So it is my understanding that we went from a feudal military systems to our current systems is a because new military...

Communication, commerce and exchange should be less capillary.
Single communities, or at least single 'feuds', should be mostly self-sufficient in regards to food, energy etc..
There should be unpredictable threats against which small communities would need the protection of insular, centralized powers with sufficient military forces.

If we suppose a catastrophic end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenario that still leaves a good percentage of the world population still alive, some infrastructures and technologies still functional and the knowledge to make them work, we could imagine people rebuilding civilization in small villages that can't rely on mass production since each one is, for the time being, cut out from the world and forced to be self-sufficient. There would be small factories and handcraft togheter, and as the communities grow so does the need to protect from scavengers and raiders coming from outside. If one village gets rich and lucky enough they can rise in power and, counting on the income from surrounding villages, upgrade its 'city guard' into an actual, effective military force, and thus extend its influence over other villages in need of protection.

Guns did exactly that but we didn't change to a more feudal structure. I'm not sure any one thing in particular could cause that kind of change short of our current society collapsing. The feudal system isn't efficient one but it works well in certain situation like lack of infrastructure. Alternatively I could see slow-ish interstellar travel causing a sort of sudo-feudal system with each planet being it's own fiefdom.

Complete and catastrophic collapse of the system that makes our current military doctrines viable. So rolling back the entire industrial revolution, both of them, then the economic growth and establishment of large-scale trade in and around Europe, reduction of the global population by 90%, and erasure of more than half a millennium of development in politics, economy, medicine, agriculture and military theory. Also a mini ice age.

None of those are technologies, genius.

How astute of you. The point was it was more the lack of technology and infrastructure is what made the feudal system necessary.

Civ tech tree is not a model for how things work IRL.

>So it is my understanding that we went from a feudal military systems to our current systems is a because new military technologies were relatively cheap and easy to use.

I feel that the biggest change was that the nobility and commoners were first alienated from a number of their former rights and those rights were then put up for auction by the state. As in military commissions were granted for a fee on top of requiring the nobleman to set up his own soldierly, to name something. The alienization of the commons was another process that generated the money, which made putting other such rights repeatedly up for sale economically feasible for the state for the first time in a while.

If increase in efficiency comes with an increase in cost (both material and skill), you could end up in neo-feudal system.

>If increase in efficiency comes with an increase in cost
That statement doesn't make a lot of sense because efficiency is measurement of effect verses cost. I also think you need to look up what exactly the feudal system is. The short version is "serve lord, get land to make a living off of being a farmer". In a modern society with industrial farming, efficient mass transit of goods and refrigeration/preservation this system is just incredibly archaic, undesirable and typically pretty oppressive of the vessels (aka every one who isn't a rich noble).

Frigging auto correct vassal not vessel.

>we went from a feudal military systems to our current systems
This feels like a really muddled question. The feudal system was an entire system of governance that predates even things like the modern concept of nations, "feudal militaries" are a relatively tiny part of that. Likewise, the step from feudal militaries to modern ones crosses fuckloads of hurdles and barriers, from weapons to logistics to healthcare and hygeine to political considerations in war and probably dozens of others.

In short, the question needs to be more specific; what aspect of a "feudal military" do you want? Everyone dying of disease in camps before and after battle? Sword and board to be viable? Armies which march on the ego of an absolute monarch rather than on national feeling?

>What kind of technologies would you need to go from our current systems to a more feudal one?

It seems to me that this isn't really a matter of weapons, armour and so on, but a matter of social organisation. The feudal system wasn't just how you raised your armies, it was how the entire nation was organised and administered. The vassal isn't just there to fight for his lord in return for land, he's also the man who is there in person on that land, a necessity to control and govern it.

With the state growing from the king in person with a few servants and advisor into a large machinery, bureaucracy and various institutions coming into being the feudal system becomes both an inefficient way to govern the land in general, and specifically an inefficient way to scrape together the military resources to fight with.

