>> Except it wasn't. Hannibal's retreating center was deliberate. As the Romans pushed deeper, Hannibal's stronger forces on the flanks held firm, then gradually enveloped the Roman formation. The Roman army found itself surrounded, packed so densely that many couldn't even raise their weapons. What followed was slaughter on an industrial scale.
It should be noted that this is the oldest trick in the book and not one of Hannibal Barca's innovations. Wikipedia cites the Battle of Marathon (490 BC, Greeks against Persian empire) and the Battle of Hydaspes (326 BC, Alexander the Macedon and the Greeks, except the Lacedemonians, against the Indian king Porus) as two examples predating Hannibal's victory at Cannae (216 BC).
Wikipedia also cites a pincer maneouver mentioned in the epic Mahabharata, possibly mythological.
NB: the wikipedia article on the battle of Marathon casts doubt on the deliberate use of a pincer maneuver in Marathon, following from what I cant tell from a single source, the historian Lazenby who claims it was all just the result of the bravery of the Greek hoplites:
To be honest, though I'm Greek, far from feeling flattered about the high morale of my ancestors I just find the explanation hard to believe.
topkai22 · 1d ago
From the title, I thought this article was going to be about how Hannibal won an incredible number of victories in the Second Punic War, but Carthage still lost the war and had to take devasting terms of surrender.
It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.
hodgesrm · 23h ago
It's also worth noting that some of the Roman commanders were simply bad, and Hannibal himself was not without flaws.
The best example of the former is Gaius Flaminius, who was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. [0] Livy memorably describes Flaminius as "not sufficiently fearful of the authority of senate and laws, and even of the gods themselves." Hannibal took advantage of his rashness to lure Flaminius into an ambush in which he and his entire army were annihilated.
Furthermore you could argue--and may still do--that Hannibal didn't even completely win Cannae, because he failed to attack Rome after his victory. His commander of cavalry remarked at the time, "You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." [1] I'm personally inclined to think Maharbal was correct, but that's the advantage of hindsight.
These accounts are both based on Livy, who didn't let facts to get in the way of a good story.
Coincidentally, the excellent podcast, Tides of History, is currently doing a miniseries on the Punic Wars, and just covered why Cannae didn't end the war.
The Romans were actually quite smart after Cannae; they had lost a bunch of pitched battles, so they decided to shadow Hannibal's army to make his foraging logistics much more complicated (and forcing him to stay close to Southern Italy where he could easily resupply). The logistics of attacking Rome were therefore challenging at best, and the Romans used this as a delaying tactic to score wins on other fronts (since they enjoyed an overall manpower advantage).
BeFlatXIII · 14h ago
One of my favorite anecdotes my history teacher shared was of Hannibal marching to the undefended Rome, throwing a spear at the gates, and walking away under the logic that if Rome could just throw away that many soldiers at Cannae, just how many more did they leave back home to defend the city?
csunbird · 8h ago
They had two dedicated legions garrisoned in Rome, who did not participate in Cannae, from what I read (not sure)
ithkuil · 19h ago
Also, Rome defeated Carthage when Hannibal was no longer a player
dijksterhuis · 18h ago
hehe, and here i was thinking it was gonna be some scottish variant of the scunthorpe problem.
>but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end
There's quite a bit about Fabius' tactics in TFA, actually.
No comments yet
belmont_sup · 5h ago
Unless the writing changed after you post this, but the writer certainly explains how Rome won after Fabius’s new strategy of attrition and “cowardly” tactics.
makingstuffs · 8h ago
I thought it was to do with the Scottish pronunciation of ‘cannot’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AStonesThrow · 7h ago
Yeah, this is what Chief Engineer Scotty said every time Captain Kirk asked for the impossible: "I cannae give ye' any more, sir!" So I just thought we were going to max out the laws of physics again.
jkmcf · 23h ago
Rome only recovered because Hannibal didn't march on Rome.
cwmma · 23h ago
Rome recovered because if its literally unmatched in the ancient world ability to recruit armies and put orders of magnitude more men in the field as a portion of their population.
Hannibal never marched on Rome because he knew he could never take it. Doing a siege in the area most loyal to Rome would have been suicidal for his force.
csunbird · 19h ago
Hannibal was basically in a hostile land, without proper logistics support. There was no way that he can stay still and lay siege, only way he was able to survive so far was his ability to stay mobile and live off the land.
In case of siege, the Romans would not need to fight, they could simply wait until his army slowly died from attrition.
z3phyr · 11h ago
Hannibal determined that Rome received strength through the Socii, the allied city states of Rome. He wanted to isolate Rome and bring terms.
However, he
1) Failed to turn most of the socii to his side.
2) Ignored the western roman allies who were slowly eating away at Iberia.
vondur · 22h ago
I thought that was due to him not having the equipment needed to carry out a successful siege. His strategy was to defeat the Roman Army in the field and then peel away their allies in the peninsula.
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 18h ago
"It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are."
