QotD: Celtic Military History

Speaking as a Celt, the dominating theme in Celtic military tradition is that on our own we lose, unless the other side are also Celts or from some group kept isolated from the main stream of human civilization for thousands of years (It's not so much the tech gap as the lack of immunity). This goes back to the Pre-Christian era, when an ambitious Celtic war leader could successfully get more of his own side killed in one battle than died in Hiroshima. The reasons why we lose are twofold: as a group, we totally suck at organised warfare and as a group, we sure don't like to learn from experience. The glorification of losers in Celtic folklore doesn't work to our advantage and neither does our delusion that we have any kind of military genius*, despite two thousand years of evidence pointing the other way. In my opinion, Celts should stick to engineering and economics (Or singing and dancing if they are no good at math).

* MacArthur is a good example: even with ample warning, he got surprised by the Japanese in the Philippines. Later in Korea, he managed to get China to intervene. He is considered a great Celtic officer mainly because his head never ended up on the end of a stick and I'm sure Truman considered it.

James Nicoll, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2006-09-06