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On the formation thing I recently read about cavalry charges with a bunch of quotes from a cavalry officer writing about charges. Might have been here or a book or somewhere else but the jist was formation is so important that you'd rather "charge" at walking pace than lose your formation. Which was eye opening for me.
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Mar 8, 2024 23:54
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:On the formation thing I recently read about cavalry charges with a bunch of quotes from a cavalry officer writing about charges. Yeah. You move faster at the very end, to close the distance, but the goal is to get a bunch of your guys to hit the enemy at the same time. If everyone starts running when you're 300+ yards away or whatever it's going to be totally disorganized because people (or animals) generally move at different speeds. Also this might sound silly, but it can also be catastrophic if one guy (or horse) trips and falls while everyone is running. You'd end up with a huge pileup of people falling and tripping over each other. To top it off, fighting is tough physical activity. You're not going to put your troops/horses at a disadvantage by making them sprint 300 yards before they even start fighting. The completely unorganized "charge across the field screaming" thing is exciting and looks good for movies though.
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Mar 9, 2024 00:05
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Yeah. You move faster at the very end, to close the distance, but the goal is to get a bunch of your guys to hit the enemy at the same time. If everyone starts running when you're 300+ yards away or whatever it's going to be totally disorganized because people (or animals) generally move at different speeds. Also this might sound silly, but it can also be catastrophic if one guy (or horse) trips and falls while everyone is running. You'd end up with a huge pileup of people falling and tripping over each other. To top it off, fighting is tough physical activity. You're not going to put your troops/horses at a disadvantage by making them sprint 300 yards before they even start fighting. I might be remembering the finer details wrong but I believe they were saying that in some engagements you wouldn't speed up even for the final push unless you were sure you could keep formation. I believe it was cav Vs cav engagements which might be different than into infantry. Damnit I'm going to have to find it now. I'm not a cav guy but I found it really interesting.
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Mar 9, 2024 00:17
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PittTheElder posted:I was gonna say, Shad has always given me the creeps for reasons I cannot identify. Shad may or may not be a Groyper, but he's has definitely not turned out to be a *secret* chud. He's got a whole political channel where he rants about things like how it's religious discrimination that he gets pushback when using incorrect pronouns for people, and about how Princess Peach wearing pants in the movie (the same motorcycle gear as one of the games) is part of the decline of western civilization. He also published a very rape-heavy fantasy novel and responded really badly to critical reviews of it. I used to like his stuff as popcorn 'here's some ideas to use in D&D games' fluff, but when I read more about some of the historical info he gave it turns out that it's often just wrong or extremely surface-level, so even before the open chudiness I had stopped watching his stuff. I wouldn't rely on anything he says about historical matters - obviously the scabbard in the link is a physical object that behaves like it does, but anything he says about who used what and why is highly suspect.
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Mar 9, 2024 00:25
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zoux posted:Especially blue phalanx vs. blue phalanx. So I'm going to come at this a little bit differently from Grand Fromage, which is to talk about this thing about dueling. The thing about combat duels is that, to my knowledge, it isn't really an alternative to group tactics, its a thing that happens above and around group tactics. I can't think of any military that does lots of 1v1 duels instead of having any sort of tactical system, and the group that I know the most about their history with doing combat duels is, amusingly, the Romans. Specifically during the Republican period we have some fairly consistent if obviously sketchy and less than perfect accounts of battlefield duels, and Soldiers & Ghosts talks quite a bit about the social and political role of dueling gauls and samnites and such. Being a Roman who won a duel with an enemy champion was a way of displaying great virtus and getting an early and substantial kick to building up your reputation and clout. The famous Marcus Valerius Corvus had an early career duel cement his reputation for the rest of his very storied life. And this didn't exist instead of having shield walls and pikes and such, it existed on top of. Lemme talk a little about The Cutting Off Way because I think it illustrates a very different system of warfare that sometimes gets described that way but only very very erroneously. By most reasonable standards not a pre-modern system but by most unreasonable standards it does count as premodern, we're talking about eastern woodlands north america ca 1600 (Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Cherokee, Cree, Tuscarora, etc). Pre contact we don't have any actual literary records, but we do have 1) the patchy and uncertain European transcriptions of oral histories and 2) the more thorough set of European writings about what they saw eastern woodlands groups do in warfare. 