Castles are just fortified houses. “In short, home defenses respond to local conditions aiming not for absolute security, but for a balance of security and cost: in safe places, home owners ‘consume’ that security by investing less heavily in it,… Read More »Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling
Battles purpose was to prevent siege. “the battle is, in this equation, a ‘second order’ concern: merely an event which enables (or prohibits) a siege. As we’ll see, sieges are quite unpleasant things, so if a defender can not have… Read More »Collections: Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook
Even basic armor makes a lot of difference in a fight. “If a gambeson was all you could afford, it was a lot better than nothing. Assuming you kept moving and made yourself a hard target, there was a good… Read More »Collections: Punching Through Some Armor Myths
Violence is not the only force in societies. “Trying to reduce all forms of authority in a society to violence or the threat of violence is an ‘boy’s sociology,’ unfit for serious adults.” https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iii-the-cult-of-the-badass/
Deep bonds are only strange to modern people. “One only needs to look, for instance, at the failure of these intense bonds to hold primacy over the bonds of family, class or tribe when efforts are made to train ‘western’-style… Read More »Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot
Guerrilla war is the default. “We may call this the first system of war. It is the oldest, but as noted above, never entirely goes away. We tend to call this style ‘asymmetric’ or ‘unconventional’ war, but it is the… Read More »Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle
There is a difference between a warrior and a soldier. “The shift to a professional military has always been understood to have involved risks – the classic(al) example of those risks being the Roman one: the creation of a semi-professional… Read More »Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part I: Soldiers, Warriors, and…
Goals are important. “But fortunately, there is also no good strategic reason to have a battle here either! The initial Italian goal was the village of Gorizia, a position of functionally no strategic value, but which had been fortified (because… Read More »Collections: Luigi Cadorna Was The Worst
WWI was just a huge clusterfuck. “the problem these generals faced was fundamentally beyond their ability or anyone’s ability to solve. We didn’t get into it here, but every conceivable secondary theater of war was also tried, along with naval… Read More »Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate
Do not assume you are smarter than people in the past were. “Many World War I generals were incompetent and some were uncaring, but there were also a lot of quite capable, focused and dedicated commanders and they couldn’t break… Read More »Collections: No Man’s Land, Part I: The Trench Stalemate