Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXI

[Beleriphon]

In the run up to the French revolution the word gains its notoriety as a negative thing which is somewhat later then Louis XIV.

Which is the reason I suspect that Marx chose to use it the way he did.

[Storm Bringer]

[EDIT: In a fully modern context here.]

Question: Assuming one has a method of perfectly blocking all communication systems (beyond something like "send a guy with a message", so radio etc.) for a large area, would the following sort of strategy make sense?

- Gather intel on enemy positions
- Ready allied units, give commanders their goals
- Inform commanders of general goals of other units, especially those acting nearby
- Block all communication
- Commence attack, relying on broken communication and shock attacks (similar to what I've read happened to the French in WWII, where some French troops surrendered because they were surprised by German tanks and thought their front lines had collapsed, when in reality the Germans had just punched through in a few places) to confuse and overwhelm defenders

I was thinking that there'd be a doctrine of relatively autonomous low/mid-level commanders, where most of the officers know the goals of the operation so that if they quickly accomplish their goals, they can immediately move to support other units or attempt to start on another objective, rather than needing new orders from further up.

Secondary question: If this group runs into an enemy who can communicate through the blockage, how large of a disadvantage are they at?

depends on a few things:

1) nature of the comm blocker. While radios and other wireless systems can be blocked, if the defenders are holding prepared positons that have wire connections to each other (ie, a base with phone lines, etc), then short of sending in commandos to physically cut the wires, those systems cant really be jammed. It would allow the defenders some level of co-ordination ability, at least at the higher levels, though tactically they would under the same constraints as the attackers (for example, they may be able to call in airstrikes to help defend a position they hold, but cant use it to co-ordinate a local counter attack beyond letting other people know its happening). Failing that, something as simple as signal flares could be used as a last resort "under attack" signal that could quickly pass the message and give other defenders more time to react.

2) defender planning and intel: while tactical surprise might be achieved, depending on how long the attackers have been planning this strike, the defenders might well know its coming (the Germans knew that "the Allies are going to invade Western Europe form England in summer 1944", and the Russians knew "the Germans are going to try and take the Kursk Salient in 1943", to name two examples). knowing this, they may have a pre-planned defensive strategy that they can swing into action as soon as it becomes clear that something is happening. local commanders may not wait for orders and start implementing this plan own their own initiative. A lot of the initial line of troops will basically just be their to act as "tripwires" or "speed bumps", in their their role in the greater defensive plan is to force the attackers to start their attack there, and to slow them down enough that the next line of troops has time to be properly ready. Its also possible that the comm jammer trick is known about, and work arounds have been planned for (like signal flares for the forward troops, hardened landlines between HQs, ect)

3) duration and scale of the operation: the longer this battle goes on, and the larger area you are trying to do it over, the worse the comm problems become. things go wrong even in the most successful plans, so their is always a need to modify and change the plan on the fly, which the comms blackout will make incredibly hard. The attacks may have an advantage in the intial stages due to their pre-planning, but the longer the battle lasts the less their plan is going to relate to the reality on the ground, and the fewer of their troops are going to be actively engaged in winning the battle, i.e. attacking and taking vital objectives, as opposed to holding their captured objectives without pushing forward, pushing forward in the wrong direction, or caught in local battles that have no greater strategic effect beyond killing troops on both sides. the commanders on both sides, watching the battle form outside the jamming, will be able to see wonderful, battle winning opportunities come up, then and disappear because no one on the ground knows about them or is in a position to do anything about them.

4) vs enemy that can talk while they cant: they would be at a severe disadvantage, due their lack of situational awareness compared to the counter attackers. In short, the defenders would be able to know where the attackers were, and in what strength, while the attackers would basically be reduced to either hours old information, or what they can see with their own two eyes. the defenders could concentrate against a small part of the attackers, crush them, then push on though to attack the attackers form directions they "know" were covered by friendly forces. at this point, the attackers best option is to turn off the jammers so they can co-ordinate properly as well. if they planned properly, they will have some pre-arranged signal they can use to get it switched off (for example, a message laid out for on the ground for the spy sats to see, or letting off a certain colour of smoke grenade).

on the whole, a battle plan like this might work, but the attackers need to win quickly. Surprise is a important tool and a major advantage for any side that can get it, but the longer the battle lasts, the less useful it will become. If the defenders can keep it together and hold on for long enough, the attacker will loose most of his advantages as his the battle moves away form the start state he based his plans on.

[VoxRationis]

Does anyone know why the late Roman Empire moved its capital to Mediolanum? Though I could see administrative or strategic reasons to do it, it seems a bit odd from a cultural standpoint—they were, after all, the Roman empire, and legion banners don't say SPQM on them.

[Max_Killjoy]

Does anyone know why the late Roman Empire moved its capital to Mediolanum? Though I could see administrative or strategic reasons to do it, it seems a bit odd from a cultural standpoint—they were, after all, the Roman empire, and legion banners don't say SPQM on them.

And it was subsequently at Revenna for the last ~75 years before the fall of the western empire.

[snowblizz]

Does anyone know why the late Roman Empire moved its capital to Mediolanum? Though I could see administrative or strategic reasons to do it, it seems a bit odd from a cultural standpoint—they were, after all, the Roman empire, and legion banners don't say SPQM on them.

Getting away from the cesspit of crime and corruption that was the senate and population of Rome probably featured large in that decision. In addition to the administrative and strategic reasons. At this point the balance of power was heading towards the eastern part of the Roman empire as well as northwards towards the fractuos northern frontier.
Many of the later Emperor seem to have purposefully trying to distance themselves from the cultural baggage that Rome came to be.


Which is the reason I suspect that Marx chose to use it the way he did.
I found a useage graph when looking it up, and useage of the word culminated in the 1950s. Not very common before the 1800s but rising sharply in the 1900s peaking about 1950-60. Not entirely certian about reliability of that (no diea what it's based on) but it would fit the historical context of the word as is its common use now. The groups referred to only came to be when industrial revolution, wealth and privillege was spread much wider giving rise to a new class looked down upon by those higher, and considered stuck up by those lower.

[Tiktakkat]

Does anyone know why the late Roman Empire moved its capital to Mediolanum? Though I could see administrative or strategic reasons to do it, it seems a bit odd from a cultural standpoint—they were, after all, the Roman empire, and legion banners don't say SPQM on them.

Snowblizz has pretty much covered it.

Rome as a city was dying by the end of the 3rd century.
The noble families could be counted on to murder each other at the drop of a hat. (Which would eventually contribute to making the Popes happy to relocate to Avignon for a century or so.)
The lower classes could be counted on to riot at the drop of a hat. They used to riot at a drop in the dole, but the urban population was already declining, and keeping the dole up at Constantinople was becoming more important. (Which was happy to have riots of its own of course.)
The location was indefensible against usurpers, though it maintained its reputation against outsiders for another century or so.
Being a few hundred miles closer to the Rhine and Danube was significantly important, not to mention being closer to the passes through the Alps.
Oh, and speaking of the Popes, being out of Rome meant not having to deal with them past making sure a compliant one was selected as needed.


Emperors would pay lip service to the Senate depending on how much cultural credit they needed, but as the 4th century turned to the 5th century, Rome was more a symbol of historical legitimacy than an imperial strongpoint.

[MrZJunior]

In the Ilyad Odysseus wears a helmet made out of boars tusks. I know such helmets existed, but how effective do you think they were?

[Max_Killjoy]

In the Ilyad Odysseus wears a helmet made out of boars tusks. I know such helmets existed, but how effective do you think they were?

I can't find video online right now, but I've seen video of a recreation being tested, and it appears they were somewhat ablative -- you wouldn't want to get hit in the same spot twice.

[darkdragoon]

On spinning:

Spinning elbows, back kicks and the like can be devastating but require a lot of setup. Its popularity in point fighting is largely due to the adoption of side stances and the protective gear becoming lighter. I suppose with weapons the *threat* of a spin might actually be more useful than doing your Link impression.

On dual wielding:
Generally speaking you will favor techniques from one particular side or hand even though training and exercise can equalize this somewhat. As usual weapons add yet another layer. Certainly there are double stick and knife systems, short swords, but really, most people are far more comfortable with "main and offhand."

Mythbusters did some interesting stuff with the "John Woo" type dual pistols and such, but generally anything heavier is risky.

[Vinyadan]

About spinning, in karate there is the ushiro geri, which involves something of a spinning technique. It can't be used every time, but it is devastating, and you can look at it as an exceptionally strong technique that requires a little more time than other kicks to get started. The thing is, it's at the same time easy and hard to see it coming. When the other person is spinning, you can suppose it's the ushiro geri coming, but, if he manages to do it at the right time, you simply won't have the time to put yourself out of reach, and it's a hard thing to block once it's launched; it seems to come from a blind spot.

Maybe someone with more karate experience than me can explain better how it works.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls8hvGBvATc

[Spiryt]

"Spinning crap" is being thrown and landed entire time in modern MMA. Even though not so long ago, they were being though as to risky and that they open fighter to takedown or counter too much.

Examples are really numerous, one would have to watch.


I'm pretty sure that it's not very comparable to unarmoured fighting with swords though, and that was original question about spinning though.

If you throw a bad spinning back punch in MMA, you can get nailed with a punch, which most of the time won't be even that bad, nevermind potentially fatal, like a sword cut....

Still:


http://fightbooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/woodley-kim.gif


Badly done spinning elbow with no setup what so ever end wie so:

[Carl]

I'm writing a longer post to fill in all the details for you but i was thinking more an engage disengage. e classic movie move i was thinking of starts with the foil in the right hand stood sideways on blade meeting his opponents and then they step back and rotate 270 degrees to their left disengaging whilst reversing the side their blade is on from their opponent perspective. I'll get back to writing details up for you though.

[mujadaddy]

"Spinning crap" is being thrown and landed entire time in modern MMA. Even though not so long ago, they were being though as to risky and that they open fighter to takedown or counter too much.

Examples are really numerous, one would have to watch.


I'm pretty sure that it's not very comparable to unarmoured fighting with swords though, and that was original question about spinning though.


Spider & Chael Sonnen :smallfrown:

[gkathellar]

Since we're talking about spinning, I just wanted to make sure that no one here had any positive opinions of Olympic fencing. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/sports/olympics/fencing-miles-chamley-watson-move.html?_r=0)

(I showed that to my Maestro, thinking he'd get a laugh out of it, and he just shook his head and looked tired, and I felt bad.)


"Spinning crap" is being thrown and landed entire time in modern MMA. Even though not so long ago, they were being though as to risky and that they open fighter to takedown or counter too much.

Exactly, spinning moves really come down to timing and how tight you can make the execution. They're only crap when they're done terribly by people who aren't aware of their flaws and counters (hell, I've seen good karateka break tournament rules just to teach some punk a lesson on the subject).

The problem with conventional wisdom in MMA is that it always seems to come from what's currently popular. That goes to the way UFC began as a marketing gimmick for the Gracies, where they showed how they could beat up on McDojo types that had never seen a competently executed chokehold. Then the kickboxers, Greco-Roman Wrestlers and judoka came in and showed the Gracies what competent stand-up fighting looked like. Now, people with a broader set of backgrounds have come in and demonstrated what competently-executed high kicks and soft deflections look like. Give it twenty or thirty more years, and we'll see more variety start to show itself.


Spinning elbows, back kicks and the like can be devastating but require a lot of setup.

It's not the elbows and back kicks and roundhouses you actually have to worry about (although they have their uses), so much as the side kicks. A spinning side-kick hits harder than just about anything, uses circular footwork to initiate a linear strike, and can be very quick coming from someone who knows what they're doing. That said, I agree in general that this kind of move is highly opportunistic, and leaves you open.


Its popularity in point fighting is largely due to the adoption of side stances and the protective gear becoming lighter.

Side stances are definitely part of it, but I'd attribute it more to low risk for failure than anything else. If you fail to plant a spinning move, especially a spinning kick, you can end up in a lot of trouble. That's not really true in point fighting, where you're allowed to return to your stance in an orderly fashion rather than the other guy picking you up and tossing you on the ground and kicking you a whole bunch. As I mention above to Spiryt, I've seen old-school, super-serious karate dudes lose matches just to demonstrate how defensively fragile a spinning kick makes you.

[Tiktakkat]

As with most things in unarmed martial arts, spinning techniques cannot be easily pigeon-holed.

A lot of the use made of them is completely unrealistic, made possible only because of the rules of competition.
Conversely, they can be extremely destructive, to the point of being banned on a lot of point fighting circuits simply because they are so dangerous and people do not bother to control them.

In most cases, spontaneously spinning like that in combat is a great way to get your spine broken. Of course since strikes to the back are absolutely prohibited that isn't a concern.
Likewise with spin kicks, they are a perfect set up to get your groin blasted, as well as get your leg caught and have yourself dumped on your head. Guess what else is banned in competition.

However, let's say you have driven in with a thrusting technique and your opponent manages a side step. You can continue straight ahead and hope he doesn't move back in and attack your back, OR;
You can spin and make it dangerous for him to close.
Is that the absolutely best option?
No, that would be not overextending in the first place. However that is already off the table, so you are stuck with the lesser of two evils.

Or, if you aren't looking at competition and instead are considering a more general melee, what happens when someone just plain comes up on your side?
Again, you can try breaking contact, opening the range and looking to reset.
But not if someone is in front of you.
Now a "half-spin" or other redirect (understanding that the line between a side kick and a back kick is very fine) is a prime option.

When considering any example of a spinning technique you need to balance between considerations of artifacts of rules and actual tactics. That means looking at specific cases rather than just the general concept.

[Knaight]

Since we're talking about spinning, I just wanted to make sure that no one here had any positive opinions of Olympic fencing. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/sports/olympics/fencing-miles-chamley-watson-move.html?_r=0)

(I showed that to my Maestro, thinking he'd get a laugh out of it, and he just shook his head and looked tired, and I felt bad.)

There's some impressive athleticism and very good tip control. That's about where the positive opinions end.

[Max_Killjoy]

Since we're talking about spinning, I just wanted to make sure that no one here had any positive opinions of Olympic fencing. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/sports/olympics/fencing-miles-chamley-watson-move.html?_r=0)

(I showed that to my Maestro, thinking he'd get a laugh out of it, and he just shook his head and looked tired, and I felt bad.)


Proof that sport fencing is completely off in la-la land and has nothing to do with its martial origins at this point.

[Lemmy]

Proof that sport fencing is completely off in la-la land and has nothing to do with its martial origins at this point.Doesn't that go for pretty much every combat competition in the Olympics? Sport karate is quite different from actual karate.

[Mike_G]

Learning fencing and competing in Olympic style fencing is great for speed and control.

Throw a fencer into an SCA rapier tournament and he'll clean up, throw an SCA rapier guy into a fencing tournament and he's screwed.

That said, it is tag with car antennas.

But I started out in college fencing classes, competed and got a national rating, and it has done wonders for my footwork, speed, sense of distance and timing and tip control. I've been able to be fairly competitive in other weapon styles right out of the gate.

[Brother Oni]

Doesn't that go for pretty much every combat competition in the Olympics? Sport karate is quite different from actual karate.

Don't get me started on olympic taekwondo... :smallsigh:


Throw a fencer into an SCA rapier tournament and he'll clean up, throw an SCA rapier guy into a fencing tournament and he's screwed.

In your opinion, how would either fare in something more full contact like a Battle of the Nations rules 1v1 tournament?

[dramatic flare]

In your opinion, how would either fare in something more full contact like a Battle of the Nations rules 1v1 tournament?

Personal (though certainly much less professional than Mike_G's) fencer's opinion? Really depends on your opponent's style. If your opponent is the type to back you into a corner or get in close, fencing footwork can only help you so much, though can certainly help you get some early shots in. If he's the type to stay back and trade blows at opportune times, fencing practice would be a boon.
Without experience in both (which I really, REALLY want to rectify if I ever get the chance) I won't offer anything more technical.

[Mike_G]

Don't get me started on olympic taekwondo... :smallsigh:



In your opinion, how would either fare in something more full contact like a Battle of the Nations rules 1v1 tournament?

I doubt either would have an advantage.

Fencing is more or less sportified smallsword. Nothing like armored full contact fighting. It's enough like rapier that you can pick one up, use what you learned in fencing and do OK. SCA rapier is nothing like Battle of Nations either. You may as well ask if an archer or a bowler would do better.

Even SCA "heavy list" has a lot of rules that change the game, so full contact fighting would be very different.

Olympic style fencing is not fighting. But the rules reward -- even demand -- speed, control and precision, economy of movement in parries and quick ripostes from those parries. Those skills will translate into less sport-ified rapier fighting. Guys who start with rapier don't get the same rigid emphasis on speed and control, in my experience. Fencing is also a small enough pond that as a college fencer I ran into members of the US Olympic team at tournaments and in clubs. It's not like NCAA ball versus the NBA.

When I was in college (a long time ago), there were no HEMA groups. The first sword-like class I had any chance to take was Intro to Fencing in 1987 at UNH. There was the SCA, but they're... not all that more authentic than Olympic style fencing.

I started with fencing and I can state from my own experience that the basic lessons make it much easier to pick up any sword and do basic, unarmored combat fairly competently. I recently got into longsword, and I have decent luck just using the thing like a big sabre. The footwork, the guards, the point control, the timing of cuts are all there.

Fencing is not a fight. It's a sport. But studying it has a lot of value.

I'm short, old and arthritic, and I can hold my own. Because my form is good and my reactions are good and those were drilled into me as a member of a college fencing team almost thirty years ago.

So I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Olympic fencing.

[Max_Killjoy]

I doubt either would have an advantage.

Fencing is more or less sportified smallsword. Nothing like armored full contact fighting. It's enough like rapier that you can pick one up, use what you learned in fencing and do OK. SCA rapier is nothing like Battle of Nations either. You may as well ask if an archer or a bowler would do better.

Even SCA "heavy list" has a lot of rules that change the game, so full contact fighting would be very different.

Olympic style fencing is not fighting. But the rules reward -- even demand -- speed, control and precision, economy of movement in parries and quick ripostes from those parries. Those skills will translate into less sport-ified rapier fighting. Guys who start with rapier don't get the same rigid emphasis on speed and control, in my experience. Fencing is also a small enough pond that as a college fencer I ran into members of the US Olympic team at tournaments and in clubs. It's not like NCAA ball versus the NBA.

When I was in college (a long time ago), there were no HEMA groups. The first sword-like class I had any chance to take was Intro to Fencing in 1987 at UNH. There was the SCA, but they're... not all that more authentic than Olympic style fencing.

I started with fencing and I can state from my own experience that the basic lessons make it much easier to pick up any sword and do basic, unarmored combat fairly competently. I recently got into longsword, and I have decent luck just using the thing like a big sabre. The footwork, the guards, the point control, the timing of cuts are all there.

Fencing is not a fight. It's a sport. But studying it has a lot of value.

I'm short, old and arthritic, and I can hold my own. Because my form is good and my reactions are good and those were drilled into me as a member of a college fencing team almost thirty years ago.

So I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Olympic fencing.


Sounds like olympic fencing is a case of turning the practice into a competition...

[cobaltstarfire]

Certainly, some years ago they changed the timing for the score boxes in saber. It tripped up folks in the weapon, I don't know if that effect rippled up into the higher level fencers and if it did how long it took them to adjust, but it did bug some of the ones I knew.

...and trying to look it up for more details, it looks like they have or will be changing the timing again, I wonder now how often they do that, and if they tweak the score box timing for foil.

Either way the timing is basically how much time you have to make a touch against someone who has already landed one on you. It's measured in milliseconds. It looks like they're increasing the time for that, maybe in an effort to get the saberists to slow the heck down or something?

[Mike_G]

Certainly, some years ago they changed the timing for the score boxes in saber. It tripped up folks in the weapon, I don't know if that effect rippled up into the higher level fencers and if it did how long it took them to adjust, but it did bug some of the ones I knew.

...and trying to look it up for more details, it looks like they have or will be changing the timing again, I wonder now how often they do that, and if they tweak the score box timing for foil.

Either way the timing is basically how much time you have to make a touch against someone who has already landed one on you. It's measured in milliseconds. It looks like they're increasing the time for that, maybe in an effort to get the saberists to slow the heck down or something?

It's more complex that that.

Sabre and foil have "right of way" which gives attacks priority. If I attack you an you just counterattack and we both gte hit, I get a point, because I started the attack and you did the "wrong" thing by not defending yourself. If you parry, my right of way ends, you gain ROW with an immediate riposte, and if I just continue my attack instead of defend myself, and we both get hit, you get the point.

The "timing" in sabre allows me to make a touch on you as you attack, where you have right if way, ansd if I hit you long enough before you land, it's my point. This is because. like Kendo, if I stop your attack by cutting off your swordarm or splitting your skull, you might not finish the attack, so a "stop cut" is allowed. Increasing the timing doesn't slow a fencer down, it makes them less likely to counterattack, because evn if thye hit, the attacker has ROW, and more time to finish his cut even iof you hit with your counter.

Right of way teaches you to defend yourself. Defeat the attack before launching your ow. It's necessary with the light weapons because when parried, unlike reals swords, they don't have the momentum taking them off line. Often if I parry, your blade will just kinda vibrate back onto target which it wouldn't if they were real small swords. But with ROW rules, my riposte will have priority of we both gte hit.

It's artificial, but the theory behind it ios supposed to reinforce proper technique.

Sabre is a mess since electric scoring. They keep messing with the rules.

[Vinyadan]

I am somewhat surprised by seeing SCA compared to fencing. Fencing has an infinite tradition behind it and very solid structures, and work on technique and conditioning, as well as worldwide practice, and was born out of real weapon duelling. SCA is a young novelty, about which most people have never even heard about, with no continuity of tradition to the combat systems it more or less tries to propose. I'm not saying that it sucks, but it's not where I would go to learn how to use a sword.

[Mike_G]

I am somewhat surprised by seeing SCA compared to fencing. Fencing has an infinite tradition behind it and very solid structures, and work on technique and conditioning, as well as worldwide practice, and was born out of real weapon duelling. SCA is a young novelty, about which most people have never even heard about, with no continuity of tradition to the combat systems it more or less tries to propose. I'm not saying that it sucks, but it's not where I would go to learn how to use a sword.

Like I said, when I was young, those were the options. There was no HEMA. In New England, anyway. There barely was an internet. Nobody was translating Talhofer, and if they were it wasn't widely distributed. The only "swordfighting" organization in the US in the 1980s was the SCA, or traditional Olympic style fencing. There was a big SCA community nearby, and they did "rapier" fighting as well as the rattan stuff.

I wanted something less sport and more combat, so after a year of fencing, I dropped in to the SCA group, and slaughtered the rapier guys. Since then, I found a HEMA group about two hours away, and now I go and do pretty well with longsword, despite not having any formal training in it, largely because a ton of fencing principles translate very well.

[Lemmy]

Don't get me started on olympic taekwondo... :smallsigh:
It's frustrating how boring taekwondo, karate and judo usually are in the Olympics... :smallsigh:

[Mike_G]

Sounds like olympic fencing is a case of turning the practice into a competition...

Pretty much exactly that.

The foil began as a training weapon for smallsword. The sport grew out of that. But the rules reward "correct" technique and punish "bad" technique. This means it's not enough to hit first, you have to hit with priority. When attacked, the burden is on you to block or avoid the attack before you can score. Which makes perfect sense as a teaching weapon. Not getting hit is a big deal.

And the fact that the swords are light and fast means your reactions get faster. If I use a heavy sword, maybe I can't move it as fast as a fencing weapon, but my brain and instincts and reflexes are used to the speed, so heavy blades seem to move in slow motion compared to foils or sabres. So parrying a HEMA weapon is easy, since it's moving at half the speed I'm used to. And I have practiced making my parries such that they set up my riposte, because in foil you have to or you won't get that in, so my ripostes are already lined up by the time I've parried, and my opponent is hit before he can recover from his attack.

I like fencing because it emphasizes correct form. You can move half as fast if you move twice as efficiently, and fencing really really rewards efficient movement.

[gkathellar]

Pretty much exactly that.

The foil began as a training weapon for smallsword. The sport grew out of that. But the rules reward "correct" technique and punish "bad" technique. This means it's not enough to hit first, you have to hit with priority. When attacked, the burden is on you to block or avoid the attack before you can score. Which makes perfect sense as a teaching weapon. Not getting hit is a big deal.

And the fact that the swords are light and fast means your reactions get faster. If I use a heavy sword, maybe I can't move it as fast as a fencing weapon, but my brain and instincts and reflexes are used to the speed, so heavy blades seem to move in slow motion compared to foils or sabres. So parrying a HEMA weapon is easy, since it's moving at half the speed I'm used to. And I have practiced making my parries such that they set up my riposte, because in foil you have to or you won't get that in, so my ripostes are already lined up by the time I've parried, and my opponent is hit before he can recover from his attack.

I like fencing because it emphasizes correct form. You can move half as fast if you move twice as efficiently, and fencing really really rewards efficient movement.

From what I've seen, heard, and experienced, this is all 100% accurate. My maestro prefers that everyone begin with foil, for the reasons you've stated and because he feels that its technique is the foundation for every weapon in his system (including things like bayonet, or bare-handed fighting). He actually won't teach dueling sword or traditional rapier (as opposed to Italian or Spanish rapier, which he will teach) unless he's satisfied with a student's foil. And his criticisms of HEMA folks are not dissimilar from yours - honestly, a lack of emphasis on form is how we get guys executing vaults while squared up and people sliding forward when they lunge.

That said, it seems to me that one should study classical fencing if at all possible rather than the Olympic form, because as you yourself have said, it's tag with car antennas. The scoring box in general is really harmful to fencing as a skill even if it prevents bias in the sport, because it eliminates the need for power (and the attendant parts of the form). I hear, anecdotally, that it got a lot worse during a wave of standardization about 30-40 years ago, so you may have dodged the worst of it.


It's frustrating how boring taekwondo, karate and judo usually are in the Olympics... :smallsigh:

It's a reality of competition. Sports, unlike martial arts need to (a) be distinctive, and (b) have clear winners and losers. The sensibilities are different, in part because more is on the line. In smaller, more personal tournaments, you see weird stuff like a master losing a fight because he feels the need to counter a poorly-done tournament kick with a sweep. At the big-name, nationally recognized level, though? There's too much on the line. No one who's gone that far in that kind of environment is going to break the rules just to make a point about martial arts.

[Galloglaich]

Learning fencing and competing in Olympic style fencing is great for speed and control.

Throw a fencer into an SCA rapier tournament and he'll clean up, throw an SCA rapier guy into a fencing tournament and he's screwed.

That said, it is tag with car antennas.

But I started out in college fencing classes, competed and got a national rating, and it has done wonders for my footwork, speed, sense of distance and timing and tip control. I've been able to be fairly competitive in other weapon styles right out of the gate.

It doesn't work that way in HEMA. We have A-Rated Olympic fencers in HEMA, a couple of them are very good - after 5 or 6 years of doing HEMA- but none of them 'clean up' on the regular by the book HEMA people.

Some of the SCA rapier guys are pretty good from what I gather but I haven't really seen many. It's a separate thing from their heavy combat.


My experience of dealing with collegiate fencers is similar to Kendoka, if you play by their rules they are very dangerous, but if you do things they aren't used to they have a big hole in their game that is pretty easy to exploit. What this boils down to in both cases is if you allow them to wait at the edge of onset distance and prepare themselves, they can come at you so quick it's hard to counter. But they are used to going back and forth on the piste. If you use cuts to counter thrusts, and come at them from the side, circle etc., you can confuse and own them.

Collegiate fencers are also typically not used to dealing with off-hand weapons like a parrying dagger and are shocked and horrified when you push aside their point with your hand, let alone punch, kick or throw them.

G

[Galloglaich]

Pretty much exactly that.

The foil began as a training weapon for smallsword. The sport grew out of that. But the rules reward "correct" technique and punish "bad" technique. This means it's not enough to hit first, you have to hit with priority. When attacked, the burden is on you to block or avoid the attack before you can score. Which makes perfect sense as a teaching weapon. Not getting hit is a big deal.

And the fact that the swords are light and fast means your reactions get faster. If I use a heavy sword, maybe I can't move it as fast as a fencing weapon, but my brain and instincts and reflexes are used to the speed, so heavy blades seem to move in slow motion compared to foils or sabres. So parrying a HEMA weapon is easy, since it's moving at half the speed I'm used to.

Interesting Mike, glad to hear you have gotten involved in HEMA. Have you tried a tournament yet?

