Sam Cade
Member
Bold statement. Can you back it up?
Swords for war
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Bold statement. Can you back it up?
Actually, Afghan tribal fighters would have an advantage over Americans if it came to swordplay. They have been fighting and killing invaders for several thousands of years using swords, bows and spears and have defeated some of histories best armies. Their culture and their numbers would overwhelm any American forces sent to fight them.
Sam Cade
Member
M.A.D doctrine is hardly less bloodshed. More efficient weapons are just that, more efficient tools for making people dead.
Remo223
member
Yes I can. But I'm at work right now. Frankly I'm shocked such a common sense statement needs any explanation at all. Any mediocre student of history should be able to verify this himself. Maybe when I get home, I'll help you out.
Remo223,
It is the obligation of the person making any claim that isn't universally accepted to support it when given the "opportunity".
I understand the basis of your claim, but not everyone does.
It is the obligation of the person making any claim that isn't universally accepted to support it when given the "opportunity".
I understand the basis of your claim, but not everyone does.
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Sam Cade
Member
My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace. "-- Albert Nobel.
"The aeroplane has made war so terrible that I do not believe any country will again care to start a war."--Orville Wright
Yeah, not so much.
Whether its the sack of Troy or firebombing Dresden, nothing changes, war is war.
“A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer's hands”--Seneca the Younger
"The aeroplane has made war so terrible that I do not believe any country will again care to start a war."--Orville Wright
Yeah, not so much.
Whether its the sack of Troy or firebombing Dresden, nothing changes, war is war.
“A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer's hands”--Seneca the Younger
Before guns it was the elite that were trained since boyhood in numerous martial arts that typically prevailed.
You didn't get to choose to be one of them either, if you were born a peasant you typically died a peasant, forced to remain ignorant on most topics including weapon use and tactics your entire life.
Becoming a Knight for example in the medieval times often began with being a 'Page' for about 7 years. At about Age 14 you could become a 'Squire', and if lucky maybe a 'Knight' sometime after 21.
It included a lot of education, and was far more extensive than romantic fiction today.
People didn't fight by grabbing swords and running at each other to engage in 1v1 fights or mass battle like almost all medieval fights in movies.
The untrained might try, but were quickly destroyed on the field. Willpower and testosterone didn't overcome methodical and extensive training.
No battle was quite tedious and formal, with numerous formations, tactics, counter tactics. It would make for boring cinematics, and not highlight single men who are the heros of the story like the fights of Hollywood.
Real knights also saw more use in putting down the occasional peasant revolt than in fighting foreigners. Knights were very valuable taking such a long time to train, and they would recruit less valuable and less skilled soldiers to have killed fighting in foreign conflicts, with some occasional exceptions (a major one being the religiously motivated crusades.) They were essentially the instrument of tyranny.
Education was similarly monopolized, the aristocrats were smarter than the peasants because they had all the time in the world to learn anything and could access and travel to sources of literature and education while the peasant could not. Peasants couldn't use the libraries that existed.
So you had the intelligent aristocrats, and the knights trained since boyhood, living off the majority of society that were kept ignorant peasants and had no hope or way to change their situation.
Romantic fiction of medieval times also focuses on the lifestyles of what were a very small percent of the population. Most of society were forced into dull drudgery of hard labor with little perks their entire lives, unless called upon to die in mandatory service in foreign conflict. (A tactic even exploited to kill off young men of fighting age in rebellious territories of a kingdom and leave the territory unable to be much threat.)
Medieval times really sucked, except for the tiny percentage of the population that lived well at the expense of the toiling peasants. For every knight/aristocrat living decent and being educated while lavishly consuming the products of labor in quantities much larger than any peasant and contributing none you had to have many peasants living low quality lifestyles receiving little for their life's work.
Swords were also not really used much in real warfare against formal opponents by most societies like the movies and fantasy portray, they were the side arm of the day.
The real weapon was often some sort of pole/spear type weapon that did the majority of the killing and had great advantage over those armed merely with swords.
One might fall back on their sword, like one would a sidearm, but only if their superior weapon was not available or damaged.
However when dispatching a peasant from horseback, or striking them down after an insult, swords were often used. This was a right even reserved by the samurai under law, to kill any peasant that disrespected them. Samurai on horseback trample your kid crossing the street and you say something disrespectful? You're dead.
The gun played a huge role in bringing down tyranny, making a common man with minimal training nearly as deadly as the formal professional trained since they were a boy. Which made the Knight/Samurai obsolete and too expensive to justify.
