Hey folks, fireside this week as I get ready for the start of a new semester! For this week, I wanted to talk briefly about the wrinkles that financing navies poses with regards to our worldbuilding primer on pre-modern armies. “what about navies?” has been a frequent question in comments and from patrons. Now a full answer to that question, I think, would require its own series – naval finance is complex – but I thought I would unspool a shorter ‘off the cuff’ answer.
The first distinction we need to draw really clearly for this question is the difference between purpose-built warships and multi-purpose ships turned to war. For substantial chunks of human history, it has been possible to be competitive in naval warfare using mostly the same sort of ships one would use for commerce. In the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds (where my knowledge is best), this was broadly the case through the bronze age into the early iron age (so to c. 700 BC or so), then stopped being the case for classical antiquity. For much of the Middle Ages, multi-purpose fleets are more common but we still have some purpose-built warships in the Mediterranean. Coming into the Age of Sail (c. 1450-c. 1850), multi-purpose sailing ships make up the bulk of military ships early on; starting in the late 1600s those multi-purpose ships start getting pushed out of the line-of-battle for major actions, leading to the primarily purpose-built navies of the 1700s. Modern navies are, of course, functionally entirely purpose built.
This distinction matters because purpose-built warships are really expensive. As a general rule only states can build purpose-built navies, so in periods where purpose-built warships dominate, non-state polities are often broadly incapable of challenging state societies at sea. By contrast, periods where, for technological reasons, multi-purpose ships dominate warfare, non-state societies can be major players at sea (e.g. vikings), because the cost of ships can be effectively devolved by simply repurposing privately held commercial ships.
What most folks, I imagine, have already sussed out is that what makes naval warfare different is that capital costs (something we were able to largely talk around with armies) suddenly become very important. And that is certainly true, although here there are some pretty substantial differences based on the style of ships and the era of naval technology we’re dealing with.
To draw the point, let’s compare a purpose-built warship from antiquity (a trireme) with a purpose-built warship from the Age of Sail (a frigate, say). A classical Greek trireme displaced around 45 tons and had a crew of 200. The cost of building a trireme from scratch was probably just shy of a talent in silver which is a lot of money (a talent might represent about 20 years of work for an unskilled laborer, assuming ~300 working days a year). Sails and fittings probably added around 2,000 more drachmae (1/3rd a talent). Expensive. And the minimum useful fleets of even small poleis would have a few dozen of these ships (big fleets with 100+ triremes for major wars appear frequently). So the ‘minimum expenditure’ to even play the game of naval power in the junior varsity league probably approaches something like 50 talents of silver or more. A state (or coalition of states) that wanted to really push for naval dominance needed to be able to drop hundreds of talents on ship construction, sums just wildly beyond the financial resources of most city-states.
You can start to see why only states play this game.
But – and here is the wild comparison – shipbuilding was not the major cost of ancient naval warfare. Crews were. A trireme has a crew of around 200 men, a mix of a handful of trained specialists (the hyperesia) and a bunch of rowers, often drawn from poorer households. These fellows need to be paid in order to support themselves and you need to pay a lot of them. The maximum field army that a poleis could field, for the largest poleis, was rarely much more than 10,000 men. But the 155 ships the Athenians deployed to the Battle of Arginusae (406) would have required 31,000 rowers! The 330 ships that the Romans deployed to the Battle of Ecnomus (256), the largest naval battle the Mediterranean has ever seen (to the present!) probably demanded something like 140,000 crew. Thucydides straight up tells us that the cost of crew wages for a trireme was one talent per ship per month (Thuc. 3.17; 6.8; 6.31; 8.29). At that price, the cost of the crew would exceed the cost of the ship in just two months.
So the really crushing cost of ancient fleets is not the ships, but the rowers: only large, well-financed states were able to support the cost of so many rowers.
But that cost structure is not universal – it changes over time. To get to our comparison, we can use hull displacement (the weight of the ship) as a lazy proxy for the capital cost of the ship as compared to the crew cost of the ship. Our trireme displaces c. 45 tons and has ~200 crew, so about 4.5 men per each ton of ship. By contrast, the USS Constitution (1797), an Age of Sail heavy frigate, displaces 2,200 tons and had an ideal maximum crew of 475, roughly 4.5 tons of ship per man (please note the reversal!). In short there’s something like twenty times more ship per sailor in an age of sail frigate than in a classical trireme. Capital costs follow suit.
In fact, of course, this understates the point because not every ton of displacement is made the same. A trireme’s displacement comes to about 40,000kg of which roughly 150kg or so would be the big metal part: the bronze ram. So that displacement is 0.375% super-expensive bronze, with the rest being cheaper (note: cheaper; not cheap) wood, sail-cloth, rope and so on. USS Constitution was a 44-gun (often ‘over-gunned’ above that number) frigate. In her initial loadout, that was thirty 24-pounder long guns (barrels at 5,556lbs per) and twenty 32-pound carronades (barrels at 2,222lbs per; carronades are the ‘sawed off shotgun’ version of a naval gun), so that’s 211,120lbs (95,762kg) of gun. Constitution has more gun than a trireme had ship. But critically, her gun complement represents close to 5% of her total displacement. So not only is there a lot more ship to Constitution, overall by percentage a lot more of that ship is expensive metal rather than cheap timber. So capital costs end up as a much larger part of an early modern navy’s expenses compared to an ancient one.
You can start to see why the question of naval finance would require its own series, perhaps written by someone deeper into naval matters (especially medieval and early modern) than I. I can do a decent job with ancient navies, though, and we may do that at some point.
