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I think divorcing "institutional effectiveness" from "morality" is a wrong choice. While it's true that part of institutional effectiveness is just the process of learning to do hard things, an institution with poor moral values will be a less effective one. Look at China - or for that matter look at the procurement/sustainment scandals in Western countries. Men without virtue are not the only thing that makes a military weak. But they do make it weaker.
Your monograph here acts as if for a theory to be correct, it has to be the only explanation for something. So if someone says "decadence is bad for military readiness and societal cohesion" you say "no, look at This Example!" Now, if someone is claiming that a lack of decadence is the only factor in military defeat, then it's fair to raise that objection (and that person is being silly). But the operative question, at least for people who understand that not everything is monocausal is really "would This Example perform better or worse if they were decadent/lacked certain virtues/were soft men/etc.
Sure. I proposed a sort of modification of the Hard Times Cycle suggesting it made more sense if you conceived of the cycle as telling a story about virtue rather than strength (or, if you prefer, suggesting a different, more nuanced understanding of strength), and using Kipling as a brief example of how we might conceive of the traits that virtue requires.
My theory is that virtue is better for a society, including a military. Militaries will perform worse if their ranks are full of the corrupt; so will societies. What evidence would make me update would be evidence that organizations and societies full of cowardly, lazy, lying people performed just as well or better as societies full of brave, hard-working, honest people.
On the one hand, I concede that there's a risk of using the Hard Times Cycle to "fix the wrong problem." On the other hand, fingering "decadence" is a problem is good in part because it is so actionable. Behaving in decadent ways is bad for you and while most people have little to no control over what their military apparatus is doing, they do have some control over what they are doing. And I would argue that advantage of fingering virtue as something that elevates a society and makes it more fit is that not only is it true, but it's actionable at all levels, both the institutional and the individual.
And, as @FiveHourMarathon points out, the historical method of creating virtue is intentionally creating a sort of limited Hard Times even amongst a society living in Good Times. That's also how the military creates institutional effectiveness: boot camp is supposed to be hard. Which, if you look at it from that lens makes your concerns (you specifically mention a lack of training!) and the concerns of the anti-decadence people the same thing - although I should hasten to clarify that I do not think that hard times in and of themselves create effective training - here I would diverge from the simplistic version of the meme. But I do think that effective training often requires hard times.
I tend to think that the problem with the Good Time/Hard Times/Decadence memeplex is that the unit of analysis is typically wrong. The luxury or thrift of the majority of people don't matter, for the purposes typically considered. What matters is really the leadership class of a society, both as aspiration and model for the lower classes and as the most important engine of society. We're concerned about the actions of the Patricians, not the Plebs.
A society experiencing "hard times" can still have an elite focused on creature comforts, a society experiencing "good times" can still have an elite that focuses on The Strenuous Life. The concept of decadence within the western tradition has always been a warning against the former, normally coded in terms of oriental despotism, and towards the latter.
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I do not dispute this claim. My claim is that "decadence" is a very bad term for the specific "moral" failings that lead to bad performance: corruption, fief-building etc. I gave the example of the US having literal ships dedicated to the storage and production as ice cream. Giving your soldiers ice cream in the middle of the warm is "decadent", so is flying out super-star actors and singers to entertain them. Even Tier-1 operators do not operate like 40k Space Marines: asking them to be ascetic monks is neither necessary nor helpful.
Why would I disagree? All else being equal, a military and nation that are less corrupt will tend to beat one that's more corrupt. That is not the crux of the matter, since all else is never equal.
If anyone can demonstrate examples of militaries that somehow don't have harsh bootcamps but do well, I'd be surprised. But the Fremen Mirage claims that it is civilizational softness that is the primary factor, producing military softness as a consequence (though that is also important).
I stand by precisely the opposite claim. Decadence is defined as:
If the US military works just fine when the soldiers have plenty of "pleasure" and "luxury", as long as they're actually locking in and fighting when they need to fight, then you need more specific terms for the actual problem(s).
