Broadsheet

Jobs might be forgiven for misspelling Rubinstein’s surname in his email to Colligan. Everyone called him “Ruby”. Perhaps akin to misspelling Greg Joswiak’s name as “Jozwiak” because everyone just calls him “Joz”. ↩︎
I think it’s more likely that Rubinstein wore out his welcome at Apple. Here, I turn to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, which has some remarkable reporting on the situation. Quoting from Chapter 35, “Round One” (which chapter title refers to Jobs’s first bout with the cancer that eventually did him in), pp. 459–460 in the print edition:

In the fall of 2005, after returning from his medical leave, Jobs tapped Cook to become Apple’s chief operating officer. They were flying together to Japan. Jobs didn’t really ask Cook; he simply turned to him and said, “I’ve decided to make you COO.”

Around that time, Jobs’s old friends Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian, the hardware and software lieutenants who had been recruited during the 1997 restoration, decided to leave. In Tevanian’s case, he had made a lot of money and was ready to quit working. “Avie is a brilliant guy and a nice guy, much more grounded than Ruby and doesn’t carry the big ego,” said Jobs. “It was a huge loss for us when Avie left. He’s a one-of-a-kind person — a genius.”

Rubinstein’s case was a little more contentious. He was upset by Cook’s ascendency and frazzled after working for nine years under Jobs. Their shouting matches became more frequent. There was also a substantive issue: Rubinstein was repeatedly clashing with Jony Ive, who used to work for him and now reported directly to Jobs. Ive was always pushing the envelope with designs that dazzled but were difficult to engineer. It was Rubinstein’s job to get the hardware built in a practical way, so he often balked. He was by nature cautious. “In the end, Ruby’s from HP,” said Jobs. “And he never delved deep, he wasn’t aggressive.”

There was, for example, the case of the screws that held the handles on the Power Mac G4. Ive decided that they should have a certain polish and shape. But Rubinstein thought that would be “astronomically” costly and delay the project for weeks, so he vetoed the idea. His job was to deliver products, which meant making trade-offs. Ive viewed that approach as inimical to innovation, so he would go both above him to Jobs and also around him to the midlevel engineers. “Ruby would say, ‘You can’t do this, it will delay,’ and I would say, ‘I think we can,” Ive recalled. “And I would know, because I had worked behind his back with the product teams.” In this and other cases, Jobs came down on Ive’s side.

At times Ive and Rubinstein got into arguments that almost led to blows. Finally Ive told Jobs, “It’s him or me.” Jobs chose Ive. By that point Rubinstein was ready to leave.

There’s a strong whiff of “You can’t fire me, I’m retiring” in the air when someone claims they were ready to leave after Jony Ive issued a “him or me” ultimatum. That’s like saying you’re ready to leave the pub after the bartender rings the bell for last call.

I’d end this footnote here, but the very next passage is too apt to omit:

He and his wife had bought property in Mexico, and he wanted time off to build a home there. He eventually went to work for Palm, which was trying to match Apple’s iPhone. Jobs was so furious that Palm was hiring some of his former employees that he complained to Bono, who was a cofounder of a private equity group, led by the former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, that had bought a controlling stake in Palm. Bono sent Jobs a note back saying, “You should chill out about this. This is like the Beatles ringing up because Herman and the Hermits have taken one of their road crew.” Jobs later admitted that he had overreacted. “The fact that they completely failed salves that wound,” he said.

↩︎︎
One can argue that this whole situation never would have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive, because if he were, Jony Ive, Tang Tan, Evans Hankey, et al. would still be at Apple, and there would be no io. But that’s like saying maybe if someone in the 1910s had given Hitler more encouragement as a painter, none of this would have happened either. I enjoy fictional alternative histories as much as the next guy, but I’m more interested in the question of how Jobs would respond, right now, to the actual current situation. ↩︎︎
A small irony is that the look-and-feel of Windows 95 borrowed much more from NeXTStep than it did from System 7. The look and layout of windows themselves; the use of gray, not white, as the default background color for the UI chrome; the chiseled 3D look — it’s almost inarguable that the Windows 95 look was ripped off from NeXT. Microsoft even copied from NeXT the window-close button going in the top right, not top left, and marking it with an “×” glyph, which the Mac never did. ↩︎︎

Lina Khan, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden, is one of the smartest and most influential thinkers about antitrust in our high-tech era, and one who has blazed new paths in policymaking. I spoke with her at a Graduate Center event back in March, and caught up with her again earlier this week for another enlightening conversation.

For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube.

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Lina Khan

(recorded 7/14/26)

Paul Krugman: This week, I managed to get to talk to Lina Khan, who was the incredibly influential and smart head of the FTC in the previous administration—with the current administration doing everything it can to undo her work. She played an important role in the Mamdani transition team and has had a lot of smart thoughts about technology and policy right now. And I thought we could talk for a bit about this, well, it’s always a bizarre moment these days, but this is the bizarre moment we’re in. And so, hi.

Lina Khan: Hi, great to be here.

Krugman: I want to get into technology and AI, but I wanted to just start with something that just happened. One of your special causes, which is “Click to Cancel,” which you tried to get as a national policy, just went through in New York City. Can you talk a little bit about what was achieved here and why?

Khan: I’d be happy to. So, last week, the Mamdani administration announced that they are moving forward with two consumer protection initiatives. One was the finalization of a “Click to Cancel” rule, which basically says that businesses have to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one.

This rule is responding to the fact that we’ve seen a pretty significant pivot to service-based revenue, and more and more companies are relying on subscriptions as a regular business revenue line. And that has created an opportunity for firms to create a lot of friction when people are trying to unsubscribe. A lot of people can relate to situations where it’s very easy to sign up, or sometimes you’re enrolled without even your full knowledge or consent. But then once you try to cancel, companies can make you jump through all sorts of hoops. Maybe you signed up with one click online, but to cancel you have to phone somebody, except the hours are really restricted or there’s nobody there to pick up the phone. In some instances, you may actually have to go in person.

When we were at the FTC, we got thousands upon thousands of complaints, and people shared how, even during the pandemic when they were looking to cancel their gym membership, some gyms required that they go in person even after they had left the state. So this has been a growing problem, and people lose real money from it. I mean, there are estimates that, in New York City alone, people could be collectively losing over $160 million a year. So this rule, which is going to go into effect in October, is an incredibly important step forward.