I wonder where you are training in the northeast? I'm doing a lecture for the IGX tournament in Boston this coming weekend, though I won't be there it will be by video. But if you are in the neighborhood, it would be a good chance for you to experience top level HEMA fighters. Anton Kohutovic is going to be there, and I can promise you his strikes do not come in slow motion, even compared to high level Olympic fencing. I think you would find it a challenge to parry even when he tells you in advance what he's going to do. I did! I think Dustin Reagan will be there too and he is an A-rated Epee fencer, there are 3 or 4 other guys who are nationally rated collegiate / Olympic style fencers who are usually there. Axel Petterson is also going to be there and he's arguably the top competition longsword fencer in the world. All interesting to see in action. Plus for the first time ever in the US that I know of, I think there are going some Russian saber guys visiting.

Even if you don't want to compete in the tournament, those guys will spar with you usually if you ask and appear to know what you are doing which I'm sure you do. And just watching them in action is an interesting experience.

G

[cobaltstarfire]

It's more complex that that.

Sabre and foil have "right of way" which gives attacks priority. If I attack you an you just counterattack and we both gte hit, I get a point, because I started the attack and you did the "wrong" thing by not defending yourself. If you parry, my right of way ends, you gain ROW with an immediate riposte, and if I just continue my attack instead of defend myself, and we both get hit, you get the point.

The "timing" in sabre allows me to make a touch on you as you attack, where you have right if way, ansd if I hit you long enough before you land, it's my point. This is because. like Kendo, if I stop your attack by cutting off your swordarm or splitting your skull, you might not finish the attack, so a "stop cut" is allowed. Increasing the timing doesn't slow a fencer down, it makes them less likely to counterattack, because evn if thye hit, the attacker has ROW, and more time to finish his cut even iof you hit with your counter.

Right of way teaches you to defend yourself. Defeat the attack before launching your ow. It's necessary with the light weapons because when parried, unlike reals swords, they don't have the momentum taking them off line. Often if I parry, your blade will just kinda vibrate back onto target which it wouldn't if they were real small swords. But with ROW rules, my riposte will have priority of we both gte hit.

It's artificial, but the theory behind it ios supposed to reinforce proper technique.

Sabre is a mess since electric scoring. They keep messing with the rules.

I didn't feel l could adequately describe right of way, nor could I work out exactly what the deal is with the timing changes on the box, I felt it had something to do with right of way but not exactly what. I've never done sabre, and very little foil (seems like everyone I've met/did class with really prefered epee, what saber I heard of as from my cousin, and this one greek guy who looooved saber, but was very good at the other two as well).

Sooo I also just don't have the mind for right of way, I'm almost 10 years out of practice on that, and only had the most basic of introduction on it. Reflecting on my own very tiny experience I probably would have benefited from getting to do much more foil before being put on the epee train. Though I didn't mind, cause watching people do foil at tournaments was almost as terrifying as watching saber, the way they just fling themselves at each other (also the screaming...so much screaming). I kind of enjoyed the relative slowness of epee....

[Garimeth]

IRT spinning...

Personally my go to rule is that if the other person knows what they are doing, or I think they might, I'm not doing any type of spin. There are all kinds of things that work well on people who don't know what they are doing, that fail miserably against someone with training or experience - especially if those people stay cool and collected.

I gave the example earlier in the thread of the guillotine choke: I got it off all the time when I started MMA, but then could never get it off - because it is easily defended against and I sparred or fought better opponents.

When I did TKD I almost got knocked out once by a jump spin kick - but the guy who did it was a second degree black belt, and I was a green belt. Now if somebody did that I'd move and when they landed things would not go well for them.

When I was younger I didn't realize that if I stepped in one a sidekick, so they couldn't chamber it and get their leverage, that at best they would do nothing, and at worst they'd throw themselves off balance - because I was focused on point sparring, not inflicting pain or damage.

I'm sure for you guys with your swordfighting and fencing can think of a ton of corollaries. I'm not saying spinning can NEVER work, but... well "all in works every time, except the last time."

[Kiero]

As with anything potentially awkward or higher-risk requiring setup, spinning techniques can work as part of a combination. You set it up with simpler, faster things beforehand, then when the momentum is with you, you attempt the more complex maneuver. The real issue is with trying to throw them cold, as the first technique.

[Garimeth]

As with anything potentially awkward or higher-risk requiring setup, spinning techniques can work as part of a combination. You set it up with simpler, faster things beforehand, then when the momentum is with you, you attempt the more complex maneuver. The real issue is with trying to throw them cold, as the first technique.

I can't disagree, but...

I don't know. I'm sure its my personal bias, but I am all about simply being great at the basics and then just adapting as necessary. Whether its shooting, or fighting, or whatever.

I'm also not a professional, nor thinking with the mindset of trying to compete with one. I have a very self-defense/military mindset, and I'm sure I would get absolutely wrecked in any kind of sport competition.

[Galloglaich]

I can't disagree, but...

I don't know. I'm sure its my personal bias, but I am all about simply being great at the basics and then just adapting as necessary. Whether its shooting, or fighting, or whatever.

I'm also not a professional, nor thinking with the mindset of trying to compete with one. I have a very self-defense/military mindset, and I'm sure I would get absolutely wrecked in any kind of sport competition.

I think the difference between (if meant to be somewhat realistic) fencing and unarmed martial arts is, very generally speaking in martial arts you can get hit over and over in a fight and keep fighting. I know I certainly have in street fights back in the day and it's normal in a boxing match or an MMA fight for people to get hit a lot. If you get grappled because you tried to do a spinning back kick or back-fist, it may not be the end of the day. Of course you could get KTFO, but it's not certain by any means. Knockouts are not uncommon but they aren't common either.

Being cut or stabbed by a large blade however, in the hands of someone who knows how to use it...

http://files.forensicmed.webnode.com/200000462-d87c9d9778/Man+complains+about+migraine...+only+to+find+he+ha s+had+a+knife+in+his+brain+for+FOUR+years++++++1.j pg

http://65.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lgxgnrzlAN1qh5ta1o1_500.jpg

http://jhs.sagepub.com/content/36/1/70/F1.small.gif

I'm leaving this last one as a link instead of an embedded image because it's so gruesome. The (fatal) result of a machete duel.

http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f10/454088d1369787811-machete-duel-ends-predictable-results-roast-20beef.jpg


Let's just say there is a little more emphasis on defense from even one hit, because the results can be devastating. That is why I personally can tell you that even though I know some techniques where you could spin, I wouldn't do that in a real sword fight. I wouldn't take my eyes off the other person if I could help it. It's just too risky.

G

[Garimeth]

Being cut or stabbed by a large blade however, in the hands of someone who knows how to use it...

http://files.forensicmed.webnode.com/200000462-d87c9d9778/Man+complains+about+migraine...+only+to+find+he+ha s+had+a+knife+in+his+brain+for+FOUR+years++++++1.j pg

http://65.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lgxgnrzlAN1qh5ta1o1_500.jpg

http://jhs.sagepub.com/content/36/1/70/F1.small.gif

I'm leaving this last one as a link instead of an embedded image because it's so gruesome. The (fatal) result of a machete duel.

http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f10/454088d1369787811-machete-duel-ends-predictable-results-roast-20beef.jpg


Let's just say there is a little more emphasis on defense from even one hit, because the results can be devastating. That is why I personally can tell you that even though I know some techniques where you could spin, I wouldn't do that in a real sword fight. I wouldn't take my eyes off the other person if I could help it. It's just too risky.

G

This is my exact mentality, well spoken.

[Kiero]

Most of my experience is indeed unarmed, where you expect to take blows and have to ride through them to get your shots in. Even in armed combat, there's a good chance you could be hit.

I remember well a knife drill I've done a few times where you and your opponent "arm" yourselves with fat marker pens to act as your knives. Then you fight. No matter how careful or defensive you are, you'll have ink on you and sometimes you discover only afterwards some dots in nasty places where you'd have been punctured if it was a blade.

[Galloglaich]

I am somewhat surprised by seeing SCA compared to fencing. Fencing has an infinite tradition behind it and very solid structures, and work on technique and conditioning, as well as worldwide practice, and was born out of real weapon duelling. SCA is a young novelty, about which most people have never even heard about, with no continuity of tradition to the combat systems it more or less tries to propose. I'm not saying that it sucks, but it's not where I would go to learn how to use a sword.

The SCA has a separate rapier thing they do, it's not the same as what they call 'heavy combat' with the armor and the rataan sticks. They do it with fencing masks etc. and steel rapiers. It was actually one of the pre-cursors to HEMA.

http://blackdiamond.atlantia.sca.org/icecastle/img/event-activity/rapier-preview.jpg

G

[Galloglaich]

Most of my experience is indeed unarmed, where you expect to take blows and have to ride through them to get your shots in. Even in armed combat, there's a good chance you could be hit.

I remember well a knife drill I've done a few times where you and your opponent "arm" yourselves with fat marker pens to act as your knives. Then you fight. No matter how careful or defensive you are, you'll have ink on you and sometimes you discover only afterwards some dots in nasty places where you'd have been punctured if it was a blade.

It's very hard to defend against a knife if all you have is another knife or are unarmed, so you are taught to expect to be at least cut. In HEMA dagger fighting tournaments they usually score it to 3 hits for this reason. In real knife fights for the same reason you'll often see the fighters carrying a shirt or a towel or a cape in their off-hand to block with and hide behind. This is very common in places where they still have a culture of knife fighting.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-U4r3TP8cJLY/TmE7hLmQPtI/AAAAAAAAB-0/qJI7S2UIizM/s320/Card-12---El-Valiente.jpg

If you know what you are doing though you can defend yourself with a sword, especially if you are fighting defensively. Some swords (or combinations of weapons, sword and dagger or sword and buckler) are better for defense than others, but with training you can defend yourself surprisingly well.

This isn't always obvious, again depending on the weapon or weapons, the person with greater skill will usually quickly dominate the lesser skilled person. That is the point of training - you want to be the much more skilled person than your opponent if you ever get into a real fight. Longswords are balanced more offensively, so the better fighter often wipes out the weaker very quickly, depending on how careful they are being and the general skill level of both fighters.

But for example with saber you can see that experienced fighters can often fight for a long time without either person scoring a hit. If you are fighting for your life and giving ground, you could extend that much longer:

http://i.imgur.com/qsQk1uA.jpg?1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHP4pSQvbxk

You can see videos of real smallsword and epee duels from the 1920's etc. where they go a long time before either person is hit, largely because (clearly) both are being very cautious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e68nuAcSuWQ

Notice no spinning ;)




http://res.cloudinary.com/marozzo/image/upload/v1471265980/handfer_trthcs.jpg


EDIT: I forgot to point this out but it needs to be, the other huge difference between fighting with markers or any kind of safe simulators (including feders or foils or whatever) is that if your simulator thanks to fencing mask and/or safety features can't actually hurt you, and you keep fighting after a hit, then of course both fighters will be hit. If however, you get your hand cut like in the hospital image I showed in the spoiler in my last post, it's unlikely you could keep swinging a sword. Depending on the circumstances, the fight may very well end after one cut, and the odds increase with every cut after that. It still doesn't preclude both fighters being injuried, which was fairly common, but you are trying a lot harder to minimize being hit if you know what you are doing and I think that is actually one of the things that swords are quite good at (to point back to the earlier discussion about swords as sidearms).

http://67.media.tumblr.com/5f0499ce6e5722db0dedb98b5857a156/tumblr_nooyc40oG31rbgia9o1_1280.gif

Swords to me, especially European style swords with good built-in hand protection are one of the best weapons for defense, as in parrying and fending off attacks. Staffs are pretty good too.

G

[Lemmy]

What are you guys talking about? Are you honestly telling me that this spin (https://youtu.be/8kpHK4YIwY4?t=34s) wasn't completely necessary and extremely effective? :smallamused:

[Tobtor]

What are you guys talking about? Are you honestly telling me that this spin (https://youtu.be/8kpHK4YIwY4?t=34s) wasn't completely necessary and extremely effective? :smallamused:

Well people using 'the force' should have really good reflexes, and know what's coming..... so he totally knew that spinning wouldn't kill him (or something).

[Vinyadan]

It never looked to me like those two were fighting, anyway.

[Galloglaich]

It never looked to me like those two were fighting, anyway.

I hear you but I wouldn't second guess the fight choreographer (and the guy in the Darth Vader suit) was a pretty amazing cat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Anderson_(fencer)

[gkathellar]

It's very hard to defend against a knife if all you have is another knife or are unarmed, so you are taught to expect to be at least cut. In HEMA dagger fighting tournaments they usually score it to 3 hits for this reason. In real knife fights for the same reason you'll often see the fighters carrying a shirt or a towel or a cape in their off-hand to block with and hide behind. This is very common in places where they still have a culture of knife fighting.

Of special note is the Bowie knife, which is distinctively useable for defense, and was designed at least in part for that purpose. But it's notable mainly as an exception: knives (and some daggers, though obviously not things like poniard) tend to be spectacularly poor for defending oneself, and knife fighting is such that it's also pretty easy to end up with tons of small, self-inflicted cuts.


But for example with saber you can see that experienced fighters can often fight for a long time without either person scoring a hit. If you are fighting for your life and giving ground, you could extend that much longer:

Yeah, I think only the rapier matches in my school go on for longer than the dueling saber. I haven't had the chance to see it in person, but I imagine the slower military saber might allow for even longer fights.


I hear you but I wouldn't second guess the fight choreographer (and the guy in the Darth Vader suit) was a pretty amazing cat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Anderson_(fencer)

Movies is movies, and good fight choreographers know that. Hell, Bruce Lee went to study TKD for a bit specifically because high kicks are important for the movies, not because he thought high kicks were the best thing ever.

[Mike_G]

The SCA has a separate rapier thing they do, it's not the same as what they call 'heavy combat' with the armor and the rataan sticks. They do it with fencing masks etc. and steel rapiers. It was actually one of the pre-cursors to HEMA.

http://blackdiamond.atlantia.sca.org/icecastle/img/event-activity/rapier-preview.jpg

G

That's exactly what i was talking about.

I met a bunch of these guys in the 1990s and sparred with them. I still see them a few times a year and spar.

With just a solid foil background, I had no trouble doing very, very well in SCA rapier. The offhand weapon thing was a struggle to remember. I could face a guy who was using rapier and dagger and do fine, but I often forgot to use my own dagger, since I had such and ingrained habit of keeping my left hand back out of the way.

Still, point control, hundreds of hours of parry-riposte drill and a good lunge did me more good than a dagger did most of my opponents.

[Clistenes]

Well people using 'the force' should have really good reflexes, and know what's coming..... so he totally knew that spinning wouldn't kill him (or something).

Couldn't they have put that spin into fast motion, or something? It really looks like Darth Vader is standing there and letting him spin... like he is "what is this old man doing? I could like, kill him twelve times while he is turning away..."

[gkathellar]

Couldn't they have put that spin into fast motion, or something? It really looks like Darth Vader is standing there and letting him spin... like he is "what is this old man doing? I could like, kill him twelve times while he is turning away..."

IIRC, the props used for the original lightsabers were very heavy and thus difficult to move quickly with. This has its upsides, as the original trilogy's lightsaber fights are spare, tense, and charged with physical and emotional exertion.

But yeah, Alec Guiness was old, yo.

[Max_Killjoy]

Trying to find the correct attribution, but before the PT came out, someone said of the OT lightsaber combat, "So far, we've seen an old man, a cripple, and a novice."

[VoxRationis]

How thick would a wooden barrier need to be to repel 18th-century musket fire? At what point would a pavise have become useless to those fighting gunpowder armies?

[Lemmy]

1- What makes Bowie knives so much better than normal daggers at defending?
2- Was there any sickle-looking blades that were consistently and effectively used in battle? Most sickle-like weapons I could find were either cerimonial or fictional. :/

[Mike_G]

How thick would a wooden barrier need to be to repel 18th-century musket fire? At what point would a pavise have become useless to those fighting gunpowder armies?

18th Century muskets were less powerful than earlier muskets. Nobody was wearing plate armor in the 18th Century, and the Brown Bess or Charleville muskets were lighter and less powered than the muskets of the 15th and 16th centuries. Easier to lug around the battlefield and more than enough punch to take out an unarmored man or horse.

That said, I haven't seen any penetration tests against wooden barriers with muskets.

[Gnoman]

18th Century muskets were less powerful than earlier muskets. Nobody was wearing plate armor in the 18th Century, and the Brown Bess or Charleville muskets were lighter and less powered than the muskets of the 15th and 16th centuries. Easier to lug around the battlefield and more than enough punch to take out an unarmored man or horse.


Lighter, certainly. Less powerful? Not so sure about that. As far as I can tell, the caliber range and powder charge remained mostly constant. The barrel length was reduced by about 25%, but were still quite long, and the charge used should still have had time to combust completely, minimizing the effect of the shorter barrel. As far as I can tell, the main factor in reducing weight was improvements in metallurgy.

[snowblizz]

How thick would a wooden barrier need to be to repel 18th-century musket fire? At what point would a pavise have become useless to those fighting gunpowder armies?

Am reading a book about North American indian wars and plenty of times the wooden forts are musket proof, sometimes even cannon proof as they only got the lightest of cannons to the remotest areas and might not be able to get the close enough to be effective. But make a world of difference what wood you use too.

The pavise became useless pretty much immeditately the first cannon types were developed for battlefield use, which was plenty early on. Being a bit easier to make a big hunk of metal withstand the pressures.

Any type of lighter cannon, and it get's tricky here as ot what is a big wall gun or light cannon, but say the stuff palced on Hussite warwagons was probably powerful enough to make pavises more or less useless.
The problem with a pavise is that it's more or less immobile, which makes you a wonderful target for artillery, which of course was among the first types deployed. You could probably conceivably make a pavise that was portable enough that worked against the lighter or less punchy muskets used at various times, but making one tough enough and it's not a pavise but a log wall.

So almost immediately really. Since deployed pavises area wonderful stationary target just not capable of taking even small caliber cannon on. AFAICT.


Lighter, certainly. Less powerful? Not so sure about that. As far as I can tell, the caliber range and powder charge remained mostly constant. The barrel length was reduced by about 25%, but were still quite long, and the charge used should still have had time to combust completely, minimizing the effect of the shorter barrel. As far as I can tell, the main factor in reducing weight was improvements in metallurgy.
Most liekly they would be. The Brown Bess and similar muskets had very large windage to allow for rapid reloading so would waste a good chunk of it's charge and used a seriously reduced ball for similar reasons. I'm not gonna hazard a guess as to much power it did not use, but early 1600s musket and a later 1800s minie type would probably pack a more serious punch due to better (different) design over the 1700s types which were made for quick-fire in massed salvoes. That is to say, a properly loaded Brown Bess using a larger ball than intended would probably be on par with earlier types.

[Gnoman]

Most liekly they would be. The Brown Bess and similar muskets had very large windage to allow for rapid reloading so would waste a good chunk of it's charge and used a seriously reduced ball for similar reasons. I'm not gonna hazard a guess as to much power it did not use, but early 1600s musket and a later 1800s minie type would probably pack a more serious punch due to better (different) design over the 1700s types which were made for quick-fire in massed salvoes.

Due to fouling, windage was a thing for all firearms until the invention of the Minee bullet (which was subcaliber until the gun went off, and was also available with a zinc ring to clear out the worst of the fouling) and the eventual introduction of smokeless powder and jacketed rounds (which reduces fouling by a truly absurd amount.) The earlier muskets might have been used more often with less windage in an attempt to increase accuracy (as they were more specialized weapons made to stop cavalry), but they would rather quickly have to increase windage or else they'd lose the ability to load their weapon in the first place. Given that the breastplate was still in widespread use until the 1830s among heavy cavalry, and didn't disappear entirely until World War I, a significant drop in power is unlikely - particularly since the breastplate was only good against pistol fire and ricochets except at long range, which is exactly as effective as armor was in the 1600s.

[Vitruviansquid]

1- What makes Bowie knives so much better than normal daggers at defending?
2- Was there any sickle-looking blades that were consistently and effectively used in battle? Most sickle-like weapons I could find were either cerimonial or fictional. :/

Does the khopesh count as a sickle sword? I'm pretty sure those were seriously used to kill people.

[gkathellar]

1- What makes Bowie knives so much better than normal daggers at defending?

Size, sturdiness, crossguard, strong inflexible spine. The critical thing is that you can actually block using a Bowie knife, as opposed to most knives which don't really have any defensive merits.

Note that this isn't unusual for daggers - just knives. Also, I'd be surprised if Filipino martial arts didn't have equivalents.


2- Was there any sickle-looking blades that were consistently and effectively used in battle? Most sickle-like weapons I could find were either cerimonial or fictional. :/

Early Mediteranean peoples seemed to favor them for a while. Egyptians in particular used something called a khopesh, while the Greeks had kopis, the Iberians had the falcata, etc. The Ottomans also used a short, forward-curving saber.

There's more to find in SE Asia, where people loved (and in some places, still love) their knives, and there were dozens of forward-curving knives and swords used in various places. The most notorious is of course the Nepalese kukri, although that's as much a utility object as it is a fighting knife.

[Kiero]

The kopis had both a shorter infantry variant (preferred by the Spartans, for example) and a longer cavalry variant.

Talking of southeast Asian knives, there's the kerambit for a sickle-like knife that comes out at a wierd angle underneath the hand.

[kraftcheese]

Does the khopesh count as a sickle sword? I'm pretty sure those were seriously used to kill people.
The blade on a khopesh was on the oposite side to a sickle though, wasn't it? Like a scimitar.

There is the dacian falx (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falx) I guess? It obsolutely had the blade on the inside edge

[Max_Killjoy]

The khopesh was sharp on the convex side (the long side).

[Vitruviansquid]

The blade on a khopesh was on the oposite side to a sickle though, wasn't it? Like a scimitar.

There is the dacian falx (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falx) I guess? It obsolutely had the blade on the inside edge

Well, he said "sickle-looking," so if the blade was on the opposite side, that's still like sickle-looking?

Khopesh is the closest thing I can think of.

[fusilier]

Lighter, certainly. Less powerful? Not so sure about that. As far as I can tell, the caliber range and powder charge remained mostly constant. The barrel length was reduced by about 25%, but were still quite long, and the charge used should still have had time to combust completely, minimizing the effect of the shorter barrel. As far as I can tell, the main factor in reducing weight was improvements in metallurgy.

The charges were lighter in the 18th century, and generally of smaller caliber. While a Brown Bess might be a decent approximation for a light (or bastard) musket of the late 16th, early 17th century, it would certainly have taken a much lighter charge and been smaller than something like a heavy Spanish musket. Also, a .75 caliber Brown Bess would be an example of large caliber musket of the 18th century, whereas .69 caliber was popular in France, and later the US -- although performance was about the same.

Windage was also an issue, but it should be kept in mind that in the early period it was all over the map, where as in the later period it was basically standardized (as high windage).

[fusilier]

How thick would a wooden barrier need to be to repel 18th-century musket fire? At what point would a pavise have become useless to those fighting gunpowder armies?

The information exists, tests were done with smoothbore muskets in the 19th century, and I've seen them before. I don't have it at hand though, and it might take some digging. The 19th century tests might be a little more powerful, because they were experimenting with reducing the windage -- although that often included a reduction in powder charge, so it might balance out.

--EDIT-- Something to keep in mind is that penetration will fall off pretty quickly with range on a smoothbore musket.

[fusilier]

Due to fouling, windage was a thing for all firearms until the invention of the Minee bullet (which was subcaliber until the gun went off, and was also available with a zinc ring to clear out the worst of the fouling) and the eventual introduction of smokeless powder and jacketed rounds (which reduces fouling by a truly absurd amount.) The earlier muskets might have been used more often with less windage in an attempt to increase accuracy (as they were more specialized weapons made to stop cavalry), but they would rather quickly have to increase windage or else they'd lose the ability to load their weapon in the first place. Given that the breastplate was still in widespread use until the 1830s among heavy cavalry, and didn't disappear entirely until World War I, a significant drop in power is unlikely - particularly since the breastplate was only good against pistol fire and ricochets except at long range, which is exactly as effective as armor was in the 1600s.

Around the start of the 17th century, armor started becoming less common and started to focus more on hand-to-hand combat which heavy cavalry was still expected to engage in during the 18th and 19th centuries. Muskets reached about the maximize size and potential in penetration around 1600. A Spanish heavy musket was large caliber, .85 or more, had a long barrel, and took a surprisingly big charge -- they were almost overcharged. After that there's a gradual decrease in caliber, length, and overall size. (Although bear in mind there was also variation, light muskets existed then, arquebuses, etc.)

At the same time, there's a decrease in the use of armor, and increasingly, cheaper, iron armor was being used instead. By the end of the 17th century muskets rarely went up against armor of any kind, and when they did it wasn't as complete or effective as it had been a century before. Armor on the battlefield wasn't extinct, but it was now uncommon, and, with the exception of siege armor, I haven't seen any evidence that cavalry armor of the 18th century or later was being made primarily with firearms in mind.

That said, when volley tactics became popular the emphasis was on opening the volley at very close range -- at such ranges a lower powered weapon can punch through armor. (Even in the 16th century arquebuses were expected to pierce through armor at close ranges). However, the trend towards less powerful weapons seems to begin before the volley became standard.

[Tentreto]

I am well aware of the French style of military structure, with captains etc, and I know this became prolific throughout Europe and the world, but are there any majorly different styles? As in ordering the corps and such?

[VoxRationis]

Am reading a book about North American indian wars and plenty of times the wooden forts are musket proof, sometimes even cannon proof as they only got the lightest of cannons to the remotest areas and might not be able to get the close enough to be effective. But make a world of difference what wood you use too.

The pavise became useless pretty much immeditately the first cannon types were developed for battlefield use, which was plenty early on. Being a bit easier to make a big hunk of metal withstand the pressures.

Any type of lighter cannon, and it get's tricky here as ot what is a big wall gun or light cannon, but say the stuff palced on Hussite warwagons was probably powerful enough to make pavises more or less useless.
The problem with a pavise is that it's more or less immobile, which makes you a wonderful target for artillery, which of course was among the first types deployed. You could probably conceivably make a pavise that was portable enough that worked against the lighter or less punchy muskets used at various times, but making one tough enough and it's not a pavise but a log wall.

So almost immediately really. Since deployed pavises area wonderful stationary target just not capable of taking even small caliber cannon on. AFAICT.
Well yes, obviously any pavise is useless against a cannon. Hence why I specified "musket fire." Cannon might not be a huge factor in every battle, and hypothetically, if pavises were effective vs. muskets, being vulnerable to cannon fire might not outweigh the benefits of protecting against the vast majority of the fire of the enemy side. Thus my question. And a wooden fort, built from logs, is much different from a pavise of thin planks.

[Lemmy]

What are the advantages of a Bowie knife over a dagger? What are its disadvantages?

[rrgg]

The Graz tests have some results for penetration against pine.

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17669/22312

Benjamin Robin's experiments with a ballistic pendulum in 1742 found that a musket with half the ball's weight in powder had a velocity of 508 m/s at about 7.5 meters so even these might be under-performing slightly. Rifled muskets shooting a round ball with a really tight fit could reach well over 600 m/s with less powder. In previous centuries powder may have been of less quality but powder loads of 3/4ths or even a whole balls weight were more common, also caliber was usually a bit larger.

So overall it would take several inches of pine to stop most muskets at 30 m assuming a good powder load.

Here's results for an 1837 west point test against seasoned white oak, which is a bit stronger. It's presumably using an American musket firing a .65 caliber ball (26.7 grams). The Brown Bess's ball was typically .69 caliber (32.4 grams)

http://www.davide-pedersoli.com/uploads/immagini_gallerie/big/582penetration.jpg

Larger caliber muskets still existed in the 18th century, generally in the form of wall guns. The American army during the revolution was using a 2-ounce (56.7 gram) and a 4-ounce (113 gram) version. These were generally mounted on swivels and fired either from the walls of fortifications or from wagons, although presumably you could still take them down and fire them from a forked rest like a 16th century Spanish musket or an old Ottoman trench gun as long as you were strong and/or brave enough.

[Xuc Xac]

What are the advantages of a Bowie knife over a dagger? What are its disadvantages?

None, really. The Bowie knife was invented for fighting at a time when most knives were used for utility purposes. Jim Bowie cut his hand when he tried fighting with a regular knife and decided to add a guard to keep his hand from sliding up onto the blade again. This is a problem that had already been solved by daggers and fighting knives for millennia.

