5 ms·

This article leaves me with a lot of questions. The article implies the use of armor dropped because it became more expensive to create armor that could resist

• PaulHoule 3y ago
  I've got some interest in Japanese military history and can say the story there was basically the same as in Europe with a long coexistence between firearms and edged weapons that mostly comes to an end when guns got a lot more lethal in the 1800s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_gun and the development of cartridge ammunition.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    Curious fact about Japan, it was united under, if memory serves well, Ibunaga using the, by some accoints, best firearms rquipped army equiped with the best muskets of the time. Only to have forearms basically outlawed once Japan was united under a new Shogun. Edit: Good article so, goes over all the important aspects, including logistics (bonus points for that!), and shows that forearms didn render armor or cavalery obsolete over night.
    • lazide 3y ago
      If you’re on a relatively remote and isolated island, once you’ve seized control, ensuring you have no real challengers by outlawing weapons is pretty doable. If you’ve got long, porous borders and are in the middle of the route everyone uses to pillage it isn’t.
      • PaulHoule 3y ago
        In the Tokugawa period warriors were honored in the abstract but there was very little war. Police were expected to disarm misbehaving, drunk, etc. samurai with a hook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitte Now I can imagine catching a sword with one of those (have a bit of experience with Okinawan weapons and such) but I would not want to do it against anybody who was actually good with a sword (so much in Martial Arts is about knowing what to do ahead of time and doing it with conviction). At the beginning of the Edo period you had some great warriors such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi but by the end Japan was in no shape to stand up to the West.
        • lazide 3y ago
          outside context problem and protected ecosystem in spades.
    • hermitcrab 3y ago
      The fact that a peasant with a musket and 1 weeks training could kill an elite Samurai who had trained all his life, threatened to upset the whole order of society. Hence the outlawing of muskets at the first practical opportunity.
• timerol 3y ago
  > Armor is an occasional expense ... Soldiers are a constant expense I'm not an expert, but it's worth considering that you can't ramp the production of armor in the same way you can ramp conscription. So to have enough armor, you'd need to be buying armor for nobody in times of peace, which is a tough decision, especially if you're living in an era where firearms are improving rapidly.
  • usrusr 3y ago
    And unlike armor, a musket is not made to fit. Even if you tried, you wouldn't have been able to stockpile quality armor for a time of need, outside a privileged warrior class (who did wear armor to battle)
    • hef19898 3y ago
      Most armor throughout history was not tailor made so. It was mix and match.
    • jjk166 3y ago
      This period actually saw the rise of "munition armor" which was meant to be mass produced. This was part of the reason for the transition to 3/4 cuirasses - the arms and legs, in addition to being less vital, are also where a lot of the customization was needed; if you stop armoring them then everything becomes lighter and cheaper.
  • lazide 3y ago
    Also, armor sucks to actually wear. It restricts mobility, wears everyone out faster due to weight, causes issues with heat management in hot climates, etc. Unless there are pretty good odds the risk of getting shot is worth the payoff (and the real costs are therefore worth paying), it’s way easier to just not use it. Ain’t nobody running an obstacle course in good time in Level 4 armor (or plate).
    • hermitcrab 3y ago
      Somebody actually did that experiment: https://digg.com/video/knight-firefighter-soldier-obstacle-course https://digg.com/video/knight-firefighter-soldier-obstacle-c... The plate armour guy was marginally faster than the guy in modern soldier's gear. Plate armour was less cumbersome than most people imagine and the weight is more evenly distributed than a modern soldier (where it is nearly all on their back).
• golergka 3y ago
  > So then, why did the size of armies grow? If a smaller armored force could route a much larger unarmored force in spite of firearms... why didn't more armies stay smaller and armored? Because of societal changes, as governments became more centralised and central authorities (usually monarchs) didn't want to rely on aristocracy, who could easily challenge their power, but preferred the masses, who were easier to control as bureaucratic and propaganda apparatus of the state grew more organised and powerful.
