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British provisions and supplies were only marginally better than what the French got, although low pay and little opportunity for leave was certainly a contributing factor. However the main reason the French Mutiny happened was because they sustained extreme casualties in the failed Nivelle Offensive after suffering extreme casualties the year before. They didn't desert the army or stop fighting, even when it was clear that the officers had no control over them, they simply refused to advance any further because they had lost faith that French leadership knew what it was doing. When Nivelle was replaced by Petain things mostly went back to normal.
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Aug 3, 2022 23:32
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I don't think conscription is a good word for what the Achaemenid Persian army was. The rank and file sparabara were definitely not the upper crust of society, but they were not nobodies who got a spear shoved in their hand and were told they were marching somewhere either. They were full citizens of Persian society and trained to use weapons from boyhood. Part of being a citizen meant an obligation to perform military service, just like a Greek or Roman citizen would be expected to fight as a hoplite or spend time in the pre-Marian legions. Like the Greeks and Romans, when they weren't fighting they were typically landholding farmers or herders. They were not true professionals, but they got the job done against most opponents they had to face. However, what the sparabara were not good at, being lightly armed and armored (spears, wicker shields, linen armor), is fighting massed formations of heavy infantry like a Greek phalanx, which is why most Greek sources seem to have a low opinion of the Persian military (outside of the Immortals, who were closer to upper crust, professional, full-time soldiers with better arms and armor). The conscription characterization might apply to the non-Persian elements of the army (Egyptians, Parthians, Elamites, Ionian Greeks, etc.) that may have had to been compelled to provide troops more forcefully at times, but generally speaking, the Achaemenid portion of the army was not an inexperienced levy. It was a vast empire that lasted for centuries. Conquest and maintaining control of that empire wasn't built on relying on an army of mostly conscripts.
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Aug 4, 2022 01:38
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In addition to professional soldiers/warrior class as mentioned above, as a soldier in pre-modern times you're walking everywhere and carrying a good portion of your equipment with you. When you're not being a soldier, you're probably involved in some kind of manual labor like farming, herding, or construction/engineering projects. There isn't a ton of need to do extra physical training, you're probably already in pretty good shape. That's not to say they never did any, but soldiers weren't coming from a cushy (relatively speaking) modern lifestyle where they were in danger of getting out of shape when they weren't with the army.
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Aug 15, 2022 00:34
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Kermit The Grog posted:There's so many movies and games about a small squad of special soldiers from all the involved nations being sent behind enemy lines on some secret mission. Did stuff like that ever really happen? Probably not. I'm sure there are exceptions based on circumstance, but generally speaking I wouldn't expect it to happen. It's good for story telling but it doesn't really make sense to combine people who potentially speak different languages, have different training, different protocols, different expectations of working in a team, etc., for a Super Secret Mission. More likely it'd be something like Country 1 sends a team of it's elite guys to do Mission A, Country 2 sends a team of their special forces to do Mission B, and Country 3 has people focused on Mission C, and all missions are part of some larger goal/objective.
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Oct 9, 2022 18:13
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Tomn posted:Eh? Wasn’t Germania essentially a collection of Stone Age tribes with nothing worth taxing, levying, or occupying until centuries later after a long period of trade, raids, and general interaction with the Romans? I don’t think Germania was any more economically and culturally vibrant than Pictland was for most of the Empire. Am I wrong on this? If they weren't worth taxing, levying, or occupying, do you think the Romans would have bothered with them? The Germanic peoples tended to live in small, rural, agricultural settlements, that were largely self sufficient, but they weren't "stone age" people with no civilization or culture. They could work their own metal, created art and poetry, practiced agriculture and herding, traded with central and eastern Europe (typically furs and amber, on the German end), etc. Culturally they have similarities to the Norse. Obviously when we refer to the Norse we're talking about people several centuries later, but the Germanic tribes migrated to the area from Scandinavia. They had similar customs, they elected their chieftains (although eventually the position became hereditary), and their pantheon was the same, or at least analogous to, the Norse pantheon. Jamwad Hilder fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Oct 11, 2022 |
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Oct 11, 2022 23:10