Daggers already had guards for that purpose. Some daggers had pronounced guards that made them useful for parrying too, such as the "main gauche". Compared to a classical dagger, the Bowie knife isn't as stabby but it's stabbier than a regular hunting/skinning/cooking knife and it's more useful for utility stuff like that than a dagger would be.

If you can carry a utility knife for kitchen and camp work and a dagger for fighting, then do that. If you need both but you only want to carry one knife, then use a Bowie knife.

[rrgg]

Another test against white oak from 1839. This time with 144 grains of powder the musket penetrated 3 in of white oak at 5 yards.

http://i.imgur.com/SFwbiNu.png

That's the other thing about penetrating wood. Not all trees are the same.

[fusilier]

Here's results for an 1837 west point test against seasoned white oak, which is a bit stronger. It's presumably using an American musket firing a .65 caliber ball (26.7 grams). The Brown Bess's ball was typically .69 caliber (32.4 grams)

http://www.davide-pedersoli.com/uploads/immagini_gallerie/big/582penetration.jpg

Ah ha -- I was looking for something similar, but that's pretty good info (although oak is usually pretty tough).

I was just re-reading Report of Experiments on Gunpowder, made at Washington Arsenal in 1843 and 1844. That was when they did the first experiments with the .65 musket ball (and 110 grain charge), the "regulation" ball at that time was .64 and used a 120 grain charge.




Larger caliber muskets still existed in the 18th century, generally in the form of wall guns. The American army during the revolution was using a 2-ounce (56.7 gram) and a 4-ounce (113 gram) version. These were generally mounted on swivels and fired either from the walls of fortifications or from wagons, although presumably you could still take them down and fire them from a forked rest like a 16th century Spanish musket or an old Ottoman trench gun as long as you were strong and/or brave enough.

I've seen 18th century wall guns in person, and I'm not convinced you could fire it like an spanish musket -- at the very least I expect it to be even more difficult to load. I don't think I would try it. ;-) My understanding is that they were more of a crew served weapon . . .

Fascinating though, everything about the wall guns were oversized: not just the barrel and stock, but the lock, the trigger, the guard, etc. It looked like a basic 18th century musket for a giant.

[fusilier]

Another test against white oak from 1839. This time with 144 grains of powder the musket penetrated 3 in of white oak at 5 yards.

. . .

That's the other thing about penetrating wood. Not all trees are the same.

There are other factors too:

How many tests were conducted? Was the result reported the average, or the maximum? Was the musket "warm", i.e. had it been fired and built up some fouling which closes off the windage. In some of the tests I was reading about they would clean the musket after every shot, but not always.

Finally, in the previous experiments I mentioned, they used a box of 20 new muskets, and they very carefully measured the bores. The .69 caliber musket was found to vary from .688 to .694 in bore size!

[kraftcheese]

How were elephants used in war, tactics-wise, and when did they stop being used?

Obviously they were big and imposing (terrifying, even), and I'm sure a line of troops would part if an elephant charged at them, but was that their only function when the Carthaginians, Persians, etc. used them?

[Storm Bringer]

How were elephants used in war, tactics-wise, and when did they stop being used?

Obviously they were big and imposing (terrifying, even), and I'm sure a line of troops would part if an elephant charged at them, but was that their only function when the Carthaginians, Persians, etc. used them?

they were used in India and other locations they were native to deep into the gunpowder era, but more as command posts as beasts of labour (the Indians made extensive use of them to pull heavy cannons, for example). as weapons of war, they fell out of favour in the Mediterranean mainly because of a lack of supply after the north African elephants died out, but were still used in India and south-east Asia in a similar manner. They were used in the medieval era, as this set of elephant armour (https://chalklands.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/untitled.jpg)shows. .

I think they stopped being used as weapons about the time field cannons started coming in, as they were too vurnerable to cannon fire. that said, they were still used as a mount for leaders, which give them both a commanding presence and a commanding view of the battlefield.

[snowblizz]

Well yes, obviously any pavise is useless against a cannon. Hence why I specified "musket fire." Cannon might not be a huge factor in every battle, and hypothetically, if pavises were effective vs. muskets, being vulnerable to cannon fire might not outweigh the benefits of protecting against the vast majority of the fire of the enemy side. Thus my question. And a wooden fort, built from logs, is much different from a pavise of thin planks.

With muskets there are cannon, even lightest cannon will make a mockery out of pavises. Standing around even if you could protect from muskets means you get moved down by the cannon. Hence the pavises will be a liability even in case they might actually protect against muskets.

And the same goes for pike blocks incidentally, which is why you wanted to force pike and later on all infantry into squares so you could blow em to bits with cannon.

[Kiero]

they were used in India and other locations they were native to deep into the gunpowder era, but more as command posts as beasts of labour (the Indians made extensive use of them to pull heavy cannons, for example). as weapons of war, they fell out of favour in the Mediterranean mainly because of a lack of supply after the north African elephants died out, but were still used in India and south-east Asia in a similar manner. They were used in the medieval era, as this set of elephant armour (https://chalklands.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/untitled.jpg)shows. .

I think they stopped being used as weapons about the time field cannons started coming in, as they were too vurnerable to cannon fire. that said, they were still used as a mount for leaders, which give them both a commanding presence and a commanding view of the battlefield.

African forest elephants weren't the only source of elephants in the Mediterranean in antiquity. The Seleukids got theirs from India (500 of them by treaty with the Mauryan Empire), and founded a stable in Antioch which they kept going for a goodly while.

[rrgg]

I've seen 18th century wall guns in person, and I'm not convinced you could fire it like an spanish musket -- at the very least I expect it to be even more difficult to load. I don't think I would try it. ;-) My understanding is that they were more of a crew served weapon . . .

Fascinating though, everything about the wall guns were oversized: not just the barrel and stock, but the lock, the trigger, the guard, etc. It looked like a basic 18th century musket for a giant.

A 2-ounce ball is about the size of the larger 16th century muskets. As long as the barrel isn't ridiculously long it should be feasible, and yes it was noted that heavy muskets that used a forked rest generally took much longer to load.

Something like this: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dTxZ_zXtGIs/T6yAqg3z6-I/AAAAAAAAESE/VYevpn10xgU/s1600/sunday_demo_3_fkxe.jpg

Less feasible to use without a swivel: http://i1.wp.com/militaryhistorynow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/trunnion.jpg

Ironically, if the musket is heavy enough that can help with the recoil quite a bit.

[rrgg]

Finally, in the previous experiments I mentioned, they used a box of 20 new muskets, and they very carefully measured the bores. The .69 caliber musket was found to vary from .688 to .694 in bore size!

Hey, compared to stories about Brown Bess muskets that were off in bore size by up to .05 in that's not to bad!

But it's true, depending on the windage, amount of powder, type of powder, how much is spilled etc the actual velocity might vary quite a bit in the field.

[Clistenes]

None, really. The Bowie knife was invented for fighting at a time when most knives were used for utility purposes. Jim Bowie cut his hand when he tried fighting with a regular knife and decided to add a guard to keep his hand from sliding up onto the blade again. This is a problem that had already been solved by daggers and fighting knives for millennia.

Daggers already had guards for that purpose. Some daggers had pronounced guards that made them useful for parrying too, such as the "main gauche". Compared to a classical dagger, the Bowie knife isn't as stabby but it's stabbier than a regular hunting/skinning/cooking knife and it's more useful for utility stuff like that than a dagger would be.

If you can carry a utility knife for kitchen and camp work and a dagger for fighting, then do that. If you need both but you only want to carry one knife, then use a Bowie knife.

By the way, Bowie copied the shape of the blade of a Spanish folding knife:

http://www.ekipado.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/1200x1200/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/1/7/17024_2.png

[fusilier]

A 2-ounce ball is about the size of the larger 16th century muskets. As long as the barrel isn't ridiculously long it should be feasible, and yes it was noted that heavy muskets that used a forked rest generally took much longer to load.

Something like this: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dTxZ_zXtGIs/T6yAqg3z6-I/AAAAAAAAESE/VYevpn10xgU/s1600/sunday_demo_3_fkxe.jpg

Less feasible to use without a swivel: http://i1.wp.com/militaryhistorynow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/trunnion.jpg

Ironically, if the musket is heavy enough that can help with the recoil quite a bit.

I've actually handled a repro 16th century heavy musket . . . they're not as long as those wall guns (ok the one in the first picture, on the left, admittedly looks shorter). When wall guns were taken to the field, they were two man weapons. Reminds me a lot of a eastern "jingal" type weapon. That said, a heavy musket and a later wall gun are probably pretty close in terms of performance, although I would expect the wall gun, with its longer barrel, to be a bit more powerful and longer ranged.

[Incanur]

Since the 16th-century musket has come into the discussion again, I'll take a moment to remind folks that we have uncertain group for assessing exactly how powerful this weapon was. Galloglaich got into one of our epic exchanges regarding this subject back in 2013 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?308462-Got-a-Real-World-Weapons-or-Armour-Question-Mk-XIII/page24). (Galloglaich had to gall to call me "homeboy" back then. I'm still a bit shaken up from that. :smallwink:)

I still lean toward believing that Humphrey Barwick, Sir Roger Williams, and other late-16th-century military writers knew how far away a heavy musket shot could penetrate the best armor (one of hardened steel and probably 3+mm-thick on the breastplate, as Greenwich was making at the time). Officers knew (or at least should have know) yard measurements like the back of their hands, as they used distance as a key part of arranging troops in the field. However, I don't even know that it's possible for a heavy musket, with it's 4-4.5ft barrel, to produce enough energy to defeat a Greenwich breastplate at 100 yards. (This would likely require 7,000+ J of initial energy.) On this matter as on many others, we need better tests. (As valuable as the Graz tests and The Knight and the Blast Furnace are, both contains various inconsistencies and limited data.) It's possible Barwick and Williams were exaggerating to make a point or simply got it wrong.

[Galloglaich]

Since the 16th-century musket has come into the discussion again, I'll take a moment to remind folks that we have uncertain group for assessing exactly how powerful this weapon was. Galloglaich got into one of our epic exchanges regarding this subject back in 2013 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?308462-Got-a-Real-World-Weapons-or-Armour-Question-Mk-XIII/page24).

I still lean toward believing that Humphrey Barwick, Sir Roger Williams, and other late-16th-century military writers knew how far away a heavy musket shot could penetrate the best armor (one of hardened steel and probably 3+mm-thick on the breastplate, as Greenwich was making at the time). Officers knew (or at least should have know) yard measurements like the back of their hands, as they used distance as a key part of arranging troops in the field. However, I don't even know that it's possible for a heavy musket, with it's 4-4.5ft barrel, to produce enough energy to defeat a Greenwich breastplate at 100 yards. (This would likely require 7,000+ J of initial energy.) On this matter as on many others, we need better tests. (As valuable as the Graz tests and The Knight and Blast Furnace are, both contains various inconsistencies and limited data.) It's possible Barwick and Williams were exaggerating to make a point or simply got it wrong.

It's hard to say, the top of the line 15th-16th Century armor panoplies, at least the thickest and best shaped parts like the breast plates and helmets, were hard to defeat, but without a doubt heavy muskets hit hard and were explicitly made to pierce armor, which they seemed to do a lot of the time at least somewhat effectively in the field. That was the original role of the musket (as opposed to the arquebus) as far as I can understand - for armor piercing.

The whole dynamic is about two orders of magnitude past what most people understand about the era of the early muskets.

Personal body armor was a major factor in war, just as it is today, and was clearly offering some protection against firearms. Plate armor probably was invented partly to deal with firearms.

Muskets were made to defeat the best available armor, which obviously they eventually helped to do. And yet personal body armor took a long time to completely go away, even though it declined in quality dramatically much earlier than it disappeared.

Of course today, it's back again.


My argument then, and some extent still now, was partly based on the notion that cannon are what really made armor start to become obsolete. Of course a heavy wall gun and a light cannon kind of overlap. But the ubiquity of cannon on the battlefields I think are what ultimately made armor somewhat pointless - it could save you from pistols, from arquebus and probably even the heaviest crossbows - but what was the point of investing in the expense (both individually and as a society) if you could still die pretty easily by being hit with a cannon ball.


And yet at the same time, armor did take a while to get phased out. Gotz von Berlichingen lost his arm to a cannonball (or more specifically - by a cannonball hitting his sword and his sword cutting off his arm) in 1504, but he was still wearing armor in battles years later.

Someone mentioned pavises upthread and how they were made obsolete by cannon and firearms - apparently not. Pavises were still pretty popular and in wide use in that same war where Gotz lost his arm. I'm not sure when they actually did go out of style.


I'm also not sure of the precise history of the development of the musket, particularly on the Turkish side - was it primarily a Turkish or Spanish invention first?

G

[fusilier]

I'm also not sure of the precise history of the development of the musket, particularly on the Turkish side - was it primarily a Turkish or Spanish invention first?

G

I would have to go over the sources again, but when I looked into Turkish weaponry, I came away with the impression that the Ottoman weapons of the 1500s are something in between an arquebus and a musket. They have the length of a musket, but the caliber is similar to an arquebus. If using more European terminology, I would describe them as a long barreled arquebus. Of course, whether or not a mid-16th century Ottoman tufenk should be considered a musket will depend upon how you define "musket" to begin with.

[rrgg]

The origin of the musket isn't really clear. I think the Spanish are still generally credited with first using the musket in large numbers in 1521 but long barreled firearms with a musket caliber or larger had been around for almost 100 years at that point. They were generally limited to wall defense and ranged anywhere from large handgun to small cannon. There are plenty of examples of hook guns with a 25 mm or 35 mm bore and even arquebuses that occasionally got pretty large.

I'm less familiar with the specifics of Ottoman weapons but they were experimenting with various sizes of firearm at the same time. As I understand it by the mid 16th century the janissaries would be armed with something like several thousand arquebus caliber weapons and then one thousand "trench guns"

[Brother Oni]

On an entirely separate note, here's a fun little casual experiment on an archer versus a swordsman:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QLpYDQ0FSA&feature=youtu.be

Please note that it shouldn't be taken at all seriously and was intended as a bit of fun and curiosity.

[Martin Greywolf]

1) Plate armor against guns

Well, plate armor wasn't developed to stop guns, once it was around for a bit, though, the guns started to take over as primary ranged weapon, so its development was geared towards it in the later years.

First hints of plate begin in about 1250 with coat of plates, and we have first solid-piece cuirasses in 1340s at the earliest, with plate harnesses being widely used by 1400. Agincourt plate harnesses are an example of this type, chain mail as foundation, plate components on top of it, and mail slowly starts to get reduced in size.

Interestingly enough, in pretty much the same period that battle of Agincourt was happening, there was a pan-European conflict going on that made Europe as such keenly aware of firearms and what they can do when used on a tactically significant scale. Sure, you had firearms used at this time, but you didn't really have any tactics centering around them. I'm talking about the Hussite wars.

2) Hussites, firearms and armor

There is very little good information about Hussites in English floating around - fortunately, I'm fluent in Czech, fluent enough to read actual period documents, and there are quite a few of them. Hussites aren't really area of my greatest focus (that being Hungary at the Arpad-Anjou interregunm), but I do know quite a bit about them.

What made Hussites so successful, apart from competent leadership and strict discipline (this one was swiftly adopted by their enemies, as evidenced by respective rules of conduct for soldiers) was the War wagon tactic. What they essentially did was use wagons as portable walls, travelling around with small castle-like fortifications wherever they went. They pretty much only fought out of them if they had overwhelming advantage or were besieging a city.

These war wagons essentially removed most of the issues firearms (and crossbows, incidentally, which were also very popular) had - slow reload doesn't matter if you can hide behind a wall, and range is not an issue if the enemy has to come to you to storm the "walls". Moreover, there were either gaps or special openings in these wagons (or both, we're not really sure) that allowed siege cannons to be used in the field - something that was, as far as I know, unheard of prior to this.

You may argue that a crossbow would be better than a firearm in that situation - and you'd be right! This, however, is where logistics come in. Hussites were essentially rebels and religious zealots, a ragtag bunch not unlike the Zeroth Crusade (Peter the Pilgrim's) - they had little in the equipment department, and needed to arm up FAST. That's where you get stuff like polearms that are essentially a sickle blade slapped on top of a staff.

A crossbow, especially one that is comparable to a handgun of that era, is a fairly complex bit of machinery - we're talking at least goat's foot or belt hook, if not cranequin. Add to that the necessary work needed to manufacture bolts (also pretty fiddly job), and there's just not enough time to do that. Firearms, however, are easy to make, as is their ammunition, and their distribution is also a lot easier (no having to worry about bolt length, and you just issue lead for balls).

This lack of equipment also contributed to war wagon tactic being invented - they needed something to make them able to stand up to heavy infantry.

Hussites did, of course, have some heavy infantry and knights - those were their leaders, after all - but their numbers were relatively small, especially compared to six Crusades they managed to comprehensively stomp to the ground.

In the end, Hussite wars contributed significantly to spread of firearms in HRE, if only because they made so bloody many of them.

3) Plate armor after hussites

As we move from Agincourt-style armor kits to things like German Gothic full plate, Greenwich armor or Maximillian armor, guns continue to evolve and become more and more of a threat. Now we can certainly say that plate armor is being developed in great part to stop firearms.

Ideas about portable light artillery are not quite lost, but put on hold a bit, at least until Gustavus Adolphus starts to use them on a massive scale.

4) What was Agincourt plate meant to stop then?

Bows and crossbows. We can see a steady increase in bow draw weight from antiquity to about this era, we have bows from migration period of max draw weight of 60 lbs (and Illias suggests weaker bows than this were in use, though that may be Homer using artistic license), whereas Mary Rose bows go to about 130-160 lbs. Crossbows also change by about 1300, and we slowly start to see stirrup crossbows (up to 120 lbs), and then goat's foot and cranequins.

Let's also not forget that coat of plates has its distant origins in the First crusade, where padded surcoats worked rather well against saracen arrows (I believe there's a period citation where the word hedgehog is used to describe knights that were otherwise alive and well). From there, we move on to people starting to add more rigid protection to it (perhaps inspired by eastern lamellar armor, monastic knightly orders being at the forefront of military tech at the time, but who knows), ending up with cuirasses.

5) Sources

Part 1 is pretty well known these days, if you watch Matt Easton on YT, you already know that. The original source for this information is Tobias Capwell.

Part 2 is tricky, sources on it are not found in English, a good chink of it comes from Rytier a jeho kral (A knight and his king) by Dvorak, but a lot of it also from a large amount of disjointed doctorates and articles about archaeological digs. Also, original sources. Those are universally in Czech.

Part 3 is at this point a summary of widely accepted facts, I'd think. Proofing by pistol and musket is fairly well documented.

Part 4, well, that's my theory. I do stand by it, however, and will continue to do so until some pesky, pesky facts destroy it.

[Vinyadan]

About random stuff and heavy vehicles, I just thought I'd share something I read a year ago or more about Leonardo's tank. The proposal made by some researchers was that the tank actually wasn't meant to follow an army or to move over terrain, but that it was meant to complement existing fortification. According to Leonardo's design, it could only rotate, but not go forward (something which has occasionally been addressed as a mistake, deliberate or not, of Leonardo). Well, the new idea brought forward is that the structure was meant to protect the people inside doing the turning and the shooting, but also to protect the people outside behind it, reloading the multiple guns. In other words, the rotation was meant to allow people to continuously reload the guns while staying out of harm's way. Any opinion on this?

[fusilier]

About random stuff and heavy vehicles, I just thought I'd share something I read a year ago or more about Leonardo's tank. The proposal made by some researchers was that the tank actually wasn't meant to follow an army or to move over terrain, but that it was meant to complement existing fortification. According to Leonardo's design, it could only rotate, but not go forward (something which has occasionally been addressed as a mistake, deliberate or not, of Leonardo). Well, the new idea brought forward is that the structure was meant to protect the people inside doing the turning and the shooting, but also to protect the people outside behind it, reloading the multiple guns. In other words, the rotation was meant to allow people to continuously reload the guns while staying out of harm's way. Any opinion on this?

So the theory is that the "tank" was actually a rotating cannon turret -- those inside could fire the forward pointing cannon, then rotate the "tank" around, and people posted outside the tank, but safely behind it, could reload the, now rear-facing, muzzleloading cannon.

That makes sense, but I'm not sure it's any more supported by the drawings than the theory that it was a moving tank. As I recall the design showed that the wheels on each side would rotate in opposite directions -- in order for it to rotate the two wheels on the *same* side would need to rotate in the *same* direction, it's the wheels on the opposite side that would rotate in the opposite direction.

There's a lot of theories about what was intended by the drawing, but as far as any one can tell it wouldn't work as drawn.

[rrgg]

Gunners in the Hussite armies remained a fairly small proportion relative to the crossbowmen as far as I know. Although they did have a fair amount of variety, from fairly small pistol caliber guns that probably did relatively little damage even if they hit, to larger guns which used a hook on the front to absorb the recoil, all the way up to various sizes of cannon.


@incanur

I don't think Williams actually conducted extensive tests on the performance of various armors at 200 yards. But given that strongest muskets have so much more force than a weaker pistol which may have been used to proof the armor and even high quality armors could vary in hardness at different points. I wouldn't be surprised if he and Barwick actually had seen men in "pistol proof" armor killed at 200 yards. The theme of soldiers apparently generally having little faith in their armor during this period seems to be a common one.

[Incanur]

Bows and crossbows. We can see a steady increase in bow draw weight from antiquity to about this era, we have bows from migration period of max draw weight of 60 lbs (and Illias suggests weaker bows than this were in use, though that may be Homer using artistic license), whereas Mary Rose bows go to about 130-160 lbs.

At best, the notion of steadily increasing draw weight from antiquity to the 15th century stands out as unproven. Various European archaeological finds suggest 100+lb wood bows. The Great Warbow has a whole chapter about this. And we have accounts from antiquity about bows piercing armor and shields, such as at Carrhae 53 BCE. A replica based on 3,000-year-old Scythian bows (http://www.atarn.org/chinese/Yanghai/Scythian_bow_ATARN.pdf) came out at 120lbs, indicating that the originals were somewhere in the 80-140lb range. And that's for bows presumably designed for cavalry use. So we have evidence for circa-1000BCE cavalry bows in the same weight range as the cavalry bows used across Asia for the next 3,000 years. Now, maybe such bows took a while to make it to Europe, but I'm skeptical.

Also, according to The Great Warbow, the Mary Rose bows averaged 150-160lbs and went up to 180lbs. (There's still some debate about these numbers, but they're widely accepted as the best current estimates.)

[snowblizz]

Someone mentioned pavises upthread and how they were made obsolete by cannon and firearms - apparently not. Pavises were still pretty popular and in wide use in that same war where Gotz lost his arm. I'm not sure when they actually did go out of style.

To be precise what I was arguing against is the idea that we could get a pavise protects against muskets kind of situation as a long term (ie not one time thing) battlefield tactic. Due to as you say ubiquity of cannon.

That said, I suddenly remember how Japanese Ashigaru would deploy bamboo "shelter", sort of pavises/cavalry obstacles in some battles. Though they used a fair bit of archery mixed in with their relatively light arquebuses. The clincher ofc is that the Japanese were not great users of artillery, either in the field or during sieges. So that in a sense would be an exception to something I just can't see happening.

[Brother Oni]

That said, I suddenly remember how Japanese Ashigaru would deploy bamboo "shelter", sort of pavises/cavalry obstacles in some battles. Though they used a fair bit of archery mixed in with their relatively light arquebuses. The clincher ofc is that the Japanese were not great users of artillery, either in the field or during sieges. So that in a sense would be an exception to something I just can't see happening.

If we're talking about this period image, then they're sheltering behind wooden shields (tate) and they've put their straw raincoats (mino) up on stands, presumably to act as an initial barrier against incoming musket fire, like a crude form of spaced armour.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Ashigaru_using_shields_(tate).jpg
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/81/6c/1c/816c1ccdd303ec00f64d0bc9395ed6f2.jpg


Depictions of some Sengoku-era battles show musketeers deployed around some sort of bamboo scaffolding, although I'm not sure how much protection they afforded:

http://www.willamette.edu/~rloftus/jfilm/naga1.jpg

Edit: I found this image, which depicts them much more like fieldworks:
https://weaponsandwarfare.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/2248153548_0638f1fc71_o.jpg

[Galloglaich]

Gunners in the Hussite armies remained a fairly small proportion relative to the crossbowmen as far as I know. Although they did have a fair amount of variety, from fairly small pistol caliber guns that probably did relatively little damage even if they hit, to larger guns which used a hook on the front to absorb the recoil, all the way up to various sizes of cannon.



I'm not sure what you mean by pistol caliber, but I don't think the Hussite firearms were particularly weak, this whole idea that medieval firearms were just for noise is another of those persistent old tropes that have been thoroughly debunked in academia but remain popular out in the slush pile.

Watch 'Boom with Slayer' to clear your pallete of this tepid notion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkbSTyT1COE

Medieval firearms basically start around the level of power of a 16 or 12 gauge shotgun shooting slugs, and move up from there. The Czechs had a firearm called a "pistala" from which we (probably) get the name pistol, but it was not a pistol nor was it pistol caliber (depending on what you mean by that term), it was smaller hand-culverin probably about 50-70 caliber on average, and certainly powerful enough to kill somebody.

Yes the Hussites had more crossbows than guns initially, but everybody had crossbows. Nor were war-wagons unheard of. What made the Czechs 'new' was their combination of the war-wagons, crossbows, firearms and cannon allowing them to fight with them in the open field. That and those nifty two-handed flails, and a very good esprit de corps...


there is a statistic which was translated by Hans Delbruck 80 years ago from the early Hussite Wars which breaks down the kit and crew for a single Hussite War-wagon, which is one gun and 10 or 12 crossbows or something like that. But that was from the 1420's - the original Hussite Wars and the Czech reprisals ('beautiful rides') which followed them went on into the 1430's. The Czech Hussites were being used as mercenaries all over Europe from that point onward from the 1440's - 1460's and were using their same type of kit (guns, war wagons etc.) the whole time. By the middle of the 15th Century they had plenty of guns.

They also had more sophisticated guns that most everyone else, including some of the earliest use of the serpentine and the touch hole (as opposed to the more primitive and risky technique of touching down the barrel) and may have been the first to use true match-locks.

http://www.hotelsax.cz/files/hotel/prague/Prague_monuments/fish-eye-view-of-old-town-square-in-prague-hd-wallpaper-579044.jpg

http://www.book-travel-prague.com/images/_f/praha/prague-astronomical-clock.jpg

I also think the "Czech Hussites were poor peasant rabble" thing is taken a bit too far. Some of them were poor peasants, the most radical ones especially, but people tend to forget about the big, rich, sophisticated Czech cities like Prague, and Prague - the moderate faction based there, is who ultimately won the power-struggle within the Hussite movement. Prague was one of the wealthiest and most sophisticated cities in Europe, had one of the best Universities and well developed craft industries including iron and steel workers. I'm sure most of the guns, cannon and a lot of the other technical innovations were coming from Prague and the other Hussite controlled towns.

Bohemia in general was a fairly wealthy and urbanized area and even baseline Czech peasants weren't the kind of destitute Monty Python rabble people seem to assume. They also had plenty of kit as loot after that first Crusade was defeated, and got more with every subsequent failed attempt by the Catholics to crush them.


The Hussite Wars also resumed in the 1460's when Matthias Corvinus rather opportunistically took up the call from the Popes for another Crusade. Though he didn't fail as miserably as the first Hussite Crusades he failed to take any land from the Hussites, only "capturing" friendly (Catholic) territory in Silesia and Moravia, and what kept him from going into Bohemia proper was apparently still the war-wagons. Czech mercenaries were also using War-Wagons all through the second half of the 15th Century in what is now Slovakia, in Hungary proper (against the Ottomans among others), in Poland in the 13 Years War and other conflicts, and in what is now Ukraine against the Mongols. In fact the Cossacks copied the Czech war-wagon (and war-boat) tactics and used them with great success against the Mongols and Ottomans. As did the Muscovites in their own way.

G

[Martin Greywolf]

1) Ancient bows of high draw weights and Mary Rose

I'm not going to believe this until I see some good studies, so far, all of them were rather lackluster. As for the scythian bow replica, the replica paper itself admits it's not really a replica, being made from different materials, adn that's not even going into the pretty likely theory that scythina bows were unusually strong for their era anyway.

Only good study I saw of a viking-era bow put it at about 90 lbs at most.

As for Mary Rose warbows, last paper I read from Mary Rose researchers estimated draw weights to be mostly in 140 lbs, with few being in the 160 and one example of a 180 lbs bow. All of these are significantly higher than any earlier bow.


