The Zerg Swarm of Harchong

Actually, our foot drill is the drill of the Thin Red Line. Pike formations were less extended, and not nearly as nimble. And usually moved at 50 paces/minute, as opposed to 100 when modern drill was still viable tactical evolutions and 120 now that it's just for show. Still, the 18th-century manual of arms did evolve out of the 17th Century's. WH's comment on the why is 2/3 the answer I usually gave recruits when they asked why foot drill [the other 1/3, of course, is simple ceremonial continuity with our predecessors - which is very, very important in itself. Tradition!] Regardless, Harold is correct that what they already know is a foundation to build on.

At 10:1, you actually need 64,000 instructors, not 6,400. If you were paying attention, the two Church cadre we saw in LAMA were both wounded in Siddarmark, and that would be the source Magwair is drawing on. He could easily have come up with 6-10,000 veterans of Wyrshym's and Kaitswyrth's campaigns [although I would offer good money that none of the survivors of the ops following Taisyn's defeat have been included < BEG >] who have seen the new weapons used against them and have at least some idea of why the new tactics they're teaching make sense. Probably not all at once, of course, since they would have to recover from their wounds, but they should be available by now. So, in principle, instructors wouldn't have been an issue.

However, Magwair has 2 problems that seem to be escaping peoples' attention. First, _nobody_ on the CoGA's side has actually used the new doctrine in action and [AFAweK] come back to report on it; the people actually training the Harchongese don't even have much, if any, experience with developing it and training with it themselves, so they're going on what they've been told. Worse, they have no idea what Wyrshym and Nybar are telling their people _now_ - what they're teaching is probably what Wyrshym put into one of his reports 6 or 8 months ago, before he had a chance to actually try it and start figuring out how well it might actually work. Anything will be an improvement on 'dress your lines and march that way!', but rote learning from someone who's learned by rote isn't the very best preparation for the current Safehold battlefield.

The second, and much more fundamental, issue is the execrable educational level of the Harchongese. NCOs for sure, and probably younger officers as well, at least by comparison with the AoG. Modern officers and NCOs, at least in the better western militaries, are specifically trained to teach today what they learned yesterday - you need that skill to do complex operational briefings and training, without which said ops are liable to blow up in your face - and that depends on a lot of what was just taught being more something brought to the surface that's been known for years. Even when it's completely new, you learn to learn by doing lots of learning. IOW, by being well educated. Nobody recruits high-school drop outs anymore, and Harchong's ranks are full of what we'd regard as grade-school drop outs. If you're lucky, since many of them aren't even that well taught. That is going to have a profound effect on both the speed and depth with which they master the new military order. If, as I suspect, the upper classes regard 'education' as spending years learning to ace the civil service exams [something many of them would have no interest in], the officer corps will also be lacking breadth and mental nimbleness. What it comes down to is that the upper ranks of the MHOGATA will take a long time to master their new lessons, and even longer to be ready to pass them on, and therefore the snowball effect WH is anticipating will take a lot longer to get rolling. However many veterans Magwair has rounded up, they probably aren't nearly enough.

Weird Harold wrote:

Keith_w wrote:The trick is "Work as a team" and if you don't have the training - through drill, ...

Modern drill is largely based on traditional Pike formations; the Harchongese army was a mostly Pike army when dispatched to the front -- they've been trained to work as a team, they just need the new weapon and a hint at the new tactics it makes possible.

I doubt that anyone expects to make the Harchongese into elite infantry, but they already know how to fight as a team. If they didn't, they'd not be using pikes; it is impossible to move without teamwork when everyone is carrying an eleven-foot spear.

Interesting discussion. I think the situation that will occur is that the Harchong army will approach battle with an extremely high moral having been given very advanced weapons and training to use them. They will believe they are prepared. Thus it is likely in the first battles that they will be quite aggressive and overconfident.

So the real question comes down to how much artillery and ammunition do the Charisian and Siddermarkian forces that oppose them have? I have not seen a lot of discussion about that here.

