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Captain Casey B. Baker, USN, is a Seminar Director and Instructor in the Air War College at Air University.
The spring winds around Sicily had shifted during the day, but not before Praetor Quintus Valerius Falto had engaged the heavily laden Carthaginian fleet. The joint fight over the port of Lilybaeum was now in its eighth year. Clashing in pitched battle, his sailors had urged each other through rowing, boarding, and ramming. Throughout the carnage, the fleets hammered at each other. For once, Rome had significantly more numbers, faster ships, and better crews. Now, hours later, standing on the deck of his flagship, with thousands drowned and many ships lost on both sides, the Praetor had to watch as the remnants of the Carthaginian fleet rigged their masts, hoisted sails, and escaped. As he regrouped his fleet, Falto could not know that he had just won the last battle of the First Punic War, a 23-year conflict between Rome and Carthage that was the first in a series of three Punic Wars.
The three Punic Wars occurred over a century (264–146 BCE). The First Punic War (264–241 BCE) spanned two continents—Europe and Africa. It reflected the long-term rise of Roman land and maritime power to hegemony over Sicily and the Western Mediterranean. It was one of the most significant conflicts of the ancient world, with the traditional dominant sea power (Carthage) facing off against a rising land power (Rome). This history, covered by classical historians such as Polybius,1 offers educational parallels as modern military strategists and leaders consider the challenges of strategic competition and “Polybian warfare” between the United States and China and Russia. For lessons, it is time to look closely at the two-decade struggle between Rome and Carthage and their prolonged Great Power strategic competition.2
Given the current environment, the First Punic War offers valuable lessons for modern strategic competitors and joint warfighting thinkers. This ancient war provides the contemporary practitioner with an example of how strategic competition (emerging from enduring interests) requires a long-term sustained effort through wins, losses, and changes in fortune for both sides. It illuminates how alliances, partnerships, and a reliance on mercenary forces can be essential and complex, and can often shift as the conflict continues. It shows the importance of building and sustaining dominance in new warfighting domains, but also shows that such dominance is expensive and technology-dependent and requires creating operational experience over time. Lastly, it illustrates the importance of linking joint warfighting and operations in time and in domains to target the adversary’s vulnerabilities.
Prolonged Struggle
The First Punic War provides an excellent example of strategic competition’s challenging and prolonged nature. In 2023, U.S. joint doctrine described strategic competition as a persistent, long-term contest between international actors that is indefinite and complex and sways between sides over decades. It stems from enduring geographic, economic, and cultural interests and rivalries between strategic competitors.3 The Joint Chiefs highlight this contest’s prolonged and indefinite nature. This contemporary doctrine argues that many battles, whole wars, and decades-long conflicts often have results that are not decisive or conclusive because the interests endure beyond them, and the fortunes of the competitors wax and wane.4
Considered chronologically, the strategic competition and the first war between Rome and Carthage reflected this definition of strategic competition. In this conflict, there were competing long-term interests leading to conflict, twists in military fortune, decisive battles, stalemated war, and natural events that saw the strategic fortunes of each competitor ebb and flow.5 The consolidation of the Italian peninsula under Rome in the 4th and early 3rd century BCE caused Rome to become more interested in who held power over Sicily’s trade, ports, and sea lanes. Carthage was in a long-term contest with the Greek colony of Syracuse for control of Sicily because of Sicily’s trade and its valuable position in the Mediterranean. These competitive interests eventually led to decisions to place forces on the island, escalating into a prolonged strategic confrontation between Rome and Carthage.
In book 1 of The Histories, Polybius gives the modern student of strategic competition a good account of the ups and downs of the Roman-Carthaginian rivalry. The conflict started in 264 BCE with Rome’s strategic decision to place land forces in the northern Sicilian city of Messana (modern Messina) to support its new allies, the Mamertines, because of feeling threatened by the growing Carthaginian presence in Sicily. Winning early victories along Sicily’s eastern coast, Rome did well. Within a year, other Sicilian cities and Greek Syracuse defected from Carthage to the Roman side, especially after Roman victories near Messana.6 Rome, building on its success, campaigned into Western Sicily. It laid siege and captured the critical western coastal Carthaginian port of Agrigentum (modern Agrigento). This victory led to the expanded goal to win all of Sicily, so Rome built its first sizable navy.7 Over the next 5 years, Rome pushed Carthage further into western Sicily. After crushing Carthage’s fleet at Cape Ecnomus off the southern coast,8 Rome successfully invaded and seized Carthaginian cities in North Africa. Carthage appeared to be approaching collapse. However, contemporary doctrine says that strategic competition and conflict oscillate, and this stage of the First Punic War was no exception.
