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CrypticFox posted:I mean, neither were the Marian reforms. In both cases, the primary changes were a gradual shift in who was in the army, a reboot of morale (the Roman army was also in shambles when it came to morale in the late 2nd century BC), and a changing relationship between the soldiers and the army/state. I think the comparison is fairly apt. In that case the question shouldn't be "what was the modern Marian reform" but something along the lines of how profoundly more significant the British and Prussian 19th century reforms were than the relatively sedate reforms of the Romans. edit: point being, and with somewhat less snark, that the Marian reforms are frequently held up as a major example of successful and extensive military reform. Maybe the reforms as a rhetorical device in military/milhist circles is blown out of proportion to the reality of how it changed the Roman military. But either way, the broader issue is that if you're looking for major, structural reforms in a modern military the US post-Vietnam isn't even in the top five. It's significant, and if you're writing a history of the US Army it's an important chapter, but the problems and the changes are both blown out into being more significant than they were. The post-Napoleonic reforms of the Prussian military are probably the biggest, most glaring one, but the more gradual changes made by the British Army between 1812 and 1914 also deserve mention. I don't know as much about it specifically (paging Ensign Expendable) but the transformation of the Red Army from the Russian Civil War era revolutionary force to the modern, professional force that was around in 1940 is another one. Hell, probably the changes they made on the fly after getting their asses handed to them in 1941 as well, although I don't know how much of that was actual reform of the structure itself vs. proper execution. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:49 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 00:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:Hell, probably the changes they made on the fly after getting their asses handed to them in 1941 as well, although I don't know how much of that was actual reform of the structure itself vs. proper execution. Actually, I think you'll find it was reducing the amount of proper execution in the Red Army which helped out.
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May 1, 2023 02:58
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The modern equivalent of Marian reforms, if there is one, is probably mechanization.
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May 1, 2023 03:06
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French revolutionary army?
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May 1, 2023 03:11
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Wait what? Is this a common usage among military historians? If so, it speaks to a fascinating and enormous disconnect between military historians and classical historians.
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May 1, 2023 03:23
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Tulip posted:Wait what? Is this a common usage among military historians? If so, it speaks to a fascinating and enormous disconnect between military historians and classical historians. Among actual military historians? Not enough that I can think of any good examples off the top of my head. Among "military historians" of both the online and bookstore/wargamer variety? God yes. I've got a pet theory that the Total War series is to blame, but then they had to have gotten it from somewhere.
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May 1, 2023 04:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:Among actual military historians? Not enough that I can think of any good examples off the top of my head. They get it from 19th/early 20th century historiography. The idea that the Marian reforms were radical, abrupt, top-down changes to the Roman army was taken for granted by influential 19th century scholars like Theodor Mommsen, who built the foundations of modern classical scholarship. In Mommsen's extremely influential three volume history of Rome (published in the 1850s) he stated the Marian reforms were a "complete revolution in the constitution of the Roman army" that "saved the state in a military point of view from destruction" and "involved a complete—although not yet developed—political revolution." (Quotes drawn from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10706/pg10706.html). Like many influential ideas developed by 19th century classical scholars, this picture of the Marian reforms has remained present in popular culture long after scholars revised their views.
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May 1, 2023 04:42
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I think the issue is that amateurs talk about the 'pre reform' and 'post reform' armies, giving the impression that it's a binary switch that occurred over the course of a year or so.
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May 1, 2023 04:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:Among actual military historians? Not enough that I can think of any good examples off the top of my head. Ah ok sure. I'm actually with you on the TW series in particular, though I think I first heard of the "Marian reforms" in Age of Empires 1. Rome TW definitely lodged it in my brain as a far more dramatic thing than it could have been. CrypticFox posted:They get it from 19th/early 20th century historiography. The idea that the Marian reforms were radical, abrupt, top-down changes to the Roman army was taken for granted by influential 19th century scholars like Theodor Mommsen, who built the foundations of modern classical scholarship. In Mommsen's extremely influential three volume history of Rome (published in the 1850s) he stated the Marian reforms were a "complete revolution in the constitution of the Roman army" that "saved the state in a military point of view from destruction" and "involved a complete—although not yet developed—political revolution." (Quotes drawn from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10706/pg10706.html). Like many influential ideas developed by 19th century classical scholars, this picture of the Marian reforms has remained present in popular culture long after scholars revised their views. Its kind of interesting in that I'm not totally unsympathetic to that 19th century historiography. I want to be clear that I think its wrong but I understand how they made the mistake. If you're not in the habit of being skeptical of your sources, I get why you'd just take e.g. Plutarch at his word and not really notice that his descriptions just flat out contradict Caesar. Its a silly mistake for sure and I'm glad that historians have generally moved on from this kind of naivete, but I've also made dumber mistakes.