If you want highly trained soldiers with expensive wargear, the modern state will be better able to afford the wages of professional soldiers along with top notch equipment for them. If you want mass armies the modern state can conscript more men, and find the money for the mass amounts of food, uniforms, weapons etc required. And all of this regardless of whether we're fighting with stealth fighters and networked tanks, or wooden clubs and stone-tipped arrows. The feudal societies (in the west) were simply brought down by the modern ones at the military technological level that they did because that happened to be the level military technology was at then.

And as reverting to a feudal society will hamstring the nations ability to develop and fund new tech, new technology aren't going to push societies back to the feudal level either. Instead anyone who tries it will most likely stagnate as a more or less direct result of it all.

>What kind of technologies would you need to go from our current systems to a more feudal one?
The space opera game I'm in currently has two things:

1) Breakdown of a hugely more advanced galactic government
2) Gene-coded weapons, technology and methods of travel

So at one point there was this democratic or at least partially democratic space society where they knew how everything worked, but that broke down. Now there's an imperial monarchy where the king/queen/their children have the right genetic code to unlock the greatest portion of what's left behind.

This basically leads to a feudal set-up where governors of planets, knights, priests, ship commanders, etc. are people titled by and with a duty to the ruling family who have access to technologies that common people do not, and are charged with using that responsibly. Beyond any weapon honestly the biggest thing holding up this space feudalism thing is that wormhole gates, which are the best method of FTL travel, are locked to the genetic code of certain families.

That is why I called it neo-feudal.

Increase in efficiency can exist with an increase in cost. As long as the return in investment exceeds the cost.

So for example, imagine a scenario where a new technology exists that allows humans to interconnect with machines. However, for individuals to be effective, they need to be trained for a long time. The equipments they need is also expensive.

The cost is very much. But the return in investment can be very high. For example, if a several of these individuals can take classic forces bigger themselves.

>Armies which march on the ego of an absolute monarch

Austria-Hungary in WW1 comes to mind, which I guess illustrates your point quite well.

Ok I see what you mean now it was just very vague the first way you put it. Now define neo-feudal. Compare and contrast it to the the feudal system and explain how it would work because as it stands neo-feudal is a pretty meaningless word.

>However, for individuals to be effective, they need to be trained for a long time. The equipments they need is also expensive.

That sounds like your current day fighter pilot.

Regardless, the greater efficiency of a more modern society means they can afford the training for more of these professionals and buying more tanks/jets/mechs/whatever.

On top of that, having the army organised form above instead of a loose collection of individuals should make it a lot easier to co-ordinate the whole thing, get the logistics working, have the proper support functions, trim away excess redundancies, and so on.

And then there's the issue of putting forth the monumental amounts of money necessary to develop new weaponry at this level. Even today few most nations don't even try to develop their own tanks and military aircraft. Trying to fund that kind of thing on a pilot by pilot basis will be, well, a challenge.

Meh, there was a war in Iraq just recently and they got another one lined up already.

Society going neo-feudal doesn't mean goes back to being full feudal. You could still have modern systems of logistics. Hell, they would be necessary. However, in turn you can have a more privatized government and breaking down of nation-states.

>the step from feudal militaries to modern ones crosses fuckloads of hurdles and barriers
For example, take rations, even. Going from antiquity to the modern era takes us from "we give everyone a frying pan and their own bread and they drag a load of cows around with them" to MREs. Along the way we cross massive changes in agricultural practise, hygiene and logistics, culinary tastes, and understanding of nutrition. As a result your food now comes in a lunchbox that in a pinch could get airdropped in rather than from the herd following your camp and whatever bushes happen to be around.

Yeah, exactly. If he wants a military where everyone lines into formation and rushes for melee that's a different result if he wants one where the biggest killer is dysentry, you know? I'm assuming this is for tabletop and feudal strategies and tactics is what he's after, but even those can be different (you could have an army that fights with fire and manuever but is limited by communications and travel time to skirmishes surrounding decisive pitched battles, for instance).

Returning to fuedalism is easy and cyberpunk/etc has done it for years.

You end up with individuals whos wealth and power are more than an individual person could ever hope to rival. They control everything, they have elite trained warfighters, they own the air you breath.

