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Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes August 2014 - Less Wrong
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This feels to me like a just world fallacy, or perhaps choosing the most convenient world. Yes, if the barbarians are completely stupid, they are probably not so much of a danger these days. If they are completely anti-science, we probably have better guns.
Now imagine somewhat smarter barbarians, who by themselves are unable to do sophisticated science, but have no problem kidnapping a few scientists and telling them to produce a lot of weapons for them, otherwise their families will be burned at stake. (Even if their religion prevents them from doing science, they may compartmentalize and believe it is okay to use the devil's tools against the devil himself.) Suddenly, the barbarians have good guns, too.
Maybe the reason why the West hasn't been conquered by Muslim fundamentalists yet is that Muslims don't have an equivalent of Genghis Khan. Someone who would have the courage to conquer the nearest territory, kill horribly everyone who opposed them, let live those who didn't (and make this fact publicly known), take some men and weapons from the conquered territory and use them to attack the next territory immediately, et cetera, spreading like a wildfire. First attacking some smaller but civilized countries to get better weapons for attacking the next ones. With multiple leaders, so that dropping a bomb won't stop the war. (Maybe one Osama hiding in secret, giving commands to dozen wannabe Genghis Khans who don't mind getting to paradise too soon.)
By the same reasoning which says that fundamentalists could do better with more efficient methods of conquest, they could do better with more efficient methods of making peace, too. They won't do as well as with conquest, but they'll do better than they are doing now. Yet they don't.
Barbarism is not optimized for conquest. It's optimized for supporting a set of social structures. Those social structures make them more dangerous as conquerers than the average society, but they're still not optimized for conquest; there are things which would make conquest more efficient which they would not do.
(To use just one example, for a country to embark on conquest and use the men from the conquered country to continue conquering more countries, they'd have to grant equal rights to conquered people who agreed to work with them. Rome did that except in a few rare but famous cases. So did the Mongols. But Muslim fundamentalists can't give non-Muslims or rival Muslims equal rights without no longer being Muslim fundamentalists.)
Not necessarily. Muslims, in particular, have a history of using slave soldiers to good effect.
You do realize it's possible to convert to fundamentalist Islam?
I seem to recall, and a glance over the Wikipedia articles suggests, that the Mamluk and Janissary systems involved raising (enslaved) boys into a military environment from a fairly young age. These boys might come from subjugated territories, but they'd in effect have been part of the dominant culture for much of their lives: it's not a system that could be used to quickly convert conquered territories into additional manpower.
That said, it hasn't been unusual for empires, modern and otherwise, to make substantial use of auxiliary forces drawn from client states. The Roman military probably relied on them as much as they did on the legions, or more in the late empire.
The late Roman Empire wasn't exactly successful at conquering anything, or even at keeping the Empire from falling apart.
Yes, but requiring that soldiers do so makes the process of conquest less optimized, since it's easier for obvious reasons to get soldiers without this requirement than with it. (The same goes for using slaves.)
You seem to be focusing solely on cost; the difference between benefit and cost is what matters, and the benefits of a fighting force with shared values (particularly shared religious ones) are many and obvious.
By that reasoning, it's the Romans and the Mongols who are un-optimized for conquest.
The Mongols had the advantage of recruiting from a pool of steppe nomads with similar values.
The Roman Republic conquered the Mediterranean basin with an army consisting of Italians that were required to adopt Roman values before joining. Later the Roman legion adopted the looser system you described. Subsequently Roman legions would spend nearly as much effort fighting other Roman legions in civil wars as fighting Rome's enemies.