She fails to consider specifically that so-called "tech" companies also operate via "orthodoxy". There are enormous "gaps" in their "mental models and reality". As such, there are similarly-sized opportunities for "disruption" and "innovation". But as we have seen through documentary evidence, sworn testimony, and Hail Mary tactics like deliberately destroying evidence and giving false testimony in federal court, these companies rely on anti-competitive conduct. This is not merely an "inability to adapt", it is an inability to compete on the merits. One could argue the ability to effortlessly raise capital coupled with the large cash reserves of these companies results in a certain "overconfidence".
This is of course not the frame she chooses to adopt.
t43562 · 20h ago
Symbian's Operating System really was superior. After all it was fully multitasking and all operating system calls were asynchronous. And it was written in C++ so the inside of the operating system was object oriented and easy to understand.
The failure was that Nokia made 20 products at a time where Apple made 1.
The effort to support the huge amount of variation was enormous and the low spec hardware made the software extremely difficult to get working at acceptable performance. So instead of 1 bug fixed once you'd have 20 sets of partially different bugs. The decision to save money by using low spec hardware also negatively affected the way application level software was designed and made it extremely effortful.
Building it took days and they insisted on using the RVCT compilers which though better than GCC were much slower. If they'd had enough RAM on the phone and enough performance to start with then it would not have been necessary to cripple development like this to eke out performance.
This is all about Nokia's matrix organisation which they created to optimise the model that was working for them - lots of phones at different price points. Apple made it obvious that this was unnecessary. One expensive phone that made people happy was better.
There were other aspects to their failure which they did try to fix - such as having an app store and addressing user experience issues. They just couldn't do it effectively because they insisted on building many phone models.
hinkley · 20h ago
I had the fortune of being in one of the launch markets for Ricochet, which tried to sell a wireless modem back in the days of the Psion 5 and before GPRS was really a thing.
The modem had I found the highest mAh rechargeable batteries so I could use the internet in cafes. Never really got it to be a daily use device. But that is still one of my favorite keyboard designs ever. The double hinge on the clamshell was really cool.
roenxi · 1d ago
> Rome's eventual strategy—the Fabian strategy of delay, harassment, and avoiding direct confrontation—wasn't intuitive to Romans. It felt wrong.
My understanding of the story is Fabius was running the Roman strategy before Cannae and had identified all the lessons of that battle in advance. It was clear that in a pitched battle Hannibal was going to do extremely well. It is a fascinating historical example about how being right is not enough in politics, but Fabius got a unique opportunity to demonstrate that he told them so. It was clearly foreseeable and foreseen, so the entire problem the Romans had was that their leadership operating foolishly.
hueyp · 1d ago
Yes, he was appointed dictator before the consulship of varro / paullus, but his strategy proved unpopular. It makes sense: identity is hard and slow to change, and the romans had a strong identity around aggressiveness.
That said, in the defence of romans, they were also open to learning and integrating others ideas into their own. Scipio africanus absolutely learned from hannibal, and was able to layer aggressiveness, deception, and delay into his strategy. Every metaphor is imperfect, and cannae is absolutely an example of being blind / stubborn, but my quibble with the OP would be that romans didn't _really_ change their aggressive identity in the long term, and that identify continued to serve them well for 100's of years after hannibal.
Attrecomet · 1d ago
We could adapt the comparison and imagine Kodak realizing the digital business just enough to adapt a bit, but never shift their focus: Just enable digital photography to make the business case for any newcomer unviable, so they'll run out of money before they start to turn a profit, but not innovate enough to create the digital photography age we have today -- it would stay a niche market, for people for whom traditional film really wouldn't work, just like it was in the years leading up to the shift.
And then let's strain the comparison, when even overcoming a genius general like Hannibal is no longer enough, and you shift from a strategy of "who cares how many losses it takes, Rome has more men" to the crisis of the third century, and barbarian coalitions coalescing into what would become the huge tribes and proto-states of the Migration Period, when that strategy wasn't even viable for any day-to-day conflict, given the severe military manpower constraints Rome faced, and destroying your enemy in an attritional battle made way for hurting them just enough that they were amenable to a tolerable negotiated settlement.
One could imagine the widespread adoption of smartphones as the point where the original market strategy of ignoring digital photography as much as economically feasible would end, and the digital photography era would finally start.
zahlman · 23h ago
Or we could take the real example of Philip Morris successfully adapting to the declining popularity of (and increasing legislation against) cigarette smoking and the approach they've taken to cannabis (in places where it's legal).
sevensor · 1d ago
Yeah, this was bad generalship, albeit on a much bigger scale than the Republic was used to. The Romans were no strangers to military disasters, but they were unusually resilient. The conquest of Italy was far from a sure thing, and it included numerous thrashings by the volscians, aequians, sabines, veiians, et al.
hangonhn · 1d ago
> The mighty armies of Carthage? Sent packing in the First Punic War.
The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.
johnnyjeans · 1d ago
In my view, it was won because the Elder Council underestimated the threat. Had they known how the defense of Sicily was going to go, they could have easily afforded to hire 50,000 more celts and turned them out onto the Italic peninsula to raise absolute hell. But hindsight is 20/20.
The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.
