This is the second half of the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. Last week we took a look at how the leadership of these armies was drawn from the existing elite classes of their societies. As with other factors, armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield, with the result that the military leadership class often mirrored, where it wasn’t simply identical with, the civilian ruling class.
Now it will not surprise you that pre-modern military literature, written almost entirely by elites in the leadership class for other elites in the leadership class, is very interested in leadership and tends to attribute all military success or failure to the fellows in charge. Modern military science, however, has increasingly recognized the importance of combat motivation in individual rank-and-file soldiers.1
As noted last time, we can break this broader concept of combat motivation into two parts: morale and cohesion, where morale is the soldier’s attachment to the cause and belief in its possible achievement and cohesion is a soldier’s attachment to his fellows. What combat motivation studies have tended to show is that morale will get a soldier to the battlefield, but will not keep him on it; it is cohesion instead, the ability of a unit to stay together under pressure that is essential for enduring the terror of combat.
That said, different armies and different societies generate cohesion in different ways, as we’ll see. Now this is one component of this series that is a bit of an exception: so far I’ve been hammering that most societies are going to be pushed very strongly towards specific kinds of recruitment, organization and leadership as a result of their civilian organization. Meanwhile, as we’ll see, certain kinds of cohesion depend to a greater or lesser degree on specific social structures or assumptions, but it is a lot more common to see armies that simply have poor cohesion due to a mismatch of cohesive principles and military or social structures.
But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
The Nature of Cohesion
We’ve talked about cohesion a few times here, so before getting into the systems that can generate cohesion, we can be fairly brief on what cohesion is. As the word implies, cohesion is the ability of a unit to hold together under pressure, but this is one of those concepts with a simple definition but more complex application.
On the one hand, cohesion is one of those ‘harder said than done’ principles. When a group of any animals is subjected to peril, the instinct is to flee and for humans, who are not herd animals, the instinct is to scatter, to flee individually. The goal of cohesion is instead to have individuals respond to peril by seeking the safety of the group rather than the safety of individual flight, so that intense fear causes the group to solidify rather than disperse. That is, as we’ll see, a challenging-but-not-impossible emotional response to stimulate, as humans are pack animals. That said, it has to be an emotional response, something sub-rational, because it needs to functions in conditions of intense fear where rational thinking is ineffective.
So you can think of cohesion, in its simplest form, as a kind of social or mental conditioning that aims to alter individual’s fear response from, ‘split up for safety’ to ‘group up for safety’ at an emotional, sub-rational level.
And then on the other hand, that has complex implications for battlefields in which humans generally fight as units rather than as individuals. Not all humans fight this way, I should note: warriors in a ‘first system’ ‘pounce-and-flee’ warfare system – as we see with hunter gatherers or early agriculturalists – often fight in a far more atomized, skirmishing style with no regular formations and no expectation that individuals will hold their ground or cohere under pressure. Instead, warriors in such a system can fall back and regroup relatively freely. But complex agrarian (even non-state complex agrarian) and pastoralist armies do fight as larger units, with complex group tactics that demand individual combatants work together and stick together much more tightly.
Meanwhile, if the unit remains cohesive – if the individual men remain bound together as a single mass – then their leaders can more readily maneuver the whole mass into action. After all, if the presence of peril is psychologically pushing each soldier to cohere for collective safety, then an officer can use that cohesion to push the group as a unit, potentially even moving it into greater peril. This is the foundation of all shock tactics – at least, all of them involving an even remotely equal opponent – because delivering ‘shock’ (that is, advancing into close combat in a group) demands advancing into peril, which is a think that is normally psychologically quite hard to do. As Ardant du Picq notes, “Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second.” Getting fellows to walk into range of an opponent’s spears (potentially walking through the range of their slings, bows or muskets to do so) requires moving directly against human psychology. But if the whole mass of men coheres, the mass may be moved forward: group psychology succeeds where individual psychology would fail.
Of course cohesion is equally relevant – for the same reasons – for getting men to stand under fire, either in a tight formation or in more dispersed skirmish order (as in modern warfare). Once again, the normal human response to being in a ‘zone of danger’ is to leave it, so the cohesion response is required to get men to stay in the ‘zone of danger’ – the unit is in the zone, the men have cohered to the unit, so the men remain because the unit remains. Now, absolutely there are a small number of people in any group who have the right psychological mixture to do these things alone, but armies cannot be built out of a tiny handful of saints and sociopaths, they must be built out of regular men.
So cohesion serves several related purposes on the battlefield: it keeps men from fleeing but it is also the means by which they can be pushed into offensive action, which is to say it both keeps them from fleeing but also gets them fighting, all as a product of the action of holding them together. Even if a unit must withdraw, cohesion allows them to withdraw as a unit – maintaining fighting capability (which in turn deters an enemy from pursuing too aggressively) – rather than breaking apart into a rout (which an enemy can pursue aggressively).
So how does cohesion happen? High cohesion is most often the product of tight bonds between the men in a unit, though those bonds can be achieved in a range of ways. That said, as we’ll see, certain ways of producing cohesion can also produce a kind of corporate cohesion, where the cohesive principle ends up rooted in the identity of the soldiers (which they share), which creates a kind of cohesion that persists even when soldiers do not necessarily know their fellows (but when they do know that their fellows are also soldiers and so share the same formative, cohesion-building experiences; that’s why I frame it as ‘corporate’ in nature).
So cohesion is important, but it is also fundamentally unnatural: it must be produced somehow, it cannot be assumed. In practice there are two ways (or categories of ways) to produce cohesion: it can be produced in civilian society or it can be produced ‘in the ranks.’
Cohesion Dyed in the Wool
One way to achieve strong cohesion is to have it produced organically through civilian society. Tight social bonds are the key mechanism for producing this kind of cohesion: it derives from serving and fighting next to men who you know well in peace time and who will continue to know you well after the fight is done. The social pressure not to let these fellows down – fellows you will have to live with long after the smoke clears – is one of the few pressures that is as strong as the fear of dying. Or, as I sometimes put it, the one thing humans might fear more than death is shame. But for shame to work, it has to come from a peer group the individual will have to live with.
In practice, this kind of cohesion then tends to come one of two ways: from a small community or from a small, tight-knit group within the community.
The classic example of the former case are various forms of civic militias, like Greek hoplites. The hoplite phalanx of a Greek polis was generally divided into sub-units by tribe or neighborhood (phyle or deme) so that men served next to their friends, neighbors and family members in the phalanx as it was drawn up. Of course in some poleis, this sort of closeness was institutionalized through common dining groups, but it seems pretty likely that regular social dining with the men who would be near you in the phalanx was common across Greek poleis. Consequently, when a hoplite stood in the ranks, he knew he was being observed by everyone (at least, all of the men – though he could be assured his mother, wife and children would hear of his conduct too!) in the world who mattered to him.
The result is the creation of what is termed in military science a primary group: the small, face-to-face social group around a soldier, which tends to be tight and cohesive. Instead of generating that group ‘in the ranks’ – impossible for an amateur militia force that only formed up when there was a battle to fight – these sort of citizen militias instead form the primary group during peacetime and then use it as a basic building block in wartime to achieve that cohesion. As a result, a civic militia like a hoplite militia could be cohesive despite having little or no formal training or collective drill and relatively little in the way of command and control structures. Their cohesion was organic, derived from underlying social structures, rather than needing to be intentionally manufactured through training.
The alternative for ‘organic’ cohesion is the creation of a smaller unit of society that is similarly cohesive, often in the context of a much larger (and thus more anonymous) society which struggles with the kind of ‘small town’ cohesion of the Greek polis. This, of course, is generally the cohesion of a warrior class: the overall society may not be small enough for everyone to know everyone else well enough to generate that kind of tight social pressure, but the warrior-class might be. The aristocracy broadly construed, for instance, of even a large medieval European kingdom might consist of only around a thousand or so households. The kingdom might not be organically cohesive, but the aristocracy could be – though as we will see, knightly cohesion was reinforced through training and drill as well. One of the most striking examples of this kind of cohesion in action to me has always been the performance of the English huscarls at Hastings (1066): even as the rest of the army crumbled and the battle was lost, this group of vocational warriors held together, despite tremendous pressure.
Hopefully, you are also beginning to see how some of what we’ve laid out in these posts can ‘line up’ to produce strong military systems. A civic militia, for instance, can benefit greatly from these tight social bonds: in the ranks, everyone knows everyone else and the unit is led by elected officers who are the same men who lead the community in peacetime. The whole unit can thus draw on the familiarity and strong social bonds without needing to build those connections from scratch. The same, of course, goes for the retinue of a Big Man, whose retainers all know each other (and will continue to do so after the battle because they’re all socially connected) and who all know and already respect the authority of the Big Man who commands.
Now there is another requirement to making this kind of cohesion work effectively: there has to be important social value placed on military performance. For the militia man in a medieval schuttersgilde or a Greek hoplite or a knight riding out in his lord’s retinue, fighting bravely was crucial to their status in the community. Their friends, family and neighbors would be watching and would care if they stuck together or ran away. But for that to work there has to be some status for these men attached to the performance of military service.
A village can have very close-knit social bonds, but if the peasants living there don’t consider the role in society to be fighting, don’t value military service and don’t see themselves as personally involved in the wars of their rentier-elites, it will be almost impossible for those rentier-elites to actually harness the latent social cohesion of the village. Those villagers won’t hold together under pressure on the battlefield, they’ll scatter together – their social cohesion will be addressed in the ways they find socially valuable (like supporting each other with food during hard times). One common ‘failure state’ of military organization is where a political leader raises a population expecting to get organic cohesion but – because the society has not invested the social value in the fighting that those kinds of people do (so they may value knightly warfare but not the infantry warfare of peasants, for instance) – the cohesion simply isn’t there and the force collapses when put under strain. Levies drawn from the underclasses of a society – peasants swiftly formed into a local militia, for instance – often collapse this way under pressure, because the society at large (which is to say, the elites) have not dedicated the social value or resources to build organic cohesion.
In addition, this kind of organic social cohesion is very hard to ‘scale up’ since it relies on relatively small-scale tight-knit social bonds. One solution, however, was for large states to recruit the component units of their armies from specific locales, in what is termed a regimental system. Under a regimental system, soldiers do not move from one unit to another but rather are raised and spend their entire service career (which may be short-service or long-service) in a single unit. Often, when this system was combined with volunteer or short-service units (as in, for instance, the American Civil War or the British army in the First World War), units were intentionally raised from small geographic areas: individual states, cities, towns and so on. While the regimental system itself is a modern phenomenon, similar sorts of systems existed earlier; the Roman socii system seems to have functioned on a similar basis: Roman socii stayed in units recruited from their relatively small communities.
A larger army can thus try to harness some of that local cohesion by recruiting local units and keeping them intact, although this also creates organizational challenges: those soldiers are unlikely to be as willing to serve outside of their original units. They was told, you see, that they’d be serving with the 2nd Maine and the 2nd Maine only. That can cause issues if the original unit has been attritted so badly that it is no longer really functional (but cannot readily be merged with others), but also could create problems because it could also geographically concentrate casualties. The famous, grim example of this was the 11th Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment (the Accrington Pals), all recruited from the same town, suffered 80% casualties in just thirty minutes of fighting at the Somme (Jul. 1, 1916), practically obliterating an entire generation of the town.2 The British abandoned the recruiting of ‘Pals Battalions’ after the Somme in no small part for that reason.
However, as you might be picking up, not every society generates strong enough organic cohesion to orient a military around (or the ‘warrior class’ that does is too small to form the bulk of the military). So then the question becomes how to create cohesion.
Training Cohesion
And it turns out it is possible to train cohesion into a unit.
What is striking is that historical societies talk about this process using a range of different understandings for how exactly they are inculcating bravery through training. Greek and Roman writers often frame this sort of training not necessarily as teaching soldiers specific, coordinated motions (the swinging of a sword, the throwing of a javelin), even though we know that the Romans, at least, did drill that sort of thing, but rather as rendering soldiers inured from hardship by putting them through hardship, by having them undertake strenuous duty regularly with strict punishments for failure (and generous rewards for success).
By contrast, early modern European drill, though it equally involved a lot of strenuous work, was understood more at the time as trying to produce a ‘mechanical soldier.’ The early modern European aristocrat largely concluded that the raw lower-class clay he was forced to work with for his army was temperamentally unsuited for bravery (these fellows were mostly stuck up snobs) and so could only be made brave by having the necessary actions for battle – loading and firing firearms, moving in formation – drilled over and over again until they became mechanical muscle memory. They use the same methods as the Romans – repetitive training of basic actions under as realistic circumstances as possible, with strict punishments for failures of discipline – but understood the mechanism of action to be quite different.
Now I want to be clear here what I mean when I say drill. Drill in this context is training through strenuous repetition of simple actions in preparation for combat. Not every army drills! There’s also a distinction here between armies that value “collective synchronized discipline” – the ability of soldiers to move together in synchronized action – and armies that don’t (you can use muskets in collective, synchronized musket lines but you can also use them independently in skirmish formations, for instance).3 It is likewise possible for armies to insist on physical conditioning in ways that do not produce group psychology effects, the difference between training together and training individually.
Now to be clear, obviously rigorously drilling soldiers in the manipulation of weapons is going to train what we can call ‘skill at arms’ – the effective manipulation of complex weapon systems – but we’re interested in the psychological conditioning here.
And the way modern thinking understands this same process is rather different than either ancient or early modern aristocratic thinking, in part because modern researchers and scholars have bothered to occasionally ask common soldiers about it. While the concept of unit cohesion has existed, I’d argue, since antiquity, it really only started receiving really systematic study after the Second World War, with the main conclusion of those early studies being that unit performance was heavily sensitive to the tight bonds in small units. Which is to say soldiers were motivated to fight for their ‘buddies’ at the squad, platoon and company level and that this social bonding effect was the primary source of unit cohesion.
The question, of course, was how a military went about manufacturing those sorts of social bonds so that units cohered under pressure. But of course the military wasn’t approaching these questions with a blank slate: in many ways the western military tradition (hardly alone) had already developed a system for manufacturing unit cohesion – what it was coming to realize is that it had never really understood how that mechanism functioned.
Instead, while the role of drill in training specific skills is important, it also imposed upon each batch of recruits intense conditions of shared suffering combined with creating a barrier to entry into the final group (one had to endure the initial drill and training process). In short, taking a bunch of potential soldiers and throwing them all into the same difficult situation (physical training and drill) they have to overcome together over an extended period of time (weeks or months, if not longer) is a way to ‘speed run’ the social bonding process to create a strong, cohesive unit.
One of the risks this approach is thought to run, however, is that rotation or high casualties can erode that cohesion. The soldier has cohered, after all, to a ‘primary group’ consisting of the men he trained or served long-term with, but that bond can be ruptured as members of the primary group are killed or rotated out of the unit (or the soldier is rotated into a new unit where they don’t know anyone). One of the responses to this reality is to avoid individual soldier rotations (such rotations in the Vietnam War were famously blamed for low morale and discipline) and instead rotate whole units, but of course there is nothing doing about casualties and the need to replace them.
The thing is, while certainly some units suffer reduced cohesion and thus reduced combat performance as they take casualties and – in the accidentally memorably bloodless phrasing of one of my graduate school colleagues – “the primary group disintegrates” that also quite clearly doesn’t happen to every military. It is a bit of a grim (and very modern) example, but the Wehrmacht (the German army) in WWII remained cohesive despite absolutely staggering casualties by war’s end and the effective impossibility of maintaining meaningful primary groups in the face of those losses.
In a similar vein, new assignments or distant posts often seem substantially less disruptive on cohesion in long-service professional forces. And indeed, mercenaries and long-service professionals can show remarkable cohesion under strain, even when the men in question haven’t necessarily been trained together. Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, recorded in his Anabasis, provide a notable example of this: the Ten Thousand were a mercenary force composed of men from ten different smaller mercenary units, scattered over the Greek world and in most cases we have to imagine the men who joined were not joining together with their neighbors but as deracinated mercenaries. Yet the Ten Thousand show extraordinarily strong cohesion under pressure, both in pitched battles but also under the steady strain of a long march under continuous threat.
