energy markets to stabilize.

Just as a measure here, as I write this apparently over the last three days or so Iran has let some twenty ships through their checkpoint, charging fees apparently to do so. That may sound like a lot, but it is a quantity that, compared to the normal operation of the strait, is indistinguishable from zero. The Strait of Hormuz normally sees around 120 transits per day (including both directions). That scale should both explain why five or six ships a day paying Iran to transit is not going to really impact this equation – that’s still something like a 95% reduction in traffic (and all of the Iran-approved transits are outbound, I think) – but also why a solution like ‘just do escorts’ is so hard. Whatever navies attempted an escort solution would need to escort a hundred ships a day, with every ship being vulnerable at every moment from when it entered the Strait to when it docked for loading or offloading to its entire departure route. All along the entire Gulf coastline. All the time.

Likewise, even extremely punishing bombings of Iranian land-based facilities are unlikely to wholly remove their ability to throw enough threat into the Strait that traffic remains massively reduced. Sure some ship owners will pay Iran and others will take the risk, but if traffic remains down 90% or just 50% that is still a massive, global energy disruption. And we’ve seen with the campaign against the Houthis just how hard it is with airstrikes to compromise these capabilities: the United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities. Cargo ships are too vulnerable and the weapons with which to attack them too cheap and too easy to hide.

There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States.

Peace Negotiations?

Which brings us to the question of strategic outcomes. As the above has made clear, I think the Trump administration erred spectacularly in starting this war. It appears as though, in part pressured by Israel, but mostly based on their own decisions (motivated, it sure seems, by the ease of the Venezuela regime-change) they decided to go ahead on the hopeful assumption the regime would collapse and as a result did not plan for the most likely outcome (large war, strait closure), despite this being the scenario that political leadership (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio) were warned was most likely.

The administration now appears to be trying to extricate itself from the problem has created, but as I write this, is currently still stuck in the ‘trap’ above. Now this is a fast moving topic, so by the time you actually read this the war well could have ended in a ceasefire (permanent or temporary) or intensified and expanded. Who knows! As I am writing the Trump administration claims that they are very near a negotiated ceasefire, while the Iranian regime claims they have rejected both of the United States’ interlocutors as unsuitable (‘backstabbing’ negotiators), while reporting suggests Israel may feel it in their interests to blow up any deal if the terms are too favorable to Iran.

That is a lot of uncertainty! But I think we can look at some outcomes here both in terms of what was militarily achieved, what the consequences of a ‘deal’ might be and what the consequences of not having a deal might be.

The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives for this war, but I think it is fair to say the major strategic objectives have not been achieved. Initially, the stated objective was regime change or at least regime collapse; neither has occurred. The regime very much still survives and if the war ends soon it seems very plausible that the regime – able to say that it fought the United States and made the American president sue for peace – will emerge stronger, domestically (albeit with a lot of damage to fix and many political problems that are currently ‘on pause’ coming ‘un-paused’). The other core American strategic interest here is Iran’s nuclear program, the core of which is Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium; no effort appears to have been made to recover or destroy this material and it remains in Iranian hands. Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.

When the United States did this in Kazakhstan, removing about 600kg (so roughly the same amount) it required the team to spend 12 hours a day every day for a month to remove it, using multiple heavy cargo planes. And that facility was neither defended, nor buried under rubble.

Subsequently, administration aims seem to have retreated mostly to ‘fixing the mess we made:’ getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the ships moving again. They do seem to be asking for quite a bit more at the peace table, but the record of countries winning big concessions at the peace table which they not only haven’t secured militarily but do not appear able to do so is pretty slim.

Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal sooner rather than later. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence. This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.

Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes. That’s going to be a hard negotiating position to bridge, especially because Iran can ‘tough it out’ through quite a lot of bombing.

And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

Strategic Implications

So my conclusion here is that the United States has not yet achieved very much in this war on a strategic level. Oh, tactically, the United States has blown up an awful lot of stuff and done so with very minimal casualties of its own. But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.

None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.

So the true, strategic gains here for all of the tactical effectiveness displayed, are functionally nil. Well what did it cost?

Well, first and foremost, to date the lives of 13 American soldiers (290 more WIA), 24 Israelis (thousands more injured), at least a thousand civilian deaths across ‘neutral’ countries (Lebanon mostly, but deaths in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc) and probably at least a thousand if not more Iranian civilians (plus Iranian military losses). The cost of operations for the United States is reportedly one to two billion dollars a day, which adds up pretty quickly to a decent chunk of change.