The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.
primitivesuave · 16h ago
Just to add something to your last sentence - I believe I read somewhere in Polybius that the Romans had never built a warship until the whole skirmish in Sicily kicked off the first Punic War, and they managed to do so by copying a Carthaginian vessel that had washed up ashore. They made one important improvement with an articulating walkway (I seem to remember it being called "the eagle" but I'm not sure) - they could swing it around and lock it to another ship to create a bridge for foot soldiers to attack.
Most important wars in the Ancient Mediterranean had a major naval component.
It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:
a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;
and
b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]
It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.
This is so dang cool!!! No I didn’t know that the Vandals were more dangerous at sea. Thank you for sharing!!
OhMeadhbh · 1d ago
I used to talk about this at IBM, though mostly couched in the phrase "we have become an organization optimized for a business environment that no longer exists."
And if you came within 50 yards of an ROTC department in the 1980s, the staff there would drag you into a discussion of Cannae. It was one of the first battles young officers are taught. Like religious scripture, you can find something in the records to support just about any lesson (though obviously military instead of moral.)
It's good to see this tradition persist.
1oooqooq · 23h ago
they probably picked it up on the military boarding school most higher ups went to.
OhMeadhbh · 21h ago
One of the interesting things about the US military is the uniformity of training. There's an entire group in the Army called TRADOC, or Training and Doctrine Command. The US military is sort of slow to adopt new ideas, but once they do, TRADOC makes sure everyone gets them pounded into their heads. I haven't been in the Marines for close to 35 years, but I can still tell you what BAMCIS is an initialism for and could probably still call in a fire mission.
Even though leaders who attend boarding schools at West Point and Annapolis have a leg up politically, the US military has been open to good ideas coming from places other than service academies. Modern Maneuver Warfare came from a political rando. But he was a political rando with a decent idea and access to pentagon staff.
And no one seems to know who came up with the "lazy commanders" concept that is so often attributed to Moltke. It's a decidedly American concept that couldn't possibly have survived the Prussian Army of the 19th century. (The best source I've heard is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, which is a little surprising, but maybe he said it right after WWI.)
But yes... military boarding schools in Maryland and New York cast a long shadow over the US armed services.
ok_dad · 21h ago
Annapolis smacks you upside your head whenever you start to get an ego about having come from Annapolis, so most of the people I know get along fine with ROTC or other sources of officers. Generally, the political connections come from outside the experience at the academy, most of the folks I went there with were just regular people with no political connections, and today they are still just regular people. The folks who rise to the top like Captains or Admirals all have the connections they have from their families or elsewhere.
OhMeadhbh · 20h ago
Yup. My dad retired as a bird colonel and went to Baylor, then OCS. And I think Colonel Day who lived across the street came from a random university in Iowa. But my dad had more than 10 air medals, a couple DFCs, multiple-award silver star, bronze star w/ V and Colonel Day had the most amazing array of ribbons topped with a CMH. So another way is to kick ass and get a lot of awards. Though I don't know if that gets you into the General ranks. I think there's an assumption that Generals have to be pretty politically aware and people who rack up the medals and awards may be "opinionated." I mean... there's a reason John McCain retired as a Captain and not an Admiral, despite family connections.
Which is to say... I think you're onto a general rule, but like everything else there are exceptions.
4ndrewl · 1d ago
So they went from
"The strategy can win it" to
"The strategy cannae win it"?
Thrymr · 21h ago
The business side of this is largely a retelling of The Innovator's Dilemma: large successful businesses often struggle to adapt to nimble challengers that can innovate in ways that are structurally very difficult in the larger org.
cameldrv · 23h ago
I see this with the U.S. military today. If you look at what has happened in the last year in Ukraine, the Ukranians are building about 250,000 drones a month. I'm not sure the U.S. military would prevail against such a force. The U.S. has some very nice drones, but in quantities that are hundreds of times less, due to extremely expensive military procurement.
Bearstrike · 23h ago
This comment is correct as written: The U.S. is under-equipped with small UAS.
However, if you're suggesting that that the U.S. is blind to the importance of small UAS (given the context of the article), that is fortunately not the case.
The U.S. started taking note of the importance of small UAS as early as the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where their use was prevalent. The continued appearance of small UAS (and their increased volume) throughout the war in Ukraine cemented the place of small UAS in future combat.
The recognition of how small UAS are changing the game is a big reason (but not the only reason) the Army cancelled the FARA program. Manned Aviation at the scale it is done in the past is not how wars will be won. It isn't going away, but it's roles/prevalance is changing.
If you're truly interested, see the DoD memos this week that include info about the Army's shift in focus with respect to aviation and unmanned systems.
cameldrv · 20h ago
They may recognize that it's an issue, but the problem is going to be procurement and manufacturing. Ukraine is building FPV drones for about $500 each. A Switchblade 300, which is roughly comparable to these, costs $60,000.
At those prices, we will never have the kind of quantities that Ukraine and Russia have.
int_19h · 14h ago
It was $500 per unit when they started building them in the first year of the war. It's closer to $400 per unit now, AFAIK, because they have learned where to cut corners without affecting efficiency.