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May 1, 2023 04:51
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Tulip posted:
There's a great term for this coined by the Italian scholar Mario Liverani - "The Problem of the Uncritical Philologist." Someone who devotes their life to learning to understand and interpret ancient languages from a philological perspective can very easily fall into the trap of focusing only on determining what a text says, not what it actually means. You can spend your whole life arguing over the significance of verb tenses in Plutarch, and that work is critical for understanding ancient texts, but by itself it will not produce a careful work of history. Liverani used this term to criticize people taking Assyrian royal inscriptions at face value, but the same principle applies to people like Mommsen and other 19th century classical scholars. 19th century classical scholars were generally philologists at the core, and that really colored their historiographical methods. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 05:07 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 05:05
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The modern equivalent of Marian reforms, if there is one, is probably mechanization. That would imply that the Marian reforms fundamentally changed the way the Romans fought; when the reforms were more about how the Romans recruited and transitioned from an army of conscript citizens that were nominally raised only in times of war, into a fully professional volunteer force of contract soldiers. The changes to the nuts and bolts of how the legions fought appear to be minimal.
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May 1, 2023 05:27
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MikeC posted:That would imply that the Marian reforms fundamentally changed the way the Romans fought; when the reforms were more about how the Romans recruited and transitioned from an army of conscript citizens that were nominally raised only in times of war, into a fully professional volunteer force of contract soldiers. The changes to the nuts and bolts of how the legions fought appear to be minimal. 
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May 1, 2023 05:37
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I just want to kind of whine that using mechanization as an example is adding a technology dimension to something I thought was more organizational. But who knows . . . maybe it [Marian reforms] was technological?
Rocko Bonaparte fucked around with this message at 07:47 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 06:14
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CrypticFox posted:There's a great term for this coined by the Italian scholar Mario Liverani - "The Problem of the Uncritical Philologist." Someone who devotes their life to learning to understand and interpret ancient languages from a philological perspective can very easily fall into the trap of focusing only on determining what a text says, not what it actually means. You can spend your whole life arguing over the significance of verb tenses in Plutarch, and that work is critical for understanding ancient texts, but by itself it will not produce a careful work of history. Liverani used this term to criticize people taking Assyrian royal inscriptions at face value, but the same principle applies to people like Mommsen and other 19th century classical scholars. 19th century classical scholars were generally philologists at the core, and that really colored their historiographical methods. Absolutely. And some of why this went this way makes perfect sense to me, like for example archaeological data being so much more limited. And just in general academia being less built around peer criticism. And of course academic ideas just being generally less competitive - far fewer people, and far more of them much closer being amateur chroniclers than meaningfully historians. TBH I also tend to think about this in Nietzschean terms, where some people are into history not to understand the past or develop tools for placing oneself in a context, but as raw material for creating feel-good stories and flattery (often self-flattery). It's just a core motivation some people have for studying the past, and while it can create useful history, it very often creates some hot nonsense.
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May 1, 2023 06:16
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Technology and numbers might not count as a Marian-style change. Otherwise I’d say the US Army pre and post Civil War, as the other one is a middling border force and the successor is possibly number one Army in the world.
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May 1, 2023 07:14
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Vahakyla posted:Technology and numbers might not count as a Marian-style change. To be fair that's going to be any army that has just finished fighting a major peer-opponent war and hasn't yet demobilised when everyone else has been doing at most small scale colonial stuff for the last decade or so, because of that 'numbers' thing plus battle experience.
