5 ms·

If I remember correctly (and I'm still looking for a better source than this[1]), the Duke Of Wellington had requested a corps of longbowmen be made ready for u

by thearn4 11y ago

If I remember correctly (and I'm still looking for a better source than this[1]), the Duke Of Wellington had requested a corps of longbowmen be made ready for use against the French in the Napoleonic wars, but was advised that no one with the skill needed to train them still existed (the training being the most difficult part of the technology). The last use of trained english longbowmen seemed to have been by some of the royalists during the English Civil War, and after the parliamentary victory practical knowledge of longbow archery as a military arm had been lost without anyone really noticing. It's hard for me to imagine a pivotal art or technology being lost like that, but I'm willing to bet its not at all uncommon if we look across history. For another military technology example, the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered. [1] http://everything.explained.today/English_longbow/ http://everything.explained.today/English_longbow/

matwood 11y ago
> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered. That's the premise laid out at the start of the Top Gun movie. That the Top Gun school was created to bring back the art of dogfighting.
- thearn4 11y ago
  As an aside, I have wondered how universally true this was. For instance, did the USAF recognize a similar issue during this period?
  - yborg 11y ago
    USAF kill:loss ratios were as low as near 1:1 initially in Vietnam while Top Gun trained Navy/Marine Corps pilots were achieving 4:1 or better. The F4 was purpose-designed as a missile-launching platform and was initially fielded without any kind of cannon.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Remember they had reorganized to wage nuclear war. Many people thought that conventional fighting was dead, and that the Air Force of the future would be intercepting bombers with nuclear rockets. A conflict like Vietnam was seen as a sideshow from a 1950s point of view, and wasn't really planned for.
    - golergka 11y ago
      So, the generals actually planned for the _next_ war, but ended up fighting the last war again, while the next one never came? Wow, didn't expect the saying to be so wrong.
- rfreytag 11y ago
  I highly recommend _Boyd: The Fighter Pilot that Changed the Art of War_ (http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780316796880 http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780316796880). He was lead instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons School. The previous commentator is right that there was a loss of air combat skill but the advent of jets and missiles lead to a diminished emphasis on Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) and over-emphasis on technology. Boyd was one of the "fighter pilot mafia" that pushed a return to basic combat flight skills and the improved kill ratios proved him and others right. The book details the battles waged inside the Pentagon over ACM, the F-15, the F-16, the OODA Loop, the reformulation of the Marines into the tip of the spear they are today, and maneuver warfare in general. Boyd was in the thick of it all. Interestingly, Gen. Schwarzkopf doesn't come out looking that great. EDIT: added lots more about the book.
ucaetano 11y ago
The "art" or "skill" wasn't lost, just not available promptly in battalion-size units.
cptskippy 11y ago
> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered. The air war in Vietnam was radically different from WWII so I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The art wasn't lost, the state had just changed so radically that it was no longer applicable and new strategies had to be devised. In WWII the dogfighting was typically between interceptor aircraft engaging bomber escorts at high altitude. You won the day by either out maneuvering or out gunning your opponent. At the end of WWII, arguably the best dogfighter in service was the P-51D Mustang which was incredibly fast at the time with a top airspeed of ~430 mph and was equipped with 6x 50 caliber machine guns. It was designed as a high altitude bomber escort and was one of the fastest and most maneuverable aircraft of the time with a high offensive yield. In Vietnam with the introduction of long range air-to-air missiles and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), close air-to-air combat was thought to be a thing of the past by the US. Tactics had shifted from bombers escorted by fighters to extremely high altitude bombers which hoped to avoid missiles by sheer range, and close ground support aircraft like the A-1 Skyraider and A-6e Intruder which utilized low altitudes, slow air speeds, and high maneuverability to avoid being engaged by SAMs. Fighter aircraft like the F-4 would provide theater support and engage enemies at range using air-to-air missiles. These tactics were designed around engaging the Soviet Union or other Super Powers, the Vietnamese however were utilizing Mig-17s, which still prescribed to the WWII method of air engagement, and was a natural evolution of the WWII fighter being fast, maneuverable, and heavily armed for air-to-air combat. What you ended up with were a bunch of aircraft ill suited for engaging one another. The A-1 and A-6 could fly incredibly low and slow in comparison to the Mig-17 and with much greater maneuverability at low speeds making it difficult for the Mig-17 to engage them with missles. The Mig-17 would have to perform slicing runs with machine guns which made it vulnerable to those aircraft coming and going. The Mig-17 could easily outpace them however making it difficult for either US aircraft to act offensively. The F-4 could offensively engage the Mig-17 at range and could easily out run it if necessary but the F-4 was far less maneuverable and lacked on-board machine guns making it ill suited for a close range dogfight. The gun pod on an F-4 was initially hampered by the fact that it couldn't operate at low speeds because it was air turbine driven and also lacked lead sighting so the gun was inaccurate at high speeds. F-4 pilots used a spray-and-pray approach if engaging a target in close air combat. The F-4 though was not an easy target for the Mig-17 because it was equipped with electronic counter measures and raw engine power that dwarfed the Mig. In the end completely new tactics had to be devised and lots of lessons were learned from the mistakes in Vietnam but there really wasn't a losing and rediscovering of an art.