That sort of ‘plug and play’ cohesion also shows up in long-service professional armies as well as other kinds of armies that have simply been in the field for a long time as the result of very long wars. One can see it, to take a modern example, quite clearly in the performance – in both victory and defeat – of British regular troops during the Anglo-Zulu War. At Isandhlwana (Jan 22, 1879), a British column was effectively annihilated when enveloped by a larger Zulu force but most of the regulars remained cohesive to the end even when it was clear the battle was lost. The same intense cohesion among the regulars enabled an unlikely victory the next day at Rorke’s Drift (Jan 22-3, 1879) when a badly outnumbered garrison post held off a large Zulu attack. Of course we should also note the remarkable cohesion of the Zulu (in their case a mix of organic cohesion and cohesion developed over frequent campaigns) in these battles, where they were able to persist on the attack despite shockingly heavy casualties.
What I think is going on here is that over time these fellows are being bound not only to a primary group, but also a corporate, professional identity, effectively a professional version of the corporate identity of the ‘warrior class’ discussed above. On the one hand, all of these ‘old soldiers’ still have shared experiences, because even though they were not drilled together, they were all drilled the same way and they all ‘know their business’ the same way. At the same time, they have a common connection to a shared identity nonetheless: they’re all soldiers, not merely by circumstance but by identity. Being a soldier is not something that has happened to them, but something that is part of them. And of course those elements – difficulty of entry, commonalities in experience in the group, a shared sense of belonging – are all elements that encourage group cohesion.
Now again, in both cases, the actual mechanism for producing this psychological and social bonding effect is drill and discipline, which of course also have other effects (as all training does) and are often done for those other purposes, developing cohesion as an accidental (but very necessary) byproduct.
Now as you might gather, the research on training and unit cohesion is, at this point, voluminous; this can only have been an overview. But I think, at least for thinking about worldbuilding (and also a general framework in which to understand the specialist literature), thinking in terms of two categories of ‘manufactured’ cohesion – primary group cohesion (a result of a group being trained together and undergoing hardship together) and corporate identity cohesion (a result of a shared sense of professional or corporate identity among a much larger group, married to shared experiences of training and hardship). However remember: your subjects may view the matter quite differently, understanding the improved combat performance to be the product of something other than the psychological conditioning that modern research focuses on.
Cohesion and its Absence
That leaves us with really four major avenues for a unit to develop effective cohesion: the organic cohesion of small communities (up to the level of a small town, but not generally much larger), the organic cohesion of selective groups (like warrior classes or specific guilds or social clubs) with in a larger, less cohesive society, manufactured primary group cohesion that results from training a unit together and having them endure hardship together and manufactured corporate identity cohesion, a result of a shared sense of identity among a larger group that have a sense of shared hardship.
Note, of course, that there’s no reason these mechanisms for cohesion cannot be combined. Roman citizen armies in the Middle Republic were recruiting with at least some substantial organic cohesion from the citizen class (and the socii in their even smaller, potentially more cohesive groups), which was then reinforced by strict discipline and the experience of military life, effectively layering small community cohesion on top of manufactured primary group cohesion. Likewise, a medieval knight (or other mounted warrior) is already coming with the organic cohesion of a warrior class, but knights also trained together extensively in small units (the conroi, a unit anywhere from a half-dozen to couple-dozen mounted warriors) and would fight in battle as part of that unit, layering that primary group cohesion over top that warrior class cohesion.
The thing is military units are not always cohesive. This is a bit of a difference from the previous sections in this series. Military units, after all, that exist presumably have to have been recruited, supplied, organized and paid somehow or they wouldn’t exist. But there’s no reason a society cannot form up an army or a unit within an army that simply never coheres will and as a result performs poorly on the battlefield. Indeed, we’ve discussed both fictional and real world examples of poor cohesion or combat motivation in the past.
Now the student of history generally comes at these questions knowing the outcome: we typically know that an army either collapsed under pressure or cohered under pressure and are seeking to understand why. Each society’s system for generating cohesion is going to differ in some respects – indeed, you may well have different cohesive principles at play in different parts of the same army for different units raised differently – but a basic sense of the varying ways that cohesion can be generated can help one begin to work out why this or that historical army might have performed well or poorly, creating hypotheses to then investigate more closely in the evidence.
For worldbuilders, the task is somewhat inverted because the armies are fictional and their battles yet unfought. So instead the task is thinking about the societies one has built and the ways they could generate cohesion and giving them military and social institutions to match. Or, crucially, giving them military performance to match. So if your story is meant to feature a fearless, highly effective sort of army, you probably ought to think at least a bit about why they cohere together so well (and not think about it in just bland ‘because they’re super soldiers’ way). Alternately, if you want a military to surprisingly underform, think about flaws or weaknesses in its cohesion – perhaps the a Big Evil who hasn’t given enough thought to psychology or has simply assumed that he can rely on organic cohesion without having done anything to foster it, for instance.
Perhaps most importantly, remember that cohesion is a properly of the regular soldiers of an army, rather than their leaders. Highly effective armies combine capable leadership with high degrees of cohesion. But cohesion can turn against leaders as well – after all, a unit that has strong group bonds will be cohesive when facing the enemy, but it will also be cohesive in a mutiny.4
We’ll probably have a shorter fireside post next week, but after that, we’ll close out this series looking at some real and fictional examples of how all of these elements – civilian society, recruitment, supplies, organization, cohesion, leader and so on – fit together to make coherent military systems (or in some fictional examples, incoherent ones).
- Note especially the impact of Ardant du Picq’s, Études sur le combat (‘Battle Studies’ in English; 1870) and the problematic but influential S.L.A. Marshall, Men against Fire (1947). It is obligatory to note that the modern verdict on the latter is generally something like ‘S.L.A. Marshall‘s work is shoddy where it isn’t outright fabrication, but he happens to be right.’
- They were not the only ‘Pals Batallion’ so badly hurt; the Sheffield City Battalion was about as badly mauled.
- On this concept of collective synchronized discipline, wee W. E. Lee, Waging War (2016), 238ff for a good primer.
- Some of this comes out in D.M. Machado, Voluntas Militum: Community, Collective Action and Popular Power in the armies of the Middle Republic (300-100 BC) (2023) for Roman armies – the tight social cohesion and civic habits of Roman citizen-soldiers show up in their group agency and collective political power. The same is true of professional soldiers in early modern Europe, something that comes out in L. Staiano-Daniels’ The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (2024) quite well, but equally crops up here and there in G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road (2nd ed. 2004).
In this vein, one should read Rob Engen’s concept of “swift trust.”
Engen’s work studies the intense Second World War combat in which battalions were torn apart, researching how the survivors and the reinforcements banded together. He introduces the concept of “swift trust” to capture the rapid bonds made between men under fire on the battlefield, based upon not training together per se, but their common status in the army.
https://canadianmilitaryhistory.ca/review-of-robert-engens-strangers-in-arms-by-russell-w-glenn/
https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol34/iss1/18/
‘S.L.A. Marshall‘s work is shoddy where it isn’t outright fabrication, but he happens to be right.’
How can he be right if her work is that fraudulently shoddy? Surely just because he happens to accidentally reach the correct conclusion doesn’t mean he’s right?
Knowing nothing about the past does not, after all, prevent you from knowing a lot about the present, but military texts are generally expected to be written with historical examples, rather than simply stated as self evident, at least in the modern western tradition. It’s presumably the conclusion that S.L.A. Marshall was a much better military philosopher than a military historian, but also that he realised modern militaries generally like their philosophy grounded in historical examples, hence why he made some up to sell the book.
His facts and conclusions are impossible.
Only 10% of shooters shoot to kill would mean WW2 battles, these super soldiers were taking ammo from everyone else.
He conducted so many interviews that it’s physically IMPOSSIBLE to do, leading many to believe that the data is also fabricated.
Similarly, the figure 11 (a man with a rifle) as the target is now seen as psychologically worthless . Proof? Modern day COD players still suffer PTSD after shooting someone.
Maybe I have misunderstood you but PSTD should not be belittled. Real PSTD makes people more or less unable to function because they are recurrently reminded by everyday things about what traumatised them.
I think this was a misunderstanding, yes. I may be misunderstanding myself, but I think that Eugene’s contention involving PTSD was as follows:
1) We observe that people can get PTSD from the traumatic experience of shooting another human being.
2) We observe that playing modern first-person shooter games, which are to some extent a partial visual (if not full auditory or tactile) simulation of killing another human being, does not, in fact, “inoculate” people against this form of PTSD. They do not, in fact, become immune to this trauma, because the trauma and the PTSD are too powerful and burn through any such ‘training.’
3) We conclude from this that vaguely slightly kinda sorta ‘realistic’ training that only vaguely kinda sorta resembles the real experience of killing someone cannot in reality “inoculate” people against PTSD.
4) I gather (this is the weakest point in my ability to be confident what Eugene is saying) that Eugene is saying that Marshall claimed (falsely, implausibly) that some specific form of WWII-era training (such as shooting at human shaped silhouettes on a paper target) was in any way useful for “inoculating against PTSD” when we know better today.
Thus, not an understatement of the power of PTSD, but rather a statement that its power is great enough to make a mockery of efforts that an armchair thinker might expect to ‘immunize’ someone against it.
My idea is that not everyone develop PTSD after becoming aware of having killed someone. A considerably number of participants in wars does develop PTSD. But I doubt it has anything to do with being aware of one’s own killing of others. However, you are right in that having played violent videogames don’t prevent it from developing.
Neither of those arguments seem to work as an evidence. Since a large majority of the fatalities weren’t caused by a small arms fire, then it doesn’t matter that much if most of the troops shoot over the heads of enemies if they are obliterated seconds later by artillery fire. Similarly, a super soldier doesn’t need to steal the ammo from the rest of the troops, they just need to make their shots count. Let’s use Simo Häyhä as an example. There are probably significant embellishments in his kill counts, but there isn’t much doubt that he did personally kill hundreds of enemy soldiers. He also did a significant amount of killing with a submachine gun as a squad leader and he probably missed a lot of those shots, but those aren’t included in the official counts. But for his work as a sniper it would seem plausible that something like 90% of the shots he took hit another human being. It’s clear he was willing to kill others and every shot would have carried a significant personal risk, so a missed shot would not have been worth it.
I have also read about the figure 11 target, but I never got the impression that the aim was to reduce PTSD, just to get the soldiers used to shooting at something human shaped. In fact, I would think this practice would increase PTSD. Never shooting towards another human should reduce the risk of PTSD. For the connection between figure 11 and CoD we don’t care about PTSD. Instead we want to ask were CoD players more likely to shoot at another human than soldiers that had never played a first person shooter.
At least those having previously played first-person shooter games have markedly easier to actually fire their guns.
If Simo Häyhä could be mistaken for super-powered this might be due to other people’s embellishments. (I don’t think he would have exaggerated himself.) Still, having killed hundreds of enemies over just three months means he was exceptionally skilled as a sniper. Lucky weather probably contributed too. His participation in WWII was during the winter of 1939 – 40. We are talking about a snowy winter since this was in Finland before global warming. Moreover, the winters during WWII were particularly cold in Northern Europe. When it snows visibility is noticeably reduced. Also, if the wind blows too much snow will blow along the ground out in the open. Or blow down from trees or roofs reducing visibility. On the other hand I don’t know if overcast skies matter for the success of snipers.
As a counter to Marshall, I would like to introduce to you another sociologist, Knut Pipping, whose work Infantry company as a society is considered a classic of Finnish sociological research. The method of the research was anthropological participant observation, and the results were interesting. I would recommend anyone actually interested in small-group cohesion to read this study, which has been available in English since 2008, at the link above.
My understanding is that he just…made up a bunch of supporting evidence for his thesis, but the thesis has generally (not in the specific percentages) tested out?
Like, to give an example in another area, if I said Candidate X will drop out of the race, because I’ve talked to his campaign staff and they all agree he has to drop out due to scandal Y. And candidate X does indeed drop out, but I never talked to anyone about him, just looked at it and went ‘yeah, he’s gonna drop out,’ I’ve reached the right conclusion, but my work is shoddy/fraudulent.
Or like saying 2×2 = 4 because 2+2=4 and addition and multiplication are the same. Your conclusion is correct, but the method is nonsense, or non-existent. It’s an example of accuracy without validity.
Okay, first of all, multiplication is repeated addition, so they are the same, it’s just a different notation. 2 x 2 = 2 + 2. 2 x 3 = 2 + 2 + 2, 2 x 4 = 2 + 2 + 2 + 2, etc.
Regarding the original statement, it’s not illogical to say that a hypothesis is correct, but that the supporting data used in the book (or even in a scientific experiment) does not prove or disprove the hypothesis. If you wanted to make a specific point about this, you would have to bring in other data that directly contradicts the original hypothesis.
By that logic it would be correct to say division is the same as addition because it’s all just counting. In division you’re counting the number of instances one number is contained in another, which is all just addition in the end. But obviously no one says mathematical functions are the same because they relate to counting; that’s an absurdity and an abuse of language.
For the second part, if all you had was the original authors data it *would* be illogical to say the original hypothesis is correct, because it’s unproven. The point is that the authors conclusion being right when his methodology is nonsense can only be determined when you bring in other data, which means it’s worse than useless. You’ve created extra work for someone else to fix your maleficence or mistake.
It’s harmless here, or at least only mildly harmful, but the amount of money and effort that’s been sunk into dead end research into medicine, for instance supposed cancer cures based on large doses of stuff like kitchen spices, is significant. There’s a legitimate economic and social cost to needing to shift through the sea of crap to determine what the state of actual research is and what potential cures are worth exploring.
I’m pretty sure that “he accidentally reached the correct conclusion” is exactly what’s meant by “he’s right” here.
I get you, but isn’t it the case that, as per the Word goes, “Just because you’re correct doesn’t mean you’re right!”? Especially in a topic with devils in the details like this; a correct conclusion without proper methodology is just being lucky, and luck isn’t generally looked up for in the shattered ship of a battlefield.
I have never heard the phrase “Just because you’re correct doesn’t mean you’re right!”. Indeed, as a native English speaker, I would consider “correct” and “right” synonymous.
The words you seem to be looking for might be “justified” or “well-supported”.
The phrase itself is a somewhat mauled-by-translation import from a famous Japanese game/visual novel. It’s part of the main character’s soliloquy about the separation between logic and human feeling and is supposed to be used when something is logically correct but morally wrong or similar situations.
I have heard it before, but only in the subtitles of an anime that is generally agreed to have been badly translated and which I assume makes more sense in the original Japanese.
“Just because you’re correct doesn’t mean you’re right!”
I have never heard that phrase before, but it is a wonderful one, and I thoroughly intend to find an excuse to use it.
“Just because you’re correct doesn’t mean you’re right!” is an interesting companion to Asimov’s famous “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right” – the meaning of ‘right’ is exactly the opposite!
So what I’m getting from this thread is the word “right” and “correct” just don’t have as defined a distinction as I thought it were. Great. Good to know for the future before i ring in like an empty can.
I think I got tripped between that quote and the “True:Valid:Sound” distinction in (formal) logic.
To be fair this also does relate to scientific or logical distinctions. The original quote is saying don’t confuse your sense of how the world *is* with how it *should* be. Asimov is saying that you shouldn’t let your emotive moral sense override your ability to make moral reasonings.
In each case the author is saying not to use the wrong “target” for your decisions and to communicate clearly, to yourself and others. That’s very similar to using the logical sound valid true or various scientific accurate versus valid distinctions. Emiya is saying that you shouldn’t use the fact he’s doomed to fail as a reason not to try (speaking to himself, time travel), and Asimov is saying that you shouldn’t use the fact that you’d feel bad about doing something prevent you from doing the right thing. The target their antithesis is targeting is wrong, so their conclusions can be accurate but invalid here.
Both actually compliment each other, despite seeming to contradict, because Emiya is saying not to let futility and despair compromise your sense of right and wrong, and Asimov is saying not to let your sense of right and wrong contradict the greater good. Asimov would see nothing wrong with futilely trying to do good against an overwhelming struggle (in fact that theme does come up indirectly), and Emiya absolutely had to do unsavory things because they were morally correct. You can follow *both*.