The administration also announced that they’re going to be proposing a rule to tackle junk fees. These are the fees that oftentimes show up at the very end of a transaction, even though they were not reflected in the original advertised price. Sometimes they’re called convenience fees, service fees, or amenity fees. And these are non-discretionary; people have no choice but to see them included. Companies will, again, often not advertise them on the front end, which is both deceptive for consumers but also gives them an unfair competitive advantage, because honest businesses that are marketing the all-in price then lose business to those firms that instead do pricing where they market a lower price and then add all the additional fees at the end.

So, I’m really thrilled that the Mamdani administration is moving forward on these two initiatives, especially because we have seen some very serious backsliding at the federal level, where consumer protection initiatives have either been abandoned entirely or powerful companies that have connections to the White House can basically pay their way out of legal accountability. And so it’s incredibly important to see cities and states fill in that gap.

Krugman: I couldn’t actually quite figure this out, but there’s this other initiative from Mamdani: public interest technology. Are you involved with that?

Khan: It is something we considered during the transition and wanted to set up the administration with the option. But, yeah, this is basically... they will be creating a team that is going to be laser-focused on improving service delivery—technological service delivery, digital service delivery—to New Yorkers. And so there are all sorts of online portals that people have to interact with that are not really optimized; really important city websites that are still optimized for desktop, and when people try to use them on their phones, they break down. And so there’s going to be a lean team of technologists designed to go in and make sure that across city services, people are having a good experience and that these things are easy to use and functional for people.

I would say the effort has some analogs to what was done at the federal level with the U.S. Digital Service, which was a team in the White House of technologists back in the Obama era. When I was at the Federal Trade Commission, we similarly brought in a team of technologists, and we’ve seen that, especially as more and more commerce goes online, and more and more government services go online, it’s incredibly important to have technologists on board designed to make sure that these things are easy to use and well-functioning.

Krugman: I’ve seen a couple of areas where essentially governmental functions are initially done by trying to buy off-the-shelf technologies or bring in Microsoft or whatever. And I know of at least a couple of examples where it was a huge improvement just getting their own people because they kind of knew what people actually needed. So, I don’t know if you’re thinking along those lines or where it goes.

Khan: I think you’re right that it does get to this deeper issue of what does it mean for the government to have capabilities and to actually build those capabilities in-house. I think we’ve seen various eras where the government will largely rely on outsourcing, relying on various consulting firms. And there’s a first-order question as to whether the government is really getting a good return on investment there. I think we’ve all seen the news stories about New York City having paid millions of dollars to McKinsey to produce a report saying, effectively, “Put your garbage in garbage cans.”

But beyond that, I think over-reliance on outside consulting firms can also deprive the state of building in-house state capacity, which can be incredibly important for the long term. And so, again, I think the administration, through bringing some of these functions in-house, is also going to be investing in those long-term capabilities within government.

Krugman: Yeah. I’ll give you, just quickly, my own example. There are bigger ones, but everybody doing sort of macroeconomics now is utterly reliant on this thing called FRED, the Federal Reserve Economic Data, from the St. Louis Fed, of all places. And the thing is, they did not outsource. They just asked some of their own people, who actually knew what working economists needed, to produce a website that is really optimized for people like me, and that’s just incredibly helpful. I assume that there are many, many examples where that could be done.

Khan: Yeah. I mean, the other risk that you create if you are entirely dependent on some external actor is that a single business decision can render some of those products useless or severely degrade the capability overnight, or it turns out that there’s a new subscription and so there are all these additional costs. And so, either diversifying those inputs or creating more in-house capability is important insurance around some of that private power.

Krugman: Okay. And New York City would certainly be among the world’s 20 largest economies so this is not a small issue.

But these days, everyone is talking about AI all the time, in terms of the economics and a lot of political stuff. You were doing a lot of work on AI at the FTC, and you have written quite a lot since. I wanted to pick your brain a bit, but why don’t you tell me where we were going before the change in administrations on AI policy, and we can move forward from there.

Khan: At the Federal Trade Commission, we were really focused on both the competition implications of artificial intelligence technologies, as well as some of the protection implications. On the competition front, we were really focused on, first of all, understanding: what is the stack? What is each layer of the AI supply chain of sorts? And how do we make sure we understand what each of the economic properties are across the board?

And so you have the chips, you have these hyperscalers, you have cloud infrastructure, you have these models, and then you have various apps and services built on top of those models. And what we’ve seen in other markets, including Web 2.0 and in digital markets, is that it can be very easy for one of these layers to become monopolized because of certain network effects, and because of economic properties that lend those markets to tip quickly. If you allow monopolization without additional rules—such as common carriage or requiring equal access on equal terms—it can really result in other layers and other markets similarly becoming monopolized or otherwise becoming distorted, rather than principles of open and free and fair competition being really what’s allowing more of this economy to thrive and develop.

And so we were really looking at the AI stuff through that lens, trying to understand: are we already seeing certain layers where there are bottlenecks or gatekeepers emerging, and could that undermine fair and free competition in other layers in ways that could deprive the public of the full promise and innovation of some of these technologies? And so we had various investigations underway based on what we were hearing from market participants. But at the end of the day, we wanted to, again, make sure that inasmuch as this is a technological inflection point, there could be a lot of opportunity. How do we make sure that the best ideas have the opportunity to win, rather than existing gatekeepers using their power to basically pick and choose winners and losers in a way that results in more self-interested outcomes for them at the expense of the public and for the market as a whole?

At that point, we were hearing various concerns about Nvidia and various ways that they had become a core gatekeeper. We’ve heard concerns about the hyperscalers and ways in which firms that run cloud computing could be getting privileged access across the AI supply chain. And so those were some of the types of concerns that we were hearing at that time.

Beyond that, we were looking at potential consumer protection abuses of these technologies, ranging from abuse of people’s personal data. For example, with more and more AI firms looking to train their models, they’ve become even more hungry for data, including people’s personal data. And so we were starting to see things like Google [Workspace] or other types of service providers sometimes changing the terms of service, saying that they could now use the content of, say, people’s inboxes or their Google Docs to now start training their models without attendant protections for people’s data. And people had not been setting up their inbox or writing emails in a way where they were anticipating that suddenly a company like Google could be using all of that for training data. And so we made it very clear that these types of after-the-fact changes in terms of service could, in some instances, be illegal.

We were also focused on ferreting out how some of these AI tools could be turbocharging fraud and scams. And so we were already seeing at that time: an uptick in complaints around things like voice cloning fraud, the way that some of these AI tools can be used to mimic somebody’s voice. You call somebody’s grandparent, pretend their grandkid is in distress and needs thousands of dollars wired over immediately. We were seeing this as a growing vector of fraud that people were starting to lose a lot of money to. And so we wanted to make sure, at the very least, that these companies knew that the existing laws on the books, both from an antitrust and competition perspective as well as from a data privacy and consumer protection perspective, still applied.

