The Cannae Problem
86 comments
·May 2, 2025topkai22
hodgesrm
It's also worth noting that some of the Roman commanders were simply bad, and Hannibal himself was not without flaws.
The best example of the former is Gaius Flaminius, who was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. [0] Livy memorably describes Flaminius as "not sufficiently fearful of the authority of senate and laws, and even of the gods themselves." Hannibal took advantage of his rashness to lure Flaminius into an ambush in which he and his entire army were annihilated.
Furthermore you could argue--and may still do--that Hannibal didn't even completely win Cannae, because he failed to attack Rome after his victory. His commander of cavalry remarked at the time, "You, Hannibal, know how to gain a victory; you do not know how to use it." [1] I'm personally inclined to think Maharbal was correct, but that's the advantage of hindsight.
These accounts are both based on Livy, who didn't let facts to get in the way of a good story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Trasimene
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae#Aftermath
whakim
The Romans were actually quite smart after Cannae; they had lost a bunch of pitched battles, so they decided to shadow Hannibal's army to make his foraging logistics much more complicated (and forcing him to stay close to Southern Italy where he could easily resupply). The logistics of attacking Rome were therefore challenging at best, and the Romans used this as a delaying tactic to score wins on other fronts (since they enjoyed an overall manpower advantage).
acjohnson55
Coincidentally, the excellent podcast, Tides of History, is currently doing a miniseries on the Punic Wars, and just covered why Cannae didn't end the war.
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/season/5/?epPage=...
ithkuil
Also, Rome defeated Carthage when Hannibal was no longer a player
dijksterhuis
hehe, and here i was thinking it was gonna be some scottish variant of the scunthorpe problem.
(cannae = cannot)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_Scottish...
zahlman
>but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end
There's quite a bit about Fabius' tactics in TFA, actually.
1980phipsi
I don't recall that in The Force Awakens?
zahlman
(In case your confusion behind the joke was serious: "the f[ine] article", common HN slang.)
jkmcf
Rome only recovered because Hannibal didn't march on Rome.
cwmma
Rome recovered because if its literally unmatched in the ancient world ability to recruit armies and put orders of magnitude more men in the field as a portion of their population.
Hannibal never marched on Rome because he knew he could never take it. Doing a siege in the area most loyal to Rome would have been suicidal for his force.
csunbird
Hannibal was basically in a hostile land, without proper logistics support. There was no way that he can stay still and lay siege, only way he was able to survive so far was his ability to stay mobile and live off the land.
In case of siege, the Romans would not need to fight, they could simply wait until his army slowly died from attrition.
vondur
I thought that was due to him not having the equipment needed to carry out a successful siege. His strategy was to defeat the Roman Army in the field and then peel away their allies in the peninsula.
1vuio0pswjnm7
"It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are."
She fails to consider specifically that so-called "tech" companies also operate via "orthodoxy". There are enormous "gaps" in their "mental models and reality". As such, there are similarly-sized opportunities for "disruption" and "innovation". But as we have seen through documentary evidence, sworn testimony, and Hail Mary tactics like deliberately destroying evidence and giving false testimony in federal court, these companies rely on anti-competitive conduct. This is not merely an "inability to adapt", it is an inability to compete on the merits. One could argue the ability to effortlessly raise capital coupled with the large cash reserves of these companies results in a certain "overconfidence".
This is of course not the frame she chooses to adopt.
t43562
Symbian's Operating System really was superior. After all it was fully multitasking and all operating system calls were asynchronous. And it was written in C++ so the inside of the operating system was object oriented and easy to understand.
The failure was that Nokia made 20 products at a time where Apple made 1.
The effort to support the huge amount of variation was enormous and the low spec hardware made the software extremely difficult to get working at acceptable performance. So instead of 1 bug fixed once you'd have 20 sets of partially different bugs. The decision to save money by using low spec hardware also negatively affected the way application level software was designed and made it extremely effortful.
Building it took days and they insisted on using the RVCT compilers which though better than GCC were much slower. If they'd had enough RAM on the phone and enough performance to start with then it would not have been necessary to cripple development like this to eke out performance.
This is all about Nokia's matrix organisation which they created to optimise the model that was working for them - lots of phones at different price points. Apple made it obvious that this was unnecessary. One expensive phone that made people happy was better.
There were other aspects to their failure which they did try to fix - such as having an app store and addressing user experience issues. They just couldn't do it effectively because they insisted on building many phone models.
hinkley
I had the fortune of being in one of the launch markets for Ricochet, which tried to sell a wireless modem back in the days of the Psion 5 and before GPRS was really a thing.
