The intuitive and a touch clever method is to take normal human walking speed – around 3mph – multiply it by walking hours per day (maybe 8) and go with that. This makes intuitive sense, but if large army logistics made intuitive sense, they wouldn’t be hard, and as Clausewitz says (drink!) “War is very simple, but the simplest thing is very hard.” Logistics is very hard. So why don’t armies move at c. 25 miles per day?
So let’s think about – in very general terms – what needs to happen and in what order for a large body of infantry to march. Everyone wakes up and starts to get moving (probably around 5am). Breakfast needs to happen, which may require making fires. Tents need to be struck and stowed along with all of the gear in the baggage train and individual soldiers need to stow their own equipment. All sorts of small tasks add up to eat away parts of the morning. Then everyone needs to get gathered and ready to march.
And now – because you are a large body of infantry, you wait. Let me explain – let’s take a nominally full strength (c. 3,000 men) American Civil War brigade, marching on a road 13ft or so wide. You can get five men (a little cramped) into a single row on that road, meaning that the infantry itself stretches 600 ranks deep. Unlike in the movies (which love ultra-compact marching formations because it looks cool) you need a few feet of separation between rows for best effect (WW2 US Army guidelines specified 2-5 yards), let’s assume each soldier occupies about 5 feet in the marching order. So the infantry is 3,000ft long (914m; nine football fields). We also need unit separation (between the regiments, it’s important to avoid “accordioning” on the march and facilitate control; WW2 army regs suggested 100 yards between companies, 50 yards between platoons, so these could be quite large), so let’s round up to 4,000 ft (1219m; 13 football fields).
But we also have tents, food supplies, spare ammunition and all sorts of other of what the Romans would have called impedimenta (sidenote: if you are thinking, “well, but a pre-gunpowder army doesn’t need this; 1) arrows take up space and 2) camp entrenching supplies – the Romans marched heavy). How many wagons, pack animals or porters you need varies – the Romans seem to have often moved with a mule for every six-to-eight men, plus the army’s siege train. A good rule-of-thumb I’ve seen for American Civil War estimates is around 20 wagons per thousand, so 60 wagons. Rule of thumb in the ACW is 80 wagons to a mile of road, so our wagon train ought to take up around another 4,000ft.
(Sidenote: you can see why logistics gets complicated fast. Even in explaining a rule of thumb, I have to resort to rules of thumb, or else we have to inventory all of the stuff an infantry brigade needs, and all of the food they need and then parcel it out by wagons (and then figure for the mule-or-horse teams for the wagons) and on and on. Fortunately for the historians, this sort of work was done by the armies at the time and written down, so we tend to use their staff-work.)
So the entire force is probably a bit more than 8,000 ft long – 1.5 miles. In practice, there’s actually a lot more space eaten up in separation (between wagons, between men) so it would be longer, but I don’t want to get lost in the details. And this is for just 3,000 infantry – we have no cavalry with their many spare horses (three per man as a typical minimum) or god forbid a siege train which might involve hundreds of wagons.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How Fast Do Armies Move?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-06.
February 19, 2022
QotD: Army marching speed in the pre-industrial era
February 15, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tanks
In theory, a good tank ought to be effectively immune to machine-gun fire, able to cross trenches without slowing and physically protect the infantry (who could advance huddled behind the mass of it), all while bringing its own firepower to the battle. Tracked armored vehicles had been an idea considered casually by a number of the pre-war powers but not seriously attempted. The British put the first serious effort into tank development with the Landship Committee, formed in February of 1915; the first real tanks, 49 British Mark I tanks, made their first battlefield appearance during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Reliability proved to be a problem: of the 49 tanks that stepped off on the attack on September 15th, only three were operational on the 16th, mostly due to mechanical failures and breakdowns.
Nevertheless there was promise in the idea that was clearly recognized and a major effort to show what tanks could do what attempted at Cambrai in November of 1917; this time hundreds of tanks were deployed and they had a real impact, breaking through the barbed wire and scattering the initial German defenses. But then came the inevitable German counter-attacks and most of the ground taken was lost. It was obvious that tanks had great potential; the French had by 1917 already developed their own, the light Renault FT tank, which would end up being the most successful tank of the war despite its small size (it is the first tank to have its main armament in a rotating turret and so in some sense the first “real” tank). This was hardly an under-invested-in technology. So did tanks break the trench stalemate?
No.
It’s understandable that many people have the impression that they did. Interwar armored doctrine, particularly German Maneuver Warfare (bewegungskrieg) and Soviet Deep Battle both aimed to use the mobility and striking power of tanks in concentrated actions to break the trench stalemate in future wars (the two doctrines are not identical, mind you, but in this they share an objective). But these were doctrines constructed around the performance capabilities of interwar tanks, particularly by two countries (Germany and the USSR) who were not saddled with large numbers of WWI era tanks (and so could premise their doctrine entirely on more advanced models). The Panzer II, with a 24.5mph top speed and an operational range of around 100 miles, depending on conditions, was actually in a position to race the train and win; the same of course true of the Soviet interwar T-26 light tank (19.3mph on roads, 81-150 mile operational range). Such tanks could have radios for coordination and communication on the move (something not done with WWI tanks or even French tanks in WWII).