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Tomn posted:All right, fair enough, I was going off vague memories of a Peter Heather book that I last read ages ago. I will suggest however that "Germania" changed quite a bit between Octavian's time and Romulus Augustus. As far as I recall, that was in fact a contributing factor to the Western Empire's decline - there was originally an enormous societal and technological gap between Rome and Germania that allowed them to keep the border pacified with a minimum of force, but by the late empire the Germans had collectively developed sufficiently that the same economy of force was no longer sufficient and was getting harder and harder to pay for and man, as well as Roman weakness allowing more and more Germanic polities to consolidate into larger, more powerful units as opposed to the past when the Romans could afford regular expeditions to cut down anyone getting dangerously large. I'm well aware that the Germans of late Antiquity were pretty close to par with Rome (albeit with smaller populations economies), but weren't the early Germans less so? Again, operating off vague memories of a book last read years ago, so I'm fully willing to acknowledge that I'm mistaken on this. Paying to maintain the legions bordering the Germanic peoples certainly was a financial drain, and a contributing factor to the late empire's decline, but at no point was it cheap or easy to pacify the German border. The Romans had to station a substantial number of legions there from the outset. During the reign of Hadrian, for example, there were five (out of roughly 30 total) garrisoned on the river Rhine alone. As a point of comparison, all of Britain had three. Many other provinces had a single legion. There were an additional 5-6 on the Danube, in what's now Austria and Hungary. These legions bordered Germanic peoples (notably the Macromanni - who fought a series of wars against the Roman empire at it's peak) but I'm not sure we're really talking about this area when we refer to Germania. The point I'm really trying to make is just that the Romans had to devote about a third of the empire's manpower to guard the borders with Germanic tribes. It was a big expenditure. Tomn posted:I'm well aware that the Germans of late Antiquity were pretty close to par with Rome (albeit with smaller populations economies), but weren't the early Germans less so? The early Germans famously annihilated a Roman army so badly that it's arguably Rome's greatest defeat after Cannae. Tomn posted:Isn't that the point of the German border, that they did in fact stop bothering with them? I.E. "We MIGHT theoretically conquer past this point, and it MIGHT theoretically get SOMETHING in taxes, but it isn't really worth the cost and effort of doing so because they're not really developed in a way that allows us to get much in the way of taxes out of them, and most probably not enough to pay for the garrison." This is sort of true but as I mentioned, they had to pay for the garrisons anyway. Germania was not a centralized state, and it was exceptionally difficult for the Romans to occupy on a permanent basis because of that. That does not mean that the Germanic tribes were technologically backwards or lacking culture.
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Oct 12, 2022 03:34
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I imagine that for some people, combat is fun and exciting in the same way that lots of other risk-taking behavior is. Combat sports, contact sports, skydiving, driving cars/motorcycles fast, etc. I think it's also worth noting that, as horrifying as war is, most people who participate in it survive.
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Oct 31, 2022 18:08
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does anyone have any book recommendations for the Russo-Japanese war?
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Nov 3, 2022 02:31
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Sounds like a good one and it's relatively recent (2007 I think I saw). I will check it out - thanks!
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Nov 3, 2022 15:06
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I read this one a few years ago and I remember it being fine. I feel like it's a bit more pop history-ish, and less about the history and more about the narrative he's going for, but it has a lot of interesting anecdotes and a broad view of the conflicts as a whole. I think it'd be appealing to a more casual history buff who doesn't want to read a big dry tome. The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It https://www.amazon.com/First-Total-War-Napoleons-Warfare/dp/0618919813
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Dec 16, 2022 19:07
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samcarsten posted:quick question: I heard soldiers in the American army during WWII would often have armaments that differed from the standard TO&E, primarily from scavenging battlefields and under the table requisitioning. For example, extra BARs per squad and the like. Is this true? Standard issue doesn't mean Required, especially when you're talking about thousands and thousands of people. People think of the army as disciplined and monolithic, and that everyone follow orders all the time, but that's generally not the case and hasn't been in the history of wars and armies. People modify and supplement (within reason) as much as they feel is necessary. Maybe in peacetime someone might reprimand you for not being equipped as you're "supposed" to be, but when you're busy fighting an actual war no one really cares about what boots you're wearing or if you have an extra pistol you picked up along the way.
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Dec 21, 2022 01:38
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"wooden ships" covers thousands of years. Age of sail? Ancient navies? what are you looking for
Jamwad Hilder fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Dec 23, 2022 |
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Dec 23, 2022 20:41
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So did they go back and find their pistol later? Maybe they didn't care which one they picked up later on? Seems like a relatively expensive item to just throw at someone or drop on the ground, especially if you're in a non-professional army that isn't providing you with your weapons.