The modem had I found the highest mAh rechargeable batteries so I could use the internet in cafes. Never really got it to be a daily use device. But that is still one of my favorite keyboard designs ever. The double hinge on the clamshell was really cool.
primitivesuave
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, and the overarching point is certainly valid (that complacency has led to some notable corporate collapses). However, for purely pedagogical reasons, I have some critique of the Punic War analogy:
- Hamilcar Barca raised his three sons Hannibal, Hazdrubal and Mago, to hate Rome from their early childhood, going so far as to make them swear an oath of eternal enmity (according to Livy). While competition in a free marketplace is much more rational and impersonal, the conflict between Hannibal and Rome was very much rooted in deep ideological hatred.
- Hannibal's strategy was to separate Rome from its allies in the Italian peninsula, which is why he did not march on Rome after Cannae. Perhaps there are realistic business strategy where the aim is to systematically dismantle any means of support that a competitor has, but they aren't well represented in the examples given.
- Quintus Fabius was originally known as Cunctator ("the delayer") as an epithet, and only much later as an agnomen, partly due to his policy that they would not negotiate with Hannibal to exchange prisoners of war. Not only that, it was illegal for the family of a captured soldier to independently negotiate for their family member's release. It's hard to understand what public opinion was like at that time, and the most reliable source (Polybius) was a Roman prisoner-of-war himself!
- The Fabian strategy as it might be applied to management wisdom would not realistically be a "delaying strategy" (i.e. wait for your competitors to run out of resources while trying to limit them as much as possible) but rather a strategy of optimizing your workforce to be more nimble and self-sufficient. Rather than have one large army that represented a single point of failure, the Fabian strategy was to have many small armies that continuously harassed Hannibal's forces for many years.
If the author of this post is reading - I love your writing style and don't intend for this to be interpreted as criticism, I just thought it was an interesting analogy that warranted further exploration.
roenxi
> Rome's eventual strategy—the Fabian strategy of delay, harassment, and avoiding direct confrontation—wasn't intuitive to Romans. It felt wrong.
My understanding of the story is Fabius was running the Roman strategy before Cannae and had identified all the lessons of that battle in advance. It was clear that in a pitched battle Hannibal was going to do extremely well. It is a fascinating historical example about how being right is not enough in politics, but Fabius got a unique opportunity to demonstrate that he told them so. It was clearly foreseeable and foreseen, so the entire problem the Romans had was that their leadership operating foolishly.
hueyp
Yes, he was appointed dictator before the consulship of varro / paullus, but his strategy proved unpopular. It makes sense: identity is hard and slow to change, and the romans had a strong identity around aggressiveness.
That said, in the defence of romans, they were also open to learning and integrating others ideas into their own. Scipio africanus absolutely learned from hannibal, and was able to layer aggressiveness, deception, and delay into his strategy. Every metaphor is imperfect, and cannae is absolutely an example of being blind / stubborn, but my quibble with the OP would be that romans didn't _really_ change their aggressive identity in the long term, and that identify continued to serve them well for 100's of years after hannibal.
Attrecomet
We could adapt the comparison and imagine Kodak realizing the digital business just enough to adapt a bit, but never shift their focus: Just enable digital photography to make the business case for any newcomer unviable, so they'll run out of money before they start to turn a profit, but not innovate enough to create the digital photography age we have today -- it would stay a niche market, for people for whom traditional film really wouldn't work, just like it was in the years leading up to the shift.
And then let's strain the comparison, when even overcoming a genius general like Hannibal is no longer enough, and you shift from a strategy of "who cares how many losses it takes, Rome has more men" to the crisis of the third century, and barbarian coalitions coalescing into what would become the huge tribes and proto-states of the Migration Period, when that strategy wasn't even viable for any day-to-day conflict, given the severe military manpower constraints Rome faced, and destroying your enemy in an attritional battle made way for hurting them just enough that they were amenable to a tolerable negotiated settlement. One could imagine the widespread adoption of smartphones as the point where the original market strategy of ignoring digital photography as much as economically feasible would end, and the digital photography era would finally start.
zahlman
Or we could take the real example of Philip Morris successfully adapting to the declining popularity of (and increasing legislation against) cigarette smoking and the approach they've taken to cannabis (in places where it's legal).
sevensor
Yeah, this was bad generalship, albeit on a much bigger scale than the Republic was used to. The Romans were no strangers to military disasters, but they were unusually resilient. The conquest of Italy was far from a sure thing, and it included numerous thrashings by the volscians, aequians, sabines, veiians, et al.
hangonhn
> The mighty armies of Carthage? Sent packing in the First Punic War.