By contrast, that Renault FT had a top speed of 4.3mph and an operational range of just 37 miles. The British Mark V tank, introduced in 1918, moved at only 5mph and had just 45 miles of range. Such tanks struggled to keep up with the infantry; they certainly were not going to win any race the infantry could not. It is little surprise that the French, posed with the doctrinal problem of having to make use of the many thousands of WWI tanks they had, settled on a doctrine whereby most tanks would simply be the armored gauntlet stretched over the infantry’s fist: it was all those tanks could do! The sort of tank that could do more than just dent the trench-lines (the same way a good infiltration assault with infantry could) were a decade or more away when the war ended.
Moreover, of course, the doctrine – briefly the systems of thinking and patterns of training, habit and action – to actually pull off what tanks would do in 1939 and 1940 were also years away. It seems absurd to fault World War I era commanders for not coming up with a novel tactical and operational system in 1918 for using vehicles that wouldn’t exist for another 15 years and yet more so assuming that they would get it right (since there were quite a number of different ideas post-war about how tanks ought to be used and while many of them seemed plausible, not all of them were practical or effective in the field). It is hard to see how any amount of support into R&D or doctrine was going to make tanks capable of breakthroughs even in the late 1920s or early 1930s (honestly, look at the “best” tanks of the early 1930s; they’re still not up to the task in most cases) much less by 1918.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
February 10, 2022
QotD: Classical Greek Polis governance
The standard ingredients of a Greek polis are an assembly of all adult citizen males (often called an ekklesia, meaning “assembly”), a smaller advisory committee (frequently called a boule), and then a set number of elected officials who carried out the laws of the other two (magistrates). I’ve given the common names for these components, but they often have different names in different poleis.
Those basic units don’t change from a democracy (like Athens) to an oligarchy (like Corinth) or even a tyranny (like Syracuse) – the type of government just reflects the division of power between them, and the method of selection. In a democracy, like Athens, the ekklesia will have most of the power, being able to overrule the boule or the magistrates. Often the members of the boule can come from a wide range of wealth classes or even be randomly selected.
In an oligarchy, power is generally focused in the magistrates – drawn from the upper-crust of society – and a smaller boule, with the ekklesia having much less power to restrain them. Alternately, the ekklesia may be restricted in size to only a wealthy subset of the citizenry. In a tyranny, a single person (the tyrant) is able to gain control of the system, through a mix of demagoguery, charisma and well-placed cronies. Even under a tyranny, the basic three-part system still exists, it is simply subverted and controlled by one person (much like how some modern dictatorships have all of the institutions of a democracy – courts, elections, etc – but all of the power is still in one set of hands and the elections are shams).
I want to note this up front because it is important to recognize that the existence of a popular assembly does not make a Greek polis a democracy, nor does the existence of a powerful magistrate make it a tyranny. As we’ll see, Sparta has an assembly, it is just laughably weak; it also has two very powerful magistrates, but their power is strongly checked. What matters is the division of power between these parts. I also wanted to start here because Sparta follows this basic model, but with some interesting variations. Knowing what the normal model looks like will make it easier to spot the variations that are unique to Sparta.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part V: Spartan Government”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
February 6, 2022
QotD: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero was a key politician in the Late Republic, but it was his misfortune that his life was spent in an era where words meant less than weapons. He sided with Pompey against Caesar, but was granted clemency after Pompey’s defeat. He was not involved in Caesar’s assassination – he was still too much an outsider for some of the stuck-up Roman elitists who made up the conspiracy (though he correctly pointed out at the time that leaving Antony alive would be a fatal mistake). In the aftermath of the assassination, he identified (correctly) Antony as the key threat to the Republic and worked to discredit him politically in a devastating series of speeches named the Philippics (in honor of a similar set of speeches made by the Athenian Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander). Cicero’s political assault on Antony succeeded – his reputation was ruined and his popularity in Rome never recovered – but it cost Cicero his life when Antony, in league with Octavian, moved into the capital and had Cicero murdered. Cicero’s literary legacy survived him, however, in part because it was useful for Augustus’ own political ends (e.g. Plut. Cic. 49.5-6).
Cicero’s position as the most eloquent orator of the Latin language – and probably its best prose stylist – is largely uncontested. It was his speaking skills – honed in the courts – that made him so politically successful. He was also a prolific writer and a tremendous amount of his writings survive, including both legal and political speeches, private letters, handbooks on oratory, and a set of philosophical works. As anyone who has read Cicero can tell you, he also has a deserved reputation for pride and self-aggrandizement. While many of Cicero’s contemporaries and readers down to the modern era have been impressed by Cicero’s thinking and eloquence, I feel confident in asserting no one – alive or dead – will ever be more impressed by Cicero than Cicero was impressed by himself.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Cicero (Natural Law)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-12-12.
February 2, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with Stormtroopers (Stoßtruppen)
The mature form of this tactical framework is often called “Hutier” tactics, after German general Oskar Emil von Hitier, though he was hardly the sole or even chief inventor of the method. In its mature form, the technique went thusly: instead of attacking with large waves of infantry which cleared each objective in sequential order, attacks ought to be proceeded by smaller units, carefully trained with the layout of the enemy positions. Those units, rather than having a very rigid plan of attack, would be given those general objectives and left to figure for themselves how to accomplish them (“mission tactics” or Auftragstaktik), giving them more freedom to make decisions based on local conditions and the ground.
These elite spearhead units, called Stoßtruppen or “Stormtroopers” were well equipped (in particular with a higher amount of automatic firearms and hand grenades, along with flamethrowers). Importantly, they were directed to bypass enemy strong-points and keep moving forward to meet their objectives. The idea here was that the follow-up waves of normal infantry could do the slow work of clearing out points where enemy resistance was strong, but the stormtroopers should aim to push as deeply as possible as rapidly as possible to disorient the defenders and rapidly envelop what defenses remained.
