Thread by @BretDevereaux

I was listening to Ezra Klein's interview with Bill Gates (megaphone.link/VMP9618126346) and Klein asked (paraphrase), "Why do we practice for war so much, but not for pandemics?"

Gates shifted around the question artfully, but I want to answer it. 1/14

Now, the answer I suspect @ezraklein expected to highlight is that we invest more time and energy into killing each other than in a collective-good work like pandemic protection.

But I don't actually think that's the answer. I think the simple answer is... 2/14

...that we are better at practicing for war because we have spent literal millennia getting better at it - time during which we weren't practicing for pandemics because we couldn't *do* anything about them yet.

Let me outline the history of that... 3/14

I think people assume that modern war preparation - at both the individual/unit and staff level - is simply something humans have always done, but it isn't. It is a learned, organizational trait. 4/14

Classical Greek armies didn't drill very much if at all (there's some debate about late-classical/hellenistic 'military dances'). Xenophon indicates that no practice or training was necessary for the hoplite (Xen. Cyrop. 2.1).

We first start to see drill - albeit dimly... 5/14

..with the Macedonians. And we really only see evidence for the sort of well-regulated, consistent drill that we think of today with the Romans during the imperial period (post-31 BCE); it then drops away and reemerges in the late medieval/early modern. 6/14

(Note that unit drill also was a thing during the Warring States period in China and remains a thing in Chinese armies subsequently).

So individual/unit drill - that kind of 'practice' for battle - is a fairly late development; it post-dates cavalry, catapults, h. inf., etc 7/14

But that's not really the kind of practice I suspect @ezraklein means. I suspect he's thinking about the development of war plans and play-books from the top level down. The sort of "we have a plan to go to war with Canada" sort of thing.

And that comes even later. 8/14

We have no evidence that the Romans did that sort of thing. They do not appear to have had the institutions which would have planned those details out.

The key institution for that kind of planning is the General Staff. 9/14

The general staff emerges (I simplify a bit) in Prussia as a response to the pressures of the Napoleonic wars and the need for an institution that can manage the absolutely massive mobilizations of that war. In a war, it would manage the operational movement of armies... 10/14

...and in peace time, the staff would be preparing for the next war by refining war plans, complete with logistics and mobilization tables. It was a radically new way to plan wars, which proved valuable in 1870, such that by 1914, basically everyone had one. 11/14

So the greater Mediterranean cultural zone took about 4,000 years of intense state-on-state warfare to develop the planning institutions we take for granted today. We've designed our states around armies (because having armies was the key original purpose of the state) 12/14

But we've really only had a hope of doing anything about a viral pandemic since the 1850s or so with the advent of germ theory. This is America's second big global pandemic in the age of modern medicine. But it's our 12ish major war. 13/14

So I think the answer to @ezraklein's question - which was a good one - is that we've been able to kill other humans much longer than we have been able to kill viruses. Consequently, we are better prepared for the former because we have so much more practice at it. end/14