I realize looking back in this comment I reworded my interpretation of what they’re saying three times without bothering to lead in properly, with better language making it look weird and possibly self contradictory. Reminder lesson to anyone who cares that it’s worth taking a minute to reassess the entire post before posting it.
Basically, read my first explanation of what each is saying as an overview, the second as context dependent to the story, and the third as a synthesis of both. And for anyone confused-Emiya is the protagonist saying “Just because you’re correct doesn’t mean you’re right!” and Asimov is the author saying “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right”.
Asimov is technically speaking through a character and Shirou Emiya is technically the product of the authors of his visual novel, but Asimov is very nearly speaking to the reader here through his avatar and the authors of Shirou Emiya are basically presenting his character as a thesis statement, so it’s most correct to view Asimov’s statement as coming from the author and Shirou Emiya’s as coming from the character.
Similarly, in scientific circles the distinction is sometimes drawn between accuracy and validity. Accuracy is hitting the target, validity is getting the correct answer. You can be accurate but not valid by consistently hitting the wrong target, by using the wrong method, or by communicating the answer incorrectly, as examples.
In this context the first would be arriving at an incomplete answer by asking the wrong questions. If you asked soldiers who deserted what they think of their commanding officers, for instance. In a low cohesion unit it’s a fair bet they don’t feel attached to them, but that’s downwind of a lack of any attachments, so the answer is accurate but incomplete.
The second would be what was actually done. The data is nonsense. You lucked into a correct result and your methods won’t work outside of that, because they’re bad or don’t exist.
The last would be reaching a comprehensive model of cohesion, then translating it a few times and saying that the correct method of holding units together is to glue them forehead to chest. It sounds silly when talked about here, but issues with communication are more real and common with scientific measurements.
Briefly, take as an example a radar gun. It measures time delay between a light pulse being sent out and reflecting back to determine speed. But that time delay is a fact of reality, not a *measurement*. In order to relate the result to the speed you need to calibrate it to some known speed (tuning forks which vibrate at a known speed are used) or the number you get isn’t guaranteed to be related to any other number. Ideally you also want to account for conditions that might influence the result this way; humidity and temperature influence radar readings, but they should influence your calibration target similarly to your actual target.
With complex scientific equipment the process of turning a measurement into information is extremely non trivial. It’s very easy to screw up and end up with incorrect information. Hence you can end up with incredibly precise and accurate information that is invalid because it can’t be related to anyone else’s information.
Of course this is just one way of talking about the same idea. There’s been some attempt to standardize the language so that accurate *means* valid, but not only is it different from how I was taught, I think it’s actually just wrong in plain English. But the concepts here persist.
… it’s just that different people will think the language you use might not be valid when communicating them.
Talking about science communication, some nitpicking: the time delay between sending out a pulse and receiving its echo (“time-of-flight”) is related to the distance to the target. To measure the speed of the target — or to be precise, the radial component of the relative speed of the radar gun and the target — you measure the difference between the frequency of the signal sent out and the echo.
It’s actually quite common for individuals who have studied and practiced *something* to be able to form perfectly accurate hypotheses about how that *something* and it’s parts work, just from a completely internalized understanding. This is called “intuition” or “expertise,” depending on how one wants to characterize it.
Separately, it is also quite common for “experts” to rely on bullshit when asked to elaborate on their intuition.
Yeah even in science a lot of the time someone first gets to the right answer, and then they work backwards from the answer to create an explanation for how they got there. Since this is happening post-fact and intuition is a subconscious thing, the generated explanation will not necessarily match the actual reasons that guided their intuition to the correct answer.
Hottest example right now is the machine learning field – people got some amazing results seven years ago, but the theory for why it works is still catching up.
My problem is more about laypeople believing their own personal untrained intuition to be infallible.
Roughly speaking, based on a little bit of experience and a larger bit of talking to people with experience, he developed an intuitive assessment of what the right answer probably was. That’s a way to be legitimately “right”, albeit not with high confidence. Then, because he wanted to spread that assessment through essentially scholastic channels, he had to write up a scholarly work with lots of numbers and citations. Which is an awful lot of work, so he half-assed a lot of it and flat-out made up parts of it.
Which left subsequent generations of scholars in the annoying position of “OK, this *sounds* right, but man this guy sucks, now we’re going to have to dig down into primary sources and do new field work to figure out whether it really is right”. It really is at least mostly right, and it’s perhaps unfair but unavoidable that we at least superficially credit S.L.A. Marshall and not the later scholars.
Once in a while, someone successfully intuits a correct understanding of some important fact about reality, then turns out to be lazy and makes up or misrepresents their supporting evidence after forming the conclusion. It doesn’t happen often, but it can. It’s not how any form of research is supposed to work, for obvious reasons, but once in a while someone lucks out.
Olivier Voinnet comes to mind, completely right about RNAi to the extent we still use his basic plasmids, also overwhelmingly falsified.
Mathematics is full of this kind of thing. There are all sorts of conjectures that are generally accepted as true or as false and numerous proofs or disproofs of them of varying quality. Sometimes it is hard to tell how good a proposed proof is. The ABC Conjecture may actually have been proven, but the validity and correctness of the proof is still considered an open question the last time I checked.
It’s a big problem with older proofs especially since the formalization efforts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Euler, considered one of the greats, would often assume a series converged or a number existed without proving it. It’s hard for a modern mathematician to follow some of his stuff without having to leap over gaps and ignore assumptions. Of course, Euler’s result was usually correct.
Because your inability to explain your hypothesis does not imply that your hypothesis is not right. If you asked a Roman engineer why blood and seawater are necessary when building with concrete he would have zero ability to offer a scientific explanation, but he’d still be correct to do so.
There is a TV-trope for this:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RightForTheWrongReasons
“One of the responses to this reality is to avoid individual soldier rotations (such rotations in the Vietnam War were famously blamed for low morale and discipline) and instead rotate whole units, but of course there is nothing doing about casualties and the need to replace them.”
I have to admit I find it somewhat silly whenever we see Vietnam military brass coming up with any explanation for low morale and cohesion besides “this is a shit war no one likes and we shouldn’t be here”. It’s exactly the kind of accurate but invalid conclusion I sometimes bring up; yes I’m sure that rotating individuals reduces cohesion, but that’s not the real problem, is it?
I think guys of a certain age were allotted to participate in the Vietnam War. If so the unpopularity of the war among the American public (especially the Baby Boom generation) mattered.
Oh weird, WordPress messed up the formating. I guess because I had been replying to people then tried to post an upper level reply?
The Vietnam war had draft lotteries, based on birthdate, so the widespread unpopularity absolutely mattered. There was no real selection process weeding out nonbelievers, nor could there be given the needs in manpower. It wasn’t a volunteer army and couldn’t be.
Reading this I thought of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which was able to field much larger armies than the other European powers. I had thought this was simply due to France recruiting from a larger pool of their population. But the cohesion issue makes me think just recruiting more Third Estate members into the military would not necessarily produce a viable large army. French peasants would not have a military tradition that makes them effectively cohere in battle. But Revolutionary and Napoleonic French armies were undoubtedly effective. Why?
Also I didn’t have to click on the bad Dark Lord link to know it goes to saying Saruman was a dumb dummy whose plans were dumb. But was Sauron good at this, because he was a smart Dark Lord. His armies were willing to fight Noldor. Maybe they broke from Ar-Pharazon, but he had new armies willing to fight Noldor and Numenorians for seven years reformed pretty quickly. I suppose he was a god-like figure to much of Middle-Earth for 6,000 years so he could do all sorts of effective social engineering.
Honestly, it seems from the books that Sauron’s forces have the high morale, low cohesion state that our good host alludes to elsewhere. Frodo and Sam, crossing through Mordor, come upon two separate fratricidal incidents among Mordor orcs in a couple of days. It very much seems like something as simple as ‘who has priority over a clogged road?’ is solved via murder.
Remember that the Ring’s power was psychological. It was about influencing and controlling people. So I assume that Sauron’s magic specialized in this kind of thing, mind control, super-charisma, intimidation turned up to 11, etc.
I don’t doubt that, but I also have a feeling this might be something to the Orcish ‘design’. Like, the force that Saruman sends to attack on Amon Hen actually displays pretty good cohesion, fighting to the last around their leader. But at the same time, Saruman personally seems to be overseeing this expedition, and Legolas can feel a will slowing them down and lending speed to the force returning to Isengard.
Again, this is more fantasy magical rules than real life army cohesive principles, but at least my own take as to why the Isengarders underperform so badly at the assault on the Hornburg has less to do with Saruman raising the army in a hurry (He’s at it for decades in the books, anyway) and more to do with the Ents attacking his stronghold; he’s too full of panic and fear for his own skin and trying to figure out what to do about that to lend his will to his army. Without that, they’re still somewhat tough and aggressive, but they don’t have the special sauce that the army needs.
Alternatively or additionally, Saruman may have never actually tried using his willpower to bolster an army of ten thousand orcs assaulting a fortified position, and found that he was unequal to the task. To be sure, Sauron could do it and Sauron was originally the same basic order of being as Saruman (a corrupted Maiar). But Sauron spent a very, very long time, first under Morgoth and then on his own, learning to master the armies of darkness and drive them in accordance with his will. Saruman was a tyro by comparison.
They didn’t actually fight to the last together, several groups splintered and they lost cohesion in the end as their leader died. However they still had some cohesive principal, albeit it was only really tested in a situation that inclined the orcs to act cohesively anyway. They were already fleeing together and already clearly best off united. This doesn’t negate the need for cohesion, but it does help.
The bigger test is helms deep, which they unceremoniously fail. Utterly.
Magic could also be at work of course. It seems to be with Sauron.
Even Mordor under Sauron seems to have weak cohesion, because most instances of the heroes turning up unexpectedly and delivering severe shock to armies of orcs seem to have the orcs break rapidly. I take it that orcs have a tendency to try and make up for this by seeking to greatly outnumber their opponents, and limit the extent to which they can receive such shock (and even that has mixed results).
Other than that, where Sauron doesn’t benefit from being able to mystically exert his will over his armies to bind them together under pressure (a capability that seems to be still present but weaker without the One Ring), he seeks to make up for it with superior logistics and organisation; try his best to keep his armies large and well supplied to keep their spirits high in pursuit of victory.
That and strategic depth. Sauron can afford to lose armies, because the resources he has accrued are sufficient to keep pulling up new ones. If he has to overcome enemies through attrition, he will. Look at how long the Last Alliance needed to besiege Barad-dur.
Notably IIRC, I seem to remember one segment of the battle of Minas Tirith the orcs breaks but the Haradrim (presumably kept together by a combination of locla/warrior class cohesion) stands. (and eventually dies)
You get it in the battle at the black gate as well. When the Ring is destroyed, you get this:
The Captains bowed their heads; and when they looked up again, behold! their enemies were flying and the power of Mordor was scattering like dust in the wind. As when death smites the swollen brooding thing that inhabits their crawling hill and holds them all in sway, ants will wander witless and purposeless and then feebly die, so the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither
and thither mindless; and some slew themselves, or cast themselves in pits, or fled wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope. But the Men of Rhuˆn and of Harad, Easterling and Southron, saw the ruin of their war and the great majesty and glory of the Captains of the West. And those that were deepest and longest in evil servitude, hating the West, and yet were men proud and bold, in their turn now gathered themselves for a last stand of desperate battle. But the most part fled eastward as they could; and some cast their weapons down and sued for mercy.
Granted, the men fall apart as well, but they seem to hold up marginally better than the orcs and trolls. They’re not committing suicide as an immediate reaction to losing whatever Sauron’s will is providing them.
Even fleeing or surrending aren’t necessarily signs of low cohesion, if they are done as a unit. It’s actually much better for an army if it’s soldiers retreat together than fight disunited, and even if they surrender together it’s often better in the long term for the polity.
But yes, the even extends to the Dunland tribes under Saruman. When the orcs get slaughtered at helms deep the Dunland tribes at least manage to surrender, indicating they have better cohesion.
Consistently the actual strongest threat to the free people of middle earth aren’t the masses of orcs, it’s other men in Saurons thrall, either the corrupted ring wraiths or the various men Saurin enslaved of manipulated. And, of course, Numenor never fell to outside action, but it’s own hubris.
There’s a philosophical point here to be sure. Orcs were fundementally either evil spirits of extensions of Saurin, but I suspect in the broadest view the significance of the war of the ring wasn’t Saurons might against men, it was a test to see if men could master themselves. That’s more in line with a Christian philosophy than simply seeing if the hero is strong or clever enough to triumph. Hell, that’s almost a foundational observation about heroic stories themselves; any foe is merely there for our protagonists to test themselves against, ultimately.
Númenor is destroyed by the Valar if I remember it correctly.
Actually Ilúvatar, *God*, destroyed Numenor. He also made the world round and physically separated Valinor from middle earth. It’s the last big act of divine intervention before Lord of the rings, excepting maybe the Ring being found by hobbits rather than kings of men.
It’s basically to be read as almost a pure cause effect chain-once Numenor landed on Valinor the remaining events were preordained. In the same way plunging your hand into a fire will burn you, touching Valinor while under the doom of man will destroy you. And Sauron tempted Numenor to touch the fire.
Yes; notably this happens after the Witch King, who has been pushing them on with his aura of terror, is slain. Also, the wild men at Helm’s Deep don’t scatter when the Uruk-Hai do.
My interpretation of this is that orcish armies (perhaps especially Mordor’s armies) tend to have very poor cohesion (because, as you talk about below, what society they have is a near-constant mass of backstabbing and spite), but that this generally doesn’t matter for Sauron’s purposes because he is directly holding them in order with the psychic pressure of his own will (and possibly his Nazgul and other lieutenants are doing the same thing on a smaller scale).
You can really see this in the battle of the Black Gate: as long as Sauron’s attention is focused on the Gate, the orcs there fight in acceptably good order. But the instant Sauron is destroyed, the orcs shatter and flee from a foe that they still wildly outnumber.
It’s actually even before the Ring is destroyed. When Frodo ‘formally’ claims the Ring as his at Mount Doom, we get this paragraph.
From all his policies and webs of fear and treachery, from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free; and throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the Power that wielded them was now bent with overwhelming force upon the Mountain. At his summons, wheeling with a rending cry, in a last desperate race there flew, faster than the winds, the Nazguˆl, the Ringwraiths, and with a storm of wings they hurtled southwards to Mount Doom.
I really do think that, and this is very contra to real life history, Orcs are *designed* to be near useless in battle UNLESS you have an evil overlord type filling them with his will to fight and keep going even in hardship. (Morgoth is perpetually afraid of his servants turning against him, this would seem like an elegant design feature from his perspective, ensuring whatever ‘loyalist’ orcs consistently can outfight any that turn stag). But even something as minor as Sauron not paying attention to them causes their performance to noticeably lapse.
A good point. Notably, this seems to be a difference between orcs and goblins. We see the goblins of the Misty Mountains in some detail in The Hobbit, and they show no particular signs of being driven to behave the way that they do by some kind of overmastering will. Although this may just mean that the goblins’ distant ancestors were subject to Morgoth or Sauron, and have had enough generations of ‘freedom’ from psychic control that the actual individual goblins have never known it and are not incapacitated by its absence.
I think the words “goblin” and “orc” can be used about different cultural groups. Otherwise they are intended to reflect different dialects of Westron.
That behavior is justified, and isn’t a sign of poor cohesion. The orcs on the field may not know much about exactly what goal they are fighting the war for, or how fighting there will achieve that goal — they outsource that thinking to high command (Sauron and his inner circle) — but they know that they fight for Sauron’s goals. With Sauron dead, the strategic goals of the operation are irrecoverably lost, and there is no possible advantage to be gained from fighting a battle then and there, even if they win. In the relevant sense, the war is over and their side is lost, even if there is not yet any treaty, and there is a present possibility of bloodshed.
Most armies do not prepare their soldiers for such a scenario. It is not surprising that the orcs act in odd, disorganized ways.
To give a modern analog: what would an ordinary soldier (so not one of the few with nuclear-deterrent-related duties) deployed just on the other side of the border — for what they think is a relatively minor operation — do when they suddenly saw with their own eyes a multitude of thermonuclear bombs going off all over their country? Not in a way where “our nation will remember this atrocity forever”, but in a “this brigade on deployment is all that remains of our nation, everyone we loved is dead, every landmark demolished, every government official from the head of state to the smallest town’s mayor dead — technically, by elimination the brigadier-general is now everything including head of state? — and pragmatically there is no point in trying to maintain a charade of the few thousand of us being a state, our nation as an entity is gone” way?