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May 1, 2023 12:30
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The Pepys Reforms (yeah it was more than just him, but he wrote a diary so) started Britain on the road from 'cannot defend own capital' to being the first global superpower - on the thesis that naval dominance was both a precondition and a spur to global Empire - so I think is a contender for the most influential.
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May 1, 2023 12:40
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What is a military reform? a miserable pile of broken clerks!
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May 1, 2023 13:52
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Alchenar posted:The Pepys Reforms (yeah it was more than just him, but he wrote a diary so) started Britain on the road from 'cannot defend own capital' to being the first global superpower - on the thesis that naval dominance was both a precondition and a spur to global Empire - so I think is a contender for the most influential.
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May 1, 2023 14:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:I've got a pet theory that the Total War series is to blame, but then they had to have gotten it from somewhere. I built a new building, so now my army is
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May 1, 2023 15:14
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What about the reforms the PLA went through post-Mao? Paul Kennedy seemed to think they were very substantial and its basically been ongoing for like 40 years now.
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May 1, 2023 17:28
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NYT has an article about a 100-yo former P-47 pilot who suddenly started having terrible nightmares after 70 years of peaceful sleep. I don't love the framing here, they don't really get into the PTSD aspects of it but it's got some great anecdotes:quote:Fighting was furious then on the Italian ground, with the Allies depending on the roaring Thunderbolts overhead near Verona and along the Po River south of Milan. quote:The place, like the surrounding city, would have been thick with unmoored young veterans like himself, and Mr. Wenzel found comfort in their company — “people like me,” he’d say later — without exactly interacting with them. He drank a lot, and he kept to himself. Anyway, he talked about the war and the nightmares stopped. I'd be really surprised if the guy went 70 years with zero PTSD symptoms that suddenly appeared at age 100 - I'd be more likely to believe that this very taciturn man simply didn't mention or ignored symptoms probably his whole life - but that's beside the point. quote:He said that right after the war, even in a downtown bar filled with other soldiers, it was unbecoming to seem to seek attention. “Nobody asked me about it,” he said. “I didn’t bring it up.” Is World War II getting smaller and smaller? In terms of first-hand witnesses, obviously, but in terms of popular history and scholarship, it's still the #1 war in the minds of most people, I'd say.
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May 1, 2023 17:47
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zoux posted:
I'm not a psychologist, and certainly not an expert in PTSD, but anecdotally I've heard from people who work with Holocaust survivors that a lot of barriers started breaking down once they got into their 80s and 90s. Lots more willingness to talk about some subjects that were taboo among even the survivor community - inmate on inmate violence for example, inmate on inmate sexual assault in the camps, as well as consenting homosexual relationships between people who otherwise identified as hetero. Age sometimes does something to both people's willingness to talk about traumatic poo poo from their youth and also their ability to repress it at all. Anecdotally my grandfather was a loving wreck after the war. He tried to choke my grandma out one night because he thought she was a Japanese soldier in his trench, and the family kept a broom stick under his bed for about a decade because if there was thunder at night he'd crawl under the bed and snuggle up to it like it was a rifle. By the time you get to the 60s he was mostly OK. My dad and uncles recall him having occasional nightmares, but grandma wasn't dodging getting throttled in her sleep and he could handle thunderstorms. Late in life it started coming back, along with a willingness to talk about it. He never said gently caress all about the war beyond a couple of humorous anecdotes (all well away from the front) and the usual platitudes and broad descriptions if you asked him directly. Then one day, out of nowhere, I was visiting their house and he joins me on the porch and just starts talking about it. Literally the only time I ever heard him talk about it in detail, and some of the stuff he talked about were stories his own sons hadn't heard. This would have been about a year before he died, in his late 80s. This stuff runs both ways, incidentally. The only reason we know about the poo poo with him choking grandma right after the war was a phone call I had with her about a year after his funeral. She never mentioned it to any of the kids, everyone was kind of blown away when I told them after she died.
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May 1, 2023 18:48
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How were Southeast Asian militaries organized in the early modern period? Was it all levies?