The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.
primitivesuave
Just to add something to your last sentence - I believe I read somewhere in Polybius that the Romans had never built a warship until the whole skirmish in Sicily kicked off the first Punic War, and they managed to do so by copying a Carthaginian vessel that had washed up ashore. They made one important improvement with an articulating walkway (I seem to remember it being called "the eagle" but I'm not sure) - they could swing it around and lock it to another ship to create a bridge for foot soldiers to attack.
Edit: It was called a raven or corvus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)
johnnyjeans
In my view, it was won because the Elder Council underestimated the threat. Had they known how the defense of Sicily was going to go, they could have easily afforded to hire 50,000 more celts and turned them out onto the Italic peninsula to raise absolute hell. But hindsight is 20/20.
The Romans bet big and stretched their logistics to the absolute limit to march every conscript they could muster down to Sicily. The Italic peninsula was completely undefended. If word had reached the army (many of whom were gang-pressed enemies of the Latins) that their villages were burning, the overwhelming majority would have revolted and fled to try and make it back to their homes. There would have been no recourse for the Romans, they spent literally everything they had coercing their army together and getting them down south.
The Canaanites are a resilient kind of people, the Greeks created the Phoenix as a metaphor for their civilizational tenacity. They can bounce back from anything. But the Elder Council made a very grave mistake. After the first Punic war they did bounce back, but they never had a chance to stop the Roman barbarians ever again. Their imperialism of the other Italic tribes had become ingrained, and it allowed them to grow too strong for a non-martial culture to castrate. The grave danger of underestimation is the most important lesson to take away from the Punic wars, imo.
null
inglor_cz
Most important wars in the Ancient Mediterranean had a major naval component.
It can be argued that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was caused, or at least massively hastened, by two negative naval events:
a) the Battle of Cartagena (461), where the Roman navy was defeated by the Vandals, partly due to some captains being corrupt [0]. This prevented Majorian, the last great Western emperor, from reconquering North Africa;
and
b) the Battle of Cape Bon (468), again a massive failed effort to crush the Vandals [1]
It is somewhat obscure to modern readers, but Vandals were probably more dangerous at sea than on land.
hangonhn
This is so dang cool!!! No I didn’t know that the Vandals were more dangerous at sea. Thank you for sharing!!
OhMeadhbh
I used to talk about this at IBM, though mostly couched in the phrase "we have become an organization optimized for a business environment that no longer exists."
And if you came within 50 yards of an ROTC department in the 1980s, the staff there would drag you into a discussion of Cannae. It was one of the first battles young officers are taught. Like religious scripture, you can find something in the records to support just about any lesson (though obviously military instead of moral.)
It's good to see this tradition persist.
1oooqooq
they probably picked it up on the military boarding school most higher ups went to.
OhMeadhbh
One of the interesting things about the US military is the uniformity of training. There's an entire group in the Army called TRADOC, or Training and Doctrine Command. The US military is sort of slow to adopt new ideas, but once they do, TRADOC makes sure everyone gets them pounded into their heads. I haven't been in the Marines for close to 35 years, but I can still tell you what BAMCIS is an initialism for and could probably still call in a fire mission.
Even though leaders who attend boarding schools at West Point and Annapolis have a leg up politically, the US military has been open to good ideas coming from places other than service academies. Modern Maneuver Warfare came from a political rando. But he was a political rando with a decent idea and access to pentagon staff.
And no one seems to know who came up with the "lazy commanders" concept that is so often attributed to Moltke. It's a decidedly American concept that couldn't possibly have survived the Prussian Army of the 19th century. (The best source I've heard is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, which is a little surprising, but maybe he said it right after WWI.)
But yes... military boarding schools in Maryland and New York cast a long shadow over the US armed services.
ok_dad
Annapolis smacks you upside your head whenever you start to get an ego about having come from Annapolis, so most of the people I know get along fine with ROTC or other sources of officers. Generally, the political connections come from outside the experience at the academy, most of the folks I went there with were just regular people with no political connections, and today they are still just regular people. The folks who rise to the top like Captains or Admirals all have the connections they have from their families or elsewhere.
Thrymr
The business side of this is largely a retelling of The Innovator's Dilemma: large successful businesses often struggle to adapt to nimble challengers that can innovate in ways that are structurally very difficult in the larger org.
cameldrv
I see this with the U.S. military today. If you look at what has happened in the last year in Ukraine, the Ukranians are building about 250,000 drones a month. I'm not sure the U.S. military would prevail against such a force. The U.S. has some very nice drones, but in quantities that are hundreds of times less, due to extremely expensive military procurement.
Bearstrike
This comment is correct as written: The U.S. is under-equipped with small UAS.
However, if you're suggesting that that the U.S. is blind to the importance of small UAS (given the context of the article), that is fortunately not the case.