All of the military resources spent in this war are in turn not available for other, more important theaters, most obviously the Asia-Pacific (INDOPACOM), but of course equally a lot of these munitions could have been doing work in Ukraine as well. As wars tend to do, this one continues to suck in assets as it rumbles on, so the American commitment is growing, not shrinking. And on top of spent things like munitions and fuel, the strain on ships, air frames and service personnel is also a substantial cost: it turns out keeping a carrier almost constantly running from one self-inflicted crisis to the next for ten months is a bad idea.

You could argue these costs would be worthwhile it they resulted in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program – again, the key element here is the HEU, which has not been destroyed – or of the Iranian regime. But neither of those things have been achieved on the battlefield, so this is a long ledger of costs set against…no gains. Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.

The next side of this are the economic consequences. Oil and natural gas have risen in price dramatically, but if you are just watching the commodity ticker on the Wall Street Journal, you may be missing some things. When folks talk about oil prices, they generally do so via either $/bbl (West Texas Intermediate – WTI – one-month front-month futures) or BRN00 (Brent Crude Oil Continuous Contracts). These are futures contracts, meaning the price being set is not for a barrel of oil right now but for a barrel of oil in the future; we can elide the sticky differences between these two price sets and just note that generally the figure you see is for delivery in more-or-less one month’s time. Those prices have risen dramatically (close to doubled), but may not reflect the full economic impact here: as the ‘air bubble’ created by the sudden stop of oil shipments expands, physical here-right-now prices for oil are much higher in many parts of the world and still rising.

Essentially, the futures markets are still hedging on the idea that this war might end and normal trade might resume pretty soon, a position encouraged by the current administration, which claims it has been negotiating with Iran (Iran denied the claim). The tricky thing here is that this is a war between two governments – the Trump administration and the Iranian regime – which both have a clear record of lying a lot. The Trump administration has, for instance, repeatedly claimed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia was imminent, and that war remains ongoing. The markets are thus forced to try and guess everyone’s actions and intentions from statements that are unreliable. Cards on the table, I think the markets are underestimating the likelihood that this conflict continues for some time. Notably, the United States is moving assets into theater – an MEU, elements of the 82 Airborne – which will take some time to arrive (two weeks for the MEU which is still about a week out as I write this) and set up for operations.

In either case, while I am not an expert on oil extraction or shipping, what I have seen folks who are experts on those things say is that the return of normal operations after this war will be very slow, often on the order of ‘every extra week of conflict adds a month to recovery’ (which was Sal Mercogliano’s rule of thumb in a recent video). If the war ends instantly, right now, ship owners will first have to determine that the strait is safe, then ships will have to arrive and begin loading to create space in storage to start up refineries to create space in storage to start up oil wells that have been ‘shut in,’ some of which may require quite a bit of doing to restart. Those ships in turn have to spend weeks sailing to the places that need these products, where some of the oil and LNG is likely to be used to refill stockpiles rather than immediately going out to consumers. For many products, refineries and production at the point of sale – fertilizer plants, for instance – will also need to be restarted. Factory restarts can be pretty involved tasks.

This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028.

Meanwhile, disruption of fertilizer production, which relies heavily on natural gas products, has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices – and food prices have already been elevated by the impact of the War in Ukraine – are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. After all, a 25% increase in the price of food in a rich country is annoying – you have to eat more cheaper foods (buy more ramen, etc.). But in a poor country it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food and hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.

I am not saying this will happen – the equally big spike in food prices from the Ukraine War has not touched off a wave of revolutions – but that it increases the likelihood of chaotic, dynamic, unsettled political events.

But it does seem very clear that this war has created a set of global economic headwinds which will have negative repercussions for many countries, including the United States. The war has not, as of yet, made Americans any safer – but it has made them poorer.

Then there are the political implications. I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.

Again, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it certainly seems like there is an open door to a future where this war is the final nail in the coffin of the American-Israeli security partnership, as it becomes impossible to sustain in the wake of curdling American public opinion. That would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel if it happened. On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s. But a future president might well cut off spare parts and maintainers for those F-35s, refuse to sell new ones, refuse to sell armaments for them, and otherwise make it very difficult for Israel to acquire superior weapons compared to its regional rivals.

Economic coercion is equally dangerous: Israel is a small, substantially trade dependent country and its largest trading partner is the United States, followed by the European Union. But this trade dependency is not symmetrical: the USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. Absent American diplomatic support then, the threat of economic sanctions is quite dire: Israel is meaningfully exposed and the sanctions would be very low cost for the ‘Status Quo Coalition’ (assuming the United States remains a member) to inflict under a future president.

