The Virtual Fortress: Core and Periphery
The Virtual Prince XIII: Independence, Deterrence, and Withstanding Online Sieges
Welcome, welcome! What a delight it is to have so many new subscribers with us on this journey through the 16th century! We’re about 40% of the way through The Prince, and it’s time to address some of the structural issues with the project. Namely, that dear Machiavelli will often begin a chapter on a discrete topic, and then rapidly divert into something completely different.
Because the core conceit of The Virtual Prince is that we’re doing a close reading of The Prince, chapter by chapter, I want to acknowledge that it can be a little jarring to begin an issue on the topic of, say, how a Prince’s power should be judged, and then abruptly pivot to discussing how to withstand sieges like a German city-state in the Holy Roman Empire - but that is exactly what Machiavelli does, and thus what we are doing this week.
Chapter 10 of The Prince, “How the strength of all principalities should be measured” contains not just insights into what marks a self-sufficient Prince, but also the psychology of withstanding a siege, how Princes and their cities should prepare for and deter sieges, and the reasons why a people will stick by their Prince even as they watch their outside-the-walls farms and fields be put to the torch by an invader.
This resonated with my experience of the last great virtual spacewar I participated in, World War Bee - or Beeitnam, or The War, whatever the kids are calling it these days - that war in 2020 where the entirety of EVE Online tried and failed to kill the Imperium. For simplicity’s sake I’ll be calling it World War Bee / WWB. That virtual war witnessed our territory burnt and sieged by the entire rest of the galaxy, and yet still we remained united and outlasted our would-be conquerors.
So this week we’re going to ‘measure the strength of principalities,’ and then focus entirely on the methods of defense and deterrence for those in the not-yet-independent class - the situation of the vast majority of Princes, virtual or not.
And hidden at the end of this chapter, Machiavelli gives an answer to one of the great mysteries of World War Bee, namely how the Imperium withstood 18 months of having its every outlying virtual asset loudly annihilated while outnumbered 3-1 during the largest conflict in the history of video games, and still came out on top.
Two Classes of Prince: Independent Peers and Everybody Else
Machiavelli begins by dividing Princes into two classes: those strong or rich enough to take battles in the field against their peers, and everyone else who must rely on defensive measures and are dependent upon others to bail them out of trouble. In the 16th century, the dependent position meant hiding behind your city’s fortified walls and enduring a siege from your stronger attackers while relying on time or more powerful allies to bail you out.
Machiavelli writes:
“In examining the qualities of these principalities, another consideration arises: that is, whether the prince has so much power that he can (if necessary) stand up on his own, or whether he always needs the protection of others.
In order to clarify this matter, let me say that I judge those princes self-sufficient who, either through abundance of troops or of money, are capable of gathering together a suitable army and of fighting a battle against whoever might attack them.
I consider men who always need the protection of others to be those who cannot meet their enemy in the field, but must seek refuge behind their city walls and defend them.”
The Prince, p. 38
Online, I believe it is much the same. You and your org are either strong enough to fight your battles out in the world against those who come at you, or you’re not. If you aren’t able to defend yourself and your org in the ‘open field’ (virtual territory, market share) you must adopt a conservative, fortifying approach and make a clear judgment about what you can invest in defensively, against what outlying assets are acceptable losses when the conflict arrives.
Does this simple division of self-sufficient vs strategically dependent Princes (those who can fight openly, vs those who must turtle) hold up online? Is this the best way to measure the strength of a virtual principality?
I think that capacity for independent strategic action is often a good enough test. For example, your virtual warfleets either have the firepower necessary to destroy enemy shipyards, or they do not. Can you pass the DPS checks of your virtual context? Your strategic path changes based upon your capability. If you lack capability, your entire focus becomes more defensive, in order to buy the time and space necessary to develop that capability in the future.
On the internet, there’s a continuum of organizations that become more like a virtual principality as they increase in complexity and cohesion. Complex territorial multiplayer wargames mirror the Italian Wars situation most closely, where you find analogues of virtual fortified cities and income-producing peripheries.
What we are talking about here are peer-to-peer conflicts vs the situation of the not-peers. It is up to you to determine if you are the peer or the not-peer. If you are already in the first class of Princes, great! But what to do if you are the not-peer Prince, facing down more powerful outsiders?
Advice for Weak Princes: Fortify The Core, Ignore The Periphery
If you can’t fight it out in the field, you need to turtle. In this situation, Machiavelli notes the need to fortify your city and not worry about the countryside.
Machiavelli writes:
“Nothing more can be added to the second case [Those Princes who cannot meet the enemy on the field] than to encourage such princes to fortify and provision their own cities, and not to concern themselves with the surrounding countryside.