I wonder if UAS include small FPV drones. The language of those announcements is necessarily vague.
parrit · 16h ago
Action is more important than intent. I'm sure many at Kodak knew that digital was a threat too. Organisational resistance prevents knowledge turning into action.
ithkuil · 23h ago
It's a lot about resilience to defeat.
Some states can suffer tremendous losses and yet they can eventually prevail due to their stronger industrial capability in the long run.
That's what allowed the US to defeat the Japanese in WWII. Japan had a capable military apparatus at the start of the war but they were not able to scale their production at the same rate as the much larger US.
The only way for a smaller state to defeat a bigger one is to go all in and win quickly.
pmontra · 22h ago
That was not the case for Vietnam vs the USA or for Afghanistan vs the Soviet Union. I'm both cases there were internal anti war movements, especially in the USA, and (for the smallest state) the resolve to outwill the largest one, no matter how many years and deaths it would take.
ithkuil · 20h ago
Well of course this logic works only if both belligerants go all in.
A defender who feels an existential threat can outpace an attacker that is fighting a war far away from home without any strong stakes.
tintor · 23h ago
Expensive in peace time.
In war time or emergencies there will be immense pressure to cut through inefficiencies.
primitivesuave · 16h ago
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, and the overarching point is certainly valid (that complacency has led to some notable corporate collapses). However, for purely pedagogical reasons, I have some critique of the Punic War analogy:
- Hamilcar Barca raised his three sons Hannibal, Hazdrubal and Mago, to hate Rome from their early childhood, going so far as to make them swear an oath of eternal enmity (according to Livy). While competition in a free marketplace is much more rational and impersonal, the conflict between Hannibal and Rome was very much rooted in deep ideological hatred.
- Hannibal's strategy was to separate Rome from its allies in the Italian peninsula, which is why he did not march on Rome after Cannae. Perhaps there are realistic business strategy where the aim is to systematically dismantle any means of support that a competitor has, but they aren't well represented in the examples given.
- Quintus Fabius was originally known as Cunctator ("the delayer") as an epithet, and only much later as an agnomen, partly due to his policy that they would not negotiate with Hannibal to exchange prisoners of war. Not only that, it was illegal for the family of a captured soldier to independently negotiate for their family member's release. It's hard to understand what public opinion was like at that time, and the most reliable source (Polybius) was a Roman prisoner-of-war himself!
- The Fabian strategy as it might be applied to management wisdom would not realistically be a "delaying strategy" (i.e. wait for your competitors to run out of resources while trying to limit them as much as possible) but rather a strategy of optimizing your workforce to be more nimble and self-sufficient. Rather than have one large army that represented a single point of failure, the Fabian strategy was to have many small armies that continuously harassed Hannibal's forces for many years.
If the author of this post is reading - I love your writing style and don't intend for this to be interpreted as criticism, I just thought it was an interesting analogy that warranted further exploration.
2mlWQbCK · 1d ago
Do you really need this to explain WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? They, like many others, built their castles on Microsoft's land. Isn't it that easy? What could they have done realistically once Microsoft decided they wanted to own the market for word processors and spreadsheets?
yonisto · 1d ago
At the higher level (CEO) no one thought Windows 3.11 will succeed. So much so that even MS thought that OS/2 would do better (and it was technically superior). So neither Lotus nor WP were willing to invest in a windows version prior to the launch.
It was not an inevitable outcome.
toast0 · 23h ago
WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 ran on many platforms, including Unix (I don't know which flavors).
I don't think people would want to have to boot directly into WP to do word processing and into 123 to run spreadsheets, especially in the age of multitasking and embedding.
There wasn't some alternate strategy they could have pursued. Microsoft developed market power with DOS and Windows, which simultaneously means that productivity tools need to be offered on that platform or they can't make sales, and that Microsoft has the ability to priviledge its own productivity tools.
Maybe you could try to play hardball when Microsoft started their productivity tools and convince them to cancel it, but that would have been anti-competitive and also needs a lot of prescience to predict Microsoft's future actions.
hughw · 22h ago
But you can't turn that into a business book and speaking engagements.
The article strikes me as yet another shallow, masquerading as deep, insight you find in the business paperbacks at the airport shop.
karmakaze · 23h ago
> Roman soldiers fought in a checkerboard formation, with the front line engaging the enemy, then cycling to the back to rest while the next line moved forward. This rotation system allowed Romans to maintain constant pressure while preventing fatigue.
The first thing that comes to mind is StarCraft2 Stalker blink micro. They have shields that regenerate over time, so the front wave fights until shields are low then fall back to recharge.
The 2nd part is also covered by general SC2 tactics, concave fronts increase attacking numbers more than convex defenders'.
chasil · 18h ago
> Kodak and digital photography: Kodak actually invented the first digital camera in 1975. But the company was so committed to its film business model that it couldn't adapt its thinking when digital technology began to take over.
The opposite of this is "knife the baby" which I first heard in a stage production of (I think) The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
The Macintosh would far supplant the cash cow of the Apple ][ (Apple 2).
Jobs did it anyway.
This appears to contradict both confirmation bias and groupthink (mentioned in the article).