2) Hussites, guns and crossbows

As Galloglaich pointed out, at the outbreak of Hussite wars, there were more crossbows and a lot of people without proper equipment. To bridge this gap, Hussites had to ramp up production of all weapons, and guns became one of the top choices, because they were relatively easy to manufacture. I didn't read translation he mentions, but my source (J. Drudik: Husitske vojenstvi [Hussite warfare]) gives early hussite war wagon crew as follows: 4 halberdiers (well, using sudlice, a Hussite version of halberd, more or less), 4 flailmen (using two-handed blunt weapons, be they maces or bohemian flails), 6 crossbowmen, 2 pavaismen (large pavaises and swords) and 2 handgunners. This is not accounting for cannon crews that were definitely attached to war wagons (and were able to shoot while wagons were in motion).

As for the power of their guns, well, it was enough to kill a guy. Effective range wasn't small because of lack of power, but because of accuracy and less than stellar projectile aerodynamics. Only plate armor would protect you from the small handguns (pistala, hakovnice), how well it did at point-blank range is something I haven't seen tested.


3) Hussites as ragtag bunch of misfits

Honestly, I think portraying Hussites as farmers isn't all that wrong. Cities like Prague or Brno did have your standard heavy infantry and cavalry contingents, but it wasn't enough. Once the uprising broke out, a lot of farmers joined in. Now, they weren't poor farmers (not all of them), but they had zero military experience and no real equipment to speak of (pitchforks, long knives, occasional polearm).

Since Hussites needed to arm them fast, they cut corners and used what tools were available, and let quality slide more often than not. This is apparent when you look at their actual weapons, a lot of them are rather crudely made. Once loot was acquired, they switched to better weapons - this was one of the reasons why they had very, very strict system for loot redistribution.

Comparing them to the Pilgrim's Crusade is pretty accurate, the difference being that Hussites had much, much better commanders and were therefore able to organize themselves into an effective fighting force.

[snowblizz]

If we're talking about this period image, then they're sheltering behind wooden shields (tate) and they've put their straw raincoats (mino) up on stands, presumably to act as an initial barrier against incoming musket fire, like a crude form of spaced armour.

That and others like it, with and witout the raincoats. I've seen pictures of the wooden shields with firing slits on them even.

I was unfortuantely lumping two different things together while typing, but I meant the shields and separate anti-cavalry stuff as e.g. used at Nagashino. Don't know how substantial the latter were, some siege depictions have the attackers firing from behind pretty much palisades.

[rrgg]

I'm not sure what you mean by pistol caliber, but I don't think the Hussite firearms were particularly weak, this whole idea that medieval firearms were just for noise is another of those persistent old tropes that have been thoroughly debunked in academia but remain popular out in the slush pile.

By pistol caliber I mean that some handguns only had about a half-inch bore.

I don't think that early firearms were just for noise, and I don't think that they were only useful at short ranges either. But many early gun designs wouldn't have been nearly quite as powerful as the later ones. One of Alan Williams tests involved three replica early handguns, one 5 in. long, one 10 in. long, and one that was 15 in. long. The two shorter weapons had an average muzzle velocity of only around 180 m/s with a lead ball whether with wet or dry-mixed powder. With the serpentine powder especially the velocity varied considerably. The 15 inch gun was actually able to reach a muzzle velocity of 560 m/s which is pretty considerable, but it seems that some designs wouldn't have packed that much punch.

[MrZJunior]

Speaking of war elephants, the Nationalist Army was using elephants as late as 1952 in Taiwan as beasts of burden.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Wang

I would bet that some were used in a similar fashion in the Cambodian war and other such conflicts.

[Tobtor]

1) Ancient bows of high draw weights and Mary Rose

I'm not going to believe this until I see some good studies, so far, all of them were rather lackluster. As for the scythian bow replica, the replica paper itself admits it's not really a replica, being made from different materials, adn that's not even going into the pretty likely theory that scythina bows were unusually strong for their era anyway.

Only good study I saw of a viking-era bow put it at about 90 lbs at most.

As for Mary Rose warbows, last paper I read from Mary Rose researchers estimated draw weights to be mostly in 140 lbs, with few being in the 160 and one example of a 180 lbs bow. All of these are significantly higher than any earlier bow.



I generally agree with Martin on this one.

The iron age bog bows from Denmark (200-500AD) are from 55-70 pounds, Viking Age bows (the few we have, such as Hedeby) 70-90 pounds. I havnt seen many good studies from the period between 11th century and Mary Rose (16th century). This article (http://www.currentmiddleages.org/artsci/docs/Champ_Bane_Archery-Testing.pdf) (which have been linked before) have a draw weight of 80-100pounds (with a single weaker example). Now they might be reconstructed/estimated slightly low, so I am not against adding 10-20 pounds to that.

Regarding the Mary Rose:correct me if I am wrong, but as I remember the great warbow uses a fixed arrow length which is longer than the actual average from Mary Rose. This would overestimate the draw weight, as pulling the same bow 26 inch or 33 inch (Mary Rose variability) gives very different results. If the stronger bows at Mary Rose where used with the shorter arrows the bows "spread" of power would be smaller (which I assume would be preferably, as you would want your archers to have comparable range).

There is some debate in general of the estimates on the Mary Rose bows, with "normal" bows either at 100-120 or 120-140pounds. Both estimates fit the suggestion that the bows grew more powerful during the medieval period.

About ancient bows and bows from other regions: I simply don't know enough.

[Sapphire Guard]

Hi folks, hope this is the right place for this. Got a question if someone's interested.

A medium sized armoured transport truck has to move through hostile territory. 8-10 crew members, pretty much expecting an attack from reasonably well equipped infantry, possibility of armour or attack helicopters if it's unlucky. If there is an attack, no support will get there in time to help. What kind of gear does that truck carry, to do as much damage as possible to the enemy forces? Assume money no object, but space is, their gear has to fit in that one truck, they can't suddenly break out a half dozen tanks or a fifty foot long piece of artillery. The crew does want to escape, but if that isn't an option they'll take doing as much damage as they can. Any thoughts?

[JustSomeGuy]

Rgarding pike formations, is there any credibility in standing off from them (perhaps behind your own shield wall) and throwing either long chains (or chain-effect replacements) or watermelon style objects (heavyish and easily impaled upon spearpoint) to weigh down and otherwise inhibit useful weilding of the pikes?

[Clistenes]

The origin of the musket isn't really clear. I think the Spanish are still generally credited with first using the musket in large numbers in 1521 but long barreled firearms with a musket caliber or larger had been around for almost 100 years at that point. They were generally limited to wall defense and ranged anywhere from large handgun to small cannon. There are plenty of examples of hook guns with a 25 mm or 35 mm bore and even arquebuses that occasionally got pretty large.

I'm less familiar with the specifics of Ottoman weapons but they were experimenting with various sizes of firearm at the same time. As I understand it by the mid 16th century the janissaries would be armed with something like several thousand arquebus caliber weapons and then one thousand "trench guns"

The Spaniards didn't create arquebusses and muskets, those had been slowly evolving for some time before 1521, but they were the first to effectively use them in the field. There existed crude musket-like wall guns before they were taken to the field, and some pretty heavy guns were used by soldiers mixed among the pike blocks, but they were perceived as mere support weapons.

During the Italian Wars between Spain and France, France had the best medieval-style army, with lots of heavy cavalry, crossbowmen and pikemen, while the Spaniards had mostly light cavalry and light infantry, fit for mountain warfare against the Moors, but not for direct clashes.

King Fernando tried to fight the French face to face (he felt it would be shameful to do otherwise when fighting a fellow Christian king), and had his ass handed to him. When Fernando left Italy and came back to Spain, he left Don Gonzalo de Córdoba, as chief in command. Don Gonzalo changed the strategy, using the advantages of the Spaniards in mountain warfare, and reorganized the army using a combination of pikes, guns and sword-and-board inspired on the Roman army so his light infantry could face the French army on the field and win.

So basically, guns were introduced as a kludge to try to balance a disadvantage, and as a replacement for roman pila, vereti and slings. It just happened that the kludge worked very well thanks to Don Gonzalo's tactical genius.

[Vinyadan]

This looks like a horrid situation to me. I guess I'd invest into ways not to be detected, have an antimissile turret in case of choppers or other missile launchers, and manpads against air. A heavy cannon probably would also help against armour, but I think you'd be generally screwed.

Also, some sort of reactive armour or defence against explosive rounds from recoilless guns.

[Storm Bringer]

Hi folks, hope this is the right place for this. Got a question if someone's interested.

A medium sized armoured transport truck has to move through hostile territory. 8-10 crew members, pretty much expecting an attack from reasonably well equipped infantry, possibility of armour or attack helicopters if it's unlucky. If there is an attack, no support will get there in time to help. What kind of gear does that truck carry, to do as much damage as possible to the enemy forces? Assume money no object, but space is, their gear has to fit in that one truck, they can't suddenly break out a half dozen tanks or a fifty foot long piece of artillery. The crew does want to escape, but if that isn't an option they'll take doing as much damage as they can. Any thoughts?


hey. Yes, this is a suitable place to ask such a question.


My immediate response is "as much TNT as you can fit in, and good life insurance for the crew", but that's not really very helpful. the next one is "A radio and a trained forward air controller and a bomber with GPS bombs overhead", which is only really slightly more helpful.

its somewhat hard to say what modern forces would do in the situation presented, because modern military forces wouldn't operated in a manner that would lead to the scenario presented. They would by preference route around the known dangers (since killing the enemy is only ever a means to complete a mission, and if the job is "get supplies form A to B", then avoided ambushes is the simplest way to complete the mission). If they cant avoid the danger area, they would send several vehicles (normally 2-3 at a minimum), with a escort, and split the cargo between the transports (so that the loss of one doesn't stop the whole delivery). that escort could included tanks or attack helicopters if the threat level was high enough.

Also, "reasonably well equipped infantry" would normally have access to things like purpose made AT mines, guided missile systems and other anti vehicle weapons that would be able to damage or immobilise anything short of a actual Main Battle Tank (and even then stand a good chance of blowing a track off). Assuming they have the time and skill to set up a half-decent ambush, they could pretty much guarantee that they'd stop that lone truck dead in its tracks. A well placed mine or missile hit would wreck a axel, bringing the truck to a halt in a roughly predictable area, which could then be covered by 2 or 3 RPG and MG teams and turned into a kill zone, which would clean up anyone who wasn't injured in the crash pretty nicely.

If a tank or attack helicopter is involved, the frist thing the truck crew will know about the attack is when their truck is destroyed by the first round/missle fired (I think the 1st round hit ratio is about 90% these days for tanks these days).


Now, the best way a lone truck can damage the attackers is with a radio, and using that to call in bigger systems like artillery or fast air (both of which would, normally, be pre-sited to cover such a high threat environment as the one your talking about).

failing that, you can put a drone up over the truck, which could be controlled by someone in the truck and given then "eyes in the sky" and let them see around blind bends and such, and load up on things like 50 cal machine guns or 40mm automatic grenade launchers, which you would then fire back at the attackers. not much point in anything heavier, as they can deal with anything less than a tank, and a tank will kill you quickly enough that its not worth mounting defence against it on the vehicle.

the crew would have their regular rifles, body armour and such, and would bail out when the truck is immobilised. they would try and get away form the truck fast once on foot (it draws fire), but only as far as the nearest defensible cover, which they would try and hold as long as possible (to await rescue). again, that is based on what a modern frist world army would do, but modern armies don't normally find themselves in the position you discibed.

[MrZJunior]

Hi folks, hope this is the right place for this. Got a question if someone's interested.

A medium sized armoured transport truck has to move through hostile territory. 8-10 crew members, pretty much expecting an attack from reasonably well equipped infantry, possibility of armour or attack helicopters if it's unlucky. If there is an attack, no support will get there in time to help. What kind of gear does that truck carry, to do as much damage as possible to the enemy forces? Assume money no object, but space is, their gear has to fit in that one truck, they can't suddenly break out a half dozen tanks or a fifty foot long piece of artillery. The crew does want to escape, but if that isn't an option they'll take doing as much damage as they can. Any thoughts?

You could fit a very powerful nuke in that truck if you are willing to go the looney route.

[snowblizz]

Rgarding pike formations, is there any credibility in standing off from them (perhaps behind your own shield wall) and throwing either long chains (or chain-effect replacements) or watermelon style objects (heavyish and easily impaled upon spearpoint) to weigh down and otherwise inhibit useful weilding of the pikes?

Not really. Pike blocks are accompanied by missileweapon armed troops, and could well advance with pikes. The only way to stand off with pikes is to outrange them (ie missile weapons) or be faster say cavalry and non-formation lighter troops. Depending if whick piekformations they would often be supported with small troops of troops better equipped for melee, say zweihänders (used to try and break up enemy pike) and halberdiers/billmen, targetiers and such.

What are you trying to accomplish exactly? Even getting a watermelon on the pike wouldn't exactly inhibit it's use as eg front rank would be bracing pike into ground anyway, and the shaft likely flexes enough to allow a weight at the tip to slide off or indeed slide down the shaft rendering itself moot.

Pike blocks don't stand around for no reason really, and are only a part of an integral "system" of supporting troops, which need to be taken into account.

[Mr Beer]

Sounds like a Monty Python sketch:

"Ready! Aim! Fire!"

*watermelons fly onto the pike formation*
*horrified screaming from the defenders*
[cue slow motion]
[cue plaintive piano score]
*dirt-faced peasant sees slow-mo approaching melon, shakes his head in terrified denial as it impales onto his pike*
*another man is struck by pieces of melon and slowly crashes down to the muddy field to increasingly sad piano*
*a third scruffy pleb sees his best friend covered with red melon juice amid the collapsing formation*

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

[JustSomeGuy]

The idea is that just before engaging with the pikemen, you put enough (ie. not much, all things considered, given the long lever/moment arm) mass on the pikes to weigh them down before trampling over them in a heroic charge to victory, tea and medals.

The chain/watermelon skit is just ways of keeping the mass on the pikes instead of falling off, feel free to consider alternative designs to achieve same effect

[Pauly]

Rgarding pike formations, is there any credibility in standing off from them (perhaps behind your own shield wall) and throwing either long chains (or chain-effect replacements) or watermelon style objects (heavyish and easily impaled upon spearpoint) to weigh down and otherwise inhibit useful weilding of the pikes?

There's nothing in the Renaissance era. The practical problem is that your throwing range on chains or similar objects is maybe 5 meters at best and the pikes aren't standing still waiting to be entangled. Also what's to stop the pikes being kept raised and only lowering them when they are right before impact?

When you go back to the ancient Romans -v- Macedonians then the Roman pila were used to weigh down the Macedonian shields and thus disrupt the pike phalanx.

[Incanur]

Most of the Mary Rose arrows allowed for a 30-inch draw or a 28-inch draw, though some were indeed shorter. Again, the Mary Rose bows averaged 150-160lbs according to The Great Warbow. Some formal and informal scholars consider this estimate too high, while a few consider it too low. (They didn't use Italian yew for the reconstructions that confirmed the computer model.)

The debate about the shortbow (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jmedhist.2011.06.002?src=recsys) does continue. If Europeans were mainly using 4ft or so bows made from wood alone before the 14th century, that would make their bows remarkably inferior to some or many of their Asian counterparts. An early 8th-century Chinese-region military exam required shooting a 167lb bow at 105 paces. Now, presumably only the better archers actually managed this standard. And exams from the 11th century and 13th century required only slightly lower draw weights.

Writing in the 6th century, Procopius claimed the Roman soldiers of that era drew stiff bows while their Persians opponents drew softer bows that they shot faster. Unless the Persians were using super weak bows, the Roman bows in question must have been fairly powerful.

I tend to think strong archers would have used powerful bows if such bows were available, but perhaps the bowmaking industry was so underdeveloped in Europe for much of the medieval period that few if any powerful bows were around.

[Brother Oni]

They would by preference route around the known dangers (since killing the enemy is only ever a means to complete a mission, and if the job is "get supplies form A to B", then avoided ambushes is the simplest way to complete the mission)

From what I've read, it also depends on the mentality of the force being ambushed. There were reports from Iraq that generally, a US Army convoy would attempt to break free of the ambush and get the hell out of there, while a USMC convoy would dismount to go kill the enemy.

[snowblizz]

The idea is that just before engaging with the pikemen, you put enough (ie. not much, all things considered, given the long lever/moment arm) mass on the pikes to weigh them down before trampling over them in a heroic charge to victory, tea and medals.

The chain/watermelon skit is just ways of keeping the mass on the pikes instead of falling off, feel free to consider alternative designs to achieve same effect

There's just no way that'd do any good. As Pauly said your throwing range means you'll be in charge range for the pike block anyway.
Furthermore, at best you might be able to affect ranks 1, 2 and maaaybe 3. Thy can drop pikes, draw sidearms and the 3-6 ranks after that will be able to lower pikes and you are back to square 1 (ooh, uninteded pun). A well drilled pike unit would be able to retire those guys to the back even (around or even through the unit). That's ignoring the very real possibiltiy of the pike supporting missile troops and closecombat infantry whose job is precisely to ensure messing with pikes won't let you break up a formation. Also, there's no trampling a pikeblock who has not already lost cohesion or been disrupted somehow.

A more realistic way, would be how it was actually done. A Forlorne Hope of armoured closecombat fighters, Landsknechts used armoured twohander guys, Spanish went with targetiers and others used halber/billmen. Depending a bit on time and place. Also, shooting the thing up, the reason closecombat cavalry started using pistols and calivers.

[Tobtor]

Most of the Mary Rose arrows allowed for a 30-inch draw or a 28-inch draw, though some were indeed shorter. Again, the Mary Rose bows averaged 150-160lbs according to The Great Warbow. Some formal and informal scholars consider this estimate too high, while a few consider it too low. (They didn't use Italian yew for the reconstructions that confirmed the computer model.)

When reconstructing 150-160 I remember them using 30inch or even 32 inch (that is the arrow-lenght they frequently use as comparison). So while I am in no doubt the bows pulls 150lbs at 32 inch, my contention is that if you use 28 inch, that translate to a lot less power....


The debate about the shortbow (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jmedhist.2011.06.002?src=recsys) does continue. If Europeans were mainly using 4ft or so bows made from wood alone before the 14th century, that would make their bows remarkably inferior to some or many of their Asian counterparts.

If you take a longbow and shorten it the pull-weight goes up. This might seem counter-intuitive, but it is the truth even a few inches makes a great difference. So the length of the bow is not in itself a direct indicator of draw weight.

There are however two reasons to go for longer bows: 1. Shorter bows puts greater stress on every point, making it more likely to snap. 2. Longer bow staves (in self-bows, such as shortbows and longbows) give a more smooth release increasing both accuracy and improves energy transfer.

Secondly: who said anything about 4 feet European bows? The Hedeby bow was 191cm (so above 6 feet). I think the around 30 bows with a certain length from iron age bog finds are from 175-190, with the majority around 185 cm (just about 6 feet). When going back to the mesolithic, the bows are 160cm (three cases between 157-160cm). So well above 5 feet. These are however flatbows where the strength is differently distributed and made of elm and not yew.

So 6-6.5feet bows can easily be "only" 60-80 pounds.


An early 8th-century Chinese-region military exam required shooting a 167lb bow at 105 paces. Now, presumably only the better archers actually managed this standard. And exams from the 11th century and 13th century required only slightly lower draw weights.

Are we talking about the exams also quoted here (http://www.manchuarchery.org/historical-draw-weights-qing-bows)? In the same exams where they had to "handle" (whatever that means) a 70kilo (140pounds) pole weapon? It does seem these where test more to show the limits of the persons, not emulate how actual warfare was fought. According to wikipedia a european pike weiged around 2.5-6 kilo, and a Sarissa (Macedonian pike) 5.5-6.5kilo. Meanwhile chinese warriors apparently used some ten times the strength....

However I did see the machu-archery page, and my impression from it was that yes, very strong bows (150+lbs) did exist. But the most solid eveidence suggest that bows around 90-120lbs where more common.

"A 1736 report found that of 3,200 troops at the Hangzhou garrison about 2,200 were able to draw bows of strengths six to ten [80-133], and 80 could handle bow strengths of eleven to thirteen [147-173 pounds]… …In comparison, the 500 troops at the small Dezhou garrison acquitted themselves with honor, all of them being able to take a five-strength bow [67 pounds], 203 a six-strength [80 pounds], 137 a seven *strength [93 pounds], and 85 a ten-strength bow [133 pounds]."

About actual finds:
"Among them a 100 and a 147 pound bow that both belonged to the Kangxi emperor and a 93 pound bow that had belonged to the Qianlong emperor (ruled 1736-1796). Apart from that, many Manchu bows I examined in various private and museum collections with dimensions that put them well in the 100 pound range. Some old bows that were strung up by bow maker Wen Chieh Huang turned out to be between 70 and 160 pounds."

Now this is of course later periods, which mean more reliable evidence for the strenght, but also some issues of different historical contexts etc. But it indicates that some didn't even went past 80pounds, while the majority was in the 80-130range, and very few above that.

It goes on to mention what a champion then pulled (240lbs aparently). To me thats like using Usain Bolt or olympic spear-throwers to model running speeds and spear-distances.



(They didn't use Italian yew for the reconstructions that confirmed the computer model.)

A note: figuring out which yew to use for reconstruction is more difficult than they assume. The climate was different, and might mean different growing conditions.

The reconstruction on Viking age bows I have seen are made of Danish growing yew (which presumably is is used back then, but perhaps slower growing-giving more strength).



Writing in the 6th century, Procopius claimed the Roman soldiers of that era drew stiff bows while their Persians opponents drew softer bows that they shot faster. Unless the Persians were using super weak bows, the Roman bows in question must have been fairly powerful.

I don't know much about Roman or Persian bows, but what some random author states is not central to me. Actual bows are, but that is the archaeologist in me.

I am sure there where powerful bows in antiquity (also bows in the 100pound range and above). However it does seem looking at the medieval period (and Iron Age Northern Europe), Martins stance hold true: from 60-70lbs in the 3rd century, to 70-90lbs in the 10th, to 90-120 in 11-15th, and finally 100-140 at the Mary Rose.


I tend to think strong archers would have used powerful bows if such bows were available, but perhaps the bowmaking industry was so underdeveloped in Europe for much of the medieval period that few if any powerful bows were around.

I am sure they did use powerful bows in the medieval period, however I consider a 90-100 pounds bow powerful, and before that (iron age) you had fewer people in heavy armour (or at least complete sets), which favours faster and lighter bows. What armour the Romans (for heavy armour users in the period) used were more vulnerable to the arrow going around the armour than penetrating, so 10 arrows at 60lbs is more deadly than 8 at 90lbs.

Note that even a 50lbs bow can kill an unarmoured man.

[Beleriphon]

Hi folks, hope this is the right place for this. Got a question if someone's interested.

A medium sized armoured transport truck has to move through hostile territory. 8-10 crew members, pretty much expecting an attack from reasonably well equipped infantry, possibility of armour or attack helicopters if it's unlucky. If there is an attack, no support will get there in time to help. What kind of gear does that truck carry, to do as much damage as possible to the enemy forces? Assume money no object, but space is, their gear has to fit in that one truck, they can't suddenly break out a half dozen tanks or a fifty foot long piece of artillery. The crew does want to escape, but if that isn't an option they'll take doing as much damage as they can. Any thoughts?

Define medium sized? Are talking 53-foot trailer style big rig, a 10-foot cub van, or a 26-foot moving truck? Does the transport section separate from the cab?

Because if it a 26-foot moving van, which is about as big as a transport vehicle gets before we start dealing with separate cab and trailer setups, that thing can store a butt ton of missile launchers/rpgs which are fantastic for taking out light armour, and marginally okay for attack choppers if we don't have any kind of tracking on the missiles. If we'r dealing with tanks we don't even necessarily have to armour the cube section since most tank rounds will fly right through the van without detonating, or really doing much of anything. If we're talking forces armed with RPGs, then we have a problem since they a designed to punch through an unarmoured covered vehicle and explode inside.

Mind you, if budget isn't an issue, just turn into a moving van version of The Beast (http://www.leftlanenews.com/the-beast-10-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-presidents-limo.html) (i.e The Presidential limo) which is reported to be able to withstand multiple RPG rounds, has windows that are something like five inches thick, and the whole thing weighs around 10-tons. If you scale that thing up to include say a tank transmission and something like the turnbine engine in an M1 Abrams rather an a commercial transmission and truck engine you'd have something pretty formidable.

[Spiryt]

There are however two reasons to go for longer bows: 1. Shorter bows puts greater stress on every point, making it more likely to snap. 2. Longer bow staves (in self-bows, such as shortbows and longbows) give a more smooth release increasing both accuracy and improves energy transfer.


Main reason to go for long bows is that without siyah or similar arm end shaping, one quickly get's very large angles between string and a bow. And that provides terrrible leverage, and amount of energy stored nosedives.

If one has bow construction that can handle being both short and correctly shaped, being short has it's merits. Lessened weight is probably the main factor.

AFAIR, Korean reflexive bows were often very short (~90cm) and wickedly quick as a result?

[Incanur]

When reconstructing 150-160 I remember them using 30inch or even 32 inch (that is the arrow-lenght they frequently use as comparison). So while I am in no doubt the bows pulls 150lbs at 32 inch, my contention is that if you use 28 inch, that translate to a lot less power....

The bow they tested was 150lb at 32in if I recall correctly, but they used a 30in draw for the Mary Rose estimate.


Secondly: who said anything about 4 feet European bows?

See the Clifford J. Rodgers (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jmedhist.2011.06.002?src=recsys) article I linked.


Are we talking about the exams also quoted here (http://www.manchuarchery.org/historical-draw-weights-qing-bows)?

Well, the Qing-era examinations would be the descendants of the 8th-century, 11th-century, and 13th-century examinations I mentioned. Many of Qing records come from the 19th century, so over a thousand years the first example. And the 8th-century examination requiring shooting thirty shots with a 167lb bow at 105 paces, according to Stephen Selby's Chinese Archery.


In the same exams where they had to "handle" (whatever that means) a 70kilo (140pounds) pole weapon? It does seem these where test more to show the limits of the persons, not emulate how actual warfare was fought. According to wikipedia a european pike weiged around 2.5-6 kilo, and a Sarissa (Macedonian pike) 5.5-6.5kilo. Meanwhile chinese warriors apparently used some ten times the strength....

Those super-heavy polearms were obviously only for examination purposes, yes. Qing officiers probably didn't fight with the 160+lbs they passed the drawing test with, especially not a horseback. But again, the 8th-century test required shooting many arrows with 167lb weapon (and hitting too, I think). If you can shoot thirty arrows with a bow and hit a target at 105 paces, you can probably use that bow on the battlefield.


"A 1736 report found that of 3,200 troops at the Hangzhou garrison about 2,200 were able to draw bows of strengths six to ten [80-133], and 80 could handle bow strengths of eleven to thirteen [147-173 pounds]… …In comparison, the 500 troops at the small Dezhou garrison acquitted themselves with honor, all of them being able to take a five-strength bow [67 pounds], 203 a six-strength [80 pounds], 137 a seven *strength [93 pounds], and 85 a ten-strength bow [133 pounds]."

Note that those were both garrisons away from the front lines. They soldiers in question didn't have to fight frequently, if ever.


Now this is of course later periods, which mean more reliable evidence for the strenght, but also some issues of different historical contexts etc. But it indicates that some didn't even went past 80pounds, while the majority was in the 80-130range, and very few above that.

As far as later period evidence goes, the late-Ming text T'ien-Kung K'ai-Wu by Sung Ying-Hsing (or Yingxing Song, depending on transliteration scheme) says that a strong bow had a draw weight of 120 catties (159lbs). It appears in English as Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century. Depending on the translation, the average archer draws 127-143lbs (1966 E-tu Zen Sun and Shiou-chuan Sun translation) or lower strength bows pull 110-126lb (Timo Nieminen's translation (https://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=292459)). And an 80lb bow is for weak archers and/or good enough for all.


I don't know much about Roman or Persian bows, but what some random author states is not central to me. Actual bows are, but that is the archaeologist in me.

The European finds before they Mary Rose are sketchy at best. I'm interested in both textual and archaeological evidence.


I am sure there where powerful bows in antiquity (also bows in the 100pound range and above). However it does seem looking at the medieval period (and Iron Age Northern Europe), Martins stance hold true: from 60-70lbs in the 3rd century, to 70-90lbs in the 10th, to 90-120 in 11-15th, and finally 100-140 at the Mary Rose.