Due to mercenaries, storms, and Carthaginian maritime power, Rome’s fortune turned sour, leading to a stalemate in Sicily over the next several years. In 255 BCE, desperate Carthage partnered with Xanthippus and his Spartan-Greek mercenaries, who led the Carthaginians to victory at Tunis. More Roman losses followed. Storms at sea claimed the entire Roman fleet and army as they retreated from Africa.9 Carthage reinforced its army in Sicily at the northwestern port city of Lilybaeum (modern Marsala), using its fleet to ferry men and supplies, which convinced coastal towns in Sicily to switch allegiance again. Rome built a new fleet and put it to sea. Landing troops in northwest Sicily, it captured another critical Carthaginian city port, Panormus (modern Palermo), in 254 BCE. Sicilian cities gravitated back to Rome. In another turn of fate, Rome lost almost its entire fleet (a second time) to storms while returning from raiding the Carthaginian coast in 253 BCE.10 Carthage reinforced Lilybaeum and Drepana (modern Trapani) in northwest Sicily thanks to its restored maritime dominance. Still benefiting from its alliance with Syracuse, Rome laid siege to Lilybaeum with a combined force. A stalemate ensued, so Rome rebuilt its fleet and used it to confront Carthage near the port at Drepana to gain the upper hand on Sicily.
Rather than breaking the stalemate, this confrontation resulted in Rome’s fortune shifting again when it lost its navy at this battle. In 249 BCE, better maneuvering, crew skill, and tactics allowed the Carthaginians to decisively defeat and destroy the Roman fleet just outside Drepana’s harbor. Despondent, Rome abandoned the sea. Carthage, victorious, became preoccupied with internal troubles in Africa and focused its attention there. The stalemate outside Lilybaeum endured. For 8 years, Rome built siege works and Carthage burned them; Rome attacked city walls and Carthage defended them; both sides gained and lost troops on land—all to no avail.11
Finally, convinced once more that only maritime forces could break the 8-year stalemate, wealthy Romans privately financed and trained a new fleet for another campaign against Carthage. Taking position off the northwest tip of Sicily at the Aegates Islands (the modern Aegadian Islands), the Roman fleet under Praetor Falto ambushed the Carthaginian resupply fleet coming to Lilybaeum’s aid and devastated it; Carthage’s army in Sicily was isolated. Exhausted militarily and financially, Carthage sued for peace in 241 BCE.12 This first war was over.
The protracted strategic conflict saw four significant reversals of fortune over 23 years. As doctrine predicts, battles often were not decisive in strategic competition, and the war was inconclusive. Despite its loss, Carthage survived. Both sides soon dealt with allied revolts. Notably, competition between Rome and Carthage was to last another 90 years because their interests in controlling the Western Mediterranean remained incompatible, and their threat to each other continued.
Allies, Partners, and Mercenaries
The First Punic War’s example of strategic competition is helpful because it illuminates how alliances and partnerships (and a reliance on mercenary forces) can be critical, complex, and shift as competition and conflict occur. Modern joint doctrine notes that the international system is complex and dynamic, where actors’ domestic trends, economics, military successes, and failures can strengthen or weaken their alliances and partnerships in ways that impact strategic competitors’ goals.13 Twenty-two hundred years ago, this was no different.
Domestic, economic, and military factors led Rome and Carthage into and out of alliances. At the start of the war, Roman domestic politics led to a shift in Rome’s desire to intervene in Sicily and to side with the Mamertines against Syracuse and Carthage. The Mamertines were ethnic Campanians (southern Italians) who had once been Rome’s adversaries (as they now were of Carthage). Rome incorporated them into the Republic in the early 3rd century BCE. Campanians rose to prominence in the Senate within a generation, eventually dominating the Consulship of Rome, and were eager to overcome Senate reluctance to support the Mamertines in 265 BCE. As southern Italians, Campanians had vital interests in lucrative Sicilian trade and access to the commercial trade routes that formed spokes extending throughout the western Mediterranean.14
Carthage was widely considered the “City of Merchants.” Trade and income from customs duties on pottery, wine, enslaved people, and metals from Sicily, Spain, and Greece funded the domestic “suffete”15 oligarchy that ran the Carthaginian empire. This leadership depended on open markets, control of trading cities, and maritime ports in the Western Mediterranean, including Sicily.16 These ties led both sides to alliances and partnerships important in the fortunes of war.