A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory. As Thucydides might put it, an outcome like that would be an “example for the world to meditate upon.” That outcome is by no means guaranteed, but every day the war grinds on and becomes less popular in the United States, it becomes more likely.

But the United States is likewise going to bear diplomatic costs here. Right now the Gulf States have to shelter against Iranian attack but when the dust settles they – and many other countries – will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty. Coming hot on the heels of the continuing drama around tariffs, the takeaway in many places may well be ‘Uncle Sam wants you to be poor,’ which is quite a damaging thing for diplomacy. And as President Trump was finding out when he called for help in the Strait of Hormuz and got told ‘no’ by all of our traditional allies, it is in fact no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated, no matter how powerful you are.

Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran. I said this at the top but I’ll say it again: the Iranian regime is odious. You will note also I have not called this war ‘unprovoked’ – the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades. That said, it is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it. But I think it is fair to say this war has been a tragedy for the Iranian people and a catastrophe for the Iranian regime.

And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?

And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.

Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer.

Hey folks! Another gap week because, as mentioned last week, I am at the annual meeting for the Society for Military History happening in Arlington. That said, we actually did have a major post this week, my 7,500 word primal cry concerning the current war in Iran. I know that won’t be for everyone – some of you read this to get away from current events – which is why I dropped it ‘off schedule’ midweek rather than having it replace this post.

That said, as I often do with weeks where I am at a conference, let me share the abstract of the paper I am delivering, “Unlearning the Marian Reforms:”

The transformation of the Roman army from the conscription-based citizen militia organized by maniples of the middle republic to the long-service professional army organized by cohorts in the early imperial period remains a topic of intense interest for specialists and non-specialists alike.  In recent years, however, the specialist understanding of this transformation has increasingly diverged from a non-specialist generalist vision which remains wedded to the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms.’  The idea of a set of reforms, occurring in the late second or early first century BC, which can be tied particularly or generally to the career of Gaius Marius (cos. 107, 104-100, 86) remains common in popular history and even academic textbooks and so permeates the non-specialist understanding of the Roman army’s transformation.  However, as this paper demonstrates, functionally every part of this narrative has come under attack and nearly all parts of it must now be discarded: there were no ‘Marian Reforms,’ ‘so-called’ or otherwise.

Instead, what has emerged from the scholarship is a prolonged process of change beginning far earlier in the second century and not entirely complete until at least the reign of Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD), in which Gaius Marius’ career forms only a single episode and not necessarily a particularly important one.  This new understanding of change in the Roman army now dominates the specialist scholarship but has not filtered through to general discussions of either Roman or military history.  This paper addresses this gap in understanding, outlining the key elements of the ‘Marian Reforms’ have been undermined and demonstrating that the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms’ as an event in the history of the Roman army is to be abandoned in generalist and textbook treatments, at it has already been in specialist ones.

Now normally this is a case where I have to hem and haw about how conference presentation papers aren’t really ready for publication even on a blog, but this conference paper is in fact a more-or-less direct translation of a blog post we have already had, “The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing.” Indeed, whereas my speaking time here (around 20 minutes) limits me to just around 2,800 words, the original post is about three times longer, with significantly more detail than I can fit into a conference paper. So you can in essence, read a longer, even more decompressed form of this argument! So feel free to go and read that if you missed it and to read my Iran War take if you want and didn’t catch it midweek and we’ll be back next week with something different (maybe Carthage themed?).

This week we’re going to look a specific piece of early Roman military equipment, the humble bronze pectoral, which it turns out is surprisingly tricky for us to confidently reconstruct, in part because the period of its use that most interests us (the run from c. 264 to c. 146 where Rome is winning its first big overseas wars) is a relative gap – fancy word, ‘lacuna‘ – in our evidence, making it really difficult to correlate what our literary source (Polybius) is telling us to the physical evidence we have (both preserved examples and artwork). This was, we are told (by Polybius) the armor of the common Roman soldier in the period of their greatest wars, yet on some level we do not really know what it looked like. Not with certainty, in any case.

In particular I am going to argue that the most common reconstruction of this armor, as a single bronze plate suspended usually by leather straps over the chest, is probably wrong and that the armor more likely existed as a complex harness, simplified in brief literary description down to just its core element. But as we’ll see, this is going to be a zone of what I term ‘real uncertainty’ – a situation where without new evidence coming out of the ground, we simply cannot know for sure.