If so, that's more evidence of the superiority of Chinese-region missile weapons before the 15th century. And your numbers for the Mary Rose are probably wrong, as discussed above: 100-180lbs, with 150-160lbs being average. And folks keep on arguing about the exact draw weight of the Hedeby bow, with estimates going as high as 130lbs (https://books.google.com/books?id=MCQzDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT191&dq=viking+bow+draw+weight&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiXqp2QmdbPAhUi0IMKHcUKC6MQ6AEIHDAA#v=on epage&q=viking%20bow%20draw%20weight&f=false). And this Ballinderry bow replica (http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/reply/509299/Ballinderry-replica#.V_6qsOArLIV) draws 140-150lbs at 30 inches. See this thread (https://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=306494) for further discussion on the matter of draw weights.

[Sapphire Guard]

Thanks everyone.


Define medium sized? Are talking 53-foot trailer style big rig, a 10-foot cub van, or a 26-foot moving truck? Does the transport section separate from the cab?

Because if it a 26-foot moving van, which is about as big as a transport vehicle gets before we start dealing with separate cab and trailer setups, that thing can store a butt ton of missile launchers/rpgs which are fantastic for taking out light armour, and marginally okay for attack choppers if we don't have any kind of tracking on the missiles. If we'r dealing with tanks we don't even necessarily have to armour the cube section since most tank rounds will fly right through the van without detonating, or really doing much of anything. If we're talking forces armed with RPGs, then we have a problem since they a designed to punch through an unarmoured covered vehicle and explode inside.


The transport section doesn't detach, so this sounds about right.

There's a complicated backstory to all this, but the point is meant to a be a hopeless fight that sparks an investigation when someone wonders "That was one stupid truck! Why was there such a big fight?"

[Mike_G]

The truck is doomed. There's a reason that transports travel through dangerous territory in escorted convoys.

If they are facing a modern enemy, any modern force has plenty of anti tank weapons that would kill any truck. TOW or Javelin or even earlier, weaker stuff like the Dragon should kill any transport. Even if they don't have a TOW, stuff like RPGs are ubiquitous and would kill most transports and immobilize anything it couldn't kill.

Even if you set the enemy back a few tech levels, simple IEDs or older, obsolete mines set on the road will still immobilize the truck. Or even go really low tech and dig a trench in the road and cover it with a tarp and shovel some dirt over it, or drop a tree across the road right after a sharp turn, then shoot the crew when they get out to move the obstacle.

You could be a little more believable with a light armored vehicle doing reconnaissance that runs into a bigger enemy force than expected, since a LAV is expected to get in fights and is used to scout in enemy territory. A straight up transport, not so much.


This (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAV-25) could work. This (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP) is stretching it.

Anything lighter is totally screwed.

[Gnoman]

If we'r dealing with tanks we don't even necessarily have to armour the cube section since most tank rounds will fly right through the van without detonating, or really doing much of anything. If we're talking forces armed with RPGs, then we have a problem since they a designed to punch through an unarmoured covered vehicle and explode inside.

Every tank gun on the planet can fire HEAT rounds, and every tank on the planet carries them. These rounds will detonate upon hitting any hard surface, and will turn any vehicle with light or no armor into a flaming wreck.

[Max_Killjoy]

Every tank gun on the planet can fire HEAT rounds, and every tank on the planet carries them. These rounds will detonate upon hitting any hard surface, and will turn any vehicle with light or no armor into a flaming wreck.

And a KE round through the engine will still ruin the engine.

[rrgg]

Every tank gun on the planet can fire HEAT rounds, and every tank on the planet carries them. These rounds will detonate upon hitting any hard surface, and will turn any vehicle with light or no armor into a flaming wreck.

Tell that to Warthunder.

[Pauly]

Tell that to Warthunder.

Warthunder is WW2 tech. That was a problem back then, but modern rounds have solved that problem。

[Brother Oni]

And a KE round through the engine will still ruin the engine.

A tank KE shell would kill the occupants if it passed through the crew compartment.

I heard stories from during the first Gulf War of Challenger IIs killing Iraqi T-72s on the first hit with APFSDS with the shell killing the crew with the shockwave as it travelled at supersonic speeds through the crew compartment. The problem they had was that the shell was over-penetrating so the Chally crews didn't get some sort of indication that the enemy tank was destroyed, so they shot it again with APFSDS with much the same effect as the first time.

They had to shoot the enemy tank a third time with HE/HEAT before it exploded satisfactorily.

[Martin Greywolf]

Here's an important thing about bow draw weights - you want a bow to have as low a draw weight as possible, not as high as you can draw.

There are people around today who hunt with bows, and they almost universally say that 60 lbs bow will send an arrow through a deer, bones or not. Having heavier bow accomplishes nothing in this case. Humans wearing padded and metal armor are somewhat tougher to shoot through, so heavy bows in warfare do make sense, thing is, you don't want to have heavier bows than you absolutely need.

So, if you're in ancient Greece and people tend to wear lighter armor or armor with lots of gaps an arrow can get through, using light draw weights (that is, 60-90 lbs) is the sensible thing to do.

From what we see of bows in Europe, it seems that anti-chain mail bows were in the 90-120 lbs range, which would incidentally fit well with Partian and Scythian bows. Once Europeans started to use more protection (padded surcoats, coat-of-plates, plate armor), bow draw weight responded accordingly and you have Mary Rose draw weights of 120-160 lbs (the 180 lbs estimate was, to my knowledge, just one bow).

You may say that I'm making a circular argument, but, well, not really. Armor and weapons don't exist in a vacuum, they respond to each other. A guy wears chain mail to be protected from arrows, so his enemies use slightly stronger bows, so the guy adds protection, so they make even stronger bows, he decides that adding more weight would slow him down, so he may as well loose some of the kit to move more freely (it doesn't work all that well against arrows anyway), so his enemies adopt lighter bows.

As the time went on, both availability and protective value of armor (in Europe, and on a large time scale, fall of Rome did mess things up, as did the Black Death) increased, and from what we see, so did the bow draw weight.

Unless we manage to find a bow that was old, used in warfare (most found bows in Europe, really, but not necessarily China) and heavier than what the period would suggest, we can say that yes, draw weight did increase.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Apologies for my ignorance on this, but wouldn't a heavier draw give the bow a longer range?

[Kiero]

From what I've read of antiquity (primarily the Hellenistic/Roman era, but stretching back to the Classical too), western bows were weaker than eastern ones. The bow just wasn't an important part of warfare in the western Mediterranean, all the powerful bows came from the steppe and Iran eastwards. Even when the Romans featured archer auxiliaries, they were men from the eastern provinces who used a bow routinely, not westerners trained in its use.

[Max_Killjoy]

Tell that to Warthunder.

That game has so many issues that HEAT is just the tip of the iceberg.

[rrgg]

Apologies for my ignorance on this, but wouldn't a heavier draw give the bow a longer range?

Generally yes. But not always. For maximum range a bow needs to shoot an arrow really fast and more stored energy usually helps with that, but if the bow is made stronger by making the arms much thicker and heavier then it might actually cast much slower with a really light arrow (that's if it doesn't cause the arrow to snap). This is why eastern composite bows tend to differentiate between war bows designed to shoot heavy arrows with a lot of force and flight bows designed to shoot a light weight arrow with a lot of speed. With wooden self bows, as someone pointed out, decreasing the length of the bow will actually increase the draw weight while decreasing the weight of the arms. It's much less efficient at storing energy overall, but as I understand it there are situations where a shortbow actually can achieve a faster cast than a longbow.

[rrgg]

Technologically there doesn't seem to be anything that would prevent societies from making high draw weight longbows prior to the middle ages and I would be surprised if they never did (if we accept the premise that the longbow was a 13th-14th century invention then that would mean that composite bows was known to northern Europe earlier than the Longbow was).

Prior to the modern era major technological innovations tend to be few and far between and rarely follow a strictly linear progression. More often you see different weapons and different styles of fighting falling in and out of fashion over the years. Even the assumption that mail armor in the dark ages must have been weaker than mail armor in the 15th century can't necessarily be taken for granted (and as has been pointed out on these threads before, arrows aren't necessarily the number one armor piercer on the battlefield. A strong man with a throwing spear can hit with much more force than the strongest archers).

It's more likely that the success of the English archers had more to do with cultural shifts than any major change in technology. Essentially the increased popularity of archery meant that England had a much larger pool of strong, skilled archers to draw upon. And their victories in the field further increased the popularity of archery back home.

It's worth noting that the Mary Rose was the English flagship and the archers aboard may not have been fully representative of the English army Montluc fought against English longbowmen that same year and was not too impressed by them, although at that point the French had guns. It's also worth noting that after the Mary Rose sank it seems to have taken less than half a century for the English archery tradition to largely collapse.

[MrZJunior]

Would a light mace be an effective substitute for a sabre for cavalry of about Victorian tech? I have been thinking about a cavalry unit that mostly uses carbines but carries maces as back up weapons for cultural reasons.

[Gnoman]

From what I've read, 19th century cavalrymen rarely used their sabres to cut, using the swords as very thin blunt weapons instead - the handful of period swords I've seen support this by being unsharpened for most of the length. This was because cutting ran the risk of entangling the blade and depriving the horseman of his weapon, while a chop with an unsharpened blade augmented by the sheer power of a charging horse would be more than enough to wreck a soldier anyway. If this is correct, than I see no reason why a mace wouldn't work just as well apart from the fact that it is a much more inconvenient weapon to stow.

[Vinyadan]

Weren't there cavalry axes? Maybe you can use those.

[Max_Killjoy]

Speaking of stowing / carrying -- how would one carry and protect something along the lines of a khopesh?

[MrZJunior]

From what I've read, 19th century cavalrymen rarely used their sabres to cut, using the swords as very thin blunt weapons instead - the handful of period swords I've seen support this by being unsharpened for most of the length. This was because cutting ran the risk of entangling the blade and depriving the horseman of his weapon, while a chop with an unsharpened blade augmented by the sheer power of a charging horse would be more than enough to wreck a soldier anyway. If this is correct, than I see no reason why a mace wouldn't work just as well apart from the fact that it is a much more inconvenient weapon to stow.

My understanding is that swords came from the manufacturer unsharpened and people were expected to put an edge on them before taking them into battle. Apparently a lot of soldiers didn't bother.

What is the difference between a chop and a cut?

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Generally yes. But not always. For maximum range a bow needs to shoot an arrow really fast and more stored energy usually helps with that, but if the bow is made stronger by making the arms much thicker and heavier then it might actually cast much slower with a really light arrow (that's if it doesn't cause the arrow to snap). This is why eastern composite bows tend to differentiate between war bows designed to shoot heavy arrows with a lot of force and flight bows designed to shoot a light weight arrow with a lot of speed. With wooden self bows, as someone pointed out, decreasing the length of the bow will actually increase the draw weight while decreasing the weight of the arms. It's much less efficient at storing energy overall, but as I understand it there are situations where a shortbow actually can achieve a faster cast than a longbow.
Thanks - I was wondering whether you could potentially have units equipped with lower draw bows for higher rates of fire/reduced fatigue at normal ranges, with a few higher draw bows scattered around for longer ranges - either sniping enemy officers if you can get accurate enough, or simply the morale impact of taking hits long before your archers are in range to fire back.

[Hoosigander]

From what I've read, 19th century cavalrymen rarely used their sabres to cut, using the swords as very thin blunt weapons instead - the handful of period swords I've seen support this by being unsharpened for most of the length. This was because cutting ran the risk of entangling the blade and depriving the horseman of his weapon, while a chop with an unsharpened blade augmented by the sheer power of a charging horse would be more than enough to wreck a soldier anyway. If this is correct, than I see no reason why a mace wouldn't work just as well apart from the fact that it is a much more inconvenient weapon to stow.

Cavalry practices varied by army, but I think the idea that 19th century cavalrymen didn't sharpen their swords comes from American Civil War collectors and reenactors. The Civil War is a bit of an odd case since the army quickly increased in size and many regiments consisted of men who had never been in the cavalry before (although there were cavalry militia units). In addition the pre-war cavalry was broken up into small detachments on the frontier acting as scouts, flankers, and mounted infantry.

Therefore, practices varied widely amongst different cavalry regiments and brigades, an overview shows that some officers devoted time to training in the sabre and emphasized the mounted shock charge while others swore by the revolver or carbine. The result is it's possible to read through diaries, memoirs, and regimental histories of the civil war and find instances where sabres were ordered to be sharpened and ones where they were kept dull. The official manual in use during the Civil War does state, "I would insist upon the sabre being kept sharp in the field, provide the men with means of doing so, and lay it down as a rule that the strength of cavalry is in spurs and sabre."

In practice whether Civil War sabres were sharpened owed a lot to the discretion of the commander, and many were left dull. But I cannot find anything in the primary sources that this was attributable to a desire to avoid entangling the blade. The same officers who tended to view the sabre as the essential weapon of the cavalrymen were the ones who ordered their men to sharpen their sabres, it was the inexperience of many cavalrymen and officers with the sabre and a preference for the pistol that kept swords blunt.

http://www.storymindmedia.com/angryalien/books/cavalry/Regulations%20and%20instructions%20for%20the%20Fie ld%20Service%20of%20the%20US%20Cavalry%201862.pdf

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/440273/pdf

The general practice of European armies was to issue swords blunt and have them sharpened by the regimental armorer when the unit was going on active service.

[Clistenes]

From what I've read, 19th century cavalrymen rarely used their sabres to cut, using the swords as very thin blunt weapons instead - the handful of period swords I've seen support this by being unsharpened for most of the length. This was because cutting ran the risk of entangling the blade and depriving the horseman of his weapon, while a chop with an unsharpened blade augmented by the sheer power of a charging horse would be more than enough to wreck a soldier anyway. If this is correct, than I see no reason why a mace wouldn't work just as well apart from the fact that it is a much more inconvenient weapon to stow.

Modern Age manuals instructed cavalry soldiers to try to cut the reins and bridle or wound the horse to make it go mad. It was safer and easier to target the horse and try to break the enemy rider's control than to try to wound him directly (if you came close enough to hurt him, he is close enough to hurt you too). So yes, sharp edges were important, at least when facing other horsemen.

And the sword wasn't used only in charges. As a matter of fact, it would often be a secondary weapon that would be used only after the lance broke, the pistols or carbine were unloaded or the enemy was too close for the bow. As such, it would often be a defensive weapon used against enemies who were trying to surround and grab or stab you; under such circunstances, you couldn't count on the force of the charge, and a weapon able to lop a hand would be a much better deterrent than one that would just break an arm.

And many swords were used as piercing weapons, extending the arm in front of you, which has greater risk of getting the weapon stuck than a slash would, so I think they were willing to take that risk.

[VoxRationis]

As such, it would often be a defensive weapon used against enemies who were trying to surrounder and grab or stab you;


At first I misread this as "surrender," and I was wondering why anyone needed a weapon for that specific role.

[Garimeth]

From what I've read, it also depends on the mentality of the force being ambushed. There were reports from Iraq that generally, a US Army convoy would attempt to break free of the ambush and get the hell out of there, while a USMC convoy would dismount to go kill the enemy.

True, there used to be some youtube videos of that stuff.

Standard USMC doctrine is if the ambushing force is outside of sprinting distance, then the portion of your element that is in the kill zone takes cover and return fire, while the portion outside the ambush flanks the ambushing party. If the ambushers are close (sprinting distance) then you assault the ambush.

[Storm Bringer]

True, there used to be some youtube videos of that stuff.

Standard USMC doctrine is if the ambushing force is outside of sprinting distance, then the portion of your element that is in the kill zone takes cover and return fire, while the portion outside the ambush flanks the ambushing party. If the ambushers are close (sprinting distance) then you assault the ambush.

hmm. intresting. UK doctrine (or at least the version taught to PONTIs like me) is "your in a kill zone, the clues in the name, getting out of it is your top priority".

[Mike_G]

hmm. intresting. UK doctrine (or at least the version taught to PONTIs like me) is "your in a kill zone, the clues in the name, getting out of it is your top priority".

It's similar in US doctrine. The idea is that if the enemy are shooting at me, but not at you, I take cover while you flank them. And this is for longer range ambushes, where immediate assault isn't an option, and being on your feet makes you a target. If I can find cover, and they keep trying to get me, they aren't watching the flanks and you should be coming roaring in from the flank to kill them.

But you don't go prone on the double yellow line in the road.

And you attack into a close ambush. Most of the enemy are lousy shots, and their marksmanship gets worse when faced with an angry Marine charging them at close range.

It's also liberating. Deployment against insurgents is a long, slow, frustrating grind to find out who the enemy are. But if they are ambushing you, it is TOTALLY OK TO KILL THESE GUYS! Let's GET SOME!!

Which actually makes sense when you're frustrated enough chasing shadows.

[Beleriphon]

At first I misread this as "surrender," and I was wondering why anyone needed a weapon for that specific role.

Ask for no quarter and provide none.

[snowblizz]

Ask for no quarter and provide none.
What about dimes and nickels? :smallbiggrin:

[fusilier]

From what I've read, 19th century cavalrymen rarely used their sabres to cut, using the swords as very thin blunt weapons instead - the handful of period swords I've seen support this by being unsharpened for most of the length. This was because cutting ran the risk of entangling the blade and depriving the horseman of his weapon, while a chop with an unsharpened blade augmented by the sheer power of a charging horse would be more than enough to wreck a soldier anyway. If this is correct, than I see no reason why a mace wouldn't work just as well apart from the fact that it is a much more inconvenient weapon to stow.

I seem to recall that a Napoleonic era French cavalry commander ordered that the only first few inches near the tip were to be sharpened. This was to get his soldiers to cut with that part of the blade -- rather than trying to hack with the sword.

[Pauly]

From what I've read, 19th century cavalrymen rarely used their sabres to cut, using the swords as very thin blunt weapons instead - the handful of period swords I've seen support this by being unsharpened for most of the length. This was because cutting ran the risk of entangling the blade and depriving the horseman of his weapon, while a chop with an unsharpened blade augmented by the sheer power of a charging horse would be more than enough to wreck a soldier anyway. If this is correct, than I see no reason why a mace wouldn't work just as well apart from the fact that it is a much more inconvenient weapon to stow.

Go to the "scholagladiatora" channel on youtube. The guy who runs it is a HEMA instructor with a specific interst in 19th century swordsmanship and is also an antique sword dealer.

Spend a few hours there and then come back.

[kraftcheese]

Would a light mace be an effective substitute for a sabre for cavalry of about Victorian tech? I have been thinking about a cavalry unit that mostly uses carbines but carries maces as back up weapons for cultural reasons.
The only problem I can think of is that something with a weight at the end like a mace gets more unwieldy the longer you make the shaft, so a sword with the same reach could be swung quicker; but cavalry did use maces in other time periods, so why not?

Some Byzantine cavalry (www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.php?6905-Byzantine-Long-handled-Mace) apparently used long maces, Persian cavalry used them too.

[Pauly]

The only problem I can think of is that something with a weight at the end like a mace gets more unwieldy the longer you make the shaft, so a sword with the same reach could be swung quicker; but cavalry did use maces in other time periods, so why not?

Some Byzantine cavalry (www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.php?6905-Byzantine-Long-handled-Mace) apparently used long maces, Persian cavalry used them too.

Historically maces are anti-armor weapons. while some Eastern European cavalry carried maces up to the 1700s the need for them died out as the practice of wearing armor died out. Against an unarmored target a sword is simply a more effective weapon. By the 1800s curassiers were only armored on the torso and maybe a helmet so there are plenty of targets, arm, neck, leg, horse that a sword can be effective against and because swords have longer reach they become much more practical, both to offend and defend.

[Lemmy]

Was there any melee weapon that was particularly good against spears? From all I could find, it seems there isn't much option other than using a shield to reduce the disadvantage.

Man... Spears are OP...

[Knaight]

Was there any melee weapon that was particularly good against spears? From all I could find, it seems there isn't much option other than using a shield to reduce the disadvantage.

Man... Spears are OP...

There were various anti-spear and anti-pike specialized weapons that popped up from time to time - this role is among the reasons two handed swords found a niche on battlefields, and spears alone can really struggle against heavier armor as is seen in late Medieval swiss conflicts after the proportion of halberds in their pike blocks had dropped a bit excessively.

[Pauly]

Was there any melee weapon that was particularly good against spears? From all I could find, it seems there isn't much option other than using a shield to reduce the disadvantage.

Man... Spears are OP...

Pikes. aka an even longer spear.

But seriously are you talking about battlefield use or skirmish use or in individual duel situations? The answer changes in each situation.

Spears lasted for a very long time on the battlefield historically for very good reasons.

[Brother Oni]

Thanks - I was wondering whether you could potentially have units equipped with lower draw bows for higher rates of fire/reduced fatigue at normal ranges, with a few higher draw bows scattered around for longer ranges - either sniping enemy officers if you can get accurate enough, or simply the morale impact of taking hits long before your archers are in range to fire back.

I think you're overlooking something important - a bow isn't a modern rifle where the power output of the projectile is fixed. If an archer needed to shoot a less powerful arrow for whatever reason, they only needed to draw back less.

Given the difference between full draw and half draw (6-12 inches at most), the time gained would be minimal, but I would agree on reducing fatigue.

I'd also say that the personalisation of a bow is also important for optimum performance (correct bow length, draw weight, right arrow length for your draw length, etc), but if all you need is a consistent output of at least 60lb force arrows at an enemy formation at 100 yards then it doesn't matter as much.


It's also liberating. Deployment against insurgents is a long, slow, frustrating grind to find out who the enemy are. But if they are ambushing you, it is TOTALLY OK TO KILL THESE GUYS! Let's GET SOME!!

'Once a marine, always a marine' eh? :smallbiggrin:

[Martin Greywolf]

1) Anti-spear weapons

As people mentioned, for melee weapons, go longer spear or another polearm - and the greatsword mostly counts as a polearm when we talk about the way you're using it.

Tactically, counter to spearmen is either flanking (if they have shields) or ranged weapons (if they don't have shields and have long pikes). Another counter to spears are laws forbidding you from carrying one (enforced by a lot of other guys with spears), although they can be bypassed by using a staff, which is almost as good.

Also, once you have heavy armor, spear becomes a lot less effective, about on par with a longsword - pollaxe (weilded by another armored foe) or halberd (wielded by several decidedly less armored opponents) counters that.

2) Blunt cavalry blades

I'm gonna put source for this at the start: D.A. Kinsley: Swordsmen of the British Empire.

There is some truth to swords being blunt in the 17-19 century era. I'm going to generalize a whole lot here, but these are the basics:

First point is doctrine. European nations came to the conclusion that thrust is superior to cut in warfare, killing more people, and therefore trained all of their soldiers to thrust rather than cut. If they were actually right is not that important, and the veteran soldiers certainly didn't like this, but it's a thing that happened. Proponents of the thrust were mostly armchair generals, but those guys were in charge of logistics and buying swords, so they preferred sword designs that were geared towards the thrust. That means that a lot of swords/sabres used in this period don't cut super well even if they are sharp - they are designed to be cut-and-thrust sword with emphasis on thrust, not unlike early rapier.

Second point is that swords were issued blunt to enlisted personnel and were only mass-sharpened when they were expected to see some action, and were sharpened by the unit's armorer at that. That means that not only are many swords we have from that era blunt, but also that soldiers weren't taught how to properly care for an edge (we'll get to that later). Incidentally, once the fighting was over, the swords were blunted again.

Third major issue is that soldiers didn't usually know how to operate with sharp swords. A lot of stuff you can get away with doing if you have a blunt is a no-no for a sharp sword (sticking it into the ground comes to mind). When you have a sharp sword, you need to keep it sharp pretty much constantly, kinda like how you should maintain your gun - smooth out dents on the edge, sharpen it with stones and leather, etc etc. If you don't do that, cutting power goes way down, while thrusting capabilities remain almost the same. This problem was often made worse by scabbards European nations were using, with mouths made of brass or, even worse, steel. This blunts the blades every time they're draw, which is a problem if you don't know you should re-sharpen them.

A last nail to the coffin of "European swords can't cut well" is the little fact that Europe mass-exported blades to many places, including India. A whole lot of Indian tulwars have European blades that are just mounted on tulwar hilts (some have manufacturer's mark present, if you ever wonder why a tulwar has "ingen" written in it, it's because the blade is from Solingen), and these things were famous for how well they cut.

So, combination of no training in cutting and no training in edge maintenance often made European soldiers not able to cut well, which we do have documented, and sometimes the swords weren't all that well designed to do either - there's at least one incident where British soldiers fighting Russinas found out that thick Russian coats made their swords bend in thrust instead of going through and that they can't cut through them either. They ended up having to club them to death.

[Kiero]

From what I've read, 19th century cavalrymen rarely used their sabres to cut, using the swords as very thin blunt weapons instead - the handful of period swords I've seen support this by being unsharpened for most of the length. This was because cutting ran the risk of entangling the blade and depriving the horseman of his weapon, while a chop with an unsharpened blade augmented by the sheer power of a charging horse would be more than enough to wreck a soldier anyway. If this is correct, than I see no reason why a mace wouldn't work just as well apart from the fact that it is a much more inconvenient weapon to stow.

Which kind of sabre? Heavy cavalry sabres were straight swords which would make serviceable clubs if unsharpened. Light cavalry sabres, which were curved, were far too light to be any use unsharpened, and there are numerous anecdotes from the Napoleonic Wars of hussars and others causing horrible lacerating head wounds on fleeing infantry.


Weren't there cavalry axes? Maybe you can use those.

From the sagaris and tabarzin of antiquity (which originated on the central Asian steppe as a cavalry weapon) onwards, yes.

[gkathellar]

This is why eastern composite bows tend to differentiate between war bows designed to shoot heavy arrows with a lot of force and flight bows designed to shoot a light weight arrow with a lot of speed.

Interesting. Is this why Kyudo bows have such low draw weights? I've always been a little confused by that.


Technologically there doesn't seem to be anything that would prevent societies from making high draw weight longbows prior to the middle ages and I would be surprised if they never did

Yeah, for whatever it's worth, the notion of extremely heavy bows appears in mythology and folklore all over the world, and the ability to use such a bow is used to demonstrate the strength and honor of such a heroic character. India's Rama very nearly gets killed (by his own previous incarnation!) for stringing and drawing Shiva's bow, a feat he wasn't supposed to be capable of; Odysseus likewise proves his identity by stringing and drawing a bow that no one else was supposed to be able to use. At the very least, the cultures of antiquity were aware that bows with extremely high draw weights were possible. It wouldn't be surprising if they existed, but simply weren't used because they had little utility in warfare, would it?


What is the difference between a chop and a cut?

On a very technical level, it's about the physics of impact. A chop is more direct and more energetic, a lot more like a blunt impact but with a blade on the front - it's what an axe does. A cut is more about the edge itself, and less about the momentum behind it. The best characterization I can give to it is to describe the difference with a jian: when you chop, it uses the middle of the blade, and tends to involve far more elbow and shoulder. A cut, by contrast, uses the upper section (or the "weak," as the Europeans would call it), and tends to be a subtler motion guided by the wrist and powered almost entirely by the feet and hips.


It's similar in US doctrine. The idea is that if the enemy are shooting at me, but not at you, I take cover while you flank them. And this is for longer range ambushes, where immediate assault isn't an option, and being on your feet makes you a target. If I can find cover, and they keep trying to get me, they aren't watching the flanks and you should be coming roaring in from the flank to kill them.

But you don't go prone on the double yellow line in the road.

And you attack into a close ambush. Most of the enemy are lousy shots, and their marksmanship gets worse when faced with an angry Marine charging them at close range.

It's also liberating. Deployment against insurgents is a long, slow, frustrating grind to find out who the enemy are. But if they are ambushing you, it is TOTALLY OK TO KILL THESE GUYS! Let's GET SOME!!

Could some of this, as it contrasts with US Army or UK armed forces, relate to the USMC's impressively aggressive reputation and persona?


Was there any melee weapon that was particularly good against spears? From all I could find, it seems there isn't much option other than using a shield to reduce the disadvantage.

Man... Spears are OP...

