Military History of Formation

Factual Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I’d like to know when and why we as a civilization evolved into military formations and battlefields with well defined phalanxes and troop regiments (armies with divisions). Isn’t urban/guerilla warfare more effective? I mean if you really want to kill somebody, do like the Viet Cong did and put booby traps in the jungles, and hide from your assailants. Be sneaky, cruel, and unfair. A siege works. A pitched battle seems like an exercise in pomp, but not really cost-effective.

We have such a problem with terrorism because the militants refuse to fight the battles in the open. They use underhanded tactics that attack our infrastructure, and play off of psychological warfare. This is effective. So is guerilla warfare. The proof of this is the continual success of terrorist tactics. We haven’t failed, but you can’t deny that we are suffering because of these low, base strategies that attack our weaknesses. What seems pointless to me is two sides lining up on a field somewhere and courteously slaughtering each other. Why be so “honorable” and proper when the point of war is to destroy and be merciless as well as to use any tactics necessary to win? Was lining up on the field really the only way to wage war on another country? It seems such a roundabout way to go when you could have just sent assassins in to terrorize the populations and kill government officials. I’m rambling here, but it seems like in the capacity of human ingenuity and predilection for violence that they wouldn’t have come to the idea of battling out in the open on their own, when wanton and surprise killings and maimings would have accomplished the same goals in a shorter period of time. Was the rise of the concept of honor involved? If so, how did honor translate to a greater expenditure of manpower and resources? Please help me figure this out. It’s 3 AM here so I may not be thinking correctly.

Thanks,

Dave

2

Spread fighting is actually worse even today - a bunch of guys can lay down more firepower than one. But it is kind of necessary to fight that way because grenades and machine guns and bombs.

However, when the principal way war is fought is by beating somebody with a stick, then being two guys beating on one with a stick is much more likely to succeed than being alone. And having friendly guys on your left and right and back keep you safe from guys you hadn’t seen jumping at you and beating you with a stick. And when some jerk on horseback tries to race at you and beat you with his stick, it turns out that a tightly packed bunch of mates with long sticks can give him a really bad day. “But arrows ! Crossbows !” will you say. “But big honking wall of shields, and big dudes on horseback to chase the bowman down !” will I reply.

To put it simply : people fought big battles in tight formation, because that was safer and more efficient than the alternative.

That is not to say that they only fought in pitched battles. Lightning raids, “guerrilla” fighting and asymetrical fighting were also absolutely a Thing - and in fact such constant raids by Vikings in the North, Magyars in the Balkans, Persians in the East etc… caused no end of political and administrative reforms in 7th-10th century Christendom and Byzantium. As well, the germanic and briton people managed to hold the Roman empire at bay thanks to terrain favourable to ambush tactics for example.

But when you want to take over a place, as opposed to looting it or generally being a jerk for jerkness’ sake, asymetrical fighting doesn’t work. It’s not good enough. Neither is killing random guys or even kings - they’ll just truck on with a new guy, and why shouldn’t they ?

Finally, and I know it’s hard to wrap one’s head around, but pitched battles were actually safer, or rather less deadly, to the combatants involved on either side. A big battle typically ended with a mere 5-10% casualties, at which point one side just ran away. Which is a rather important consideration when your fighting force is *also *your food-producing force and also your administrative/legislative body. Professional soldiery is a relatively recent development.

As for sieges, first of all they don’t always work - ask Archidamos how besieging a city that’s got a strong navy goes. Second, they take a long-ass time, which is not good when your soldiers really want to be back home for the harvest, and also not good when the guys you’re besieging have friends coming to their rescue. Third, they kind of rely on the defender having walls to hide behind - which up until the 11th century was not really a given. Spartans deliberately never built any - they thought it was pansy :).