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Jan 5, 2023 17:57
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I thought a brace of something means a pair. Is there an entirely different definition when we're talking about guns?
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Jan 5, 2023 18:48
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Xiahou Dun posted:I see someone has never asked a group of people how big “a couple” is, where a word you think means “2” actually means “a small, indefinite number” to many people. Yeah I get that, I just didn't know if it was a word they used literally to mean two, or if it was a colloquialism of sorts. I've only ever heard it in context where someone actually meant a pair of things. Like in Cyrano's example actually. Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah, it generally means a pair. It's a kind of archaic term, but you still find it used with guns because of old, matched pairs being a thing. Obviously it's a thing with dueling sets but you'll also find it with more mundane poo poo like boot guns. I've also seen it with pairs that aren't identical pistols but were made or detailed by the same smith. So something like a normal pistol and a smaller boot gun that are both trimmed out the same way and belong together as a set. That makes sense, thanks
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Jan 5, 2023 19:01
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zoux posted:Yeah I never thought of it like that but I guess that's exactly what volley fire is The Japanese may have used matchlocks in the way you were imagining, at least initially. There are some accounts that say that Oda Nobunaga supposedly had his arquebus armed troops organized as either loaders or shooters, with three weapons per shooter. The men who were the best/most accurate shooters would operate the weapons and the others would take turns loading the other guns. Or it may have been that samurai operated the guns (contrary to popular depictions, samurai loving LOVED guns) and their retainers helped load them for them.
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Jan 6, 2023 05:41
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Siivola posted:The Crecy book I listened to earlier made me realize I can't really imagine how things look from a scout’s perspective, because I’ve only looked at battles from above in games and books. Fictional work tends to show scouts as individuals or small groups of men, but these would have been substantial units. Dozens if not hundreds of men, and almost always mounted if possible. Detailed topographical maps aren't a thing until the 1800s, so you'd rely on scouts and local guides to get your army from point A to point B each day. You often hear or read that they're the "eyes" of the army, which is a common analogy for good reason. Is the bridge that's supposed to be ahead still there? Are there settlements your army can buy (or take) supplies from? These are things a pre-modern army needs to know well before they actually get to the location. Fiction also tends to show them as being just ahead of the army, like by a few hundred yards maybe, but in reality they'd be several hours and miles ahead. But not too far ahead. It doesn't do a pre-modern general any good to have scouts three days in front of him who can't report on what's ahead. So generally the scouts are back and camped with the rest of the army at night. In fact, it was probably part of their role to find a suitable camp site for the army. The next day, the scouts would leave several hours before the rest of the army gets moving and do it all over again. In addition, there's the obvious need to pinpoint where the enemy is as best as possible. In pre-industrial times there were limited options for where you can take an army, even a small army. Armies moving by land are generally restricted to major roadways in order to accommodate wagons and draft animals to carry supplies, and both sides know that. Even if your army isn't using draft animals, they're still going to be following the road most of the way because settlements are along roads, and they'll need these settlements in order to feed themselves. So an army defending their territory knows that an invading force will likely only have a handful of potential routes they can go. A defender would want to find out which road the enemy was taking, and the invaders would want to know if the road ahead was defended. Both sides would have sent mounted scouts ahead of the main army to check. It's like a big game of hide and seek. Regardless of your intentions, you want to find the enemy before they find you so you. This is where screening comes in. Basically, your scouts want to kill their scouts whenever possible (metaphorically blinding them) so that you can take advantage of the enemy's lack of information in some way. Don't know if that helps you visualize their role better at all. Jamwad Hilder fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Jan 10, 2023 |
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Jan 10, 2023 22:55
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Yeah it's a good line, but the fact that everyone is fighting in a completely disorganized melee is complete nonsense. Usually if your army is out of formation, it means it's hosed and they're about to get slaughtered. Also Octavian and Mark Antony wouldn't have been with each other at Philippi, but that's obviously changed for dramatic reasons so we can let it slide.