Firearms were great for the idea of democracy because a ill-fed, ill trained peasant isn't much of a threat to a trained from birth, well fed, kitted out knight. Turns out when you can kill him with something far, far cheaper it really makes it easier to enforce your will rather than theirs. If you were to reverse this it would likely be the equivalent of attack robots/suits/etc that required a massive amount of resource to maintain but absolutely dominate everything else anyone can do. EG : You have a marine, I have a bullet proof robot that can see you in the dark, from 2 miles away and shoot you in the face as you round the corner. It is almost completely above retaliation and you live in its gunsights. Super-murder drones require alot of resources that only the "lords" would have...so on and so forth.

At this point I think I should just join in asking what exactly this neo-feudal system is.

Ok, but who controls the logistics? How do you gather enough funds for your super soldier tech R&D or the money to field them? The nation-states aren't there to do that any more, so your "privatized government" step up to fill that role? Well how do they do that? What the fuck are they any way? How do they work, how do they get their money, how do they decided what belongs to whom? And who runs the police or maintains the roads? What about laws and courts?

A neo-feudal system would be a system where the governance is privatised. You can also call it a corporate feudalism of sorts.

The super-soldiers and eventually their bureaucratic associates would.

Governments are providers of services, right? Well in this case, protection would be one of these. You can eventually argue that technology used by the super-soldiers can be used for more economic purposes for example organising economies etc. So eventually, the resources gathered from the people might be in exchange for such economic purposes.

Now the standard services (police, education, law etc.) of governments would be still provided by the privatised government as it is beneficial to all sides.

BTW, I should have thought of a definition of neo-feudalism before starting the thread. I was hoping to come with something as I want on.

Feudalism wasn't replaced by a more modern state due to arquebus-wielding commoners revolting, it rather got replaced due to the kings with a "modern" state machinery behind them being able to be a twelve shades of snot out of those who had only an old feudal system to govern their lands with. Small, cold and sparsely populated Sweden could go up against the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth thanks to superior organisation, and the Danish nobility was brought into line and accepted their new roles as beureucrats and officers instead of vassals and lords mostly by the siege artillery of Karl X Gustav pounding away at Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, the Swiss held off the feudal lords quite well without gunpowder playing any major role, as did the inhabitants of Dithmarschen. The Battle of the Golden spurs also come to mind. And the knight as heavy lancer didn't disappear because he was shout out of his saddle by arquebuses, he simply dropped his lance and got a brace of pistols instead.

In the future case, that power armour of yours should be easier to develop, afford, man and support for a society organised along modern lines, whereas a more or less feudal or medieval one will have to make do with whatever export model they is available to buy, and they can afford.

Now such power amour could make an armed uprising by the general population futile, but if we look at the part of the world today that are decent to live in we find that most of them haven't had anything such as of late, and I don't think people in general have weapons at hand that could deal with tank or fighter jet anyway. Other factors have prevented a return to feudalism.

Heh the main gripe I have with this is the "privatized government [...] is beneficial to all sides". Private organizations have almost never been beneficial to any one but them selves and those in charge of them. And modern corporate mentality has only been making that worse.

Reminder that guns made war 10000000x times more boring

Have you ever been in any sort of war, with or without guns?

Beneficial to all sides if you really push the definition.

It is beneficial to neo-feudal lords as it is more profitable to have an ordered society. Well to be precise, it is profitable for you if your society is stable and somewhat educated.

It is beneficial to the people because of obvious reasons.

However, when they can the neo-feudal lords cut corners. Even when they don't, the services are designed to bring in more profit for them.

You think governments don't cut corners....

Well, with a bit of pushing, being very liberal about "land", and a stiff shot of vodka I guess I could see how you could connect that with feudalism. Though the feudal part frankly looks mostly like a word slapped on because it's cool.

I don't see how military technology would make it much more or less viable though. How exactly would that thing be organised anyway? Trying to hold on to the feudal part it seems we'd need department heads/regional directors/franchise holders/some such each providing military forces or personal military service. Which means a very fractioned military force compared to one organised as a whole from the start, and as such at a disadvantage form the start regardless of military technology.

> What kind of technologies would you need to go from our current systems to a more feudal one?
sarna.net/wiki/History

You would be right, if we were thinking in the context of a single planet. In this case, having division of labour is logical as transportation and communication is easy. In a bigger context, it might make more sense.

