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The role that technology plays in warfare and thus in history fascinates me. The longbow ended knights. Gunpowder ended archery. WWI was really defined (technol

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ggm 5y ago
  The Stirrup would be an unknown inexplicable advantage for about one dead mongol horseman's time above ground, followed by the delay to ask a smithy: "make me 20,000 of these" More realistically, however long it took to make something in the field from the leather/rope/cloth to hand, and a willingness to understand it's implications.
  • yywwbbn 5y ago
    But stirrups hd already been available in Europe for hundreds of years prior to the Mongol invasions
• Razengan 5y ago
  Technology in general often overrides and obsoletes existing things.
  • dotancohen 5y ago
    And war has historically been the impetus for much technological investment.
    • Razengan 5y ago
      Food and Sex have been the prime motivators for all most everything, and Murder when someone prevents you from either of those. Only relatively recently has Entertainment become an end in itself when the other three are satiated. :)
      • hbarka 5y ago
        I would hardly think this is what drives Putn and other dictators.
        • hef19898 5y ago
          Power, money and sex are quite often interchangeable manifestations of the very same desire.
        • Razengan 5y ago
          Probably the same things that drove Bush and other democratically elected warmongers.
    • i67vw3 5y ago
      War has brought the human civiaztion where it is today. Without war, we would be in caves.
    • oblio 5y ago
      This feels like a bit of a historical trope. It doesn't even make economic sense. During a war you're not going to invest as much into R&D (especially basic research), industrial production, etc, because you know, you have to... build the things that kill the other people. To me war feels more like the thing that publicizes the things we've discovered since the last war, because the way (pop) history is presented, everything is about: - wars (because they're "interesting", finding out about the slow accretion of inventions that lead to the mass production of iron is less cool) - great people (99% great men)
• smogcutter 5y ago
  Some points that are more or less pedantic nitpicking, but I think are worth calling out because they illustrate the kind of trouble that technological determinism can run into: > The longbow ended knights This is not the case. Sounds like something that comes from a pop account of crecy or agincourt? Gunpowder is closer to the mark, but funnily enough armor kept getting heavier longer than many realize. The full plate harnesses that people generally picture when they think of a “knight in shining armor” are really Renaissance/early modern, well after the Middle Ages. > Gunpowder ended archery Again, ehh… sure, guns eventually obsoleted archery, but it’s more important that gunpowder ended a social system based on local military elites and enabled a period of rapid state consolidation. > The Mongols too had a technology that completely altered warfare and gave them a huge advantage: the humble stirrup Even the article doesn’t really bear this out. The stirrup was far from new, and even before the stirrup both shock and skirmish cavalry got along fine without. Stirrups are cool, no doubt, but far from a secret to the mongols success. Kind of like saying the Polynesians were great sailors because of their boat designs. Like, it helps, but it also really helps to have a culture oriented around sailing. So again, this is really nitpicking, not arguing against your main point. But I think it’s worth pointing out how Jared Diamond-style stories can sound really sensible, but once you get into the details things often turn out to be much more complex and interesting.
  • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    > Stirrups are cool, no doubt, but far from a secret to the mongols success. You don't realize how huge an impact stirrups had to horseriding and by extension, civilization.
    • genghizkhan 5y ago
      Their response was about how it wasn’t the secret to mongol success specifically. The mongols had the double recurved bow and the advantage of a fully nomadic pastoral society in which all adult males were trained to be warriors. That and Genghis Khan’s decimal system is what transformed them into a fearsome conquering machine.
    • qwytw 5y ago
• Lio 5y ago
  I’ve heard it said that the defining technology of World War 1 was barbed wire. That stopped horse based cavalry from advancing and led to entrenched positions. That stalemate lasted until the invention of the tank later in the war.
  • cf141q5325 5y ago
    >barbed wire On the topic i recently watched an interesting documentary on the problems at the battle of the Somme in WW1 https://youtu.be/CbkJS5cLLOQ?list=PLhMDlPcDRBKQuhPC9Ifj2IL8LSIWMTnEb&t=87 https://youtu.be/CbkJS5cLLOQ?list=PLhMDlPcDRBKQuhPC9Ifj2IL8L... ( ~15min segment) A short summary is the British assumption that massive artillery barrage would destroy the German defenses and allow for British troops to walk through easily. Unfortunately they used shrapnel shot which did very little to the defenses and worse, left the barbed wire installations untouched. Advancing troops then got stuck and were mowed down
  • hef19898 5y ago
    On the Western front, and tgat was as much the machine gun, and artillery, as it was field fortifications. WW1 on the Eastern front was very much mobile warfare, including cavalery. Until WW2, for what it's worth.
    • chrisseaton 5y ago
      We used horse cavalry in WW2 in the middle-east as well. At one point British horse cavalry was fighting Vichy French aircraft.
      • hef19898 5y ago
        Horses are great for rough terrain mobility, as are Camels and donkeys. EDIT: People tend to see the Wehrmacht as this fully mechanized beast of an army. Truth is the vast majority of soldiers walked into battle, with animal drawn carriage for their stuff from food to field guns.
      • hassancf 5y ago
• cf141q5325 5y ago
  Fascinating indeed, i am still looking for a book / timeline of dominant military doctrine throughout history. You tend to have years of evolving efficiency of doctrines and technologies till one day a hard counter shows up that changes everything.
