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Notes -
War, Genes, History, Capital, Data
Opening
I’m making a top-level response to the Quality Contribution (QC) of RandomRanger for the week of September 8, 2025: "But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?". This will be blunt, but I’m open to being moved.
My stance: It shouldn’t have been a QC. The Motte defines QC as: "interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered." and the comment is certainly polished. But the bar that made me join here was higher: QC is a comment/post that explains something counter-intuitive, or something that changes my mind, or at the very least makes my view of the world more nuanced (and yes I know that I just repeated the same thing three times). This QC does the opposite: it uses an eloquent voice to sell a very strong claim about “racial war ability” that its own evidence doesn’t actually support.
The comment argues, and I quote, that: "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary. Ye olde racist might be wrong 9/10 times but is right where it matters, regarding key civilizational abilities of which warfare is the most important".
Before I push back, I want to note what I think the QC gets right. It’s absolutely true that warfare is a brutally demanding composite of logistics, industry, organization, and abstract thinking, and that it tells more about a society’s real capabilities than feel-good representation in sports or prestige slots. I also think it’s fair to say that colonial wars were often “easy” given the power and capital disparities involved. My disagreement is not with those premises, but with the jump from those facts to a story about fixed racial essence.
In this comment I’m doing two things: (1) arguing that the specific racial thesis is not supported by the evidence presented, and (2) arguing that holding this up as Quality Contribution lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
Let's get into it. I have three rebuttals, and then some various thoughts that I put in an appendix.
1. "Too early to tell" isn't a dodge, it's history
Stephen Kotkin's "too early to tell" should be the first test for any broad assertions. Imagine The Motte in 1904, before the Battle of Tsushima, and the confident essays about how East Asians “just don’t have civilizational war in them.” Or The Motte in Tang-era China, self-secured about southerners who’d been ruled on and off for a millennium, then asks Vietnam about how permanent that looked. Hell, look at the Jews and how long did it take before they got to really rule themselves?
History routinely punishes premature essentialism. The fact that we can point to an era where one region dominates does not conclude a law of peoples for all time. And even within Africa, we’re barely a few post-colonial generations into modern state formation, compared to the half-millennium runway European and some East Asian states had to iterate on fiscal-military institutions.
On the timescales we are talking about, modern African states are a brand-new experiment. Their “industrial-era warfare record” consists of a small number of highly skewed trials, many of them fought under extreme external constraints. Declaring a permanent “war ability gap” on the basis of this very particular, very lopsided historical window is not caution, it’s overfitting.
2. "GDP not HBD” and that compound interest fights wars
War isn't about race, it's logistics, industry, and fiscal state capacity. If it can be pointed out how genetic components lead to the development of the bond market, increasing financial capacity to feed armies and wage wars, now that would be a much more compelling argument.
Right now, the examples in the QC are consistent with at least two stories:
The data cited in the comment simply doesn’t distinguish between (A) and (B). If we line up a low-capital polity in 1885 against a peak-industrial empire, we didn’t measure “innate war-ability”; we measured who got to compound capital for 400 years and who got repeatedly reset or never even started.
Take a more personal compound-interest analogy. Start two players at $100k and $1M: the 8% guy with a head start beats the 8% guy without it, every time. It should be obvious to everyone here that the player without the head start has to be more hardworking, more brilliant, more cunning, more successful, and do that repeatedly over a sustained amount of time to have a chance. If one side got centuries of relatively (I acknowledge "relative" is a load-bearing word) unmolested compounding (trade routes, gunpowder iteration, fiscal states, etc.) and the other got geographical isolation, depopulation, extraction, arms restrictions, and arbitrary boundary-drawing, then you don’t need chromosomes to explain outcomes.
This is what I mean by path-dependence (see Appendix point 7): outcomes depend on the sequence of early moves, not just the static “inputs” we see today. Once one cluster of polities industrializes early and builds fiscal-military states, and another cluster is repeatedly raided, partitioned, and ruled through extractive institutions, you should expect a persistent gap even if the “human material” were identical.
If you want to argue for (A) over (B), you’d need cases where institutions and capital are roughly comparable but ancestry varies, and then show a robust systematic gap. You’d also need to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”. The QC never even sketches what such a dataset would look like, let alone shows it. Before we invoke genes, we should at least exhaust the far more direct account in terms of path-dependent sabotage, disinvestment, and the inertia of early advantages.