In any event, to summarize: capital costs are much more important for navies than armies in the pre-modern, but how much more important varies a lot depending on the period and the kind of navy in question. For navies that use multi-purpose ships, those capital costs can be devolved onto civilian ship owners, enabling weak states and non-state polities to be naval players, but for periods where purpose-built warships are the rule, the shattering expensive of having to build large navies that do nothing but fight (and so the costs cannot easily be devolved onto their civilian owners because they do not have any) basically demands a large, complex and relatively financially sophisticated state. Naval warfare thus often ends up as a game that only the largest or most efficient states can play at scale, in contrast to armies. Everybody has an army, but not everyone can afford a navy.
That’s going to come up again in another post I am planning, a military theory primer looking at the role the US Navy plays in making the global economy work.
On to Recommendations.
First off, my own stuff: I was on a slew of podcasts lately. I talked about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on the Normal Men podcast and I talked about the right-wing authoritarian obsession with J.R.R. Tolkien (and how he would have despised them) on the Fighting Fascism podcast. I also had a grand talk with Stefan Sasse over at the Boiled Leather Audio Hour talking about the Rise and Fall of the Galatic Empire (from Star Wars) and how Star Wars imagines totlitarian regimes. Finally, as I write this, I just recorded an episode of The Rest is History with Tom Holland on the (lack of any) Marian reforms, which is set to come out in early September, so keep an eye out for that. On to better stuff that isn’t mine.
This week also brings a new issue of Pasts Imperfect with a wide range of interesting bits, including a discussion of famed novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s idiosyncratic take on Herod the Great, now published eighty odd years after her passing. It also features links to a wide range of neat history stuff, from the possibility to polar bears in the Colosseum, a new exhibit on medieval manuscripts at the Getty Center, isotopic testing on an Archaic mass grave in Attica, the difficulties of UNESCO World Heritage sites caught in geopolitical power struggles and more. If you are not regularly checking in to Pasts Imperfect, you should be!
In security/defense news, I wanted to highlight recent reporting about the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), deployed in the Indian Ocean in support of the operations against Iran. It is all too easy sometimes, when presidents launch wars far away, to forget that those wars must be waged by people who do not have a choice if they go or not when ordered. As a result of political decisions, the Lincoln ended up deployed at sea for over 260 days with just two days in port – the sort of deployment one might expect in a major, existential war. My views on the abject stupidity of the Iran War are well known, but the absolutely appalling conditions on the Abraham Lincoln equally speak to poor planning, logistics and strategic incoherence of a war that we are told will either result in civilization destruction or world peace on any given Friday (and one imagines that whiplash is part of why the Abe Lincoln has remained deployed for so long, since without a plan the ship couldn’t be recalled nor replaced). The Lincoln is now set to be relieved by the USS George Washington (CVN-73), but the debacle speaks to the deep readiness ‘hole’ developing as a result of this war (alongside similarly dire reporting concerning munitions levels).
This week’s book recommendation was a pretty easy choice: Kori Schake, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States (2025). The title, of course, recalls Samuel Huntington’s famous The Soldier and the State (1957), which has long been essentially the Bible of American civil-military relations despite being quite substantially flawed. Schake is invoking Huntington but neither reprising him nor attempting merely to repair him – indeed, Schake spends half a chapter illuminating and rejecting the fundamental errors in Huntington’s vision of civil-military relations, a part of the book that I now wish would be appended to the end of every copy of The Soldier and the State sold or issued. Instead, Schake is embarking on a ground-up analysis of the history of American civil-military relations and the unique structures and strains it experienced.
The resulting book is a lot thinner and more readable than Huntington and also frankly a lot better reasoned. Schake’s narrative is a chronological walkthrough of American civil-military relations, reviewing both the crises that happened (the Newburgh conspiracy, Jefferson’s creation of a small, clqiuish and politicized officer corps, Grant’s hard decisions in the constitutional crisis of 1866-7, everything about Douglas “Dugout Doug” MacArthur, etc) as well as (as Schake puts it), “the dogs that mostly didn’t bark.” Schake ends up a chapter appropriately titled, “How Worried Should We Be?” which both lays out the considerable grounds for concern as well as the steps that might be taken to reduce the strain.
Fundamentally, Schake’s view, which I am largely persuaded of, is that both now and historically, most of the danger in the American civil-military relationship has come from the ‘civil’ side, particularly political leadership. The military often maintains very high public trust because the public understands it as a “disciplined, merit-based organization obedient to the Constitution.” But precisely because it maintains very high public trust, “It is a truth universally acknowledge that politicians will hide behind the military for as long as the military is more popular than are the politicians.” In short, the core problem the military faces in its civil-military relation is an old one: the effort by politicians to pull the military more completely into the realm of politics, to use it for political gain, against political rivals either rhetorically and symbolically or – more darkly – directly and kinetically. As Schake notes, in both scholarship and public discourse, this is treated as the military’s problem, but most of the solution for a problem created by civilian leadership cannot lie within the military. The public needs to take more ownership of their half of the civil-military relationship (somewhat ironically, this book was coming out at almost the exact time I wrote my essay on the American civil-military relationship and so neither Schake nor I was aware what the other was writing, yet I think Schake ends up fairly close – with greater detail, skill and vision – to my concept of the ‘civil-military bargain.’)
Perhaps most importantly (and in some contrast to Huntington and the other scholarship she cites), Schake’s book is very readable and very accessible, making it a perfect device for educating the public about this issue. And precisely because the public needs to take more ownership over the civil-military relationship, needs to think harder about how to maintain the military as defenders of the constitutional order and the rule of law, rather than tyrants over it, or bystanders as it crumbles, this is a book that is easy to recommend.
