Antonius Miles

Speaking to the military side, a roman army of 250,000 sounds large but spread it out across western europe and it gets pretty thin. The situation is difficult, form static defenses and the concentrated german armies march through. Contrawise use mobile armies and the enemy is able to lay waste to the frontiers. As others have stated the fall of the empire had many causes primarily the combined military threats and the economic crunch brought on attempting to deal with it. The economic system was unable to pay for the numbers of troops needed to defend the empire. This led to taxes in kind and a restriction of people's ability to move in the system, i.e. soliders sons are soliders, farmers sons etc. There is also an element of disintegration in social unity. The newcomers into the empire were tolerated but not integrated. Especially after the 3rd century foreign tribes were settled inside the empire but they were not assimilated into roman society. In addition to all these problems you have the religious issues and the frequent civil wars caused by a nonexistant method of secession. My question is since 2,000 years later we can barely decide why it failed could it have been saved? That's probably a question for another thread.

I think it's important to keep in mind that there was no really Grand Strategy as we would think of it. Conquests were often embarked on for no other reason than to provide the emperor with a triumph. As someone else already noted. Dacia provided Trajan with quite a bit of loot (probably enough to justify it) and a triumph that left us a nice colum in his forum. As to why it was abandoned they probably didn't see it as being profitable enough to justify keeping it. As an agriculturual society it was more important to protect the areas that provided farm income to the empire. Maybe if Dacia had silver it would have been different as that was the main common currency. The idea that it was strategic is I believe flawed because the maps of the time are so inaccurate that the fact that Dacia was a bulge in the defenses would not have been clear to them.

The failure of the army and the Roman state proceeded hand in hand in the empires final century. Constantines final reorganisation downgraded the already pressed frontier troops and consolidated smaller mobile forces near the frontier into larger formation's farther away from the hot spots. That chicken came home to roost after Adrianople when it was some time before new forces could be gathered to bring the Goths into check, even then it was only temporary. The problems of the 3rd century crisis were repeated except this time Rome never recovered her lost provinces. The Eastern half of the empire was literally able to buy itself some breathing space due to greater tax revenues in its area of control. In many cases bribring the barbarians to go west. It's hard to blame the army itself because it was a tool created by the state not an indepedant entity capable of making it's own decisions. Far to many emperor's crafted a tool to protect themselves and discourage rivals rather than an effective force to defend the empire. Great numbers of trained men and monetary resources were destroyed by rivals fighting over the purple. There were possibly just too many problems with not enough information for anyone to be able chart a clear course. The bureaucratization of the late empire made any effective responses even more difficult, as witness what happened to Stilcho. Possibly the greatest flaw in the empire that affected the military was that there was never a truly stable method for transfer of leadership. The institutions were just unable to cope with the stresses placed on them.

You might want to take a look at this one http://www.albion-swords.com . Expensive but nice work. Most of the better blades are going to be in the $300-400 range.

As a former Marine I can sympathize with your experiences. I think for the most part we can trust the historical accounts generally because they like all defeats are similar to your experience. There was no situational awareness. No unit cohesion. No effective leadership. Like in your excercise the defeated side broke and was usually cut down running. That's the purpose of the training to teach you to pay attention and maintain unit discipline.

I would say early empire. Weapons, tactics and disipline were all strong. One weakness however was the mass enlistment and discharge of leigons. A system continually infusing new men would have been better.