I can't speak to the battlefield, but in a dueling context, the only answer to a spear that I know of is to stay on top of it until you can get past the point. In spear vs. spear, this means arranging a geometrically advantageous position and controlling a larger cross-section of their shaft with a smaller cross-section of your own. In spear vs. shorter weapon, it means aggressively countering the spear's circular movement so that you can prevent thrusts from happening, rather than trying to deal with the thrusts when or as they happen. Some samples:

Shortspear vs Smallsword: 1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1kh4Z5qQmo) and 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIpbxryNLOg). Note that these two are from what is primarily a sword school, and so probably favor that side of the equation - take it for what you will.
Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinyo-ryu sword vs. naginata (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqu0QpQFykc). Naginata isn't a spear, but it's similar enough to provide some ideas. TSKSR tends to practice in pre-arranged forms, however, so this probably isn't live sparring (the reason I saw probably is that, IIRC, the sword always wins in TSKSR forms, and that's not true here). If you look around, they've also got some sword vs. longspear stuff, which is interesting.


But yeah, a spear or long staff is a pretty robust weapon.

[Mike_G]

Would a light mace be an effective substitute for a sabre for cavalry of about Victorian tech? I have been thinking about a cavalry unit that mostly uses carbines but carries maces as back up weapons for cultural reasons.

I know I'm late to the party on this one.

As a side arm, if you mostly rely on carbines and pistols, it shouldn't make much difference. The US Cavalry in the Indian Wars often left the sabre behind, since it was just extra weight and most fighting was done with firearms. Most of them carried a knife and there are more stories of knife fights than sabre use.

That said, if you are fighting unarmored enemies a sabre is much better than a mace. You have a reach advantage, sabre blades being much longer than maces. Sabres are better balanced, with most of the weight near the hand, so you can wield it more easily. Maces are weighted near the head by design. And if nobody is in armor, you don't need the impact of a mace. It's easy enough to cut or stab a man who isn't armored. A light hit with an edge or point can still do a lot of damage, but you need to strike pretty hard with a blunt weapon, so quick tip cuts or draw cuts with a sabre would be more effective than glancing blows with a mace. It's hard to even use a mace to make a quick tip strike while keeping the weapon out in front of you where you can parry. That's kind of the sabre's whole thing.

So, it probably won't matter all that much at a strategic level if you're talking about late 18tgh or 19th century cavalry. But I would not want to fight a sabre armed enemy if all I had was a mace.

[Corsair14]

Counter to spears and pikes was longer lances. Polish Hussars used 18 foot hollowed lances which were longer than the Swiss pike.

Or you can go the route of the flammburge swordsmen who got paid double normal rates to run in between formations of pikemen and chop the heads of enemy pikes. Needless to say they had short lifespans.

[Garimeth]

Could some of this, as it contrasts with US Army or UK armed forces, relate to the USMC's impressively aggressive reputation and persona?

Yes. As an example I have a good friend and mentor who was an individual augment to 82nd Airborne from 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion. They took fire at one point on a movement and my friend (who is not an operator, just support personnel - but he grew up in the USMC) starts looking for the the source of the shooting and heading towards it. He got yelled at by all the soldiers he was with (who also, admittedly might have been support personnel) because they had all just gone prone. He was assaulting the ambush. That part is indoctrination. USMC boot camp is longer than any other branch, and everyone has to go to a follow-on combat school that is at least 2 months, longer if they are infantry. THEN they can go to their MOS school.

Now as a separate commentary, let's look at demographics. I will preface this by saying this is my OPINION, but it is an opinion I formed after serving in the Navy, growing up Army, and spending my formative military years with USMC infantry, which included a year in Afghanistan. I will also say that I have yet to speak to a Marine that disagrees with me on this. That said...

If you line up a row of Marine infantryman and Army infantryman on average the soldier is bigger. He's taller, and he's just a bigger guy. The type of recruiting the USMC does attracts the underdog, people with something to prove. They were the person that everybody said would never amount to anything, or that got picked on, or came from an abusive home - not all of them, but a lot of them. They chose the USMC because it had the reputation of being the best, and they wanted to be the best. This becomes even more true when you start getting into the combat arms communities.

So now we go back to indoctrination, their indoc period is longer than the other services, and they have a self-selected population that has something to prove. It doesn't take a lot to make the average one of them a bit of a scrapper. The service rewards aggression and assertiveness, particularly among its enlisted personnel. Hell I'm at a support unit now and this morning we played basketball for Staff Non-Commisioned Officer PT, and we had guys who were in their 40s shoulder checking and elbowing each other like we were playing a street game in high school. lol.

EDIT: Obviously I playing a law of averages here, and I'm biased. I know some great soldiers who are hardcore, most of them are either 101st Airborne, 160th SOAR, or 5th SFG guys just because that's who I hung out with. I also have a great deal of respect for the Brits and Aussies I worked with in AFG. The Aussie's were freaking crazy...lol.

[Carl]

What is the difference between a chop and a cut?

Whats the diffrance between a butchers meat cleaver and a carving knife. The cleaver chops, the knife cuts.

[Max_Killjoy]

Speaking of stowing / carrying -- how would one carry and protect something along the lines of a khopesh?

Any thoughts or references?

[Carl]

Yes. As an example I have a good friend and mentor who was an individual augment to 82nd Airborne from 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion. They took fire at one point on a movement and my friend (who is not an operator, just support personnel - but he grew up in the USMC) starts looking for the the source of the shooting and heading towards it. He got yelled at by all the soldiers he was with (who also, admittedly might have been support personnel) because they had all just gone prone. He was assaulting the ambush. That part is indoctrination. USMC boot camp is longer than any other branch, and everyone has to go to a follow-on combat school that is at least 2 months, longer if they are infantry. THEN they can go to their MOS school.

Now as a separate commentary, let's look at demographics. I will preface this by saying this is my OPINION, but it is an opinion I formed after serving in the Navy, growing up Army, and spending my formative military years with USMC infantry, which included a year in Afghanistan. I will also say that I have yet to speak to a Marine that disagrees with me on this. That said...

If you line up a row of Marine infantryman and Army infantryman on average the soldier is bigger. He's taller, and he's just a bigger guy. The type of recruiting the USMC does attracts the underdog, people with something to prove. They were the person that everybody said would never amount to anything, or that got picked on, or came from an abusive home - not all of them, but a lot of them. They chose the USMC because it had the reputation of being the best, and they wanted to be the best. This becomes even more true when you start getting into the combat arms communities.

So now we go back to indoctrination, their indoc period is longer than the other services, and they have a self-selected population that has something to prove. It doesn't take a lot to make the average one of them a bit of a scrapper. The service rewards aggression and assertiveness, particularly among its enlisted personnel. Hell I'm at a support unit now and this morning we played basketball for Staff Non-Commisioned Officer PT, and we had guys who were in their 40s shoulder checking and elbowing each other like we were playing a street game in high school. lol.

EDIT: Obviously I playing a law of averages here, and I'm biased. I know some great soldiers who are hardcore, most of them are either 101st Airborne, 160th SOAR, or 5th SFG guys just because that's who I hung out with. I also have a great deal of respect for the Brits and Aussies I worked with in AFG. The Aussie's were freaking crazy...lol.

I'd say it's much simpler than that. The Army and the USMC have very different primary missions and their training and responses reflect that. to my understanding they can be summarized thus:

The army's primary mission is fighting it out across country sized area's with a similarly equipped opponent in which mechanised warfare and the maneuver warfare that comes with that are the primary arms. If a force is attacked it's job is to hold on till the air force pulls it's thumb out of it's arse or until another unengaged unit can outflank and hammer the enemy. Their job is to stay alive for tomorrow's fight and keep the enemy focused on them. They're job is to be a really big, solid, dumb, anvil in the meantime and stay alive to fight tomorrow's battles.

The USMC's primary mission is to pull of successful amphibious landing that will be contested by well dug in and fortified enemies and given the navy's attitude towards the fire support role, little or no effective help from the transport division. Their job is to break the enemy defence in spite of all the disadvantages and inevitable losses as quickly as possibble so the follow on boy scouts otherwise known as the US army don't get chewed up like they did in normandy back in ye olden days. They're the tip of the spear thats going to punch right through the enemies defences, and if said tip gets smashed in the process as long as it does the job, well thats acceptable losses.

The UK army is probably colored by their northern ireland experiance where i imagine there was a focus on making sure any shooting that happened avoided placing shots near wherever the civilians are or might be. Meaning they prefer being the big juicy out in the open target thats well away from the civilians over storming into a building where there's civilians mixed with hostiles and walls that won;t stop misses going on to hit somthing regardless of what they where aimed at.

[snowblizz]

So the army is a pikeblock. The airforce the musket sleeves. And the marines the forlorne hope :P.

[Tobtor]

The bow they tested was 150lb at 32in if I recall correctly, but they used a 30in draw for the Mary Rose estimate.

Many scholars doses not agree to their results, but even if they are correct: So whats that if they used a 28inch arrow on the same bow? Probably 130 or so.


See the Clifford J. Rodgers (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jmedhist.2011.06.002?src=recsys) article I linked.

Well neither me nor Marin did, and as I showed the bows where 5-6.5 feet.



Well, the Qing-era examinations would be the descendants of the 8th-century, 11th-century, and 13th-century examinations I mentioned. Many of Qing records come from the 19th century, so over a thousand years the first example. And the 8th-century examination requiring shooting thirty shots with a 167lb bow at 105 paces, according to Stephen Selby's Chinese Archery.

OK. But it is still examinations, not actual war. To me its still more like the olympics than actual war.



Those super-heavy polearms were obviously only for examination purposes, yes. Qing officiers probably didn't fight with the 160+lbs they passed the drawing test with, especially not a horseback. But again, the 8th-century test required shooting many arrows with 167lb weapon (and hitting too, I think). If you can shoot thirty arrows with a bow and hit a target at 105 paces, you can probably use that bow on the battlefield.

Yes, you can use it. But it would tire you faster, and you would shoot slower, hence my point about 10 arrows at a lower power, than 8 at a higher, as long as the 'low power' is enough to kill.


Note that those were both garrisons away from the front lines. They soldiers in question didn't have to fight frequently, if ever.


Noted. Though it says they passed with honours etc. Also the majority of examined finds in the post also fell with in that range (around 100-120 pounds) though a few is noted to be stronger. So textual and archaeology agrees that 100-120 is normal, 160 exist but is rare.



As far as later period evidence goes, the late-Ming text T'ien-Kung K'ai-Wu by Sung Ying-Hsing (or Yingxing Song, depending on transliteration scheme) says that a strong bow had a draw weight of 120 catties (159lbs). It appears in English as Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century. Depending on the translation, the average archer draws 127-143lbs (1966 E-tu Zen Sun and Shiou-chuan Sun translation) or lower strength bows pull 110-126lb (Timo Nieminen's translation (https://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=292459)). And an 80lb bow is for weak archers and/or good enough for all.

Again: yes 160 existed, but was strong, and 80 was the lower limit. If 160 was common, we would definately have 180-200lbs as sytrong, and 120 as weak.



The European finds before they Mary Rose are sketchy at best. I'm interested in both textual and archaeological evidence.

I think a single actual bow says a lot more than a vague comparison between two bows of unknown strength by a historian.

I would say the finds before Mary Rose is LESS scetchy than Mary Rose. The hedeby bow was complete and other almost identical bows where found. There were found many bows in the iron age bog-finds, counting multiple finds (notably Nydam, Illerup, Vimose, Thorsbjerg and others). It is true than only a handful or two longbows from the interim period exist. However: The Mary Rose might be a large sample, but is a single find. As a royal flagship it might not represent the average etc.

IN any case as the bows from the 2-4nd century are many and draws 60-70, the interim bows gradually go up in weight until the Mary Rose, it seem that they increase in draw weight over time, fitting also with the gradual development in armour.



If so, that's more evidence of the superiority of Chinese-region missile weapons before the 15th century. And your numbers for the Mary Rose are probably wrong, as discussed above: 100-180lbs, with 150-160lbs being average.

No, my numbers is not probably wrong. I am above the suggested average by people such as Mike Loades. Also note that they use 32 or 30 inch for the strongest bows, that is using the two maximum values, ignoring that we have arrows at 26inches. So using 28-39 inch arrows give different results.


And folks keep on arguing about the exact draw weight of the Hedeby bow, with estimates going as high as 130lbs (https://books.google.com/books?id=MCQzDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT191&dq=viking+bow+draw+weight&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiXqp2QmdbPAhUi0IMKHcUKC6MQ6AEIHDAA#v=on epage&q=viking%20bow%20draw%20weight&f=false).

And this Ballinderry bow replica (http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/reply/509299/Ballinderry-replica#.V_6qsOArLIV) draws 140-150lbs at 30 inches. See this thread (https://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=306494) for further discussion on the matter of draw weights.

Note that the replicated bow is a bit shorter than the actual bow (making it more powerfull) and the arrows above the viking age average in length. Also he never explains if the dimensions (thickness) are similar. The book reference comes with no reference so it is hard to track down. My information comes from danish and german scholarship (notably Dan Høj: Jernalderens bue og pil - fremstilling og brug, Harm Paulsons works (as well as personal talks with Harm). Together they have made many replicas (and shooting with them regularly), using both foreign and native trees, and they consider the bows much less powerfull.

[gkathellar]

Any thoughts or references?

While it's hardly a khopesh, the kampilan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kampilan) shows one avenue for sheathing unusually-shaped blades. The scabbard is actually semi-disposable, made from two suitable pieces of wood that are tied together around the blade with one or two cords. The weapon doesn't need to be drawn in this configuration, because any good swing swing will cut the cords and release the weapon for combat.

[MrZJunior]

I know I'm late to the party on this one.

As a side arm, if you mostly rely on carbines and pistols, it shouldn't make much difference. The US Cavalry in the Indian Wars often left the sabre behind, since it was just extra weight and most fighting was done with firearms. Most of them carried a knife and there are more stories of knife fights than sabre use.

That said, if you are fighting unarmored enemies a sabre is much better than a mace. You have a reach advantage, sabre blades being much longer than maces. Sabres are better balanced, with most of the weight near the hand, so you can wield it more easily. Maces are weighted near the head by design. And if nobody is in armor, you don't need the impact of a mace. It's easy enough to cut or stab a man who isn't armored. A light hit with an edge or point can still do a lot of damage, but you need to strike pretty hard with a blunt weapon, so quick tip cuts or draw cuts with a sabre would be more effective than glancing blows with a mace. It's hard to even use a mace to make a quick tip strike while keeping the weapon out in front of you where you can parry. That's kind of the sabre's whole thing.

So, it probably won't matter all that much at a strategic level if you're talking about late 18tgh or 19th century cavalry. But I would not want to fight a sabre armed enemy if all I had was a mace.

So the mace makes more sense as a "ceremonial" weapon that just so happens to end up in the field an awful lot even though they should be using a sabre.

[Vinyadan]

So that's how the marines now are everything but "marine", I mean, being deployed to places like Afghanistan and Iraq, in the end being marine infantry means being specialised assault infantry that can be used anywhere there is something to assault?


Any thoughts or references?

This is just supposition on my side, but you can make a scabbard for a bill hook out of leather or one for an axe, so I guess you can just make one for a khopesh. It's not like a sword's scabbard, it would need to be manually opened before you can pull out the blade. In the quiet, you can keep it in the scabbard and attach the scabbard to your person without fear of being cut. But given how incredibly ancient these things are, I guess there are no remains of such things, and I have never seen a depiction of something similar.

[Tobtor]

I think you're overlooking something important - a bow isn't a modern rifle where the power output of the projectile is fixed. If an archer needed to shoot a less powerful arrow for whatever reason, they only needed to draw back less.

Given the difference between full draw and half draw (6-12 inches at most), the time gained would be minimal, but I would agree on reducing fatigue.

I'd also say that the personalisation of a bow is also important for optimum performance (correct bow length, draw weight, right arrow length for your draw length, etc), but if all you need is a consistent output of at least 60lb force arrows at an enemy formation at 100 yards then it doesn't matter as much.



Note also that the power for draw-weight is different for 'eastern recourve' (chinese etc) and 'northern' self bows (longbows and shortbows). So for recourve bows much of the power comes from the first few inches, while the longbow curve is more gradual.


Technologically there doesn't seem to be anything that would prevent societies from making high draw weight longbows prior to the middle ages and I would be surprised if they never did

Sure you would always have exceptions. We also have various historical references to extra strong bowmen etc. But as Martin says, creating very heavy bows is first done when needed.


From what I've read of antiquity (primarily the Hellenistic/Roman era, but stretching back to the Classical too), western bows were weaker than eastern ones. The bow just wasn't an important part of warfare in the western Mediterranean, all the powerful bows came from the steppe and Iran eastwards. Even when the Romans featured archer auxiliaries, they were men from the eastern provinces who used a bow routinely, not westerners trained in its use.

I agree. I think eastern bows where more powerfull. Not only in draw weight but also in output (recourve bows perform better than self bows, a lot of power is lost in the wood so to speak).


Apologies for my ignorance on this, but wouldn't a heavier draw give the bow a longer range?

As noted: that depends. But also even though longer ranges might be good, arrows is also a resource used sparringly. Just shooting at the enemy at long distances is going to make you run out of arrows (yes, sometimes they brought 48 arrows, but imagine sending modern sliders to war with 48 "shots" pr. battle, and poor posibillity for restocking during a campaign... in earlier periods 24 arrows where common as well). What you want to do is toi send a few reigns at long distances to hurt/injure horses, make the enemy on guard etc, and thus force him to either retreat or go foreward, and then save your arrows for when you can hit him reliably, and then shoot as many arrows as fast as you can before he reaches where he can force close-combat. Then retreat behind other troops.

[Garimeth]

I'd say it's much simpler than that. The Army and the USMC have very different primary missions and their training and responses reflect that. to my understanding they can be summarized thus:

The army's primary mission is fighting it out across country sized area's with a similarly equipped opponent in which mechanised warfare and the maneuver warfare that comes with that are the primary arms. If a force is attacked it's job is to hold on till the air force pulls it's thumb out of it's arse or until another unengaged unit can outflank and hammer the enemy. Their job is to stay alive for tomorrow's fight and keep the enemy focused on them. They're job is to be a really big, solid, dumb, anvil in the meantime and stay alive to fight tomorrow's battles.

The USMC's primary mission is to pull of successful amphibious landing that will be contested by well dug in and fortified enemies and given the navy's attitude towards the fire support role, little or no effective help from the transport division. Their job is to break the enemy defence in spite of all the disadvantages and inevitable losses as quickly as possibble so the follow on boy scouts otherwise known as the US army don't get chewed up like they did in normandy back in ye olden days. They're the tip of the spear thats going to punch right through the enemies defences, and if said tip gets smashed in the process as long as it does the job, well thats acceptable losses.

The UK army is probably colored by their northern ireland experiance where i imagine there was a focus on making sure any shooting that happened avoided placing shots near wherever the civilians are or might be. Meaning they prefer being the big juicy out in the open target thats well away from the civilians over storming into a building where there's civilians mixed with hostiles and walls that won;t stop misses going on to hit somthing regardless of what they where aimed at.

I don't necessarily disagree, but its important to remember that the USMC is coming off of over a decade of being utilized as a second Army. There was a lot of lost institutional culture relating to naval embarkation and amphibious warfare. From 2010-2014 when I was still with my infantry unit, there was a perception that doing a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) deployment wasn't even a real deployment, because you weren't going to combat.

Also, having the mission statement and doctrine is one thing, but you still have to recruit the right people and teach them to get them to have the institutional culture you are shooting for.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'd say it's much simpler than that. The Army and the USMC have very different primary missions and their training and responses reflect that. to my understanding they can be summarized thus:

The army's primary mission is fighting it out across country sized area's with a similarly equipped opponent in which mechanised warfare and the maneuver warfare that comes with that are the primary arms. If a force is attacked it's job is to hold on till the air force pulls it's thumb out of it's arse or until another unengaged unit can outflank and hammer the enemy. Their job is to stay alive for tomorrow's fight and keep the enemy focused on them. They're job is to be a really big, solid, dumb, anvil in the meantime and stay alive to fight tomorrow's battles.

The USMC's primary mission is to pull of successful amphibious landing that will be contested by well dug in and fortified enemies and given the navy's attitude towards the fire support role, little or no effective help from the transport division. Their job is to break the enemy defence in spite of all the disadvantages and inevitable losses as quickly as possibble so the follow on boy scouts otherwise known as the US army don't get chewed up like they did in normandy back in ye olden days. They're the tip of the spear thats going to punch right through the enemies defences, and if said tip gets smashed in the process as long as it does the job, well thats acceptable losses.


Always interesting to see a discussion colored by silly old interservice rivalries.

[Mike_G]

I just want to point out that we haven't made an opposed amphibious assault since Inchon.

I still bleed Marine, but the idea that our job is seize the beach so the Army can land safely later on is, kinda....well...not really true.

The Army is designed to fight major land campaigns. they have more mechanized infantry resources, since they spent most of the last 60 years planning to fight a mechanized war in Europe or Korea.

The Marines have always been a force in readiness, forward deployed with the Navy, and have always been the small force deployed quickly to unexpected hot spots. We have less mechanized stuff, because we expect to land from ships and then fight as infantry. We don't have a real APC. But we do spend more time on small unit infantry assault and the Marines have been doing counter-insurgency stuff since the Banana Wars.

I'd say Iraq and Afghanistan look more like the Banana Wars than the Fulda Gap.

So yes, doctrine and mission affect training and tactics. I happen to think, in my own biased way, that the Marines emphasis on small unit and individual tactics makes better infantry, but that's really really biased.

[Storm Bringer]

I just want to point out that we haven't made an opposed amphibious assault since Inchon.

I still bleed Marine, but the idea that our job is seize the beach so the Army can land safely later on is, kinda....well...not really true.

The Army is designed to fight major land campaigns. they have more mechanized infantry resources, since they spent most of the last 60 years planning to fight a mechanized war in Europe or Korea.

The Marines have always been a force in readiness, forward deployed with the Navy, and have always been the small force deployed quickly to unexpected hot spots. We have less mechanized stuff, because we expect to land from ships and then fight as infantry. We don't have a real APC. But we do spend more time on small unit infantry assault and the Marines have been doing counter-insurgency stuff since the Banana Wars.

I'd say Iraq and Afghanistan look more like the Banana Wars than the Fulda Gap.

So yes, doctrine and mission affect training and tactics. I happen to think, in my own biased way, that the Marines emphasis on small unit and individual tactics makes better infantry, but that's really really biased.

Uncle Sam has more Misguided Children than Auntie Liz has in her combined armed forces. (active duty personnel only. if we mobilized every reservist, the uk has a slight numbers advantage. 220,000 jarheads vs 235,000 limeys)


I'm sorry, they might be many things. but the USMC is NOT small.:smallbiggrin::smallbiggrin:

[Garimeth]

So yes, doctrine and mission affect training and tactics. I happen to think, in my own biased way, that the Marines emphasis on small unit and individual tactics makes better infantry, but that's really really biased.

Oh for sure! I had LCpl fire team leaders who were going on a second pump, and it was normal to have a Cpl who was on their third. USMC infantry promotes slow, unlike the Army, and it pushes down responsibility. I just think the difference in recrutiting demographics and indoc are what cause the big differences in what decision those leaders come to.

I may be Navy, but I "grew up" (militarily) in the USMC.

[Garimeth]

Uncle Sam has more Misguided Children than Auntie Liz has in her combined armed forces. (active duty personnel only. if we mobilized every reservist, the uk has a slight numbers advantage. 220,000 jarheads vs 235,000 limeys)


I'm sorry, they might be many things. but the USMC is NOT small.
Ehh, it isn't small BUT...

Current strength of the USMC is around 175k operating forces and establishment, with another 10k as Marine Security Guard. Comparatively the Army is between 300k and 400k. USN is about 320k.

[MrZJunior]

Current strength of the USMC is around 175k operating forces and establishment, with another 10k as Marine Security Guard. Comparatively the Army is between 300k and 400k. USN is about 320k.

Those security guards are the guys who protect embassys right?

[Mike_G]

Uncle Sam has more Misguided Children than Auntie Liz has in her combined armed forces. (active duty personnel only. if we mobilized every reservist, the uk has a slight numbers advantage. 220,000 jarheads vs 235,000 limeys)


I'm sorry, they might be many things. but the USMC is NOT small.:smallbiggrin::smallbiggrin:

Oh, you Europeans with your metric system.

US planning is to be able to fight in several theaters at once, so teh USMC is smaller than the Army, Navy or Air Force, but yeah, bigger than many other nation's militaries.

But how does the UK population compare to the US? Or how does the number of UK troops commited to combat missions worldwide compare to US numbers?

Not trying to dump on your military, just that from a US perspective the Marines are a small service. And the comparitively small size fits the different mission.


Those security guards are the guys who protect embassys right?

And nukes.

[Storm Bringer]

Oh, you Europeans with your metric system.

err, I think you have me confused with those continentals that we recently voted to be set apart form.


who do you think invented all those interesting units still referred to as the Imperial system?:smallbiggrin::smallbiggrin:




US planning is to be able to fight in several theaters at once, so teh USMC is smaller than the Army, Navy or Air Force, but yeah, bigger than many other nation's militaries.

But how does the UK population compare to the US? Or how does the number of UK troops commited to combat missions worldwide compare to US numbers?

Not trying to dump on your military, just that from a US perspective the Marines are a small service. And the comparitively small size fits the different mission.


substanially smaller, in both cases. 309 million US vs 65 million as of the last census for both (2010 & 2011, respectively).

To my knowledge, we've not commited a unit bigger than division size on ops since the Korean War. the height of out commitments to both Afgan and Iraq was around 10,000 in both cases, I believe.

[Vinyadan]

Oh, you Europeans with your metric system.

Are USMC calculated in hands, rocks, grains, or tea spoons?

[snowblizz]

Are USMC calculated in hands, rocks, grains, or tea spoons?

By the jar I hear.

[gkathellar]

By the jar I hear.

I see what you did there.

[Carl]

I don't necessarily disagree, but its important to remember that the USMC is coming off of over a decade of being utilized as a second Army. There was a lot of lost institutional culture relating to naval embarkation and amphibious warfare. From 2010-2014 when I was still with my infantry unit, there was a perception that doing a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) deployment wasn't even a real deployment, because you weren't going to combat.

Also, having the mission statement and doctrine is one thing, but you still have to recruit the right people and teach them to get them to have the institutional culture you are shooting for.

Oh i agree they've been used in a very non-mission centric way lately. But all that doesn't change the fact that choices of who to recruit and what kind of "culture" you want are going, (when everything is working right), to be determined by training doctrine which is going to be itself determined by operational doctrine which is going to ideally be determined by the mission statement coupled with operational experiance. There you can run into a problem of course is when poor "culture" and recruitment methods result in poor operational experiance and instead of working to address that they change the doctrine to somthing that whilst it works better in terms of producing good operational experiance in the problem area's, compromises success at achieving the mission statement. Of course this gets complicated because when you get down into the minuta what is mission statement and what is doctrine can get a little blurry.

@Mike_G: oh no question on that point, but it's obvious from various comments around the Iwoa's and the new Zumwaltz that it's still at the front of many minds in the USMC. To be fair and without trying to take anything away from those serving in the USMC or the USMC as an organisation it's somewhat a force looking for a role these days, traditional ground war capabilities are far better provided by army units with the heavy stuff and if you need rapid deployment with light kit the army also has paratroopers that can be deployed faster than a ship and can deploy with the same or heavier kit if need be. Their real area of expertise is amphibious ops, particularly beach landings ofc, but also other areas.


@Max_Killjoy: in case it escaped your attention i'm not ex military, i have no irons in this fire, i was deliberately pocking fun at said rivalries.


So the army is a pikeblock. The air force the musket sleeves. And the marines the forlorn hope :P.

:smallbiggrin:

Sort of. The thing to remember is that to use an old adage, an army fights on it's stomach. Well it's stomach, it's brain, and it's eyes. A military force to be successful need the necessary intel capabilities to find the enemy in a timely manner, the necessary command and control elements to analyse and communicate decisions based on that intel to the units charged with carrying out the responses, and the neccessery logistics capability to manufacture, maintain a reserve of, and deliver to the units all the men, equipment, munitions, rations, medicines, and other stuff they need to carry on a war. The ideal in any military campaign is to eliminate the enemies manufacturing base, supply stores, supply chains, C&C networks, and intel gathering capabilities without ever engaging his military units. However unless one side has a major advantage over the other this doesn't usually happen and instead both sides to one degree or another will have to engage the other side whilst pursuing their objectives.

The army's doctrine, (from what i can make out, obligatory interpretation and understanding on my end warning), is built on the concept of defeat in detail, if they do engage the enemy they should do so in overwhelming force from a superior position. So until they have that they'll hunker down and wait for backup so they have said force and possibly positional advantages.

