Thread by @0xAlaric

Two good posts, and I’ll expand a bit on modern vs. premodern tactics here.

For centuries, the superiority of European militaries came not from pure technology, but from *tactics*.

This may end up being a long thread.

1/

The “base” state of premodern warfare closely resembles hunting.

Dispersed, stealth raids that end in gritty 1v1 to 3v1 fights, or just pillaging if the raiding force isn’t detected.

Battles look like the above video; dispersed, hesitant, uncoordinated.

This comes naturally to people, and even more naturally to hunter-gatherers.

You can see similar situations in large street fights, or riots with two untrained (i.e. non-police) groups.

It’s awkward and very individualistic. Still very violent.

In more-developed historical societies, we begin to see aristocratic warfare.

For example — charioteers, armored and trained, attacking each other in duel-like engagements and mowing down legions of dispersed peasants in the meantime.

How do you counter that?

You develop formations, and combined-arms warfare.

Tight formations can make even the boldest cavalry charge stall; and groups of archers, javelin-throwers, or slingers can take down far superior troops.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Not every culture developed… any of this.

IB’s tweet is true for the modern viewer, but not generally. Tight, rigid formations *do not* come naturally. In fact, they’re just about the most unnatural way to fight.

They require discipline.

Tribal warfare, again, is derived from hunting tactics, and comes quite naturally — but to mass your group up and march forward together is *terrifying*.

I’ve talked about this before, but the experience of fighting in formation is one of denying every instinct against it.

This is why “conviction”, “boldness”, etc. were so deeply valued in warrior societies, and cowardice so strongly scorned.

If even one or two guys don’t get with the program, so to speak, your formation collapses and you rout.

It’s high risk, high reward.

In European history, we have the Greeks to thank for first developing massed formations, with an independent genesis in Northern Europe as well.

The phalanx (originally a ritualized form of warfare rather than a natural evolution of tactics) kicked off European martial history.

The intellectual genealogy roughly goes:

1. Greek phalanx
2. Roman testudo (+ other formations)
3. Fracturing into various medieval variants
4. Dominance by cavalry
5. Strong pike lines prove superior
6. Early pike formations
7. Combined-arms tercio, etc.
8. Firearm dominance

That list is massively simplified, but that’s roughly the evolution.

Technology and tactics constantly adapted to tighter, larger formations.

The civilizational advantage of this kind of fighting showed best when European militaries fought non-European forces.

Centuries of constant, internal European wars honed the dominant cultures of the continent into something utterly foreign to the rest of the world, and far superior.

You can see it as early as the Battle of Tours in 732, in which a small Frankish army under Charles Martel repelled a *far* larger Umayyad force.

The Franks held a tight shield wall, spearing down the dispersed Muslim cavalry charges one by one, until they gave up.

Again, this method of fighting was vastly different than the tactics of almost every other world culture.

It takes a specific intellectual lineage, extreme training, and constant refinement against other massed forces.

This advantage most clearly showed in the New World.

Most people talk about cannons and guns being the reason for Spanish success in their American conquests, but this gives too much credit to their (nascent) firearm technology.

Ultimately, it came down to hand-to-hand combat.

Of course, technology (steel armor & weapons, stirrups, etc.) played a huge part as well — but that technology was built in tandem with the tactics that forged European military thought into an absolute machine.

On a philosophical level, there are some interesting results — for one, the European military spirit is fundamentally one of cooperation in small units, as part of a larger whole, rather than individualism.

The Indus Valley relationship between the charioteer and archer expanded to the koryos, then to the phalanx line, the Roman contubernium, and so on — nowadays, the squad.

It is still, ultimately, a spirit of fraternity.

I could talk about this for probably a hundred tweets, but I’ll leave it there for now.

If you enjoy these types of discussions, you should read Dissident Review Volume IV, which just released today.

The theme is “Conflict”, and multiple great essays cover tactics & doctrine: