War is a Prince's True Calling
The Virtual Prince XVI: Sunrise, Parabellum; Mastering Virtual Terrain, Building the War Machine, and Studying Your Predecessors
War isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.
Machiavelli writes:
“A Prince, therefore, must not have any other object nor any other thought, nor must he adopt anything as his art but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands… it is evident that when princes have given more thought to delicate refinements than to military concerns, they have lost their state. The most important reason you lose it is by neglecting this art, while the way to acquire it is to be well versed in this art.”
The Prince, p. 50
We now come to Machiavelli’s 14th chapter of The Prince: ‘A Prince’s Duty Concerning Military Matters,’ [Quod Principem deceat circa militam], completing three chapters dedicated to the arts of war.
In Machiavelli’s day, states lived and died by war; men rose to kingship through armed conflict and were deposed by war. Not much has changed about the human condition; an unarmed statesman, without soldiery of his own, stands little chance of securing state and a legacy, despite our modern pretensions.
In the online context, war either matters a great deal or not at all. If you are running a remote team in an online corporation, you don’t need to be scouting out territory for potential battles. But if you are running a gaming clan in a wargame, absolutely everything you do should revolve around war.
For our purposes, I’m going to assume that war matters to your online organization. That, or there is some kind of competitive, existential conflict which puts yourself and your organization at substantial risk. War matters so much to Machiavelli because it is both the fastest way to create a state and to lose a state; if you fail to prepare for war in a context where war matters, you are at the mercy of those more powerful than you and can be swept aside.
So this chapter is particularly relevant for leaders in online games where large-scale conflict is the order of the day. The more the consequences of a lost war could harm you and your organization, the more that war requires your focus as leader.
Mastering Virtual Terrain: From Theory to Practice
To be skilled at war, a Prince must learn the terrain he might be fighting battles across in intimate and intuitive detail. Online, that means the gritty mechanics and peculiarities of whatever game you happen to be playing at.
Machiavelli writes:
“He should, therefore, never take his mind from this exercise of war, and in peacetime he must train himself more than in time of war. This can be done in two ways: first, through physical exercise; second, by study.
As far as physical exercise is concerned, besides keeping his men well ordered and exercised, he must always be out hunting and must accustom his body to hardships in this way; and he must also learn the nature of terrains, and know how mountains rise, how valleys open, how plains lie, and understand the nature of rivers and swamps; and he should devote a great deal of attention to such activities.
Such knowledge is useful in two ways: first, one learns to know one’s own country and can better understand how to defend it; second, with the knowledge and experience of these terrains, one can easily comprehend the characteristics of any other site that it is necessary to explore for the first time… so that by knowing the lie of the land in one territory, one can easily come to know it in others.
A prince who lacks this expertise lacks the most important quality in a commander, because it teaches you to find the enemy, choose a campsite, lead troops, organize them for battles, and besiege towns to your own advantage.”
The Prince, p. 51
If a matter relates to the conflict, the objectives, the surrounding ecosystem, whatever it is that might impact the conflict itself or impinge upon its outcome, that is your problem and focus as Prince.
In the 16th century, this meant understanding the impact of swampy terrain on soldiers, among all the other terrains Machiavelli mentions above. In the online world, this could be knowing the chokepoints through which logistics routes cross, or the speeds of competing types of warfleets rushing to an engagement.
In my online adventures, I first came to understand the nature of internet spaceship warfare a la EVE Online because I was involved in the intelligence field. The spy organization I founded funneled intel between our agents and our fleet commanders (FCs), so for years before I took up the crown I spent time in the field with the FCs, transmitting real-time intelligence about enemy movements and dispositions as fleets fenced between stargates or sieged starbases.
Through this, I came to have a region-by-region understanding of most of the key chokepoints in the game, as well as an understanding of how FCs operate and how to command them. Preparing for space battles, reading the signs of an impending attack, getting agents positioned in the correct enemy fleets and understanding what objectives were worth fighting for from both sides; I was immersed in the soup of details of internet spaceship war, even if I wasn’t personally leading troops myself - and better still, I was able to see both what we were doing, and what a variety of different types of hostile organizations did in hopes of countering us.
I would advise another up-and-coming virtual prince to focus on leading their own forces directly rather than taking the intelligence director’s path to the big chair, but I think my example is useful to show how one can gain an understanding of virtual terrain from a different angle. You will have to identify the nature of your own battlefields and immerse yourself within them according to your particular context.
Understanding the terrain of virtual conflict at an individual level - whether through intelligence work, direct command, or other hands-on experience - provides the foundation for building an organization optimized for war. But true mastery requires scaling these insights across an entire empire. One could argue that many things happen in a competitive online organization that don't actually have anything to do with war. I would reply that war is, under the hood, the profound motivating factor behind almost every aspect of a successful empire, real or virtual.
Building the War Machine: How Every Department Serves Combat
I will use the structure of my alliance from EVE Online during my tenure as an example. We were famous for our logistics division, but that was an ‘offensive logistics’ division, which allowed us to ship huge caches of ships and war materiel around to supply our forces. We used our logistics skill to rapidly redeploy, to evacuate entire regions worth of loot, to open up fronts behind enemy lines for our ‘special interest groups’ to deploy from.