2) obvious has some problems but at least we can make some critical evaluations about the sources. Anyway This is a warfare system that had dueling. And generally not very fatal dueling. There are European accounts that describe the warfare system as just kind of random duels that didn't seem to have any decisive effect or lethality. The thing is that dueling wasn't really a major part of the warfare system, it was just the part that some European observers latched onto, because it was a warfare system where pitched battles were very rare and usually not very effective, and that was the thing 17th century European observers were looking for. People who spent more time with native groups, including people who were captured by native groups, were pretty clear that this whole dueling and pitched battles thing was just a face-saving maneuver when the rest of the war system didn't go as planned. The actual tactical system was not designed for battles at all. It flowed from two large elements of how warfare fit into native societies of the region: first, the primary war goal of nearly every war was revenge, typically for an individual death, that did not need be targeted at the specific person who did the killing; second, war leaders had virtually no compulsory power to force people to join in a war, they had to persuade individual warriors to join them. Which means tactics are adapted very strongly to 1) maximize kills and 2) minimize deaths for the war party. So they DO have very elaborate group tactics, but these tactics are all built around offensive ambushes, since the safest way to kill a person is to hit them when they don't see you at all. Another big factor in this is that the way that defensive alliances were structured meant that the defending forces, once alert, had overwhelming numerical superiority over any long-range raiding party, so the structure of a military campaign was to 1) move as quietly as possible, including only eating cold food for several days of the march 2) inflict maximum damage on vulnerable targets 3) get out of the area of operations before a defensive can be mustered. To be clear, this is actually an incredibly lethal combat system, on a per capita per year average. But on a per engagement basis, it's incredibly low lethality. So in order for things like duels and pitched battles to happen, the offensive has to fail to inflict meaningful damage before the defensive is mustered, but not such an overwhelming defense that they just run immediately. Frankly, pretty narrow set of circumstances. Anyway, point is, in the Roman case dueling was a thing on top of the tactical system, in the eastern woodlands it was basically a fail-state that attempted to retain some honor for war leaders in a situation where things had already went off the rails, in neither case are they a replacement for the more general tactical system. Tulip fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 01:38
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia_opima is relevant to the dueling.
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Mar 9, 2024 01:50
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If you can afford a freaking huge sword, you can afford some kind of underling and/or animal to carry it for you until you need it.
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Mar 9, 2024 09:46
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If you squint you can kinda see similar techniques in modern crowd control approaches as might have been used in ancient shield walls. Like doing different formations, moving them, keeping lines straight and formations coherent etc. I did a lot of crowd control drilling during my time in army and it took a lot of practise to be able to do it with just like hundred dudes. And that's just in training scenarios where opfor is just kicking your shields and throwing random poo poo at you and not trying to stab you to death using their own formations.
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Mar 9, 2024 10:01
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Tulip posted:The cutting off way I have to read this; this whole subject is fascinating. The apparently ever relevant Bret Devereaux went into it a little in one of his earlier series: quote:The oldest way of war was what Native North Americans called evocatively the cutting off way of war (a phrase I am borrowing from W. Lee, The Military Revolution of Native North America in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)), but which was common among non-state peoples everywhere in the world for the vast stretch of human history (and one may easily argue much of modern insurgency and terrorism is merely this same toolkit, updated with modern weapons). The goal of such warfare was not to subjugate a population but to drive them off, forcing them to vacate resource-rich land which could then be exploited by your group. To do this, you wanted to inflict maximum damage (casualties inflicted, animals rustled, goods stolen, people captured) at minimum risk, until the lopsided balance of pain you inflicted forced the enemy to simply move away from you to get out of your operational range. I remember reading recently (here??) that it's theorized many foraging societies had truly staggering per capita deaths from human-human violence. Like, 25-50%? It honestly all sounds kind of terrifying.