A lack of trade and communications.

Uh... if any thing in a bigger context the organizational challenges makes the feudal system worse against a centralized government. If anything a "feudal" interplanetary system would merely be a transitional phase.

Let's see here, if a collection of planetary armies is to replace a single army spread over multiple planets, then there has to be a reason for that. I guess the reason is that, due to problems in transport, said army would generally have to stand on its own, instead of working as part of a unified army along with the other planetary forces. But then we get the question of why the planetary lords stay as vassals of corporate HQ, as moving in a forces that could bring a stray planet in line has already been established as being a major embuggerance.

It also seems that the feudal parts of this would only really be in effect at the very top, interplanetary layer. With the feudal system relying on each part, in this case planet, being strong in itself, a non-feudal system would appear to be favoured for the planets' internal organisation. This then reflects back up to the top layer, which starts looking more like the Galactic Federation than the Interplanetary Kingdom of Goldilocks Inc.

I disagree. If you lack quick communication and transport, a system similar to feudalism is not a choice but a necessity. You can't organise stuff from far away so you have to be independent to an extent.

For each planet or star system, you might a a system resembling our own. For truly large collections, you will end up something resembling feudalism.

Why would it by necessity have local power assigned from above, instead of having the local powers banding together on their own?

>Meanwhile, the Swiss held off the feudal lords quite well without gunpowder playing any major role, as did the inhabitants of Dithmarschen.

The Swiss were vassals to both the HRE and the French Crown and recieved massive funding in return for the free and fast military support they could deliver. There wasn't too much reason to fuck with them, especially since entering a more formalized feudal relationship with them would've actually made it harder to activate and deploy all those delicious swiss mercs.

If the central power can draw more military strength than the local powers can, the central power will be able to dictate terms.

I don't see why it has to be one way or another. It might be that the ruling class of a local region was chosen locally, but still has to submit to higher powers. Or they delegated from above.

However, in both cases, they have to submit to offices higher in the hierarchy.

>For truly large collections, you will end up something resembling feudalism.

At the top level, the HRE was a representative Democracy rather than a feudal state though. The nobles repesented the interests of their people and voted for the next Emperor after all. That Emperor then functioned as the highest judical and executive authority in the HRE.

for a purely military Elite warrior caste situation...
Super Soldiers who must be created though selective breeding of bloodlines. Then they would need elite weapons that only they can use because they are super soldiers. Like maybe a form of powered exoseketal armor allowing them to use heavier weapons than the average man, move faster, fight harder, survive greater injury. Now you have your military elite. Because of their birth conditions they are raised above normal soldiers and made officers from the moment they are old enough to fight.

The point was that the commoner armies of the Swiss could beat off the Austrian knights even without relying on gunpowder, such as they did at the battle of Sempach. The social organisation is irrelavnt to that.

That said, the Swiss were mercenaries, not really vassals. They were paid in coin when hired, not given land for perpetual service-as-needed. And you seldom invade your own vassals...

If the central power can easily shuffle around the military forces to enforce compliance, then it seems unnecessary to fracture the military into distinct planetary forces. So the feudal bit here really is balancing on a knife's edge between independent planets and a more coherent organisation.

Making that feudal however would mean splitting your realm into small regions and giving every super soldier one to rule with a large degree of independence, tasking them with using the revenue form that region to buy and maintain their arms and armour.

It's not so much that it's easy, as that it could do it if necessary to prevent rebellion. 40k is an example of this (although you could argue how well it portrays it.)

>That said, the Swiss were mercenaries, not really vassals.

Their official status was vassals and the various cities sent their soldiers out under the guise of their obligation as such. Everybody of course knew that they got paid and that the various merchenary entrepreneurs recieved massive sums of black money to influence Swiss politics, but the legal fiction generally was upheld. At least until the Swiss started lynching those entrepreneurs, that is.

Point is they were officially allied to both the HRE and the French crown and they offered an important service to both, so neither had too much interest in going to war with them. That they could beat off heavy cavalry was part of it, but those other factors were probably more important.

Glory and automatic salvation for every single heretic destroy with blessed swords!