Victories, defeats, and changes in the competitors’ military strength during the long war shifted alliances among Greeks, Syracusans, Sicilians, and Numidians (an ancient Berber people who lived in what is now Algeria, Tunisia, and parts of Libya). At the start of the war in 265 BCE, the Campanian Mamertines (after antagonizing Syracuse) initially allied with Carthage after Syracuse laid siege to them in northeastern Sicily at Messana. Once the Roman consuls and prominent Campanian Roman citizens decided to intervene, the Mamertines soon switched sides and ousted the Carthaginians. Rome, lacking a navy, used allied Greek-Italian city-states’ naval transports from Locri (near modern Calabria) and Tarentum (near modern Apulia), both on the southern Italian coast, as well as Velia (near modern Salerno) and Neapolis (modern Naples) to move their consular armies to Sicily.17
This soon led to Syracuse switching sides too. After the Romans defeated a combined Carthaginian-Syracusan army outside Messana, Hiero II of Syracuse switched sides, joining Rome in 263 BCE. He was unwilling to side against the new dominant power in Sicily and was traditionally resentful of the alien Carthaginian presence in Sicily.18 Rome now had a critical ally on the island, providing logistics, port access (through Syracuse), and forces to assist it. This pivot allowed Rome to concentrate troops on the Carthaginian port stronghold of Agrigentum on the southwest coast of Sicily. In turn, the fall of Agrigentum in 262 BCE caused many inland Sicilian towns and cities to move over to the Roman side to avoid fighting.19 For Rome, its victories made for more allies.
Carthaginian partnerships varied between success and fragmentation. Carthaginian alliances were based on tributary-state kingdoms such as the Numidians and Libyans of neighboring Northern Africa. These kingdoms did not enjoy influence in Carthage’s political institutions like the Italian Campanians had achieved in Rome. They did provide mercenary services to Carthage’s multi-ethnic armies through a host of mercenary infantry and cavalry formations led by Numidian or Libyan generals. As the war dragged on into the 250s BCE, these partners began to desert as the cost of support to Carthage in men, food, and taxes levied on Numidian and Libyan territories skyrocketed. Carthage’s expansion crowded African farmland near these partnered neighbors as Carthage compensated for the loss of food imports from Sicily.20 Some Numidian partners even became adversaries and revolted as the Romans invaded Africa in 255 BCE.
Not all was bad for Carthage’s network, however. Given Carthage’s smaller populace and superior wealth, its reliance on mercenary armies was often successful. Despite setbacks with Numidia, it successfully used Greek Spartan mercenaries (with their general, Xanthippus) in 255 BCE. This partnership with Spartan mercenaries—well known for their military excellence— turned the tide in Africa. It saved the city of Carthage and decisively turned back the Roman invasion of Tunis. The partnership allowed Carthage to survive the war. Carthage’s expulsion of Rome from Africa led the Numidians to resume support for Carthage (until the last year of the war). Carthage’s hold on Northern Africa was restored.
However, the Spartan partnership did not last long. Xanthippus (like a Punic version of 2023’s Russian mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin) openly criticized the leadership of Carthaginian forces and their tactics. Native Carthaginian military leadership soon became envious of Spartan success after Tunis. Xanthippus, discerning a “cooling” friendship amid conspiracies, departed (surviving an attempted assassination).21 Alliances, partnerships, and mercenaries had played their part to lift some Roman pressure on Carthage. However, the changing matrix of allied and partnered city-states for both sides did not depend only on money, funding, or shared interests; maritime power mattered, too. Coastal cities’ allegiances shifted as Rome’s navy expanded. Rome’s pivot to the maritime domain was also part of its strategic competition.