  • Geisterde 3y ago
    An interesting point, I remember hearing of the janissaries, who were slaves, but well trained and equipped; there appear to be instances of those janissaries seizing political power. Relying on a military to maintain power is like a mouse keeping wolves chained up, and using the wolves to control lions. Its far more reliable and economically feasible to control the minds of the populace, as long as you have control over what they see/hear.
    • usrusr 3y ago
      Losing power isn't really an issue as long as those who had it don't lose status. The defining property of situations like the Janissary one is that the group coming into power is exempt from status.
    • golergka 3y ago
      Oh, the Osman Empire had a completely different societal structures which changed greatly over time, including the roles of janissaries. But the function of the janissaries was similar: not part of the nobility, completely uprooted from their family and social circle, they owed all they had to the Sultan, so they helped him safeguard his power from entrenched power sources — at least that's how it worked during some periods. My original comment was more about feudal Europe in territories of modern France, UK, Germany and to some extent Italy and Spain. Even in medieval Moscovy and Poland things were not quite similar.
• GravitasFailure 3y ago
  Much of the time the size of your army was determined by the number of able bodied men that lived on your lands, and they were armed with whatever weapons and gear they brought with them. Feeding and housing them wasn't that much of an expense, either, since armies would often confiscate whatever food they needed from farms and towns along the way (leading to the 3rd amendment of the US Bill of Rights.) It wasn't until standing armies with standardized weapons and gear became more of the norm that a smaller, better equipped army was really even an option, and by that point firearms technology (and artillery) had progressed enough that armor wasn't very useful. Even then, soldiers wearing a cuirass into battle were still a thing up until WWI, so it's not like the practice died overnight.
• ckemere 3y ago
  Is it an axiom of civilization that destruction always costs less than construction?
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Depends on many factors, we're often spending hundreds of thousands or millions on "smart bombs" to blow up structures that probably cost thousands.
    • InitialLastName 3y ago
      Isn't the goal of the "smart bombs" rather to avoid having to blow up hundreds of structures that cost thousands to get at the one (and to get that one really, properly blown up)?
    • chmod600 3y ago
      In a weird sense smart bombs might be considered construction, in much the same way as a carefully-controlled chisel creates a statue rather than destroying a rock. I'm not making a moral equivalence here -- please don't construe my comment to mean that blowing people up is somehow good. But from the perspective of the person dropping the bomb, they are reshaping rather than destroying. If their goal were purely destructive, there are cheaper means available.
  • jameshart 3y ago
    Not sure if it’s an axiom of civilization, but it’s the second law of thermodynamics.
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    The overwhelming net outcome has been construction. Look out your window (or at your computer). We're not living in caves.
    • yen223 3y ago
      It would take a lot less energy to destroy everything we've built, than the energy needed to build them in the first place. It's only by the grace of something that we chose not to destroy everything we see. I hope that remains the case for a long time.
• usrusr 3y ago
  Armor is a one time expense, that's the thing. But more men is a no time expense unless you are at war. This is before the establishment of (modern) standing armies, and the occasional armored units victorious over larger unarmored ones were the closest thing to an exception. The initial decline of the knight was perhaps less about firearms than about pikeman tactics (tercio and all that) with the various revivals of heavy cavalry mentioned, e.g. under Gustavus Adolphus, being merely reactions to shifts in the balance between pike and shot. When it's pike and shot vs pike and shot they will eventually try to outbid each other in focus on shot, until they become vulnerable again to the heavy cavalry charge that had been deemed obsoleted by pike.
• bee_rider 3y ago
  I think it is hard to generalize off of a couple examples like this. It is an iterated game with multiple strengths and weaknesses and also scaling issues. For example, if heavy cavalry can still beat an all-firearms army, the obvious thing to do is mix in some pikes. Pike and shot had a whole era, haha.