Anyone who has fortified his city well, and has managed his affairs well with his subjects in the manner I discussed above and discuss below, will be attacked only with great hesitation, for men are always enemies of undertakings in which they foresee difficulties, and it cannot seem easy to attack someone whose city is well fortified and who is not hated by his people.”
The Prince, p. 38
Let us divide our virtual principality into two strategic areas, the Core and the Periphery, to stand in for Machiavelli’s city and countryside. We are updating 16th century strategy for the internet era, so some of this will require you to examine your own virtual organization and determine for yourself if a given component is Core or Periphery.
The core of our virtual principality is everything that the org requires to truly function on a day-to-day basis. The communications infrastructure, the central heart of the virtual territory, the home base of your coercive capacity (military or otherwise). The Core is typically the ‘best defended’ area of your org. Sometimes part of the Core is not a territory, but a division of people performing a critical task; the logistics divisions of EVE organizations are a good example of this.
The Periphery is everything else that requires power projection from the Core to exploit and defend. Machiavelli’s countryside would include farms, fields, mines and factories outside the shelter of the walls of a city-state. Online, this could be a neighboring virtual territory that is profitable enough in peaceful times, but requires your forces to travel for hours every time it comes under attack. In the parlance of EVE, I would refer to regions like this as a ‘floodplain,’ a valuable yet functionally indefensible buffer zone.
So Machiavelli advises those weaker Princes who cannot yet meet their enemy in the field to fortify and provision their Core and ignore their Periphery. What does that look like?
To Fortify and Deter: Hardening an Organization Against Attack
Machiavelli writes:
“The cities of Germany are completely independent, they control little surrounding territory, they obey the emperor when they please, and they fear neither him nor any other nearby power. For they are fortified in such a manner that everyone considers their capture to be a tedious and difficult affair. They all have appropriate moats and walls; they have enough artillery; they always store in their public warehouses enough drink, food, and fuel for a year.
Besides all this, in order to be able to keep the lower classes fed without loss of public funds, they always keep in reserve a year’s supply of raw materials sufficient to give these people work at those trades that are the nerves and lifeblood of that city and of the industries from which the people earn their living. Moreover, they hold the military arts in high regard, and they have many regulations for maintaining them.
Therefore, a prince who has a city organized in this fashion and who does not make himself hated cannot be attacked. Even if he were to be attacked, the enemy would have to retreat in shame, for the affairs of this world are so changeable that it is almost impossible for anyone to sustain a siege for a year with his troops idle.”
The Prince, p. 39
Having identified our virtual organization’s Core, we should apply ourselves to fortifying it with the same diligence as one of these exemplar German cities. The goal is the same as in the 16th century; to survive and endure any attack, but to ideally avoid attack in the first place by making it such an obvious tribulation to assault that stronger powers will not bother.
These preparations will vary depending on your organization’s context; fortification in the context of a virtual wargame involves stockpiles of materiel and setting forces at chokepoints, while in the corporate context it might mean laying in more inventory or devising a litigation strategy.
Machiavelli advises that we be prepared to withstand a siege for about a year. The amount of time you need to be prepared to withstand a virtual siege will depend on the context of your organization. In some virtual situations, conflicts last only weeks; in others campaigns can last months. On the internet things tend to move faster than in the real world, but I would still advise the cautious and canny Prince to over-prepare.
Having now issued the required caveats about how every organization is slightly different, I’ll call upon an example from my own experience in the situation of fortifying an organization as a Weak Prince - not my favorite place to be!
At the outset of World War Bee, our spies discovered that the entirety of the rest of the galaxy was about to unite against the Imperium and kick off the largest war in the history of video games thus far, bringing 152,000 pilots against our 47,000.
I think that Frederik Knudson did an amazing overview of this conflict on his epic 6-hour Youtube documentary about EVE Online; the segment about World War Bee begins in the last hour, and my only quibble with his coverage is that he gets a key number wrong; through this conflict, the Imperium was outnumbered 3-1, not 2-1.
I note this because in many cases humans choose to attack at the 3-1 odds level. If you are able to keep your enemies at bay or divided, you will not typically be attacked, should your preparations be known and diligent, and your affairs in order. But when it’s 3 on 1, the psychology seems to change, and previously wary attackers think they can make a play; the dogpile begins.
But it is possible, with warning and preparation, to stand against these seemingly impossible odds. Like the exemplar German city state in Machiavelli’s analogy, we had spent years fortifying the Core of our territory, which had come to be known as Fortress Delve, one of the most developed and population-dense zones in the history of gaming.
At the outset of World War Bee, it was obvious that we were in the position of the Weak Prince. The entire galaxy was setting each other as allies and coming after us; we were Venice in these Italian Wars, the too-powerful hegemon who had to be taken down. While typically the Imperium could sally forth and take battles at its pleasure, regularly amassing warfleets of 1000 pilots for a standard strategic objective, it quickly became apparent that our enemies - ‘PAPI’ - could field 3000. Every day. Every night. Yikes.