These sets of infantry tactics were in turn combined with the hurricane barrage, a style of artillery use which focused on much shorter but more intense artillery barrages, particularly associated with Colonel Georg “Breakthrough” Bruchmüller. Rather than attempting to pulverize defenses out of existence, the hurricane barrage was designed merely to force enemies into their dugouts and disorient the defenders; much of the fire was directed at longer ranges to disrupt roads and artillery in the enemy rear. The short barrage left the ground relatively more intact. Meanwhile, those elite infiltration units could be trained to follow the creeping barrage very closely (being instructed, for instance, to run into the shell explosions, since as the barrage advantages, no gun should ever strike the same spot twice; a fresh shell-hole was, in theory, safe). Attentive readers will recognize the basic foundations of the “move fast, disorient the enemy” methods of the “modern system” here.
So did infiltration tactics break the trench stalemate? No.
First, it is necessary to note that while infiltration tactics were perhaps most fully developed by the Germans, they were not unique to them. The French were experimenting with many of the same ideas at the same time. For instance, basic principles of infiltration were being published by the French General Headquarters as early as April, 1915. André Laffargue, a French infantry captain, actually published a pamphlet, which was fairly widely distributed in both the French and British armies by the end of 1915 and in the American army in 1916, on exactly this sort of method. In many cases, like at the Second Battle of Artois, these French tactics bore significant fruit with big advances, but ran into the problem that the gains were almost invariably lost in the face of German counter-attacks. The Russians, particularly under Aleksei Brusilov, also started using some of these techniques, although Brusilov was as much making a virtue of necessity as the Russians just didn’t have that much artillery or shells and had to make due with less and Russian commanders (including Brusilov!) seem to have only unevenly taken the lessons of his successes.
The problem here is speed: infiltration tactics could absolutely more efficiently overrun the front enemy lines and even potentially defeat multiple layers of a defense-in-depth. But after that was done and the shock of the initial push wore off, you were still facing the same calculus: the attacker’s reinforcements, shells, artillery and supplies had to cross broken ground to reach the new front lines, while the defender’s counter-attack could ride railways, move over undamaged roads and then through prepared communications trenches. In the race between leg infantry and trains, the trains always won. On the Eastern Front or against the Italians fighting under the Worst General In History at Caporetto (1917), the already badly weakened enemy might simply collapse, producing massive gains (but even at Caporetto, no breakthrough – shoving the enemy is not a breakthrough, to qualify as a breakthrough, you need to get to the “green fields beyond” that is open ground undefended by the enemy), but against a determined foe, as with the 1918 Spring Offensives, these tactics, absent any other factor, simply knocked big salients in the line. Salients which were, in the event, harder to defend and brought the Germans no closer to victory. Eventually – often quite rapidly – the front stabilized again and the deadlock reasserted itself. Restoring maneuver, the actual end-goal of these tactics, remained out of reach.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
January 28, 2022
Spartan glossary
As part of a multi-post series at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry on explaining (and debunking) the modern day mythology of classic-era Sparta, Bret Devereaux compiled a useful glossary of terms that will be of use as I’ll be excerpting several sections of his series for today’s and several future QotD entries. I’ve added a few entries that seem necessary and expanded some others, but these are enclosed in square brackets “[ ]” to show they’re not directly from Bret’s original post.
Leonidas at Thermopylae by Jacques-Louis David, 1814.
Wikimedia Commons.
Acclamation. A vote held by acclamation (sometimes called a “voice vote”) is a vote where, instead of getting an exact count of yes and no votes, the outcome is judged by the volume of people calling out yes or no. Obviously it would be very hard to tell who had really won a close vote. This is used in modern democracies only for very lopsided (typically unanimous) votes; in Classical Sparta, this was the only voting system, votes were never counted.
[Agoge. The Spartan education system for boys (ἀγωγή, pronounced ah-go-GAY). “Spartan boys were, at age seven, removed from their families and grouped into herds (agelai) under the supervision of a single adult male Spartan – except for the heirs to the two hereditary kings, who were exempt. Order was kept by allowing the older boys to beat and whip the younger boys (Xen. Lac. 2.2). The boys were intentionally underfed (Plut. Lyc. 17.4; Xen. Lac. 2.5-6). They were thus encouraged to steal in order to make up the difference, but severely beaten if caught (Plut. Lyc. 17.3-4; Xen. Lac. 2.6-9). … We are not told, but it seems unavoidable that in a system that intentionally under-feeds groups of boys to force them to steal, that the weakest and smallest boys will end up in a failure spiral where the lack of food leads to further weakness and further victimization at the hands of other boys. I should note that while ancient parenting and schooling was certainly more violent than what we do now – the Spartan system was recognized as abnormally violent towards these boys, even by the standards of the time.”]
Apella. The Apella was the popular assembly of Sparta, consisting of all adult male Spartiates over the age of thirty. The Apella was presided over by the Ephors and all votes were by acclamation. The Apella did not engage in debate, but could only vote “yes” or “no”. The Gerousia had the power to ignore the decisions of the Apella. [In most other Greek poleis the equivalent body would be called the ekklesia.]
