The trouble with Anthony Everitt is that he makes reading books on ancient history by other qualified, contemporary authors seem so, well, dry and ancient. He possesses a unique ability to put figures like Cicero and Octavian into situations and terms that are remarkably relatable to typical twenty-first century westerners. Long dead aristocrats from a…

I worked with the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment in the 1990s. For all the fuss made back then about an emerging Revolution in Military Affairs – long range precision strike capabilities and information dominance – many of us believed that the truly important core competence of the US armed forces was (and would remain)…

The military explanation for the fall of Rome is a familiar one, and it remains popular. It goes something like this: by the third century barbarians began to outnumber native Roman citizens in the ranks of the army; cavalry units eclipsed the traditional foundation of Roman strength found in the infantry legions; frontier units became…

Every so often I pick a general topic I want to better educate myself about. This year, I’ve focused on explaining the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a timeless debate that never seems to lose its relevance, literally argued, refuted, and refined continuously from the time of the Declaration of Independence to the…