Sometimes in Washington, there can be a pattern where firms try to use new technological moments to argue that existing laws are invalid or out of date and don’t apply. And we wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding about that—that the existing legal tools in place absolutely applied.

The other thing we heard on the competition side was this issue of “interlocking directorates.” We were seeing a lot of AI partnerships and a lot of investments, famously Microsoft and OpenAI, and a whole bunch of other ones between Google and Amazon. And there was a lot of murkiness around what were the actual terms of these partnerships and investments, and could some of these investments, in turn, give outsized control to some of the existing monopolists over competitively strategic decisions? And so that was another area where we were looking under the hood to try to understand what’s really going on here in terms of these financial relationships.

Krugman: Going back into history, the trusts that originated “antitrust” as a term... that was kind of overlapping, interlocking control. It was basically when you had the same people overseeing many companies. I’m perhaps doing violence to the history here, but am I right?

Khan: Yeah, that’s right. The trust referred to basically a form of corporate control where this trust vehicle would basically roll up various entities and have financial control over various enterprises.

Krugman: Yeah. And the Standard Oil trust was the most famous, but by no means the only one. And did you have specifics about the kinds of laws that they wanted to put by the wayside? I mean, I’m sure, but just give it a little concreteness for us.

Khan: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the legal issues that is still percolating is this question around copyright. A lot of these models have been trained on existing information that is online, but much of that information has copyright associated with it. And so we would also hear from a lot of authors, artists, graphic designers, and people who produce content for a living who said they woke up one day to find out that this model had been trained on their life’s work and was now suddenly spitting out content in some instances that was competing with them. And yet, it was trained on them. And then because some of these firms controlled how search results are listed, they were now losing business to the AI version of their work.

And so there are some really serious, meaty legal issues embedded there around unfair competition and copyright. This is an instance where, in existing litigation, some of the AI companies are arguing for “fair use”—that they were basically able to scan and train on all of this information because it was effectively in the public commons. And so some of these issues are still being litigated.

But it’s really important to think about what the long-term incentives will be for newsrooms, for example, to still invest in news production and investigations if they’re not able to actually recoup their investments because it’s then just being swallowed up by some AI model. And so there are some serious long-term questions here around whether we are structuring our markets and structuring compensation structures in ways that are still going to incentivize the production of news or information content that we, as a society, decide is valuable.

Krugman: Yeah. One thing I’m hearing from people in the news business is that the rise of AI in search is sort of suppressing links. Instead of getting a link to the deep investigative report by The New York Times or Bloomberg or whatever, you get an AI summary of what was in it, and people never go to the links. That’s the kind of thing, I guess, we’re worried about in many domains.

Khan: That’s exactly right. And this is something that we had been seeing with Google even before 2022 or 2023, where they were giving privileged search results to some of their own vertical products in reviews, maps, or other types of search and travel verticals. But this problem is now being turbocharged, precisely for the reason that you said, and some of the statistics that are coming from publishers around just what a dramatic drop-off there has been in terms of search traffic to some of these publishers’ websites is just staggering.

And so we see: before, Google used to be a turnstile to the rest of the web, where Google was the starting point so you could get to other destinations. And now, especially with more of these AI tools summarizing what’s on other websites and keeping people just within Google’s ecosystem, it’s depriving all of these other publishers of the traffic and oxygen that they would need to continue being financially viable, even as those other publishers and producers are the ones that are creating the information and the content in the first place. And so I think these are going to be some serious challenges.

Krugman: Yeah, this is something where people that I know fairly well are actually quite seriously scared that their financial models are being undermined at lightning speed. One thing you can say about AI is that whatever is happening, it happens really fast.

Okay. The particular thing that got me wanting to do this interview was an Op-Ed that you published in The Times, I guess soon after leaving the FTC. That was February 2025. Although when I looked and saw that that was the date on it, I was shocked because, in my memory, it was so prescient that it had to have been written like late last year. But it was actually written at the beginning of last year. It was under the headline, “Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants.” Can you summarize what you were saying there? Because it does seem incredibly relevant to where we are right now.

Khan: So, this was a piece that I wrote looking at the history of innovation in Silicon Valley and noting that, historically, the most paradigm-breaking innovations have come from markets that have allowed for real competition and allowed for new ideas to come in, get funded, and then to be able to really break into the market and compete on the merits of whether businesses or consumers like their products and services, as opposed to markets where you have gatekeepers basically deciding who gets to enter and who doesn’t get to enter.

And so I was noting in the piece that at this moment of growing investment in AI, we would do well to want to double down on that commitment to competition, rather than allowing the monopolies and incumbents of Web 2.0 to be the ones that get to decide who gets to come into this market and who gets to compete or not.

One of the catalysts for my writing this piece was the emergence of DeepSeek. This was an AI firm that originated in China. And it really shocked Silicon Valley and Wall Street when its model was rolled out, because it mirrored or rivalled the sophistication of American models but was able to do that with much more efficiency. And it really, I think, was a wake-up call from where I sat as to what it would mean to allow the American giants to just control these markets and innovate on the trajectories that they were determining, rather than allow for real competition.

And I think with the American AI giants, there’s this additional question around conflict of interest. Again, some of these very firms—the Microsofts, the Amazons, the Googles—have their own cloud computing businesses. And inasmuch as these AI models are heavily relying on cloud computing, I think there’s a question to be asked as to whether these firms are going to have the right incentives when it comes to wanting AI models to be efficient, if they are simultaneously making a lot of money from models that are not efficient. And so I think the DeepSeek revelation was something that brought that conflict of interest to bear.

Krugman: I sometimes hate that everything gets formulated in terms of competition with China, but at least part of the issue now is the idea of “national champions”—and we get to that in a minute or two—but that they are arguably, at least, putting us behind in competition with China. And then again, a lot of that has come to a head recently. People started to say, “Oh my God, we’re spending too much on tokens,” and a fair bit of turning to Chinese models. And that’s a huge move. And that was why, when I look back and read your piece, the date just popped out at me. I can’t believe you wrote that 18 months ago.

Khan: Yeah. I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. And there are some real historical parallels here when it comes to certain technological companies insisting that these markets are inevitably going to be monopolistic, and therefore the government should treat them as “national champions” and support their monopolization.