If they have enough artillery, then those 600,000 odd riflemen's numbers should be whittled down dramatically; and those rifles will likely not be recovered from the field for use by Harchong. If not, then the casualties will be high but Harchong will hold the field at the end of the day.

Which brings to experienced troops are scared troops.

Weird Harold wrote:

Keith_w wrote:The trick is "Work as a team" and if you don't have the training - through drill, ...

Modern drill is largely based on traditional Pike formations; the Harchongese army was a mostly Pike army when dispatched to the front -- they've been trained to work as a team, they just need the new weapon and a hint at the new tactics it makes possible.

I doubt that anyone expects to make the Harchongese into elite infantry, but they already know how to fight as a team. If they didn't, they'd not be using pikes; it is impossible to move without teamwork when everyone is carrying an eleven-foot spear.

No, they haven't. The book clearly states that when forced to send their army, that the Harchongese went out and rounded up serfs and marched them, under guard, to the front. Their military police were trained, trained to make the serfs do what they were told.

phillies wrote:If they use pike drill, they will attack in dense lines or dense columns, which will not be a career enhancing outcome.

Nobody's modern army attacks in dense lines or columns, but almost every army teaches new recruits to march in formation derived from centuries old drill manuals for Pike warfare.

Weird Harold wrote:

Keith_w wrote:The trick is "Work as a team" and if you don't have the training - through drill, ...

Modern drill is largely based on traditional Pike formations; the Harchongese army was a mostly Pike army when dispatched to the front -- they've been trained to work as a team, they just need the new weapon and a hint at the new tactics it makes possible.

I doubt that anyone expects to make the Harchongese into elite infantry, but they already know how to fight as a team. If they didn't, they'd not be using pikes; it is impossible to move without teamwork when everyone is carrying an eleven-foot spear.

The majority of the Harchongians weren't trained in anything before setting out. The were recruited from the plantations courtesy of the lash and told they were going to wage war against heretics in a compressed period of time.

There is no evidence that they were trained as pike units prior to that.

The COGA apparently has sent out training core and has experienced at least some success in imparting some basic skills such as learning to shoot a rifle that a soldier needs along with some discipline. But I would suspect that they are still pretty raw.

Don

n7axw wrote:There is no evidence that they were trained as pike units prior to that.

A unit equipped with pikes can't move without training in movement with pikes. The result of trying to move a unit equipped with pikes without training them on drill first is a keystone cops moment at best and total disaster at worst.

n7axw wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:I doubt that anyone expects to make the Harchongese into elite infantry, but they already know how to fight as a team. If they didn't, they'd not be using pikes; it is impossible to move without teamwork when everyone is carrying an eleven-foot spear.

The majority of the Harchongians weren't trained in anything before setting out. The were recruited from the plantations courtesy of the lash and told they were going to wage war against heretics in a compressed period of time.

There is no evidence that they were trained as pike units prior to that.

The COGA apparently has sent out training core and has experienced at least some success in imparting some basic skills such as learning to shoot a rifle that a soldier needs along with some discipline. But I would suspect that they are still pretty raw.

Don

The Mighty Host is about 1/3rd composed of the old regular army. The infantry portion of it, at least, had some pikes and a good number of bows, arbalests, muskets, and slings. Insofar as the training to operate together using all of those goes, they've got plenty of cadre for extending those skills to the new portion of the Mighty Host.

No question, the whole thing IS pretty raw, and they'll be starting, as Louis R reminds us, with a poor foundation for learning, from people who are themselves behind the rapidly evolving curve, with weapons that just about no one knows how to use well. And where the Army of God has had the amateurs' advantage of having no bad habits to unlearn, that old regular army portion of the Mighty Host may have carried old bad habits in many cases over. (Still though, when the cavalry has emphasized horse archers and the infantry tends toward missile weapons, they may well have carried over less bad old habits than Siddarmark or Desnair.)