Sauron may be better at raising armies than Saruman, but that’s not saying much.
The Pelennor Fields is the one battle we have a detailed account of how a Mordor army performs (happy to be corrected by those who’ve read all the extra volumes). When it goes badly, the orcs show low cohesion in scattering, while the human Easterlings and Haradrim show high cohesion. Which suggests to me that as allies rather than being under direct everyday command of Sauron, the Easterlings and Haradrim have their own, more effective, methods of installing morale and cohesion.
I think Sauron’s process of meticulously building his strength before going to war against his western enemies consisted of assuming a high degree of control over those other human societies. But crucially, they’re still human societies, with their own bonds and hierarchies to keep them moving and motivated. Orcs seem to exist in a constant state of mutual spite, which they can be organised into effectively to commit atrocities, but makes them very fragile against opponents that can fight on an even footing.
Sauron, at least, can be credited with the strategic sophistication to recognise this and plan his order of battle around it. Orcs are useful for their numbers and fierceness, but expect them to fail if the going gets tough.
There’s of course a higher-order argument to be made, to what extend the orcish lack of cohesion is due to their innate nature, and to what extend Sauron cultivated it by the way he ordered Mordor’s society. From the snippets we get, orc society under Sauron is very repressive and built around mutual distrust – orcs appear to get rewarded for snitching around each other, and different units are encouraged to think of themselves in competition, not cooperation, with other units (see for example the way the Cirith Ungol orcs talk about the Morgul orcs). It’s not surprising that army cohesion is low if society is ordered in such a way that close-knit bonds of trust are discouraged.
The question which I don’t think the text lets us answer are:
– Is this because orcs are innately treacherous so this low-trust society is the only way to order a stable state with them?
– Or is this because Sauron’s desire to dominate makes him unable to envision a society based on trust, and thus he’s ordered the orcs this way even though it impedes military performance?
One big factor for Tolkien orcs is that they’re actually smaller than humans, let alone elves.
There was a leader of the orcs in Moria, who was unusual in that he was actually as tall as a human.
The Uruk-hai were also unusually tall for orcs, being as tall. IIRC there was speculation in the book that there was some human ancestry in them (which confuses the issue of orcs origin as being “corrupted elves”, but Tolkien never settled on an origin anyway).
So if you’re an orc, you may outnumber the other side, but any single opponent is significantly taller than you. He outreaches you and almost certainly is stronger.
What cohesion exists in orcs seems to be from origin. Units seem to be “from” somewhere, and fights are generally when units see a prize. E.g. the tower that Frodo is taken prisoner in seems to be garrisoned by two units, who fall into fighting.
Uruk-hai have cohesion because they’re visibly different, and have the sense that they’re elite.
Which is also likely a factor in Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift. British troops weren’t going to successfully run away from fighting there. They looked completely different from the people they were surrounded by. This isn’t absolute of course, but it probably figured into things.
I suspect you can model Sauron’s control as something like “You’re always visible to the leader”. Rather like being right in front of the general’s position, and you fear his vengeance if you rout. Which is fine, until suddenly that sense disappears (when the Ring is destroyed).
The Haradhim likely stuck together after via the same sense of being in a foreign land and not having anywhere to hide if they ran.
Probably a mixture of both. One thing that’s worth noting is that in The Hobbit, the goblins of the Misty Mountains display notably better morale and cohesion than Sauron’s or Saruman’s armies seem to manage: taking multiple shocks and reasonably heavy losses without breaking. Which would seem to imply that even orcs can build up bonds of cohesion if left to their own devices, but that Sauron’s domination prevented the orcs of Mordor from forming such structures (either accidentally, or deliberately because he was afraid that such bonds would strengthen the orcs to desert or otherwise rebel against his rule).
I agree with Aeshdan that it is probably at least partially cultural. If I understand it correctly Sauron is a control freak. Such can’t trust people organising their own collective action.
In support of orcs being smaller than humans, at Helm’s Deep, Gimli is fine fighting orcs but has to step back against humans.
I suspected they were about the size of dwarves on average since unusually short ones are as short as hobbits while the tallest ones are comparable to humans. Tolkien dwarves are somewhere in between these in height.
So, to the topic of late 18th/early 19th century France. It’s my understanding that the initial outcomes of levee en masse were not super impressive in terms of preventing desertion or holding up in battle. The government might have opted for it primarily through a combination of thinking they would need to bring up the biggest armies in history to hold up against the forces arrayed against them, and to lend credibility to the notion that this was war in defence of a government of the people.
I think most cohesion there can ultimately be laid at whatever training they underwent combined with any extent to which the invasion of enemies under those circumstances could come to be seen as an existential threat to the nation. Also possibly an extent to which the Revolutionary Armies found that column formations could make up for weak cohesion by trying to ensure sufficient shock from heavy numbers to disperse the enemy before it came to that.
By the time you get to Napoleon, you’ve got a full on professional army bolstered by any sense that Napoleon’s style is enough to deliver consistent victories.
Napoleon’s armies were based on conscription. They were not professional.
The point about the conscription system you made is more general, though. A conscription system needs some time to get going. For example, when Finland became independent in 1917 and the Civil War was over in 1918, our conscription system remained pretty unpopular until late 1920’s: your average conscript was quite unconscious about why his service would be ncessary, and the rates of desertion and other major military crimes were rather high. It took about ten years to build a system where the population at large considered conscription to be a natural rite of passage, and where the training in the units was structured to improve motivation and cohesion, not to destroy it. (Naturally, in the Finnish case, this also required conscious simultaneous work to build up a cohesive democratic civilian society worth defending after a very traumatic civil war.)
So, it is no wonder that it was same for the French. The early revolutionary conscription system was surely worse than one they had in 1814, honed by almost 20 years of constant work and proof by fire.
Professional and conscript armies are not mutually exclusive, they’re nested concepts. If the army is modelled such that people are soldiers as their full time lifestyle over a long term whether there is a war on or not, ready to be deployed at will, and managed bureaucratically, they’re a professional army regardless of whether they’re volunteers or there is a mandatory period of service.
That in addition to the general principle of the Grande Armee being constructed around a spine of full on career soldiers. The difference between them and generally filling the ranks with conscription was the big part of why the losses in the Russian campaign were so catastrophic. Filling out the numbers again was the easy part.
Still, the French armed forces were weakened enough they made the defeat of France possible.
Yes? If the difference between French armies when they were dominating Europe and when they finally fell was “they lost most of the people with the professional edge and had to replace them with fresh conscripts”, then I think I have ground to stand by the statement of “by the time post-revolution armies became some of the strongest in Europe, they had become highly professional”.
Losing to many of their professional soldiers to hardship is a pretty good explanation to me.
Pardon, I was looking at avatars rather than usernames, so I thought you were the same person I was replying to.
On the other hand, I’m not certain why one of my own stated points was being repeated to me as though it was a correction.
I was just pointing out you provided a more detailed explanation than the one I had known about.
Saurons troops feared the Witchking so that they killed themselves at his command
Which sounds impressive at Evil Overlord school, but unlikely to be any use. As Prof Devereaux often reminds us, battles are won by making the other side run away, not by killing them all. Making your own troops afraid even before the fighting starts is not going to help.
Tolkien was probably thinking of historical commanders with a reputation for harsh discipline and turning this up to eleven.
It’s basically just the Evil Overlord version of the triarii; instead of elder fellow soldiers being there to bolster cohesion so you don’t run all the way away, it’s a simple threat of magical torture-death to keep the orcs from completely fleeing battle.
For Tolkien, the ability to remain steadfast in battle instead of taking flight reflects inherent moral worth (with no relationship to so-called “STEM lords”). Saruman’s Uruk-Hai do in fact have better cohesion than the orcs of Mordor in the one instance where we can directly compare them. When faced with the riders of Rohan, they are superior in morale and discipline, likely prevent the entire army from breaking up prematurely and in the end a few Uruk-Hai led by their great captain Ugluk almost manage to escape out of their encirclement.
Naturally men are superior to orcs, but they become even better when they possess the blood of Numenor like Imrahil or Faramir. Such men also make the best leaders, as they can inspire their men to greater courage.
The general theme with Sauron’s orc armies seems to be that they fear their leaders and thus the consequences of retreat more than their enemies, especially when a Nazgul is on the field in person. When a Nazgul is not present or driven off or slain their cohesion is pretty fragile, and when a band ambushes the Fellowship with arrows on the river (IIRC this isn’t in the movie) they pretty much rout from Legolas downing a fellbeast with rider despite having taken zero casualties and no other member of the Fellowship having a bow, but when one is driving them on with terror that even the stout men of Gondor (drawn from a population that places a high value on courage, and either extensively drilled in the case of the standing army or raised and fighting in their own communities in the case of the reinforcements) cannot bear, the orcs fight with mad fury. Presumably when Sauron was personally on the field, especially with the Ring’s power to dominate, he had a similar effect.
The men in Sauron’s and Saruman’s service have good organic cohesion, but are in their own societies.
Dr. Devereaux’s series on the Battle of Minas Tirith specifically talks about how the Witch King of Angmar (the commander actually in charge of a big army fighting for Sauron) handles his forces much more professionally and competently than Saruman does. Including, for instance, detaching blocking forces to keep a surprise enemy attack from devastating his force if they come up on his siege army from behind. Sauron overall operates with a considerably better and more practical strategy, so him being in some senses “better at war” than Saruman does seem supported by the text.
Because Revolutionary politics and government, even into the Napolenonic, gave the Third Estate an actual stake in their society that they then defended and enhanced with their military service. As noted in the above article if you were going to make soldiers fight and cohere effectively you had to provide them with some sort of status. Which is what happened in effect with Revolutionary France.
> but the Wehrmacht (the German army) in WWII
That was the name of the entire German military, not just the army.
> if you want a military to surprisingly underform
Typo: underperform
> cohesion is a properly of the regular soldiers
Typo: property
More possible typos:
“which is a think that is normally psychologically quite hard to do”
think or thing?
“Alternately, if you want a military to surprisingly underform,”
underform or underperform?
The Roman contubernium clearly had a cohesive function. A contubernium was eight soldier unit that trained together, fought together and (as the name suggests) shared the same tent.
I can easily see how this would foster unit cohesion. You might or might not stand fast for some remote 1` consul, but if you let your tent mates down you’d never hear the end of it.
Providing that soldiering has status, I’d expect any army that takes to the field for a prolonged period to develop small community cohesion. Even without top down efforts you’re going to get small groups forming that eat/camp/march together, and I don’t think its a big leap to expect them to line up together when battle starts.
The C17 Spanish army issued very large loaves of bread (the basic ration), so that soldiers ate together (it was one or the notably more cohesive forces of the time)
Boy Scout Troops do successfully build cohesion via camping trips.
That does it, I’m terrified of being attacked by the Boy Scouts!
For a long time after the Romans, the “mess” was the men you ate with, usually as many as could fit around the table (eight to ten).
In US Army terms, it’s a “squad”.
“ Alternately, if you want a military to surprisingly underform, think about flaws or weaknesses in its cohesion – perhaps the a Big Evil who hasn’t given enough thought to psychology or has simply assumed that he can rely on organic cohesion without having done anything to foster it, for instance.”
Also a more interesting framing for the standard “the dark lord’s goblins flee at the first sight of trouble because they’re inherently cowardly” trope, I think. Which I suppose also matches historical conflation of poor cohesion with personal cowardice.
Goblins, orcs, etc. are usually written as being tribal (may not be the correct term), when the author pays attention.
So the dark lord overawes whoever is the Big Goblin for each tribe. “Fight for me and you get loot, or don’t fight and die”.
Then he more or less ignores them (as long as they keep up on the march), and the rivalry that Goblin Tribe A has with Goblin Tribe B (and the rivalry they both have with C).
Then he’s surprised when Goblin Tribe A and B get into it with each other when things go a little wrong instead of attacking the Good Guys.
If the author has studied history then the dark lord will put A and B on either side of another unit. And some zampolit wizard units behind both of them.
I often find it interesting to see how the question of cohesion makes even the best laid battle plan a bit of a gamble. There are so many cases where a well equipped and well placed army still seems to have a wing just disintegrate in contact with the enemy.
I’m thinking about how this might be processed in terms of battles turning on the whim of gods, and thus wonder about the role that religious ritual might play in the subject. How much might cohesion include whether or not a suitable sacrifice was carried out prior to the battle?
>How much might cohesion include whether or not a suitable sacrifice was carried out prior to the battle?
This also ties into expectations of leadership. To quote Bret: “An American general who slaughtered a goat in front of his army before battle would not reassure his men; a Greek general who failed to do so might well panic them.”
“Chain of command” is pretty much a modern concept.
The Roman consul was the one who was legitimately able to lead the legion. He was also the priest in charge of sacrifices. They sacrificed for a lot of things.
“Should we move out of camp today” was one.
If the consul died, there wasn’t really a deputy to take over. They pretty much had to send back to Rome to get a new one.
It is about expected behavior. A naval officer who tries to act as captain on a ship, and who isn’t already in the “chain of command” without being officially “read in” will experience problems.
This is true even if that officer is higher rank. If the captain on a ship with an admiral dies, the XO takes over, not the admiral. And not anyone on his staff either.
It’s possible for the admiral to pull rank and appoint one of his staff, but that indicates lack of confidence in the entire existing chain.
Which is likely to cause morale and cohesion problems, unless the ship was pretty dysfunctional to start with. In that case, *not* doing this until the captain dies, is a problem with the admiral.
Our host has given us many quotable lines over the years, but that remains one of my favourites.
“An American general who slaughtered a goat in front of his army before battle would not reassure his men; a Greek general who failed to do so might well panic them.”
A British colonel who slaughtered a goat in front of his battalion might either reassure or panic them, depending which battalion it was. Gurkha troops celebrate Dashain with a goat sacrifice, beheaded in public either by the commanding officer (who would be British) or a senior Gurkha NCO.
Victory – and even more so repeated victory – was seen as a sign of divine favour. The historian Peter brown traces Constantine’s progressive public revelation of his Christianity (first a claim of general divine favour, then reference of a supreme divinity – Sol Invictus, then to the christian God) each after a significant victory. Each victory validated the claim. The chancy nature of battle leaves a lot of room for luck.
One source of cohesion is coordinated group work – particularly with heavy machinery. The crew of a steam locomotive, the sailors hauling together, the crew of a gun. The object becomes the focus of the group, to be protected and served. Railwaymen were the core of Bolshevik support, and the industrial working classes the mainstays of organised dissent across C19/20 Europe.
In the same vein, there’s a close link between morale and cohesion. The believers hang in there, rally faster, return to the field after defeat. As in the French revolution, or Cromwell’s Presbyterian troopers, or Washington’s army or the Chinese or Vietnamese Communist causes. Some part of German cohesion in WWII was because the army had been Nazified (see Omer Bartov).
Much heavy machinery was named, even if informally.
I though steam locomotives only needed two people. One controlling its speed and one feeding its steam engine fuel. On the other hand they may have been prone to breakdown. If so at least one mechanic would have been needed.
This is a bit of tooth-to-tail definitional problem, I’d say. Yes, a steam engine moving down the tracks might only require two people, one who looks out the window and one who shovels, but the engine can only do so because of the work of people who aren’t currently on it – the mechanics in the train yard, the people manning the refueling stations, the signallers and controllers at train stations. Now the social bonds between those people and the actual people on the train might be weaker, as they’re of course not spending an entire shift next to each other in the cabin. But these people still have very regular contact with the train crew and form social bonds based on that.
I suspected something like that since I knew of the need for all these additional people.
The duty of the mechanic, and many others, were folded into the jobs of the driver and the fireman. E.g. unlike modern internal combustion engines, which have a centralized pressurized lubricating system, steam locomotives’ many joints were locally lubricated. Thus every so much distance, when the train had to stop anyway, a member of the crew would use the opportunity to walk around the engine with oil can in hand. Not all tasks had a fixed allocation. For instance, if a train had to be stopped at a signal for a long time, someone had to visit the signalbox and sign the signalman’s register as proof, but it could be either man. Partly the visit was to make sure the signalman wasn’t asleep, partly to make sure that he didn’t forget the train was there. (And that the put a reminder object in the right place, such that he couldn’t clear another train into the same place even if he were to forget about the first train.)