The piece also mentions Boeing as a cautionary tale here. There was a merger in the late 1990s that the U.S. government approved, where we allowed Boeing to buy up their last U.S. rival, McDonnell Douglas. And that merger, and what followed, basically has led us down a path where you then had Boeing’s planes falling apart, and people have died. And I think it’s unfortunate to have to admit that the lack of competition there probably played a role in Boeing not having to invest as much. There were other factors in terms of the culture internally—moving away from one that focused as much on engineering to instead one focused more on a McKinsey-type culture based on consulting—but I think we’ve seen how a lack of competition in some cases has really major consequences.

Krugman: Yeah. This is one of the things which I love about your analytical work: the interplay between the cutting edge and history. Because everything is new, but on the other hand, we’ve been here before. And I thought that the Boeing example, as how things would go wrong, was a little bit revelatory.

I know that you have a bunch of other things on your plate, but to the extent you’re following AI—and you may be following it more closely than I would imagine—where are we in that process now? Has the U.S. AI sector managed to get sloppy with monopoly already? I mean, everything now seems to happen at ten times the historical pace.

Khan: I think there are going to be some new openings for potentially having more competition. I think, even with some of the more open models, you’re seeing that they can themselves be an input into more competition. And historically, we’ve seen that with open source—there are a lot of committed people around it because they believe the philosophy, but open source as a business model can also be enormously lucrative because it can just really catalyze innovation. And so I think making sure that we still have a vector and markets that are going to be built around that openness is going to be incredibly important.

I think this issue of conflicts of interest is one that we need to take seriously and think through. Does it make sense to have the vertical integration that we do? Vertical integration can have, no doubt, various types of benefits, and there are sectors where having markets vertically integrated in that way can make a lot of sense. In markets where you are going to have one layer or multiple layers—the bottleneck layers, new layers where you have a lot of consolidation—allowing market participants in those gatekeeper-monopolized layers to also have a presence in layers that actually should be competitive. There’s nothing about economic properties that require those layers to be monopolized. But that’s when I think you can see a real problem. Because then you allow the monopolies to export their control and their consolidated power up and down the supply chain, distorting competition and distorting the trajectory of innovation.

And so I think that’s the kind of prism through which we really need to look at the AI stack, along with these questions of efficiency. And what are the underlying incentives here? Do we have the right incentives when it comes to wanting to promote more efficiency with these models?

Krugman: Right. And getting back to your example, at least as I understand it, if you have big players, either directly or with substantial ownership stakes, who are also in the business of selling compute, essentially they have no incentive to help the models use less compute—even though that would mean less environmental damage—and also have an incentive to favor profits there that are inefficient. And possibly, given that we do have a global economy, losing ground to rivals. Am I garbling this, or is that kind of how it is?

Khan: I think that’s right. I mean, the other thing is these AI technologies and advances are coming against the backdrop of markets that had already been monopolized, right? There are major litigations against Google, which has been found to be a monopolist three times over, and against Amazon and Apple. And these are companies, especially when it comes to Google and Apple, that already have very significant control over key portals and over key distribution points.

So, the way that most people interact with some of these AI models is through technologies owned by some of the existing gatekeepers—be it Microsoft, Apple, or Google. And so with those firms in particular, and especially Google and Microsoft which have invested more in AI, that’s where we also see potential conflicts of interest. We’ve already seen Google’s share of some of these markets go up because they’ve made such an aggressive push to use their existing monopolies in areas like Chrome and Google Search to make sure that it’s their AI services that get a leg up.

Krugman: Yeah. Just a quick sociological observation—this is striking. I remember in a way that hopefully you don’t, but the dot-com era: that was all the scrappy young guys in their garages, and this is all giant corporations—the already giant corporations, and guys who made their decabillions 10 or 15 years ago. In some ways, I almost sometimes feel like the AI investments are kind of a plutocrat midlife crisis playing out.

Sorry, but last point on this: One concern I have about the view of national champions is that we end up with—and I think you expressed this as well—having national policy directed to protect these incumbents, these players, even when they don’t have the right stuff. And now with talk of the Trump administration taking a stake in things, how big is that in your view?

Khan: Specifically the concern around state control?

Krugman: Well, not so much state control as that maybe if the Chinese have a better model, we start saying, “Oh, no. National security. It can’t be used here.” Or if there’s a smaller player that has a better model, that somehow or other there will be federal contracts, federal rules written to favor the big players who help pay for ballrooms and stuff like that.

Khan: It’s a huge concern. I mean, it’s no secret that the CEOs of some of these technology companies have made it a top business priority to curry favor with this White House. They were all sitting there on the stage at the inauguration. They all make regular pilgrimages to the White House, to various state dinners. And so I think there’s a very serious risk of capture—a very serious risk of regulatory decisions being made in ways that are not serving the public interest at large or serving competition at large, but instead are serving the narrow private interests of a very small number. And so I think those are very serious risks.

We’ve seen some debates in the White House and some policies that are veering in this way or that way. It seems like initially the White House had a very hands-off approach when it came to AI, and then they’ve started to take more interest in some of these specific models and where and when they’re being released. But I think, from a competition perspective, there is a very real risk that we’re going to see the biggest, most powerful incumbents, through their access to the White House and politically powerful individuals, be able to get rules and regulations that are personally favoring them and personally advancing them at the expense of the broader market, in the sense of startups and newer firms that in some instances may have better ideas.

I mean, this is an age-old debate: what are the underlying market conditions that best pay for innovation? Is it monopoly or is it competition? The famous Schumpeter-Arrow debate. And at the end of the day, it comes down to this question of what type of innovation you are trying to promote. The empirical evidence shows that monopolies can be good at innovating, but they are primarily good at innovating in ways that deliver incremental improvements on existing technologies. Historically, the breakthrough innovations and the paradigm-shifting innovations have come from outsiders and have come from a competitive market.

And so I think that’s why it’s especially important, as we look down the inflection point of some of these AI technologies, that we’re not allowing extreme centralization of those systems, when it’s in fact openness and competition that have been such a key driver of American innovation and market growth.

Krugman: Yeah, in your op-ed, you point out that, I guess, the fundamental, sort of conceptual breakthrough that made what we call AI possible all came from Google, which just did nothing with it. It wasn’t until people left that they brought it to other places, and it started to become what we now see all around us.

Khan: That’s right. And sometimes if you talk to employees at some of these companies, they will note just the enormous amount of bureaucracy, an enormous amount of bloat and red tape that can start to hobble the ability of these bulking institutions to really deliver fast-moving innovations. And so that’s why you see that sometimes ideas that even came from within Google actually have to go outside to get the attention and space to really be able to deliver.

Krugman: Yeah. One of the great myths of our time is that the private sector is being efficient and innovative and only government is bureaucratic and slow. But if you’ve ever worked for or know anybody who works at a large corporation, it just ain’t so.