3. Mutilating a dataset and how successes are flukes, failures are inherent
Methodologically, there’s a clear pattern in the comment. When an African/Black polity wins, it’s “disease,” “terrain,” “numbers,” "politics," or “European rifles.” When whites lose strategically, it’s “just politics.” When blacks lose, it’s taken as evidence about their essence. That’s not a neutral reading of history, it’s a one-way explanatory filter that can only ever point in one direction.
On top of that, the metric itself is baked to produce the conclusion. “Only once did a black army inflict a major campaign-ending defeat on a white army” sounds impressive until you notice how narrow and hand-picked that category is: “black” vs “white” armies, in “major campaign-ending defeats”, under modern conditions defined by European great-power wars. If you define your dataset so that African victories mostly don’t count, then treat what’s left as a natural experiment in “racial war ability”, the result isn’t surprising—you built the maze.
Apply the same moves to European history and it becomes obviously silly. Napoleon’s march on Moscow? “Oh, that was just winter and supply lines, doesn’t tell us anything about French military competence.” Stalingrad? “Just weather and Hitler’s politics.” If you treat all your side’s failures as contingent and all the other side’s failures as intrinsic, you can prove anything you like about “innate capacity” without ever admitting you changed the rules midstream.
Now, to some of the specific cases.
Yes, the 1896 Battle of Adwa shows that forces with almost equivalent technologies (French vs Italian rifles/artilleries) but one side has the superior numerical advantage would lead to ... predictable results. That's not surprising nor evidence for some proof-of-contradiction for inherent racial ability. But notice what happens rhetorically: when Africans win at long odds against a European power, it gets filed under “numbers and technology, nothing to see here.” When Africans lose to an industrial power, it’s suddenly racial essence again. Heads I win, tails you lose.
And the 1935 Italian comeback was because of airplanes and ... chemical warfare. That's industry and international impunity, not racial revelation. The only tenuous argument that I think can be made here is why there wasn't industrialization of Ethiopia between the two wars, and well, industrialization is hard.
Haiti isn’t an asterisk, either. Attrition by yellow fever was probably the strategy as much as winter is Russia’s. I think a general who was also "well known as an 'herb doctor'" would be aware of the health advantages between his people and the colonizers. If Napoleon freezing outside Moscow counts as “Russian generalship plus winter,” it’s odd that disease in Haiti gets counted as “just disease.” Subtracting an adversary’s environmental advantages but keeping your own is a one-way filter, not an empirical method.
“Portuguese defeat were primarily political defeats, not military ones.” That’s a category error if you’re using those defeats as evidence of “innate capacity.” A great general once said: "war is a mere continuation of [politics] by other means", or in other words, to impose your will on the enemy at an acceptable cost. If your battlefield kill ratios are fine but you cannot hold territory, sustain the war, keep your coalition intact, or secure the population’s compliance, you have lost at the thing war is for. You don’t get to call tactical performance “essence” and strategic failure “mere politics” if your thesis is about civilizational war capacity. That’s not an exception, that’s just defeat.
Finally, let's jump to modern day and examine the vignette of "a fairly small Wagner force can go on safari and take a whole African country, they can go in on the Central African Republic and take their gold mines, take the country's foreign policy." Right, old-superpower-backed paramilitary group vs capital-starved country fractured by decades of external meddling. Again, not attributing industry and capital and international impunity, but assigning ancestry as the reason. If this scenario happened in Europe — say, between Russia and Georgia — we don’t suddenly say “there must be something deficient about Georgian ancestry.” We correctly treat it as a story about power, capital, and position, not chromosomes. The fact that the same kind of mismatch in Africa gets read as “racial war ability” is exactly the asymmetry I’m criticizing.
Closing
The QC claims that "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary." On its own terms, it never actually establishes this. It interprets a highly skewed historical record under one favored story about essence, filters counterexamples until they don’t count, and then declares victory.
I’m not denying differences exist between peoples. I’m denying that the QC, as presented, can tell us where those differences come from, or cleanly separate history, capital, contingency, path-dependence, and politics from “innate ability.” It treats a lopsided, distorted record as if it were a clean experiment in racial war-ability, and then summarizes the result into "essence".
At best, the evidence on offer is compatible with multiple causal stories: one where genes sit at the root of everything, and one where geography, timing, conquest, and accumulated institutional and capital advantages do most of the work. Nothing in the QC even tries to tease these apart. It just assumes the genetic story, then reinterprets every data point in its light.
To me, that shouldn’t qualify as a Quality Contribution. QC should make it harder, not easier, to confuse the complicated truth from the stories we tell ourselves. If we’re going to invoke genes and civilizational fitness, the standard of care should go up, not down. Holding this up as exemplary lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
What would satisfy me? At minimum, an attempt to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”, and some acknowledgement of how far our current evidence is from that ideal. And even then, I’d still want an answer to a simpler question: even if Europe and East Asia did get lucky in some deep way, why must that luck be retrofitted into a story about racial essence, instead of leaving it as just that, simply luck?
