Whatever became of the Roman Army in the West

[Robert Vermaat]

The Roman army had plenty of Roman recruits. There is simply put no evidence for a 'Germanised Roman army' other than the grumblings of a few historians. When we find names that 'Germanisation' is simple not born out by the evidence.

But how Roman is a Roman? If service in the military becomes a hereditary chore, and lots of Germans continually get settled on Roman lands on the contingency of military service then gradually the soldiers become more Germanish even if they are not recruited across the border. The fact they recruit extra soliders across the border for their routine civil wars just adds to the trend.

Now you're being argumentative. As to the Germanic influx into the empire, even if we would take the highest estimates, these numbers are still dwarved by the number of Roman citizens. If what you suggest is indeed that most 'Roman' recruits were in fact men descended from germanic ancestors, I can only ask you where you found that information, because I can't think of any scholar who has suggested this development. 'Roman' can indeed mean Italian, Gaul, Greek, Pannonian, Syriac, Egyptian. But I would never go as far as dismissing all of these and state that most Roman recruits were also of Germanic descent. That would be overstating the evidence.

I would suggest a good analogy for the late roman army is the Afghan army, sure it probably has a paper strength of x but a military planner wouldnt count on them being a reliable manpower source. They are poorly paid (thus extremely corrupt and hated by the ordinary people) and poorly motivated given they really have no conception of loyalty to a abstract construct called the Afghan State. Compare that to the Taliban who are extremely well motivated and willing to fight. Once the NATO forces leave the whole construct of an Afghan state will collapse, the Taliban can wreck a weak economy with little effort, no economy equals no taxes. No taxes equals no army and no legitimacy.

In fact I agree. The Roman army, Republican or Dominate, can never be equated to effective military organisations such as the US Army. In fact, the Roman government has been compared in terms of effectiveness to that of a modern state like Zimbabwe. Whatever we think of the Romans, we should always remember that they were very close to the tribal Iron Age, not to industrialised Europe.
Beyond that I disagree. There is no evidence that the Late Roman army was a structurally poorly or unpaid demoralised ragtag bunch of thieves. If functioned up to standard whenever possible. Unpaid armies cease to exist, as we know from the very end of a Roman unit in late 5th c. Noricum. Sure, pay could be late, but we know that somehow it continued to arrrive. Of course there was corruption, but no more or no less than in other parts of Roman society - we never hear of the army being excessively corrupt. Also, loyalty was not a problem in the Roman army until the very structures of the Roman state in the West began to dissolve. Also remember that many Roman soldiers fought for their very homes.
The general comparison to the Afghan situation is not a good one. Society is very different, the eceonomic situation is different, the enemy is different.

Likewise the late Roman soldier has little chance of getting the big paydays like days of old through conquest (thus little prestige), poorly paid and thus extremely unmotivated. The ruling elite whose property the army is supposed, utterly despise the commoners (foreigners or citizens) who make up the army so the army has little love for the system. The sources often mention the army more interested in extortion than doing their job and this trend got worse in late antiquity. At least in the early empire the army was nasty but effective, the late army was nasty and useless. The sources mention that mercenaries such as the Huns were extremely well valued because they would actually do the job they paid for. No doubt when the Huns see they get recruited to do simple stuff like put down peasant uprisings they realise they can rob the empire blind.

You are exaggerating here.
Money could be a problem but not consistently so. Pay was raised during several occasions and recruits were still attracted enough to man the ranks. Prestige was a problem at times, but also not consistently so. The attitude of the elite towards commoners never played any part in the loyalty of the army towards 'the system'. No evidence of such disloyalty exists. Also, I'de like to learn what sources 'often mention' that the army was 'more interested in extortion than doing their job and this trend got worse in late antiquity'. I think you're exaggerating wildly here. Some sources complain about certain trends, but we need to look at these complaints with caution, such as the complaint of Vegetius that the army refused to wear armour, which has been proven to be incorrect. Some sources liked to moan about the 'good old days'.

You statement that the Late Roman army was useless is nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

This probably also partly explains the rise of private armed retainers the bucellarii. Local potentate surely could see the weakness of the central state and the ineffectiveness of the army and worry that greedy barbarians and uppity tenants might have designs to upset the social order and thus the incentive to create their own private militias.

Private armies were a result of unrest among the general population, banditry and bagaudae. Not the uselessness of the army. I never heard of a case in which the army was used against bucellarii. Belisarius used his own bucellarii in the reconquest of Africa and Italy.

Whether the imperial army was made up predominately of Latin Romans, Provincials, Germanics, or whomever, is tangential to the larger issue of: what became of those tens of thousands of soldiers armed under the imperial crown? Again, I would think that somehow they would have been disarmed and disbanded—either by force or choice or both—or else reconstituted elsewhere.

Like the Afghan army, there is such a thing on paper, but it doesn't really have any worth in a meaningful sense when it gets put to the test. The army and the state are two sides of the same coin, when one sinks so does the other. To me, it seems implausible that the West could have been overrun so easily if the forces in the Notitia actually were all combat capable. The East was in a similar boat but didn't seem to have the wealth inequalities, demographic problems of the West and was lucky it faced a state like itself and was at peace during much of the 5th century, so there was no means that the East could collapse like in the West.

Like I wrote earlier [and what you either dismissed as nonsense or failed to read], the West was never overrun. It was hollowed out and at some point ceased to exist.
And what is written in the Notitia predates the fall of the West by about 80 to 60 years, and may not have any bearing on the actual form or size of the Late Roman army in the West by the later 5th century.

The main difference between the situations in the West and the east were that a) the East had a geographic advantage (in the sense that a rebel that managed to gain control of Asia, almost always failed to control Europe) and b) the East managed to forestall the leading role of generalissimos such as Arbogast, Stilicho, Aetius and Ricimer, whose struggle to gain and hold power did innumerably more damage to the strenght of the state than any invading Germanic army.