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> We can fill our stomachs in 5 minutes

That is not at all now it has gone for most of human history. Feudalism and its ancient world precursors, an entire religious-social-economic system of vassalage, was necessary concentrate the tiny bits of surplus food into long standing specialized military forces.



So people can fill in 5 mins, whilst the others work to do this.

Elephants can't digest enough calorie rich food to be able to do this. They individually have to spend longer eating.


Yet war elephants are a thing.


Apparently specifically because of the food issue they weren't generally worth the trouble. ACOUP has a good post about it [1]. TL/DR: For the amount of fodder and manpower you need for one elephant, you can have a lot of traditional horse calvary.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/02/collections-war-elephants-part...


We've always been able to eat that quickly.

If you're suggesting there wouldn't be enough food to feed an army of humans, need I remind you that elephants are made of meat?


We've had standing armies for almost 3000 years. So, for most of "history".


> standing armies

Armies yes. Standing, not so much no. Human history is 100,000-200,000 years. That would be < 3% of human history. To do this, humans had to invent pre-feudal client/vassal networks of specialized food producer and warrior classes. This for the very reason that most humans had to spend most of their time in the act of producing food.


History is considered to be since the invention of writing. (<10000 years) Anything before that is pre-history.


Yeah but this was definitely achieve well before 200 years. Armies existed since the dawn of civilization. We are talking B.C. dates.


Most armies where farmers who did a little bit of training in their village in the off season. They would be called up for specific battles, given a couple weeks training and then off to battle, those who survived went back home.

Very few societies could afford a large standing army. There would be one or two village watchmen to keep watch over night. The king might have a dozen guards that were well trained. The bulk of the army was farmers conscripted a few weeks before at need, and sent back home when done. The economies just couldn't support more when 95% of the total human population had to be a farmer just to grow enough food.

There were exceptions. The Romans did manage to hold large standing armies, but they were exceptions.




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