Okay, just an open-ended question: what competition issue are we not paying enough attention to right now? Just trying to think about all of that stuff going on. It’s so much AI-focused, but what else? What’s kind of nagging at you as you track what’s happening?

Khan: Well, I think one question is the way that AI and continuing technological advances and sophistication will intersect with other markets that are already very consolidated. And so as we see more and more integration of some of these AI tools in areas like healthcare, for example, or in areas like retail, I think there is an opportunity for these technologies to move. On the one hand, they could make these markets more open; but on the other hand, they could actually result in even deeper consolidation.

We’ve already seen a whole set of lawsuits noting how in areas like housing and agriculture, there is use of algorithms to facilitate price fixing and collusion. Because where you already have a lot of concentration, these tools can basically make it easier to collude, or make it easier to collude with more precision and sophistication. And so I think the intersection of AI and technology with the rest of the economy is going to be an area to keep watching.

Krugman: All right. Brave new world and really kind of alarming. I wish you were still in the federal government. But you’re by no means out of public policy. So thanks for talking.

Khan: Thanks for having me.

This is the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. We’ve talked about how armies are recruited, equipped and paid for. In particular, as we’ve seen so far, the structure of recruitment, organization and payment (such as it was) is heavily dependent on the underlying civilian structures, often mirroring them quite closely. Armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield.

The same is absolutely true for leadership and cohesion, essential for getting an army to fight effectively. Now we need to clear up some definitions here at the start between the three ideas we’re going to focus on here: we’re breaking up a multifaceted idea (‘combat motivation’) into component parts because, as we’ll see, effective combat motivation is something of a ‘three-legged stool’ that needs all three legs to stand effectively. Those three legs are leadership, morale and cohesion; the first of which will be our focus this week and the last of which will be our focus next week.

Leadership refers to the to the command structures of an army, which as we’ll see certainly do have a motivation component. This is a top-down sort of combat motivation: good leaders might cultivate the respect or admiration of their troops, might find ways to motivate them in difficult times, might lead by example or otherwise ‘perform’ generalship and so on. What we’re going to focus on here is where leaders come from because, as it turns out, most societies have pretty strong ideas about where military leaders are supposed to come from, what backgrounds they’re supposed to have and (no surprise) they tend to mirror civilian leadership structures.

Meanwhile morale refers to the bottom-up motivation of the combatants. Specifically, I tend to use this to mean their attachment to the cause, both their loyalty to it and also their belief that it can be achieved. We aren’t going to deal too much with morale here because it is often very conflict-specific: different causes come with different morale implications. However, I do want to stress an important idea here: morale is what gets soldiers to a battlefield, not what keeps them on it (generally).

Finally cohesion is a side-together sort of motivation: the ability of a unit to cohere under pressure, to ‘hold together’ rather than breaking up when things get difficult. In the terror of combat, the high sounding reasons for service (the foundations of morale) are hard to keep in mind and combatants need something a bit more primal to keep them in the ranks: that is cohesion and it is generally based in some kind of strong attachment to the other fellows in the ranks next to them. As we’ll see, just like leadership systems tend to mirror civilian leadership structures, the options for fostering strong cohesion among soldiers are heavily dependent on what a civilian society looks like. We’ll treat cohesion principles next week.

By way of clarifying contrast: a force with low morale might melt away from desertion even when there’s not fighting going on, because no one is invested in the cause. A force with low cohesion (but high morale) might panic and disperse in a battle but reform later to fight again: they remain committed to the cause, but unable to handle the terror of battle collectively. A force with bad morale but high cohesion is very dangerous to a general, because that is the raw material for mutinies: the men will hold together against you as quickly as for you.

Naturally, most military systems that have existed for more than a single campaign have some effective system for arranging leadership and ensuring cohesion on a repeat basis. And that is what we’ll be looking at this week: how the structures of societies shape and constrain leadership and cohesion of the armies they form.

But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to ~~recruits~~ readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting 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).

Where Leaders Come From

Polities have a bewildering array of ways that they chose military leaders – some are determined by hereditary positions, others by professional career tracks, other elected and so on – but the general rule to understanding all of them is this: the same sort of people who exercise positions of authority to organize civil society also lead the armies and navies of that society. The biggest distinction between leadership system is often just the question of if the civil leader are the exact same people as the military leadership, or different fellows drawn from the same class. Those who lead in peace, almost always lead in war.

So from the worldbuilding perspective, before you can think about your ‘officer class,’ you need to think about the ruling class of your society. This isn’t quite the place to get into every possible permutation of ruling class a pre-modern society can have, but we can make do with a few examples to give a sense of how these notions connect. One thing I will note: in pre-modern societies, professional leadership classes are extremely rare – even as they are very common in modern societies. So while your instinct may be that ‘to be a general, someone just goes to ‘general school’ and then works up the career ladder’ that is almost never the career path for pre-modern military leadership. To the degree these societies have professional classes, they are usually politically marginal and politically marginal groups do not get to lead a society’s army.

Instead, as a rule, the aristocrats who organize large institutions and groups in peacetime assume, as a matter of course, that they have the necessary skills to organize the same large groups in war time. Coming from a modern viewpoint, with our emphasis on ‘scientific’ leadership approaches and specialist knowledge, the idea that experience at large-scale farming or Confucian philosophy fully qualified one to lead armies seems strange, but those historical aristocrats are generally untroubled by the idea that their training might not prepare them to lead. After all, the skills of the aristocrat – whatever they might be – are the large-scale leadership skills of the society and it usually takes quite a sharp and humiliating experience of defeat to cause any aristocracy to reconsider that (and often not even then).

So let’s look at some connected civilian-and-military leadership structures to get a sense of how they can work, keeping in mind that we’re not being exhaustive.

The most common system by far is some form of military-aristocracy: a hereditary or nearly hereditary class that wields military leadership as its prerogative. In complex, agrarian societies, these are almost always leisured large-landholders who live off of the rents of their lands. There is thus often an inherent tension in how a leisured class justifies its role of power and privilege in society by pointing to its military leadership role. One of the classic summations of this was the medieval European division of society into “those who work (the commons), those who pray (the clergy), and those who fight (the nobility)” – it is the role as ‘those who fight’ (or who lead the fight) which justifies aristocratic privilege and wealth.

Crucially, I want to stress: the aristocrat earns their position of command by wealth and birth, they do not earn wealth and birth by martial excellence. These aristocracies are ‘rich mens’ clubs’ not ‘good fighters’ clubs,’ and they are buttressed with ideologies that assume people born from the lower classes make poor soldiers and generals by their very nature. Pre-modern societies are, by modern standards, extremely low in social mobility and so they create cultures and customs which justify and normalize those systems.