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Mar 9, 2024 12:12
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Koramei posted:
Has anyone checked War After Civilization (2016)
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Mar 9, 2024 13:33
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quote:A. Gat, War in Human Civilization 
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Mar 9, 2024 14:06
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Koramei posted:I remember reading recently (here??) that it's theorized many foraging societies had truly staggering per capita deaths from human-human violence. Like, 25-50%? There's, unsurprisingly, a lot of debate about numbers since all we can do is estimating from extremely incomplete information. Some of the more documented stuff, like medieval England's murder rates, have been overcounted because of not understanding how crimes were recorded at the time (a lot of counting the same murder multiple times for example). It's well accepted that premodern violence rates were shockingly high compared to what we live with though, plenty of evidence of that. The Night City murder rate would be fairly peaceful for most societies in the past. I've seen the ~25% male deaths from violence stat for foraging societies quite a few times. I dunno what the current thinking is on it. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 17:36
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Grand Fromage posted:I've seen the ~25% male deaths from violence stat for foraging societies quite a few times. I dunno what the current thinking is on it. That's over an entire population, for individuals' entire lives, 25% of them would eventually die of violence, right? That seems reasonable for foraging societies. But also I have no idea how you would go about estimating that, because generally such societies wouldn't keep extensive records.
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Mar 9, 2024 18:30
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Fuschia tude posted:That's over an entire population, for individuals' entire lives, 25% of them would eventually die of violence, right? That seems reasonable for foraging societies. But also I have no idea how you would go about estimating that, because generally such societies wouldn't keep extensive records. Yep. You're right about the records, which is part of the problem. The estimates are mainly from population size (itself an estimate, though we have a decent idea of this) and finding bodies that died from violence, which is of course a very incomplete source. What we can say for sure is a surprisingly large number of remains are found where the guy was murdered, far more than you would expect if violence rates were comparable to today.
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Mar 9, 2024 18:37
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep. You're right about the records, which is part of the problem. The estimates are mainly from population size (itself an estimate, though we have a decent idea of this) and finding bodies that died from violence, which is of course a very incomplete source. What we can say for sure is a surprisingly large number of remains are found where the guy was murdered, far more than you would expect if violence rates were comparable to today. That's what always struck me about Otzi. Someone(s) really wanted him dead, they tracked him all the way into the mountains to get him got.
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Mar 9, 2024 18:47
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Grand Fromage posted:The Night City murder rate would be fairly peaceful for most societies in the past. The Polish developers have some satire failures there, like a murder rate that would be unremarkable for Baltimore or incredibly heavy cars which are actually lighter than popular modern American cars.
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Mar 9, 2024 18:52
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Reading a translation of Gallic Wars and giggling at Caesar's cognomen. Kyle I. Baldy presents: The French Wars.
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Mar 9, 2024 19:06
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Grand Fromage posted:There's, unsurprisingly, a lot of debate about numbers since all we can do is estimating from extremely incomplete information. Some of the more documented stuff, like medieval England's murder rates, have been overcounted because of not understanding how crimes were recorded at the time (a lot of counting the same murder multiple times for example). It's well accepted that premodern violence rates were shockingly high compared to what we live with though, plenty of evidence of that. The Night City murder rate would be fairly peaceful for most societies in the past. I recall reading a paper that went through pre-modern records in Stockholm and worked out the murder rate, and it was roughly comparable to current-day Detroit.
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Mar 9, 2024 19:46
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I recall reading a paper that went through pre-modern records in Stockholm and worked out the murder rate, and it was roughly comparable to current-day Detroit. Seems rather intuitive if you dont leave a witness you are less likely to get caught so you may as well kill your victim. The penalties for theft were rather extreme back in the day and dying from hunger is not a fun way to go. Id be curious if the penalties for theft being reduced helped lower the rate of murder over time.
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Mar 9, 2024 20:27
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep. You're right about the records, which is part of the problem. The estimates are mainly from population size (itself an estimate, though we have a decent idea of this) and finding bodies that died from violence, which is of course a very incomplete source. What we can say for sure is a surprisingly large number of remains are found where the guy was murdered, far more than you would expect if violence rates were comparable to today.
