There may actually be something to this idea.
1. The weakness of The Spartan Way was that it automatically created two centers of gravity: A) The small number of Spartiates which, given sufficient casualties would leave insufficient numbers to train recruits, and B)Helotage, which was an economical system which could actually be destroyed in a successful campaign simply by driving off or lureing off all the Helots(unlike Athens and Thebes which could only suffer moderate crop damage, so long as the farmers came back to their farms).
2. However, hoplite battles seldom generated enough casualties in actual combat to threaten the Spartan predominance. Furthermore no Greek state before the Macedonian empire possessed a strong enough exploitation arm to make up for that in the rare event of a Spartan retreat.
3. Therefore, so long as Sparta's policy remained restricted to the maintenence of hegemony over the Peleponece then having a body of severely trained hoplites that can be usually trusted to win a head-to-head clash, and almost always trusted to maintain good enough order to prevent a hot pursuit in the rare instances of a retreat is very useful. Spartiates could not prevent raiding or partisan warfare. What they could do is always be a present threat. And so long as they were always there, Sparta was there. The reluctance of Sparta to risk Spartiates in battle becomes understandable. It may have short term disadvantages but it also has considerable advantages.
Edited by jatay3 Hide / Show Replies
A good way to picture this point is to think of the Spartiates, not so much as a force, but rather as a "fortification". That is their chief contribution was simply their existence rather then anything they did.
Actually, there are two things wrong with a lot of the criticism of this trope: first of all, it works (but not if training casualties get above 1.5%), and secondly, those military forces that have used it tend to be pretty awesomely effective. The Nazis worked out the exact numbers and methodology that works best in WW 2, and, while this is hardly recommendation, the fact remains that the German Army in World War 2 generally took about 20-30% lower casualties for any given force level that got involved in a combat than did any other military force...and that was with green troops.
See, the thing is, recruits KNOW that their training is only going to be as hard as they can handle. It is going to be EXACTLY as hard as they can handle, yes, but because they believe that it is structured to keep them alive (dead trainees are wasted expense), there is going to be some tendency to slack off. In short, recruits don't learn the lessons in regular training all the way down to the bone. With the Spartan way, they do learn those lessons, and they learn them all the way. That tends to eliminate the early die-off of people who just didn't pay attention, which means that the whole unit tends to get better a LOT faster than is the norm. So...yes, this works, as is proven by the performance of the military forces that use or have used it.
So why do more military forces not use it? Two reasons: one, the military forces of the Western world actually DO care about their men, and regard this as an extreme measure that is almost never justified. The fact that the end result is going to be higher combat casualties is thought to be sort of irrelevant, because those combat casualties will only be sustained for fairly brief periods, whereas training is constant and continuous. In short, you would (theoretically) lose more people by training in this manner than you would by training them less harshly, and then taking higher combat losses. Secondly, training according to the Spartan Way is significantly more expensive, on a man per man basis, than regular training (US military methods are the exception to this rule). That's why Sparta had to have a helot class to feed their citizens, and why the German army ultimately lost the war—they simply could not afford to modernize fast enough and efficiently enough to have the kind of mobility that proved to be the winning factor throughout most of the war.
Edited by 71.206.165.127
I just find the mentioning of various special forces diluting the trope into pointlessness. The Spartan way refers to a blatant disregard for the welfare of the soldiers, a regimen were causalties are expected even desired, not merely "tough" training. Sending 45000 Soviet soldiers through the nuclear fallout from an airial nuke at Totskoye 1954 as an exercise qualifies, the Seals "hell week" not so much.
Look, the USMC is a good branch. They get shit done. But I need to see a damn good reason why this article is listing the entire branch alongside SOF units. It's, to be perfectly honest, a bit disrespectful to units such as the SEA Ls and the Special Forces to put an entire branch on their level.
Like I said, if any of you folks out there are Marines, please don't take offense. I think you guys should have been accepted into SOCOM a long time ago. But Marine basic is, let's face it, a cake-walk for any real SOF unit, including MARSOC and Force Recon.
Actually, before the Spartans won the Peloponnese war, Sparta was mostly admired and considered as a city that would always stand for justice (see the treatment of Sparta in the works of Plato, for instance), unlike the way Athens was said to treat its allies. After the war, though, Sparta gained supremacy in Greece, and installed military governors in many cities. They behaved in such a dictatorial way that many cities soon hated them and used every possible mean to expel them (see Thucidydes's "Peloponnesian War" and especially Xenopho's "Hellenica").
There's another possible meaning to "The Spartan Way" I'm having trouble finding the trope page for: the case in which the point of the training style isn't to select for those tough enough to endure it, but to be plainly impossible and require breaking the rules (for example, too little food for the exercise you're doing, so you should be either taking the food from other recruits or breaking into the camp stockpiles after dark to steal more for yourself, and of course getting away with it) to excel? Not really a Hidden Purpose Test, as it's usually far too obvious. And while actual, modern militaries don't really go in for this (sometimes more elite forces are expected to understand the reasons behind rules enough to know which can be ignored when) I can think of examples in fiction - but most of them wouldn't fit in on this page.
If the right page already exists, could the trope's description link it in the "related" section?