Over the history of warfare in the western world, technological and organisational developments have at times caused a total revolution in the way armies fought for supremacy.
In his book The Art of War in Western World, Archer Jones systematises war by dividing armies into four systems of arms: light and heavy infantry, and light and heavy cavalry. For "light", think archers who can harm the enemy from a distance.
The classical lineup is that light infantry (archers, but also skirmishers) can hurt but not break heavy infantry, but the body armour that protects heavy infantry also makes it impossible for them to catch the light infantry. Heavy infantry fight in heavy gear in tight formations, like the Greek phalanx and the Roman maniple, and will rule the ground they stand on. All cavalry is able to evade infantry. Light cavalry is able to evade heavy cavalry. Heavy cavalry cannot beat heavy infantry in formation without flanking or relying on other arms to break it down first, and light cavalry can evade and hurt, but not destroy, heavy cavalry. Light infantry, on its part, can crush light cavalry (a standing archer is superior to an archer on horseback), but will be destroyed by heavy cavalry if left unprotected. Think paper-rock-scissors with four modes of arms, and people actually getting killed.
This is a static view, and it is both at times misleading and incomplete. There are many other issues at play. First, we have speed. An army does not march in the same formation it fights in, and marching formations are much faster than the fighting formation. The result is that any army that is not pressed up against a natural barrier, like a river or the sea, can always evade combat. Much of Europe's military history, for example, is about the battles that were never fought. An army that evades combat evades destruction by a superior foe, and can then fight another day.
Another crucial issue is fortifications. The ancient Assyrians were masters at destroying fortified positions. So were the Romans. In Medieval Europe, however, he who had a castle was a king. Fortifications were largely superior to any offensive siege weapons. Whatever you may have been tempted to believe playing Age of Empires, I don't think medieval war machines like trebuchets ever were able to break down a real fortified city or castle with a decent number of able armed men protecting it. Along with the fact that armies could not normally be compelled to fight, this meant that Medieval Europe was one which mostly favoured defensive warfare.
In the classical age, the balance of power between the four arms systems I describe above mostly holds. From Alexander to the Roman empire, heavy infantry ruled the battlefield, with cavalry playing a mostly auxiliary, if occasionally decisive, role.
The decline of the state's ability to arm and train large armies of infantrymen, the rise of a powerful nobility who insisted on fighting on horseback (a trend also known in the late Roman empire), the invention of the stirrup as well as heavy cavalry armour, all favored the soldiers on horseback. In High Medieval Europe, the knight dominated the battlefield, and the French cavalier was the best of the best. Naturally, arming a heavy cavalryman was expensive, and only nobles were able to hold castles and knights. Citizen's militias were normally no match for the knights, and the nobility, in reality far from the romantic ideals of chivalry, did as they damn well pleased.
The importance of logistics, or the lack thereof in earlier times, can hardly be overstated. It was virtually impossible to transport sufficient supplies for a large army by pack animals or carts. It was possible by sea, but this limited the movement options considerably. A soldier fights on his stomach, and that stomach would be empty if he could not find food. The horse ate even more than the man sitting on it. Thus ancient armies wanted to feed off enemy land and supplies, which required bringing the fight to hostile territory immediately, and succeeding in combat pretty fast. Armies did not stay in the field for long.
In the late 1400s, exemplified with the Burgundy Wars, the supremacy of the knight was about to end. It was not, as many believe, the advance of gunpowder that shot the knight out of his saddle, it was the long pike of a Swiss pikeman that bumped him off, so to say, his high horse. Maybe reinventing some of the discipline of the Roman legion, the Swiss fighters, who became the most popular mercenaries for a century and is the reason the Pope today has a Swiss Guard, totally reversed the fortunes on the battlefield for the much ignored heavy infantry. Fighting and moving in the same formation, these disciplined fighters could hold any ground, and heavy cavalry had no chance to use shock tactics against them. Continued improvement of gunpowder weapons also meant the end of the supreme rule of the heavy cavalryman. The new combined arms system of musketeers and pikemen, however, was still as limited by logistical problems as earlier armies had been.
A later, significant revolution on the battlefield was showcased with devastating effect in the American civil war. At this time, the heavy and light infantry was mostly fusioned into one, with muskets playing the role of the standoff weapon, and mounted bayonets giving the same soldier shock action capability. In the American civil war, rifled muskets and cannons gave soldiers even more firepower. Perhaps even more importantly, the invention of the railroad made it possible to move both armies and supplies much, much more efficiently than any earlier method, allowing huge armies to be amassed against each other, and also having them stay in the field for long times.
Generals in Europe failed to learn from the experiences of the Americans. The grisly spectacle of old-fashioned tactics combined with deadly, modern weapons and supplied by modern logistics played out again, with even more devastating results, in World War I.
It is a cliche that any army is perfectly able to win the previous, as opposed to the next, war. The old heavy cavalry had ceased to exist, cut down by machine guns and exploding cartridges, and the allied armed forces were by 1939 perfectly adapted to fight, and win, World War I again. But the end of the great war had seen the introduction of the tank, which Archer Jones correctly, I think, sees as the heavy cavalry reinvented. While the British (who had invented this weapon) and the French typically dispersed tanks in mechanised infantry divisions, the Germans understood its power in large formations. France, famously, surrendered after 43 days of hostilities.
World War II also saw the return of the light cavalry, in the form of warplanes in major combat roles. Fighters and bombers had a decisive effect in the war. Large scale strategic bombing had a devastating effect on civilian populations, though its actual effectiveness in winning the war has been heavily debated ever since.
So what became of the light infantry? Obviously, any modern heavy infantry soldier has ranged capabilities in our time and age, so we could argue that like in the age of Napoleon and the American civil war, these two battlefield roles are fused into one.
 Or, we can maybe argue that the recent stalemate in the Lebanon war, the continuous violence in Iraq and the persistent guerrilla tactics in Afghanistan demonstrate the return of light infantry in its traditional role: hard to touch by its heavier counterparts, able to choose the time and place of fighting, and making itself largely invisible to enemies with superior firepower by blending into the civilian population. Guerrilla warfare is certainly not a new development, ask Lawrence of Arabia or Mao Zedong, but weapon systems like portable surface-to-air missiles (SAM), rocket propelled grenade launchers (RPG) and improvised explosive devices (IED) have given small groups of irregular fighters unprecedented firepower, as well as the traditional advantages of mobility, local knowledge and stealth.
British, Israeli and American forces are very well equipped today to win the Falklands war, the Yom Kippur war or Operation Desert Storm. But the times appear to be changing. The next wars are increasingly being fought on the terms of the new military revolution, which combined with media scrutiny of collateral damage caused by western forces and low tolerance of friendly losses, give the terrorist armies of the 21st century the upper hand.
4:15:15 PM 
|
|