So this is not just an exercise in working through how to reconstruct one specific kind of equipment, but also how historians engage in questions that exist in a zone of really low confidence.

But first, as always, affording a full panoply of heavy infantry equipment as is the duty of any propertied Roman citizen is expensive! If you want to help me waste spend my money on reproduction ancient military equipment, you can support this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Polybius

Our first stop is Polybius. Polybius wrote in the mid-second century (that is, the 140s), but his history covers the period from 264 to 146 and his description of the pectoral is placed relatively early in the narrative, in 216, as part of a larger explanation of the Roman military system. There is thus immediately a question as to if the details Polybius is giving are correct for 216 or for the 140s when he wrote. In practice, the answer must be something of a mix: Polybius has sources that reach back and might give him details appropriate to the period (he seems to have the writings of a military tribune to use for this description of the dilectus), but it seems likely that his description of the pectoral comes from observing it. Consequently, while I suspect that Polybius’ description of who is required to wear what may be accurate for 216, he has clearly seen the pectoral and understands it to still be in use in his own day (indeed, at other points in this extended passage, he explicitly notes things that used to be one way but had changed by his own day).¹

That’s handy, because Polybius is the only source that describes this armor. Later historians – Livy, Plutarch, etc. – seem broadly unaware of it and it really does seem like the pectoral was in the process of going extinct when Polybius was writing (for reasons below). So we have one description of the armor, but at least it is by an eyewitness. Here it is (Polyb. 6.23.14-15, trans. mine):

The many [hoi polloi, “the common folk”] taking a bronze plate a span [c. 23cm] on all sides, which they place over their chests and call ‘heart protectors’ [καρδιοφύλαξ, very literally ‘heart protector’], finish their armaments. However those worth more than ten thousand drachmas [= the first class of Roman infantry], instead of the heart-protector wear mail coats [αλυσιδωτοί θώρακες, “hooked [or chain] cuirasses” which we know is the Greek way to say ‘mail coats.’]

And…that’s it. From later authors (Varro, De Ling. Lat. 5.116; Plin HN 34.18) we get the Latin name for this armor, pectorale (pectorale, pectoralis (n) for the Latin nerds), thus the English term ‘pectoral’ but no more details of its construction.²

Crucially, this armor doesn’t show up on any highly visible Roman military monuments. The reason is fairly simple: the earliest really visible Roman military monuments are the Pydna Monument (168) and the so-called Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus (late second century) by which point the pectoral was already on the way out. Ancient artists tend to prefer high status equipment and so with the pectoral on the way out (though likely still very much in use in 168) and the poorer, lower status armor, they didn’t depict it, instead preferring to use mail armor to signal Roman soldiers (specifically, mail is used on the Pydna Monument to signal ‘these are Romans’ in contrast to Macedonians or Gauls).³

As a result, scholars initially didn’t have a lot to go on except Polybius’ description – the archaeology, as we’ll see, doesn’t really get sorted out until the last 40 years or so. So they reconstructed on that basis. A ‘span’ (σπιθαμή) is a ‘natural’ unit, the distance between the thumb and the little finger at full extension, which is conveniently more or less half of a cubit (the length of a forearm out to the end of the middle finger), which eventually becomes formalized in Attic measurements (which Polybius tends to use; other places might have slightly different measures for the same terms) as 23.1cm and 46.2cm respectively.

That leads to the most common thing we see in artistic reconstructions and reenactor kit: the pectoral is reconstructed as a brass or bronze plate, usually about 1-2mm thick (the normal thickness for breastplates), 23cm by 23cm square. Since obviously it needs to be attached to something it is often shown backed in leather, with leather straps around the waist and over the shoulders holding it in place. I am going to call this reconstruction – a single plate, 23cm square, on a leather harness – the ‘traditional’ reconstruction.

That size lets the pectoral cover most of the chest, but it does nothing for the belly, sides or shoulders. On that basis, I have very often heard scholars regard it as a very minimal, almost token defense, unlikely to do much at all to protect the men wearing it. And again, before there was much archaeology to work with (or before finds had been analyzed, arranged chronologically and had their development worked through), you can see how this is the most logical extrapolation of what Polybius is saying.