More importantly, the nature of the technology is such that the two people have to operate it in concert with each other.
– Coal is not free. Railways incentivized firemen not to be wasteful with it by partly tying their pay to how much they used. A driver who was bad at his job and used steam inefficiently not only made the fireman do more shoveling, he inflicted a pay cut on him.
– A fireman doing a bad job will leave the driver with less power than he is accustomed to, or less than he needs to do his job. It was not uncommon for an engine to run out of steam while trying to climb a hill.
– A good fireman has some tricks to temporarily make more steam available than is sustainable, if they can anticipate when the driver will need it.
However, in various places freight trains in particular had a guard and possibly several brakemen as well, and if their cooperation with the engine crew broke down, the result could range from an uncomfortable, jerky ride for them, a minor accident (jerking a coupling so hard it snaps, tearing the train into two separate parts), or a major accident (the opposite: running the wagons of the train together so hard some of them derail).
Casualty Rate
Fatigue & Physical Strain
Supply Status
Command Proximity
Officer Quality & Presence
Unit Experience & Drill
Communication Integrity
Tactical Threat Angle
Suppression & Fire Volume
Shock & Surprise
Cascading Morale
Terrain Friction
Visibility & Weather
Defensive Cover
Any other suggestion for elements affecting cohesion? I’m thinking of wargame formulas to calculate its coefficient.
One that’s been noted in some previous articles is (percieved) relative strength of the opposition, with hoplites sometimes routing before contact when they saw Spartans coming, or mistaking a small detachment for an entire additional enemy army. I imagine if your average peasant levy sees incoming knights in full armor they’re not gonna stick around long enough to take a lance charge.
Your comment right at the end – that soldier cohesion could cut against you in a mutiny – makes me wonder if the failure to inculcate that cohesion in peacetime wasn’t an oversight. Perhaps the Big Man had deliberately chosen a policy stance, and then it bit him in the butt. He might have wanted to “calibrate” peasant cohesion; not too little or you get lawlessness, not too much or you get revolution. Both bad outcomes for the Big Man! But the calibration that worked in peacetime may not have worked on the battlefield, and he may not have had the time or the foresight to readjust.
Sort of like how Putin has spent decades “depoliticizing” the Russian populace and then seemed shocked when that “depoliticized” populace kept sweeping the streets instead of rising up against the Wagner mutiny.
I would doubt it’s down to deliberate social engineering in pre-modern times. People did not think of societies as malleable and such a way and did not have the means of monitoring or enacting such a change. However, I can agree that it does seems to be somewhat of an “equilibrium state” in societies with high social stratification, where revolt was close to the only way a peasant’s voice could be heard in the political process.
We see such a philosophical framework emerge in the European middle ages, which roughly classed people as “those who fight”, “those who pray” and “those who farm”, but also in India with the varna caste system, which is pretty close to the same, with the Kshatriya (warrior aristocrats), Brahmin (priests), Vaishya (merchants, craftsmen and farmers) and Shudra (labourers).
Interestingly, the Chinese Four Occupations system appears to have historically started pretty similar, but with state formation, the aristocrat class lost its association with warfare, which resulted in soldiers being left out or considered the lowest of the low, even below the merchant. Something which would of course end up biting the Song dynasty into the butt.
In the 19th century the Brahmins might have placed themselves on top deliberately.
In the 19th century the Brahmins might have placed themselves on top deliberately.
Caste is a lot more complicated than varna, in ways we don’t need to get into rn, but this isn’t even close to correct. The varna system reflects social hierarchies that are about 2000 years old (and that dates back in part, though with somewhat more flexiblility, to the Indo-European migrations maybe 1500 years before that). Nothing 19th c about it. (There are other unfortunate aspects of South Asian society that did get more crystallized in the 19th c, I believe sexism/misogyny may have hardened around that time, but the varna structure isn’t really one of them).
Brahmin-class scholars were formulating the Varna system (and its further divisions into castes) for British colonialists. I am not sure how much influence this had on the later interpretations of it.
Thanks, I was hoping you might have more knowledgeable input here. I recall you mentioned before that the varna system has stopped being societally relevant to the point where most people stopped tracking their family’s status in it. Which of course makes sense under the argument I advance above: It’s useful for lending legitimacy to the societal order in pre-industrial monarchic polities, but a lot less so for post-industrial democratic polities. I also wouldn’t have been very useful in the 19th century, when military/secular power was held by the British who of course were not Kshatriya.
I think present-day India is industrialising rather than post-industrial. Being both racist and classist the British colonialists insisted on registering the indigenous population based on pre-existing social divides. These might not have been quite as sharply delined before that:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734
It’s a quite famous tactic, I think mostly exemplified by Song dynasty. The previous dynasty Tang had very effective military but is ripped apart by rebellion. In contrast, Song dynasty tried so hard to make their military docile to prevent that, to the point that they can’t even control all of China and instead only half. Then they’re defeated by Mongols, though I’m not sure if a better China could withstand them either.
Please compare a pair of quotes:
“And then on the other hand, that has complex implications for battlefields in which humans generally fight as units rather than as individuals. Not all humans fight this way, I should note: warriors in a ‘first system’ ‘pounce-and-flee’ warfare system – as we see with hunter gatherers or early agriculturalists – often fight in a far more atomized, skirmishing style with no regular formations and no expectation that individuals will hold their ground or cohere under pressure. Instead, warriors in such a system can fall back and regroup relatively freely. ”
“Once again, the normal human response to being in a ‘zone of danger’ is to leave it, so the cohesion response is required to get men to stay in the ‘zone of danger’ – the unit is in the zone, the men have cohered to the unit, so the men remain because the unit remains. Now, absolutely there are a small number of people in any group who have the right psychological mixture to do these things alone, but armies cannot be built out of a tiny handful of saints and sociopaths, they must be built out of regular men.”
Plainly contradictory statements.
The savage warriors are not a tiny handful of saints and sociopaths. They must be regular men.
How do leaders of skirmisher armies get their men to advance into danger, and return to fight after flight?
Also you must surely have armies which have some cohesive units and where the majority is noncohesive skirmishers like native allies. What are the advantages of cohesive units against skirmishers? Especially when they don´t have superior arms?
There is no contradiction there as such – a skirmishing fighting style is not based on being in the ‘zone of danger’ for any length of time. The general human fighting instinct (and frankly most animal fighting instincts) are based on exploiting vulnerability. You attempt to create a situation in which the opponent is vulnerable and unable to attack, and *then* you attack, followed by immediately jumping back out of danger. First system fighting is basically the same thing scaled up to the entire society/army.
However, at this larger scale, the important motivator shifts from cohesion to cause. A skirmisher decides to try and fight because they believe in the purpose of the fight, and they turn back around after scattering as long as the purpose of the fight is not lost.
The advantage of cohesive units over skirmishers is operational and strategic more than tactical. On a tactical level, the whole thing can appear like a stalemate – the skirmishers are unable to stand up to the advancing formation, but the formation can’t actually force the skirmishers into a fight without breaking and thus losing the advantage. But when you zoom out, the issue is that the skirmisher, by constantly advancing and retreating, keeps giving ground to a slowly advancing formation. So eventually, the formation will reach the skirmisher’s camp and take their stuff. Which is how on a strategic level warfare between first and second system armies played out – the battles were indecisive or might have as many skirmisher victories as losses. But the second system, agricultural army slowly gained ground, because they could set down forts and outposts that the skirmishers could not reliably dislodge. So the skirmisher side ended up getting pushed more and more out of the contested land, even if they managed to give as good as they got during battles.
“First system” warfare is covered in more detail in
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/
The first system skirmishers still have morale and cohesion like other humans, they’re members of a family and a tribe. The “pounce and flee” style warfare encourages combat where one group outnumbers the other and catches them by surprise, high morale for the first group, very poor morale for the second. And if the combat isn’t going well, individuals from either side can easily retreat and the numbers on both sides are so small that doing so is relatively risk free.
I think there’s also something to be said for the cohesion (insofar as that’s what we call the willingness to keep trying to move in range) to the social prestige attached to actually being successful in that endeavour. Counting coup, and all. Cohesion in non-professional armies arguably rests a lot on what maintains social standing; for the Greek hoplite that’s standing firm in the face of pressure exerted by another line, for the skirmisher that’s managing to get close enough to make a touch. If your society ostracizes you from failure or unwillingness to do so, where can you fall back to?
I suspect that the psychological mechanisms change in very small scale engagements. If you are facing a large group of enemies standing in formation, any fight or flight response will be flight, but if there is only one enemy close enough to threaten you, fight or flight instincts may well pull you in the fight direction.
But I still think cohesion as described here plays a large role. A tribal warrior in a first system skirmish is still within sight of the members of his village or band, and will feel the same pressure to not let them down, as if they were in a shieldwall.
I guess I am basically trying to say if you want your men to advance into contact with a close order body of enemies, they need to be in close order too, but one loose group of skirmishers can psyche themselves up to approach another, without having to huddle together.
I mean, if you look at the quotes you’ve picked out, he does already say that in skirmishing warfare you already have the freedom to just run when you’re in danger and come back at a different time or from another angle. From what he’s written elsewhere about first system warfare, it’s more about ambushes and raids than an actual battle.
It’s one thing to attack an unaware enemy, knowing you and your mates are prepared to run if the situation stops being overwhelmingly in your favour. It’s another entirely to march through arrows to get to the pikes that want to kill you in the face, and then stand there on the front lines for like twenty minutes being stabbed at.
A good illustration is to watch any large scale police action during a riot, particularly in england (the lack of tear gas/rubber bullets both make the difference clearer and make it literally easier to see into the bargain). The police will move as a coherent unit, sticking together in formation to provide them shelter from a larger, often slightly more dangerously armed (the police rarely bring their own petrol bombs), crowd. Rioters do not, as a rule, cohere that much, so rioters will come out of the generally larger body of rioters individually or in small groups, throw things at the ‘wall’ of riot police, then run back out of the way, particularly in the face of water cannon. Which, remember, fire water – enough to knock over some, but not all, individual rioters, but hardly bowling over the crowd en masse. Generally the police can, and often do, advance under these conditions, despite being vastly outnumbered, and again, probably outgunned in the moment (you generally do not send armed police to riots unless you are a repressive regime, as it goes wrong very quickly. I guess for americans, you might need to actively disarm your police for riot duty so they have the free hands to hold the baton and shield).
In essence, doing violence doesn’t require you to cohere, which is why people get beat up in fights outside nightclubs, but having a coherent unit gives you a decided advantage over an incoherent one. Part of this is humans are specifically wired to throw things from a distance as a hunting strategy, so it’s what actually comes naturally; we’re unusually good at actually hitting targets with thrown objects for an ape. In fact, no matter how many jokes people make about chimps throwing poop, you or i would probably beat them 9-times out of ten if we were lobbing our faeces at a marked target.
Throwing things was used as defence against predators before being used for hunting. Chimps throw rocks and sticks as weapons, not their own poo.
The answer for pure skirmishers is that their leaders pretty much don’t. Men will briefly screw up their courage to advance slightly, throw a single missile, and retreat, and there’s a documentary video of such a battle in modern times (it’s been linked here before but I can’t remember where) in which the combatants mostly hang out outside of range behind shields and there’s very little activity with only a handful of spears being chucked at a time.
The main advantage of cohesive units in pre-modern times is that if they get into close quarters with a loose force of skirmishers the skirmishers are totally screwed. The skirmisher’s lack of cohesion means that they won’t hold a coherent line and thus when the cohesive unit’s front line runs into them there’s often two guys both engaging one skirmisher, and you need an absolutely massive skill differential to have any hope of winning two against one. And until a good bit into the gunpowder era (American Civil War if not later) it wasn’t generally possible to lay down enough fire to stop a determined enemy force from closing while remaining combat effective.
In modern times, skirmishing can be pretty effective, but there’s a lot of very effective tactics that require the entire squad to act simultaneously, if not necessarily in close proximity, rather than individually as they work up the nerve. E.g. half the squad fires into the windows to suppress the defenders of a house while the other half sprints across the yard to blast a hole and get to grips with the defenders.
One big point is that “danger” is not a binary state. Rather it is a continuum, from “entirely safe” a mile away, to “likely to be stabbed within the next second” when standing directly next to an armed opponent.
Moving up the gradient of danger takes bravery and motivation, and staying up that gradient takes increasing levels of bravery and motivation and cohesion the longer you want to stay there, but it’s by no means impossible for someone to dash in quickly, take a potshot and dash away again. Writ large, what this looks like are two ‘clouds’ or ‘mobs’ of skirmishing fighters, broadly hanging out far enough away they’re mostly safe, and lunging forward singularly or in small groups to deliver attacks and then backing off immediately.
What formed cohesive units give you over skirmishers is the ability to take ground. If one side has a body of troops willing to push forward into a situation of increased danger _and stay there_, while the other only has a skirmishing cloud like this, then the formed unit can really go where it will. It can push forward, and the only response the skirmishers will have (should their missiles be insufficient to drive the formed unit off) is to fall back and cede ground.
Conversely, the advantage for the skirmishers is that it’s very hard for the formed troops to actually get to grips with them, although without their own shock troops it’s definitely possible for opportunistic charges to really make a mess of those who get in too close. Traditionally this is one of the key roles of cavalry – even without being able to break formed troops by themselves, they can keep them pinned in formation and allow skirmishers to operate closer with more safety.
“How do leaders of skirmisher armies get their men to advance into danger, and return to fight after flight?”
What you have to remember is that there’s a huge difference between hit-and-run tactics (skirmishing) and routes. Running away isn’t necessarily bad–a lot of military tactics relied on avoiding the enemy. A group out scouting, or foraging, or the like isn’t expected to take on a well-ordered enemy troop of greater size, for example; their duty would be to fall back and report.
Retreating, falling back, hiding–these things done as part of an established plan do not wear on morale. Or at least don’t necessarily wear on it, and don’t wear as much as a route. That’s because they’re pre-planned, expected actions taken deliberately and in a controlled manner. The plan working as intended usually has a net positive effect on the people involved!
In contrast, a route is the shattering of morale. It’s the result of the person no longer having the will to stand and fight. The action may seem similar, but the psychological result would be far different. It’s NOT the plan–it is, in fact, the complete abdication of the plan in blind terror.
Objectives also matter. If you’re fighting to drive the enemy off fertile land you want, you can be routed a few times and as long as you’re alive it’s fine. You’d be astonished how fast a close call can become a funny story–I watched a particularly nasty injury I’d received go from “cause of concern and horror” to “amusing story to tell people” before the x-rays had developed. Not everyone will go out and do another raid, and everyone has limits, but if you have a culture that treats such events as funny anecdotes and not horrors it does help. And knowing that you running away this time is 1) not a social death sentence and 2) not catastrophic to your objectives also helps.
This works in modern combat as well. If my objective is to harass your supply lines so as to pull troops and material from the front lines, I don’t actually have to win that fight to accomplish it. I just need YOU to be worried enough about next time to dedicate resources to it. Ukraine doesn’t have to kill every supply convoy, they just have to damage enough of them that Russia knows withdrawing armed support from supply convoys would result in catastrophic losses. Makes for good asymmetric warfare.
The other ways you get skirmishers to go into danger is to minimize the danger to them, or make the danger worth it. You do the former via planning and formations–you use them to hit the enemy where the enemy can’t hit back, such as supply lines, communications lines, poorly-defended flanks, etc. Skirmishers are light troops and can’t take a lot of abuse, so you put them in places where they don’t take a lot of abuse. As for the second, you make sure they understand that if they ARE in an area taking abuse, it’s not just to die. They’re there to do X, Y, and X, which is part of the Grand Master Plan. Charisma, authority, and trust all come into play here, and there are examples of commanders unable to pull this off.
