Reading about war

I grew up in a part of the east coast where you can't drive ten minutes without passing a battlefield. My parents took me to the parks on weekends because they were free and close, and I'd wander the trails reading the infographic signs. I remember standing on a hill where soldiers had been ordered to march across open ground into a wall of rifles, and not being able to let it go. Somebody sat in a tent the night before and decided that. Why did he think it was the right call?

That question sent me backwards. The generals I read about had studied Napoleon, who studied Caesar, who studied Alexander. By middle school I'd run out of people to read and landed in ancient Greece, and I never left. Classical and Hellenistic warfare is the longest-running interest I have. I read whatever books I can find, watch documentaries with my dad, and have logged an insane number of hours on YouTube channels where someone spends forty minutes on one battle with little animated arrows. When I'm too busy for a real hobby, this is the one I still make room for.

What keeps me hooked has never been the fighting. It's the people underneath it. An ancient army was thousands of men who each had to decide to trust the person next to them, and a general who had to know how far that trust would stretch. The commanders I admire most were the ones who understood how people act under pressure and planned around it.

Weirdly, that's what I study now. Accounting, payments, analytics. It's all people systems, who trusts whom, who moves first, what happens when someone doesn't hold their line. I keep realizing I already know the shape of the problem, because I've already been reading about it in a different costume.

The largest idea I've taken from all of it comes from Epaminondas, a Theban general who beat Sparta at Leuctra by refusing to spread his army evenly. He stacked everything at one point and accepted being weak everywhere else. That's how I make decisions now. Where does this get decided? I put everything there and I let the rest go. It is also how I think about a small team competing with much larger ones.

This interest has been with me longer than any other. It gave me the questions I ask about everything, it is a big part of why defense technology pulls at me, and it's still what I'd rather read about than most anything else.