gregjwild 11y ago
Not the only example of this: Towards the end of the Vietnam war, the US had developed a fairly comprehensive counter-insurgency (COIN) program. By Iraq 2, they were pretty much only equipped for state on state warfare again and had to relearn COIN - and were actually doing an okay job by 2008. Ironically, given the withdrawal from Iraq, they're probably going to have to relearn it again the next time they're forced to put boots on the ground. It happens quite regularly. Military forces have to adapt to the problem of the day.
Spooky23 11y ago
Who paid for the training? Rememeber that you didn't have national armies in those days. If the sponsors of the training became unwilling or unable to fund it, it would just go away. Lots of modern examples exist. We build unneeded submarines specifically to maintain production capability for some advanced welding techniques.
- crpatino 11y ago
  No one, that's the beauty of it. Commoners trained themselves, in times of war, sample bias of the soldiers returning home loaded with treasure was incentive enough to put a generation of kids to practices for hours. In times of peace, the nobility subtly encouraged their people to participate by the way of organizing archery contests with prizes. It was very popular, in a sort of proto sport way. I read once that an early version of football was banned by the English crown because it distracted the peasants from their archery practice.
- pklausler 11y ago
  The paper mentions laws banning leisure activities that weren't longbow practice. Worth reading.
jernfrost 11y ago
Actually one of the points made in the book Guns, Germs and Steel is that technology and inventions aren't developed because there is a need for them. Rather inventions pop up and disappear all the time through history in different cultures. But what makes the technology stay around is that it ends up getting used. E.g. South America did invent wheels, but since there was no ox or horse to pull the invention had not real practical application beyond toys and never got developed. So according to this view I guess technology is always in danger of disappearing if it isn't being used. E.g. the Apollo moon rocket can't be build anymore because the engineers, companies and machines needed to build all the parts and assembly it are no longer around. One would have to recreate a 1960s American industrial base to do it.
- douche 11y ago
  I still find that a little mind-boggling, that in, say, pre-Colombian Mexico, they had wheeled children's toys, and nobody thought to scale that up and build a wheelbarrow or a two-wheel dogcart. I mean, they must have been using rollers on some level to maneuver the massive pieces of stone that they used in construction.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  Surely Llamas could have pulled some cargo. This says that an adult llama can pull cart loads of up to 200lbs: http://workingllamas.com/?id=93 http://workingllamas.com/?id=93 That's significantly less than a draft horse, but probably roughly the same as a pony.
  - cwp 11y ago
    Actually, the issue there is terrain. Llamas are very agile and can carry loads to areas that neither horses nor carts can reach. Smaller loads, of course, but still much more than a person can carry. Even today, horses aren't really a thing in the Andes, compared to say, Patagonia.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  The Saturn V's F1 engine was just 3D scanned and reverse engineered by NASA and is the base for the new F1b engine coming online in the next year or so to power the new Space Launch System series or rockets.
peckrob 11y ago
> It's hard for me to imagine a pivotal art or technology being lost like that, but I'm willing to bet its not at all uncommon if we look across history. This has happened quite a bit throughout history, actually. Complete social collapse, as has happened many times throughout history, can have a really bad effect on technological innovation. Focusing specifically on the Roman empire (because that's what I'm more familiar with), here are three off the top of my head: * The various methods to making various different kinds of concrete have been lost and rediscovered several times [0]. Early concrete-like materials were used as far back as 6500BC by the Nabataeans. In both Roman and Egyptian times it was re-discovered that adding volcanic ash to the mix allowed it to set underwater. The Roman methods for making concrete were lost again following the collapse of the Western empire and were not rediscovered in Europe until the 1400s. * Roman roads were extremely well engineered [1], to the point that some are still around today. While this wasn't "lost" per se (we could always go dig up a Roman road and see how it was made), the Roman road system in Europe deteriorated because of lack of resources and skills to maintain them. [2] * The Romans made extensive use of plumbing [3], but much of that was again lost in Europe after the fall of the Western empire. The Roman Empire had indoor plumbing, meaning a system of aqueducts and pipes that terminated in homes (at least of wealthy people) and at public wells and fountains for people to use. [4] Lead pipe was used (okay, so maybe that part wasn't so great), and there were sewer systems [5]. Even the word "plumbing" derives from the Latin word plumbum for lead. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, plumbing development virtually ceased for centuries except for isolated cases of plumbing installed in palaces and castles. These three things are so integral to the modern world we probably don't even think about them much, just assume they were always there. But not too long ago (at least on the scale of human civilization), they weren't. TL;DR the Romans were awesome engineers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads#Construction_and_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads#Construction_and_e... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_road_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_road_transport [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sanitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sa... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_water#Pipe_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_water#Pipe_materials

by thearn4 11y ago

matwood 11y ago

> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered. That's the premise laid out at the start of the Top Gun movie. That the Top Gun school was created to bring back the art of dogfighting.

