Pivot to Decimation

Salve, soldiers of the 9th Legion!

Today is a difficult day. As many of you know, strategic conditions have changed along the Transalpine frontier. Record increases in supply costs, a challenging growth environment in the Black Forest, and disappointing results from many of our parent Republic’s ventures in Asia Minor have forced us to make some hard choices. That is why we have decided to decimate the 9th.

We have undertaken an extensive study of all our operations over these past months, enabling us to conduct random executions of one man in 10. Your HR Prefects will be meeting with your teams later today to draw lots. This is not the news I hoped to be sharing with you today, and I know many of you will be disappointed. I am disappointed as well, and share your pain, though obviously not all of it.

Many of you have already asked me why the legion finds itself in this situation given our many victories in recent years. We have, after all, made many new conquests on behalf of Rome, set records for loot returned to the city, and thanks to your efforts, we face no strategic rival for the first time in our history.

If you take a wider view, however, you will see that while we achieved all our missions and brought glory to our eagle and wealth to the Republic, we lost sight of sustainability. I share some blame for this: when we were building our mighty works and engines to subdue the ruthless and innumerable Gaul, we were not taking our budget as seriously as we ought to have been. Moving forward, we should plan on winning victories without the expensive tactics we have grown dependent on, and we should look for efficiencies in how we conduct our operations, like employing more local auxiliaries, or fighting only those battles that will result in decisive victories yielding large swaths of valuable territory and rich returns in liquid assets.