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What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrow
by jjk166 1y ago
What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting.
For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.
- sandworm101 1y ago>> I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.
- detourdog 1y agoThis was a nice write and it would be nice to hear about the advantages of the long bow.
- gota 1y agoFrom the same author: https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-some-armor-myths/ https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-s... https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-and-kiting/ https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a... If you're not yet aware of it (unlikely as it made it 'big' in the overall internet), I believe the video from Tod's Workshop with actual experimentation is a must see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE There is a sequel and many other related videos, but this one is the source for a very famous clip (at 20:50 - https://youtu.be/DBxdTkddHaE?si=oISZqXvdv8ymoCDi&t=1239 https://youtu.be/DBxdTkddHaE?si=oISZqXvdv8ymoCDi&t=1239)
- detourdog 1y agoThank you for the links. It took me a few hours to figure out their relevancy since they all seem to be about power and armor. After a good night sleep I realized this implies the longbow was about power and against armor. I thought it might have had to do with range. The description of how archers were used made me consider that have longer range bows would be an advantage and thought that might have be related to the longbow.
- trhway 1y ago>Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and that is where volley may be helpful - simultaneous hit to multiple horses and soldiers may break the pace and may cause stumbling and local pile-ups. Slow down of advance -> more exposure time to the follow up arrows.
- _heimdall 1y agoIt takes a special (in a bad way) kind of commander to send more arrows after their cavalry and infantry engaged. I'm sure there are records of it having happened, but you have to assume you're taking just as many casualties as the enemy due to friendly fire.
- wvh 1y agoI assume the accuracy of the average arrow and non-professional soldier might dissuade one to get anywhere near the fire range. Enough will fail to launch properly, slip or be dysfunctional that there's no way you'd want them shot from right behind you.
- lazide 1y agoEh, plenty of people run into the line of fire even today. People don’t think straight when under a lot of stress. Also, the only safe place to be in War is far from it; so by definition soldiers need to be trained to ignore a lot of threats to their wellbeing in order to do their job.
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe anti-cavalry arrows are never sent after engagement, any more than commanders on the front line today call for indiscrimenent shelling on their own front line. Anti-cav arrows were used at Agincourt to great effect, although it's possible the mud killed more French than the English did.
- AzzyHN 1y agoAs an untrained soldier myself, I can attest that I would freak out if I saw a whole bunch of arrows flying in my general direction, and probably change my course entirely.
- wvh 1y agoSome might call this intelligence.
- gherkinnn 1y agoIt is brave to hold against what one might call intelligence if doing so conforms to the zeitgeist and stupid when it runs counter to it. Bret, the author of ACOUP, goes in to a lot more detail here: https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-i-soldiers-warriors-and/ https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warr...
- Der_Einzige 1y agoWar is a racket. Smedley Butlers word have aged like fine wine.
- bell-cot 1y agoGenerally true. Unfortunately, "don't cooperate with racketeers" is not always a viable strategy.
- allturtles 1y agoMany actions that are individually intelligent can be collectively disastrous.
- Aeolun 1y agoNot sure if you’d ever see a whole bunch of arrows. In a space the size of a battlefield, with 1 arrow per 10s per archer, you’d need a lot of them to have several in flight in your general direction at once.
- throwup238 1y ago> I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. It very much depends on the historical context. Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue. If they broke rank or ran away from battle, everyone including their parents, siblings, neighbors, and potential lovers would hear about it back home (and never let them live it down). Most conscripts at that time fought alongside their fellow villagers and farmers, not random professional soldiers. They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.
- antisthenes 1y ago> Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue. Most peasants during the Middle ages did not fight at all, except in revolts and uprisings, usually with terrible outcomes. If they were taken along for the (military campaign) ride by their feudal lord, it is most likely they would have avoided the battlefield altogether, providing auxiliary services, e.g. setting up camp, feeding the horses, cooking, tending to their liege, etc. Conscription was not really a thing until the mid-Renaissance (roughly), and the vast majority of battles in the Middle ages was fought by nobility, ranging from lower class to dukes and lords.
- usrusr 1y agoSurprisingly close to a standing army, when looked at from a certain angle. Only that it's not taxes going to the central authority and then getting paid to warriors, but warriors getting assigned an area to tax, and keep their cut as compensation for their military readiness. (of course when looked at from just a slightly different angle, it's also indistinguishable from a protection racket)
- lazide 1y agoFor war as a different type of racket, there is of course the book the decorated general Smedley Butler wrote [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket].
- tomr_stargazer 1y agoBret (the author) does discuss the discipline of conscripted troops in another post, here: https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiia-discipline/ https://acoup.blog/2022/06/17/collections-total-generalship-... In particular, the concept of 'drill' gets a lot of attention: "Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.... The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine."
- treis 1y agoIMHO that's the key point against the "no volley" idea. Up until the modern age no soldier did anything on their own. You act in formation and repeat what you've been drilled. A company of archers is probably the same. They'd be working in unison following the direction of their captain. Not for shock value. But to manage fatigue, arrow supply, and ensure that they're firing with a full draw.
- pimlottc 1y agoYou can act together in formation without being in total lockstep for every motion. Did all the infantrymen swing their swords at the same time? Of course not. It doesn't make any sense for one archer to "wait" for their neighbor before firing. And as the article points out, firing in unison would increase fatigue, not reduce it.
- lmm 1y ago> What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. He talks specifically in other posts about the problems with "discipline" as a term (it groups too many different things as though they were the same), and he talks specifically about "cohesion" (which is the thing I think you're getting at) in this post at several points.
- jjk166 1y agoI'm not going to say discipline isn't an overloaded term, but it really ought to include resisting instinct and desire to do what needs to be done so as to accomplish goals. I would certainly not describe what I'm referring to as cohesion, which I would consider more the skill of soldiers coordinating their movements and actions.
- pm3003 1y agoThere are some examples in the American War of Independence (or maybe War of 1812), where militias would lie down to reload and break the discipline of the overall force. Another practical aspect is sound / smoke. Letting the force fire at will would probably mean the officers could no longer really be heard. The problem certainly didn't exist with bows.
- creaturemachine 1y agoIt's unlikely they were muzzle loading lying down. They could maybe kneel at times, but the barrel had to be vertical for reloading.
- anshumankmr 1y ago>the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows Case in point the Spartan army led by Leonidas. One of the soldiers apparently really said that if the Persians will rain fire arrows on them, they will fight in the shade.
- folbec 1y agoThe author has a VERY dim view of Sparta, and of the people who worship Sparta and of the quality of information the legend of Sparta is based upon (second hand roman information, from Romans, at a time where Sparta had become a sort of theme park for bored senators). https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-retrospective/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r...
- anshumankmr 1y agoJust talking about the last stand of Leonidas and the 300 (+7000 thebans etc). Of course, a society driven purely by millitaristic macho men will implode. I have read about this a bit before (Not from this author)
- hermitcrab 1y agoI do wonder how all these Alt-right Alpha bros, who are into the Spartans, feel about the Spartan predilection for pederasty.
- totalkikedeath 1y ago[dead]
- fennecbutt 1y agoOr the fact that the Spartans were solely defeated by the sacred band of thebes, an army of gay men.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoWe know quite well what drafted peasants would do facing combat. Sinking to their knees in endless "Father ours"..
- jsnider3 1y agoThat's not what they did.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoThats what we see today, pretty sure thats what they did.