Just as the printing press removed the monopoly on access to education, and allowed 'rogue' presses to distribute information.
The governments sought to control arms, implement gun control, seek out those pesky rogue printing presses and their books, etc to compensate and retain the control they had for centuries. But that proved much more difficult than the previous situation which in turn lead to many rights and freedoms for the masses over time.
As for the ugliness of war itself? War was far deadlier for those involved before firearms.
Here is some examples I posted in another thread.
The Ilad and Aeneid figures are from sword and spear times.
Notice nearly 9 out of 10 people injured in war died back then fighting other organized forces. Now consider you might inflict lethal wounds on an opponent and still get some in return, or from the guy in formation next to him. Hacking and stabbing at eachother at close range is gruesome, and it's not the movies where the first person stabbed goes down defeated.
Individuals can take horrific wounds and still hack or stab back themselves, especially when mentally prepared to do so beforehand as many soldiers of the time period trained for. There was even units that were expected to die and suffer lethal wounds almost any time they engaged a formal enemy in combat but deliver lethal wounds as well. Take a look at the old Berserkers for such an example. They would charge in with such ferocity and indifference to wounds (but more organized than in the movies) that they always exacted a toll but almost always died as well. They had a whole subculture of training to honorably die in battle while inflicting maximum damage on enemy forces while dying (like say a modern suicide bomber.)
Any knife fighter will tell you that in a knife fight you need to expect to get cut. Two trained knife fighters will certainly get a few cuts and stabs on the other before one defeats the other. Now imagine when that was the way of war and any deep cut or stab by a sword or spear was likely to be eventually be fatal.
You didn't get to choose to be one of them either, if you were born a peasant you typically died a peasant, forced to remain ignorant on most topics including weapon use and tactics your entire life.
Becoming a Knight for example in the medieval times often began with being a 'Page' for about 7 years. At about Age 14 you could become a 'Squire', and if lucky maybe a 'Knight' sometime after 21.
It included a lot of education, and was far more extensive than romantic fiction today.
People didn't fight by grabbing swords and running at each other to engage in 1v1 fights or mass battle like almost all medieval fights in movies.
The untrained might try, but were quickly destroyed on the field. Willpower and testosterone didn't overcome methodical and extensive training.
No battle was quite tedious and formal, with numerous formations, tactics, counter tactics. It would make for boring cinematics, and not highlight single men who are the heros of the story like the fights of Hollywood.
Real knights also saw more use in putting down the occasional peasant revolt than in fighting foreigners. Knights were very valuable taking such a long time to train, and they would recruit less valuable and less skilled soldiers to have killed fighting in foreign conflicts, with some occasional exceptions (a major one being the religiously motivated crusades.) They were essentially the instrument of tyranny.
Education was similarly monopolized, the aristocrats were smarter than the peasants because they had all the time in the world to learn anything and could access and travel to sources of literature and education while the peasant could not. Peasants couldn't use the libraries that existed.
So you had the intelligent aristocrats, and the knights trained since boyhood, living off the majority of society that were kept ignorant peasants and had no hope or way to change their situation.
Romantic fiction of medieval times also focuses on the lifestyles of what were a very small percent of the population. Most of society were forced into dull drudgery of hard labor with little perks their entire lives, unless called upon to die in mandatory service in foreign conflict. (A tactic even exploited to kill off young men of fighting age in rebellious territories of a kingdom and leave the territory unable to be much threat.)
Medieval times really sucked, except for the tiny percentage of the population that lived well at the expense of the toiling peasants. For every knight/aristocrat living decent and being educated while lavishly consuming the products of labor in quantities much larger than any peasant and contributing none you had to have many peasants living low quality lifestyles receiving little for their life's work.
Swords were also not really used much in real warfare against formal opponents by most societies like the movies and fantasy portray, they were the side arm of the day.
The real weapon was often some sort of pole/spear type weapon that did the majority of the killing and had great advantage over those armed merely with swords.
One might fall back on their sword, like one would a sidearm, but only if their superior weapon was not available or damaged.
However when dispatching a peasant from horseback, or striking them down after an insult, swords were often used. This was a right even reserved by the samurai under law, to kill any peasant that disrespected them. Samurai on horseback trample your kid crossing the street and you say something disrespectful? You're dead.
The gun played a huge role in bringing down tyranny, making a common man with minimal training nearly as deadly as the formal professional trained since they were a boy. Which made the Knight/Samurai obsolete and too expensive to justify.
