Those who cannot remember the past

The major souvenir of my last trip to Baghdad was a persistent case of bronchitis, so while recuperating I’ve gone on another ancient Roman history binge. This time was Michael Grant’s The Army of the Caesars (Scribner’s, 1974), a terrific study of the structure of the Roman military and its relationship to the state. The Roman Empire faced many of the same problems the United States does in prosecuting a long war against terrorists. Like us, its military was relatively small, very effective, but quite expensive. And as with us, the Roman answer was to develop local partners. We call these "indigenous security forces"; they called them auxiliaries. Both they and us came to understood that these foreign units were essential — just read all the recent Pentagon statements about the need for partners in the long war, especially those coming out of the Special Operations shop of Michael Vickers, the only current assistant secretary of defense to have been a character in a hit movie, in Charlie Wilson’s War, for his role as a CIA operative arming the Afghan mujahedeen.

Of course, there are huge differences, notably that the foreign forces raised by the Romans generally weren’t for use in their countries of origin, as a matter of policy. But I’m beginning to suspect that among those many differences between us and the Romans is that they tended to treat their allies better. Upon completion of their service, auxiliary soldiers could receive Roman citizenship, a significant elevation in status. This strikes me as a real contrast to the way we’ve treated our allies in Iraq. For several years, we brought them to the surface but often failed to protect them. Nor have we offered them American citizenship as a fallback, just in case things don’t work out in Iraq. Among other things, bestowing that benefit would give soldiers what Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who is an expert in military cohesion, calls "a sense of a shared future"—the thing that really bonds soldiers.

Also significant was that the Roman military structure, as described by Grant, made working with foreign troops an expected major part of any Roman leader’s career. The career path for the Roman knight, he writes, "came to be standardized as the successive tenures of three posts: prefect of an auxiliary cohort, tribune of a legion and finally prefect of an auxiliary cavalry regiment" (p. 71). This strikes me as roughly equivalent to company command, battalion command, and brigade or regimental command — the three great posts in the life of an Army or Marine officer nowadays. But the Roman career pattern placed far more emphasis on working successfully with foreigners than our military does now. Lesson to be learned about better rewarding our military advisors?