Ephor. The Ephors were a board of five officials in Sparta, elected annually by the Apella (technically plus the two kings). The Ephors oversaw the two hereditary Spartan kings and could even bring a king up on charges before the Gerousia. In practice, the Ephors – not the kings – wielded the most political power in Sparta. The Ephors were also responsible for ritually declaring war on the helots every year. The institution as a whole is sometimes collectively referred to as the Ephorate.
Gerousia. The Gerousia – literally a council of old men (the members were “Gerontes” – literally “old men”) which consisted of thirty members, 28 elected (by acclamation in the Apella) plus the two hereditary kings. The elected members all had to be over the age of 60. Gerontes were elected for life. The Gerousia decided what motions could be voted on by the Apella and had the power to cancel any decision of the Apella. It also functioned as a court, with the power to try Spartiates and even the kings. In practice, with the Ephors, the Gerousia wielded the real political power in Sparta.
Helot. The subjugated slave class of Sparta, which made up the overwhelming majority of its residents, the Helots did the agricultural labor which kept the Spartan state running. Helots can be further subdivided into the Laconian helots (those living in Sparta proper) and the Messenian helots (the populace of Messenia which had been reduced to helotry after being conquered by Sparta in the 7th century B.C.). Helots often fought in Sparta’s armies, apparently as screening light-infantry forces (and also as camp followers and servants).
Homoioi. See: Spartiates.
Hoplite. Hoplites were Greek heavy infantry soldiers who fought with a heavy round shield (sometimes called a “hoplon” but more correctly an “aspis“) and a spear, typically in armor.
Hypomeiones. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Hypomeiones (literally “the inferiors”) were former Spartiates who had fallen off the bottom of the Spartan social system, either through cowardice or (more likely) being unable to pay the contribution to the Syssitia. Though free, they had no role in government.
[Kings. Sparta had two royal lines and two kings at all times. The kings were drawn from the Agaids and the Eurypontid families. In theory, both kings had the same set of powers. The kings’ wealth was derived from lands allocated from territory taken from the perioikoi, and the eldest son of the current king in each line was the presumptive heir. On this basis, the kings were almost always the two wealthiest men in Sparta.]
[Kleroi (sing. kleros). The (theoretically) equal plots of land allocated to each Spartiate, worked on his behalf by Helots to generate the contributions to the individual Spartiate‘s Syssitia. Up to half of the production of the kleros had to be paid to the Spartiate by the Helots who worked that land. At some point, the kleroi became inheritable property, which facilitated the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, contributing to the demographic collapse of the Spartiate class.]
Lycurgus. [The name of the (almost certainly) mythical founder figure of Sparta.] Lycurgus had been the younger brother of one of Sparta’s two kings, but had left Sparta to travel when his brother died, so that he would be no threat to his young nephew. After a time, the Spartans begged Lycurgus to come back and reorganize society, and Lycurgus – with the blessing of the Oracle at Delphi – radically remade Spartan society into the form it would have for the next 400 years. He did not merely change the government, but legislated every facet of life, from child-rearing to marriage, to the structure of households, the economic structure, everything. Once he had accomplished that, Lycurgus went back to Delphi, but before he left he made all the Spartans promise not to change his laws until he returned. Once the Oracle told him his laws were good, he committed suicide, so that he would never return to Sparta, thus preventing his laws from ever being over turned. So the Spartans never changed Lycurgus’ laws, which had been declared perfect by Apollo himself. Subsequently, the Spartans accorded Lycurgus divine honors, and within Sparta he was worshiped as a god.
Mothax. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Mothakes were non-citizen men, generally thought to have been the children of Spartiate fathers and helot mothers, brought up alongside their full-citizen half-siblings. Mothakes fought in the Spartan army alongside spartiates, but had no role in government. A surprising number of innovative Spartan commanders – Gylippus and Lysander in particular – came from this class.
Neodamodes. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Neodamodes were freed helots, granted disputed land on the border with Elis. Though they served in the Spartan army, the Neodamodes lacked any role in government. We might consider the helots who served in Brasidas’ army, the Brasideioi as a type of the Neodamodes (they did settle in the same place).
Peers: See: Spartiates.
Perioikoi (sing. Perioikos). The perioikoi (literally the “dwellers around”) were one of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta. The perioikoi were residents of communities which were subjected to the Spartan state, but not reduced to helotry. They lived in their own settlements under the control of the Spartan state, but with limited internal autonomy. The perioikoi seem to have included Sparta’s artisans, producing weapons, armor and tools; they were also made to fight in Sparta’s armies as hoplites.
Polis (pl. poleis). A complicated and effectively untranslatable term, polis most nearly means “community” and is often translated as “city-state”. However, there were poleis in Greece without cities (Sparta being one – a fact often concealed by translators rendering polis as city). Instead a polis consists of a body of citizens, their state, and the territory it controls (including smaller villages but not other subjugated poleis), usually but not always centered on a single urban center. Poleis are almost by definition independent and self-governing (that is, they have eleutheria and autonomia).
Skiritai. The Skiritai were one of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta. Dwellers in Skiritis, the mountains between Laconia and Arcadia, they were mostly rural people who were free, but subject to the Spartan state, similar to the perioikoi. The main difference between the two was that the Skiritai – perhaps because of their mountainous homes – served not as hoplites, but as an elite corps of light infantry in the Spartan army.
Spartiates, also called peers or homoioi. The citizen class at Sparta, the Spartiates were a closed ethnic aristocracy. Membership required both a Spartiate father and a Spartiate mother, as well as successful completion of the Agoge and membership in a Syssitia. Spartiate males over thirty were the only individuals in Sparta who could participate in government, although the political power of the average Spartiate was extremely limited.
