THIS! AIN'T! SPARTA!

Indiana National Guard troops are heading out for a deployment to Kuwait in support of Operation Spartan Shield, described in press release boilerplate as "the United States' operation to strengthen defense relationships and build partner capacity through leader engagements, multinational exercises and response planning."

I dunno about you, but I've kinda come down with a case of Sparta Burnout. They had really good PR, not only in some surviving ancient histories, but in modern tongue baths from sources as diverse as Steven Pressfield and Frank Miller.

Don't get me wrong, Gates of Fire and 300 are great entertainment, but they are anything but historically accurate. The reputation of Spartan military prowess is vastly inflated by Laconaboos.

This piece by historian Bret Devereaux is worth the read...

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth.

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