It’s also worth noting that someone who’s fled in terror once may not do so a second time. This isn’t a binary thing; there are countless stories of troops getting routed, only to rally behind the banner of some lord, form up, and charge again. So it’s not like getting routed means that soldier is no longer of any value, which is an unstated premise of your argument. Someone who’s run from the fight once may well stand and fight next time. (Modern weapons and tactics make this significantly less likely as I understand it; it was far more common in the Middle Ages and prior.)
A legendary example in the Low Countries of a battle determined by a profound misunderstanding of cohesive principles is Battle of the Golden Spurs, 1302. A French royal army attacked an approximately equal number of Flemish city militia in a strong position. The French had huge cavalry superiority and at the height of the battle charged , expecting to scatter the Flemings, whonwere after all not in the warriorclass. But these had been raised under the militia guild system mentioned in the article and did not break at all, which led to the French being badly mauled
The description of the Huscarls last stand seems in need of a small correction. It probably shouldn’t say “arrow volleys”, unless where were a lot more really we’ll trained crossbowman at Hastings than I recall. I’d suggest “hail or rain of arrows” instead.
What about outside pressure to maintain cohesion? The Ten Thousand were surrounded by hostile people on all sides – deserting wasn’t really an option. Is this something that matters?
Sun Tzu would agree that it’s important, to the point of both insisting a general should always leave an enemy army a way to retreat, and, when possible, to actually cut off the possibility of retreat for the own army. I’m not sure if more recent military theorists have a different opinion on it.
Sometimes, but there are plenty of armies that disintegrated and were slaughtered in similar situations. The British Army’s retreat from Kabul in 1842 is one of the more dramatic examples.
Afghanistan is a nightmare of a country to invade.
Nah, people do it all the time. It helps there is often no unified defense.
Holding it is a different matter.
Retreating from it is still another problem – ask the Russians, and most recently the US. Even when there was a cease-fire and an agreement.
“And he that hath no stomach for this fight/ Let him depart; his passport shall be made/And crowns for convoy put into his purse” , Henry V says; I’ve always thought this is black humour because they are, at this moment, as the play makes clear, entirely surrounded by hostile French, and anyone taking up the offer wouldn’t last long.
It’s something of an edge case (the Ten Thousand had little in the way of strategic or operational goals beyond survival and reaching friendly territory), but desertion is a question of morale — being invested in the strategic goal — rather than cohesion.
The key to cohesion is than no matter how disastrous it would be to break, formations break anyway. For example, it is not an infrequent occurrence that an army or a part of an army routs into a swamp or a lake, where they take far worse casualties from drowning than they ever would take from fighting an enemy.
Adding another possible typo:
“On the one hand, cohesion is one of those ‘harder said than done’ principles. When a group of any animals is subjected to peril, the instinct is to flee and for humans, who are not herd animals, the instinct is to scatter, to flee individually.”
Should that be ‘easier said than done’?
While using Morale and Cohesion as distinct things, I do think there’s some degree of overlap: Larger ideological structures, religious communities, etc. can certainly help form bonds. A group of people who all joined up to fight for God, or the Fatherland or Communism etc. might not instantly have those bonds but they are likely to develop them faster.
Similarily loyalty to a leader can help form cohesion as well, people will start to think of themselves as “Caesar’s boys” or whatever.
And as you mentioned, simply living the army life, going through the struggles of military life (even without explicit drill) can build cohesion “naturally”. The trick of course is to not have that cohesion be degraded during this process. (by casualties, etc.)
There is, but remember that for the vast majority of history, military units weren’t permanent. long-service troops will tend to build cohesion “naturally”, but for the majority of history, soldiers weren’t long-service. Meaning “natural” cohesion needs to be rebuilt regularly when you needed to raise a new army.
Correct. Which you can often see: You have a warlike king (or king who just have to fight a lot of wars) whose army seems to build up a lot of cohesion, then a period of peace and the next time the army doesen’t perform nearly as well. (because the cohesion it built up through fighting for a few decades has been lost and there’s no institution to retain/recreate it in peacetime)
This is only true if you define “bandit” out of the meaning of “soldier.” For possibly all of human existence there have been at least small bands of people who were forced out of any opportunity for subsistence other than direct violence against other humans, and the features of cohesion and leadership do apply to such groups.
I’m going to note that Sun Tzu Art of War, by noting factors to increase cohesion (and how to quantify it) such as putting soldiers in deadly ground, observing how they hold their spears and how to exploit it.
The common English translation is will and morale for your morale and cohesion respectively though.
I’m immediately reminded of the Trollocs from Wheel of Time, who are noted for being big, strong killers but *abominable* soldiers. They don’t keep formation, run when actually endangered by cohesive opposition, split up to pillage and plunder, and clearly hate everyone else they’re forced to serve with. Fittingly, while they’re scary to small unarmed groups, they’re pathetic in open battle against orderly, disciplined soldiery. They have no cohesion at all because The Shadow doesn’t care to give them any reason to fight besides joy of slaughter.
The only way to get Trollocs to stick together and actually do their jobs is have them supernaturally enchanted by Myrddraal, Wheel of Time’s ringwraith-alikes. We never learn what makes *Myrddraal* such enthusiastic officers, but their comparative rarity, better equipment, and explicit supernatural powers might make them a sort of Military Aristocracy sort, bound to the cause (of pure existential evil) by being the “elite” and thus taking pride in their work.
But the forces of evil rely on “fear and promises of power” as motivating forces, which are noted even in-universe to be poor sources of true loyalty. Many of the heroes’ victories came from the bad guys backstabbing one another when they really ought have been working together.
Of course we’re talking about barely-ensouled monsters empowered by the sapient manifestation of the very concept of evil, hatred, malice, and destruction. For all that Robert Jordan was a Vietnam veteran and knew his military science, we might not want to read *too* deeply into his disposable bad guys; he explores quite a few other groups of soldiery throughout Wheel of Time, from the tribal Aiel (small group cohesion) to the elite Queen’s Guards of Andor (corporate cohesion as members of a highly select military unit).
The Dark One being bad at understanding cohesion is actually key to the ending; at the Last Battle the armies of the Light are in a pretty bad way against overwhelming hordes of Trollocs and the disciplined Sharans (though the Sharans were never too sure about being here and now that their messianic figure and third-greatest general of all time is dead they’re definitely not in a mood to stick around) but between their various sources of cohesion and the fact that they’re well aware that this is the end of the world the forces of the Light aren’t breaking, and the Dark One cannot comprehend how they’re doing it. And he’d been in a philosophical debate/comparison of possible future worlds with Rand, and the Dark One’s breakdown gives Rand the necessary emotional boost to pick sealing away the Dark One.
Also, the most cohesive unit in the setting is probably the Band of the Red Hand, which I think is mostly from drill and a (newly formed) tradition of victory, followed by the Ever Victorious Army, which is also mostly drill and tradition of victory (hence the name). The Ever Victorious Army puts on a pretty good show against the Heroes of the Horn and is quite willing to stick it out against constant teleport strikes from Rand’s forces during their campaign for Illian, only retreating after Rand unleashes Callandor and brings down countless lightning bolts at once, and even that’s under orders.
You talk about how armies that have been in the field a long time can have improved cohesion. Are we sure that this is a form of cohesion at all? These guys have been in battle a few times and survived each time. So it must be that their emotional response to battle is now lessened to some extent. So they will need a stronger stimulus to cause them to flee. It will appear as though they have better cohesion when they’re really just less scared.
There’s a degree of that, but if you take a bunch of these troops and reorganize them so they’re fighting alongside men they aren’t familiar with cohesion tends to suffer pretty badly until they’ve drilled together for a few months, hence armies tending to avoid doing that until casualties force them, and then they try to pull the unit off the line for training if possible.
Raw recruits going through boot camp and specialty school create “green” troops. Additional training will not produce “professional soldiers”. Professionals are 1) “blooded” (killed an enemy combatant) and 2) have survived against actual enemies who were trying to kill them. This is the source of their cohesion. Some individuals cannot cope with 1) and/or 2). Having an exam, or using a simulator might hint at a persons metal state, but actual combat is the only valid test.
A professional army requires a payment of both blood and treasure.
I don’t think the definition of “you can’t be a professional soldier until you’ve survived attempts to kill you and also personally killed an enemy” is actually true. “Professional” is a statement about organization, institutions, and the soldier’s identity and vocation. You seem to be trying to take something we already have a word for (“veteran”) and assert that the name for that thing is “professional.” Though it is not generally agreed that even the term “veteran” refers only to people who have specifically killed someone.
I’m not sure what underlying theory of warfare informs the way you’re defining these categories but I’d be curious to know.
I seem to recall a US Civil War phrase – “Seeing the Elephant’ which is analogous to having been on a battlefield. You were in danger, you probably saw dead and wounded soldiers (along with huge clouds of white powder smoke), and you may have fired shots in the general direction of other humans (see ‘powder smoke’).
That’s an important dividing line from ‘marched and did drill’.
“Though it is not generally agreed that even the term “veteran” refers only to people who have specifically killed someone.”
Legally you have to be in a branch of the Armed Services for 24 consecutive months and be discharged other than Dishonorably.
In every-day speech the term is less precise (it’s English, a language of allusion, inuendo, and metaphor). I think most people assume anyone calling themselves or someone else a veteran has seen combat, and they assume anyone in combat has killed. I’ve heard “combat vet” used to differentiate between those who’ve seen active combat and those who don’t, often treating those who have seen combat as superior. That said, I’m NOT telling my buddy, a mechanic in the military, that he’s not a veteran; he and I have sparred, and I’m out of shape and out of practice, and having your head slammed into a car hood is an experience I’ll gladly limit to a one-time thing.
There’s also the question of what qualifies as combat these days. Back before Putin went bonkers a big part of the military’s job was looking impressive. Countries would perform maneuvers or play war games or test weapons with the goal of keeping the enemy from attacking certain things–the idea being, the enemy could see that we were primed and ready for a fight, making the odds less favorable for the enemy. (I’m not discounting proxy wars by any means!) The idea was that by flexing our military muscles we made large-scale conflict too costly to occur. The boys testing the nukes did as much for international politics as the boys doing the shooting at times, and sailors passing by ports often were just as effective by merely existing as they would have been had they fired. Not sure where to put them with regards to veteran vs combat vet vs something else.
Which just goes back to something I always say: Labels are dangerous. They assume hard barriers between bins, when in fact most of the time the edge cases are as numerous as the “normal” ones!
Then we need a separate mental category for the edge cases.
I’m immovably skeptical of any definition of “professional soldier” that excludes the protagonist of Jarhead (yes, including the Marines’ definition).
“Additional training will not produce “professional soldiers”. Professionals are 1) “blooded” (killed an enemy combatant) and 2) have survived against actual enemies who were trying to kill them.”
No, not at all, not in any era. Well, maybe First Systems Warfare, but not in any others.
In modern warfare a LOT of soldiering is done on the “tail” side of things. Logistics win wars, and this means a lot of soldiers are moving stuff, storing stuff, maintaining stuff, and loading/offloading stuff. Their cohesion doesn’t come from shared blood-lust but rather from discipline instilled during Basic. And let’s be clear, this doesn’t mean these are cushy jobs! They are every bit as vital as the guys doing the shooting–without them there can be no shooting–and the risks are very real. Go ahead and tell those soldiers that they’re not professionals. See how that goes for you.
Then there are the suite of tasks that generally don’t require killing or being shot at, such as guard duty–Marines at embassies, things like that. If they get shot at something has gone rather horrifically wrong. But you go ahead and tell those embassy guards they’re not professional soldiers. I’m sure they could use the entertainment, and the medics could use the practice.
In the past, when men lined up to stab each other with spears, a lot of war was about denying the enemy territory. It was moving around and existing within the space. You could be a professional–as in, your job was to be a soldier–and rarely if ever see combat. This is even more true with sailing warships. You could go most of your career without seeing combat, because you were on blockade duty, or convoy duty, or some other duty that kept you away from the enemy. Even the ones who saw combat saw very, very little of it–minutes of battle for each month at sea was a huge ratio. Telling someone who’s been at sea for over a decade on warships that they’re not a professional would not end well for you.
To insist that the only real professional soldiers are those who kill is to downplay the very thing that makes modern US and NATO-style militaries effective. It is, to be blunt, a child’s view of war. I can see some front-line grunts holding this view, but I would expect any NCO, and absolutely any officer, to know better. Further, to put blood-lust at the top of the list of things soldiers need is dangerous in the nuclear era. Nuclear weapons and MAD have made outright attack dangerous in many areas, because the upper limit of escalation is the elimination of civilization as such. This means a LOT of soldiers since WWII have spent their careers doing drills, maneuvers, and war games, not because they’re not professionals, but because those were the most effective use of their time. These games and maneuvers and drills were constructed to let the enemy know our capabilities so that the enemy didn’t engage in open warfare against us (proxy wars, of course, did occur).
The information age makes this worse for your argument. Command and control, and intel gathering, have always been part of warfare, but these days they are a front in and of themselves. Cyberattacks can cripple a city just as effectively as a bomb. Satellite access can make or break front lines. You may never shoot anyone or be shot at, but I’d argue defending critical infrastructure is a reasonably good role for military personnel.
For my part, I’m perfectly comfortable calling anyone who’s making a career in the armed forces a professional soldier. We can debate whether they are effective, and whether they could be better used somewhere else, but
I agree with you that the “kill or be killed” mentality would be counterproductive in modern wars. To me a professional soldier is someone who is both employed by a defence force and has had some minimum of training in using modern weapons. So the person can in practice use them if needed.
In most modern wars, the number of combatants killed is smaller than the total number of combatants. This means that as a matter of basic mathematics, on average, each individual combatant in any given war killed less than one combatant. Which, in turn, means that the group of all combatants contains a certain number of people who never killed a combatants. Which means that under your logic, they are not professional soldiers.
Besides, every soldier has a *first* encounter with the enemy, so, under your logic, where do green soldiers get the necessary cohesion to keep them from running away in their first encounter with the enemy from?
Some animal species crowd together when threatened. These are the ones which can be herded with a smaller fraction being subsequently domesticated:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Only-some-animals-are-suitable-for-domestication#wbb1
“When a group of any animals is subjected to peril, the instinct is to flee and for humans, who are not herd animals, the instinct is to scatter, to flee individually. The goal of cohesion is instead to have individuals respond to peril by seeking the safety of the group rather than the safety of individual flight, so that intense fear causes the group to solidify rather than disperse.”
I don’t get this. It is certainly the first time I have heard it asserted that the instinct is to flee individually. Generally, it is said that humans in peril tend to keep together, because no one wants to risk encountering the threat on his own. People running from fires and collapsing buildings tend to stay together, to the extent this is compatible with running away from the danger.
Conversely, the fact that herd animals tend to stay together in no way causes them to stand their ground against the threat. Quite the reverse. For animals on the threatened side of the herd, running towards the centre of the herd requires running in the same direction as running away from the threat – the two instincts are pushing in the same direction. That is absolutely not what we want for an effective army. What we need for an effective army is for people to move to the assistance of a threatened comrade, which requires them to move *towards* the threat.
What we need is loyalty, if not to the cause of the army, at least to their comrades and immediate leaders. Otherwise, there would be no reason to follow a leader or comrade if he leaves the safety of the group to head towards the enemy.
Are people who run effectively away from fires and collapsing buildings doing so in a sense of blind panic, or are they following established procedures that have helpful diagrams and probably the odd practice run to keep them calm and focused?
All comments on how humans act in a state of rout need to be kept in the frame of “there is ample evidence that this is a state of mind where people utterly lose any state of rational thinking”.
The thing to compare it to is less well-practiced forms of retreat from danger, such as crushes. I don’t think they hold up as examples of effective coordination in fleeing; people who can’t keep up get trampled to death.
Given that someone is irrational, I do not see why that irrationality should make them more likely to run from their friends than towards their enemies. Or do a handstand.
Encouraging everyone in the unit to see each other as closer friends will encourage them to stay together only if they already have a tendency to stay with their friends – which sounds both perfectly natural and the opposite of what the above quote asserts.
I want some evidence that people tend to avoid their friends and allies during times of danger. A crush is the exact opposite of that. A crush might be evidence of people heading towards each other – it can hardly be evidence of their heading away from each other.