But I do want to note some things here. Polybius’ description of this armor is extremely brief. He does not even bother to explain what Roman mail armor is like at all – no description, for instance, of its length (to the knees) or shoulder-doubling or the front-closure mechanism. If it weren’t for period depictions of mail, we would probably reconstruct it without these elements. As for the pectoral, all he says is that it is a span square and the Romans have a funny name for it. Which is to say it is entirely possible that Polybius is leaving out some details here. Which brings us to:

The Development of the Italic Pectoral

This, of course, is the point at which we naturally turn to archaeology to provide us both physical examples of this kind of armor and also visual representations of it. And he we run into an immediate problem: the third and second century feature a near total lacuna of Italic armor, in both artwork and preserved examples. The problem is frustrating in its elegant simplicity: the Roman military system – terribly efficient and in its way, anti-aristocratic – coincides as it expands with the end of aristocratic ‘warrior burials’ wherever it goes. Thus as Rome during the fourth and early third century goes about consolidating control of Italy, the amount of nice tomb paintings with aristocratic warrior in procession or burials with arms and armor drop to basically nothing. The Roman army is removing the evidence we might have for the Roman army. Astoundingly frustrating.

The evidentiary record begins to pick up a bit in the second century with more artistic depictions of Roman soldiers as the Roman state engages in more monumental depictions of its soldiers (noted above), but by that point mail rather than the pectoral is the ‘national armor’ of Rome’s armies (even though the pectoral is likely in use) and pectorals never appear. The really strong archaeological record for armor will have to wait until the imperial period, when the permanent stationing of Rome’s armies on the frontier of the empire means they sit in one place long enough for us to recover bits of armor.⁴ Weapons show up more often than armor (pila more often than any other type of weapon, a testament to their disposability) and we get a lot of helmets (for reasons not entirely clear to me), but functionally no body armor from this period. The best we can do are tiny fragments of metal rings for mail and even those are rare.

Worse yet, as mentioned before, the pectoral was going extinct in this period. Notably, when our evidence improves massively in the first century BC and AD, the pectoral is nowhere to be found. No source mentions it as still in use in that period, no artist depicts it, no finds of it are recovered. Polybius is thus our last source for this armor, suggesting that by the start of the first century, it had been wholly replaced by mail. No shock, mail is awesome (if expensive). But that means we cannot look for later examples to help us understand what Polybius is saying.

But we can can look at earlier ones.⁵

The Italic pectoral seems to have arrived from the Middle East in the 8th or perhaps 7th centuries (sometime between c. 750 and c. 680). This form of armor, a more or less flat metal place (as opposed to an enclosing breastplate of the sort we see in Greece around this time) has Middle Eastern precedents (we see Assyrian soldiers in artwork wearing similar armor), though how exactly it made it to Italy is unclear – Phoenicians seems most probable, but uncertain. In either case, by the seventh century, these pectoral armors are quite common over all of Italy, including Latium (where Rome is) and Etruria. The armor at this point generally consists of two bronze plates (a front plate and a back plate), which might be rectangular or circular, about 20-25cm wide (or tall; sometimes these are even smaller than this) and which were connected by leather straps. We generally call these ‘rectangular’ and ‘single disc’ pectorals. When decorated (and they very frequently are), they usually feature either geometric designs (often rectangles within a rectangular cuirass) or animal designs, either punched into the plate or embossed.

And you can see how an archaeologist looking at these pectorals from the seventh century might be thinking, “ah, I see exactly what Polybius was talking about: a bronze plate a span square!” Except, of course, the sixth century is not the second century and these pectorals keep evolving.

Now, in significant parts of Italy, especially Etruria, these pectoral armors begin to be replaced in the late sixth century by Greek-style armor, especially for elite, high-status warriors. In particular, the Etruscans love the tube-and-yoke (linothorax) armor when it shows up and it swiftly becomes a marker of elite status, though pectorals do occasionally show up in Etruscan art, albeit less frequently, but they are certainly petering out. Annoyingly, at roughly this point the archaeological record for Rome specifically also dries up, so it isn’t clear exactly what armors are popular in Rome in the very early Republic (our literary sources assume Greek-style armors, which may be right, but they are guessing and deeply anachronistic in their assumptions).

However in central Italy, in the Apennines Mountains, the pectoral persists and undergoes some significant design changes. Around 600, we start to see changes to the strap mechanisms holding the armor together: one shoulder strap is replaced with a pair of bronze plates connected by a hinge. The resulting harness gets pretty complex, as you can see in the figure of the Capestrano Warrior (c. 550), where the harness that holds the pectoral also supplies a scabbard (suspended at the chest) for the sword and there is a clear contrast between the metal hinged plate (over the right shoulder) and the more reddish-colored leather straps (of which there are three, two wide and one narrow) holding the harness and scabbard together.