Just as the printing press removed the monopoly on access to education, and allowed 'rogue' presses to distribute information.
The governments sought to control arms, implement gun control, seek out those pesky rogue printing presses and their books, etc to compensate and retain the control they had for centuries. But that proved much more difficult than the previous situation which in turn lead to many rights and freedoms for the masses over time.
As for the ugliness of war itself? War was far deadlier for those involved before firearms.
Here is some examples I posted in another thread.
The Ilad and Aeneid figures are from sword and spear times.
Notice nearly 9 out of 10 people injured in war died back then fighting other organized forces. Now consider you might inflict lethal wounds on an opponent and still get some in return, or from the guy in formation next to him. Hacking and stabbing at eachother at close range is gruesome, and it's not the movies where the first person stabbed goes down defeated.
Individuals can take horrific wounds and still hack or stab back themselves, especially when mentally prepared to do so beforehand as many soldiers of the time period trained for. There was even units that were expected to die and suffer lethal wounds almost any time they engaged a formal enemy in combat but deliver lethal wounds as well. Take a look at the old Berserkers for such an example. They would charge in with such ferocity and indifference to wounds (but more organized than in the movies) that they always exacted a toll but almost always died as well. They had a whole subculture of training to honorably die in battle while inflicting maximum damage on enemy forces while dying (like say a modern suicide bomber.)
Any knife fighter will tell you that in a knife fight you need to expect to get cut. Two trained knife fighters will certainly get a few cuts and stabs on the other before one defeats the other. Now imagine when that was the way of war and any deep cut or stab by a sword or spear was likely to be eventually be fatal.
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I don't even know where to begin...
I can assure you that there are damn few swords, spears, or bows present in Afghan culture because (like almost everyone else on planet earth), they adopted firearms long ago. AK47s are so commonplace that they are considered to be Male Jewelry.
Afghan tribal fighters have only rarely prevailed against American forces sent to fight them. To the contrary, in any kind of a standup fight, they are usually slaughtered by Americans.
They are generally terrible marksmen and make poorly organized infantry. About what you'd expect from armed militia throughout history.
I will give them one thing...they like to fight and are not afraid to duke it out with small arms fire.
Kyhber knives? Yes. Swords, Bows, and Spears? Not. There is no modern tradition of edged weapon use for combat or hunting. Rifles replaced spears and bows for combat and almost all the huntable game in Afghanistan was exterminated many decades ago by wealthy visiting hunters and regional nobility.
I did once meet an armed, white bearded, Pashtu Great-Grandfather wearing crossed bandoliers of black powder paper cartridges for his single shot rifle. He offered to accompany our patrol to help us kill the "Bloody British". The UK troops standing there thought the idea was famous...
He didn't have a sword either.
Ole Humpback
Member
"It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee
Lee said that near the end of the day at Fredricksburg after the Union made 13 failed charges up the hill toward entrenched Confederate positions. The number of Union dead was so great that retreating Union soldiers, unable to flee due to the superior Confederate fire, made breastworks out of the dead bodies of their fellow soldiers.
"The corn was cut so close to the ground as if had been cut by hand with a scythe, so great was the fire upon that field." - John Bell Hood
Hood made this comment in an after action report after the battle of Sharpsburgh (Antietam). He engaged Joseph Hooker on the Northern flank of Confederate lines and wasted Hooker's Corps in less than 2hrs. Hooker had nearly 15000 men at the start of that day, he left with less than 200.
"War is hell. The more destructive and inhumane it is, the sooner its over." William Sherman
Sherman made this comment as he watched Atlanta be razed to the ground after he laid seige to it. Shermans March was the death nell of the Confederacy as he rapped the countryside by destroying agricultural production, rail lines, and key manufacturing centers in Georgia.
The rifled musket was the deadliest weapon of its day and the Union wasted over 20000 men in a single day at Fredericksburg and over 5000 Union soldiers fell in the first 5 minutes of Sharpsburg. Pretty bloody results for a gun capable of only 3rds per minute and they fought that war for 5 yrs. More Americans, Union & Confederate, were casualties in the Civil War than in all wars since (the number was surpassed in 2009 with the ongoing war on terror).
If people have an axe to grind, they will make sure it gets ground. Question is, how much blood are people willing to suffer to achieve victory.
Remo223
member
whatever.
granted the inventors overstated the impact of their inventions. But they were, to a degree, correct. every time a newer more deadlier weapon was invented, wars became a little less deadly. It appears I no longer need to do any research for you since it was already done in post 33. there is a lovely chart there for you to look at.