thearn4 11y ago
As an aside, I have wondered how universally true this was. For instance, did the USAF recognize a similar issue during this period?
- yborg 11y ago
  USAF kill:loss ratios were as low as near 1:1 initially in Vietnam while Top Gun trained Navy/Marine Corps pilots were achieving 4:1 or better. The F4 was purpose-designed as a missile-launching platform and was initially fielded without any kind of cannon.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Remember they had reorganized to wage nuclear war. Many people thought that conventional fighting was dead, and that the Air Force of the future would be intercepting bombers with nuclear rockets. A conflict like Vietnam was seen as a sideshow from a 1950s point of view, and wasn't really planned for.
  - golergka 11y ago
    So, the generals actually planned for the _next_ war, but ended up fighting the last war again, while the next one never came? Wow, didn't expect the saying to be so wrong.
rfreytag 11y ago
I highly recommend _Boyd: The Fighter Pilot that Changed the Art of War_ (http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780316796880 http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780316796880). He was lead instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons School. The previous commentator is right that there was a loss of air combat skill but the advent of jets and missiles lead to a diminished emphasis on Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) and over-emphasis on technology. Boyd was one of the "fighter pilot mafia" that pushed a return to basic combat flight skills and the improved kill ratios proved him and others right. The book details the battles waged inside the Pentagon over ACM, the F-15, the F-16, the OODA Loop, the reformulation of the Marines into the tip of the spear they are today, and maneuver warfare in general. Boyd was in the thick of it all. Interestingly, Gen. Schwarzkopf doesn't come out looking that great. EDIT: added lots more about the book.

ucaetano 11y ago

The "art" or "skill" wasn't lost, just not available promptly in battalion-size units.

cptskippy 11y ago

> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered. The air war in Vietnam was radically different from WWII so I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The art wasn't lost, the state had just changed so radically that it was no longer applicable and new strategies had to be devised. In WWII the dogfighting was typically between interceptor aircraft engaging bomber escorts at high altitude. You won the day by either out maneuvering or out gunning your opponent. At the end of WWII, arguably the best dogfighter in service was the P-51D Mustang which was incredibly fast at the time with a top airspeed of ~430 mph and was equipped with 6x 50 caliber machine guns. It was designed as a high altitude bomber escort and was one of the fastest and most maneuverable aircraft of the time with a high offensive yield. In Vietnam with the introduction of long range air-to-air missiles and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), close air-to-air combat was thought to be a thing of the past by the US. Tactics had shifted from bombers escorted by fighters to extremely high altitude bombers which hoped to avoid missiles by sheer range, and close ground support aircraft like the A-1 Skyraider and A-6e Intruder which utilized low altitudes, slow air speeds, and high maneuverability to avoid being engaged by SAMs. Fighter aircraft like the F-4 would provide theater support and engage enemies at range using air-to-air missiles. These tactics were designed around engaging the Soviet Union or other Super Powers, the Vietnamese however were utilizing Mig-17s, which still prescribed to the WWII method of air engagement, and was a natural evolution of the WWII fighter being fast, maneuverable, and heavily armed for air-to-air combat. What you ended up with were a bunch of aircraft ill suited for engaging one another. The A-1 and A-6 could fly incredibly low and slow in comparison to the Mig-17 and with much greater maneuverability at low speeds making it difficult for the Mig-17 to engage them with missles. The Mig-17 would have to perform slicing runs with machine guns which made it vulnerable to those aircraft coming and going. The Mig-17 could easily outpace them however making it difficult for either US aircraft to act offensively. The F-4 could offensively engage the Mig-17 at range and could easily out run it if necessary but the F-4 was far less maneuverable and lacked on-board machine guns making it ill suited for a close range dogfight. The gun pod on an F-4 was initially hampered by the fact that it couldn't operate at low speeds because it was air turbine driven and also lacked lead sighting so the gun was inaccurate at high speeds. F-4 pilots used a spray-and-pray approach if engaging a target in close air combat. The F-4 though was not an easy target for the Mig-17 because it was equipped with electronic counter measures and raw engine power that dwarfed the Mig. In the end completely new tactics had to be devised and lots of lessons were learned from the mistakes in Vietnam but there really wasn't a losing and rediscovering of an art.

gregjwild 11y ago

Not the only example of this: Towards the end of the Vietnam war, the US had developed a fairly comprehensive counter-insurgency (COIN) program. By Iraq 2, they were pretty much only equipped for state on state warfare again and had to relearn COIN - and were actually doing an okay job by 2008. Ironically, given the withdrawal from Iraq, they're probably going to have to relearn it again the next time they're forced to put boots on the ground. It happens quite regularly. Military forces have to adapt to the problem of the day.