The USMC however expect to be having to assault a dug in well prepared, well supported, and well positioned enemy in a full on frontal assault whilst bereft of heavier support element the army commonly has. Traditional, (i.e. army), wisdom says "don't put yourself in a position where you have to do this" Of course occasionally conventional wisdom runs aground on the shoals of reality. If you do have to do that experiance, (such as normandy), says sitting on your backside and letting them shoot at you dosen;t work out too well and that hard fast aggressive action achieves good results. You'll still take a lot of losses either way, but the overall total will be better for the hard and fast attacker.

Of course normandy also says, good fire support from the navy makes a huge positive impact. Hence the constant back and forth grousing between the navy and the USMC. The navy has no interest in having anything more to do with ground warfare than throwing bombs and missiles at their choice of targets like a gourmet devouring a 5 star meal. Covnersly the USMC would like the navy to pull it's thumb out of it's arse and do it's dammed job. The result is not a match made in mash potato heaven.

[VoxRationis]

While we are discussing aspects of US military culture:
I am of the understanding that in the past, US military units were often drawn on a state-by-state basis (so one unit would be all from Alabama, a different unit from Pennsylvania, etc.). Is this still done? Does it create intraservice rivalries?

[Max_Killjoy]

While we are discussing aspects of US military culture:
I am of the understanding that in the past, US military units were often drawn on a state-by-state basis (so one unit would be all from Alabama, a different unit from Pennsylvania, etc.). Is this still done? Does it create intraservice rivalries?

It hasn't been done for a long time -- it was however the practice in the Civil War era for many units.

[Mike_G]

@Mike_G: oh no question on that point, but it's obvious from various comments around the Iwoa's and the new Zumwaltz that it's still at the front of many minds in the USMC. To be fair and without trying to take anything away from those serving in the USMC or the USMC as an organisation it's somewhat a force looking for a role these days, traditional ground war capabilities are far better provided by army units with the heavy stuff and if you need rapid deployment with light kit the army also has paratroopers that can be deployed faster than a ship and can deploy with the same or heavier kit if need be. Their real area of expertise is amphibious ops, particularly beach landings ofc, but also other areas.
.

I completely disagree.

The last amphibious assault was at Inchon, Korea in 1950. That's a long damn time ago. We aren't still planning on that as our main role.

The biggest mission of the Marines is to provide the Navy, which is always forward deployed --because anywhere there is a trouble spot, we send a battle group-- with a ground combat element that can be quickly deployed. The Marines always deploy first, because they are always closest. Somalia, Kuwait, Beiruit, Haiti. All eventually combined arms, all started with Marines as the first boots on the ground because there was a Battalion Landing Team right there. When US AF pilot Scott O'Grady (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_O%27Grady) was shot down over Bosnia, he was rescued by Marines (the mortar platoon of a plain old infantry company) because they were close by with the fleet and ready and no snake eating SF Operators were ready to go.

Marines have been landed in protection of US interests since we've had interests, and we are very very very good at small wars. In fact, the Small Wars Manual was developed by the Marines from experiences in Central America and when followed, it works.

Yes, the Army has more and better equipped armored divisions, so stopping the Russians or North Koreans would be more up their alley, but the USMC is not "in search of a mission." Storming beaches like John Wayne in "Sands of Iwo Jima" has a much to do with modern warfare as forming squares versus cavalry.

Naval gunfire and air support from carriers and from dedicated Marine air wings is well co-ordinated with Marine ground units. I don't know where you're getting your information.

[MrZJunior]

The French produced a couple of military revolvers in the late 19th century that are known for being chambered with rather anemic cartridges. Wikipedia compares them to .25 ACP and .32ACP. Are these as seriously under powered as Wikipedia seems to suggest?

[Hoosigander]

While we are discussing aspects of US military culture:
I am of the understanding that in the past, US military units were often drawn on a state-by-state basis (so one unit would be all from Alabama, a different unit from Pennsylvania, etc.). Is this still done? Does it create intraservice rivalries?

It sorta depends on what precisely you mean. Generally speaking, the cases you're thinking about where a Regiment was raised from a particular locality and went around calling itself the "69th New York," or something, were not regular army regiments but volunteer regiments raised, or militia units called into to federal service, in times of war. During 19th century conflicts, but particularly in the Civil War, there was a division between the Regular Army and the Volunteers (Administratively; they served side by side in battle.) Volunteer regiments were raised by the states and were as you described, Regular Army regiments were not. Although, in practice logistical concerns meant that many Regular Army units tended to have a geographic bias. The situation is somewhat analogous to the situation today with a centralized Regular Army that recruits from the whole country and a state-based National Guard.

Interestingly, the immense growth of the U.S. Army during the Civil War by the absorption of all these volunteer regiments (the U.S. Army went from 16,000 men at the beginning to about 1,000,000 at the height of its wartime size), plus the expectation that the Army would shrink at the end of the conflict, meant that officers held two ranks: one in the Volunteers and one in the Regular Army. Their volunteer rank was the one that accorded to their actual command responsibilities, the Regular Army commission was usually much lower. Officers were promoted on both tracks, but much slower on the Regular Army one. Take George Custer, he started the war as a Lieutenant and ended it as a Major General of Volunteers. After the volunteers mustered out, he was just a captain, although soon to become a Lieutenant Colonel.

[dropbear8mybaby]

My understanding of using most larger weapons (anything larger than a gladius/smallsword) is that the primary benefit of them is reach. A bastard/long sword, for instance, a spear, etc. At what size/length of weapon would you say the benefit is primarily reach rather than leverage/weight?

[dropbear8mybaby]

Is there any term to denote a person who specialises in the use of one, one-handed weapon? I'm trying to come up with a different term for the "Dueling" feature in 5e D&D because it makes no real sense to call it that.

[PersonMan]

Is there any term to denote a person who specialises in the use of one, one-handed weapon? I'm trying to come up with a different term for the "Dueling" feature in 5e D&D because it makes no real sense to call it that.

"Einhander", the German for 'one-hander', is the closest I know of (compare to 'Zweihänder', which denotes the bigger two-handed swords) and could work.

Perhaps "Einhander Specialist" or similar, then?

[Vinyadan]

A little image I found really funny in relation to this thread :smallbiggrin:
http://schizmatic.com/images/comics/78/75638504da548b2bfdabbf360698a914906350994.jpg

[snowblizz]

My understanding of using most larger weapons (anything larger than a gladius/smallsword) is that the primary benefit of them is reach. A bastard/long sword, for instance, a spear, etc. At what size/length of weapon would you say the benefit is primarily reach rather than leverage/weight?
Not sure it can be answered exactly in that way. Any weapon longer than the opponents is primarily going to be about reach. But several pole weapons like halberds and polllaxes use that reach to gain benefits of more power when swung. Most pikes in formation however are essentially all about the reach. Same with spears in a shieldwall type formation.
I would posit it's more a question about intended function of a weapon. Many popular weapons aim to give several advantages simultaneously, eg reach, ability to pierce armour and so on.



Is there any term to denote a person who specialises in the use of one, one-handed weapon? I'm trying to come up with a different term for the "Dueling" feature in 5e D&D because it makes no real sense to call it that.

Olympic fencer.:smalltongue::smalltongue::smalltongue:

Outside of sports and duelling there's really no such thing.




On the note of the USMC, I seem to recall hearing that the US President has more leeway in deploying the Marines, hence why they guard embassies, as compared to regular Army units. Is that true? I think the army may have required congressional or senatorial approval or something?

[gkathellar]

My understanding of using most larger weapons (anything larger than a gladius/smallsword) is that the primary benefit of them is reach. A bastard/long sword, for instance, a spear, etc. At what size/length of weapon would you say the benefit is primarily reach rather than leverage/weight?

Two-handed weapons can also be very quick and provide superb control due to superior leverage, and provide a greater variety of grips.

[Beleriphon]

On the note of the USMC, I seem to recall hearing that the US President has more leeway in deploying the Marines, hence why they guard embassies, as compared to regular Army units. Is that true? I think the army may have required congressional or senatorial approval or something?

Not quite, and don't quote the specifics but in general the president can order troops to deploy and attack anywhere at any time. In essence the Commander-in-Chief can order a war whenever they feel like it. However, only Congress can sue for peace and ratify treaties. So the president can declare war, but only the "people" can end it.

[gkathellar]

Not quite, and don't quote the specifics but in general the president can order troops to deploy and attack anywhere at any time. In essence the Commander-in-Chief can order a war whenever they feel like it. However, only Congress can sue for peace and ratify treaties. So the president can declare war, but only the "people" can end it.

The president can't declare war - only Congress can invoke the relevant statutes. But the commander-in-chief can order troop movements without such declaration, and it is traditional to request congressional approval for any large-scale deployment.

That said, Congress has not declared war since WW2.

[Beleriphon]

The president can't declare war - only Congress can invoke the relevant statutes. But the commander-in-chief can order troop movements without such declaration, and it is traditional to request congressional approval for any large-scale deployment.

That said, Congress has not declared war since WW2.

Fair enough, although there is a difference between declaring war and starting one.

[JustSomeGuy]

It seems i didn't cover enough basics earlier with my watermelons n' chains pike counter, so to cover the basics:

Lets assume i have a competent military of similar standing to my enemy, so i will also be using cavalry, archers, shieldmen etc. Lets also assume i don't plan on standing in front of enemy troops messing around and getting killed any more than i have to, which i'm guessing troop formations do kinda imstinctively.

Now, there are a block of pikemen that i need to deal with, and so far the best options are
1) Also pikes, lets push into each other for a good 50/50 death and injury trade off, and hope they break first
2) Organise a band of no hopers, renegades and scoundrels (much like most good old war movies) to go and do the dirty business, probably die and hope they do enough damage that i can work with later

Now, slighlty later in history, troops would advance and deploy ladders in an escalade under rifle and musket fire, so this is definately achievable on the battlefield, and something i can use to overweigh the enemy pikes would be very useful immediately prior to that same melee assault which would follow the usual forlorn swordsmen or pikepush, but hopefully without killing a bunch of my own troops first - i like to think a good tactic is not killing my own troops when avoidable.

Either the enemy pikemen are bracing the base with their foot, which would make it easier to hold up against my cunning plan, but also reduces their pikes to a pretty static weapon my troops kind of have to walk into to die on, since one end is pretty firmly in place so no thrusting etc is on the cards, OR, they are holding the pikes aloft in a more offensive, acutally-able-to-manipulate-and-thrust kind of manner, only now it is much easier for me to overbalance the pointy end (because physics), rendering it pointless (yes i wrote that).

Come to think of it, perhaps ladders themselves would work...

[Beleriphon]

Now, slighlty later in history, troops would advance and deploy ladders in an escalade under rifle and musket fire, so this is definately achievable on the battlefield, and something i can use to overweigh the enemy pikes would be very useful immediately prior to that same melee assault which would follow the usual forlorn swordsmen or pikepush, but hopefully without killing a bunch of my own troops first - i like to think a good tactic is not killing my own troops when avoidable.

Either the enemy pikemen are bracing the base with their foot, which would make it easier to hold up against my cunning plan, but also reduces their pikes to a pretty static weapon my troops kind of have to walk into to die on, since one end is pretty firmly in place so no thrusting etc is on the cards, OR, they are holding the pikes aloft in a more offensive, acutally-able-to-manipulate-and-thrust kind of manner, only now it is much easier for me to overbalance the pointy end (because physics), rendering it pointless (yes i wrote that).

Come to think of it, perhaps ladders themselves would work...

I think you're going to run into a few problems with the anti-pike watermelon is watermelons don't hold up well when spiked like that, and two anything that is going to hold up is probably not actually heavy enough to be a problem, and if it is heavy enough it is hard to throw. The other issue is since it can get spiked, there's nothing to stop the pikemen from just thrusting with the thing on the end of the pike and pushing the spear head through the "watermelon" into the enemy.

[Gnoman]

The French produced a couple of military revolvers in the late 19th century that are known for being chambered with rather anemic cartridges. Wikipedia compares them to .25 ACP and .32ACP. Are these as seriously under powered as Wikipedia seems to suggest?

It took a long time to figure out exactly where to balance firepower and compactness for modern pistol rounds. The US Army, for example, replaced the old .45 Long Colt cartridge with the .38 Long Colt for a time, which compares poorly to the much-derided .38 Special, while the Navy used a .36 caliber revolver for many years that was similar to the .380 ACP in power.

[Xuc Xac]

Olympic fencer.:smalltongue::smalltongue::smalltongue:

Outside of sports and duelling there's really no such thing (as using a single one-handed weapon).


I was going to suggest "athlete" for that reason. Or "amputee" for warriors with no choice in the matter.

[JustSomeGuy]

I think you're going to run into a few problems with the anti-pike watermelon is watermelons don't hold up well when spiked like that, and two anything that is going to hold up is probably not actually heavy enough to be a problem, and if it is heavy enough it is hard to throw. The other issue is since it can get spiked, there's nothing to stop the pikemen from just thrusting with the thing on the end of the pike and pushing the spear head through the "watermelon" into the enemy.

I don't think it would take an awful lot of mass to pin down a pike head, or at least weight it enough to be unuseable, i imagine it would be very easy to just hold down the end except the owner is trying to stab you with it, hence using a proxy to hold it for you without the risk.

But the best method is what is eluding me, and the best i can come up with is either something with enough mass and 'stickyness' that a whole bunch, thrown en mass (like the roman pila) would individually tangle up sufficient pikes to make an assault safer and easier, or elsesomething like a bunch of chains or laddery-pole type things that when thrown have enough width and awkwardness to sit on top of, or through, again enough pike heads to stop so many of your troops getting themselves stabbed.

Of course, then you'd have to be advancing over a bunch of trip hazards and pike hafts, but that seems prefferable to me than through the forest of pike heads.

I was also thinking of cloth (which while light individually, quickly collects in weight, like a roll of carpet or even a laundry hamper) or whatever, stuff that is easily carried around by a troop formation and plentiful to hand that they can throw enough at whoever they need to (btw i doubt many soldiers would want to waste food unless reallypushed or they had a massive stockpile), and i'm kind of coming up short here too. Perhaps nets, but would they be heavy enough? Loads of boots tied in pairs with the laces, but obviously who carries and hurls pairs of boots in battle?

I mean, clearly there are some hurdles to overcome with the plan, but i can't see them being worse than basically earmarking a bunch of guys to die and hoping they achieve something workable beforehand!

[Vinyadan]

So, lots of bolas?

[gkathellar]

The thing is, if there were an easy close-range counter to the pike block, somebody probably would've figured it out. No cute trick you can devise is going to neutralize a well-drilled pike block, because no cute trick anyone could devise at the time managed to, either. It was the dominant formation of its time for a reason: there's no simple counter to it prior to the artillery barrage.

[rrgg]

Anything heavy enough to weigh down the pikes probably won't be able to be thrown very far, and most of the time they're likely to just miss or slip off. In addition, as dangerous as pikes can be they still aren't necessarily the main threat since they generally won't penetrate the armor of the front rankers anyways. What decides the outcome of a pike engagement is discipline and the mass of men. Guns are much better at undermining both and can be reloaded.

[Vinyadan]

How about a machine that throws burning tree trunks at the enemy formation and makes them roll within their lines? It probably would disrupt the formation.

[PersonMan]

Additionally, if you're dealing with a well-trained group, couldn't they just co-ordinate a downward movement of their weapons, to let whatever you threw on slide off? You'd temporarily disable them, but the window would be so small it'd be difficult to take advantage of, even if you solved all the other problems.

[Xuc Xac]

How about a machine that throws burning tree trunks at the enemy formation and makes them roll within their lines? It probably would disrupt the formation.

It probably would. So would nuclear weapons.

[Mike_G]

Not a thing from history, as far as I know, but in one of Robert Adams' "Horseclans (https://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Horseclans-Book-3-ebook/dp/B0027CFNHE)" books, some troops are armed with throwing nets, which they throw onto the pikes to entangle them before charging and ducking under the points to use their swords.

It seemed improbable to me when I read it, but I think that's the kind of thing you're thinking about. Adams did supposedly do a lot of research on armor and weapons and tactics, but the books are twenty or so years old, so some of his stuff adheres to what was then current thought. I don't know if he made the tactic up or read about it being done at some point.

EDIT: Wow. Those books are almost 40 years old. I linked Book 1. Not sure which book had the pike tactics in it. They're not bad for old-school violent, pulpy sword and sorcery stuff. Not great, but not bad.

[VoxRationis]

How about a machine that throws burning tree trunks at the enemy formation and makes them roll within their lines? It probably would disrupt the formation.

That would disrupt most formations. The difficulty is in getting a machine that can do that properly and is mobile enough to be at all useful in a battlefield setting. Maybe a catapult or something with a fork instead of a "spoon" or sling. The range would be terrible, though.

[Tiktakkat]

On the note of the USMC, I seem to recall hearing that the US President has more leeway in deploying the Marines, hence why they guard embassies, as compared to regular Army units. Is that true? I think the army may have required congressional or senatorial approval or something?

Kinda, sorta, with a lot of dependence on technicality, more on historical background, and finally some actual legislation.

The legislation is the easy part: there is a specific law that says Marines can be "requested" to guard embassies. It came about after WWII, when embassies were expanding and certain things were being formalized.

The technicality is the next easiest part: by the Constitution, appropriations for the Army may not exceed 2 years; there is no such limit on appropriations for the Navy. As a result, the Navy can get enough money in an appropriations bill that the President can order it about as he pleases without having to go back and beg Congress for more money every few years. The Marines being part of the Navy, that lets the President send the Navy off, with a bunch of Marines, to "explain things" to foreign powers as he sees fit, as well as making it easier to budget for Marine guards at embassies.

The historical background is the tricky part: the Founders hated standing armies as a concept. Navies didn't worry them as much, but they weren't that thrilled with them either, so it took awhile for them to get one going. Thus the technical part of the Constitution above. From that grew the general principle, eventually becoming a tradition, that the President could send the Navy and Marines hither and yon without bothering Congress, but the Army wasn't going anywhere unless Congress got to put its 2 cents in. That of course got blown up as a result of Vietnam, leading to the War Powers Resolution.


Not a thing from history, as far as I know, but in one of Robert Adams' "Horseclans (https://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Horseclans-Book-3-ebook/dp/B0027CFNHE)" books, some troops are armed with throwing nets, which they throw onto the pikes to entangle them before charging and ducking under the points to use their swords.

It seemed improbable to me when I read it, but I think that's the kind of thing you're thinking about. Adams did supposedly do a lot of research on armor and weapons and tactics, but the books are twenty or so years old, so some of his stuff adheres to what was then current thought. I don't know if he made the tactic up or read about it being done at some point.

EDIT: Wow. Those books are almost 40 years old. I linked Book 1. Not sure which book had the pike tactics in it. They're not bad for old-school violent, pulpy sword and sorcery stuff. Not great, but not bad.

First, Horseclans is amazing.
So is his other series, Castaways in Time, which is a Lord Kalvan knockoff.
The last few are clearly kludged together from his notes with LOTS of repeated sections from other books, but once I started reading I kept itching for the next one, and was quite sad to hear of his passing.
As for his background, the author notes routinely stated he made weapons and armor at his own forge, stopping only when his writing career took off.

As for the pike tactics, it was in one of the Bili the Axe books, probably the fourth one, Champion of the Last Battle, where Bili led a "traditional" chivalric heavy cavalry plus foot levies against a Swiss pike imitator. Bili being an "innovative" type and rejecting the "Lawful Stupid" chivalric tradition, ala John the Blind at Crecy, broke out the nets to entangle the pike heads, and disrupt the formation long enough for his cavalry to break in.

[Mike_G]

Kinda, sorta, with a lot of dependence on technicality, more on historical background, and finally some actual legislation.

The legislation is the easy part: there is a specific law that says Marines can be "requested" to guard embassies. It came about after WWII, when embassies were expanding and certain things were being formalized.

The technicality is the next easiest part: by the Constitution, appropriations for the Army may not exceed 2 years; there is no such limit on appropriations for the Navy. As a result, the Navy can get enough money in an appropriations bill that the President can order it about as he pleases without having to go back and beg Congress for more money every few years. The Marines being part of the Navy, that lets the President send the Navy off, with a bunch of Marines, to "explain things" to foreign powers as he sees fit, as well as making it easier to budget for Marine guards at embassies.

The historical background is the tricky part: the Founders hated standing armies as a concept. Navies didn't worry them as much, but they weren't that thrilled with them either, so it took awhile for them to get one going. Thus the technical part of the Constitution above. From that grew the general principle, eventually becoming a tradition, that the President could send the Navy and Marines hither and yon without bothering Congress, but the Army wasn't going anywhere unless Congress got to put its 2 cents in. That of course got blown up as a result of Vietnam, leading to the War Powers Resolution.


Good job explaining.

Yeah, for a long time we relied on very small standing army with state militias being called up in time of need. The Navy is different, especially in an 18th Century context, of being the service that can most quickly respond to foreign crises.

It still does work that way. Easy enough to park a carrier battle group with a Marine Expeditionary Unit off the coast of any hot spot, then just sail away later if it isn't needed. Sending the Big Red One is a lot more work, and a lot more provocative.




First, Horseclans is amazing.
So is his other series, Castaways in Time, which is a Lord Kalvan knockoff.
The last few are clearly kludged together from his notes with LOTS of repeated sections from other books, but once I started reading I kept itching for the next one, and was quite sad to hear of his passing.
As for his background, the author notes routinely stated he made weapons and armor at his own forge, stopping only when his writing career took off.

As for the pike tactics, it was in one of the Bili the Axe books, probably the fourth one, Champion of the Last Battle, where Bili led a "traditional" chivalric heavy cavalry plus foot levies against a Swiss pike imitator. Bili being an "innovative" type and rejecting the "Lawful Stupid" chivalric tradition, ala John the Blind at Crecy, broke out the nets to entangle the pike heads, and disrupt the formation long enough for his cavalry to break in.

That sounds right. I read the books back in the 80s, and the recent discussion of tactics versus pikes reminded me of the scene. I never would have remembered which book, though. I think there wound up being like 18 of them. I did enjoy them overall, but the last few did get repetitious.

[fusilier]

On the note of the USMC, I seem to recall hearing that the US President has more leeway in deploying the Marines, hence why they guard embassies, as compared to regular Army units. Is that true? I think the army may have required congressional or senatorial approval or something?

There's a related issue, that has more to do with international law (or should I say convention?), concerning the difference between Army and Navy:

If a nation was to take Army units and move them, uninvited, into another nation, that would be considered an overt act of war/invasion. However, naval vessels are allowed to "call" on foreign ports. They are also allowed to put navy personnel ashore. Stretching the rules a little bit further, the navy is allowed to take certain military actions, of a limited sort, without, necessarily, being considered acts of war.

Put more succinctly: the presence of naval forces is considered "temporary," whereas the presence of army forces is considered "permanent."

Marines fall under the jurisdiction of the Navy -- therefore sending Marines into a foreign country could be interpreted as a temporary measure: to secure assets, often business interests in the country that are threatened by local conflict.

Keep in mind the expansion of the Marine Corps beyond its very traditional role was one that really began in the 20th century, with involvement in places like Nicaragua. Antecedents existed earlier, although these often primarily involved navy personnel ("bluejackets") supported by small numbers of Marines (i.e. those usually detailed to the ships involved).

[fusilier]

While we are discussing aspects of US military culture:
I am of the understanding that in the past, US military units were often drawn on a state-by-state basis (so one unit would be all from Alabama, a different unit from Pennsylvania, etc.). Is this still done? Does it create intraservice rivalries?

The old Volunteer system was used through the 19th century, and units called something like the "6th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry" could still be found during the Spanish-American War, and some of the fighting in the Philippines.

That system was replaced by the National Guard in the early 20th century. To the best of my knowledge the National Guard is still organized by state, but the units received generic designations. For example, the WW2 era 200th Coast Artillery was part of the New Mexico National Guard, with its soldiers recruited from New Mexico. Its designation wasn't specific to New Mexico (otherwise it would imply that New Mexico alone fielded at least 200 Coast Artillery battalions/regiments -- although why New Mexico would field any Coast Artillery is a separate question).

[Carl]

@Mike_G@: My comments vis a vis fire support are based off the general furore surrounding the Zumwaltz where it's abundantly clear the only people who seem happy about it's capabilities are the navy itself. And nobody but the Navy seems to feel that air strike fully compensate for the lost capability.

The rest, it would make an interesting discussion TBH but i've got a feeling it's a touchy subject and i respect present and past servicemen a bit too much to start a potential pissing contest so to speak.

[snowblizz]

That system was replaced by the National Guard in the early 20th century. To the best of my knowledge the National Guard is still organized by state,
Should be still AFAIK. Though they aren't really allowed to deploy outside a state and so aren't "en masse" sent overseas e.g. It's the state governor that "controls" their deployment, yes?
Though somehow used as a strategic reserve for the army it seems. Know I guy in Illinois NG who was in Iraq for a tour. Not sure how he ended up going, I assume it was volounteering.

All the war movies seem to mix soldiers from various backgrounds. Closest I've ever seen to local units was from the "Lost Battallion" movie about WW1 where a large part of a unit was from New York city but got a bunch of reinforcements from various places just in time for plot to happen.

Britihs in WW1 at least experiemnted with units made up of certian groups, friends, coworkers and "villagers" but the grind at the front wiping out entire units turned that into a very bad idea for morale countrywide. It's easier when you can spread out the casualities so it doesn't look so bad, which is why they generally stopped doing it. I would presume the US did the very same, that and it does kinda create a spirit of nation if you mix in people from all over the place.

[Max_Killjoy]

@Mike_G@: My comments vis a vis fire support are based off the general furore surrounding the Zumwaltz where it's abundantly clear the only people who seem happy about it's capabilities are the navy itself. And nobody but the Navy seems to feel that air strike fully compensate for the lost capability.


There's a lot going on with the Navy's recent ship designs that mirrors the nonsense with, for example, the F-35.

Don't draw TOO much historical "fact" from just the disagreements about those ships.

[fusilier]

Should be still AFAIK. Though they aren't really allowed to deploy outside a state and so aren't "en masse" sent overseas e.g. It's the state governor that "controls" their deployment, yes?
Though somehow used as a strategic reserve for the army it seems. Know I guy in Illinois NG who was in Iraq for a tour. Not sure how he ended up going, I assume it was volounteering.

I'm not that familiar with it myself (there are some people I can talk to though), but National Guard units can be activated by the President for Federal service. See the subsection "Federal Duty":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_the_United_States


All the war movies seem to mix soldiers from various backgrounds. Closest I've ever seen to local units was from the "Lost Battallion" movie about WW1 where a large part of a unit was from New York city but got a bunch of reinforcements from various places just in time for plot to happen.

Traditionally, in the United States, regular army forces were not recruited from a specific region, so when the Regular army was expanded in war time, you would see precisely what you described -- a mix of soldiers from various backgrounds/locales. Nevertheless, there are some movies, like The Fighting 69th which centered on a National Guard unit from New York.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fighting_69th

[fusilier]

Should be still AFAIK. Though they aren't really allowed to deploy outside a state and so aren't "en masse" sent overseas e.g. It's the state governor that "controls" their deployment, yes?

Oh, and the 200th Coast Artillery, from New Mexico, was deployed to the Philippines, before the attack on Pearl Harbor. So while I'm not sure what the current status is, historically National Guard units could be ordered overseas even during peacetime. --EDIT-- The Philippines were effectively a territory of the United States, so they weren't being deployed to a foreign country, but they were being deployed outside of their state -- which is kind of necessary if they were coast artillery. ;-)

[Tiktakkat]

While we are discussing aspects of US military culture:
I am of the understanding that in the past, US military units were often drawn on a state-by-state basis (so one unit would be all from Alabama, a different unit from Pennsylvania, etc.). Is this still done? Does it create intraservice rivalries?

Yes it was, because of inheritance from the militia system, and because of technology. It is difficult to muster a division when half the people need a month to get there by horseback, 3 months on foot.
It also presents a problem of losing the entire "future" of a town or county as the result of a single battle. England suffered severely from this during WWI, but it also affected the U.S.

It is no longer done for regular Army units.
For National Guard units, it is required by the militia concept. However, due to the continuing decrease in the number of National Guard units, as well as a continuing shift in the focus of the mission of the National Guard, which is driven by political considerations, very few States support a full National Guard division, or even brigade. Instead, National Guard units are select specialist units, supply and military police being big currently, that are attached to other, regular Army units, as needed. For full National Guard divisions, they are typically organized from units from 3-5 States.