But – as I’ve been alluded to this whole series – not all military aristocracies are the same. In particular, there is a marked difference between warrior-aristocracies and what I am going to call (very roughly) officer-aristocracies – the core difference is the precise martial skill that justifies aristocratic power, but that has all sorts of ramifications with how these fellows behave.

In a warrior-aristocracy, a core part of being an aristocrat is mastery of a specific style of personal combat, most frequently cavalry combat (or chariot combat, before the advent of true cavalry). Part of this is simply the expense of it – you have to be rich to have access to horses from a young age to learn to ride well – but there is also a heavy skill component, in that it is very hard to learn to be a truly excellent horseman if you do not start early. The thing to keep in mind is that because warrior-aristocrats’ social position is contingent on performing a specific kind of warfare, they are going to want to be visible performing that sort of warfare. As a result, these fellows are often socially constrained to lead from the front and to fight personally even when it might be wiser not to.

Via Wikipedia, a detail of the Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii, an early first century BC copy of a likely third century BC original. Alexander’s Macedonian nobility are a good example of a state-society that nevertheless maintains a warrior-aristocracy: the clear expectation was that Macedonian noblemen in command fought **in person**. Alexander, of course, was famously wounded many times, but his father too lost an eye and gained a limp in battle from a broken tibia. Several of Alexander’s companions, like Antigonus I Monophthalmus (‘the one-eyed’) sported battle wounds as well.

Warrior-aristocracies cover, as best I can tell, the great majority of complex, agrarian non-state societies and it isn’t hard to see how all of the systems fit together: the warrior-aristocrats, their retinues of lesser warrior-aristocrats and common-soldier retainers, the fragmentation of violence in the society and the leadership role of those warrior aristocrats. Naturally, the most senior (by wealth, generally, because this is about power within a society) warrior-aristocrats will lead the army in battle, with more junior warrior-aristocrats leading common soldiers in a retinue-of-retinues army structure: the biggest Big Man leads the army, with the retinues of his subordinate Big Men beneath him and so on, down to the common soldiers at the bottom of each of these retinues.

Via Wikipedia, another part of the Bayeux Tapestry (depicting the Battle of Hastings, 1066), here showing the climax of the battle, including the death of king Harold II. It is worth noting here how the members of both the mounted Norman warrior-aristocracy and the dismounted Anglo-Saxon military aristocracy are shown in full-size in the center, while lesser soldiers (the Norman archers) are shown in miniature on the lower register. Also note how both William of Normandy and Harold of England had to be **personally present** at this battle because that was the kind of military leadership their society expected.

As a society gets more complex and a state emerges, the state often comes with new kinds of non-military, non-aristocratic civilian leadership roles (note that religious leadership roles invariably pre-date the state – but priests and the state is a topic (voted on by the Senate) for another day). That opens up new forms of military-aristocracy but also new forms of civil leadership – the interactions between them are complex.

On the one hand, the form of military leadership might change, from warrior-aristocrats to what I am calling officer-aristocrats. In this second form, military leadership remains largely hereditary, limited to large landholders, but they understand their military role not as personally fighting in a given way, but as leading or organizing. The Roman aristocracy functions this way: Roman generals are invariably aristocratic senators, but their model of leadership is not based on the demonstration of personal combat ability or even necessarily personal physical bravery. They are thus free, as a matter of social expectation, to ‘command from the rear’ – a Roman general can get ‘stuck in,’ but they do not have to and it is rarely the wise thing to do so they don’t do it often. Instead of performing personal fighting, these fellows are often expected to be performing organizational and logistical leadership. I cannot see any specific reason why this form of leadership couldn’t emerge in a non-state society, but I struggle to think of an example – even Chinggis Khan and his heirs had to demonstrate their martial bona fides in riding and hunting to maintain legitimacy within their aristocracies, in a way that no Greek strategos, Roman general or Chinese general seems to have had to.

Via Wikipedia, a statue of Trajan from the Roman settlement of Colonia Ulpia Traiana, now Xanten, Germany. It is an example of Trajan performing Roman generalship, visually, but in that context you may notice that he strikingly carries no weapon. While his martial qualities are communicated with his armor, this is now a fellow expecting to fight man-to-man on the field, but rather he appears ready to deliver a rousing speech and then manage the battle from the rear.

The other quirk for increasingly complex aristocracies is the relationship between budding civil administrations and older military aristocracies. Often, even as the civilian administration is taken over by an educated sub-aristocratic class (professionals, burghers, etc.) the command of armies remains in the hands of the old aristocracy. The classic example of this was the distinction in Ancien Régime France between the noblesse d’épée (‘Nobility of the Sword’) – the old nobility, which still exercised most military command – and the noblesse de robe (‘Nobility of the Robe’), a newer nobility that generally held administrative or judicial positions, but not generally military ones. Likewise, the old Prussian aristocracy, die Junker, maintained a clear presence in military posts in the German army through the Second World War.

In other cases, the rising civil administrative class and the military aristocracy remain the same. The Greek polis and the Roman Republic both provide paradigmatic examples, where the assumption clearly was that the same sort of skills that prepared a man to lead in peace also prepared him to lead in war. To greatly simplify, in both Greece and Rome, there was generally a hereditary landed aristocracy of elite families in any given community and often the function of voting systems was to choose which of those hereditary elites would exercise power (by holding this or that office) at a given time.

The other major option for states are to forgo a military aristocracy more or less altogether and professionalize their officers. Because this is how most modern militaries work, I think it is what people reach to first, but I have put it last because it is so incredibly rare. Vocational leadership classes – our military aristocracies where men are born into command – are very common; professional leadership classes, where men are selected and trained for the task, are very rare. This runs counter to most folks’ expectations, but it remains broadly true: the enlisted ranks (the ‘common soldiers,’ though by the time we’re talking about them as ‘enlisted ranks,’ we’re obviously talking about quite well established states) are professionalized long before the leadership class is. The Roman army by the first century AD is fully professional in its ‘enlisted’ ranks (through the centurions), but retains its senatorial military-aristocrat command class. Likewise, European armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century increasingly consist of professional soldiers, supported by an increasingly professional civil bureaucracy, lead by the same old military-aristocracy as the Late Middle Ages. Professional soldiers often come before – and often simply without – professional officers.