• bloak 5y ago
  Julius Caesar refers to foraging in his "Gallic Wars". It wasn't easy because the Gauls would systematically destroy all food supplies in the vicinity of the Roman army ("scorched-earth policy"). I wonder what the local peasants thought about that. Do you think the Gaulish soldiers punished peasants who tried to hide their grain supplies rather than let them be destroyed? Bad times for the working peasant!
  • watwut 5y ago
    Isn't "foraging" just euphemism for "looting"? They were not picking wild berries. They were taking that food from peasants. So yes, peasants were in for bad times.
    • hef19898 5y ago
      It's looting if your enemy does it. And yes, passants, and generally civilians, are always in for bad times during war.
    • bluGill 5y ago
      An army that wants the peasants alive (which is by no means all) can only take so much of the food the area produces in a year, if a previous army had already been through that was probably zero. Of course for Peasants you need to come up with a way to hide most of your food, while having what looks like all your food in what looks like a poorly hidden place where the army can force you to give it up. (good luck)
      • bloak 5y ago
        Also: "Sorry, we've already been pillaged!" (It might work.)
      • watwut 5y ago
        The army that is passing through does not have reason to care about keeping peasants alive. Moreover, soldiers were brutalized enough not to care.
• lordgrenville 5y ago
  On this subject I highly recommend William McNeill's The Pursuit of Power.
• throwawayffffas 5y ago
  I think you are really going to enjoy this blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ It's all about history and it's popular conception from an actual historian.
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    I wonder when acoup is going to reflect on the relationship between Russia's approach to taking Ukraine, and the Mongol long line of advance, transforming into a crescent and finally an encirclement. It certainly looks as if Russia tried to encircle Ukraine. Putin has spoken and written about the legacy of the steppe people to the Russians; it seems to almost be a romantic obsession of his. Unfortunately tanks and trucks are not horses, and the gist of the article is about the dependence of steppe horse armies on large amounts of grassland, and the effect that has on their operations.
    • VHRanger 5y ago
      Russia tried to execute on their normal "Deep Battle" doctrine where they attack from multiple fronts simultaneously and culminate towards the same point. The problem was execution. Military analysts expected exactly that, but Russia failed in operations. See here on March 4th when it started becoming clear the operation was botched [1]: "They [Russia] have also continued conducting operations in southern Ukraine along three diverging axes rather than concentrating on one or attempting mutually supporting efforts. These failures of basic operational art—long a strong suit of the Soviet military and heavily studied at Russian military academies—remain inexplicable as does the Russian military’s failure to gain air superiority or at least to ground the Ukrainian Air Force." [1] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-conflict-update-14 https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-confli...
• newsclues 5y ago
  I find technology of war to be fascinating but the reality of demographics and geography seem to be historically more important, and interesting in the balance. Look at Afghanistan or Ukraine and see how geography trumps even modern tech. Aviation units struggle with mountains and mechanized units struggle with wet ground. Technology doesn’t enable an elderly population to wage war effectively.
  • hutzlibu 5y ago
    "Technology doesn’t enable an elderly population to wage war effectively. " How about drone operators?
    • newsclues 5y ago
      Eyesight, fine motor skills, learning and using technology, sure you can find some old people who can function as drone operators but they won’t be as effective as young people. They won’t be able to ruck into the front lines with a pack of drone equipment to support front line units. They aren’t doing effective manufacturing of drones. Old people can shoot an ak47 but they aren’t effective combat soldiers.
• LordHeini 5y ago
  I think to a large degree technology is overrated. Especially in the long run. The knight was not beaten by gunpowder or longbows but by vast hordes of peasants with halberds. Those peasant hordes showed up because changes in society enabled rulers to field these large armies. In order to conduct in a long lasting war with large armies one needs a society with "backbone". The ability to lose a battle and still win a war is what makes a true great empire. Few ancients could to this, like the Roman empire, the Assyrian empire, the Mayans and so on. Medieval Europe (where the knights ruled) was a largely fragmented bunch of small states, where a lost battle often resulted in a complete defeat. WW1 style trench warfare emerged in the American Civil war and the Crimean war. Neither machine guns nor barbed wire where deployed in mass. Those wars where won by the ones who could hold out for longer. Even WW2 was largely won by infantry and artillery, tanks and aircraft are way overrated. Here are the German numbers for operation Barbarossa: 3.8 million personnel 3,350–3,795 tanks 3,030–3,072 other AFVs 2,770–5,369 aircraft 7,200–23,435 artillery pieces 17,081 mortars 600,000 horses 600,000 vehicles There are a couple orders of magnitude between infantry and tanks. The numbers for the attack on France look similar. That tanks feature so prominently is due to propaganda (since those things look cool). In modern societies, warfare is all about logistics, morale and the ability to take a punch. Even a completely lopsided tech advantage can be negated if you survive the first few attacks. That is one of the reasons why the Mongolians are gone but the Taliban are still there.
  • throw0101a 5y ago
    > Even WW2 was largely won by infantry and artillery, tanks and aircraft are way overrated. You may wish to read Engineers of Victory: The Making of the War Machine That Defeated the Nazis by Paul Kennedy: > Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan. Certainly you need (to use the probably over-used phrase) "boots on the ground". But air supremacy helped a lot in European campaign, as did many other Allied innovations, and the technologists that put those developments into field: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabees_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabees_in_World_War_II