银鞍照白马，飒沓如流星

to summarize very briefly, D&G claim that the kinds of organizations used to wage war have an existence that is ontologically separate from the kinds of organizations we call as states, and that when states wage war, they do so through encapsulating and juridifying (to coin a term) this previously-extant autonomous war-machine, which d&g identify primarily with nomadic steppe polities (which they characterize as being based on numerical principles of organization vice the territorializing principles of the state) and segmentary-lineal "tribal" organizations. to quote them: "Axiom II The war machine is the invention of the nomads. […] Proposition V: Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions o fthe war machine in space." much time is spent characterizing the two antagonistic spatial logics of nomadic and territorial societies, with the former being characterized as "smooth" and the latter as "striated;" a distinction that is in turn applied to sciencies and probably lots of other things. similarly, war-machine organizations are characterized as "rhizomatic" and state-based ones as "arborescent." now for d&g the war-machine is an abstract mode of organization that can apply to many separate organizations, many of which aren't warlike in the strict sense at all, but it's a fundamental ontological basis of their thought all the same.

historically speaking, this is mostly nonsense. d&g do this incredibly annoying thing where they quote one guy whose works have been deeply controversial and just assume everything they say is correct, and then use it to make universalizing claims that are given no further support. this happens in the first section with dumezil, whose primordial dialectic between the magician-king and priest-jurist is simply assumed to be representative of sovereignty as such, despite the clear presence of counter-examples in the medieval jurist-king. similarly, they draw on clastres at length, without ever even touching other anthropologists who critiqued him. unfortunately for clastres and d*g as a whole, the idea of segmentary lineage societies, while anthropological orthodoxy for decades thanks to its remarkable political utility, has been thoroughly dismantled over the past few decades, with many of the most detailed and trenchant critiques (many of which had specific reference to the nuer) written in the 1970s, before the publication of AO. read kuper's the reinvention of primitive society. shockingly, claims in history and anthropology can be just as contested as those in philosophy, and to present these specific claims as evidence without even the slightest attempt at critique, analysis, justification, or even citation of other critiques is the height of scholarly irresponsibility. philosophy may be the queen of the sciences, but that does not give philosophers license to do the bare minimum of work required to understand other fields.

their understanding of nomadic societies, however, lacks even the most minimal level of academic citation; one of the most explicit evidentiary basis for their claims comes from Children of Dune. yes, the novel. this explains many basic errors in their understandings of nomad societies. for one thing, despite a tradition dating back to at least engels that characterizes pastoral nomadism as an ur-mode of "primitive" human existence and which was only buttressed by the kurgan hypothesis (for which there is precisely one piece of actual bit-wear evidence over thousands of years; see drews' early riders and anthony's the horse the wheel and language) actual pastoral nomadism, where people move all their stuff on animal-back continuously, dates back to around 800-600 BC, literally thousands of years after the first territorial states emerge. in addition, the idea of "pure" pastoralism where people live entirely off animal products is equally false; humans needs carbs and all actual nomad-pastoralists either grow crops (often by planting them at one stop on the route and coming back to harvest later) or trade with people do. herodotus himself, in addition to describing nomad-pastoralism as a new way of living, also describes "scythian plowmen" who grow grain, probably on a sedentary basis; the region that is the cradle of steppe nomadism was also one of the great breadbaskets of the classical world; see moreno's feeding the democracy. the ruins of panticapaeum show very clearly that the elites of these nomad worlds were incredibly eager to appropriate hellenistic state-forms, and the tombs of the rulers of these scytho-greek city-states show they did so in a way that granted them staggering wealth, contrary to d&g's facile claim that they somehow stood apart from writing and stability. this timing means that d&g's claim "that the war machine was the invention of the animal-raising nomad" is obviously false, as is their claim that "horseback riding was the first projector of the warrior, his first system of arms." war-chariots clearly predate it, as infantry-based armies do chariot-based armies.

if we look at what makes this steppe nomadism possible, it's obviously horses. horse domestication by steppe peoples does date back thousands and thousands of years, but the body of evidence suggests they were used as meat animals, not ridden. it's only when horses make their way down into territorial states and get assimilated into previously extant traction-vehicle traditions that they becomes used as a source of speed, and they do so in the form of the war-chariot, an extremely technically sophisticated vehicle that required large amounts of different skilled labourers to build. it's only after another millennium or so of charioteering that we see actual horse cavalry emerge in the assryian army, and it's only after that that they make their way back to their site of original domestication as mounts. in other words, it was the state that made the key technology of nomadism possible. if you're wondering "lol did it really take them five thousand years to figure out how to ride a horse" i strongly suggest you find an unbroken horse and try to jump on its back. make sure you wear a helmet.

