The war in Iran teaches an old lesson about military spending.
Six hundred years ago, on a muddy field near Agincourt in northern France, King Henry V’s outnumbered, half-starved English army faced the flower of French chivalry. French knights were expensive, each man-at-arms the product of many years of training, his armor and warhorse a major investment.
Henry’s archers carried longbows that cost little, drawn by men trained in every village across the kingdom. When the volleys came, the knights fell by the hundreds. Quantity overwhelmed quality—and the mud helped. France lost the battle, but defeat in the war came not in the dying. It was in the impossibility of replacing what had died.