Building Dominance in New Domains
Another critical lesson that joint warfighters can take from the First Punic War’s strategic competition is how important it is to build, develop, and sustain dominance in new warfighting domains. This dominance is dependent on technology, requires generating experience operating in the domain over time, and is expensive to sustain. A fundamental principle of managing joint forces in competition is that to design and develop forces in different domains, it is necessary to rapidly acquire new capabilities. Acquisition and sustainment can fill gaps and build an advantage for the competitor.22 However, domain advantage takes resources.23
Achieving dominance in a new do- main to prevail in strategic competition and joint warfare was a core challenge for Rome and Carthage beginning in 261 BCE. After winning Agrigentum, Rome realized it had a hold on Sicily and could potentially eject Carthage. Simultaneously, the Carthaginians had an uncontested ability to raid coastal cities on the Italian peninsula, ferry reinforce- ments from Spain and Africa to Sicily, and raid coastal Sicilian towns. Carthaginian naval power hurt Rome’s system of Sicilian partnerships:
As time passed and the Romans retained possession of [Agrigentum], many inland towns were alarmed enough about the Romans’ land forces to join their side, but more coastal towns were frightened enough of the Carthaginian fleet to secede from them. The scales of war were constantly tipping one way or the other, with increasingly larger fluctuations. Under these circumstances, the Romans committed themselves to taking the sea.24
Rome sought to break the stalemate on land by turning to a new domain.25 To do this, Rome needed more than a handful of small coastal transport vessels, so it constructed its first true navy in 261 BCE. It recovered a Carthaginian quinquereme26 that had run aground in Messana and discovered that Carthaginian builders had labeled the ship’s structural members. This discovery and shipbuilding expertise, design, and shipyard capacity (from allies) allowed Rome to reverse-engineer its ships and build its fleet of 120 vessels in 60 days— rapid acquisition, indeed.27 At the same time, Rome trained rowers on land using mockups, streamlining use afloat once ship construction was complete.28
For Rome, the drive to dominate a new domain required using innovative technology and gaining operating experience at sea. Its introduction of the pioneering corvus turned the tactical tables on Carthage. The corvus was a pivoting bow ramp with a metal spike rigged to swing down and embed in the deck of another ship.29 This design facilitated rapid boarding and seizure of ships. This innovative design enabled the Roman fleet to play to its land strength (strong infantry) in boarding ships, while it nullified the historical advantages of Carthage’s naval experience and seaman- ship. Victories at Mylae (near modern Messina), Sulci (on the southern coast of Sardinia), and Tyndaris (near the modern town of Patti on the northeast coast of Sicily) followed in 259 BCE.30 In 255 BCE, thanks to the corvus, maneuvering, and superior numbers, Rome won the largest naval battle in classical history at Cape Ecnomus.31 This substantial victory gave Rome temporary superiority over the Carthaginian navy for the first time.
However, with new technology and a new domain came expensive operational lessons. Rome lost almost its entire fleet three times: twice (in 255 BCE and 249 BCE) to storms off the coast of Sicily, and once to poor maneuvering near the port of Drepana (in 253 BCE). These losses were partially due to the impact of the corvus on ship stability and maneuverability, particularly in heavy weather and combat. Rome also learned a hard naval-manning lesson when consuls directed ship crews to serve as siege engineers on land during the siege of Lilybaeum in 249 BCE. As a result of this dual-hatting, Rome lost most ship crews to privation and attrition, defending siege works from frequent Carthaginian sorties on land. It did not repeat this mistake 8 years later, leading to its final naval victory at the Aegates Islands in 241 BCE.32 It is essential to realize how expensive the fleet, its technology, and these operating lessons were. Just as building, learning, and sustaining take dollars today, they took denarii back then.33
Romans initially passed a tributum (temporary tax used by the consuls) to fund building, sustaining, and operating the fleet. In time, the costs of maritime dominance grew. Maintaining and replacing the fleet several times mandated building many smaller support ships. Shipbuilding meant recruiting, hiring, and retaining skilled engineers. Building ships required shipyards, factories, workshops, riggers, foundries, and smithies. Based on Polybius’s numbers, the Romans and Carthaginians lost more than 1,200 quinqueremes during the 23 years of the first war.34 Both sides struggled to build and operate their respective fleets. Romans came to balk at the tributum’s weight. The consuls eventually turned to private citizens’ loans to fund rebuilding the last fleet, which won the Battle of the Aegates in 241 BCE.