Take the Peloponnesian war for instance : when Archidamos and his Spartans came to besiege it, the Athenian elites didn’t care because thanks to their naval superiority there were steady food shipments coming in and the Spartans couldn’t breach Athens’ walls. Rather, Pericles advocated exactly what you suggest : avoiding open battle with the Spartan hoplites, who were super good, and instead focusing on small ship-borne raids all over Spartan territory. But every *rural *Athenian, all those people who lived and farmed and raised cattle in Athens’ back country, they had to flee to the city in the meantime, leaving all of their shit behind. Which the Spartans were more than happy to loot and burn because there was nothing good on TV and you get bored, you know how it is. Had the Athenians manned up and opted to deal with this shit head on once and for all, phalanxo a phalanxo, the whole war could have been done with, one way or the other, in one year instead of thirty.

If you’re wondering who won that particular war in the end btw, it’s the Spartans. Eventually they got a navy of their own, and that was pretty much that.

3

First of all, Guerilla warfare is purely a defensive strategy - it’s based on the being more familiar with the land and being able to vanish among the civilian population. You can’t do that when you’re invading a country.

Second of all, by abandoning traditional warfare you’re effectively admitting defeat. It means that you’re letting the enemy take all your stuff: your cities, your factories, your farms, your *families *- everything you can’t carry on your back or hide in a hole. I like my stuff. *And *my family. I’d want to at least try to prevent the enemy from taking them from me. If I fail, then maybe I’ll think about taking to the hills.

4

If you are interested in these matters, I would suggest this book is a great place to start:

Simply put: ‘warfare’ as a concept always took various forms; some more ‘ceremonial’ (both sides lining up to be seen acting bravely, and taunting each other mostly), some more ‘vicious’ (one side sneaking up at night to massacre the other while they lie asleep in their beds), and everything inbetween.

Early anthropologists often mistook primitive (in this context, ‘primitive’ means lower on the band/tribe/chiefdom/state spectrum of social evolution - not a smear on the individuals) warfare as being all ‘ceremony’, because that was what the ‘primitive’ people themselves liked to talk about and glorify - not the sneaky massacre of enemies by night. However, the anthropologists eventually discovered that ‘primitve’ people did, on occasion, practice ‘sneaky’ warfare as well - they just didn’t brag about it.

[Another example of ‘sneaky’ warfare had to do with the common practice of ‘trecherous feasting’ - that is, inviting one’s neighbouring nobles in for a big feast - then killing them when their guard was down).

You may ask - why do societies go in for ‘ceremonial’ type battles, when if you really wanted to do your enemy down, it would be better to be ‘sneaky’?

The reason seems to be this: ‘primitive’ peoples, like any other, have to live in a world that is complex - full of potential enemies and allies. Having a reputation for being ‘sneaky’ carries a cost - others tend to dislike it; it gives you a bad reputation; you may find your allies more reluctant, your enemies more willing to band together against you.

Of course, under certain circumstances it may be worth it - so it does happen - but typically, for resolution of disputes it is ‘more effective’ as in less costly to have a one-day ‘honourable battle’ and make peace afterwards, than to seek to kill every last one of your enemies in a ‘sneaky’ manner - which may inspire a Hatfield vs. McCoy - type blood feud with every one of your enemy’s allies, and make your own allies think you are assholes.

5

In the hand-to-hand days, formations were adopted as both a method of command and control and a way to fight more effectively. Which is going to win- the 4 dozen guys running up in a a mob willy-nilly to fight individually, or the 4 dozen guys formed up in a formation with the front rank having shields overlapped and raised to resist the willy-nilly attack, and the second rank stabbing over the front rank? (some variation of the shield wall was the standard infantry combat method from Greek days up past the Romans).

Then when firearms came about, they weren’t often very accurate, so the best way to get effective fire was to fire them en-masse at the enemy. So they organized the troops to best effect- early on, it was mostly a volley or two, and then a bayonet charge, and the troops weren’t always super-disciplined, so deeper (more ranks) were better. As the battles changed into standing and firing at one another until one side ran away, the formations changed into more linear ones, so that more men could be firing and not obscured by the front ranks.

This persists more or less into the modern day- infantry still attacks in a sort of skirmish-line formation, although not like they did in say 1812, and they do fire & movement (one group fires to suppress the enemy while the other group advances, then they swap roles).