That said, the Chinese state bureaucracy, particularly as it comes to be dominated by the civil service examination system during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and subsequently does represent a kind of professionalization of military leadership, albeit professionalized not around military skills but rather around skills in writing, literature and philosophy. If that seems shocking, remember that Roman aristocrats got formal training in philosophy and rhetoric, not command, as boys too. We’ll cover in a moment how military leadership skills were communicated. Nevertheless, these scholar-officials show up pretty often in military leadership roles.

Leader Selection

Now briefly, we should also talk about how these leaders are selected. After all, a society has more potential generals than armies, so there must be some way to decide who gets command. In non-state societies, where the potential generals are also military-aristocrats with their own retinues, chieftains and kings often have very limited options on who to put in command: if the king is present, the expectation is that he leads the army (that’s what kings are for), but if he isn’t, then often there’s a strong impulse for the biggest of the magnates to do so. After all, if you snub Duke so-and-so for command despite his bringing the largest retinue, he might just leave and take his retinue with him.

Indeed, for many non-state polities where military power is highly fragmented and fluid, the answer to ‘who leads the army’ is often ‘whoever can.’ In pre-Roman Spain and Gaul, the pattern we see in our sources looks fairly fluid, with charismatic or capable warlords emerging – invariably out of the warrior-aristocracy, these men are not peasants – to knit together large coalitions and thus large armies through personal leadership and charisma.

By contrast, as the state grows stronger, it can exercise more choice on who gets command. For monarchies, that often means royal selection, which may be quite personal (if the aristocracy is small) or, in large bureaucratic states, institutionalized and impersonal. Often the lower ranks have an institutional system of advancement (as we’ll see below), but major commands need to be signed off on at the center of power, simply because generals and admirals represent substantial risks to central authority and must be vetted for loyalty even more than for ability.

Republics are comparatively rare, but they tend to elect their generals and often elect lower officers as well. For states which structure recruitment through contractors, those contractors generally become the officers who lead units, typically led by a general chosen by the king. But those colonels (the contractors) and the general are almost invariably drawn from the same military aristocracy that would have provided them in a vassalage-based system (though in some cases the captains beneath the colonels may come from lower social backgrounds, in which case their career path may be different and may reach its ceiling earlier).

Crucially, the ‘roster’ from which the state – be that a king personally or a bureaucracy generally – can select from tends to remain limited to the tradition, generally hereditary leadership class. After all, a king who tried to fill his posts with commoners would find all of his other key stakeholders – who are military aristocrats – swiftly moving against him. There are occasional exceptions, of course, but they remain occasional because the state, in whatever form it is, needs these magnates in order to function and so it cannot simply sideline them. Of course eventually the modern administrative state emerges which no longer needs these fellows and thus may dispense with them, but that is quite explicitly a modern creature and in any case it merely creates a new leadership class.

There is, after all, a reason that modern armies are led by college-educated officers, often with advanced degrees in the higher ranks, drawn from the same system of elite education that produces our presidents, prime ministers, senators and MPs. Because no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield, so a society where the divide is no longer aristocrat and peasant, but blue-collar and white-collar has blue-collar soldiers and white-collar officers.

How Leaders are Trained

Now generals, admirals and other officers are not, in fact, born ready to command, whatever the social mythology of a ruling class may think. Armies – even smaller units within armies – are complex creatures that require a fair bit of knowledge and skill to control properly. As important, leadership is a skill itself: it is a performance, the exact elements of which will vary from one culture to the next, but it has to be learned. So clearly there must be some way in each of these societies to teach the fellows who will lead.

Here is a spot where I see worldbuilders who aren’t necessarily familiar with historical systems err quite badly, because they import the assumptions of how individuals are prepared and selected for leadership from modern societies. Sometimes the assumption is that command preparation works more or less like an idealized becoming the manager of a small franchise: one starts as the cash register and works upwards. But that absolutely does not work: these societies have low social mobility and a military leadership class which is jealous of its privileges. Service ‘in the ranks’ may or may not be an expectation of command preparation for that military leadership class, but even for societies where it is, no one expects to simply ‘work their way up’ from the ranks. Instead, in pre-modern armies as in modern ones, there is generally a sharp and rarely bridged (in pre-modern armies, often flatly unbridgeable) divide between officers and senior enlisted personnel, because there is a class difference being expressed.

The alternative assumption is to assume that pre-modern command preparation must look rather a lot like modern command preparation or at least some version of modern education: there has to be a ‘generalship academy,’ with classes and competitive exams and so on. This tendency is, I think, heightened in a lot of fiction where the audience are young adults and so the core conceit is basically, “what if high school and college was all facets of life?” because high school and college is the social structure the reader knows and cares about. So you get the military academies of Fire Emblem: Three Houses or Trails of Cold Steel or Final Fantasy VIII (a trope that clearly started in Japan but feels like it has worked into English-language young adult fiction over time as well). Pre-modern societies functionally never have these formal institutions for officer training. The only major exception here is the aforementioned Chinese civil service system, but that didn’t train command or military skills, which were left to be acquired through experience and apprenticeships.

But of course leaders must be trained. These societies engage in quite a lot of warfare and they cannot afford to simply be bad at it, so leaders have to be prepared.

The most common answer by far is some form of apprenticeship system: young potential leaders (from the right social class) are trained with a mix of informal tutelage (at the hands of more senior leaders) and experience, often in a sequence of experiences and roles that is quite clearly and often rigidly defined. Not always so, mind you – the path by which became a general in ancient Greece was often a lot less predictable, for instance – but frequently so.

So, for instance, the Roman cursus honorum, the sequences of posts and offices a Roman aristocrat embarking on a political career might hold, has a pretty clear bent towards military preparation. A young man would first serve a few years ‘in the ranks’ (typically as a cavalryman, because he’s rich), before trying to obtain a post as a military tribune (essentially a staff officer), where the expectation was that the commanding general he served under (a consul or a praetor) would take his tribunes under his wing. Military tribunes also had some command duties, generally lower-stakes and usually accomplished in pairs. Then came the quaestorship, a financial and administrative office which often meant handling logistics for an army (or the finances of the whole state), again under the watchful eye of more senior magistrates. Then the praetorship represented the first independent opportunity for command, but generally with a small force in a largely pacified region. Only then might a Roman aristocrat, now approaching the eligibility age of 42, consider the consulship and real field command – which of course came with it an expectation of tutoring the next generation of military tribunes and quaestors and so the process repeated. In short, the career path is a series of ‘command apprenticeships.’

