Agriculture created a stationary population that both wouldn’t move but which could also be dominated, subjugated and have their production extracted from them. Their wealth was clustered in towns which could be fortified with walls that would resist any quick raid, but control of that fortified town center (and its administrative apparatus of taxation) meant control of the countryside and its resources. Taking such a town meant a siege – delivering a large body of troops and keeping them there long enough to either breach the walls or starve the town into surrender. This created a war where territorial control was defined by the taking of fixed points.
In such war, the goal was to deliver the siege. But delivery of the siege meant a large army which might now be confronted in the field (for it was unlikely to move by stealth, being that it has to be large enough to take the town). And so to prohibit the siege from being delivered, defenders might march out and meet the attackers in the field for that pitched battle. In certain periods, siegecraft or army size had so outpaced fortress design that everyone rather understood that after the outcome of the pitched battle, the siege would be a forgone conclusion – it is that unusual state of affairs which gives us the “decisive battle” where a war might potentially be ended in a stoke (though they rarely were).
We may term this the second system of war. It is the system that most modern industrial and post-industrial cultures are focused on. Our cultural products are filled with such pitched battles, placed in every sort of era of our past or speculative future. It is how we imagine war. Except that it isn’t the sort of war we wage, is it?
Because in the early 1900s, the industrial revolution resulted in armies possessing both amounts of resources and levels of industrial firepower which precluded open pitched battles. All of those staples of our cultural fiction of battles, developed from the second system – surveying the enemy army drawn up in battle array, the tense wait, then the furious charge, coming to grips with the enemy in masses close up – none of that could survive modern machine guns and artillery.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
May 31, 2023
QotD: The second system of war
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