6

As I understand it, the traditional view of warfare from the American Revolution and Napoleonic wars was based on the relatively new musket technology. The soldiers stood in rows of 2 or 3 deep, so one row could load while the other fired, then they changed positions. The unrifled muskets were wildly inaccurate so the most effective tactic was to fire a massive volley in the general direction of the enemy and hope that a few found the target. The bright uniforms were necessary because the constant firing with the gunpowder of the day created thick clouds of smoke so it was difficult to see anything, it made it easy to identify friend or foe when the lines met with bayonets on.

Of course, rifled barrels and improved accuracy made hidden sniping a viable tactic against this sort of formation.

But people fighting in large groups, as mentioned above, had distinct advantages. The Romans famously refined the formation so that the massed troops with large shields (Tortise formation) could defend themselves against less organized attackers.

I think it’s pretty obvious that groups fought as groups ever since the first time more than one person attacked more than one person. The need for better organization was probably very obvious the first time someone saw the old “fake running away and surround them when they run into your middle” tactic - advance as a solid line and there is no chance for the enemy to surround and take out an isolated front group.

7

Another point - horses aren’t stupid, they generally will balk at things like running into a row of pikes pointed at them. Since the days of cavalry and horse carriages in warfare, the best defense was for a row of men to stand together with long pikes pointing outward to discourage the horses. Originally it was carriages since the traditional carriage could include a driver and a swordsman/archer; while the stirrup which allowed better stability for the rider was relatively new, about 1000AD or so IIRC. The trick was to persuade a bunch of guys they were safer staring down a thundering herd riding full tilt toward them. If anyone turned and ran, there was a hole that allowed the horses to come at the rest from the side and behind. Discipline was key, and/or fear of the consequences if they ran.

8

I agree with most of what you say, but not this: anthropologically, fighting ‘as a group’ is a reasonably late development in human history, and by no means universal.

Throughout most of human history, people probably fought much like contact-era New Guineans: that is, lined up in mobs, taunting the enemy, throwing/dodging spears and arrows, and only occasionally comming to hand-to-hand combat - and then, as individual duelists.

This sort of warfare is quite similar to what one reads in the Iliad - it is very alien to the machine-like killing machines of the phallanx or the Roman legion. Which, of course, may account for why these latter types tended to dominate the “barbarians” they fought against (until the “barbarians” learned to counter these tactics).

9

Sounds like the schoolyard (minus the spears and arrows; substitute sticks and stones).

10

Man, you went to a pansy-ass school.

:slight_smile:

11

I agree with others, but there is one point missing. Modern armies divide the enemy into soldiers and civilians. Ancient armies did not. Unless opposed “in the field”, the enemy army would torch your village, trample your fields and drag your family into slavery. That is a strong incentive to come out and face them (or to grab your family and all movable property and run for hills).

12

I asked about this in another thread, receiving the same explanation. It didn’t take much more research to see how much sense it makes. The armies on the road to away games were traveling in a pack, trying to pick off a few men would have the whole army immediately on top of you. There weren’t bombs or guns to use, until small crossbows were developed there was no way to snipe from a distance. The traveling armies didn’t have a supply line to disrupt because they carried everything with them and when that ran out they expected to live off the land until they were resupplied, if they ever would be. Safety came in the large groups, and well into the age of guns the greatest danger was from the direct assault of an entire army and the only way to have a chance in that fight was with your own army grouped together.

13

The other thing that hasn’t really been explicitly said is that fighting terrorism isn’t really a “war”, at least not in a classic sense. Yes, politicians like to say “War on Whatever”, but in reality, it’s probably more of an intelligence gathering and law enforcement operation than a military one, in that the military only comes in at the point when the terrorists are identified, their positions located in foreign countries, and the decision is made to actually eliminate them. Otherwise it’s the CIA, FBI, NSA and various state and local law enforcement agencies trying to figure out who the players are, what their allegiances and affiliations are, what their capabilities are, what they are going to do, and where / when they’re planning to do it, so they can stop it.

Put simply, stopping 9/11 would have been a matter of intelligence and law enforcement, and the military wouldn’t have had a role until the decision to take out Al Qaeda where they hide had been made.