And as I said, encouraging people to be friendly towards each other can encourage them to stay together only if they already have a tendency to stay with their friends.
It is evidence of them not moving in a manner coordinated as a group or with regards to the presence of other people. Running somebody down and stepping across their prone body in desperation to be away is a fucked up way to regard “moving towards people”.
One thing important to remember is how crushes form. Most of the time they form because of restrictions to mobility.
Basically what happens is that crushes (or scrums or whatever) form when you have too many people trying to move through an area that was designed to move a lot fewer. Like a movie theater that’s generally okay with people trickling in, but can’t handle a packed house all trying to get out at once. City streets can do the same thing if there are enough people. This is, fundamentally, what a traffic jam is: Too many cars, not enough capacity.
There’s a whole field of study related to this, as it’s a HUGE problem in designing buildings to be safe. It’s why you have fire doors that push open from the inside, for example–generally you don’t need that much capacity to move people, but when you do you need it five minutes ago and having doors that naturally open when people press into them gives you an automatic way to add a lot of capacity very quickly without anyone thinking about it. This is one of those building codes written in blood; we went through a number of disasters before someone decided to stop killing low-wage workers and dancers. If you want to know why I get fired up, there’s your answer: It’s a well-studied problem with a known solution and failure to implement basic, well-established protocols and technologies ALWAYS spills innocent blood among the most vulnerable populations.
Anyway….
You generally don’t have that in battlefields. There exceptions–sieges are full of them, and Agencourts terrain turned it into one–but largely you’re talking wide open fields. You need that to allow your troops to maneuver. Any choak point you’re not intentionally creating is an area where your men will be killed by accident. I still contend that Bret rather seriously under-estimates how tight a truly tight formation can get, but even if you’re shoulder to shoulder you’re not “actually crushing each other to death” close unless, again, you’re in a choak point.
In the case of natural disaster (fire, volcanic eruption, earthquake, flooding) only 10% panic:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150128-how-to-survive-a-disaster
The ideas that most people would panic in such a situation could be an over-generalisation from being threatened with weapons.
Loyalty to comrades and immediate leaders is one of the things covered by cohesion I believe. Loyalty is merely another bond that binds the soldiers to the group.
As for fleeing individually, my thinking is that the intense fear affects the men at the back of the formation first who then abandon their positions and leave their fellows behind to be slain so then they may live, which causes the cascading effect which collapses the army as people run and the new people at the back start running.
One thing I tried to factor into my own attempts at wargame design is that men in heavy armor should get a morale bonus, because they know they can survive blows that would kill or severely injure unarmored or lightly armored men. Also, they know they won’t be able to flee as fast if the battle turns against them, so it’s better to stick it out. There’s a battle scene in a DeCamp fantasy novel where a mercenary contingent forms square while the city levies break up up around them and flee; the mercs simply march off the field, and the enemy decides to attack the defenseless (and delicious) militia instead.
T E Lawrence saw something like this – as Ottoman troops fled in disorder in 1918 as the front collapsed an Austrian and German contingent formed up and marched away steadily.
This assumes the men in heavy armor have enough practice with it for it to actually be a plus. Yes, you can do a lot more than most people think in heavy armor (it helps a lot for it to be properly fitted), but there is a learned skill to moving in it.
Even learning where you’re blind and learning to move your head around to cover those spots (and when that’s not a good idea) is something to be learned.
“Form square” is very powerful defensively. But it assumes that people know how to form square while being pressured, and not getting in each others way. Especially if you have polearms. Marching backward while holding weapons at the ready isn’t something you do with ten minutes practice.
Otherwise it’s probably worse than just fleeing while splitting up, at least that way the enemy also has to split up to chase you.
The militia probably don’t have any loot, while the mercenaries have at least their armor. But the mercenaries visibly haven’t broken.
I’m not sure which novel that is. Lest Darkness Fall I think had a similar scene, but it’s alternate history. And no one in that novel would have considered humans delicious.
The book is ‘The Fallible Fiend” in DeCamp’s Novaria series, and the enemy army considered it sacrilege not to eat what you killed.
I’ve been in SCA battles in what I would call medium armor – 30 or so pounds of handmade butted mail – and never developed the stamina to do more than jog for less than a mile in the stuff, with no shield. Better to link up with your mates and walk out.
I think it’s The Clocks of Iraz, the second book in The Reluctant King series. The Novarian contingent leave the siege in good order.
That’s likely about as heavy as infantry armor gets. You hear about heavier armor, but that’s pretty strictly cavalry stuff. And most of the stuff we can weigh that weighs that much is *tournament* armor, not stuff you would wear on a battlefield.
Current US armor level IV is 35-40 pounds. The only stuff heavier is bomb disposal, and they don’t move much in it.
It’s an idea which shows up historically as well. Retreating with any sort of semblance of good order and formation is quite a bit safer – yes, you might lose a few individuals being picked off as you go, but unless the enemy can redouble and break your unit specifically you’re probably going to get off safe.
(Also, helmets don’t make that much of a difference – remember that most helmet designs are open, precisely because vision is so useful)
Helmets make a huge difference, to the point where the first armor people got was a helmet of some sort, and then something for the chest.
Admittedly it would be a fairly limited helmet, but an “armored hat” is about the most common item.
Probably because if you get smacked on the head you’re either dead or out of the fight.
You are correct though that facial armor is a lot lower on the priority list. Probably because of the difficulty and expense in doing it well, the limits it places on vision and hearing, the extra heat retention, and frankly the limited cases where people get hit in the face. You have a reflex to protect it with your arms and what’s in them, and blows are pretty easy to see coming.
Yes, I specifically mean “they don’t make much of a difference to hearing and vision”, with the exception of specific designs with substantial facial protection.
“This assumes the men in heavy armor have enough practice with it for it to actually be a plus.”
For the most part the people in heavy armor are the warrior-elite who’s jobs are 1) fighting, and 2) managing their territory. It’s safe to assume anyone in heavy armor is reasonably well-trained in it. You don’t get the armor until you’ve had the training. That said, what constitutes heavy armor is going to be variable between cultures and times.
Like Bryan Haught, I’ve fought in medium armor (home-made butted maille). I was okay with it–never been a runner, but I can hike for days and could wear the armor all day long. I even danced in it on a regular basis (the ladies of the Shire would ask fighters to dance while we took a water break, and it was generally considered very rude, as well as really stupid, for a guy to say no). The knights and other good fighters I know didn’t really consider their armor an encumbrance. Proper fitting, as you said, makes a huge difference.
“Marching backward while holding weapons at the ready isn’t something you do with ten minutes practice.”
No, but you’d be amazed what spending 15-20 minutes a week practicing can do. The unit I fought in with the SCA was notorious for cohesion and being able to pull off some complex maneuvers, and that’s all it took: Cohesion from being friends outside the shield wall, and consistent practice. A standing militia for a town could reasonably be expected to perform basic maneuvers without cutting their own ears off.
This training is the sort of thing you can do on a march, or while waiting for the enemy to arrive, or during a siege. Not ideal, of course–you want to have this prepared before you need it–but if you don’t have it you can get a little training in, which is better than nothing.
“Otherwise it’s probably worse than just fleeing while splitting up, at least that way the enemy also has to split up to chase you.”
I doubt that’s true. We can assume the enemy is competent, and “chase down the routed enemy” is pretty standard military practice. Putting yourself into a situation that the enemy has specific plans and doctrines for is generally a bad idea. A poor defensive position is probably going to be slightly better than playing into the enemy’s hands (to be clear, we’re talking a few percent difference, not great odds either way). Plus a poor defensive position gives you the chance to surrender–the enemy has to at least take a little time before stabbing you, and that could give your commander enough time to shout they want to talk terms or wave a white flag or something. You don’t really have that when you scatter. The enemy cuts you down individually, and unless they recognize you as a VIP they won’t take the time to negotiate before they kill you.
I military context showing a white flag means wanting to talk with the enemy. It does not necessarily means giving up.
FFS @Lena is there some kind of competition to see who can write the largest number of pointless comments that the rest of us don’t know about? Or are you using a chatbot to generate your responses?
I’m using harsh language because this isn’t a one off case, you keep doing this over and over and over again. The blog topic is cohesion, we have comment threads about retreating vs routing and how people behave differently, and you are writing that “Afghanistan is hard to invade” and “white flags don’t always mean surrender”. WTF?
Comments don’t have to be well written, objective, thoroughly researched, provide vital information. I’m fine with irrelevant or off-topic comments as long as they are in some way interesting and/or entertaining and/or thought provoking to read.
And not everyone is perfect all the time either, I know I’ve written short comments that in retrospect were worthless. But this flood, 91 comments on the last blog post about leadership, is just grating.
I don’t use any chatbot but I have got complains on meaningless comments before. A lot of people wrongfully believe a white flag to mean giving up.
I think the problem with that is that the defensive value of heavy armour goes down if your unit disintegrates around you, because even if you initially outnumbered your opponent a group in rout is essentially a bunch of individuals, individuals can be swarmed over from multiple angles, and heavy armour won’t avail you much if you’re dragged to the ground and they can take their time shoving something into the eye holes.
This is notable as a challenge for reviving the historical American militia system, honestly probably the greatest challenge.
The American militia seems to have been pretty ineffective after the Revolutionary War, and meanwhile today the people are *vastly* more deracinated and split into different subcultures, a straightforward approach to organic cohesion (even for a levy that selects for willingness to show up and drill) would seem totally futile.
American militia have always been something of a mixed bag. During the AWI, for every Bennington, there was a Camden, and at Guilford Courthouse, the Virginia militia performed very credibly while the North Carolinians just kind of fell apart.
There’s also an entire complicated series of politics involved, some militia did to well, others didn’t. But there are certain political currents who were heavily invested in the militia system and making it look better. (often kinda t the expense of the Continental Army regulars) for a variety of reasons.
The militia certainly helped, but it was the regular army that won the war.
James Madison actually had something to say about that after the Battle of Bladensburg. Quote: “I could never have believed so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I not witnessed the scenes of this day.”
Bladensburg is a fascinating example of this in action. The militia came apart quickly except for the ones who were supported by Commodore Joshua Barney’s sailors and Marines, who held out against the Brits even after their militia supports eventually broke and ran until their position became untenable–and even then, they still retreated in good order, despite not having been at all trained in land warfare.
(The story goes that when launching a counterattack they cried out “Board ’em, Board ’em!” as they charged.)
Not knowing you neighbours becomes so much more likely when you have to use a car to get anywhere. I can’t help wondering how many percent of the American population lives in such typical car-centred suburbias without any natural meeting points.
This is not how American communities work. We build meeting places–both formal (such as clubs, shared hobbies, religious centers, and the like) and informal (ie, people just hanging out, walking dogs together or the like)–throughout our communities. People in large cities may or may not know their immediate neighbors, but the idea that Americans don’t have community is pure nonsense. We build communities based on shared values, not geography.
One can argue that many groups have INCREASED their sense of cohesion (homosexuals, transgendered people, nerds, minority religions, etc) specifically because ease of transportation and communication have combined to allow us to build communities that don’t consider casual assault and battery against the groups to be a good way to spend a Friday night. Our “neighbor” may be three hours away, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t part of our community.
Please, before you criticize the USA again, PLEASE take the time to actually learn something about our culture. Your shallow, ignorant, prejudiced comments would be considered deeply insulting if directed at any other nation or people, and I think it’s reasonable to expect a similar level of respect be paid to the USA that you’d expect be paid to your culture.
I am sorry for sounding prejudiced. The worst parts of the American people seem especially prominent right now.
When I think about it the Americans appearing particularly prominent right now are not the worst but perhaps the third worst. The worst Americans would be serial killers, serial rapists and career criminals. (Which one of these subgroups is the worst is a matter of debate.) The second worst would be fanatics so hateful it seems only the perceived risk of getting caught prevent them from literarily killing their opponents.
The group seeming especially prominent right now are those basing their arguments on severe misconceptions on the workings of society and the human mind. Such misconceptions are a mix of pre-modern myths, ideas formulated by the 19th century middle class, corruption of ideas through distant rumours and tropes originating within fiction. When people start treating tricks to make storytelling easier as if they corresponded to current reality I can’t help wondering how little face to face interaction they have with others.
One contributing factor could be residential areas being car-centred and lacking obvious third spaces. Anther is being heavily economically exploited. Or being fooled to believe working as much as if you were would make you happy. In both cases people get lonely because they don’t have time or give themselves time to socialise with others. Let us say a non-negligible part of the American population are replacing face to face interactions with smaller amounts of unrealistic fiction and automatically selected content of social media. If so their understanding of other people would actively get worse. Add having no idea of how large various groups are. Then we have individuals treating the most preposterous accusations against others as if they had to be true.
Still awkward in a military crisis that restricts transport.
George Washington didn’t have a great opinion of the American militia system even in the Revolutionary War and made a point of getting someone who could professionally drill them. In particular they were basically incapable of standing up to bayonet charges in an era where they could be delivered reasonably frequently.
I somewhat wonder if, ironically, this translates massively differently to brass-cartridge skirmishing (ironically because the brass-cartridge era aligns with the era when militias seemed to fall completely out of relevance).
One thing I find notable is just how *little* drilling seems to have been done by the militia historically, understandable what with limited surplus capacity. It seems like a *slightly* selective levy in modern times might be able to make the drills rather more drill-ish.
This actually makes Saruman’s stupidity make even more sense. Like those nobles he thought more about his own contribution than about the social structure that would lend his force cohesion, and assumed that the same things he was so proud of about the design of the uruk-hai would lend them confidence, when the truth is that by creating them just in time to send them to war he had created a soldier class with not just no cohesion, but no social bonds of any sort whatsoever, and then sent them to fight a tough foe that would test the cohesion even of a force that had any.
“but of course there is nothing doing about casualties and the need to replace them”
I’m not entirely sure what is meant here (possibly “but of course this does nothing about casualties…”).
“Nothing doing” is an informal idiom. It can be an emphatic way to say “no” in response to a question (at least that’s how I’m familiar with it), but I could also see it in this context as being something like “but of course there is nothing that can be done about casualties and the need to replace them.” (It could also be a typo.)
I do hope our host one day talks about Tyranny, because this is one of my bigger issues with the Scarlet Chorus. An army where murdering your superior is a legitimate way (in fact, the main way) to get promoted is likely not going to be a very cohesive one.
“While the concept of unit cohesion has existed, I’d argue, since antiquity, it really only started receiving really systematic study after the Second World War…”
This frankly astonishes me. The navies of the 1700s/1800s knew this fairly intimately. (I’m mostly familiar with the British Royal Navy, so understand there’s a lot of diversity here.) The ships were a tight-knit community comprised of smaller tight-knit communities: you had the ship itself, then you had watches, gun crews, messes (usually about 8 men who ate together), the officers (divided into the gun room, wardroom, and captain), and various specialized trades (surgeons, gunners, bosons, etc). On a well-run, happy ship these bonds allowed them to operate effectively in situations that can only be described as hellish. The ‘tween decks of a ship-of-the-line was called the Slaughterhouse, which tells you what a ship in action was like.
And this extended off the ship. When sailors went ashore they’d drink, carouse, and fight as a unit–the Victories and the Indies would get a few pints into them and someone would say something stupid and suddenly they’d be fighting, each ship’s men fighting together (and both fighting against the Army). Men also CAME BACK from leave, which is astonishing when you look at the conditions they lived in (14 inches a man to sing a hammock, 4 hours of sleep at a time, etc). It takes a huge amount of cohesion to convince men to return to conditions like that. Some ran, of course, but enough came back to sail and fight the ship!
And they wrote about it. Sailors were loquacious in letters, in no small part because the Admiralty encouraged it. What better way to find out which lieutenants are actually good, and which captains can command loyalty?
“it really only started receiving really systematic study after the Second World War…”
“This frankly astonishes me.”
It’s really not that astonishing when you consider that systematic studies within the “soft” sciences are a relatively recent development, historically speaking, only really *starting* within the past century and a half, and not really coming into any form of maturity until the 1950s–and even then, the methodology was often a bit dodgy, at best.
Agreed in terms of historical timeline. Realistically you can only count psychology as being systematically studied since Sigman Freud, and even there his most significant contribution was providing things to disprove.
I’m not disputing the facts. I’m just really surprised at them.
