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We need to shed this idea of a war machine.

I don't like some of the tone of this. The Legions were very much a war machine, in battle, and in military engineering. Of course the soldiers were people, nobody ever claimed they were military robots.

When well led, the legions defeated everybody they faced. They even defeated the Parthians for a time, and briefly occupied nearly all of present day Iraq.

The point of Roman army training and weaponry was for the legion to be able to fight and win against all adversaries even when outnumbered. That requires unit cohesion, with standard weapons and tactics even though additional decoration and weapons were permitted. Wives and children were routinely allowed at permanent bases in order to make the conditions of service more bearable.

Based on literary sources, none of this is new even though excavations and close study make such aspects of legionary life tangible and verified by artifacts.

They kept coming after a defeat, and used iron discipline and training and uniform equipment and tactics to chew up numerically superior adversaries.

There's a line in the 1960 "Cleopatra" that has long struck me -- Caesar et al arrives in Alexandria, and the pharaoh's tutor says, "and with so few men." That's something that often struck and even emboldened attackers, who in 99% of cases learned their final lessons in the space of a couple of hours.

It's always seemed a little odd to me when The Great Anonymous Online Legions advocate for Roman adversaries and play up the rare Roman defeat here and there.

Trajan took the Parthian capital, added Mesopotamia to the list of provinces, then died of old age.

Trajan's adopted heir (allegedly adopted heir is more like it) Hadrian immediately gave up that one, and had to be talked out of giving up the hard-won Dacia. He then spent much of his reign touring the Empire, building shrines to his dead catamite, Antinoos. No wonder there is so much praise among for his reign among the woke.

I do find it interesting that we haven’t really evolved to much over 2,000 years. I bought my son the video, letters from Vindolanda. Soldiers writing home,”send money”, talking about the “charms” of the local women. The garrison commanders wife upset at being in the far flung regions of Rome and missing out on the latest fashions. The children being tortured with school work etc. Well lead, disciplined armies are hard to defeat, technology also is needed and it needs to change with circumstances.