Appendix of unconnected thoughts
GDP (or rather, what GDP is actually trying to measure, economically valuable output), doesn't compound. Countries hit points of diminishing returns, hit points where they are up against the edge of technology and the pace slows down, hit points of bad government, and other countries catch up because they don't have to invent anything new, they just rapidly adopt other inventions. Hence, how Japan caught up with the West in about 70 years, or how China is now blowing past the USA. If a country has good government, economic output converges toward what smart fraction theory would predict.
Consider this simple fact though: out of a billion plus people in countries all around the world, in countries of all different economic situations, in countries that were never colonized, or threw off colonial oppressors long ago, or had gentle transitions from colonialism, all different circumstances, there is not a single black owned and operated company that can produce an engine block (nor anything more technologically sophisticated than an engine block, like a jet turbine or a CPU). It's going to be pretty hard to be good at war without engine blocks and jet turbines.
Being good at modern war requires intelligence, and the lower average intelligence of subsaharan Africans is hardly tenuous, but this is well-trodden ground for people on this forum. You can start with Chapter 13 and 14 of the Bell Curve, a book that was "argued against" but never "debunked" (after spending a very long time evaluating the arguments from both sides, many years ago, I came to the conclusion The Bell Curve actually understates the case).
The last thing this forum needs are long AI assisted gish-gallop posts based on stuff the poster did not even read, think about, verify, and synthesize.
Thank you for your response, here's what I think of it
I'm really confused and maybe I need you to explain further but I am firmly of the belief that GDP compounds. It's also easy from my perspective that early wins/advantages leads to "snowballing" or sustained comparative advantage. And extension from that is others can close the gap if they don't have to go through the slower innovation/invention process and can achieve "faster compounding". I would attribute to China blowing past the USA in terms of manufacturing and certain technologies is because clearly they put way more focus and intentionally built the foundation for it in the past and now the future. Also we have to account that currently China has more people than the USA, that is undoubtedly an advantage.
Ok, I would like to invoke my Argument 1 and say I will wait for an African polity that "has good goverment". I actually think that time isn't too far away, optimistically it will happen soon (so 1 or 2 decades), at worst I do think it will happen before I die (which should be about 40-60 years away). The invading part though I'm not sure would ever actually happen.
Unfortunately I don't know mechanic skills, but I do believe a "powertrain" is more complex than an "engine block". I found Piston Automotive which is black-owned and "supplies powertrain systems, front-end cooling systems, chassis systems, BEV and PHEV battery packs, and interior systems for the automotive industry." and is a pretty big company. I'm sure I can find more. We can also find multiple car manufacturers in Africa that are black-owned (the first one I picked had a white-ish looking founder actually but the second and third one are very black-looking). You are right that there are currently no black-owned aircraft manufacturer that I can find. I do find lots of black-owned companies in the tech world. I think my Argument 2 is strong here, automotive industry is known to be capital-intensive, requires high vertical integration, if we just talk Africa, that's a lot of demand for a continent where 40% still living below the poverty wage.
Let me attempt at a rewording of my conclusion:
My Argument 2 and 3 mostly expresses my bailey, Argument 1 mostly expresses my motte. Unfortunately, HBD is not well-trodden ground for me so thanks for the linked book. I've only occasionally read HBD stuff because of the usual QCs around it, but I didn't focus or really think about them. I suppose as of the last year I have been focusing on great powers competition (in the current world) so the QC comment crossed my bailey.
Let me expand.
Well after World War II, northeast asian countries were maybe 60/40 for good government? China and North Korea bad, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan decent. And then a generation later, China got a decent government. How come African countries have flipped tails 50 or 100 times in a row? That said, I think there have been African countries with decent enough government.
I said owned and operated. Are the engineers black? Are the technicians black? That they are have a black front-man and are bragging about being "minority owned business" (a designation which potentially gives them all sorts of bonus points in getting various contracts) does not mean anything. It's pretty telling there are no photos of anyone but the owner... Maybe Linkedin, can help us out, yep, here is the VP of Engineering: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-miller-48350a12 The actual workforce looks very white: https://www.linkedin.com/company/piston-automotive/people/
What I mean is that there is no company with blacks at every important position in the engineering and production of some complex technological product.
China, India, South Korea, were all very poor, and then they figured out how to build more and more technologically complex products and sell them and then they got richer.
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