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Mar 9, 2024 21:22
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Nessus posted:What I remember vaguely was something that was using analysis from relatively peaceful PNG hunter-gatherer tribes, and the general format was interviews, where they would ask people about their family members and how they died. And it wasn't that they were always busting out the war drums, but when you talked to a somewhat-older-but-not-ancient woman and she can recall three different relatives who were killed in raids or counter-raids, and this is not that unusual in terms of frequency, you have a staggeringly high rate of violence per capita, even if you have many fewer capitas involved. Which in turn means there are long stretches with no violence whatever. That format is setting up sirens in my head because you are interviewing folks/groups dealing with the effects of being colonized which is insanely distruptive. There were similar issues with the UC system of trying to interview/perform ethnographic studies on tribes in California as a form of salvage ethnography before they were impacted too much.
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Mar 9, 2024 21:55
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Shad loving sucks, and for being such a sword pedant, you'd think he'd know better in a recent controversy in HEMA youtube: For some reason he got into his head that the Darth Maul double-bladed sword was a viable weapon, and made counter-callout videos when people called it dumb.cheetah7071 posted:I read a book once that argued essentially that in the ancient Mediterranean, you had a sliding scale between taxing and conscripting conquered peoples; the Ptolemies went hard on taxation, Rome went hard on conscription, and the rest of the powers were somewhere in between. The rest of the book was an in depth analysis basically saying that when two powers went to war, the one that did more conscription almost always won It's still an expansion of state capacity in both cases, but considering the quality of ancient logistics, any increase in taxation is going to undergo massive attritional losses as it flows from the periphery to the metropole. But it's still money, and money gives immediate power and status. There is a reason why Cleopatra was famous for her parties. Meanwhile if you focus on attrition, you're building up military capabilities in your peripheries, and so you'd drat well hope you have means of ensuring political stability and loyalty towards your metropole.
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Mar 9, 2024 22:47
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sullat posted:That's what always struck me about Otzi. Someone(s) really wanted him dead, they tracked him all the way into the mountains to get him got. What's really weird to me is why he still had his axe with him. It's copper! Metal is valuable! I mean he was killed in the mountains with close range arrow shots, the attackers pulled out the arrow shafts in attempts to recover the heads, but they didn't take his stuff? Not to mention some perfectly good arrows and food on him. Maybe hsi attackers were interrupted by something.
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Mar 9, 2024 22:56
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One of the few books that had so many red flags I couldn't even get past chapter 1. soviet elsa posted:Reading a translation of Gallic Wars and giggling at Caesar's cognomen. This is very good.
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Mar 9, 2024 23:11
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Elden Lord Godfrey posted:What's really weird to me is why he still had his axe with him. It's copper! Metal is valuable! I mean he was killed in the mountains with close range arrow shots, the attackers pulled out the arrow shafts in attempts to recover the heads, but they didn't take his stuff? Not to mention some perfectly good arrows and food on him. Maybe he escaped the attackers and pulled the shafts out himself, if they got to him they might as well have cut the arrows out intact. We also don't know if he was alone, he might have had partners who helped him some way but then couldn't carry him so left him with his belongings to survive? Just hypothesizing here.
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Mar 9, 2024 23:15
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Tulip posted:One of the few books that had so many red flags I couldn't even get past chapter 1. peeps either hate or love that first chapter, never any indifference i was indifferent
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Mar 9, 2024 23:19
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soviet elsa posted:Reading a translation of Gallic Wars and giggling at Caesar's cognomen. (two thousand years later in a Russian palace) court announcer guy: Ladies and gentlemen, Baldy Nicolas the Second! bystander: ....what?
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Mar 9, 2024 23:53
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Tulip posted:One of the few books that had so many red flags I couldn't even get past chapter 1. Mind sharing with those who never read the thing? I love a good takedown.