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Jan 12, 2023 15:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:That one from Rome is bad, but they could do it right, too. Most notably the very first shot of the series, the legion fight against the Gauls: That one is good for a fictional portrayal but still wrong because it portrays the Gauls as a bunch of idiots who just charge into the enemy with no understanding of tactics or regard for safety. TV shows and movies love to show barbarian enemies in this way though because the truth isn't as exciting to watch. If you have the Gauls advancing and fighting in formation just like their "civilized" counterpart it's less alien and scary.
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Jan 12, 2023 16:07
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CommonShore posted:t's obviously hocum but seeing it in that context got me reflecting on how late in an engagement of that size that a unit could be able to figure out exactly what they're going to be meeting. With the dust, distance, and chaos, not to mention the difficult flow of information in a battle, those fellows might not know until they're nearly within stabbing distance that they're facing a heavy infantry line with comically long weapons and not a standard hoplite formation or a light infantry line comparable to themselves. Yeah. Both sides would essentially be blind to what the other's formation was. Ancient generalship involves a lot of guessing what your opponent might do, arranging your troops in the way you think is correct, and then hoping for the best. You're not going to be able to react to the enemy formation and change things around by the time the battle starts because in a battle armies generally formed up within like a mile or less of each other. The result is that a lot of ancient and medieval armies used safe/predictable formations. Heavier troops in the center, more lightly armored or more mobile troops towards the wings. I'm not sure how phalangites would be classified. I guess heavy infantry? Regardless, if the whole line is heavy infantry its a problem for a Persian army because, as you mentioned, their style of fighting was totally different. Tulip posted:To be fair even if the lines were in good order there's basically no chance any individual person in a battle that was 100,000-200,0000 total participants has any real clue whats going on. Its one thing with radars and computers and planes and cameras, its another when you're "a guy on a horse" getting hand delivered (more likely spoken) messages via courier. Yeah pretty much. If you're a general in an ancient/medieval battle you set things up ahead of time and then you just see what happens, basically. The Romans were successful in part because lower level officers were trusted and given discretion to make changes in the moment. Jamwad Hilder fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 17:17
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Tulip posted:The other thing I'd put as an asterisk to the first point is that there was a thing a general could do once he saw the opposing formation: withdraw to his camp, aka "refuse." And that was common. In fact in the battle scene I'm reacting to with Mark Antony, that's the Battle of Philippi, where Brutus repeatedly refused Antony's "offer" of battle (the battle was fought Oct 3, the two armies first met sometime in September). The logic for Brutus was actually very simple which was that he gained more from a drawn-out, indecisive campaign than a decisive one, but it was very much a thing in ancient battles for the two sides to line up a mile or so apart and then just kind of stare at each other and then go back to their camps if one commander or the other didn't like it - bad omens, bad weather, unfavorable ground, etc. The alternative was to just assault their camp, which is inevitably going to be fortified and on favorable ground, so this was not preferred. The obvious limiter is that one army or the other is going to run out of supplies, so there's only so many times battle can be refused, and refusing battle can piss off your subordinates or get you removed from command for being a wuss, but it was an option and a common one. Yea I meant that once the offer of battle has been accepted, there's not much tinkering you can do. Generals obviously refused battle due to a variety of factors all the time. Philippi was actually even more complicated than that. The armies met in September, they fought on October 3 but the battle was inconclusive, and they fought again on October 23. This is actually very rare in the ancient world. Like you mentioned, it's very hard to keep armies in place for that long in because generally neither side has the supplies for it, and you can't forage or buy/steal food from the locals forever.