So saying that terrorist tactics “work” in a warfare context is just wrong. Asymmetrical warfare, as experienced by the US in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Latin America in the first third of the 20th century, are fundamentally defensive tactics, like others have said, and they’re also generally the last resort when a group is unable to fight the enemy in the field straight-up, due to the actual army having been defeated, the area being behind enemy lines (partisans) or never actually engaging in battle.

14

And the flip side of this is that, for a very long time (the Roman legion being sort of an aberration, only made possible by the huge amounts of slaves Rome already had by the time Marius came along), “soldiers” and “farmers” were one and the same. Which is non-negligible when you’re subsistence-farming at the best of times. They couldn’t afford to let wars drag on.

True, an army on the march could live off the land, but it could only really do so for one season per region. Each geographical location generally produced just enough food to feed its inhabitants, with a little margin for growth if that. A surprise ten thousand more blokes to feed was unbearable. Of course, those blokes would kill a whole bunch of locals in passing - but that only reduced the food production even *more ; *and the army would also damage the land, empty the granaries, destroy growing crops and eat up seeding reserves, the whole process caused epidemics…
Even in the 17th-18th century where farming productivity and outputs were leagues ahead of those of Antiquity/Middle Ages, when standing armies became a thing their regiments had to be kept on the move at all times even in peacetime because their very *existence *in one location for any length of time just plain broke the place.

Basically, sustained war was a monstrous calamity. So that’s one incentive to getting it over with.

15

Working my way through this:

Rameses II in the battle of Kadesh, 3300 years ago, had something like modern or Roman troop deployments and tactics. I think what converted the taunting mob like the Iliad into an army in need of discipline was horse and chariot tactics. A standing mob was fairly helpless against horses thundering down on them (or going by fast firing arrows). Plus, the group breaking and charging the other side in a spread-out random wave made them even more vulnerable to horses. Discipline was what was needed to ensure that the whole was protected against cavalry/chariot charges. IIRC the chariot was relatively new in the Middle East around 3500 years ago.

16

What is interesting is that this type of bronze-age chariot army, while very efficient, appears to have died out in places during the Bronze Age “dark ages”.

For example, the Mycenaens appear to have had a chariot army (though most depict them armed with a driver and a warrior holding a long spear, rather than a bow); assuming that the siege of Troy was an actual reference to a real, historic event rather than pure myth, it was most likely a fight between Mycenaens and a Hittite client-state - both of which used chariots as their ‘strike force’.

Some have claimed that, due to the rocky/hilly terrain in Greece, the Mycenaens could not have used chariots in battle, but only (as later Greeks) for ritual/ceremonial use - but the evidence is strongly against this: written records from Mycenaen cities list large numbers of chariots stored in arsenals, and chariot-fighting is depicted in pictures from the time. There would be no use for hundreds of “ceremonial” chariots.

However, by the time that the Iliad was written down - hundreds of years later - even the memory of how to fight with chariots in the approved strike-force manner was lost - the Homeric heroes ride their chariots to the battleplace, dismount - and then fight in taunting groups tossing spears at each other or as individual duelists on foot!

The notion of using the chariot in battle in disciplined formations had, evidently, been lost.

17

Found an interesting discussion of how Mycenaens may have used chariots here:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=r-wI_8kb99IC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=mycenaean+chariot+army&source=bl&ots=CKtJ-JZucD&sig=K_LSAti8qLZu0Obcbh6viA5mF1A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5sVLVajOD4aWyQSmxoGYBw&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=mycenaean%20chariot%20army&f=false

18

Didn’t Alexander the Great face an army of Persian charioteers?

19

Of course “sneak over to the enemy village at night, quietly kill/rape anyone you see, steal things that aren’t nailed down, and sneak away before the village wakes up” has been a pretty common form of “warfare” since before human beings were human beings.

But the problem comes when all the men in the enemy village get their weapons together and march over to your village. What are you gonna do now? Run away and harass them with guerrilla tactics? You could do that, but that means they’re in your base killing your dudes. You can’t run away from your fields and houses and women and animals and stored food and goods and let the enemy villagers do what they like. They’ll burn your fields, burn your houses, rape and/or enslave your women, capture your animals, and carry away or destroy your food and goods.