  • hermitcrab 3y ago
    There is a game on Steam called 'Pike and shot' by Slitherin. it is quite reminiscent of a tabletop game. Worth a look if you are interested in the era.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      I’ve been interested vaguely in these sort of computer war games (seen too many complaints about the unrealism of total war lately). But co-op against AI’s seem to be very rare in the genre, which is essentially table stakes for me.
• jjk166 3y ago
  > Armor is an occasional expense -- purchased once, repaired infrequently. Soldiers are a constant expense -- they have to be paid, fed, housed, etc. At the end of the article the author notes that armor would actually have to be repaired quite often, and that doing this for large armies was likely impractical. Further, while a small armored force might be able to defeat a larger force in a single battle, there are definitely advantages to having more warm bodies: you can cover wider areas without gaps, you have more manpower to build fortifications, you can rotate people through stressful parts of soldiering, etc. It doesn't necessarily follow that the massive upfront cost is justified, especially if you can get a lot of the benefit by only having a much smaller number of elite units equipped with such armor. Then there are further logistical concerns - soldiers don't just need to survive battles, they need to complete objectives, which means a lot of marching to locations and moving around to deal with situations. While craftsmen of the period were capable of producing bulletproof armor, it was nevertheless getting heavier - not so heavy that you couldn't move around in it, but heavy enough that you might move slower. As per the article, the trend was toward lighter, more maneuverable units armed with a lot of firepower. While heavier units could still win from time to time, that doesn't necessarily mean they were better. > So then, why did the size of armies grow? > If firearms were ineffective against proper armor, why did their use spread? I've always understood that the advent of firearms and their effectiveness led directly to knight's loss of dominance on the battlefield but this article strongly implies otherwise. So if it wasn't the firearms, what was it? Armies weren't growing because of the adoption of firearms, firearms were being adopted because armies were growing. Firearms were relatively cheap (especially compared to the armor required to protect against them), and compared to weapons of similar range and capability they required little training. And if you look at the evolution, it's basically you start with an army of pikemen, then you have an army of pikemen where they strap a gun barrel to their pike to get one shot off at the start of the engagement, then you have pikemen where the pike is a musket and they plug it with a bayonet, and eventually you have socket bayonets that allow the soldier to have a perfectly functional musket and pike at the same time; and at that point we start calling them musket men instead of pike men. Firearms were adopted because they were a cheap and seamless way to boost the effectiveness of a fighting force, not because they were a counter to any particular force on the battlefield. At this point in time political organization had increased to the point where wars were being fought between nation states, and there simply weren't enough people who had been training for their whole lives to be longbowmen or lancers to fill the ranks. Really this a return to form, in more politically organized areas and time periods, such as China or the Roman empire, armies in the hundreds of thousands were not uncommon. Medieval Europe just had a long period where no one could consistently muster a force that could resist a good sized group of knights on horseback. Heavy cavalry were still effective, as demonstrated by the Winged Hussars, but you needed them to scale to appropriate numbers and use them appropriately in the new warfare framework.
• lukan 3y ago
  "If an army in full plate can defeat a force > 2x its size, it would seem economically viable to cut it in half and armor it." You cannot really generalize those things. It depends on the battle site. Heavy cavalry cannot operate everywhere. Not in a city, not in dense forest, nor mountains. And not in heat. In general, armor limits mobility. Also the heavy cavalry is an elite formation, taking years to train the knights and (breed) the special horses. Hard to scale. A simple human infanteryman on the other hand: give him a cheap mass produced rifle, drill him some days and then put him into a formation. That scales easily. Then you can also give him a long lance and drill him some days more and any cavalry charging at a prepared position will be a bloodbath for the horses. And once down, the shiny knight could barely move and was an easy target. But yes, at the right moment, a heavy cavalry charge at cheap musketeers was indeed shocking and routing formations en masse. It takes great discipline holding a line, when thousands amored battle horses charge at you.