At the same time, financially strapped Carthage could not fiscally sustain maritime dominance even using loans. By 241, all Carthage had was an older fleet cobbled together from captured Roman ships and hastily recruited, poorly trained mercenaries. The ships were cheaper but less effective.35 The Roman decision to rebuild and sustain fleets of 220 to 240 ships (sometimes more) for these decades was not random but a long-term effort to maintain a fleet above Carthage’s traditional 200-ship level. Roman leadership came to see this number as required to ensure Roman maritime dominance over Carthage.36 Despite Roman investment in sea power, the sustained effort to develop, build, replace, and fund sea forces was insufficient. Rome also had to employ joint warfare and operations using its land forces and sea forces together.
Joint Operations and Warfighting
The first struggle between Rome and Carthage clearly shows the importance of joint warfighting by linking operations in multiple domains. Modern doctrine discusses the importance of using operations synchronized in time and location but conducted in different domains (for example, land and sea or air and space) to target an enemy’s vulnerabilities. This joint approach to warfighting and operations seeks to create dilemmas for the adversary and eventually eliminate its ability to respond or prevent access of its forces to enter and operate in contested areas.37 This idea, displayed during the First Punic War, is not new.
The operations of armies and fleets on land and sea were intimately connected and often mutually reinforcing during the First Punic War. Fighting over territory in Sicily meant fighting on the coast, laying siege on land, moving troops from the Italian mainland or Africa to Sicily and back, ambushing fleets near island chokepoints, and raiding cities.38 Initially, Carthage successfully used its fleet to bolster its harbors on Sicily and its land forces to recapture coastal cities or raid them with impunity. Because of a lack of Roman control over the seas around Sicily, Roman armies working outside the Italian mainland for the first time experienced challenges from 264 to 261 BCE in synchronizing maritime support and land operations.39 Rome then stole a page from the Carthaginian joint operational book and decided to build and use its sizable new fleet to deliver two consular armies directly onto the African doorstep of Carthage. This joint operation bypassed the stagnant front on Sicily and struck a vulnerable Carthaginian mainland, winning several quick victories.40 In 255 BCE, after 8 expensive years of warfare, cash-strapped Carthage could defend Sicily or Carthage, but not both. Unfortunately for Rome, the tributum became too hefty, and the Senate withdrew half the force to control costs. Rome lost at Tunis soon after.41
Joint land-sea warfare and operations continued. In 254 BCE, Rome built a second fleet after the first was lost to storms. Rome used the fleet to ferry and land another consular army in Sicily, and its land operations captured the port city of Panormus, two other small cities, and new agricultural areas, easing the need to ferry food from the Italian peninsula. Joint land and sea operations in these cities and the acquisition of this land provided better access to Sicily by land forces and made sustainment of those forces for Rome much easier. Carthage attempted to retake Panormus in 250 BCE, sending an army from Lilybaeum. But without supporting maritime forces, Carthage could not cut off Roman forces and their supply trains into the harbors Rome controlled. Carthage lost.42
A last example of joint land-sea warfare in the First Punic War was its final phase, the multiyear siege of Lilybaeum (250–241 BCE). Both sides used warfare in different domains to their advantages. Rome could not stop the Carthaginian fleet from periodically running its blockade of the city. Carthage could send in more troops and supplies to hold the city. Shoals and hydrography of the port could be exploited by experienced Carthaginian mariners to frequently run the blockade and thwart the siege. Later, Carthage synchronized land-sea operations to withdraw cavalry forces from Lilybaeum. Carthage used ships to remove the cavalry, unneeded inside a city under siege, saving valuable supplies. Carthage repositioned the cavalry to nearby Drepana where it conducted raids on Roman communication lines in that region. For Carthage, this successful use of land and sea allowed it to prevent the starvation of Lilybaeum and to hold on to northwest Sicily. Seven years later, Rome realized that only joint forces could break this stalemate and entirely cut off the Carthaginians in their last Sicilian stronghold. Rome again resurrected its navy, isolated the city, and won its closing victory at the Battle of Aegates. In 241 BCE, Carthage realized that it had lost (and could not replace) its army and navy sent to reinforce Sicily. Carthage sued for peace.43 Rome had achieved control of both land and sea around Sicily and the Western Mediterranean through sustained joint warfare and operations.