Sam Cade
Member
A chart that has casualty figures for "The Iliad" might have some margin of error.
The advent of the machine-gun and poison gas artillery shells made WWI less deadly? Yes or No?
The practice of indiscriminate bombing of cities made WWII less deadly?
Yes or No?
ICBMs made the prospect of international total war LESS deadly than when nukes were carried on-bombers? Yes or No?
Equal Balance of Edged Weapons:
Battle of Cannae, 216 B.C. (Carthaginians vs. Romans) - Arguably one of the greatest historical slaughters of ancient times & done the old fashioned way; 45-70 thousand dead out of an 86,000-man Roman force, killed in a day of carnage (casualty figures vary depending upon historical sources).
A one-sided battle that still resulted in 5-8 thousand casualties for Hannibal's army.
Imbalance of Edged Weapons vs. Firearms / Artillery:
Battle of Omdurman, 1898 A.D. (Britain vs. Sudanese Ansar) - 23,000 casualties and 5000 prisoners out of a Mahdi force of ~ 52,000; all lost going against massed British cavalry, artillery, riflery, and machineguns. British casualties less than 400.
All Sides Armed Equally with Firearms / Artillery / Automatic Weapons:
Battle of the Somme, July - November 1916 A.D. (Britain & France vs. Germany) - Between 750,000 and 1,000,000 + casualties total for all sides; UK casualties alone are ~ 60,000 on the first day of battle.
Swords? Modern weapons less deadly? Maybe not.
Battle of Cannae, 216 B.C. (Carthaginians vs. Romans) - Arguably one of the greatest historical slaughters of ancient times & done the old fashioned way; 45-70 thousand dead out of an 86,000-man Roman force, killed in a day of carnage (casualty figures vary depending upon historical sources).
A one-sided battle that still resulted in 5-8 thousand casualties for Hannibal's army.
Imbalance of Edged Weapons vs. Firearms / Artillery:
Battle of Omdurman, 1898 A.D. (Britain vs. Sudanese Ansar) - 23,000 casualties and 5000 prisoners out of a Mahdi force of ~ 52,000; all lost going against massed British cavalry, artillery, riflery, and machineguns. British casualties less than 400.
All Sides Armed Equally with Firearms / Artillery / Automatic Weapons:
Battle of the Somme, July - November 1916 A.D. (Britain & France vs. Germany) - Between 750,000 and 1,000,000 + casualties total for all sides; UK casualties alone are ~ 60,000 on the first day of battle.
Swords? Modern weapons less deadly? Maybe not.
Remo223
member
No, if that were the case it would have been accepted without anyone having to explain it. Thanks to our other members who did offer relevant explanations everyone is better informed.
Not everyone is aware of the history of warfare nor of the opinion voiced that each new engine of distruction will save lives by making warfare to horrible to contemplate or so efficient as to end it. Those claims are not always correct because each technological innovation in killing leads to counters in strategy, tactics and technology.
None the less, the mass deaths typical of most wars though history were not continued into the 20th C and the percentage off deaths continues to drop. This is not just due to the technological developments in the tools of war, but without the modern machines to have forced the other issues we might still see massed troups hacking or volley firing over the mounded bodies of the dead and wounded.
Not everyone is aware of the history of warfare nor of the opinion voiced that each new engine of distruction will save lives by making warfare to horrible to contemplate or so efficient as to end it. Those claims are not always correct because each technological innovation in killing leads to counters in strategy, tactics and technology.
None the less, the mass deaths typical of most wars though history were not continued into the 20th C and the percentage off deaths continues to drop. This is not just due to the technological developments in the tools of war, but without the modern machines to have forced the other issues we might still see massed troups hacking or volley firing over the mounded bodies of the dead and wounded.
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Remo223
member
Chindo18Z:
try doing a comparison of soldiers killer per 1000 citizens per year.
try doing a comparison of soldiers killer per 1000 citizens per year.
Sam Cade
Member
Remember that Civilian lives count too.
Fer instance, The American Civil war resulted in the death of around 2% of the population.
Victory in the Great Patriotic War cost the Soviets about 15% of the population.
If you take the high estimate, the Soviet war in Afghanistan killed about 5% of all Afghans.
More recently, the Bosnian War killed about 6.5% of the population.
Ole Humpback
Member
Does that number include the 20 million Soviet civilians who starved to death so that the Red Army could have the barest ration of food possible?
We've wandered pretty far afield from the original question and into a military history discussion so we're going to put this one to bed and get back to sticks and knives.
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