Spooky23 11y ago

Who paid for the training? Rememeber that you didn't have national armies in those days. If the sponsors of the training became unwilling or unable to fund it, it would just go away. Lots of modern examples exist. We build unneeded submarines specifically to maintain production capability for some advanced welding techniques.

crpatino 11y ago
No one, that's the beauty of it. Commoners trained themselves, in times of war, sample bias of the soldiers returning home loaded with treasure was incentive enough to put a generation of kids to practices for hours. In times of peace, the nobility subtly encouraged their people to participate by the way of organizing archery contests with prizes. It was very popular, in a sort of proto sport way. I read once that an early version of football was banned by the English crown because it distracted the peasants from their archery practice.
pklausler 11y ago
The paper mentions laws banning leisure activities that weren't longbow practice. Worth reading.

jernfrost 11y ago

Actually one of the points made in the book Guns, Germs and Steel is that technology and inventions aren't developed because there is a need for them. Rather inventions pop up and disappear all the time through history in different cultures. But what makes the technology stay around is that it ends up getting used. E.g. South America did invent wheels, but since there was no ox or horse to pull the invention had not real practical application beyond toys and never got developed. So according to this view I guess technology is always in danger of disappearing if it isn't being used. E.g. the Apollo moon rocket can't be build anymore because the engineers, companies and machines needed to build all the parts and assembly it are no longer around. One would have to recreate a 1960s American industrial base to do it.

douche 11y ago
I still find that a little mind-boggling, that in, say, pre-Colombian Mexico, they had wheeled children's toys, and nobody thought to scale that up and build a wheelbarrow or a two-wheel dogcart. I mean, they must have been using rollers on some level to maneuver the massive pieces of stone that they used in construction.
merpnderp 11y ago
Surely Llamas could have pulled some cargo. This says that an adult llama can pull cart loads of up to 200lbs: http://workingllamas.com/?id=93 http://workingllamas.com/?id=93 That's significantly less than a draft horse, but probably roughly the same as a pony.
- cwp 11y ago
  Actually, the issue there is terrain. Llamas are very agile and can carry loads to areas that neither horses nor carts can reach. Smaller loads, of course, but still much more than a person can carry. Even today, horses aren't really a thing in the Andes, compared to say, Patagonia.
merpnderp 11y ago
The Saturn V's F1 engine was just 3D scanned and reverse engineered by NASA and is the base for the new F1b engine coming online in the next year or so to power the new Space Launch System series or rockets.

peckrob 11y ago

> It's hard for me to imagine a pivotal art or technology being lost like that, but I'm willing to bet its not at all uncommon if we look across history. This has happened quite a bit throughout history, actually. Complete social collapse, as has happened many times throughout history, can have a really bad effect on technological innovation. Focusing specifically on the Roman empire (because that's what I'm more familiar with), here are three off the top of my head: * The various methods to making various different kinds of concrete have been lost and rediscovered several times [0]. Early concrete-like materials were used as far back as 6500BC by the Nabataeans. In both Roman and Egyptian times it was re-discovered that adding volcanic ash to the mix allowed it to set underwater. The Roman methods for making concrete were lost again following the collapse of the Western empire and were not rediscovered in Europe until the 1400s. * Roman roads were extremely well engineered [1], to the point that some are still around today. While this wasn't "lost" per se (we could always go dig up a Roman road and see how it was made), the Roman road system in Europe deteriorated because of lack of resources and skills to maintain them. [2] * The Romans made extensive use of plumbing [3], but much of that was again lost in Europe after the fall of the Western empire. The Roman Empire had indoor plumbing, meaning a system of aqueducts and pipes that terminated in homes (at least of wealthy people) and at public wells and fountains for people to use. [4] Lead pipe was used (okay, so maybe that part wasn't so great), and there were sewer systems [5]. Even the word "plumbing" derives from the Latin word plumbum for lead. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, plumbing development virtually ceased for centuries except for isolated cases of plumbing installed in palaces and castles. These three things are so integral to the modern world we probably don't even think about them much, just assume they were always there. But not too long ago (at least on the scale of human civilization), they weren't. TL;DR the Romans were awesome engineers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads#Construction_and_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads#Construction_and_e... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_road_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_road_transport [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sanitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sa... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_water#Pipe_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_water#Pipe_materials