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Mar 10, 2024 00:06
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Telsa Cola posted:That format is setting up sirens in my head because you are interviewing folks/groups dealing with the effects of being colonized which is insanely distruptive. There were similar issues with the UC system of trying to interview/perform ethnographic studies on tribes in California as a form of salvage ethnography before they were impacted too much.
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Mar 10, 2024 00:09
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Nessus posted:I would tend to agree, although it might be less ridiculous since I think it was in the forbidding parts of PNG which have never really been settled by modernity. (Obviously, they have inhabitants, who arrived there at some point, but you know what I mean) Right but regardless of how far away they are from "modernity" they still are impacted by diseases and various trade goods being brought in. They might not have contact with Europeans or whatever, but their neighbors might (or their neighbors might, etc).
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Mar 10, 2024 00:24
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Tulip posted:One of the few books that had so many red flags I couldn't even get past chapter 1. I know absolutely nothing about that book, I was just making a stupid reaction to the fact that it's a book about violence written by A. Gat. Yes I'm lowbrow.
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Mar 10, 2024 00:35
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he was a major in the idf, too
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Mar 10, 2024 00:36
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Mind sharing with those who never read the thing? I love a good takedown. Fundamentally the intro and first chapter are Azar Gat saying that the best historian is Steven Pinker and the best anthropologist is Napoleon Chagnon and he is going to go hard to the mat to defend their honor. I don't feel like I need to say why going for Steven Pinker as your #1 source for history is a huge red flag, but for those not in the know Napoleon Chagnon may be the single most disgraced anthropologist of the 20th century.
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Mar 10, 2024 00:36
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Tulip posted:Fundamentally the intro and first chapter are Azar Gat saying that the best historian is Steven Pinker and the best anthropologist is Napoleon Chagnon and he is going to go hard to the mat to defend their honor. Not going to make any comment on Chagnon but yeah if you're citing Steven Pinker for anything other than refutation of his bilge your work is poo poo.
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Mar 10, 2024 02:16
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Not going to make any comment on Chagnon but yeah if you're citing Steven Pinker for anything other than refutation of his bilge your work is poo poo. 
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Mar 10, 2024 04:12
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 Look, I think some of the criticism of Diamond, especially this book, is overblown. Having said that, don't loving cite him in what you want to be serious scholarly work, especially not for whatever this is supposed to be. Take five minutes at the library and find something less "babby's introduction to human geography and history".
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Mar 10, 2024 07:45
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Telsa Cola posted:Right but regardless of how far away they are from "modernity" they still are impacted by diseases and various trade goods being brought in. They might not have contact with Europeans or whatever, but their neighbors might (or their neighbors might, etc). Not denying there couldn't be a impact, but if ethnographic interviews in PNG and archaeological evidence in Germany are pointing in the same direction despite both having significant but unrelated questions in their methodology, that's a positive in the "hunter-gather life was very violent per-capita" theory evidence box. Something kills everyone in the end, and Violence being a large % of the causes makes sense, when the others are Disease, Old Age, and Starvation.
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Mar 10, 2024 08:51
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:
I'm not a scholar of anything, but I was always surprised at the vehemency towards Diamond, because I was assigned Ecological Imperialism in college. It's not like a perfect 1-1 or anything, but from what I remember Crosby has a lot of similar arguments at times.
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Mar 10, 2024 10:18
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Not denying there couldn't be a impact, but if ethnographic interviews in PNG and archaeological evidence in Germany are pointing in the same direction despite both having significant but unrelated questions in their methodology, that's a positive in the "hunter-gather life was very violent per-capita" theory evidence box.
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Mar 10, 2024 11:06
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Considering prehistory is littered with the remnants of archaic homo sapiens who became extinct due to climactic shifts, hunter gathering is extremely vulnerable to climactic shifts. Though it is worth noting that most "hunter gatherer" societies that have survived to the pre-modern era are comparatively sophisticated, utilizing complex land management techniques to encourage the growth of gatherable nutrients and game animals. Even towards the neolithic, the peoples around Göbekli Tepe could develop hunter gathering strategies that could support large populations. It's just going to a lower population density than bona fide agriculture.
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Mar 10, 2024 11:37
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