The education of a medieval western European knight started even earlier, but was also structured effectively as a series of apprenticeships, although in this case focused as much on personal combat skills (because this is a warrior-aristocracy, unlike the Roman one) as leadership.¹ High-born boys would be effectively apprenticed to another noble house as a page at age seven to serve and also be trained in the necessary skills of his rank, including combat and leadership. At fourteen, that boy would graduate into being a squire, a knight’s on-the-field shield-and-armor bearer, learning the skills of the warrior-aristocracy first hand, ideally becoming a knight himself in his early 20s. Even then, he is probably not going to be handed a large unit, but rather be expected to lead his own small unit, while the more senior (by both age and wealth) members of the nobility lead larger retinues.

As an aside, popular depictions of knights miss a component of this because they tend – the recent Knight of the Seven Kingdoms does this, albeit with a plot excuse that the main character is a very poor knight – to have a knight on his own with just a squire or a page. But in practice even a relatively humble knight was expected to lead a small unit (a ‘lance fournie‘) of at least a half-dozen men. Of course the kind of boy who might, by dint of birth, expect to end up commanding much larger retinues would probably squire for a lord who also commanded much larger retinues.

Alternately, we might even jump well into the early modern period and look at the career path for an officer in the French army of the 17th century.² Aspiring officers, drawn from France’s old knightly and noble classes, first served a couple of years as a regular soldier (either as a cadet or as a volunteer serving with a relative), before being pulled into service as one of the very junior officers (ensigns and sous-lieutenants). Service at that level qualified a young man to seek to purchase a commission as a captain to lead a company, where he served under a colonel. In each step, a young men relied substantially on patronage and support from his superiors and so young officers were encouraged to attach themselves to more senior ones both to try to learn and to try to impress. Captains who came from wealth could eventually purchase a commission as a colonel, while those who lacked it might instead advance to the dead-end administrative post of major. The king then chose the officers above the post of colonel, but generally from men who had processed through this system. Lynn openly describes the system as one of “military apprenticeship.” The period’s navies worked much the same, except that the highly technical nature of naval warfare meant the apprenticeship was longer and involved more formal learning.³

In literate societies, these apprenticeships might be supplemented with written guidebooks, military manuals of various kinds. There is an odd tendency in modern fantasy fiction to pooh-pooh this sort of thing – Game of Thrones (the show, in particular) goes out of its way a few times to cast aspersions on the usefulness of such works – but the fact that societies with literate military aristocracies produce and preserve these kinds of works with regularity suggests that the fellows who would know best – the one’s actually leading armies – found them useful.

In the pre-modern era, however, such military manuals are rarely strictly technical in nature – they are not very much like a modern field manual. Instead, they tend to be framed more like a work of philosophy, laying out general principles for command, compiling lists of strategems or famous examples of tactics and so on. Often they extend beyond what we might consider strictly military matters, to include general advice on rulership, blending into a genre we call ‘mirrors for princes,’ guidebooks on how to rule well. The key thing to keep in mind is these manuals were not intended as textbooks for classics, but often works for reflection, intended to be read (and re-read) alongside a man’s trip through his military apprenticeships. Purely technical ‘reference’ books existed as well (Vitruvius’ De architectura is a paradigmatic example), but seem to have been more rare; they get a lot more common after gunpowder, when a command of engineering and mathematics (for ballistics) suddenly become a lot more important.

However, for someone looking to come to grips with the leadership culture of a pre-modern society, I would encourage you to see military manuals and mirrors for princes operating within a continuum of other literary works: histories, epics, religious texts and so on, all of which are telling aristocrats how to be aristocrats. These men, after all, are not generally professionals trained in a school, they are members of a permanent, hereditary (or semi-hereditary) military-leadership class and so excellence at command for them often consists of the refinement of the manners and habits of their class. That might include careful logistics or sound tactical planning, but equally it might include poetry, courtly manners, the habits of a good patron and so on. The delineation we expect between the professional skills of ‘military science’ and the social skills of the professional managerial class (to which most modern officers belong) simply does not exist for pre-modern societies where military leadership is not professionalized.

Thinking About Leadership

For the worldbuilder then, thinking about fictional armies (or the student of history thinking about real ones), be sure to think about the entire military-leadership life-cycle. After all, when the important council of war gathers, it isn’t just going to be the top generals involved: those generals have their own subordinates (who are also their apprentices), who may have their own subordinates (who are their apprentices) and so on. One thing that is often missing in these sorts of stories are the host of junior officers we know would normally be present, observing the decision-making process – even if, because they’re more junior in age or rank, they aren’t expected to say anything.

So the first question should be “where does the ‘officer class’ as it were, of this society come from?” Some kinds of armies can get away with fairly minimal numbers of officers and relatively amateurish ones, but most more sophisticated kinds of warfare demand a fair bit of organization. Keep in mind, when thinking about this question, the sharp limits on both information gathering and on issuing commands, which is going to mean that leaders even relatively small distances away from the ‘center’ (whoever is in overall command) are going to be exercising a lot of independent leadership. As a result, there are probably a fair number more fellows involved in leadership and decision-making than you might expect for even a very modest army.

Next, think about what kinds of peacetime life habits the officer class might have. Since they’re unlikely to be professionals, chances are they are large landholders, or (in a pastoral society), large herd owners. The war leader is more often the fellow who wields the most influence within a society – on account of wealth, charisma, family connections and so on – than the best fellow at commanding, so think about what kinds of power matter within the aristocracy and what latitude the social system has for advancement based on merit. But also think about how these fellows interact with subordinates in their peacetime role, because that is likely how they will default to acting in a military role – it is the ‘leadership skillset’ they are learning even when they are not in the saddle. Roman command behavior, I’d argue, flows very directly out of Roman patron-client relations and their habits. Likewise, it is hard not to see medieval leadership language conditioned both by the war aristocrats related to fellow aristocrats in their household (the knights in the retinue of a lord, for instance) and also the far more domineering way they interacted with their peasants (who might be their common soldiers).

Above all: these men are attempting to perform generalship. They are not so much moving pieces on a chessboard as they are playing on a stage, attempting to look the part of being a general because that is actually what often mattered the most.

Finally, think about how these men advance – not merely who decides who gets to be the general, but also who gets to decide who advances through more junior offices. Systems will, after all, select for the skills which ensure advancement and a system of elected generals is going to work quite differently from a system where advancement has more to do with patronage from senior officers to more junior ones, which in turn is also going to be very different from a system where state power is so weak that ‘advancement’ just means having the largest private army within a larger retinue-of-retinues force.

Next week, we’ll shift our focus from leadership back to the common soldiers to look at how to think about the cohesive principles of a given force, since different armies rely on different systems to generate that all important cohesion.

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