The article does mention that possibly one can't escape this issue totally.
But with incompleteness theorem we have a far stronger statement, that no matter how expressive the model space, there are possibilities that it will eventually encounter in its use and that it won't let anticipate. Well it doesn't say exactly that in that terms, but that's a rather straight forward interpretation of it.
hinkley · 20h ago
I don’t play milsim but I do play Age of Wonders and find the oblique order works better.
Hannibal put his strongest units on both flanks. Frederick the Great put more units on one flank, and when that broke they crushed sideways along that end of the formation. Unzippering the entire front line. It also, I suspect, put the opposing general in mortal danger sooner, since he now has to retreat when the battle is only half over.
Having your strongest on one end means you can’t get separated into two groups. Unlike a game with an omniscient general you risk losing communication with half your army if things go poorly.
But it’s more common in games, where the general is omniscient and fatigue does not exist (so running across the map takes time but not energy), to see the lines fall back at a diagonal, forcing the enemy to chase down the far end of the formation, while it falls back to the center and the center joins the flank. By the time the battle is fully joined, the overmatched flank is nearly defeated, and the formations can roll up on the enemy’s center within a turn or two, while the rest stalls for time.
zelos · 5h ago
That’s a special case of the general strategy of defeat in detail I think?
bob1029 · 1d ago
> Their mental maps of how battles should unfold were so ingrained that they couldn't recognize when the territory had changed.
This feels like the core aspect of most bad leadership I've experienced.
Organizations can turn on a dime, even very large ones, if leadership allows themselves to recognize and adapt to the new terrain.
The central challenge with this is that the adaptation process is painful, often requiring a 1v1 contest to the death with one's own ego.
w10-1 · 18h ago
Strengths are weaknesses insofar as they bias you against building alternative capabilities. This is true on the personal level as well.
As for military red teams, a more relevant example might be from Japan in the 1980's: when they did product development, they set up distinct groups that had to take different approaches and compete for the chance to be the ultimate product.
The difficulty with taking this too far is anxiety, undifferentiated fear, splitting focus and attenuating priorities. That drains you and makes you ineffective. Players too weak to confront you directly sow discord in your ranks. That brings us back to questions of loyalty and validating that the critical perspective is being adopted in good faith. (Sadly all at work today in the US.)
yonisto · 1d ago
October 7 comes to mind. The Israelis had almost all the data about the attack but convinced themselves it will not happen.
myth_drannon · 23h ago
I also thought about October '23 but also October '73. Iron Dome made the government (not idf) captive of "conception" and the multi billion dollar fence... The whole system was so fragile. Also the Yom Kippur war and the Bar-Lev line, same belief in powerful defence lines and captive of old concepts.
At least an attack on Hizbollah was out of the box thinking, which gives some credit to the establishment.
DuckConference · 1d ago
What the fuck is happening? How is some "what the spanish inquisition taught me about SAAS sales" linkedin spam getting near the top of the HN feed?
Also the author's knowledge of roman history seems to be to the level of a summary of an inaccurate youtube video.
krispyfi · 15h ago
And they are mischaracterizing the concept of "normalization of deviance".
This is a link aggregator for founders of tech startups funded by venture capital - never forget it.
sevensor · 1d ago
I think the Sicilian Expedition would have better served the point here. Cannae is a disaster, but the Republic bounces back. Syracuse was a point of no return for Athens.
frutiger · 20h ago
> It's August 2, 216 BCE
Did August exist before Augustus?
jjmarr · 20h ago
If the author said "Sextilis 2, 216 BCE" you wouldn't know it was late summer.
And BCE didn't exist before Jesus Christ (AD/BC was invented in 525). So the period-accurate translation is "Sextilis 2, the year of consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro".
1minusp · 23h ago
I thought this was about scots/scottish dialects.
roxolotl · 22h ago
One thing that’s difficult about this is knowing if accepting a differing strategy than orthodoxy will actually be successful. Absolutely effort should be put into breaking out of the Cannae Problem but it’s easy to fall into a reverse trap where simply because something is unorthodox it must mean it’s the solution to the current challenge.
senderista · 22h ago
Coincidentally, this morning I listened to a podcast that tries to take a first-person POV on this battle:
The mention of Blockbuster/Netflix reminds me of a series of articles that was posted on HN about a decade ago, but I can't find now. The thesis was that the demise of Blockbuster was overdetermined, and it was floundering long before Netflix got any degree of popularity.
fellowniusmonk · 18h ago
Also, if you know the inside ball on Netflix/Blockbuster then you've heard that blockbuster did massively fund a break into digital and streaming at a time that conceptually wasn't "too late" but Netflix was way ahead of them on classification systems and predicting lifetime customer ROI.
Netflix had cutting edge marketing automation teams that sabotaged every single dollar and every sales initiative by dumping low and _negative_ value consumers (dorm IP addresses, etc.) onto every single loss leader marketing initiative Blockbuster launched. They had "independent" free signup marketing flows for "free stuff" etc, and if they identified good clients they would be sent to Netflix, predicted "bad customers" they would actively send to blockbuster.