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Jan 12, 2023 17:57
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Sidenote to the artillery question, but parabolic/indirect fire from archers is another thing made up by movies and tv. Outside of a siege situation where you need to shoot over walls you're generally trying to hit your target with direct fire. They'd also be shooting from close range, or at least much closer than movies would have you believe - perhaps 100 meters rather than across a giant field. Ammunition is limited. The length of time you can shoot is limited (by muscle power/fatigue). Contrary to what's shown in a movie, armor and shields are very effective against arrows. You're not going to waste time taking potshots from far away, and by shooting in to the air, because it's not going to hurt anyone.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:54
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Of course shooting over the heads of troops directly in front of you certainly happened. The Hollywood thing where they shoot at like a 50 degree angle into the air is less likely. That's what I'm talking about. There are contemporary depictions of archers using indirect fire, but it's always in the context of a siege. Most art featuring archers in a battlefield setting depicts them shooting directly at their opponents. The English did use indirect/long range fire at Agincourt, but specifically to goad the French knights into attacking and potentially to panic horses. Once the attack began they waited until the French were closer, because at shorter range their shots would be more accurate, have a better chance of penetrating armor, and therefore more lethal. I'm aware that it's a divisive topic among a lot of historians, but in my amateur opinion as someone who practices archery in their spare time I tend to agree that indirect arrow fire doesn't make a ton of sense as a battlefield tactic. A war bow is heavy and requires a lot of strength, shooting it is tiring, and ammunition is limited. It would take discipline, but you would want to use that limited ammunition and physical strength in a manner that maximizes your chance of killing or disabling the enemy. High arcing shots going for the maximum range of your weapon are not that. Direct shots from closer distances are.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:21
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CommonShore posted:The other thing that came out of that series that really boggled my mind was when Tod got Matt Easton out to swing a rondel dagger at one of the steel armor plates they were using for testing arrow penetration and he was reliably able to get 4 inches of dagger through material that otherwise laughs off big swings from swords, arrows, and polearms. That's the rondel working as intended. Armor and weaponry develop in conjunction with each other. Plate is great for shrugging off slashing and cutting attacks and warding off most arrows, so the solution is a weapon specifically designed to reliably penetrate that armor. It was better at penetrating weaker portions of the armor like joints, but as you saw with enough force it can make it through the plate directly.
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Jan 13, 2023 18:22
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CommonShore posted:well yeah, but seeing it in action is different from understanding the intentions in theory. As someone who has spent a long time gaming, too, it runs contrary to the usual assumptions about the interactions between various weapons and armor. In every game I've ever played, a dagger is a shitass weapon that can't hurt anything at all, but then I see Matt Easton send one through maille as if the maille were simply not there, and punch through a steel plate far enough to create a lethal wound. Video games tend to lead to a lot of assumptions about armor that are contrary to reality. Rather than just wearing one type of armor, someone would have worn as many as they could. A cloth base layer with mail over it, then plate over the mail if possible, for example. Cloth armor in particular is portrayed as being a robe or a regular shirt or something. In reality, when we're talking about cloth armor we're referring to layers and layers of cloth on top of each other to make something stronger. That photo up thread of the historian shot by an arrow is wearing a linothorax, which is body armor made entirely out of linen. A gambeson is a later example of cloth armor. This stuff was strong enough to stop arrows, a sword slash, maybe even a thrust, in the right circumstances. You'd want to wear layers (if you can afford to) in order to increase your chances of survival. Leather is another one I think gets misunderstood. I think in a game when you see leather armor you're imagining something as thick or as heavy as, like, motorcycle protective gear. Better than nothing, slightly thick, flexible, but not strong enough to protect you from a serious weapon. In reality most leather armor would have been hardened and moulded into shape until it was thick and inflexible, sometimes its just as heavy as plate armor.
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Jan 13, 2023 19:22
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They look like Luftwaffe badges. The one in the bottom left looks like its this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircrew_Badge_(Nazi) The one in the bottom right looks like it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachutist_Badge_(Nazi_Germany) No idea how rare or interesting they might be. I just typed "Nazi medals" into wikipedia.
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Nov 3, 2023 03:55
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The Japanese definitely had things similar to poleaxes. The word "yari" often gets translated as "spear" but it encompassed a wide array of different pole weapons. You can see in the pics below there are definitely some designed to fill most of the roles of a poleaxe.   They generally did not have a hammer like a poleaxe, but they did have a weapon called the kanabo, which is essentially a big studded baseball bat for when you need to hit someone wearing a lot of armor. In general though I think you're right that they didn't have a widespread need for these weapons because full suits of armor were non-existent in that part of the world. Contrary to what movies and popular depictions might have you believe, full plate armor was extremely expensive and complicated to make, and it's production was essentially controlled by guilds, and as a result it was actually pretty rare. Most people, including people in Europe, would have probably used some combination of cloth, leather, mail, and smaller plates (for specific parts, like a simple cuirass) for protection.
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Nov 21, 2023 22:20
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Imagine the sports game is a campaign, and every goal scored is a battle won. All the "pointless sports poo poo" is the maneuvering and logistics that lead to winning a battle. And shoot outs are uhh. Duels between champions I dunno.
