Thats still true today.
True but the impact is a little different, in that adjoining units typically can’t see each other flee today, so that if one unit flees, it’s not as critical as in old-school set piece battles where if units ran, everyone else saw them run, and it had a corrosive effect on their side’s morale, and a boost to the enemy’s.
Thats accurate, but determined infantry is the devil to trey and dislodge.
Yeah, and something Dr Konijnendijk has mentioned in a few of his comments on the topic, the thing that the Spartans were actually really training was a mentality. Their physical training was primarily athletic in nature, not actually military, like they didn’t spend, as best we can tell, an inordinate amount of time learning to wield shield and spear. Certainly, all adult Greek male citizens received a basic instruction in how to form a phalanx and wield the hoplite weaponry in the Classical Greek era, but mind you this wasn’t the work of a lifetime, this was sort of like the introductory training period of being in the U.S. National Guard, you didn’t practice at it every day or for the rest of your life.
This is again because, by the era of Classical Greece, fighting was in formation and the impact of “individual skill in the spear” just wasn’t a significant determinant of who won battles.
Pre-modern peoples did tend to get better and better at maneuver and formations over time, with some eras of regression. For example, while the Hoplite Phalanx can be traced back to the Archaic Greek period, they are believed to have only very roughly fought in a formation.
Classical era Greeks fought in a more proper formation, but again, they weren’t professional soldiers so they had serious limitations–they couldn’t perform a tactical retreat, and re-maneuvering after melee was engaged was difficult because they hadn’t developed systems of battlefield command.
By the era of Julius Caesar, the Romans were much better drilled at formations and maneuver, they could perform some (for the era) complex maneuvers in combat, and they also had the ability to perform a tactical retreat–which is actually really important, a tactical retreat is very different than your lines breaking and a general retreat. In pre-modern times when your formation broke you often suffered really devastating losses and a total loss of the field of battle and control over whatever area you were fighting. A tactical retreat enabled you to fight again relatively quickly.
The Romans also had some other things they had improved upon–for example in a tactical retreat they would detach ambush units in case the enemy engaged in a reckless pursuit, which could expose the enemy to counterattack.
The Romans even had some good techniques in the Early Republic period, in that period maniples would maintain gaps between them, so if a line started to break, they could retreat through the gaps, and soldiers who were not engaged could move forward to start fighting, this made it more difficult to push a Roman line into a true rout.
I wonder if the real trick in modern warfare is getting troops to attack more than defending.
ISTM with modern comms and tracking it should be easier than ever to coordinate an assault. (Assuming the commander knows how to use his or her forces.)
I think in today’s landscape of largely professional militaries, it’s different than it used to be, when you had the professional “guards” or huscarls or whoever, and then a bunch of conscripts whose motivation and esprit de corps are less than ideal. Now at least in the West, the troops are all volunteer and all professionals, so the equation is a bit different than it used to be.
I was thinking more along the lines of a time period like WWII or Korea, where you would have largely conscript armies, and the real challenge was getting the troops to get out of their holes and attack, not so much command, control and communication related issues.
I imagine the Russians are facing this to varying degrees right now in Ukraine; everything I’m reading implies that they’re suffering pretty drastic morale and leadership problems and that’s why their offensive in the eastern part of Ukraine has stalled out.
Yes, a major difference at least in the West is the move to all professional military and all-volunteer. Up through the 1990s many NATO member countries actually still had a significant amount of conscription; this has died down quite a bit to where most don’t practice conscription at all any longer and those that do are dialing it back.
Russia is kind of an outlier in how reliant it is on conscription of a so-called “top military” in modern times. China for example has not actively utilized conscription since 1949, it has been able to keep the PLA fully manned through volunteers.
I laugh that in the soundtrack for the film, the musical piece for the battle is called “The battle of Stirling”, sans Bridge.
One of the things they trained was to be an unhesitant killer, something militaries have always struggled with. They did it in quite a brutal way.
Of course, how much of Spartan superiority actually was real and how much was myth is still debated. I like this series of articles for the naysayer side. I haven’t read this book yet but I gather it covers similar ground.
Yeah, I have seen some decently compelling argument that it was myth, and pretty strong argument that if there was a “Spartan Difference” it was much more in a sort of elan, attitude way and not like the 300 where one Spartan was a better warrior than 5 Thebans or what have you. There is just scant evidence that in the Hoplite Phalanx era of classical Greek history, any of the Greek states believed that it was necessary or even useful to do the sort of 20th/21st century “professional soldier non-stop military training” that has been superimposed on the legends about Sparta.