Netflix's "counter marketing" team was extremely successful. Indeed is a good example of a company that has had similar expertise in their org as well.
Oddly enough the short hand lesson people learn about blockbuster is both true and a slight of hand.
ArthurStacks · 13h ago
Written by someone utterly clueless
soco · 1d ago
I would say science and why not also democracy are having their Cannae moment right now. And it's painful to watch...
Qem · 1d ago
That is happening in the energy sector. US owes a lot of its initial development surge to early oil exploration. But now China is making strides in green energy, fleet electrification and renewables deployment, while the big oil lobby acts like an anchor dragging US behind, hampering advance in those areas.
ogogmad · 1d ago
#NotAllDemocracies
More broadly, I think that Americans have been too arrogant and have been prone to thinking that the only part of the world which matters stops at their own borders.
FredPret · 1d ago
This is a natural consequence of:
- major oceans on two sides, very similar country on one side, and only one border with a truly different country
- 25% of the world's economy
- very easy to travel, work, and do business internally across the US
- some cultural and lots of climate diversity inside the US
All of which means you can live a very full and happy life without ever leaving the States or even thinking about what happens outside of it.
readthenotes1 · 1d ago
In support of "democracy", some States tried to prevent Trump from being on the 2024 ballot--that is, to prevent the demos from selecting who they wanted.
There are several similar stories from Europe where the putatively democratically elected leaders are working to save the demos from itself.
So #NotAllDemocracies, but more than there should be
Attrecomet · 1d ago
It's not horribly unusual for a system that can be called democratic with every right to exclude those that have repeatedly stated, and shown in action, that they would not actually abide by any result that goes against them. It's the paradox of intolerance right there -- it's not those defending the rules of democracy that are damaging it.
dudinax · 17h ago
A democracy has to protect itself from coup attempts
It should be noted that this is the oldest trick in the book and not one of Hannibal Barca's innovations. Wikipedia cites the Battle of Marathon (490 BC, Greeks against Persian empire) and the Battle of Hydaspes (326 BC, Alexander the Macedon and the Greeks, except the Lacedemonians, against the Indian king Porus) as two examples predating Hannibal's victory at Cannae (216 BC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pincer_movement
Wikipedia also cites a pincer maneouver mentioned in the epic Mahabharata, possibly mythological.
NB: the wikipedia article on the battle of Marathon casts doubt on the deliberate use of a pincer maneuver in Marathon, following from what I cant tell from a single source, the historian Lazenby who claims it was all just the result of the bravery of the Greek hoplites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon#Conclusions
To be honest, though I'm Greek, far from feeling flattered about the high morale of my ancestors I just find the explanation hard to believe.
It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.
The best example of the former is Gaius Flaminius, who was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. [0] Livy memorably describes Flaminius as "not sufficiently fearful of the authority of senate and laws, and even of the gods themselves." Hannibal took advantage of his rashness to lure Flaminius into an ambush in which he and his entire army were annihilated.
Furthermore you could argue--and may still do--that Hannibal didn't even completely win Cannae, because he failed to attack Rome after his victory. His commander of cavalry remarked at the time, "You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." [1] I'm personally inclined to think Maharbal was correct, but that's the advantage of hindsight.
These accounts are both based on Livy, who didn't let facts to get in the way of a good story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Trasimene
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae#Aftermath
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/season/5/?epPage=...
(cannae = cannot)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_Scottish...
There's quite a bit about Fabius' tactics in TFA, actually.
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Hannibal never marched on Rome because he knew he could never take it. Doing a siege in the area most loyal to Rome would have been suicidal for his force.
In case of siege, the Romans would not need to fight, they could simply wait until his army slowly died from attrition.
However, he 1) Failed to turn most of the socii to his side. 2) Ignored the western roman allies who were slowly eating away at Iberia.
She fails to consider specifically that so-called "tech" companies also operate via "orthodoxy". There are enormous "gaps" in their "mental models and reality". As such, there are similarly-sized opportunities for "disruption" and "innovation". But as we have seen through documentary evidence, sworn testimony, and Hail Mary tactics like deliberately destroying evidence and giving false testimony in federal court, these companies rely on anti-competitive conduct. This is not merely an "inability to adapt", it is an inability to compete on the merits. One could argue the ability to effortlessly raise capital coupled with the large cash reserves of these companies results in a certain "overconfidence".
This is of course not the frame she chooses to adopt.
The failure was that Nokia made 20 products at a time where Apple made 1.
The effort to support the huge amount of variation was enormous and the low spec hardware made the software extremely difficult to get working at acceptable performance. So instead of 1 bug fixed once you'd have 20 sets of partially different bugs. The decision to save money by using low spec hardware also negatively affected the way application level software was designed and made it extremely effortful.
Building it took days and they insisted on using the RVCT compilers which though better than GCC were much slower. If they'd had enough RAM on the phone and enough performance to start with then it would not have been necessary to cripple development like this to eke out performance.
This is all about Nokia's matrix organisation which they created to optimise the model that was working for them - lots of phones at different price points. Apple made it obvious that this was unnecessary. One expensive phone that made people happy was better.