In the early fifth century, this design is both enhanced and greatly simplified with the emergence of the first ‘triple disc’ pectorals. These are so named because the front plate (and back plate) take the form of three discs in a triangular arrangement, though I must stress this is a single plate with three circular designs on it in a roughly triangular shape, not three individual circular plates. Indeed, earlier archaeologists supposed that the ‘triple disc’ cuirass must have evolved in two stages from the disc pectorals discussed above and posited a ‘double disc’ cuirass, which turns out not to have existed.

These triple-disc breast- and back-plates were joined together not by leather straps but by a simplified version of the hinged plate system used in the sixth century disc pectorals, except now there are four connecting plates: one each over the shoulders (each of them hinged) and one at the sides (without hinges). These plates also get a bit wider, providing relatively fuller coverage over the upper body and the armor is supplemented by a wide bronze belt worn around the waist which protects the lower abdomen. You can see the full armor clearly in artwork:

In the second-half of the fourth century (so 350 onwards), we see these triple-disc cuirasses joined by another type, particularly on the western coast of southern Italy (so the area south of Latium), the ‘rectangular anatomical cuirass.’ This takes the existing triple-disc harness structure, with its bronze belt and connecting side and shoulder plates, but instead of the triangular triple-disc cuirass, it substitutes rectangular breast- and back-plates, with the designs on these invariably mimicking the musculature on Greek muscle cuirasses, although – because these plates are smaller than Greek breastplates (which wrap around the body) – the muscles depicted are visibly smaller-than-lifelike. In short, the artistic form of the muscle cuirass is being copied, but this is not an effort to mimic the actual muscles of the man wearing the armor.

To give a sense of size, recovered triple disc cuirasses range from 27-32.5cm tall and 26-28cm at the widest, while the rectangular anatomical cuirasses range from 29.5 x 37cm tall to 25 x 30cm wide for the front plates.⁶ Combined with side and shoulder plates that tend to be 5-8cm wide and a wide bronze belt (7-12cm wide, 70-110cm long, ~1mm thick), these really do cover most of the upper body, albeit with gaps, and are something closer to an articulated breastplate than they are to the small ‘heart protector’ of the Capestrano Warrior.

And you may note that a rectangular plate over the chest of c. 30cm by c. 28cm is not very far from Polybius’ description of “a bronze plate a span on all sides” and better yet is far more likely to have actually be in use in the third and second centuries for Polybius to see.

Notably – and this is going to matter in a moment – these fifth and fourth century pectoral harnesses do not appear without bronze belts or connecting plates. You will find these pectorals in museums without those added elements, in many cases because when the first of these armors were excavated (and/or looted) it was done carelessly and so the smaller plates were missed. However, whenever we get these armors with secure provenance or see them depicted in artwork, as Michael Burns notes, without exception, we get the full harness with all seven elements (frontplate, backplate, 2 shoulder plates, 2 side plates, bronze belt). We never to my knowledge ever see them suspected in simple leather harnesses; it surely was possible to do so, but it is unclear that anyone ever did after the introduction of the four-plate harness.

What Michael Burns thinks is happening (revising earlier work by the late, great Peter Connolly), and I think he is right, is that Southern Italic peoples are responding to the increasing presence of Greek muscle cuirasses coming in through Greek colonies in Southern Italy. But rather than just copying the muscle cuirass, they seem to have innovated from their own single-disc pectorals (which didn’t always cover a whole lot of the chest) to the triple-disc to create a kind of ‘exploded’ muscle cuirass. Initially, they do this by taking their own armor form, the single-disc cuirass, and expanding it out into a full ‘exploded’ breastplate, but eventually, in the fourth century, there’s enough artistic crossover that designs that use a rectangular plate and intentionally mirror Greek artistic tropes appear alongside triple-disc styles (which do not go away). It is worth noting that some of these triple-disc and rectangular anatomical armors are wonderfully decorated with complex designs, but many of them are very minimally decorated, especially as we get into the fourth century, suggesting a demand for a cheaper, no-frills version of this protection.