Well, you’ve run away and suffered no losses, except now you come back and your village is a smoking ruin, and the only sexy times you’re going to have from now on are with the few beardless youths among the warriors.

The cruel and unfair bit is for attackers. The stand up and fight bit is for defenders. And as was mentioned earlier, if you have to fight, if there are 100 guys from your village and 100 guys from their village, if your guys all stay together in a pack, and their guys are all spread out at random, you can attack his guys with local superior numbers, even if they actually have more men.

Concentrating your forces is a time-tested winning strategy. If you double the number of guys you put on a 100 foot battle line, then your guys fight at a two to one advantage. And this is how Roman legions could routinely slaughter barbarian hordes that vastly outnumbered them. The side that sticks together shoulder to shoulder and laughs at danger wins the battle. The guys that are reasonable and run away lose the battle.

And now consider what happens if your side runs away, and the enemy forces have horses. Horses run faster than people. And this means groups of mounted or chariot troops can ride up and slaughter the routing army piecemeal.

And this is where the intense centuries-long emphasis of the bloody-minded “warrior’s code” comes from. Why do warriors laugh at danger? Because running away is dangerous. A warrior always sticks with his buddies, because being alone is suicide. An army where you trust the guy to your left and the guy to your right with your life, knowing they do the same to you, can easily crush and destroy an army where you don’t give a shit about the guys next to you. And of course the warrior’s code with it’s emphasis on personal bravery and disregard of danger means that your buddies have to SEE you being brave and disregarding danger, or it doesn’t count. And so you have elaborate machismo and self-destructive shows of manliness, all to prove what a bad-ass you are.

But what choice do you have? Be a coward? Cowards live to fight another day. Except the side that ran away lost, and their homes and families were now exposed to the mercy of the winning side. Even if you’re still alive, what’s the point if you come home to a burned house, destroyed crops, no food, your wife carried into captivity, and your children impaled on spikes?

What destroyed this way of fighting was accurate artillery, and accurate rifles. Formations of troops could no longer stand together in the open, they’d get blasted apart by cannon fire, or picked to death by accurate rifle fire. By the time of the American civil war this was obvious. But not that until the invention of reliable breech-loaders it was next to impossible to reload a firearm unless you were standing up. The invention of breech-loading rifles using metallic cartridges meant soldiers could reload their rifle while flat on their bellies. And of course machine guns and barbed wire just intensified the problem.

Of course the other big problem is command and control. How do the leaders tell their troops to march over to this spot, and fight here, or run there, or retreat, or fortify? By yelling “Follow me!” and charging is one way. Fighting in formation is a way of effectively controlling your troops. How do you get hundreds or thousand of guys to fight together? A hundred guys who fight together as a group can literally massacre thousands of guys who don’t know how to work together, even if the thousands of guys are individually superior fighters.

The reason guerrilla tactics work against Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam is that they work against the stated purpose of the Americans being there in the first place. If we had invaded Iraq to kill all the men, rape all the women, enslave all the children, burn all the buildings, and take all the oil, guerrilla tactics would have been worthless. But we were trying to set up some sort of allied state there. So we didn’t want to burn down the villages, we wanted happy prosperous allied villages. But what happens when you’ve got a village that’s ostensibly allied, yet a couple guys from the village sneak out at night and shoot at American soldiers? Destroy everything? How’s that going to accomplish your supposed war aims? It’s a lot easier to destroy than to build. And note that while Iraqi guerrillas had quite a bit of success in Iraq, there weren’t very many of them sneaking into America to shoot at Americans over here.

20

Yup.

The idea didn’t die out everywhere (though it was considered mighty antiquated by the time of Alexander - cavalry did everything charioteering did, only better).

Greece, though, definitely went from a place where having chariot armies was the norm, to a place where a chariot was a ‘prestige vehicle’ for purely ceremonial use.

The Romans retained this (generals celebrating a truimph, for example, rode in a chariot - the Roman army didn’t use chariots in battle, though; however, some of their enemies - such as the Britons - did).