It does not cause intraservice rivalries.
What it did cause was significant culture shock because of differing cultural values, particularly in regards to segregation.
It also involves political posturing, as National Guard units are "grandfathered" in, and cannot be eliminated unless a State agrees. Naturally, many States want to maintain their forces, and the money they get from them.


Should be still AFAIK. Though they aren't really allowed to deploy outside a state and so aren't "en masse" sent overseas e.g. It's the state governor that "controls" their deployment, yes?
Though somehow used as a strategic reserve for the army it seems. Know I guy in Illinois NG who was in Iraq for a tour. Not sure how he ended up going, I assume it was volounteering.

When not in federal service, the State Governor determines what National Guard units of the State do, though he cannot send them overseas, and I think it requires federal approval to send them to other States for disaster relief or use them for any law enforcement purposes. (There are a bunch of specific laws on such, the details of which I don't recall at the moment.)
When in federal service, the President determines what National Guard units do, including deploying overseas, though using them for domestic law enforcement requires Congressional approval and/or declaration of martial law/state of emergency.
Congress sets the laws for when the National Guard can be federalized.


If a nation was to take Army units and move them, uninvited, into another nation, that would be considered an overt act of war/invasion. However, naval vessels are allowed to "call" on foreign ports. They are also allowed to put navy personnel ashore. Stretching the rules a little bit further, the navy is allowed to take certain military actions, of a limited sort, without, necessarily, being considered acts of war.

Back pre-WWII, naval vessels could not expect to be allowed to "call" on foreign ports automatically. The current situation is the result of a LOT of treaties, both direct and international.
This was even more critical in the 19th century, when coaling and oiling rights were prime elements of negotiations. (Ships needed to refuel a lot more often back then.)
The significance of events like Perry "opening" Japan derive from this - he showed up with a fleet (4 ships, so more of a squadron) and "informed" the Japanese that he was making port where he wanted to - or he was going to shell their capital.

You would need to research "gun boat diplomacy" and some of the lesser known military actions like the Sumatra Expeditions for more details on how such things work. There is a lot of politics involved with it, both domestic and international.

[Storm Bringer]

Brits in WW1 at least experiemnted with units made up of certian groups, friends, coworkers and "villagers" but the grind at the front wiping out entire units turned that into a very bad idea for morale countrywide. It's easier when you can spread out the casualities so it doesn't look so bad, which is why they generally stopped doing it. I would presume the US did the very same, that and it does kinda create a spirit of nation if you mix in people from all over the place.


we still do link our regiments to places.


every regular infantry battalion and cavalry regiment in the British army has a traditional link to some part of the UK. Some are relatively straightforward, others are a bit less so. . most of the "tail" arms have no local affiliation, and are filled with people form all over the UK (you can walk into a REME garage in any base on the UK, shout for "scouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouse)", and be confident that someone is going to answer)

these affiliations to specific parts of the UK go back to at least Napoleonic times, often longer. Here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Regiments_of_Foot)is a link to the old numbered regiments of the time of Wellington and Sharpe.

The ww1 battalions you are refering to were known as the "Pals" battalions. They were formed on the basis that those that "joined together, would serve together". this was a recruiting tool, as it helped convince people to join en masse, confident they would go to war with their friends by their side. As you mentioned, it was discontinued after it was found that the shock of seeing whole streets getting told that every single man on them was dead or injured was too bad for morale. The Accrington Pals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accrington_Pals) is a famous example, as they were pretty much wiped out on the first day of the Somme.

However, almost every battalion of WW1 and WW2 was linked to a specific county in England, and most still are. this let them have the benefit of a "local" unit while letting them spread the losses out somewhat.

[snowblizz]

What it did cause was significant culture shock because of differing cultural values, particularly in regards to segregation.
That's how it's usually depicted. "Oh you cowboys from Texas, haychewers from mid west, us sophisticated Nah Yorkers know how things are done, yea I came over with my parents on a boat so what?".



When not in federal service, the State Governor determines what National Guard units of the State do, though he cannot send them overseas, and I think it requires federal approval to send them to other States for disaster relief or use them for any law enforcement purposes. (There are a bunch of specific laws on such, the details of which I don't recall at the moment.)
When in federal service, the President determines what National Guard units do, including deploying overseas, though using them for domestic law enforcement requires Congressional approval and/or declaration of martial law/state of emergency.
Congress sets the laws for when the National Guard can be federalized.

Yea that's what I was trying to remeber. I recall there's a rather complex interplay of legalities and various levels of authority invovled with federal, state and local government (and jealously guarded borders between those), but not being American, I'm at slight disadvantage (but only slight).:smallbiggrin:

[fusilier]

Back pre-WWII, naval vessels could not expect to be allowed to "call" on foreign ports automatically. The current situation is the result of a LOT of treaties, both direct and international.
This was even more critical in the 19th century, when coaling and oiling rights were prime elements of negotiations. (Ships needed to refuel a lot more often back then.)
The significance of events like Perry "opening" Japan derive from this - he showed up with a fleet (4 ships, so more of a squadron) and "informed" the Japanese that he was making port where he wanted to - or he was going to shell their capital.

You would need to research "gun boat diplomacy" and some of the lesser known military actions like the Sumatra Expeditions for more details on how such things work. There is a lot of politics involved with it, both domestic and international.

Right. They could get away with it, because other sea-powers wouldn't act to stop them. That's the "international law". The Korean Expedition of 1871 is another example. If it was just navy forces, forcing a smaller nation to grant concessions (which most of the other sea powers would also benefit from) wasn't considered an overt act of war -- by those who had the power to stop it. If on the other hand, the United States had shipped an army to Japan, and tried to occupy sections of it, that would have looked like "conquest", i.e. a permanent transfer of land and it wouldn't have been as easily tolerated.

Although, sometimes these actions could lead to annexation, like Hawaii.

[Mike_G]

@Mike_G@: My comments vis a vis fire support are based off the general furore surrounding the Zumwaltz where it's abundantly clear the only people who seem happy about it's capabilities are the navy itself. And nobody but the Navy seems to feel that air strike fully compensate for the lost capability.

The rest, it would make an interesting discussion TBH but i've got a feeling it's a touchy subject and i respect present and past servicemen a bit too much to start a potential pissing contest so to speak.

I'm going to echo Max_Killjoy and advise against reading too much into that. We could say the same thing about the Air Force being much more excited about dogfighting and long range bombing than supporting the Army in a CAS role. The though of losing the A-10 and hoping the craptastic F-35 could fill the gap was keeping Army grunts up at night.

But I cannot stress enough that, while it's AWESOME, the idea of naval bombardment with 16 inch guns followed by a Tarawa style assault under fire just isn't really a thing anybody really expects to pull off these days. Amphibious assault was a big deal for maybe eight years. The Corps has been on the job for 240.

What many others have stated about the Navy (which does include the USMC) being the quick reaction force is true. If the Pentagon decided to cut the USMC out of the budget tomorrow, it's not like they could get the same use out of the 101st Airborne. It's like driving screws with a hammer. It seems like it might work, but you're better off picking the right tool for the job.

Since WWI, the Marine Corps has been used like an extra Army division in extended land conflicts, which is a modification of the original mission, but that's a century of "off label" use, so I don't see that going away, and the Marines have been pretty good at it.

So, the USMC mission and doctrine is more geared to police actions and small brushfire wars, and those are increasingly common, but adaptable enough to augment the Army in a major land war, so "in search of a mission" is not the phrase I'd choose.

[Tiktakkat]

That's how it's usually depicted. "Oh you cowboys from Texas, haychewers from mid west, us sophisticated Nah Yorkers know how things are done, yea I came over with my parents on a boat so what?".

Actually I meant more along the lines of "You talk to those people? Are you crazy?"
Then there were the outright murderous incidents in segregated areas.


Yea that's what I was trying to remeber. I recall there's a rather complex interplay of legalities and various levels of authority invovled with federal, state and local government (and jealously guarded borders between those), but not being American, I'm at slight disadvantage (but only slight).:smallbiggrin:

The interplays aren't actually that complex, they are just somewhat numerous and a bit tedious. The politics are however quite complex, and often confused, sometimes deliberately, for political purposes. The law enforcement element being a prime example: most people have no clue about what "posse comitatus" means, as opposed to the Posse Comitatus Law, or the details of said law.
Not having such pre-/misconceptions would actually put you at advantage if you tried to figure them all out.


Right. They could get away with it, because other sea-powers wouldn't act to stop them. That's the "international law". The Korean Expedition of 1871 is another example. If it was just navy forces, forcing a smaller nation to grant concessions (which most of the other sea powers would also benefit from) wasn't considered an overt act of war -- by those who had the power to stop it. If on the other hand, the United States had shipped an army to Japan, and tried to occupy sections of it, that would have looked like "conquest", i.e. a permanent transfer of land and it wouldn't have been as easily tolerated.

Although, sometimes these actions could lead to annexation, like Hawaii.

They could get away with it because the target nation could not resist.
Other Great Powers might or might not act to stop them, depending on circumstances.

The prime example there is the Triple Intervention following the First Sino-Japanese War.
The Japanese demanded concessions in Manchuria. The Russians didn't like it and got the French and Germans to back them. The Japanese were unable to get the British or Americans to back them and were forced to back down and take money.
In the aftermath, Russia wound up with Manchuria, and Britain, France, and Germany forced other concessions involving land from China.
Japan felt thoroughly abused, leading eventually to the Russo-Japanese War. It also contributed to Japan being willing to side with the allies during WWI, receiving the German concessions in China (and most of their island protectorates in the Pacific) as a reward.

And note, this applied onto to Great Power - Non-Power relations.
A Great Power warship sailing into the harbor of another Great Power without permission could be interned or fired on, and it was the trespasser who was giving casus belli.

[PersonMan]

What would the advantages of an extremely sharp blade be? 'Extremely sharp' meaning anything from just sharper than normal to some sort of monofilament edge.

Apart from upkeep (which would be handled by magic in this case), what downsides would there be to a weapon like that? If we assume that a proper sheath, etc. is made and magically reinforced to keep the blade from getting dull or cutting through it accidentally.

[Brother Oni]

Naval gunfire and air support from carriers and from dedicated Marine air wings is well co-ordinated with Marine ground units. I don't know where you're getting your information.

I remember hearing some grumbling from the USMC that they'd like the USN to retain something that could fulfil the off-shore bombardment fire support role. Not something at the scale of the Iowa class (although that would be undeniably awesome), but something more sustained than missiles.

I believe the proposed railgun on the Zumwalt class still has a flaw in that it can't do over the horizon attacks easily.


In the aftermath, Russia wound up with Manchuria, and Britain, France, and Germany forced other concessions involving land from China.

All these collective shenanigans in the far East were known as the unequal treaties (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_treaty). The wiki page has a great political cartoon from the time that neatly sums everything up:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/China_imperialism_cartoon.jpg


What would the advantages of an extremely sharp blade be? 'Extremely sharp' meaning anything from just sharper than normal to some sort of monofilament edge.

Apart from upkeep (which would be handled by magic in this case), what downsides would there be to a weapon like that? If we assume that a proper sheath, etc. is made and magically reinforced to keep the blade from getting dull or cutting through it accidentally.

How tough is the material that the blade is made out of?

Obsidian arrowheads and blades on the macuahuitl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl) were incredibly sharp but very brittle. The journals from the conquistadors report that the obsidian arrowheads tended to shatter on their metal armour, sending razor sharp glass fragments everywhere and causing significant injuries and the descriptions of the macuahuitl on the wiki page are terrifying.
The show Deadliest Warrior (I know, I know), had a cutting test with a macuahuitl on a pig torso and simply sliced it apart, so that could be used as the baseline for what your super sharp blade would do on unarmoured targets. On anything harder, then blade material and durability starts coming into play.

One of the downsides is care in handling - one of the people testing out fencing with the macuahuitl accidentally tagged himself in the back of his leg on a backswing, which possibly required stitches to fix.

Edit: Page 50, new thread time. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?503643-Got-a-Real-World-Weapon-Armor-or-Tactics-Question-Mk-XXII)

[Martin Greywolf]

What would the advantages of an extremely sharp blade be? 'Extremely sharp' meaning anything from just sharper than normal to some sort of monofilament edge.

Apart from upkeep (which would be handled by magic in this case), what downsides would there be to a weapon like that? If we assume that a proper sheath, etc. is made and magically reinforced to keep the blade from getting dull or cutting through it accidentally.

It sort of depends on the blade. If it's a normal sword blade with very sharp edges, then it would be really sharp, and that's about it. You will be able to dent the opponent's blades a bit more, and you may be able to make shallow cuts in armor, but nothing too spectacular, since the sharpness of the blade is limited by the (relatively) thick edge behind it (my Albion squire sword has 0.2 mm spine thickness at the tip).

This, of course, depends on the edge angle, a sword with very sharp edge angle may be more similar to a monofilament blade.

If you have a blade that is monofilament along its entire width, then situation changes a lot - you can cut through pretty much anything, but you can say goodbye to any edge parries, and parries in general would be problematic since your sword is probably much lighter. The bright side of this is that you can move your sword faster, but that's not such a tremendous advantage, since a lot of swordsmanship depends on your legs.

Monofilaments also have problems with rigidity - they may be effectively unable to thrust, unless the magic is keeping them from bending like a paper sheet - this would also be a problem with cuts, but if you swing the sword, it realigns itself thanks to aerodynamics. This is all assuming that it has enough stiffness to be usable as a normal sword, as opposed to urumi - though urumi with monofilament blades would be pretty scary.

tl;dr After you make a sword sharp enough, there are diminishing returns in sharpening it further. The greatest advantage of your sword may be that you don't have to sharpen in manually.

[Garimeth]

I'm going to echo Max_Killjoy and advise against reading too much into that. We could say the same thing about the Air Force being much more excited about dogfighting and long range bombing than supporting the Army in a CAS role. The though of losing the A-10 and hoping the craptastic F-35 could fill the gap was keeping Army grunts up at night.

But I cannot stress enough that, while it's AWESOME, the idea of naval bombardment with 16 inch guns followed by a Tarawa style assault under fire just isn't really a thing anybody really expects to pull off these days. Amphibious assault was a big deal for maybe eight years. The Corps has been on the job for 240.

What many others have stated about the Navy (which does include the USMC) being the quick reaction force is true. If the Pentagon decided to cut the USMC out of the budget tomorrow, it's not like they could get the same use out of the 101st Airborne. It's like driving screws with a hammer. It seems like it might work, but you're better off picking the right tool for the job.

Since WWI, the Marine Corps has been used like an extra Army division in extended land conflicts, which is a modification of the original mission, but that's a century of "off label" use, so I don't see that going away, and the Marines have been pretty good at it.

So, the USMC mission and doctrine is more geared to police actions and small brushfire wars, and those are increasingly common, but adaptable enough to augment the Army in a major land war, so "in search of a mission" is not the phrase I'd choose.

Again, I completely agree. To give a slightly more sketched out picture for the others:

When our generals/admirals or war college students are war gaming and op planning the first two questions they tend to ask are "Where's the MEU?" and "Where's the carrier?"

The MEU at any given time can be on station, much faster than paratroopers can. You always have one out from each coast, and then the 31st on standby in Oki. They also show up with the Amphibious Readiness Group, their own air and ground assets, and everything they need to function for about a month.

VERY importantly, they also show up with the capability to provide their own egress, as well as that of any non-combatants they have to secure or evacuate. Para-troopers do not bring the same capability, they bring some different ones that are very important, but its apples and oranges.

SOF units are light-weight, fast in fast out, but lack the structure for anything seriously drawn out or conventional. The Army is medium to heavy weight. You can use the 75th Ranger Reg to do some pretty badass stuff, but to an extent that assumes air superiority, or no possibility of a quick exfil. The MEU fills the gap of missions that are too big for SOF units (who by the way are often embarked with MEUs and Carriers) but too time critical or small for the Army, nevermind the political machinations that have already been discussed.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we have not really fought a "real" war in many decades. If we went to war with another developed military where air superiority is not a given, or is contested, then the amphibious assault becomes immediately important again - because that's how you are getting there unless you have a neighboring ally willing to let you use their territory for an air base. The USMC is in the process of acquiring new AAVs, or rather their replacements, and the higher ups are absolutely concerned about the USN's dilapidated amphibious fleet.

That said, for the individual grunt in the fire team that guy wants to go get some - and he doesn't care if its with a MEU or boots on ground. I'm Navy, but my Marines know where I came from before I came here. None of them get upset or defensive when I say I'm more of a Marine than most of them, not that I say that often because well its not their fault. The MEU is still viewed as a second rate deployment by most of the Corps.

By way of example first I give you Terminal Lance:
http://terminallance.com/2010/06/22/terminal-lance-45-vacations-dont-count/
http://terminallance.com/2016/08/19/terminal-lance-435-traveling-abroad/
http://terminallance.com/2011/08/09/terminal-lance-139-semantics/

And for the more satirically minded, The Duffel Blog:
http://www.duffelblog.com/2012/04/needs-photo-marines-to-deploy-on-revolutionary-aqua-fobs/

Enjoy!

[Carl]

So, the USMC mission and doctrine is more geared to police actions and small brushfire wars, and those are increasingly common, but adaptable enough to augment the Army in a major land war, so "in search of a mission" is not the phrase I'd choose.

Ok given this is sort of a paraphrasing large parts of what i was going to say i think i can safely provide a larger comment. I just didn't want it to come off as dismissive of anyone or dismissive of what various people have been through in various conflicts.


The first thing i'd say is that the main reason the US hasn't fought a contested landing since 1950 is that they haven't faced an opponent able to offer the necessary level of cohesive conventional military resistance that would be required to effectively attempt to oppose a landing. But then you've kinda acknowledged that yourself as i noted. I think the addendum i'd add is that any time they are pitted against a competent well equipped and credible opponent the marines are not getting ashore without a fight. The thing is (and i'll discuss this more below), nothing i've heard or read makes me believe the upper echelons of the USMC or any other Military branch is unaware of this and plans strictly on the assumption that this will allways remain so.

The thing is there's nothing about the USMC aside possibly from training, (which has no reason to be unique to them other than the army being lazy), that makes them uniquely qualified for it.

I'd also argue that fundamentally you don't keep a military around to do these things. Rather you use the military to do these things because it's an efficient use of existing resources to deal with a "threat to national interests", but fundamentally you keep them around to deal with "threats to national survival". Protecting your interests of course helps with avoiding threats to survival and it's a solid efficient use of military forces between the big threats, but its not why you go keeping one around.

Also don't misunderstand what i meant with my paratrooper comments. Everything i know about the US army's units in that suggests their totally not suited for the rapid response role as they're setup now. My point was that a properly setup, organised, trained, e.t.c. airborne force with appropriate air force support, (in the same way the USMC needs navy support), attached and properly dispersed among the US's many foreign bases could reach any point on the globe with a modest sized force on a matter of hours notice subject to appropriate readiness when the order comes down. The USMC can only beat that if they have a ship prepositioned, (and not by much), and the navy doesn't have that many ships that it can preposition them to cover so much of the globe simultaneously. Add in that all those specialised ships are probably a lot more expensive and i don't see the USMC as the best option for rapid response to the kind of opposition the US commonly faces in it's current typical national interest fights.

Pseudo EDIT:

Grimeth posted while i was writing this so i'll quickly address a couple of lines of his.


VERY importantly, they also show up with the capability to provide their own egress, as well as that of any non-combatants they have to secure or evacuate. Para-troopers do not bring the same capability, they bring some different ones that are very important, but its apples and oranges.

I won't disagree with this entirely, (though depending on the circumstances it's entirely possible to have the paratroopers either seize an airstrip or if the terrain is favourable drop in combat engineers and clear one), but my understanding is we where talking about the fairly typical situation and advance force going in first to get boots on the ground early ahead of the big boys in the army showing up. Obviously a quick in and out in larger than a special forces is somthing that an amphibious force can do far better when there's a suitable coastline available and i'll admit it didn't really occur to me till you pointed it out. It;s a good argument for some form of USMC capability in some "National Interest" situations. I'd still say however that a properly equipped, trained, organised, and based airborne force can get an adequately sized and equipped force boots down faster, which is what i thought we were discussing tbh when i made the initial comments about paratroopers.



then the amphibious assault becomes immediately important again - because that's how you are getting there unless you have a neighboring ally willing to let you use their territory for an air base.


This is kinda where i was going next, the USMC's real strength is it's the only ground combat force that thanks to its naval heritage and work alongside has the experiance to engage in amphibious operations. But amphibious operations get proportionally more useful the less useful all the alternatives get and those tend to get less useful in direct proportion to the degree of resistance the enemy can offer. Of course as shown above that dosen't mean i can think of every use for them. Though i imagine helicopters are the primary transport medium atm for the USMC getting ashore.



I remember hearing some grumbling from the USMC that they'd like the USN to retain something that could fulfil the off-shore bombardment fire support role. Not something at the scale of the Iowa class (although that would be undeniably awesome), but something more sustained than missiles.

I believe the proposed railgun on the Zumwalt class still has a flaw in that it can't do over the horizon attacks easily.

Well my understanding is that it was supposed to be a dedicated offshore fire support ship but got over designed into a do everything ship, (hence the F-35 comparisons which was already my impression), and compromising its primary mission as a shore bombardment ship in the process.

Also the Zumwaltz isn't getting the railgun, it's getting the AGS. But both have the same issue, they're focused on BVR, (the railgun can do that, or so the navy claims), which is completely the wrong approach as it means long flight times, long flight times means long delays between a fire support request being sent and the fire support arriving. They're also both lacking real punch when they arrive. Both will kill whatever they hit. But both have issues if they don't get a direct hit. Which when your shooting at targets that are mobile, dispersed, or who's coordinates are just not known down to a few meters is completely inadequate.


ALso damm chrome. I was writing a big post on the whole spinning attacks thing clarifying what i meant and what i was trying to achieve and a browser crash lost it, (nope, autosave didn't save it), :(. me sad.

[Garimeth]

Pseudo EDIT:

Grimeth posted while i was writing this so i'll quickly address a couple of lines of his.



I won't disagree with this entirely, (though depending on the circumstances it's entirely possible to have the paratroopers either seize an airstrip or if the terrain is favourable drop in combat engineers and clear one), but my understanding is we where talking about the fairly typical situation and advance force going in first to get boots on the ground early ahead of the big boys in the army showing up. Obviously a quick in and out in larger than a special forces is somthing that an amphibious force can do far better when there's a suitable coastline available and i'll admit it didn't really occur to me till you pointed it out. It;s a good argument for some form of USMC capability in some "National Interest" situations. I'd still say however that a properly equipped, trained, organised, and based airborne force can get an adequately sized and equipped force boots down faster, which is what i thought we were discussing tbh when i made the initial comments about paratroopers.


This is kinda where i was going next, the USMC's real strength is it's the only ground combat force that thanks to its naval heritage and work alongside has the experiance to engage in amphibious operations. But amphibious operations get proportionally more useful the less useful all the alternatives get and those tend to get less useful in direct proportion to the degree of resistance the enemy can offer. Of course as shown above that dosen't mean i can think of every use for them. Though i imagine helicopters are the primary transport medium atm for the USMC getting ashore.

I guess I was more addressing whoever said its "searching for a mission". I still maintain that the airborne guys aren't getting there faster, the MEU is already out and about, and its prepositioned half the time.

Helos are actually not the primary means of getting the Marines and their gear ashore. Its a combination of Amphibious Assault Vehicles (AAVs) and Landing craft Air Cushioned (LCACs) and helos.

I agree that airborne could get an airfield built, but again without a nearby airbase or air superiority it is far inferior to showing up ready to rock and roll.

Some of the Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW) that the USMC is set up for are:
Arms Control
Enforcement of Sanctions and maritime intercept operations
Enforcing exclusion zones
Humanitarian Aid
Non combatant Evacuation Operations
Show of Force operations

[Vinyadan]

AFAIK, the fabled railgun which e.g. Ghost Fleet (the book) put on the Zumwalt actually isn't an option yet, it just needs too much energy. The book treated it like a problem like a camera's flash, a flash consumes a lot of energy and has a separate battery that is loaded before sending the large energy quantity the flash needs. Apparently, the right battery to have a railgun shoot 10 rounds of unspecified weight per minute at 8,200 feet p s on a range of over 200 miles just doesn't exist yet. Instead, the Zumwalt has the Amazing Superfast Howitzer.

There are currently 2 railgun projects I know of, one is by GE and is pretty much a mobile base that needs to be used after unpacking and while not moving and is mainly sold as anti-air, the other one is from BAE that has developed a prototype model as naval cannon and is now trying to build one to be used as a tank gun. I couldn't find exact details, however (I guess it's all in-between "safety hush-hush" and "budget hush-hush"). However, they aim to 100+ miles for the naval cannon, so over the horizon is surely an objective.

About what kind of blast area these things would have, I am not sure it would be small, it all depends on how much energy can be packed into them. 32 mega joule is the British project, maybe someone can approximate what it means: my calculations give 8 kg of TNT (or a 33 tonnes truck running you over at 100 mph). Not so awesome, compared to the Iowa cannons.

Also, is a new discussion needed?

[Carl]

Yeah let me tak this to the other thread sorry, missed that :).

[Max_Killjoy]

New Thread -- http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?503643-Got-a-Real-World-Weapon-Armor-or-Tactics-Question-Mk-XXII (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?503643-Got-a-Real-World-Weapon-Armor-or-Tactics-Question-Mk-XXII)


:biggrin:

[Lemmy]

What are/were common tactics to break/disperse enemy formation? Both in olden times and after the invention of gunpowder?

How big would be the advantage of an inhumanly disciplined army (such as the Unsullied from ASoIaF) and what would be good ways to diminish said advantage?

[Mike_G]

The thing is there's nothing about the USMC aside possibly from training, (which has no reason to be unique to them other than the army being lazy), that makes them uniquely qualified for it.

I'd also argue that fundamentally you don't keep a military around to do these things. Rather you use the military to do these things because it's an efficient use of existing resources to deal with a "threat to national interests", but fundamentally you keep them around to deal with "threats to national survival". Protecting your interests of course helps with avoiding threats to survival and it's a solid efficient use of military forces between the big threats, but its not why you go keeping one around.

Also don't misunderstand what i meant with my paratrooper comments. Everything i know about the US army's units in that suggests their totally not suited for the rapid response role as they're setup now. My point was that a properly setup, organised, trained, e.t.c. airborne force with appropriate air force support, (in the same way the USMC needs navy support), attached and properly dispersed among the US's many foreign bases could reach any point on the globe with a modest sized force on a matter of hours notice subject to appropriate readiness when the order comes down.




So, if you totally re-organize the Army to do the Marines' jopb, then they could?





The USMC can only beat that if they have a ship prepositioned, (and not by much), and the navy doesn't have that many ships that it can preposition them to cover so much of the globe simultaneously. Add in that all those specialised ships are probably a lot more expensive and i don't see the USMC as the best option for rapid response to the kind of opposition the US commonly faces in it's current typical national interest fights.



But the ships add support close to the theater of operations. If we need to fly Air Force support from Germany to East Africa, but we could park a fleet three miles off the coast, what would be better?

And parking a carrier and a MEU off the coast is a clear signal that we are ready to intervene, but without actually violating anybody's sovereignty.




Pseudo EDIT:

Grimeth posted while i was writing this so i'll quickly address a couple of lines of his.



I won't disagree with this entirely, (though depending on the circumstances it's entirely possible to have the paratroopers either seize an airstrip or if the terrain is favourable drop in combat engineers and clear one), but my understanding is we where talking about the fairly typical situation and advance force going in first to get boots on the ground early ahead of the big boys in the army showing up. Obviously a quick in and out in larger than a special forces is somthing that an amphibious force can do far better when there's a suitable coastline available and i'll admit it didn't really occur to me till you pointed it out. It;s a good argument for some form of USMC capability in some "National Interest" situations. I'd still say however that a properly equipped, trained, organised, and based airborne force can get an adequately sized and equipped force boots down faster, which is what i thought we were discussing tbh when i made the initial comments about paratroopers.



It's a lot bigger messier operation to have the 101 drop in and seize an airstrip, relying on planes flying in from hundreds of miles away, to do a job that a MEU is already ready to do, supported by a fleet parked three miles offshore.

So, sure, we can replace the Marines, if we re-engineer the Army's units to fit the job the Marines do.

The Marines have a very flexible mission that they are train and equipped for. The Army has a different mission that they have trained an equipped for. Both can do conventional ground combat, and there is overlap, but replacing the Navy and Marines with Airborne troops supported by the USAF is ...

Well, it's a bad idea.

The same way mothballing the Army and the Air Force, because the Navy already has ground and air aseets is a bad idea.