Making your men suffer needlessly doesn't make them a better fighting force. Beatings, hazings, being starved on the field do not improve their fighting capabilities, or else vatniks would conquer the world. US drill sergeants aren't allowed to beat up their men anymore, and nothing of consequence was lost (cleaning toilets with toothbrushes is still effective punishment). If they're suffering purposefully during boot camp or in training, that is a whole different story. I don't think soldiers shouldn't need to do demanding physical training or military drills that require shivering in the cold.
There's something salvageable here, I think.
Simo Häyhä -- the White Death, the deadliest sniper ever -- was an avid hunter all his life. It wasn't his profession, per se; he was a farmer's son. But surely it was in part the desire for meat to supplement a farmer's diet that prompted his hunting and the hunting culture of rural Finland more generally. From there, it turned into a hobby; during his compulsory term in the militia -- which, importantly, does not train snipers -- he won a number of marksmanship competitions. I think it's fair to say that by the time he eventually did receive formal training as a sniper a decade later, he was already an exceptionally skilled shooter. And while he was the best, he was far from the only: Finnish snipers were unusually effective all through the war.
But would that have been the case had Finland not had a hunting culture? It still does to this day, but one could imagine a number of ways it might not: concerns over gun violence, ecological worries, meat getting cheap while other hobbies got more tempting.
Perhaps a more pointed example: Britain's success in the Napoleonic Wars largely came down to its navy, and its navy's success came down to the competence of its sailors. Officers' commissions were bought and sold in the British army of the period, but not so in the Navy: in that branch, they wanted competent officers. To have any chance of achieving the rank of captain, you were expected to start at the age of 12, and there were multiple stages of reportedly quite difficult exams (in that many failed, including boys from very privileged backgrounds) to rise in the ranks. It was by all accounts a fairly miserable and dangerous experience, and one that lasted not the thirteen weeks of bootcamp but thirteen years before one might be offered command over a small sloop. Why did English gentlemen -- and it was generally gentlemen -- subject their sons to that?
And, naturally, it was worse for the seamen, very difficult, high-skill labor for terrible wages (often as not months late) under brutal discipline and with all the dangers of combat. How did they train these men? This was not an easy job. Well, they largely didn't; they just conscripted civilian sailors. The 'merchant navy' was broadly acknowledged as the source of Britain's naval dominance, the core of their national security strategy despite being a civilian institution.
There are other examples I could mention -- English longbowmen, or the horse archers that have already come up a couple times -- but I think the point is clear: not every skill of military relevance can be learned in a few months at the outbreak of war. A society that encourages the development of those skills in civilians have a real advantage in acquiring competent soldiers. Not an unbeatable edge, but there's no such thing; it's substantial enough to consider, at least.
Of course, these skills include things like literacy and math, not central examples of martial virtue. These days, it might well include video games skills as preparation for drone piloting. But other ones are: declines in gun culture, fitness, self-reliance, patience, wilderness survival, persevering in the face of adversity despite bad food and little sleep, and so on are just the sort of thing grouchy old veterans are talking about when they say society has gotten soft.
To stake out the boundaries of this motte: soldiers often have to perform difficult tasks in harsh conditions, some with very high skill ceilings, and if a nation has a well of civilians who've spent years and years performing similar tasks in similarly harsh conditions to draw on, they've got a leg up on nations that don't. This is much narrower than (some) claims about the corrosive effects of ill-defined decadence (not even going to try to steelman the focus on sexual morality; I wouldn't know where to start), but I think the core concept is preserved. It's not 'any and all privation is good, because it makes people tougher,' but it's also not as trivial as 'fighting makes people better fighters.' There's a region where, demonstrably, improving (some) people's circumstances would make them worse soldiers.
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It doesn't refute the argument because the myth of Ghurkas is that they are forged by their harsh mountain enviroment before they reach bootcamp, and the reality is that they go through a tough selection process (particularly British Ghurkas given how few we now recruit and how much of a standard-of-living bump it is compared to rural Nepal), but Ghurka bootcamp notoriously involves no striking of recruits by instructors and minimal yelling.
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