One of the things that lead to the down fall of the Roman Empire was the fact that rich Romans no longer wanted to fight their own wars. The Abbasid’s lost power because they came to rely on their Mamluk armies to do their fighting for them. And so it goes throughout history. The separation of a nation’s elites and those who do the nations fighting invariable spells disaster for the elites.

In “On Forgetting the Obvious” Robert D. Kaplan highlights the growing divided between America’s military and the educated elite that rules the country.