Our ‘special interest groups’ may have had wacky names, but under the surface each of these was designed as a military force focusing on tactics and capabilities we considered important enough to fund and utilize from the leadership layer.
You need interdictor pilots? There’s a group for that, and it has a budget and a supply cache funded by the alliance. The recon group? Sure, they can scan resources and look for non-military assets for the organization, but really that’s about hunting down the enemy and dropping our capital ships on them. Diplomats? Our organization is famous for the quality and negotiation ability of our diplomats, but their primary function was to keep us and our allies positioned and ready militarily vis a vis our enemies, and to channel soft intel gained along the way into our command structure.
At every layer of the organization, an astute prince can channel and focus groups and subgroups for a purpose that will enhance your ability to fight and survive wars.
Big safety net reimbursement program that replenishes your line member’s ships? Gets them to the front faster. Big, efficient network of transport infrastructure? That’s for the warfleets. Huge financial sector? That’s a pool of money to draw from when times get rough.
The Kremlin Example: When Management Structure Serves Strategy
Even organizations that don't seemingly have anything to do with war often were created for war. At one point when our organization had scaled past 30,000 pilots, we needed to implement a larger leadership layer. Where before we had a simple hierarchy of Leader -> Officers/Directors -> Line Members, we created a new intermediate tier called the 'Kremlin'.
This new layer sat below the Directors but above the line members, expanding our leadership pool significantly. While the Directorate had about fifty members, the Kremlin included several hundred subdirectors.
Expanding the franchise with a Kremlin-like org might have been necessary eventually for enhanced communication and management cohesion, but the reality was that the Kremlin was created for, you guessed it, war! We were at the time being assaulted around the clock by NPC enemies sent by the creators of the game during some kind of promotional event (the Drifter attack, for the space nerds) and this meant that our organization needed to arrange and coordinate hundreds of starbase gunners to defend our empire’s infrastructure.
The Kremlin allowed us to do this, and while the improved organizational structure proved valuable in many ways, at its core it remained what it was built to be: a tool of war and mobilization, like virtually everything else in the Imperium.
It doesn’t have to be this way; you can, as a leader, design and build institutions that don’t directly improve your military capacities or power. A good portion of your time will be spent resolving disputes between your essential supporters. But, like Machiavelli, I recommend a focus as leader on war and warfighting as the most important purpose of a throne-sitter.
Study Your Predecessors: Learning from Victory and Defeat
If you have an example of a great, successful leader within your context, you should study and consider emulating them. Learn their lives and their history, because the human condition is similar enough that their challenges and rivals on their paths to power are likely to have echoes in your own.
Machiavelli writes:
“But as for study, the prince must read histories and in them consider the deeds of excellent men. He must see how they conducted themselves in wars. He must examine the reasons for their victories and for their defeats, in order to avoid the latter and to imitate the former.
Above all else, he must do as some eminent men before him have done, who elected to imitate someone who had been praised and honoured before them, and always keep in mind his deeds and actions: just as it is reported that Alexander the Great imitated Achilles, Caesar imitated Alexander, and Scipio imitated Cyrus.”
The Prince, p. 52
I think it is also valuable to study the failures and errors of the mediocre and the catastrophically incompetent; learn what can go wrong amongst the worst and dumbest, in order to avoid mirroring their mistakes. Every spectacular train wreck is a learning opportunity; the height of wisdom is learning from someone else’s mistakes.
Sunrise, Parabellum: In Peace, Prepare for War
If you are the Prince, war and command must be your focus at all times, especially when war is not yet on the horizon. We do not often have the luxury of our enemies announcing their intentions, and so you cannot assume that you will not be attacked out of the blue. You must have caches of materiel, an understanding of everyone who might reasonably attack you or betray you, the dispositions of your forces and recent estimates of theirs, as much espionage access as possible, and to constantly spend your days working to improve not only your personal qualities as a commander, but to enhance the capabilities of everyone in your organization to better fight and win wars.
Machiavelli writes:
“A wise prince must follow such methods as these and never be idle in peaceful times, but he must turn them diligently to his advantage in order to be able to profit from them in times of adversity, so that when Fortune changes she will find him prepared to resist her.”
The Prince, p. 52
When you are not at war, you should be constantly gaming out scenarios: What happens if conflict erupts tomorrow? Who would strike first? Who has superior forces or tactics? Who are the enemy commanders you fear most? Which potential allies might be swayed to your side? What environmental changes could impact your strength? The virtual landscape can shift in an instant - a game patch, a platform change, a corporate merger - and the wise prince prepares for upheaval before it arrives.
For a virtual prince, "war" may mean different things in different contexts. Perhaps it's territorial conquest in a game, market share in business, or mindshare in a community. But the principles remain constant: master your terrain, build your forces, study both excellence and failure, and structure every aspect of your organization to support your competitive edge. Most importantly, use times of peace to prepare for conflict - because in any competitive space, conflict is never far away.
The alternative is to follow the path of countless failed virtual empires: becoming complacent in success, letting your guard down, and discovering too late that you've lost the capacity to defend what you've built. The virtual world offers second chances that Machiavelli's princes never had - you can usually log back in after defeat. But why learn these lessons the hard way when centuries of leadership wisdom point the path to victory?