It astonishes me that we have a tremendous wealth of knowledge–one entire side of what I consider the first global conflict–and we just….sat on it. For a century. And I don’t think we’ve actually mined this trove of information systematically.
This is a rather astonishing example of a situation where we had the data, but we collectively chose not to investigate it. We knew about cohesion, we knew some of the mechanisms by which it worked, we knew what didn’t work, and we had COPIOUS amounts of literature in the form of first-person accounts from both sides of the equation (officers and enlisted), and we…..didn’t do jack.
Steven J. Gould talks about historical contingency–the role of chance in evolution. A similar concept can be applied to research. In order for research to gain momentum there has to be a cultural drive to understand it. Scientists like to think we’re objective and methodical and thorough and investigate everything, but the reality is we’re people swimming in a cultural sea, same as everyone else. It really makes you think. We had, and likely continue to have, a HUGE blind spot with regards to data on a subject that impacts nations at the highest level, and that blind spot has endured for two centuries. What other blind spots do we–do I, as a scientist–have?
“Realistically you can only count psychology as being systematically studied since Sigman Freud”
Not to be confused with Sigmar Freud, legendary founder of the Empire, who famously said “sometimes a warhammer is just a warhammer”.
Many and perhaps most of Sigmund Freud’s ideas were thought out when under the influence of cocaine. I don’t think he realised how mentally abnormal he was.
This does give me the vocabulary to wonder about the effect of some fantasy elements on cohesion.
Constructs, or most forms of undead for example are usually under some sort of magical control by command: morale is not a factor, they will show up to the battlefield no matter what, and cohesion likely doesn’t matter either.
Do wizards have to corral their golems to make sure they stick together? No fear of death and left with some kind of “attack” command and they might not think to stay in formation.
You mention humans, being pack animals, having the instinct to scatter and flee, and while you could probably drill standing and fighting-cohesion into sentient herd animals -say, centaurs or some kind of humanoid bovine – I wonder if the instinct to stick together and stampede might not be even more advantageous.
What happens if you remove fear of death through probably magic means?
With knowledge how it works you can start manipulating parts and see what breaks, this is my favourite series now
So how could these be translated to game? I guess morale is how many troops you can get from manpower (I guess this can raise total damage) and cohesion is total HP (which is also multiplied by raw number of troops of course) that raises logarithmically the longer a unit is together.
Also I don’t understand the “must have bravery culture” requirement of that natural cohesion. I thought regardless of everything, someone will stay if their family is attacked. I guess the real reason why that leader can’t harness village cohesion is that they carelessly mismatched the villagers from several different village or something so they don’t care about each other.
Also this makes me wonder if nobility treats other nobility better not necessarily because they’re snobs or anything (thought they did) but genuinely it’s because they relate better to someone in the same “profession”. I guess smiths have the same kind of elitism with each other.
Also I’m not sure if that “professional” and “small group” cohesion is that different. I guess we can see those Greek mercenaries as Greeks’s “warrior class” as people who can leave their land and fight somewhere else must not be that many. Same with Vikings and Varangians.
“Also I don’t understand the “must have bravery culture” requirement of that natural cohesion.”
The natural cohesion is to your town, village, family, friends, etc. If something was directly, physically threatening those people, you’d stand and fight until your last breath. But standing and fighting on a battlefield hundreds of miles away doesn’t trigger the same idea. In a culture that doesn’t value a specific type of bravery it’s perfectly logical for soldiers to go “Nope, I’m out.”
This isn’t theoretical, it’s had a rather significant influence on tactics in our own country’s history. In the Revolutionary War and Civil War soldiers were called up for specific, relatively short periods of time, and they expected to be allowed to leave when that time was up, regardless of the state of the war. The idea of standing and fighting until the job was done wasn’t part of our culture; men would go and fight, sure, but they would only do so for their contracted period of time. This led to some hasty attacks that realistically should have been put off, because the attack had to happen while there was an army to do the attacking.
A culture that valued bravery–or at least, a certain kind of bravery–would take a very different view. They’d expect the person they sent to war to stick it out to the end, and to stand and fight just like if he were in his home village. Beowulf is an example of this. He and his men are far from home, but they stand and fight because that’s what their culture values and rewards. El Cid is another example. There IS shame in going home before victory here. In Beowulf’s case it’s a very public sort of shame; the drinking and bragging included being called out if you did something cowardly, and you were called out in front of everybody.
“So how could these be translated to game?”
I think hit points would work, with a twist. Once the unit HP reaches 0 the unit breaks and runs. Doesn’t mean that everyone is dead, just that the unit scatters. But if the unit isn’t chased or killed, they will re-form (with lower HP) and rejoin the fight. Remember, it doesn’t take many killed or incapacitated to break a unit, 10% or so will do the trick (culture, training, and other factors will raise or lower this). And different parts of the unit will matter more–the leader (captain or whatever you want to call it) dying would have a much greater effect than a random spearman. So you could have units with 0 HP but still with 90% of their people standing that breaks, but after a minute or two reforms at, say, 3/4 HP.
This would make cavalry and skirmishers more useful. They wouldn’t be there to punch through the troops, but to chase down those broken units and make sure they don’t reform. Heavy cavalry would be useful to knock out those last 3-5 HP and break the front lines.
“The natural cohesion is to your town, village, family, friends, etc. If something was directly, physically threatening those people, you’d stand and fight until your last breath. But standing and fighting on a battlefield hundreds of miles away doesn’t trigger the same idea.”
See, for instance, the famous 1914 Christmas Truce. Apparently, this was mostly a thing between German and British troops fighting it out in France. From their perspective, they had in common with each other that their respective countries’ political leaders had sent them to kill each other in a foreign country some distance from home (by Western European standards). So taking a break in that for a moment seemed like a good idea.
The Truce seems to have been a lot less of a thing in those parts of the Western Front where the Entente side of the trenches was manned by French troops, for whom the whole thing was a lot more like a matter of defending their home against attackers, at least under a very broad understanding of the word “home”.
Morale is more general than that. It refers to confidence and enthusiasm. A unit can think it’s going to lose and keep fighting, or think it’s going to win and he disorganized. A unit can also be winning and not know it’s winning.
In some ways there’s no way to model this in a game. You generally don’t dive into a soldiers brain, and their belief in a future state does not always translate to anything specific. The most “realistic” I’ve seen is increased critical chances, a higher chance to deal extra damage, where a unit that thinks it’s winning and had enthusiasm is modeled as being more decisive in its attacks and more willing to take risks. But this is system dependent.
As for bravery, that’s kinda a translation thing. Bret is short handing bravery for a more generic “feeling of importance”. Bravery itself is often a complex stew of pride, anger, and ambition, after all. The basic thing here is that there’s some shared narrative that the group believes which means the outcome of the battle and of their actions had meaning.
The morale breakdown between nobles and peasants in medieval Europe was comprehensive. The small folk didn’t believe their actions would matter, because they rarely did, that they would be rewarded, because they weren’t, or even that they were really on the same side as their leaders, because their competing leaders would gladly have sided with each other over them. And often did by casually trading ownership of villages as part of peace deals of marriages. Hell, even the church offered no help, as murder was a mortal sin and the clergy often (well, depending on era) largely uninterested in actually helping mere serfs figure out if killing a Christian because their Lord told them too was okay.
So it wasn’t not really bravery, it’s that nothing that happened on that battlefield besides you or a friend dying mattered. So if you ever thought that running was acceptable, or your friends were dead, of if you could get away without punishment. That’s a critically weak cohesive principal. Or rather, the serfs might cohere….as they ran away from your battle.
Basically every part of society made serfs more likely to run. Bravery is a holistic word for a complex emotional and intellectual state.
As for the nobles, while we can’t really know their internal worlds, there’s plenty to suggest many were really just vile supremacists, absolutely high off their own supply of propoganda and generally cruel towards their inferiors, both in their actions and writings. If anything the only thing limiting such cruelty is that actually being cruel, even to your serfs, was liable to make you a deeply unpleasant and abrasive person. It damages your ability to navigate even in group politics. And the church, when it even slightly functioned, at least tried to teach nobles to follow some rules.
But the treatment of serfs was often one stage up from plantation slavery. If that. It depended greatly on time and place, of course, as to what the rule of lordly conduct actually was, but let’s be clear that the tendency to expect is that the powerful are cruel because power makes you cruel, more than simply being an in group bias.
I have thought some on how this situation arose and was upheld. While serfs were thought of as having rights these rights were poorly enforced resulting in a lot of power abuse. Serfs coming into direct contact with their manorial lord then tried to reduce the risk of being abused by being ingratiating to the person. Their attempts only resulted in the abuser becoming unaware of the abuse even being seen as such. Instead manorial lords took it for granted the best for themselves as individuals was the best for everyone. Believing themselves to be good and their enemies evil they expected a loyalty which just was not there. When their serfs did not show any in battle this could be excused by not having tried hard enough. (That is a common way of explaining away a method not working.) So manorial lords continued to do the same without any effect on the situation. Each generation repeated the same social errors. This could continue for centuries depending on how long serfdom lasted in the relevant area.
one thing that prevent the serf to run away is punishment. As Bret said before, medieval societies were organized around households, which means lords could punish the family of runaway serfs easily. Also, not able to return home could be a death sentence for many people at that time.
I thought about posting this in one of the sub-discussions that are currently going on here, but I wasn’t sure in which one, so I’ll post it in the general thread.
People sometimes say that panic in dangerous or risky situations is “catching”. That is, if some people are in real or potential or perceived danger together, and one of them starts to panic, the others become more likely to panic, too.
But I think that on one or two occasions in my own life, I noticed other people around me getting nervous, and as a result, I myself actually got *calmer*. My armchair psychoanalysis take on the matter is that in those situations, some part of my brain thought something like, “OK, at least I#m not the *only one* who’s nervous here”, and that, in turn, had a calming and perhaps even confidence-boosting effect on me.
I don’t know if this is relevant for the topics of the main post, but it might be relevant for some of the discussions people are having here.
Really funny thing about the word “armchair” here – usually “armchair profession” is used in a derogatory (or self-deprecating) way to say “someone who did not had contact with the real thing”. But unlike a general, a captain, or a farmer real psychoanalysts ARE supposed to sit in armchair to do their work.
Hah!
There’s going to be a huge variety of responses.
For me, I’ve been in these situations to know my response. I make sure my team is safe, then get everyone to a place where I don’t have to worry about them, then assess the situation again. If someone’s actively trying to kill us I get VERY angry, but First Aid trumps blood lust.
I’ve seen other people completely collapse. They are physically and mentally incapable of any sort of action. I’ve also seen others that get too excited, and do flagrantly stupid things. Had to tell people that when you hear bullets zing by your head, DO NOT stand up and try to see where the bullets are coming from (for context, this was technically a class at a university, so we were “armed” with hammers–Field Camp is a rite of passage, and ). I’ve seen others frantically look for some sort of leadership, someone they can follow, regardless of whether that leader was good or bad.
I won’t say any are morally superior to the others. I will say I’m glad I’ve been put to the test and can honestly say I’m more concerned with saving my team members than my own skin, but it’s entirely personal. I didn’t blame those who panicked; I just made sure they got out alive.
What I’ve found is that as long as people have at least someone who appears in control, people can get through a lot. But it comes a very small group of people holding everyone else together. As long as people like you and me stand firm, everyone else will (I say this as a matter of tactics, not ego). If the folks like you and me break, so will everyone else. Which matches what I’ve read in Medieval literature.
Thank you for the perspective! To avoid misunderstandings, I’m not a veteran, and I wasn’t talking about truly *dangerous* situations in my post.
I’m not either. Field geology just gets really exciting sometimes. I gave up counting times I was nearly killed a long time ago, though these days it doesn’t happen as much. Something about being in a pit of toxic sludge while things blow up and scatter debris just overhead really pushed me to move up the chain of command.
You don’t have to be a vet to have been in life-and-death situations. My father was on the fire department, which put in him consistently in some very hairy situations. And construction back in the day was….intense. Folks today would run screaming from what I considered normal early in my career, and listening to stories my early career was tame compared to what it used to be like.
Construction is certainly much safer now in Sweden too. In 1954 my dad, his parents and two brothers were to move into an apartment building only to find it unfinished. My grandfather then got to the construction site in the morning before its construction workers. He then used their work elevator to get his family’s furniture into their unfinished apartment. They had to live with my great-grandmother (the “trespasser’s” mother-in-law) until their new apartment was finished.
Nowadays Swedish construction sites have tall fences with signs telling only those employed there have the right to get in. Having a pragmatic attitude to rules I have gotten into construction sites a few times as an adult. However, I only ever did so in the weekends when no-one was working there. Also, I can’t recall having gotten less than about five feet from an unfenced ledge since 1998. Me and my family then visited Pont du Gard in France which is open to the public.
“Now it will not surprise you that pre-modern military literature, written almost entirely by elites in the leadership class for other elites in the leadership class, is very interested in leadership and tends to attribute all military success or failure to the fellows in charge. Modern military science, however, has increasingly recognized the importance of combat motivation in individual rank-and-file soldiers.”
“the Roman socii system seems to have functioned on a similar basis: Roman socii stayed in units recruited from their relatively small communities.”
Note that the military historians, and military manual writers, writing as officers for officers, talked about combat motivation and unit properties.
One part of relatively low coverage of cohesion might have been that there is a lot of things that might rapidly increase or decrease morale of your own or enemy´s forces. Morale can rapidly respond to news, including deceptions. Whereas cohesion is soldiers´ attitude to their comrades, and there is little a commander can do rapidly to improve his own units´ cohesion, and less he can do about his enemies.
Still, note a contrast in case of the Roman armies.
The socii formed units based on relatively small town neighbours – and stayed together.
The Romans, in the course of dilectus – groups of four men called up by tribe were split up each to a different legion.
That is, in contrast to the socii, Roman dilectus operated to split up men who were from the same village, or clients of the same patron.
This contrast was entrenched in Roman alliance treaties, Roman laws and expectations of the other consul. It was not in discretion of an individual consul.
Note that when in Late Republic, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo raised an army in Picenum, he created exactly what dilectus prevented. An army of neighbours, clients of a shared patron/commander. And other Late Republic commanders followed suit.
Did any ancient historians or military writers ever discuss the options of keeping pal recruits or preexisting units together vs. splitting them up as options for the commander, why or why not?
Emperor Maurice´s Strategicon was transmitted. And it discusses picking unit sizes: gives advice to not have units of uniform size in order to hamper enemy scouting. Maurice is making the assumption that unit size, and therefore identity, is something the commander has discretion about.
Why was Maurice´s Strategicon ever transmitted? It was well known that Maurice committed the morale blunder of provoking several mutinies, whereof he died. Should his posterity not have concluded that his advice was bad, and discarded the book?
Another military writer who concentrated on units of poor morale is Aeneas Tacticus. Who goes by assumption that there are traitors in the city, sufficiently unknown that the commander has no better choice than to trust potential traitors with night watch. And discusses making gates physically secure, so that even a band of traitors trusted with gates for the whole night cannot open the gates without making noise and alerting people not on the plot.
So, which other ancient military writers and historians discuss unit cohesion?
You don’t need to call Sauron into the matter: one of the clearest (and with worst results) example of these mechanics in practice is the Italian Army during WWI: a technologically and logistically superior Army facing poorly equipped reserves that yet only managed to inch forward with massive casualties over years… And then lose everything and risk total surrender in matter of weeks the moment Germany put a little pressure on the front.
Absolutely atrocius leaderships (and yet Cadorna still have plazas and statues named after him) with a mess of uncohesive troop composition because they were heavy mobilized from the recently annexed southern regions that could not understand why they had to die for “A Notheners’ war”.
The unification of Italy took place more than 40 years earlier. However, there are considerable cultural differences within Italy. Those organising the country’s armed forces may not have thought about this.
When I think about it the Italian government may have taken cohesion for granted. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a tendency in Europe to believe everything one was used to being given by nature once and for all. (This is oftentimes not the case.) The combination of internal conformism and external hostility was believed come naturally to everyone. In reality people vary individually in their tendency to conformism. Hostility to outsiders comes from perceiving eternal threats which can be real or imaginary.
It should be “external threats”.