Knowing that they were coming was invaluable. We had been diligent in our fortification and stockpiling long before we had the specific intelligence that the war was actually coming, but things shifted into overdrive when we understood the enemy warplan.
Among our preparations:
We announced to our membership exactly what was coming to set expectations and to remove the enemy’s ability to surprise us, and we did this before the enemy had even announced the upcoming war to their own members, stealing their thunder.
We aggressively withdrew from and tore down outlying space fortresses in our Periphery regions, and redeployed them in our Core, before the enemy fleets even arrived.
We kept hidden the actual extent of our stockpiles in our Core; the enemy later deployed against us, bragging about how they would bring ‘almost 1000’ Titan-class ships against us, when unbeknownst to them we had double that.
Knowing war was coming, each subdivision went into overdrive to fix their particular issues. Logistics worked to relocate assets from Periphery to Core; IT worked to harden and expand the Imperium’s voicecomms infrastructure to handle 2000+ people simultaneously. Our spy agencies began seeding redundant assets in hostile orgs, to prepare for agent loss over the course of a long conflict.
We repeatedly communicated the size, scope, and duration of the conflict to our members, and the fact that we would be losing Periphery / Floodplains assets along the way.
This war lasted 18 months, easily the longest unbroken campaign I’ve experienced. Past spacewars would flare up for at most six months, but this one had an inertia of its own, brought along by the sheer mass of 152,000 PAPI pilots. It is only because we prepared and fortified for so long, and with such diligence, that we were able to survive.
The theory of the war from the PAPI perspective was simple: get everyone together and start sieging Fortress Delve. By the time the Imperium has lost its outlying territory - and then some of Delve - surely, they will surrender. Or surely, the line members of the Imperium will abandon their leader, and the whole thing will come crashing down!
I say this about the PAPI theory of the case for their war not from supposition, but from knowing the inner workings of the PAPI leadership and their internal deliberations and plans; our intelligence agency had a bit of a festival during the whole mess; it’s much easier to infiltrate the enemy when it’s Literally Everybody Else. This got to the point where I was openly leaking the enemy’s high command chatlogs on reddit under the pseudonym ‘Papisnowden,’ which for some reason they never realized was me.
PAPI had the apparently reasonable perspective that once enough of the Imperium’s farms and fields in their Periphery were burned, the people of the Imperium would flee, overthrow their leaders, or both. So PAPI came and began to chew on the Periphery of the Imperium’s territory. Starting with a region called Fountain, then Querious and Period Basis, the Imperium’s outlying regions - our countryside - began to fall, as the invaders slowly marched towards our Core.
If only they had read their Machiavelli, they would have known this strategy was doomed from the start.
Let the Floodplains Burn: How A Prince Unites A People Under Siege
When I began studying this chapter of The Prince, I swear I didn’t know his analysis would be so on-the-nose when it comes to the situation of PAPI in World War Bee. If I were to write an epitaph for the war strategy of my enemies during that conflict, I could do no better than what Machiavelli writes here:
“And if it is objected that when the people have their possessions outside the city, and see them destroyed, they will lose patience, and that the long siege and self-interest will cause them to forget their love for their prince, let me reply that a prudent and spirited prince will always overcome all such difficulties, inspiring his subjects now with hope that the evil will not last long, now with fear of the enemy’s cruelty, now by protecting himself with clever maneuvers against those who seem too outspoken.
Besides this, the enemy will in all likelihood burn and lay waste to the surrounding country upon their arrival, just when the spirits of the defenders are still ardent and determined on the city’s defence. And thus the prince has so much less to fear, because after a few days, when their spirits have cooled down somewhat, the damage has already been inflicted and the evils suffered, and there is no longer any remedy for them.
Now the people will rally around their prince even more, for it would appear that he is bound to them by obligations, since their homes were burned and their possessions destroyed in his defence. The nature of men is such that they find themselves obligated as much for the benefits they confer as for those they receive.”
The Prince, p. 39
This is essentially how things went down on the Imperium side during the war. There was indeed some wailing about each loss; it is demoralizing to fight 3000 vs 1000 on a nightly basis, shedding space fortresses and fleets along the way, executing a Fabian strategy over many months. I think the war went much longer than it might have otherwise due to the Covid lockdown at the time; we were all trapped on the internet with each other, and so it goes.
But as our outlying territory burned, our people began to realize that the Core was secure, and that the Imperial Palace was full of more stockpiles of weaponry and fuel than our enemies could have possibly conceived. And, every time the enemy would loudly insist that because an outlying region had been lost that the Core should surrender, this only steeled the resolve of our people to see the foe break - which they finally did, after 18 months, the longest, largest and messiest spacewar I ever fought in.