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Nov 22, 2023 21:10
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Sports and military stuff have a lot of overlapping terminology and concepts I think because while we get mostly clean, sanitized, versions nowadays, they all started out a lot different. Modern lacrosse came from a game played by the Iroquois people, who played it as an activity to train warriors and referred to it as "the little brother of War" among other things. And of course sports are still dangerous today too. It's not uncommon to hear athletes referred to as modern gladiators and things like that. Hell, a hockey player died just a few weeks ago in a minor pro game in England when his neck got cut open by a skate.
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Nov 23, 2023 01:38
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My opinion of the Napoleon movie was that it looked very cool but it didn't seem even remotely historically accurate aside from some of the uniforms. And my extent of knowledge of the Napoleonic wars is based on like three books and all of the Sharpe series so I'm far from an expert.
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Nov 27, 2023 04:11
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Semi-related but the the video that comes up a lot, specifically with regards to riot police in comparison to ancient tactics (specifically Roman legion tactics), is this one of South Korean riot police training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4D-HUUTXvQ Almost certainly not exactly right of course, and probably a lot more complicated than anything you'd see on a battlefield, but interesting to think about. You can also see that they don't really "charge" - order and coordination are more important than speed, generally speaking.
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Nov 30, 2023 02:13
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zoux posted:Chainmail would utterly defeat a katana wouldn't it The Japanese used chain mail. It's called kusari and they wore it from some time before the Mongol invasions right through the end of the Edo period
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Dec 9, 2023 01:28
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That makes sense. The samurai, or the warrior nobility that preceded them (so about the time of the Genpei war) were primarily archers, or horse archers if you were very rich. They used other weapons too of course but the idea of the katana being their iconic weapon comes much later.
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Dec 9, 2023 15:30
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The Royal Navy had a whole class of patrol boats called Gay-class so you had a bunch of ships going around called like HMS Gay Viking, HMS Gay Archer, HMS Gay Corsair, HMS Gay Centurion, etc.
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Dec 13, 2023 15:14
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Allied troops did their share of killing prisoners and civilians. Sometimes they got prosecuted for it, and I'm sure there are plenty of times they got away with it too.
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Dec 14, 2023 00:46
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I'm pretty sure some of my relatives on my mom's side of the family probably did some messed up stuff, but I don't have any proof or stories since they've been dead forever. I do know that my maternal great-grandfather ran a mine in North Korea for the Imperial Japanese Army which is...probably not great. On the other hand, my mom's dad was Japanese-American and fought for the US despite the fact his family was interned, so he was cool at least.
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Dec 14, 2023 01:43
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Small cannons on elephants were used in Southeast Asia. Not sure if you'd even really call them cannons though, they were more like a swivel gun. As far as I know they were mostly used against infantry since they were mobile and had more range than muskets, but not as much as real artillery.
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Dec 21, 2023 19:06
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IIRC one of the main reasons elephants were popular, at least in SE Asia, is that you're higher up and can see things a little better. Don't know if that's true.
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Dec 21, 2023 19:33
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Perestroika posted:Also, it shouldn't be forgotten that elephants (particularly African ones) tend to have a much more imposing effect when you're actually seeing them in front of you in person. I remember how even just having one of them walk in my general direction at a leisurely pace activated some primal mammalian neurons that went "nope, too big, get away!". Yeah I'm sure I'd be terrified by an elephant up close and in person, even horses can be scary. Years ago, when I was in college, I was in the streets partying after a basketball game. It was the NCAA tournament and we won a game we weren't supposed to, and some people were taking the opportunity to be destructive. Anyway, we were mostly all just dumb kids but the city PD sent cops to calm things down, and that included horse cops. I understood cavalry as a concept but I didn't really get the "gently caress gently caress gently caress run away now" psychological factor that cavalry probably had until I saw ~20 cops on big loving horses trotting towards us. Everyone loving scattered, cops didn't even hit anyone. Your brain just has a very primal response to seeing that, I guess.
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Dec 22, 2023 00:58
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I think it's mostly conjecture but it tracks. An elephant is a huge investment. In many cases it's more of a prestige thing than a practical combat animal. That doesn't mean they weren't effective when they were used in battle (although they weren't, a lot of the time) but even when they were effective the investment involved far outweighs the benefit they provide. The general argument seems to be if you had invested the same amount of time and money in regular cavalry, or infantry, or something else, it would've been a better use of money than spending it on elephants.
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Dec 22, 2023 01:39
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