Syssitia (sing. syssition). The Syssitia were the common mess-groups into which all adult Spartiates were divided. Each member of the Syssitia contributed a portion of the mess-group’s food; the contribution was a condition of citizenship. Spartiates who could not make the contribution lost citizenship and became Hypomeiones.
QotD: The Myth of Spartan Equality
Where does this idea come from? Well, it comes from the same pro-Spartan sources we discussed last time. Plutarch claims that Lycurgus‘ decision to banish money from Sparta essentially removed greed by making all of the Spartans equal (Plut. Lyc. 9.1-4) – or equally poor – though we should note that Plutarch is writing 900 years after Lycurgus (again, probably not a real person) was supposed to have lived. Xenophon notes approvingly that Lycurgus forbade the Spartans from engaging in productive business of any kind, making them thus unable to accumulate wealth (Xen. Lac. 7.1-6). Land was supposed to be distributed equally to each full Spartan citizen – the spartiates or homoioi (we’ll define these terms in a second) in equal plots called kleroi.
This idea – the Myth of Spartan Equality – is perhaps the single “biggest idea” in the conception of the Spartan state, rivaled only by the myth of Spartan military excellence (don’t worry, we’ll get there!). There is something deeply appealing, at a bedrock emotional level, to the idea of a perfectly equal society like that. And that myth of equality has prompted all sorts of thinkers from all sorts of eras (Rousseau, most famously) – including our own – to be willing to look past Sparta’s many, many failings.
And on the face of it, it does sound like a very equal society – practically a collectivist utopia. It is a pleasant vision. Unfortunately, it is also a lie.
[…] every Greek polis had a three-level layer-cake of status: the citizen body, free non-citizens (like foreigners), and non-free persons (slaves). You could – and the Greeks did – divide that top group by wealth and birth and so on, but we’ll get to that a bit later in this post and the next. For now, let’s stick with the three-level layer cake. Sparta follows this scheme neatly.
At the top were the Spartiates, the full-citizen male Spartans. According to Herodotus there were once 8,000 of these (Hdt. 7.234.2); supposedly 9,000 based on the initial number of equal land plots (kleroi) handed out (Plut. Lyc. 8.3 – or rather than saying “handed out” we might say “seized”). Of course these are tallies of Spartiate males, but women could be of citizen stock (but not citizens themselves) and we ought to imagine an equal number of spartiate women at any given time. For a child to be born into the citizen class (and thus eligible for the agoge and future full citizenship), he had to have a citizen father and a citizen mother. We’ll deal with the bastards a bit further down. Also, the spartiates were often also called the homoioi, sometimes translated as “peers” but literally meaning something like “the equals”. As we’ll see, that equality is notional at best, but this ideal of citizen equality was something Sparta advertised about itself.
[…]
But the final word on if we should consider the helots fully non-free is in their sanctity of person: they had none, at all, whatsoever. Every year, in autumn by ritual, the five Spartan magistrates known as the ephors declared war between Sparta and the helots – Sparta essentially declares war on part of itself – so that any spartiate might kill any helot without legal or religious repercussions (Plut. Lyc. 28.4; note also Hdt. 4.146.2). Isocrates – admittedly a decidedly anti-Spartan voice – notes that it was a religious, if not legal, infraction to kill slaves everywhere in Greece except Sparta (Isoc. 12.181). As a matter of Athenian law, killing a slave was still murder (the same is true in Roman law). One assumes these rules were often ignored by slave-holders of course – we know that many such laws in the American South were routinely flouted. Slavery is, after all, a brutal and inhuman institution by its very nature. The absence of any taboo – legal or religious – against the killing of helots marks the institution as uncommonly brutal not merely by Greek standards, but by world-historical standards.
We may safely conclude that the helots were not only enslaved persons, but that of all slaves, they had some of the fewest protections – effectively none, not even protections in-name-only.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-23.
January 22, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with artillery
(I should note I am using “railroad networks” as a catch-all for a lot of different kinds of communications and logistics networks. The key technologies here are railroads, regular roads (which might speed along either leg infantry, horse-mobile troops and logistics, or trucks), and telegraph lines. That last element is important: the telegraph enabled instant, secure communications in war, an extremely valuable advantage, but required actual physical wires to work. Speed of communication was essential in order for an attack to be supported, so that command could know where reserves were needed or where artillery needed to go. Radio was also an option at this point, but it was very much a new technology and importantly not secure. Transmissions could be encoded (but often weren’t) and radios were expensive, finicky high technology. Telegraphs were older and more reliable technology, but of course after a barrage the attacker would need to be stringing new wire along behind them connecting back to their own telegraph systems in order to keep communications up. A counter-attack, supported by its own barrage, was bound to cut these lines strung over no man’s land, while of course the defender’s lines in their rear remained intact.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
November 26, 2021
The modern carrier debate
I recently started reading A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, a fascinating historical blog run by Dr. Bret Devereaux. You can expect to see plenty of QotD entries from his blog in future months, as I’ve been delighted to find that he not only has deep knowledge of several historical areas I find interesting, but that he also writes well and clearly. This post from last year is a bit outside his normal bailliwick, being modern and somewhat speculative rather than dealing with the ancient world, classic-era Greece, Republican and Imperial Rome, or the Middle Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean basin:
The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) underway in the Persian Gulf, 3 December 2005.
