Thread by @lymanstoneky

dig a ditch, step to the left, and shoot an arrow

https://twitter.com/BasQuetzal/status/1460440812752412673

one of the really important things to understand about ancient warfare is:

1) modern humans are exposed to such a huge amount of military history we have an astonishing reservoir of tactical ideas they didn't have

2) the main problem isn't ideas, but organization and resources

pretty much everybody who confronted a disciplined formation like this in fact did have ideas on how to beat it: but finding the right battlefield to be conducive to your ideas, getting enough soldiers in one place to pull them off, preparing the field correctly...

like if you have the time and manpower and geographic situation where you can prepare the battlefield to your favor and select optimal terrain, 300 spartans can do a whole lot of damage!

but if you happen to have not been able to get all your dudes in place in time, or if the battle isn't where your strategy needed it to be, it's Manzikert.

a classic problem of ancient armies is:

1) hauling supplies is crazy hard and resource intensive
2) but for a large army to forage or even use prepared warehouses it must split up
3) but for a battle it must be concentrated

So you get this repeated trope in battles as distant as Kadesh and Manzikert and a million others where the battle is joined by one unit and your other units kinda gradually show up in sort of random places nobody intended

Modern high-information high-organization warfare from the 1700s onwards has totally wrecked our idea of how wars are fought, because societies were rich and complex enough that logistics and looting were no longer as salient to the story of war.

Of course even in the US Civil War: Gettysburg famously is an accidental battle with units trickling in over days, and Sherman's March to the Sea is exemplary of ancient military mobilization. But even by 1860 these things are becoming exceptional.

This is also why, when an *organized military* which campaigns year-round appears on the scene, it tends to absolutely eviscerate everyone nearby: Neo-Assyrians and Cyrus' armies are good examples, but so is Charles Martel's army or Byzantine tagmatic troops.

And of course because Mongol horse archers *do not have supply chains* they create a whole new thing where they can cluster their army without the army starving to death. As long as there's grass and you like the taste of horse, the army keeps going!

There are of course cases where armies with relatively even resources and organizational capacities face off and tactics and strategy are super important. Indeed, this is why the wars of Greek states (or the Punic wars tbh) are so fun! Because they are just such a field!

No, "total war" is merely an episodic re-occurrence of "normal war" for human history. Genocide is the typical outcome of wars observed in ancient times and among non-human conficting species!

https://twitter.com/alon_levy/status/1460650457941123082

The wholesale extermination of peoples and seizure of their resources is the normal experience of conflict among human societies up until the point at which skills-biased technical change renders genocide non-lucrative for conquerors.

And indeed we can see that this is true because even in the ancient world communits with unique skills like the Phoenicians or the Sogdians repeatedly escape genocide by super-duper-genocidal conquerors because they are the goose laying the golden egg.

But anyways the point is that "How do you defeat a Macedonian phalanx?" is not *complicated*. It is *difficult* because you must maneuver them into adverse terrain, prepare the field, and keep your army mobile. But it does not require great imagination.

Roman maniples tore them to shreds by implementing the tactics every single prior enemy had attempted to implement. What made the Romans different was they had the resources to formally train armies for all-season warfare to pull it off.

https://twitter.com/tyklip/status/1460651530361753600

It's not like the ROmans were the first ones to think of hitting a phalanx from the side; it's just that doing so is not easy if your units are not highly trained and disciplined, and that training requires long weeks taken off from harvesting grain, which requires resources.

Moreover, at Cynoscephelae, the maniples did *not* best a phalanx in an open field! It was a foggy day with deep mud with a hill between the two sides. The right flank where the phalanx could walk and see steamrolled the Romans. Only the left where they couldn't form up collapsed

The advantage of the Roman troops was that they could fight effectively in more different army configurations and sizes, and on more types of battlefields. Those are big advantages. But even in bad terrain, Roman victory was a close call!

When they do butcher the phalanxes, it's because a mid-rank officer deviates from the Roman plan and sends some units off to the side to go behind the still-strong Macedonian right flank. That wasn't even the plan!