their characterization of nomad societies as well is deeply flawed; contrary to their fantasy of nomads; despite attempting to portray nomadic societies as sort of univocal hordes without class distinctions in reality you see aristocracies in steppe polities almost everywhere you look as sneath's the headless empire shows; the orkhon inscriptions, for example, regularly mention "both begs (nobles, from which the modern turkish term bey is derived) and peoples." the primary instrument through which this aristocracy was maintained was something d&g don't mention in the slightest, which is the practice of "leasing" out livestock. in thhis system, known as emanet in old turkic, saun in kazakh, and sureg tavikh in mongolian, rich men with huge herds would lease out small portions of their livestock to poor men, who were in turn required to remit a large portion of the product back to the owners of the livestock. if this sounds exactly like the systems of land-lease that underpinned what used to be called feudalism, that's because it does. you can also see this system among the xhosa of southern africa, the comanche polity, and probably in many other places. nomad polities are also far more spatialized than d&g want to admit; because of pasture scarcity and the need for transhumance it's actually quite common for specific territorial boundaries to be made and enforced by higher authorities, even by ecclesiastical powers in the mongol case, although of course d&g would insist that somehow it's done in a ~smooth~ way.

central to their concept of nomad society is their generalization of them as being based on a "numerical" principle as opposed to the "territorial" organization of the state and the "lineal" organization of bands. the last, as discussed, just doesn't exist. ironically, d&g's nomad fetish means they don't fall into the incredibly common trap of characterizing nomad polities as based in lineal organizations. instead, they fixate on the 'decimal' organization you see in some (but not all!) nomad polities wherein all households are organized into interlocking groups of ten, hundred, thousand, and ten thousand households that are then mobilized into military units on the same basis. this is an actual real thing, but it's certainly not as omnipresent as they make it out to be. it's first identified with the xiongnu in about 100bc, and appears to have spread widely from there, but unfortunately the only text i can find that addresses the subject in detail is in german and undigitzed. it was continued by other east asian pastoralists and most famously used by the mongols, and appears to have some presence in the various turkic steppe polities, but paron's history of the pechenegs of what is now ukraine claims there is only one documented instance of a specifically decimal organization, and that's just in one battle. herodotus doesn't mention the scythians having decimal organizations (instead he claims they were organized into territorial districts) and there doesn't seem to be any kind of decimal system in the comanche polity. in contrast, d&g cite the book of numbers, which has no historical basis whatsoever; the exodus never happened. there are also decimal-based systems in territorial states; perhaps the ming huangce system was inspired by steppe systems, but the anglo-norman tithing definitely wasn't. shockingly, d&g just don't mention them. now this numerical thing is really important for d&g, and to them is an essential component of nomad society, but it just very obviously isn't universal like they want it to be. the idea that state-incorporated war-machines are necessarily numerical is false too; you see plenty of state war-machines that don't have regular numerical subdivisions like the incredibly chaotically numbered retinues of late feudal england or the very disparate citizen militia that actually made up hoplite armies. you even sometimes have these numerical divisions explicitly territorialized, as with the 19th century reserve systems where units would be exclusively raised from particular subregions.

let's laser-focus on genghis, whom d&g love to wank to. first of all, chinggis (the preferred transliteration today) became powerful not being a nomad, but by incorporating what was needed from agricultural states into the steppe. for one thing, he integrated armoured shock cavalry, requiring immense amounts of metal (contrary to what d&g say the idea of metalworking as a nomad practice par excellence is just nonsense) into the traditional steppe horse archers, although precisely how is unclear. the idea that he specifically numericalized the lineages is nonsense too; decimalization dates back to the xiongnu and are attested in mongol culture pre-chinggis. also vital to his success was the mongol ability to effectively conduct siege warfare, enabled by the mongol practice of directly recruiting captured artisans whenever possible. during the climactic siege of xiangyang during the conquest of the southern song, the mongols were able to triumph, according to contemporary sources, by bringing in western european siege weaponry, although the mongols had very extensively used other designs beforehand. even better, none of this is unique to chinggis. all of these can be seen in the liao and jin empires, which originated as steppe polities and ended up explicitly claiming the mantle of emperor (huangdi) through a very similar process of assimilation. speaking more broadly, d&g say that "the power of slaves, foreigners, or captives in a war machine of nomadic origin is very different from the power of lineal aristocracies, as well as from that of State functionaries and bureaucrats." but again this is bollocks; nomad polities like the jin and liao very explicitly kept hallmarks of bureacratic organization like the examination system in place, and often kept separate legal systems for steppe and agricultural subjects; the idea that non-steppe 'foreigners' were somehow marginal to these polities is utterly wrong.

leaving aside nomads specifically and going on to their broader military theory; d&g's claim that weapons are nothing without social organization is of course true but their explication of the organizations is wrong. bronze age swords have nothing to do with cavalry, and the stirrups did not create the knight, although the stirrup thing has been espoused by many (wrongly). the hoplite was a citizen-soldier but not a peasant soldier; the average peasant did not have the money to afford hoplite armament and therefore served as psiloi (skirmishers) or, if they were really screwed, hypaspistai (military servants; literally shield-bearers). the stuff about numerical hoplite armies bound into ordered ranks by the two-handled aspis is wrong, too, but it was scholarly orthodoxy when they published ATP (the big revisionist salvo was van wees' '84 book iirc) so we can't blame them too much for that.