>>99285
Serious answer: the Romans made it work. The Assyrians made it work. The Egyptians made it work. The Macedonians made it work. Vladimir Putin is trying to make it work but it turns out his army is pretty shit at this "war" stuff without American taxpayers providing the food, fuel, ammo, trucks, tanks, planes, etc. The adventure in Chechnya told us that much, though Putin did eventually get their oil fields under control, plus unlimited access to pretty much all their extant population of postpubescent males for the subsequent adventures in Georgia and Ukraine.
The Romans were able to make conquest feed conquest. They made war feed war. They were really good at it. It wasn't just "make the new provinces pay taxes in wheat" or "ethnically cleanse the newly acquired fertile land and colonize it." A yuge part of the process was yoinking each conquered tribe's young males and using them as cannon fodder to conquer the next one. Empires can grow for centuries using this one weird trick, but they die when they run out of readily accessible populations to loot this way, as Rome did. Putin is speedrunning collapse. He thought the Ukrainians were, like the Georgians, generally disinclined to resist. I assume that he thought he'd already be using the Ukrainians as cannon fodder in Finland or maybe the Baltic States, or Poland. He guessed wrong about an awful lot of things, which is one of the hazards of being a crazy despot who kills people who tell you things you don't want to hear.
Saddam Hussein, likewise, was constantly told that his military was top-notch and unstoppable. Part of the reason his generals kept telling him this was that he had them killed if they didn't. Part of the reason was that their grift was dependent on not rocking the boat, so everybody in his military establishment and civil service who had anything to lose passed outrageous bullshit up and down the line as gospel truth. This is a great system for getting rich until the shooting starts, and then there's a problem. Saddam had no idea until he watched his troops get rolled up like cheap carpet. Many such cases.