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May 1, 2023 19:11
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Raenir Salazar posted:What about the reforms the PLA went through post-Mao? Paul Kennedy seemed to think they were very substantial and its basically been ongoing for like 40 years now. The core answer to this is "we don't know." The post-Mao PLA has not engaged in any substantial combat. It has taken several substantial deviations not just from its previous form, but also from basically any other global military, notably in its submarine and missile tech, tools that the PRC understandably has a strong interest in keeping very secret (which also means that if e.g the US does have a good sense of what those capabilities are, they have a vested interest in playing that close to their hands). It is basically untested. It could be amazing, it could be dreadful, most people say one or the other based on whats politically convenient for them. I do know that Xi Jingping frequently expresses dissatisfaction with the PLA, especially its officer corps and deployment speed/organization. Alchenar posted:The Pepys Reforms (yeah it was more than just him, but he wrote a diary so) started Britain on the road from 'cannot defend own capital' to being the first global superpower - on the thesis that naval dominance was both a precondition and a spur to global Empire - so I think is a contender for the most influential. Well this gets to a little bit of where there's fuzziness about "what is a reform" (as other posters have already joked about). Mostly the question being "at what point does it become too broad to be a reform." The European Military Revolution of the early modern era is dramatic as hell, but it takes place over like 100+ years, spread across many countries, and cannot at all reasonably be talked about as the work of any one single reformer. Similar points could be made about the military changes during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, and for that matter I'd frankly buy that the changes to European armies between about 400CE and 700CE, where the focus goes from state-directed large bodies of professional soldiers to personal-directed small bodies of elite warriors is also a dramatically impactful set of changes and reforms that very much cannot be attributed to any particular person setting out to "fix a problem" or something along those lines. I guess my point is that I'm not sure where we'd draw the boundaries of a reform. Does it need to have a deliberate, stated intention? Does it need to take place in one military? What is the time window at which it stops being "a" reform and becomes a "series" of reforms? Is that time window just one number or is it relative to the context of what's going on around it (by which I mean, we don't tend to think of all of the changes that happened to militaries between 1900 and 2000 as one thing, we talk about changes that lead to WW1 type militaries, to WW2 type militaries, to the modern system militaries that people in this forum have served in, all as separate series of events, even though that is the same length of time as the original theory of the European Military Revolution).
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May 1, 2023 22:34
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[Ah, Post Mao, never mind, sorry.]
Cessna fucked around with this message at 22:39 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 22:37
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For the purposes of this challenge I would bound it as 'a policy pursued by one or a defined group of people'. So not happening organically or because the neighbours are doing it, but because a group of people sat down in a room somewhere and said 'we want to go from A to B'. That project might be a lifetime's work, but it is recognisably a single project.
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May 1, 2023 22:39
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Tulip posted:
I'll take a stab at this: I would argue that a reform needs to be deliberate, and it needs to take place in a single military. Once you get to the big stuff like "adopting airpower" or "discovering the stirrup" or "modern mobile warfare" you're into technological or doctrinal revolutions that go far beyond a single organization. Reform, to my mind, implies that people recognize a specific deficit and work to repair that. I've mentioned it up thread, but the classic example in my mind is the long, hard look that Prussia took in the mirror following Napoleon handing their collective asses to them in 1806. It's important to note that these reforms were massive and sweeping - almost a revolution without the political leadership turnover that implies - and impacted everything from civil administration to the schools to the military. It was a major rationalization and restructuring of society and is as important in German political history as 1789 is to French. But even just looking narrowly at the military context (and it should be noted that military reforms almost never happen in a vacuum - there's usually civilian stuff happening alongside it) it's massive. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Clausewitz (as well as others, but those are the big 3) worked with the civil administration (in particular vom Stein) to rebuild what was still very much an early modern military into a modern one, complete with one of the first modern general staffs. You also have substantial reforms in the structure of the military, including the abolishment of physical punishment and the introduction of universal conscription and the beginnings of what we can recognize now as the cohort draft system of conscripts that a lot of European militaries still use. These ideas didn't come out of a vacuum, of course, it's a bit much to say that they invented modern military structure, but it's a loving massive gear shift and one that had a very specific, albeit very quietly stated aim: to rebuild their military such that they could take on Napoleon in the field again reassert Prussia's role in the region. It's also one of those cases where you not only see the results quickly - Prussia's military was shockingly effective a few years later compared to the trainwreck that they were in 1806.