The U.S. started taking note of the importance of small UAS as early as the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where their use was prevalent. The continued appearance of small UAS (and their increased volume) throughout the war in Ukraine cemented the place of small UAS in future combat.
The recognition of how small UAS are changing the game is a big reason (but not the only reason) the Army cancelled the FARA program. Manned Aviation at the scale it is done in the past is not how wars will be won. It isn't going away, but it's roles/prevalance is changing.
If you're truly interested, see the DoD memos this week that include info about the Army's shift in focus with respect to aviation and unmanned systems.
cameldrv
They may recognize that it's an issue, but the problem is going to be procurement and manufacturing. Ukraine is building FPV drones for about $500 each. A Switchblade 300, which is roughly comparable to these, costs $60,000.
At those prices, we will never have the kind of quantities that Ukraine and Russia have.
parrit
Action is more important than intent. I'm sure many at Kodak knew that digital was a threat too. Organisational resistance prevents knowledge turning into action.
pmontra
It's probably "Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform" https://www.defense.gov/news/publications/
I wonder if UAS include small FPV drones. The language of those announcements is necessarily vague.
ithkuil
It's a lot about resilience to defeat.
Some states can suffer tremendous losses and yet they can eventually prevail due to their stronger industrial capability in the long run.
That's what allowed the US to defeat the Japanese in WWII. Japan had a capable military apparatus at the start of the war but they were not able to scale their production at the same rate as the much larger US.
The only way for a smaller state to defeat a bigger one is to go all in and win quickly.
pmontra
That was not the case for Vietnam vs the USA or for Afghanistan vs the Soviet Union. I'm both cases there were internal anti war movements, especially in the USA, and (for the smallest state) the resolve to outwill the largest one, no matter how many years and deaths it would take.
ithkuil
Well of course this logic works only if both belligerants go all in.
A defender who feels an existential threat can outpace an attacker that is fighting a war far away from home without any strong stakes.
tintor
Expensive in peace time.
In war time or emergencies there will be immense pressure to cut through inefficiencies.
4ndrewl
So they went from "The strategy can win it" to "The strategy cannae win it"?
chasil
> Kodak and digital photography: Kodak actually invented the first digital camera in 1975. But the company was so committed to its film business model that it couldn't adapt its thinking when digital technology began to take over.
The opposite of this is "knife the baby" which I first heard in a stage production of (I think) The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
The Macintosh would far supplant the cash cow of the Apple ][ (Apple 2).
Jobs did it anyway.
This appears to contradict both confirmation bias and groupthink (mentioned in the article).
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/theater/reviews/the-agony...
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/microsoft-asked-appl...
2mlWQbCK
Do you really need this to explain WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? They, like many others, built their castles on Microsoft's land. Isn't it that easy? What could they have done realistically once Microsoft decided they wanted to own the market for word processors and spreadsheets?
yonisto
At the higher level (CEO) no one thought Windows 3.11 will succeed. So much so that even MS thought that OS/2 would do better (and it was technically superior). So neither Lotus nor WP were willing to invest in a windows version prior to the launch. It was not an inevitable outcome.
toast0
WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 ran on many platforms, including Unix (I don't know which flavors).
I don't think people would want to have to boot directly into WP to do word processing and into 123 to run spreadsheets, especially in the age of multitasking and embedding.
There wasn't some alternate strategy they could have pursued. Microsoft developed market power with DOS and Windows, which simultaneously means that productivity tools need to be offered on that platform or they can't make sales, and that Microsoft has the ability to priviledge its own productivity tools.
Maybe you could try to play hardball when Microsoft started their productivity tools and convince them to cancel it, but that would have been anti-competitive and also needs a lot of prescience to predict Microsoft's future actions.
hughw
But you can't turn that into a business book and speaking engagements.
The article strikes me as yet another shallow, masquerading as deep, insight you find in the business paperbacks at the airport shop.
w10-1
Strengths are weaknesses insofar as they bias you against building alternative capabilities. This is true on the personal level as well.
As for military red teams, a more relevant example might be from Japan in the 1980's: when they did product development, they set up distinct groups that had to take different approaches and compete for the chance to be the ultimate product.
The difficulty with taking this too far is anxiety, undifferentiated fear, splitting focus and attenuating priorities. That drains you and makes you ineffective. Players too weak to confront you directly sow discord in your ranks. That brings us back to questions of loyalty and validating that the critical perspective is being adopted in good faith. (Sadly all at work today in the US.)
From the title, I thought this article was going to be about how Hannibal won an incredible number of victories in the Second Punic War, but Carthage still lost the war and had to take devasting terms of surrender.
It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.