Gongol.com Archives: August 2025
August 9, 2025
A pseudonymous account on Twitter recently had a viral moment with an observation that for all of the people who claim (groundlessly) that "I wasn't meant for Excel spreadsheets. I was meant to fight in Caesar's legions", the appropriate response is that "the Romans would have gone nuts for Excel". It's clever and undoubtedly true. ■ First, true on the face of it: Imagine how happy we in the modern age were by the transition from slide rules to pocket calculators to spreadsheets. It's been a wild ride, and it would seem all the more incredible to someone who had only known a world in which paper itself was scarce. ■ But it's even more important to see what having Excel would have actually meant: A truly incomparable strategic advantage. As Ned Resnikoff noted, "The Roman Empire was first and foremost a trade and logistics network." And as important as it has always been to have good battle planning in war, it's at least equally important to have logistics figured out. ■ No army ever won without figuring out a supply chain. Some have figured it out by plundering what they encountered along the way, but even the legendarily destructive and genocidal Mongols under Genghis Khan still faced resource constraints like having enough grass for horses to graze. ■ Dwight Eisenhower noted in his reflections on World War II that his Russian counterparts "suggested that of all the spectacular feats of the war, even including their own, the Allied success in the supply of the pursuit across France would go down in history as the most astonishing." ■ Empires and victorious armies are really just vast logistical networks, right beneath the surface. Being able to see that -- to see the underlying systems, rather than just the thing that's evident on the surface -- is one of the most valuable skills in the modern world. It would have been powerful in ancient times, too, and there's no reason to believe that it won't still be an advantage to people living two thousand years from now.
