Remember Fukuyama's thesis in The End of History, which argued that there was no ideology that could reasonably compete with liberal democracy? John Fonte's discovered it, and analyses this emerging political movement in this humdinger of an article from UNC. It's an impressive piece of work, tying together a lot of assorted left-wing (especially euro-left, but lots of far-left american) actions that are seemingly absurd (Durban) and illogical (Kyoto), and deduces from them the outlines of this new movement which he names "transnational progressivism".

A must-read. Seriously.

Another good article on Policy Review, this time examining the possibility that 9-11 was the enactment of an Al-Quaeda fantasy rather than a conscious act of war. He makes a lot of good points, and it jibes well with some odd facts.

It's about time the Palestinians started waking up.

Another followup to Stephen den Beste's Macedonian discussion: besides the pike itself and the professionalism required to master it, I should mention that both the combined-arms component and the various formations were prerequisites for the Macedonian success, and neither were Macedonian inventions.

Xenophon's Anabasis is an absolutely fascinating read in this regard. The army that Xenophon develops is roughly halfway in development between the hoplite phalanx and the alexandrian model. It starts out as a pure hoplite phalanx consisting of professional soldiers from the mercenary class that had developed in the later stages of the Peloponnesian war. It fought in that mode at Cunaxa, but during the retreat from disaster at Cunaxa back to the Greek colonies it morphs under the pressure into a combined-arms army, marching in a square or some other rigid formation as the circumstances required, with a mixture of heavy infantry, light infantry, archers/slingers, and cavalry. Over the course of the retreat, the only real disasters that occurred were when the hoplite phalanx was caught without archery or cavalry support. Interestingly enough, Thucycides documents the use of the square phalanx formation in his account of the Athenian retreat from Syracuse, in which they were slaughtered pretty much to a man. Xenophon's account mirrors the Athenian experience at first, but then they convert some of their troops to slingers, and acquire some horses, and immediately the tide turned.

So all of the components were there already in place. What Philip and Alexander did was put it all together, along with the ambition to put it to use in a way that history would remember, and that militaries could duplicate for generations to come.

Keep in mind that there have been many such potential "revolutions". The English longbow and associated tactics probably qualified -- During the hundred-years war, England repeatedly took on France which had the most powerful army in all Christendom, and completely embarrassed it. Repeatedly. The capabilities of the longbow would not be duplicated until the rifled musket during the American Civil War -- aimed fire out past 100 yards, and a rate-of-fire of over 6 shots per minute. As the French learned to their dismay, massed troops (even heavily-armored knights) simply died under that hail of file.

But the longbow had one weakness: It took a lifetime of practice to master. Because archery was the national sport this was not a problem for England -- until the Wars of the Roses where the archers were slaughtered on both sides until there weren't enough left to field an army, at which point the English switched over to the quicker-to-master crossbow and musket, and the skill was lost.

For that matter, we don't really know how the Roman legion fought. We know their organization (legion, century, maniple, etc), and we occasionally find out tidbits based on disasters (such as the too-deep formations at Cannae). And we know that when they invaded Greece they cut though the alexandrian-model phalanx at Pydna like it was butter. But after the fall of Rome their military knowledge was lost to the ages, so that the new infantries that rose were based on Alexandrian tactics and weapons instead of their more immediate Roman ancestors.

Couple of points about Stephen den Beste's essay on the changing nature of warfare, specifically on the Macedonian contributions to warfare, and a slightly different analysis of the two-and-a-half "revolutions" in warfare.

Macedonians:

The significance of the Macedonian pike wasn't just the pike itself, although that was a pretty impressive weapon in conjunction with the phalanx. What made the pike work was the professional army wielding it -- Victor Hanson argues that one of the main virtues of the hoplite/phalanx style of warfare was that it required no practice for the greek farmers, only some equipment and massive amounts of courage. But the unwieldy pike was another matter entirely, requiring lots of formation practice such as you described in your essay. The Macedonian army was the one of the first large, full-time armies.

The second innovation was the combined-arms assault (in his case infantry and cavalry) with each leveraging its strengths simultaneously to destroy the enemy.

The third thing was the use of the catapulta and ballista for destroying enemy towns, although the catapult wasn't a Macedonian invention, it reached its maturity during Phillip's reign. This tends to get overlooked a bit, because this was only really a factor in the first few years of his campaign (the catapult wouldn't become a battlefield piece until the Romans), but it allowed him to quickly capture the Persian fortified cities on the mediterranean coast, which secured his rear lines and provided major logistical support during his campaign.

Revolutions in warfare:

Also, I would argue that your "second revolution" didn't really occur the way you described it. The first revolution was the tight coordination at the lower levels of the army. For the classical Greeks, this basically meant that all the troops from a polis' (or possibly a tribe within that polis in the case of a really big polis like Athens or Thebes) acted as one tightly coordinated unit. But there was very little coordination or discipline between the various polis. This was due to rivalries between the various polis and the difficulties in communicating (ok, yelling) amidst the clamor of the battlefield, and it did indeed place a premium on troop-level discipline and strategos-level independent action.

The Persians against which the Greeks fought, maintained tight control of each large unit, but their army was much less well coordinated at the finer level.

The Greek method obviously worked better in practice, partly because it demanded discipline and coordination at the level where it was practical to achieve under battlefield conditions, while the Persian system quickly fell apart at first contact with the enemy, as the old aphorism goes.

The "second revolution" that started occurring between WWI and WWII was basically a shift from the Greek system to the Persian system, as technology made possible the tight coordination between division-level units, while simultaneously the increased battlefield lethality had forced the individual troops to spread out to the point where tight coordination was becoming awkward, so you began to see more of a reliance on squad- and troop-level initiative.

If this analysis is correct, then the potential of the Army's various "networked soldier" initiatives may well be staggering, even though it all looks pretty silly at the moment.