U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Matthew Bash via Wikimedia Commons.
Let’s talk about aircraft carriers for a moment […] There is currently a long-raging debate about the future of the aircraft carrier as a platform, particularly for the US Navy (by far the largest operator of aircraft carriers in the world), to the point that I suspect most national security publications could open companion websites exclusively for the endless whinging on aircraft carriers and their supposed obsolescence or non-obsolescence. And yet, new aircraft carriers continue to be built.
As an aside, this is one of those debates that has been going on so long and so continuously that it becomes misleading for regular people. Most writing on the topic, since the battle lines in the debate are so well-drawn, consists of all-or-nothing arguments made in the strongest terms in part because everyone assumes that everyone else has already read the other side; there’s no point in excessively caveating your War on the Rocks aircraft carrier article, because anyone who reads WotR has read twenty already and so knows all of those caveats already. Except, of course, the new reader does not and is going to read that article and assume it represents the current state of the debate and wonder why, if the evidence is so strong, the debate is not resolved. This isn’t exclusive to aircraft carriers, mind you – the various hoplite debates (date of origin, othismos, uniformity of the phalanx) have reached this point as well; a reader of any number of “heterodox” works on the topic (a position most closely associated with Hans van Wees) could well be excused for assuming they were the last word, when it still seems to me that they represent a significant but probably still minority position in the field (though perhaps quite close to parity now). This is a common phenomenon for longstanding specialist debates and thus something to be wary of when moving into a new field; when in doubt, buy a specialist a drink and ask about the “state of the debate” (not “who is right” but “who argues what”; be aware that it is generally the heterodox position in these debates that is loudest, even as the minority).
Very briefly, the argument about carriers revolves around their cost, vulnerability and utility. Carrier skeptics point out that carriers are massive, expensive platforms that are increasingly vulnerable to anti-ship missiles and that the steadily growing range of those missiles would force carriers to operate further and further from their objectives, potentially forcing them to choose between exposing themselves or being pushed out of the battlespace altogether (this, as an aside, is what is meant by A2/AD – “Anti-Access/Area-Denial” – weapons). The fear advanced is of swarms of hypersonic long-range anti-ship missiles defeating or overwhelming the point-defense capability of a carrier strike group and striking or even sinking the prize asset aircraft carrier – an asset too expensive to lose.
Carrier advocates will then point out all of the missions for which carriers are still necessary: power projection, ground action support, sea control, humanitarian operations and so on. They argue that no platform other than an aircraft carrier appears able to do these missions, that these missions remain essential and that smaller aircraft carriers appear to be substantially less effective at these missions, which limits the value of dispersing assets among a greater number of less expensive platforms. They also dispute the degree to which current or future weapon-systems endanger the carrier platform.
I am not here to resolve the carrier debate, of course. The people writing these articles know a lot more about modern naval strategy and carrier operations than I do.
Instead I bring up the carrier debate to note one facet of it […]: the carrier debate operates under conditions of fearsome technological uncertainty. This is one of those things that – as I mentioned above – can be missed by just reading a little of the debate. Almost none of the weapon systems involved here have seen extensive combat usage in a ship-to-ship or land-to-ship context. Naval thinkers are trying to puzzle out what will happen when carriers with untested stealth technology, defended by untested anti-missile defenses are engaged by untested high-speed anti-ship missiles which are guided by untested satellite systems which are under attack by untested anti-satellite systems in a conflict where even the humans in at least one of these fighting forces are also untested in combat (I should note I mean “untested” here not in the sense that these systems haven’t been through test runs, but in the sense that they haven’t ever been used in anger in this kind of near-peer conflict environment; they have all been shown to work under test conditions). Oh, and the interlinked computer systems that all of these components require will likely be under unprecedented levels of cyber-attack.
No one is actually certain how these technologies will interact under battlefield conditions. No one can be really sure if these technologies will even work as advertised under battlefield conditions; ask the designers of the M16 – works in a lab and works in the field are not always the same thing. You can see this in a lot of the bet-hedging that’s currently happening: the People’s Republic of China has famously bet big on A2/AD and prohibiting (American) carriers from operating near China, but now has also initiated an ambitious aircraft carrier building program, apparently investing in the technology they spent so much time and energy rendering – if one believes the carrier skeptics – “obsolete”. Meanwhile, the United States Navy – the largest operator of aircraft carriers in the world – is pushing development on multiple anti-ship missiles of the very sort that supposedly render the Navy’s own fleet “obsolete”, while also moving forward building the newest model of super-carrier. If either side was confident in the obsolescence (or non-obsolescence) of the aircraft carrier in the face of A2/AD weapons, they’d focus on one or the other; the bet hedging is a product of uncertainty – or perhaps more correctly a product of the calculation that uncertainty and less-than-perfect performance will create a space for both sets of weapon-systems to coexist in the battlespace as neither quite lives up to its best billing.
(I should note that for this brief summary, I am treating everyone’s development and ship procurement systems as rational and strategic. Which, to be clear, they are not – personalities, institutional culture and objectives, politics all play a huge role. But for now this is a useful simplifying assumption – for the most part, the people procuring these weapons do imagine that they are still useful.)