To achieve its victory, Rome had to repeatedly use its maritime forces to move, reinforce, and sustain its land forces. When Rome did not revitalize its naval power, the fight stalemated for several years, giving Carthage a chance to retain its advantage on Sicily through joint land-sea operations. For the modern observer, there is a cautionary tale here. The United States, China, and Russia will aggressively use the newer space and cyber domains to support their operations in more traditional domains. Linked joint operations are as crucial to joint warfare now as they were 22 centuries ago. Powers that do not take advantage of joint operations in multiple domains risk stalemate and loss.
Punic Lessons for Modern Competition and Joint Planners
The First Punic War provides modern planners, policymakers, and strategists with essential lessons on the nature of strategic competition and joint warfare between competing powers over the long term. Success in Ukraine, Taiwan, or the Middle East will likely not be the end or the beginning of the end, but simply the start of 21st-century strategic competition between the United States and China and Russia. Allies and partnerships, domestic threat perceptions, and mercenary forces (for example, the modern Wagner Group and Quds Force) also factor into strategic competition and joint warfare. As one side or the other’s fortunes wax or wane, so will the bandwagoning of some allied and partner nations. Strategic competitors can expect to lose or gain partnerships depending on the threat’s severity and their ability to protect the less powerful partners. Yesterday’s Numidia, Sparta, or Syracuse could echo today’s Hungary, India, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, or Taiwan. Modern planners and strategists must also consider the best use of allies. Notably, allies and partners might not significantly affect the forces used in frontline combat. However, they may be most useful in helping provide access for forces to enter and operate in or closer to contested areas or by offsetting significant logistics burdens (for example, Syracuse, Tarentum, Neapolis/Naples, or Velia for Rome as a model of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia in the current Indo-Pacific, or like European Union nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners in Europe).
But it is not just allies and partners. The United States must venture aggressively into new warfighting domains to achieve an advantage. Strategic conflict and joint warfighting require the proactive use of new technology (like the Roman corvus), the ability to quickly replace forces, the ability to sustain force levels exceeding those of adversaries, and the operational synchronization of forces in newer domains. To the modern observer, some of this ancient push to maintain Roman or Carthaginian force levels on land and sea seems eerily like current debates over hypersonic weapons, the use of unmanned systems, or the adequacy of the current U.S. Navy to meet the Chinese naval threat in the Pacific. Are 355 ships sufficient? Does the United States have enough repair and shipbuilding infrastructure? Is the United States building enough money into its defense budget?44 The modern multidomain questions of force levels and sustainment for U.S. Space Command, U.S. Strategic Command, and U.S. Cyber Command for example, echo the Roman experience of building and replacing its navy several times to achieve lasting maritime dominance. Experience suggests modern competitors must shoulder a lot of cost.
Space or cyber domains could be to modern players what the maritime domain was to Rome in 261 BCE. Competitors must target joint pressure at adversaries’ geographic vulnerabilities for longer than expected. Fleets and armies slugging it out in and around the contested island of Sicily in the 3rd century BCE could easily be the classical template for a modern contest in Taiwan heavily influenced by events in orbit. The Classical Era’s hub of Western Mediterranean trade and sea control in 265 BCE could be a foil for the 21st-century hub of trade and control within the Indo-Pacific. Similarly, today, advantages and even victories of one Great Power over another, mainly as they develop and expand operations into newer domains, may not determine the long-term out- come of the fight. The United States must be prepared to replace significant losses not only in the traditional domains but in space and cyber too as it gains operational experience like Rome had to do at sea.
More generally, looking at the generational fight between Rome and Carthage, it may be that a not-so-new style of warfare has returned to trouble the modern Great Powers. This Polybian warfare is competition and conflict that (as 2023 joint doctrine indicates) is long, complex, and dynamic. Its indefinite, meandering, decades-long boxing matches stem from strategic competitors’ geographic, economic, and cultural interests, and it can cycle between competition and fighting if those interests endure. It uses (and loses) new forces in every domain to compete. It requires rebuilding, retooling, and reattacking. It must be joint, and it is costly. Nevertheless, upon it the fate of the modern Great Powers rests. In it are lessons and cautionary tales worth mining. The Punic Wars, Byzantium and the Caliphs, the Crusades, the Reconquista, the Hundred Years’ War, and 19th- and 20th-century Britain and Germany saw this Polybian warfare. Rome’s Quintus Falto sailed through it first; do we follow his course? JFQ