Editing Proud Warrior Race (section)

== Problems ==
There are a lot of issues with the Proud Warrior Race and how they function, but the stem of it is that any society is complex and reducing them to one part of that greater whole makes as much sense as designing a car and only designing an engine.

The first and most obvious point is that even in a Warrior Culture, someone needs to keep them fed, clothed, armed and armoured. To get their sword, a warrior gets a blacksmith to forge it. To do so, the blacksmith needs food, fuel, metal, and a forge to work them in. This requires peasants from subservient castes to feed them and supply them with coal and bog iron, as well as a mason to build their forge (who also needs to be fed, requiring even more peasants) and the peasants and mason will need metal tools, so you'd probably want another smith who'd make them who'd also need food, a tanner to make forge bellows, aprons and gloves for the smiths and leather bits for the armor, a carpenter to build their houses, etc. In the end for every full time warrior, you need dozens of other people behind them providing support. While some societies and fictional settings have some take up hybrid occupations with part time craftsmen and traders, such setups tend to either degrade average martial prowess or lead to different tiers of membership (with all the politicking and segregation that that entails).

Similarly, even in warlike cultures not everything was about war and fighting all the time. The Vikings and the Mongols were not only warriors, but skilled traders. The Samurai produced a lot of capable poets and artists who's work would as often be about flowers than battle and eventually they largely evolved into a class of Bureaucrats.

That said, a Warrior Culture can still exist and thrive in a pre-industrial context as they lord over civilian subjects and are not above doing some farming, herding, trade, accounting, land management and landscape painting on the side themselves. A few elite warriors clad in the best armour with the best weapons, trained from childhood to use them and willing to press on even when death seems certain can best several times their number of peasants with cheap spears and helmets and minimal training that are liable to panic if things don't go their way. The most obvious and extreme example of this in history are the Spartans. The Spartans (i.e. officially recognized full citizens of the city of Sparta) themselves did all the Proud Warrior Race guy stuff training, Spartan way extreme training, fighting and so on and so on. But they were supported by an entire social class of slaves, the Helots. Said Helots were conquered at some point in history (we think this was over 2,000 years ago), and were kept in slavery to do all the support work the Spartans required for their Proud Warrior stuff. But due to them being slaves, the Spartans had to spend a lot of time and energy keeping them in line. Nevertheless, it was effective for a few hundred years roughly between 900BC and 200BC: Sparta's power and influence would only wane away by the time Alexander the Great came conquering along and ultimately be definitively put under by the Romans. 

The problem is that as societies and technology advance, this model gets less and less viable. When a nation has access to both firearms and cannons as well as the apparatuses of state to recruit the sons of peasants, artisans, clerks, etc... in the tens of thousands and train, drill and organize them into a professional army; said army can overcome mighty warriors trough tactics and/or sheer numbers, even if the opposition has a substantial advantage in one-on-one fights. What’s more, said tactical and technological simplicity (often supported by massive populations from agriculture) means any losses incurred by the traditional warrior culture are irreplaceable while the sedentary culture can train up adequate conscripts faster. Do note that it is a lot easier said then done: historically, only the Roman Empire and maybe China could really claim to have been able to do that until arguably the 16th century. In no small part because warrior classes will often resist the implementation of systems which renders them and their political station obsolete. In a fantasy setting, the Proud Warrior Race Guy can perfectly make sense make sense: one could say the romanticized version of a [[knight]] is a form of Proud Warrior Race Guy. It's when you start getting into the vast industrial complexes of science fiction that this can strain suspension of disbelief without some additional thought put into it the way the T'au do for example.

Another problem is the "Proud" part of "Proud Warrior Race Guy". Codes of Honour are not a bad thing in of themselves, after all they can provide stability and encourage people to do their best and push their boundaries. The problem is that the Honour systems the Proud Warrior Races usually are more concerned with glorifying an individual. They'd often avoid weapons and tactics they deem "cowardly", which a pragmatic and opportunistic enemy will identify and exploit. There are of course various degrees this could be portrayed: a modern real-world military like the US Marines could be said to have a code of honour. '''Not shooting medics''', '''Not harming non-combatants''', '''Not torturing people''' and '''Not using chemical weapons/sub-munitions/etc...''' make for a reasonable code, as they limit collateral damage and casualties without hampering the combatants ([[skub|too much]]). In fiction, however, it get taken to stupid levels like '''No ambushing, head straight for the enemy!''' or '''Ranged weapons are a coward's tool!''': such codes are so inherently self-limiting that you wonder how they're able to manage to be successful warriors in the first place. The Mameluks were a class of elite heavy cavalry in Egypt that had such attitude to missile weapons, which did not serve them well when the Ottomen marched in with matchlock muskets. Other impractical practices can include refusal to accept or offer surrender and expected suicide in the face of failure; all good for heroic tales and extreme motivation but can lead to excessive waste of life and experience.

This is before the matter of internal conflicts. If you have a bunch of fairly small factions which feel that see armed conflict as the first and best option to resolve problems and advance their interests and feel that it's important that [[Dawi|grudges need to be avenged]] it does not take a lot to get these guys to kill themselves. A good weapon that has often been used against feudal powers is to capitalize and inflame these internal conflicts. A case and point example of this is the rapid disintegration of multiple nomadic steppe Empires like the Mongols and the Turks; when you inevitably subjugate everyone in view then it’s more likely you and your extended family will start quarreling in the absence of a strong and charismatic leader to keep it all together.

Overall in both fiction and IRL: the Proud Warrior Race guys tend to eventually lose to those societies that are better able to mobilize larger parts of their population than the small, more elite Proud Warriors. More so when firearms are involved.