In many ways, the current aircraft carrier debate resembles a fast moving version of the naval developments of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Naval designers of the period were faced with fearsome unknowns – would battleships function alone or in groups? Would they be screened against fast moving torpedo boats or forced to defend themselves? How lethal might a torpedo attack be and how could it be defended against? Would they be exposed to short-range direct heavy gunfire or long-range plunging gunfire (which radically changes how you arm and armor these ships)? With technologies evolving in parallel in the absence of battlefield tests, these remained unknowns. The eventual “correct solution” emerged in 1903 with the suggestion of the all-big-gun battleship, but the first of these (HMS Dreadnought), while begun in 1904 was finished only after the Battle of Tsushima (May 27-8, 1905) had provided apparently startling clarity on the question.
October 28, 2021
There are bad generals, there are evil generals, and (in a class of his own) there’s Luigi Cadorna
Earlier this month, Bret Devereaux took the time to give WW1 Italian general Luigi Cadorna the attention he richly deserved as the worst general of that war (which also included the strong Austrian contender Conrad von Hötzendorf), and certainly must be considered to be in the running as the worst general in military history:
Luigi Cadorna, Marshal of Italy, Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, 1914-1917.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
This week we’re going to break from our normal fare and take a bit of a lark. I thought I ought to substantiate the nearly endless shade towards Luigi Cadorna, Italian Army Chief of Staff from 1914-1917 (though I realize after writing this that what I actually ought to have done is just told the same bad joke about Cadorna 11 times in a row and let that stand as the explanation). I said that Cadorna was my pick for the worst general of World War I. Now, as I noted at the time, there is some stiff competition for that position. While I argued that the tactical problem of trench warfare probably wasn’t solvable by any general, that doesn’t mean that some generals didn’t perform better than others under the difficult conditions imposed by the stalemate.
Now I should be clear here what I mean by “worst general”. What I am assessing here is the fellow who was worst at generaling, rather than the worst human being who happened to be a general. That latter prize probably goes to İsmail Enver Pasha, Ottoman Minister of War from 1914 to 1918, a vain, arrogant strutting sort of man who not only utterly botched the only battle in which he commanded directly (Sarikamish, Dec. 1914 – Jan 1915) but who also then blamed his defeat (falsely) on the Armenians and subsequently instigated and played a key role in the Armenian genocide. He then sold his services to the Soviets, before betraying them to side with the Basmachi movement, which didn’t go particularly well either.
We are also here not investigating to see which WWI leader made the single worst decision. As I’ve noted before, the worst decision in the First World War was having a First World War, though the responsibility for that is diffused across multiple different leading figures.
Luigi Cadorna didn’t, to my knowledge, perpetrate any genocides, though as we’ll see, he was cruel and unreasonable. Nor did he bring Italy to war. The son of Count Raffaele Cadorna (who had led the army which captured Rome, completing the unification of Italy), Cadorna’s political connections, particularly to the king Victor Emmanuel III, made him functionally impossible to remove from command after he was made chief of staff in 1914. For his part, Cadorna seems to have spent about as much time fighting a political battle in Rome as he did fighting the actual war on the Isonzo; Cadorna insisted at the outset that he would only accept the job if he was given unfettered, complete authority. As we’ll see, that complete authority is not going to come with complete responsibility for outcomes. But in any event, this is a good illustration of Cadorna’s personality: bitter, arrogant and callous, but with a cruel authoritarian streak and a profound conviction that all of his mistakes were someone else’s fault.
[…] Cadorna has a small, fragile and relatively weak army to work with. Conscription would eventually put millions more Italians in the ranks (and slowly make the equipment situation less of a disaster), but of course everyone else was doing that too and even then it was clear from a simple exercise in demography that Italy’s manpower reserves were likely to be brittle. An equally simple exercise in economic statistics would suggest that while Italy’s army might be made minimally sufficient in equipment (the Italians eventually end up deploying well over a thousand artillery pieces on the Isonzo front, though the quality of their artillery never matched what was available on either side of the Western Front), it would never be excellent. Strategically then, Cadorna had the one army; it was small and weak and it was also effectively all Italy had. Moreover Italy, only recently unified (recall, Cadorna’s father had been directly involved!) was still politically fragile itself and might not take well for horrible casualties. So Cadorna’s army had to be husbanded carefully, spent only in great need and for great benefit.
Instead of doing literally any of that, Cadorna opted to pursue the highest operational tempo of any front of the war. I can’t stress this enough: between May 1915 and October 1917, the French launched (or supported) four offensives (Second Artois, Third Artois/Second Champagne/Loos, the Somme and the Nivelle Offensive; I’m not counting Second Arras as that was a Commonwealth operation in which the French had little part), plus being on the defensive at Verdun. Of course there were lots of minor operations too, but that’s five major operations on the Western Front, where the French were almost totally focused. In contrast, in that same time frame, Cadorna – who again, has the smallest, weakest major army – launches eleven (11)(eleven)(XI)(1011)(I𐤗)(ΙΑ)(eleven!?!) offensives on the Isonzo River.
[…]
Because Cadorna thought that discipline and morale were the key components of victory (and also because he seems to have just generally been a cruel, uncaring and authoritarian person) he attempted to enforce both in his army through coercion and cruelty. Cadorna executed around 750 men for cowardice (to my knowledge the highest rate in any army of the war), presided over a military justice regime that convicted something like 3.6% of his army of one disciplinary charge or the other. He dismissed an incredible total of 217 officers during his tenure, frequently because he felt they were not committed enough or aggressive enough and when his army began to fall apart at Caporetto, he ordered the summary execution of officers whose units retreated. It turns out that actually adopting a “the beatings will continue until morale improves” command style does not actually improve morale.