The whole “every Spartan is a warrior and nothing else” was of course also a distortion. Sparta had in common with all of the Greek states that all citizens who were adult males were expected to fight when their state went to war. However, unlike most of the other Greek states e.x. Athens, where your “day job” was being a craftsman, trader, wool merchant or etc, Spartan society was based on the helot slaves doing almost all work of that nature. The Spartan citizens thus basically did not, and were actively discouraged from, having “vocations”, although they did still manage their agricultural lands and other activities. In a sense yes, one of their few real “jobs” was fighting in the military when necessary–but that was essentially the same as the other Greek states.
Not being an expert, my guess is institutions like the Spartan agoge probably created an adult male population perhaps somewhat more “vicious” and with a stronger killer instinct, and less proclivity to break early in battle–of course we know that the Spartans lost many battles in the Peloponnesian War, not to mention allied with the outsider Persian Empire to ultimately win, which paints a bit of a different picture of them than pop culture offers up. Mix that in with our natural human tendency to mythologize and there you have it. I have little doubt the typical Spartan was in far better athletic conditioning and a far “tougher” person than a typical first world Westerner of the 21st century, and lived in an incredibly harsh and brutal society, which is probably enough truth to justify the fictionalizations.
In most respects I agree, but I think they’d be generally smaller and less well-nourished, which also counts for something in that kind of combat.
I’ve often wondered about the prevalence of PTSD throughout history. WWI brought us “shell shock”;it seems plausible that being exposed to Civil War or Napoleonic era artillery would have similar effects; I can’t believe that many people emerged from hack and slash melee fighting, or even the victorious side of a rout, without some lasting psychological effects. Cutting another human up at close quarters or seeing the same happen to your close comrades must have had pretty similar effects on people then as it would now (unless they’ve gone the Spartan route and pre-traumatised themselves for everyone’s convenience). And that’s not even talking about sieges which could lead to pure horror show stuff if they went to breach.
Did people have coping mechanisms? You could say that life in general was so harsh then that having your mate’s brains dashed across your face was less of a big deal, but that seems glib.
I suspect desertion was easier and more common in the pre-20th century era, which provided something of a relief valve.
I actually am not sure how much easier desertion was, it would vary a lot from time to time and place to place, but I think in many situations it would have been much harder.
As an example, a Civil War Era deserter of either North or South, America was a really big country then, it wasn’t that hard to get away from the front lines and to some community big enough that a random stranger wouldn’t be obviously a deserter. You would need to steal clothes and such, and find some plausible means of setting yourself up, but you at least have a chance. People drifted around back then.
Ancient Greece on the other hand I think deserting would be very, very difficult. The units you served in largely everyone knew who you were. Your entire life was tied to your family, your family’s various familial ties, and your interests back in your home Greek state. If you just ran away from battle, everyone around you who survived would know you had ran away and remember it forever. You could never return home. In that era, it wasn’t that easy for a random Greek speaking person not from the local state to just show up and be like “hey, I live here now, I’m an adult male who speaks Greek with an Athenian dialect, unknown family provenance, no local relationships or business ties etc.” That…would be difficult to work out.
I don’t think that is true. Painting with an extremely broad brush, in pre-modern societies premature death was very much present in everyone’s life, atrocities of most sorts abounded, and life was fucking hard for almost everyone. Under those conditions, seeing violent deaths, facing such, or taking a life is bound to be less of a shock than in our pampered realm, with almost 100 % child survival rates, sci-fi medicine and the least violent phase in human history.
There is a description in Herodotus of a soldier who was struck with an inexplicable blindness just after the battle of Marathon. There is no way to be sure if this particular event actually happened, but it at least suggests that the idea of being psychologically afflicted post combat was present in the Classical age.
The best research I’ve seen on PTSD suggests it is a byproduct of our body’s system that basically kicks us into an adrenaline fueled, fight or flight mode when we fear our life is in danger. Warfare creates a scenario for many people where they are stuck in states like that for relatively long periods of time, repeatedly, and that in many cases this causes somewhat permanent psychological harm.
While I would tend to agree an ancient Greek by the age of 25 had probably seen more casual death than a 21st century American (even outside of war, just the lack of emergency medicine or antibiotics means they likely would have seen siblings die etc), that fear response–>adrenaline surge we experience when we think we are in danger of imminent death is essentially a biological response we are going to have regardless of the society we live in or the era.
“Ancient Greece on the other hand I think deserting would be very, very difficult. The units you served in largely everyone knew who you were. Your entire life was tied to your family, your family’s various familial ties, and your interests back in your home Greek state. If you just ran away from battle, everyone around you who survived would know you had ran away and remember it forever.”
Punishments for desertion appear to have existed in Greece, but were not extreme (loss of rights but not property (https://www.persee.fr/doc/antiq_0770-2817_1979_num_48_2_1945)) and soldiers sometimes deserted to the other side (as during the Peloponnesian War).