JeffEngel wrote:EdThomas wrote:Don,
You're right about the number of cavalry. I went back to the MHOG chapter in LAMA and did some arithmetic.
“almost seventy percent of the regular army was still mounted. The reformers had, however, built up a solid core of over one hundred thousand well-trained, well-armed, well-armored heavy infantry, supported by thirty thousand bowmen and arbalesteers and a tiny handful of matchlock-armed musketeers. The IHA’s true striking power, however , continued to reside in the highly mobile horse archers who composed nearly half its total manpower.”
“the entire Imperial Harchongese Army had numbered less than five hundred thousand men, horse and foot, with no field artillery at all, at the beginning of the Schism.”
They’d gone from a strength of four hundred seventy-one thousand to one of over one million and three hundred thousand in less than four months,
Weber, David (2014-02-18). Like a Mighty Army (Safehold) (p. 493). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition.
70% x 470,000 = 329,000 mounted
45% x 470,000 = 211,500 horse archers
117,500 other mounted troops
829,000 conscripts
The 100,000 trained pikemen is interesting. This would be an excellent source for junior officers and ncos for the conscript units. MHOG might not be as bad as we've been thinking.
Those horse archers are intriguing. Given that they would be very well trained and experienced, they'd be able to move overland at fair speed and harass Charisian/Siddarmark formations (or supply columns) at range. A very good horse archer is only barely getting superceded by the current rifles in wide service.
Whether or not those troops would be willing to do good cavalry service that way is another issue, alas.
Given what the AoG advisers can communicate, I think dispersed formations among the rifle-equipped infantry really may be the order of the day. Even though the Host will be strapped for confident, knowledgeable and experienced NCO's and junior officers to lead those groups, artillery and rifle fire leave them no good choice. (And higher up, they have to worry about senile commanders.) Packing men up to keep them under great central control while they die by the hundreds is not better than spreading them out under the control of non-coms working out what they are doing by theory and on-the-job. Neither is entirely palatable, of course, and the second goes against tradition, but at least it allows those non-coms and junior officers maybe to live and have their troops live long enough to shoot back and learn better.
While Clyntahn adores Harchong's orthodoxy, I doubt he's committed to geriatric command and may not get in the way of any maneuvers Duchairn and Magwair may sponsor to make sure that the very old, very senior, very hidebound officers are kept in places where they are either junior to an experienced AoG officer and/or having the actual work done by someone younger and more professional. Just how far they can go with that sort of shuffling is an open question. Some terribly senior sorts may have to get themselves and a lot of their men killed in old-fashioned charges to clear the command structure up top.
The mounted troops that aren't horse archers - classic heavy cavalry, I assume? - are not likely to do much good. Hopefully they can be re-trained as dragoons, or at least broken up into special purpose forces on strange occasions where a cavalry charge again has a point. But they're also, happily, a small portion of the new, triple-size Harchongese army.
I wonder what happened to the Duke of Sun Rising after the Battle of the Markovian Sea. Gotta love those titles, don't you... I expect that he survived. The Harchongese galleons main contribution to the fight was to surrender, IIRC. Maybe after the RCN got him to Charis, they found a comfortable place to confine him???
That has to be the caliber of senior officer that the allies are praying for when the fur starts to fly this summer.
Don