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May 1, 2023 22:53
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zoux posted:NYT has an article about a 100-yo former P-47 pilot who suddenly started having terrible nightmares after 70 years of peaceful sleep. I don't love the framing here, they don't really get into the PTSD aspects of it but it's got some great anecdotes: Delayed onset PTSD is a thing. Current thinking is that Delayed onset PSTD is about 25% of all PTSD cases. Usually it's months or years but decades aren't unknown. This guy would be an outlier but still very possible. Doctors and therapists don't know why this happens, but the running popular theory is that people with it are below the threshold of a PTSD diagnosis and then something just kind of pushes them over the edge. As far as the validity of him not having symptoms, they can present differently in different people. He may have had symptoms but they didn't fit the stereotype. So he ignored them. If he was in the kind of mental place where he wouldn't have qualified for a PTSD diagnosis then they may also have been very manageable. Or his avoidance behaviors were strong enough to overcome it.
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May 1, 2023 23:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:"discovering the stirrup" Lynn White's hypothesis can not die fast enough.
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May 1, 2023 23:41
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Cessna posted:Lynn White's hypothesis can not die fast enough. What hypothesis?
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May 1, 2023 23:50
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Quackles posted:What hypothesis? "The invention of stirrups led to feudalism."
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May 1, 2023 23:52
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I was just talking about heavy cav.
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May 1, 2023 23:57
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Isn't it the other way around? Discovering feudalism gives you a tech boost for stirrups.
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May 1, 2023 23:58
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Thomamelas posted:Delayed onset PTSD is a thing. Current thinking is that Delayed onset PSTD is about 25% of all PTSD cases. Usually it's months or years but decades aren't unknown. This guy would be an outlier but still very possible. Doctors and therapists don't know why this happens, but the running popular theory is that people with it are below the threshold of a PTSD diagnosis and then something just kind of pushes them over the edge. As far as the validity of him not having symptoms, they can present differently in different people. He may have had symptoms but they didn't fit the stereotype. So he ignored them. If he was in the kind of mental place where he wouldn't have qualified for a PTSD diagnosis then they may also have been very manageable. Or his avoidance behaviors were strong enough to overcome it. This reminds me a bit of my dad, who had a minor history of strokes. As I understand it, when you heal from a stroke, part of what's going on is that your brain learns to compensate for the injury. That compensation can break down later due to other stresses. For example, when my dad got an infection, one of the ways it manifested was the symptoms of the stroke returning. I want to make it clear that I am not in any way a doctor, nor do I know the medical history of the person we're talking about. I'm just saying that it's plausible, to me, that someone could suffer PTSD but not have the symptoms manifest in a recognizable way, to anyone including the patient, until much later in life.
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May 2, 2023 00:21
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Ah, so that author decided to stirrup some trouble.
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May 2, 2023 00:25
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You could argue that the reforms the Qing army made after the second opium war were dramatic and sweeping. Within 20 years they went from a disorganized banner system composing of horse archers, melee troops and matchlock teams, to something capable of facing european troops in serious battle. France badly underestimated them in their war over vietnam, and were only saved by their navy, and the fact that Japan was causing trouble in Korea. On the ground the Qing Dynasty was winning. Of course it all fell apart again soon after. Japan went through massive (and more successful) reforms at the same time, by the 1890s they were out there colonizing stuff with the same group of nations that had impugned on their sovereignty a few decades earlier.
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May 2, 2023 01:10
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Yeah, while scrolling down I thought about the Japanese military plans, although at that point the gap was big enough that it might be more of a 'Okay, gently caress it, we're gonna put together the parts from other people's systems that look cool and then go from there.' I'm not sure about much of their pre-WW2 army doctrine.
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May 2, 2023 01:19
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Quackles posted:Ah, so that author decided to stirrup some trouble. Someone run this guy through with a lance.
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May 2, 2023 01:52
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Nessus posted:Yeah, while scrolling down I thought about the Japanese military plans, although at that point the gap was big enough that it might be more of a 'Okay, gently caress it, we're gonna put together the parts from other people's systems that look cool and then go from there.' I'm not sure about much of their pre-WW2 army doctrine. They put together parts so thoroughly they even adopted the foods those militaries ate.
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May 2, 2023 01:53
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