October 22, 2021
QotD: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the ancient (or medieval) world
That is often not the impression that you would get from a quick google search (though it does seem to be the general consensus of the range of ancient military historians I know) and that goes back to arguments ex silentio. A quick google search will turn up any number of articles written by folks who are generally not professional historians declaring that PTSD was an observed phenomenon in the deep past, citing the same small handful of debatable examples. But one thing you learn very rapidly as a historian is that if you go into a large evidence-base looking for something, you will find it.
That’s not a species of research positivity – it’s a warning about confirmation bias, especially if you do not establish a standard of proof before your investigation. It is all too easy to define down your definition of “proof” until the general noise of the source-base looks like proof. In this case, we have to ask – before we go looking – what would evidence of PTSD in ancient societies (I’m going to start there because it is where I am best informed) look like?
Well, ancient societies engaged in a lot of warfare. Among the citizenry – the sort of fellows who write to us and are written about in our sources – combat experience was almost ubiquitous. That only really changes as we get into the Roman Empire, as violence levels both decline generally and are pushed to the frontier via a professional army. The percentage of veterans in the citizen population (again, citizen here is an important caveat, but then those fellows basically are our primary source base) probably equaled that of the WWI generation in Britain or France, except all the time (there’s a point in the Second Punic War where the Roman censors went through the entire rolls, checking to see how many had managed to avoid military service and found only a few thousand in a citizen body of c. 150,000 adult males). So what ought we expect from our sources? We should expect to see signs of PTSD everywhere. It should be absolutely pervasive in a source-base produced almost entirely by, for and about combat veterans, in societies where military mortality exceeded modern rates by a robust margin.
And it simply isn’t there. There is one very frequently cited account in Herodotus (Hdt. 6.117) of a man named Epizelos experiencing what is generally understood as “conversion disorder” (which used to be badly labeled “hysterical blindness”) in combat. Without being wounded he went blind at a sudden terror in battle and never recovered his sight. Herodotus terms it a θῶμα – a “wonder” or “marvel”, a word that explicitly implies the strange uncommonness of the tale. Herodotus is concerned enough about how exceptional this sounds that he is quick not to vouch for its veracity – he brackets the story (beginning and end) noting that it was what he was told (by someone else) that Epizelos used to say happened to him. In short, this was uncommon enough that Herodotus distances himself from it, so as not to be thought as a teller of tall-tales (though Herodotus is, in fact, a teller of tall tales).
This one example – cited endlessly and breathlessly in internet articles – is remarkable not because it is typical, but because it is apparently very unusual (also, it is my understanding – with the necessary caveat that I am not an expert – that while conversion disorder is a consequence of emotional trauma, it is not clear that it is associated with PTSD more generally). Meanwhile, in the war literature of the Romans, in their poetry (including that by folks like Horace, who fought in quite terrible battles), in the military literature of the Greeks, in the reflections of Xenophon (both on his campaigns and his commands), in the body of Greek lyric poetry … all of it – nothing. It is simply not there – not as a concern that such a condition might befall someone, nor a report that it had done so. Nothing. The lacuna baffled me for years.
My impression is that the medieval literature looks much the same: a few scattered passages that, if you squint hard enough, might be PTSD set against a vast backdrop of nothing in a society where literature was dominated by the war-fighting class. More examples than in the classical corpus (but then the medieval corpus is much larger; oddly, the examples I’ve seen all seem to concern crusading particularly), but nothing close to what we would expect given a literary tradition absolutely dominated by military aristocrats and their (often clerical) families. I call this my impression, because the medieval corpus is both much larger and I have read much less of it; but if there is a hidden reservoir of accounts showing clear symptoms of PTSD, I have not found it yet. I was always struck that – despite the fact that monastic life was often a destination for medieval military aristocrats troubled by their life of violence – none of the monastic rules I have read (admittedly, not all of them), which often have guidelines for abbots to deal with difficult monks, have had anything about how to deal with the symptoms of PTSD.
Now that’s not to say there isn’t grief at loss, mind you! The lamentations of defeat, the sorrow of losing a loved one (even in victory), the misery of war – that you find in the ancient texts in abundance. It occupies literary topoi, it is depicted in artwork, it gets entire tragedies to stretch out in, it is addressed by great big political speeches, it sits at the cornerstone of the Iliad‘s narrative (one reason, no doubt, that the Iliad remains a useful text for soldiers working through their experiences). But the persistent symptoms of PTSD, no. I haven’t been able to find one “flashback” or combat-memory related dissociative episode in ancient literature. You might argue that they simply weren’t recorded, but that strikes me as unlikely in societies where other forms of war-damage were so fiercely valorized and which would have often seen – as with Epizalos – such symptoms as divine omens. There should be dozens and dozens of them. These are societies with active medical literature, after all!
I think the evidence strongly suggests that ancient combatants did not experience PTSD as we do now. The problem is that the evidence of silence leads us with few tools with which to answer why. One answer might be that it existed and they do not tell us – because it was considered shameful or cowardly, perhaps. Except that they do tell us about other cowardly or shameful things. And the loss and damage of war – death, captivity, refugees, wounds, the lot of it – are prominent motifs in Greek, Roman and European Medieval literature. War is not uniformly white-washed in these texts – not every medieval writer is Bertran. We can’t rule out some lacuna in the tradition, but given just how many wails and moans of grief and loss there are in the corpus it seems profoundly unlikely. I think we have to assume that it isn’t in the sources because they did not experience it or at least did not recognize the experience of it.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-04-24.
