alt Hacker NewsThis would be an interesting debate, but it is after midnight here, so I will be going to sleep shortly.
Basically, yes, but also no. There is a huge difference between being able to mobilize a large portion of your population for a short time vs. keeping the standing army indefinitely. With the latter, various intrinsic economic limitations will bite. Rome started with the "big temporary armies" model, but slowly transitioned into "big permanent armies" model, which required a lot of support from civilians.
Professional soldiers are economically unproductive; they have to be fed, clothed and provided with weapons. Just the necessary smelting of iron in order to equip a single legion would be a lot of work for blacksmiths, miners and lumberjacks who produced the necessary wood for charcoal. If a premodern empire can field tens of thousands of iron-clad professional soldiers indefinitely, it must have a lot of civilian workers supporting that army. Literally millions.
The precipitous drop in the size of field armies in the Early Middle Ages is a good indication of the precipitous drop of the entire economy which would prop them up.
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> Rome started with the "big temporary armies" model, but slowly transitioned into "big permanent armies" model, which required a lot of support from civilians.
What does that have to do with what they were doing in the 3rd century BC?
Or maybe a drop in military spending?
Germany under Hitler had a big army, it now has a small one. It's not because they population or economy collapsed. See also modern Russia where they are cranking up the army in spite of declining population and an iffy economy. It seems more about having a dictator who wants to do wars.
>If a premodern empire can field tens of thousands of iron-clad professional soldiers indefinitely, it must have a lot of civilian workers supporting that army.
Or it must continually conquer new territories to plunder and tax. And that was the Roman model. But finally the empire got too big to manage with the technology of the day. They weren't able to conquer new territories and that meant they could not afford the huge professiomal army. Which led to the collapse of the empire in the west. Or you could argue that it just morphed into the Roman catholic church.
(Not a historian, just been reading a bit about this recently)