There were other aspects to their failure which they did try to fix - such as having an app store and addressing user experience issues. They just couldn't do it effectively because they insisted on building many phone models.
The modem had I found the highest mAh rechargeable batteries so I could use the internet in cafes. Never really got it to be a daily use device. But that is still one of my favorite keyboard designs ever. The double hinge on the clamshell was really cool.
My understanding of the story is Fabius was running the Roman strategy before Cannae and had identified all the lessons of that battle in advance. It was clear that in a pitched battle Hannibal was going to do extremely well. It is a fascinating historical example about how being right is not enough in politics, but Fabius got a unique opportunity to demonstrate that he told them so. It was clearly foreseeable and foreseen, so the entire problem the Romans had was that their leadership operating foolishly.
That said, in the defence of romans, they were also open to learning and integrating others ideas into their own. Scipio africanus absolutely learned from hannibal, and was able to layer aggressiveness, deception, and delay into his strategy. Every metaphor is imperfect, and cannae is absolutely an example of being blind / stubborn, but my quibble with the OP would be that romans didn't _really_ change their aggressive identity in the long term, and that identify continued to serve them well for 100's of years after hannibal.
And then let's strain the comparison, when even overcoming a genius general like Hannibal is no longer enough, and you shift from a strategy of "who cares how many losses it takes, Rome has more men" to the crisis of the third century, and barbarian coalitions coalescing into what would become the huge tribes and proto-states of the Migration Period, when that strategy wasn't even viable for any day-to-day conflict, given the severe military manpower constraints Rome faced, and destroying your enemy in an attritional battle made way for hurting them just enough that they were amenable to a tolerable negotiated settlement. One could imagine the widespread adoption of smartphones as the point where the original market strategy of ignoring digital photography as much as economically feasible would end, and the digital photography era would finally start.
The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.
The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.
The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.
Edit: It was called a raven or corvus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)
It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:
a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;
and
b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]
It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cartagena_(461)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cape_Bon_(468)
And if you came within 50 yards of an ROTC department in the 1980s, the staff there would drag you into a discussion of Cannae. It was one of the first battles young officers are taught. Like religious scripture, you can find something in the records to support just about any lesson (though obviously military instead of moral.)
It's good to see this tradition persist.
Even though leaders who attend boarding schools at West Point and Annapolis have a leg up politically, the US military has been open to good ideas coming from places other than service academies. Modern Maneuver Warfare came from a political rando. But he was a political rando with a decent idea and access to pentagon staff.
And no one seems to know who came up with the "lazy commanders" concept that is so often attributed to Moltke. It's a decidedly American concept that couldn't possibly have survived the Prussian Army of the 19th century. (The best source I've heard is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, which is a little surprising, but maybe he said it right after WWI.)
But yes... military boarding schools in Maryland and New York cast a long shadow over the US armed services.
Which is to say... I think you're onto a general rule, but like everything else there are exceptions.
However, if you're suggesting that that the U.S. is blind to the importance of small UAS (given the context of the article), that is fortunately not the case.
The U.S. started taking note of the importance of small UAS as early as the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where their use was prevalent. The continued appearance of small UAS (and their increased volume) throughout the war in Ukraine cemented the place of small UAS in future combat.
The recognition of how small UAS are changing the game is a big reason (but not the only reason) the Army cancelled the FARA program. Manned Aviation at the scale it is done in the past is not how wars will be won. It isn't going away, but it's roles/prevalance is changing.
If you're truly interested, see the DoD memos this week that include info about the Army's shift in focus with respect to aviation and unmanned systems.
At those prices, we will never have the kind of quantities that Ukraine and Russia have.
I wonder if UAS include small FPV drones. The language of those announcements is necessarily vague.
Some states can suffer tremendous losses and yet they can eventually prevail due to their stronger industrial capability in the long run.
That's what allowed the US to defeat the Japanese in WWII. Japan had a capable military apparatus at the start of the war but they were not able to scale their production at the same rate as the much larger US.
The only way for a smaller state to defeat a bigger one is to go all in and win quickly.
A defender who feels an existential threat can outpace an attacker that is fighting a war far away from home without any strong stakes.
In war time or emergencies there will be immense pressure to cut through inefficiencies.
- Hamilcar Barca raised his three sons Hannibal, Hazdrubal and Mago, to hate Rome from their early childhood, going so far as to make them swear an oath of eternal enmity (according to Livy). While competition in a free marketplace is much more rational and impersonal, the conflict between Hannibal and Rome was very much rooted in deep ideological hatred.
- Hannibal's strategy was to separate Rome from its allies in the Italian peninsula, which is why he did not march on Rome after Cannae. Perhaps there are realistic business strategy where the aim is to systematically dismantle any means of support that a competitor has, but they aren't well represented in the examples given.
- Quintus Fabius was originally known as Cunctator ("the delayer") as an epithet, and only much later as an agnomen, partly due to his policy that they would not negotiate with Hannibal to exchange prisoners of war. Not only that, it was illegal for the family of a captured soldier to independently negotiate for their family member's release. It's hard to understand what public opinion was like at that time, and the most reliable source (Polybius) was a Roman prisoner-of-war himself!
