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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 peasant

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

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