Gallia- wrote:The Manticoran Empire wrote:Two questions. First, why are you so fascinated with marital and reproductive norms and their impacts on military effectiveness? Second, why would you assume that military effectiveness depends upon a hardy masculinity.
Demography is literal life and death of societies/population groups and because the latter is more or less true. Effective militaries are generally masculine organizations. Ineffective ones are feminine organizations.
Islam isn't exactly a winner in demography though (neither is the West, but c'est la vie) and despite being masculine it's only really effective at waging underground campaigns that involve a large amount of oblique attacks through political channels and craft produced ordnance, where Arab armies are highly effective at defeating Westerners consistently and decisively. The US Army somehow doesn't fear the Asiatic infantryman despite being consistently having its ass handed to it on a silver platter by everyone from Iraqis to Afghans to Vietnamese to Chinese tho.
Polyandry is a loser's strategy though. The only societies which were polyandrous were conquered by their neighbors (Nepal, Tibet, Inuit groups, a few Polynesian societies) or collapsed internally with no outside pressures. They have never really been effective at defeating neighboring empires, and this goes back to ancient pre-history.
Historically the most effective and socially capable (in terms of GDP growth, wealth creation, conquest of neighbors, protection of borders, scientific invention, birth rates, etc. etc.) societies have been monogamous, although monogamy is somewhat rare among societies absolutely it is dominant in terms of absolute population. Most people were sired by parents in monogamous relationships because monogamous societies from ancient China to medieval Europe to modern America have demolished their competitors for the most part.Champagne Socialist Sharifistan wrote:Do polyandrous societies produce bad infantrymen?
>Tibet
>Eskimos
>Untouchables
Maybe.
Or maybe polyandrous societies are just weak men.
Well the U.S. absolutely dominated them militarily. There was like a 1 to 30 kill ratio in both conflicts, the only issue being we withdrew from Vietnam, and the Viet Cong didn't live up to their end of the peace agreement, which is to be expected, but under Carter he apparently equated ending the war to pulling out troops which, didn't really work when you consider the over 2.6 million killed, in the killing fields.
The reality as well is that they both had tremendous outside support, the Taliban with Pakistan and the Vietnam with Russia and China. That being said, we pretty much have squashed the Taliban so far so, unless we pull out it should be fine.