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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27386 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?

The Peloponnesian War featured multiple Spartan invasions of Attica. So, probably not the exact same spot in a trench warfare sense, but certainly seeing the same area over and over again.

Can imagine that getting frustrating for a bunch of guys who really just wanted to stab the enemy.

There is indeed something about drawn-out trench warfare that I find particularly distressing. Probably has something to do with one's fate feeling completely out of your own hands. Regardless of your skills as a warrior you're not really enhancing your own odds of survival since the thing that gets you won't be another dude, specifically, but something you never even saw coming.

Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight. Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.

Without that issue, I can sort of conceive of a war as banding together with your bros for an adventure and your odds of survival turning much more on your individual skills AND your ability to plan and effectively coordinate rather than luck of the draw.

The other comments cover the broad point - longbowmen were a hell of an investment, and weren't a war-winning instrument alone - but I don't think they go far enough. The best book on this is probably Sumption's series on the Hundred Years War, and he makes the point that (1) longbowmen as used in the English army were invariably mounted and armored, and represented an investment broadly analogous to that of a armored man-at-arms; essentially, the English and French armies both had proper knights (far more french) and then a significant number of men-at-arms, and the English essentially stopped having traditional cavalry man-at-arms in favour of what are better imagined as primitive dragoons, and (2) the war winning instrument was less longbowmen and more reliable polearm infantry in compact blocks with field defenses. The role of longbows was important, but even without them the English army was incredibly lethal, as were other armies - e.g. the Flemish. Basically, the age of the knight was really coming to an end either way. It dominated the field against unreliable levy forces, but against forces who stand and fight and are professional enough to build consistent field defenses and not get caught out of position on a big field, it was always a somewhat non-viable strategy.

But! On your broader point, of war as being a fun adventure... the interesting thing is that it very much was viewed as that in this period... but by the English. Edward III was the archetypal chivalrous king, and people from all over Europe showed up to his campaigns against the French and the Scots. The English force was smaller (than the French - much larger than the scots) and much more professionalised, and the main feature of the first few decades of the hundred years war was English chevauchées into France, which tended to be lucrative and highly individual, and often very local - literally the earl of such and such and his friends and a bunch of men from the local towns and villages. I think it's an interesting but very understandable error to match up that image of war-as-adventure with the French knights, when you actually should have that image, but matched with the well equipped mounted longbowmen.

Without that issue, I can sort of conceive of a war as banding together with your bros for an adventure and your odds of survival turning much more on your individual skills AND your ability to plan and effectively coordinate rather than luck of the draw.

I'm not going to get into the longbow countering the knight thing as others have already, but it's hard to overstate how much of an advantage noble knights had in battle. You were not going to be given a role in battle that would amount to cannon-fodder/bait, you had presumably access to the best training, a horse, the best armor. It was pretty unlikely you'd be killed or seriously wounded on your feet and most importantly, no one was really incentivized in finishing you off if you found yourself surrounded or knocked down/out, as ransoming you was much more lucrative.

Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight.

It really didn't. It meant "charging straight at the enemy's prepared across a muddy field and relying on your glittering form to terrify them into running away" was even MORE stupid than it might otherwise have been, but that kind of thing also failed against armies without longbows.

It just meant that the knights had to get a bit more sophisticated with their tactics. Speed and aggression, as at the battle of Patay, or use of pinning and flanking maneuvers, such as at Formigny, saw thousands of English longbowmen cut down by French chivalry.

Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.

Other people have covered how the longbow takes a lifetime to master - and English Longbowmen were capable melee fighters themselves, with coats of brigandine and rondel daggers specifically designed to get at the weak joints of plate armor.

But also, the Longbow did not "one-shot" a man in armor. The advantage of the longbow came from (1) its ability to loose arrows in a ballistic arc instead of just the flat trajectory of crossbow bolts, (2) the incredible rate of fire that seasoned longbowmen could muster for brief periods of time, and (3) the longbow's effective range.

Individual longbow arrows were nuisances to a man in full-plate. But shoot 150 arrows at him and one will likely find a joint or seam, or just ring his bell hard enough that he'll fall down (and in plate, a man on the ground is essentially dead, either to a swarming enemy or to getting trampled by his own side). Also, those arrows were murder on enemy horses.

There was no unified French command structure at Agincourt. You had four or five different French lords with their own forces. Since each one individually had more troops than the entire English army, they were more concerned about getting in there and getting credit for the victory than about survival and overall victory, which already seemed assured. So instead of a unified attack on the English line, you had several piecemeal assaults that got diced up and defeated in detail. They forgot to achieve Harry, and then sell his bones.

They also let the bowmen get set up and deploy their stakes, didn't bother to think ahead about the effect the churned-up muddy field would have on successive charges, were dumb enough to run down their own missile troops out of impatience and malice, and didn't bother to vary their axis of advance substantively. Just an absolute disaster from the jump.

All true.

And why its fair to say Artillery is the modern day equivalent there.

You might still survive an Artillery barrage if you're in a heavily armored vehicle, but the existence of heavy artillery forever changed the tactics involved.

Obviously Cavalry was still used straight up into WWI itself, and flanking, exploiting weaknesses in the ranks and running down retreating enemies was still useful for a long time, but the days of 'individual glory' on the battlefield kinda ceased when massed projectiles are a risk.

Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight. Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.

It has been a while since I did a deep dive on the literature, but I believe that a traditional longbowman was a skilled fighter that required a significant training investment. It didn't require the capital investment of a knight, but you couldn't grab Any Random Asshole out of the fields and expect him to be effective.

It wasn't until crossbows and firearms that we saw the terrifying power of Armed Masses of Random Assholes.

How do you train a longbowman? Start with his grandfather.

The new weapon that was a game changer and only required a short period of instruction was indeed the matchlock gun, not the longbow.

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