- The Fabian strategy as it might be applied to management wisdom would not realistically be a "delaying strategy" (i.e. wait for your competitors to run out of resources while trying to limit them as much as possible) but rather a strategy of optimizing your workforce to be more nimble and self-sufficient. Rather than have one large army that represented a single point of failure, the Fabian strategy was to have many small armies that continuously harassed Hannibal's forces for many years.
If the author of this post is reading - I love your writing style and don't intend for this to be interpreted as criticism, I just thought it was an interesting analogy that warranted further exploration.
I don't think people would want to have to boot directly into WP to do word processing and into 123 to run spreadsheets, especially in the age of multitasking and embedding.
There wasn't some alternate strategy they could have pursued. Microsoft developed market power with DOS and Windows, which simultaneously means that productivity tools need to be offered on that platform or they can't make sales, and that Microsoft has the ability to priviledge its own productivity tools.
Maybe you could try to play hardball when Microsoft started their productivity tools and convince them to cancel it, but that would have been anti-competitive and also needs a lot of prescience to predict Microsoft's future actions.
The article strikes me as yet another shallow, masquerading as deep, insight you find in the business paperbacks at the airport shop.
The first thing that comes to mind is StarCraft2 Stalker blink micro. They have shields that regenerate over time, so the front wave fights until shields are low then fall back to recharge.
The 2nd part is also covered by general SC2 tactics, concave fronts increase attacking numbers more than convex defenders'.
The opposite of this is "knife the baby" which I first heard in a stage production of (I think) The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
The Macintosh would far supplant the cash cow of the Apple ][ (Apple 2).
Jobs did it anyway.
This appears to contradict both confirmation bias and groupthink (mentioned in the article).
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/theater/reviews/the-agony...
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/microsoft-asked-appl...
But with incompleteness theorem we have a far stronger statement, that no matter how expressive the model space, there are possibilities that it will eventually encounter in its use and that it won't let anticipate. Well it doesn't say exactly that in that terms, but that's a rather straight forward interpretation of it.
Hannibal put his strongest units on both flanks. Frederick the Great put more units on one flank, and when that broke they crushed sideways along that end of the formation. Unzippering the entire front line. It also, I suspect, put the opposing general in mortal danger sooner, since he now has to retreat when the battle is only half over.
Having your strongest on one end means you can’t get separated into two groups. Unlike a game with an omniscient general you risk losing communication with half your army if things go poorly.
But it’s more common in games, where the general is omniscient and fatigue does not exist (so running across the map takes time but not energy), to see the lines fall back at a diagonal, forcing the enemy to chase down the far end of the formation, while it falls back to the center and the center joins the flank. By the time the battle is fully joined, the overmatched flank is nearly defeated, and the formations can roll up on the enemy’s center within a turn or two, while the rest stalls for time.
This feels like the core aspect of most bad leadership I've experienced.
Organizations can turn on a dime, even very large ones, if leadership allows themselves to recognize and adapt to the new terrain.
The central challenge with this is that the adaptation process is painful, often requiring a 1v1 contest to the death with one's own ego.
As for military red teams, a more relevant example might be from Japan in the 1980's: when they did product development, they set up distinct groups that had to take different approaches and compete for the chance to be the ultimate product.
The difficulty with taking this too far is anxiety, undifferentiated fear, splitting focus and attenuating priorities. That drains you and makes you ineffective. Players too weak to confront you directly sow discord in your ranks. That brings us back to questions of loyalty and validating that the critical perspective is being adopted in good faith. (Sadly all at work today in the US.)
At least an attack on Hizbollah was out of the box thinking, which gives some credit to the establishment.
Also the author's knowledge of roman history seems to be to the level of a summary of an inaccurate youtube video.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
Did August exist before Augustus?
And BCE didn't exist before Jesus Christ (AD/BC was invented in 525). So the period-accurate translation is "Sextilis 2, the year of consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro".
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-expe...
Netflix had cutting edge marketing automation teams that sabotaged every single dollar and every sales initiative by dumping low and _negative_ value consumers (dorm IP addresses, etc.) onto every single loss leader marketing initiative Blockbuster launched. They had "independent" free signup marketing flows for "free stuff" etc, and if they identified good clients they would be sent to Netflix, predicted "bad customers" they would actively send to blockbuster.
Netflix's "counter marketing" team was extremely successful. Indeed is a good example of a company that has had similar expertise in their org as well.
Oddly enough the short hand lesson people learn about blockbuster is both true and a slight of hand.
More broadly, I think that Americans have been too arrogant and have been prone to thinking that the only part of the world which matters stops at their own borders.
- major oceans on two sides, very similar country on one side, and only one border with a truly different country
- 25% of the world's economy
- very easy to travel, work, and do business internally across the US
- some cultural and lots of climate diversity inside the US
All of which means you can live a very full and happy life without ever leaving the States or even thinking about what happens outside of it.
There are several similar stories from Europe where the putatively democratically elected leaders are working to save the demos from itself.
So #NotAllDemocracies, but more than there should be