And then in 290 the Romans win the Third Samnite War and take control of the non-Greek parts of Southern Italy. And as noted above, when the Romans incorporate a given part of Italy into their ‘alliance’ system, for reasons that are not entirely clear to us (but the pattern is very strong), warrior burials, ritual weapon depositions and aristocratic artwork of warriors stop. Which means right around the year 300, our evidence for the Italic pectoral tradition simply vanishes. Really, we basically have an expanding bubble of darkness, radiating out from Rome (which is also probably how the Roman conquest felt to the Samnites), blinding our ability to track the development of armor in Italy.

So by the third century, we do not see any pectorals, because we don’t see much of anything (except helmets; we continue to see those) for quite some time.

Except…

The Weird Exception We Need To Dismiss

The one odd exception to this is a pectoral disc found in the siege camps at Numantia.⁷ It is 17cm wide and circular, with a pattern of concentric circles and a large central knob and for quite some time if you went looking for an actual Roman pectoral this is what you would find.

The problem is that it isn’t Roman, it is very obviously Spanish. This spent a century not getting noticed because archaeologists working on ancient arms and armor tend to be very geographically specialized, so folks working on Roman and Italic arms and armor are not likely to be very familiar with the arms and armor of the fifth century Celtiberian Meseta. But if you are familiar with that, it is very clear that this is not a Roman pectoral at all, but a Spanish one, despite it turning up in a Roman camp.

First, while Italy had single-disc circular pectorals these had been replaced in the archaeological and artistic record in the fifth century by the larger triple-disc pectorals discussed above. Moreover, those earlier single-disc Italic pectorals don’t feature raised concentric circles as part of their normal artistic motifs. The more often have animals on them, or punch-holed simple geometric designs. They were also flat and did not feature central knobs.

But you know who did have pectoral harnesses with circular central plates featuring raised concentric circle designs and prominent central knobs? The Celtiberians, who are the people who lived at Numantia, where these camps were. Now the tricky bit here is that these pectorals are also – as far as we can tell – long out of use in the Iberian Peninsula as well: they persist through the fifth century, but fade out at the beginning of the fourth.

But whereas it is a little difficult to imagine a second-century Roman soldier decided to bring a piece of armor with him to Spain that had been out of use in Italy for something like four centuries, it is a lot easier to imagine the same Roman soldier in Spain might have looted a temple or a tomb (or simply struck a burial while entrenching his camp) that contained a fifth or very early fourth century Celtiberian disc-harness and that this soldier then looted the shiny bronze plate, later to be (for whatever reason) discarded in the camp.

Reconstructing the Roman Pectoral

So that is the shape of our evidence: with the Numantia pectoral removed (because it is not Roman at all, but Celtiberian), we have no examples of this armor from the third or second centuries B.C. What we do have is a tradition of pectoral armors which lead to the emergence of the triple-disc and rectangular anatomical pectoral harnesses in the fourth century, which we lose sight of in the general lacuna for most non-helmet military equipment in the third and second century. When our evidence returns, they are gone but we have this report by Polybius that poorer-but-still-propertied Romans in the heavy infantry (so not the poorest Romans fighting, those are the velites or do not serve at all) wear a bronze pectoral plate about a span square over their chest.

That admittedly quite poor evidence base leaves us with really just two options, both of them somewhat unsatisfactory.

The first option, the one taken – so far as I can tell – by the great majority of modern artistic reconstructions, is to simply read Polybius and reconstruct exactly what he says. That gives these Roman soldiers a single metal plate, typically shown mounted on a leather backing with leather straps, about 23cm square. This is, in a sense, the philologically elegant solution: it assumes nothing not in our text. The problem, from an archaeological perspective, is that this effectively requires arguing one of two cases: either first that sixth century pectoral – with its simple leather suspension – somehow survived in Italy for four centuries to be observed in action on the battlefield by Polybius in the mid-second century without leaving any other evidence at all. Not one piece of artwork, not one surviving example in the intervening period, despite the fact that we have sixty-seven fifth and fourth century examples of the later pectoral types (45 triple-disc and 22 rectangular anatomical cuirass types). That could be right. But it is a heroic assumption.

Alternately, the argument would be that the Romans at some point developed their own version of the pectoral, probably based off of the rectangular anatomical type, which discarded with the wide bronze belt, the shoulder plates and the side plates and so consisted only of a breastplate and a backplate. The problem here is simple: as Michael Burns notes in his survey of Italic pectorals, that configuration never occurs in artwork or in archaeology where site and provenance are secure. We do not have a single example of those later Southern Italic pectorals – the types that emerge after the more complex harness structure discussed above – dispensing with those pieces. Could they have done? Of course. But as of 2005 (and so far as I know, to the present), we have no evidence that anyone ever did. This solution thus requires conjuring into existence an effectively unknown armor-type. That could be right, particularly given how bad our evidence for Roman arms and armor in the Early Republic is. You can even imagine, if we had evidence of it, how we’d explain it: the broadening participation in the Roman army leads to poorer Romans to take up the Samnite cuirasses (that is, triple-disc and rectangular anatomical cuirasses) they have seen, but to jettison the ‘extra bits’ to make it cheaper and more affordable, effectively reversing a few centuries of armor development to create a stripped down breast- and back-plate only version. That’s what we’d posit, if we had some, but we don’t have some and I would argue that it runs against the rules of evidence as practices in archaeology to conjure into existence an unattested variant of an object-class (which does not developmentally link to anything else you can see) simply because it would be convenient. That is not how we assess coins or pots, I do not see why we would do it with armor.

That leaves another option: Polybius is describing the Southern Italian pectoral harness we can see, but doing so incompletely. It is not hard to imagine how the Romans will have picked up this armor: they spent the period from 343 to 290 fighting the Samnites in Campania and the Samnites are the major users of the triple-disc cuirass and Campania is where we most often see them in artwork. If the Romans weren’t already using this armor (and remember, we have no evidence at all of what armor the Romans are using in c. 300), they could certainly pick it up.

Then Polybius comes along in the mid-second century, where this armor is already dying out, largely replaced by mail, but still hanging on here or there – perhaps as hand-me-downs used by poorer Romans. One advantage of the pectoral harness’ seven-part structure is that it is a sort of ‘one-size-fits-no-one’ set that would be reasonably easy to modify or pass down to new users (unlike a Greek-style muscle cuirass, which really needs to be fitted to the wearer). Polybius then, writing about the Roman army as it existed in the Second Punic War (218-201) and, as per Rawson, using perhaps the accounts of some military tribunes, is aware of this armor’s place in the military regulations of that time and so includes it but with only minimal description. As a Greek, Polybius is used to thinking about body armor as a single piece – a breastplate, a tube-and-yoke cuirass, a mail coat – rather than a harness, so looking at a rectangular anatomical cuirass that is, perhaps 30cm by 28cm for its front plate, he describe sit simply as ” bronze plate a span on all sides.” Just as he doesn’t include the details of Roman mail armor’s shoulder doubling, he feels no real need to include the shoulder and side plates of the harness and he may not even be aware that the wide bronze belt has any real armor value at all (early archaeologists made the same error, assessing it as purely decorative, but it would offer some protection).

I think these are the three options we are left with for the pectoral: surprising sixth-century survival in the mid-second century, otherwise un-evidenced recreation of an older form out of the fourth-century rectangular anatomical cuirass or simply that it is the rectangular anatomical cuirass, harness at all, that Polybius has described incompletely. My own instinct is that the latter is probably correct. One interesting thing is that compared to, say, muscle cuirasses, these pectoral cuirasses of both the triple-disc and rectangular anatomical types were probably produced from sheet metal (sheet bronze, in particular), rather than forged from an ingot, which would have made it relatively easier to produce larger numbers of armors – equally if one opted for a style with simple decorations, amply in evidence in the archaeological record. Meanwhile, as noted the design is fairly easy to adjust for size. Jeremy Armstrong and Nicholas Harrison suggest that this in part allowed for “the expansion of warfare in Italy seen in the fourth century and marked by Rome’s wars of conquest” and I think that is right.⁸

Now in the fourth century, that armor might still be restricted to the fairly well-off. But in the late third or early second century, it is not hard seeing how the introduction of an even better but also substantially more expensive armor – mail – might ‘push’ existing pectoral cuirasses (again, of both types) down the socioeconomic ladder as the Roman first census class was required – as Polybius tells us – to acquire mail. The spare armor might ‘flow downwards’ as it were, making the affluent man’s undecorated but still shiny bronze armor of c. 350 the poor man’s pectoral of c. 150. Indeed, there is no reason it couldn’t be the very same piece of armor.

I do not think the evidence allows us to answer this question with confidence, but I do think that simple inertia has led scholars to continue reproducing the ‘traditional’ pectoral reconstruction long after it stopped being the most likely one. Instead, the most likely solution is that the Romans had continued to use, in some form, the full triple-disc or rectangular anatomical cuirass, including metal connecting plates (and perhaps the wide bronze belt) and that what Polybius was seeing was not, in fact, the small decorative chest-plates of the sixth century but rather this armor.