Louis R wrote:At 10:1, you actually need 64,000 instructors, not 6,400. If you were paying attention, the two Church cadre we saw in LAMA were both wounded in Siddarmark, and that would be the source Magwair is drawing on. He could easily have come up with 6-10,000 veterans of Wyrshym's and Kaitswyrth's campaigns [although I would offer good money that none of the survivors of the ops following Taisyn's defeat have been included < BEG >] who have seen the new weapons used against them and have at least some idea of why the new tactics they're teaching make sense. Probably not all at once, of course, since they would have to recover from their wounds, but they should be available by now. So, in principle, instructors wouldn't have been an issue.

Right, and the idea at one point was two tiers of instructors: take the initial bunch of people who know what they are doing, have them teach another group, and let the second, larger group have primary responsibility for teaching the remainder. And there's a measure of basic training the old regular army could be conveying to the new recruits meanwhile - you'd just want to be careful that what they are training them in is not counter-productive to the new combat environment, as best you understand it.

However, Magwair has 2 problems that seem to be escaping peoples' attention. First, _nobody_ on the CoGA's side has actually used the new doctrine in action and [AFAweK] come back to report on it; the people actually training the Harchongese don't even have much, if any, experience with developing it and training with it themselves, so they're going on what they've been told. Worse, they have no idea what Wyrshym and Nybar are telling their people _now_ - what they're teaching is probably what Wyrshym put into one of his reports 6 or 8 months ago, before he had a chance to actually try it and start figuring out how well it might actually work. Anything will be an improvement on 'dress your lines and march that way!', but rote learning from someone who's learned by rote isn't the very best preparation for the current Safehold battlefield.

I suppose fresher communications from Wyrsham and Nybar aren't impossible, but they're not exactly likely and all they'd do is provide some theoretical work that people would be trying to digest in the midst of learning more basic skills. So yeah, it's going to be somewhere between very limited use at best and possibly dangerous confusion at worst.

There's some hope that some of the officers and NCO's are aware that there's a very rapidly evolving combat environment and tactics for it, are prepared to adjust as they find out more, and have trained their men to be prepared for that too. But expecting that to work out well, given the background, is a tall order. It's not really a friendly political environment to tell troops frankly, "Have some weapons! They're neat and new and powerful! We'll be able to tell you how to use them sometime later!"

The second, and much more fundamental, issue is the execrable educational level of the Harchongese. NCOs for sure, and probably younger officers as well, at least by comparison with the AoG. Modern officers and NCOs, at least in the better western militaries, are specifically trained to teach today what they learned yesterday - you need that skill to do complex operational briefings and training, without which said ops are liable to blow up in your face - and that depends on a lot of what was just taught being more something brought to the surface that's been known for years. Even when it's completely new, you learn to learn by doing lots of learning. IOW, by being well educated. Nobody recruits high-school drop outs anymore, and Harchong's ranks are full of what we'd regard as grade-school drop outs. If you're lucky, since many of them aren't even that well taught. That is going to have a profound effect on both the speed and depth with which they master the new military order. If, as I suspect, the upper classes regard 'education' as spending years learning to ace the civil service exams [something many of them would have no interest in], the officer corps will also be lacking breadth and mental nimbleness. What it comes down to is that the upper ranks of the MHOGATA will take a long time to master their new lessons, and even longer to be ready to pass them on, and therefore the snowball effect WH is anticipating will take a lot longer to get rolling. However many veterans Magwair has rounded up, they probably aren't nearly enough.

It may be a bit better than that for some portions of the officer and NCO corps.

Bright serfs, who pick up new skills readily, can transmit them to others, and lead those others in the execution of tasks, should make for natural NCO's even without the formal educational background that ideally makes much of that much easier, and getting them literacy skills is an obvious priority during winter months.

Harchong does have towns, merchants, and manufacturers - nothing impressive per capita, but they do have a whole lot of capita. Those people will have education for the "real world" and should take to staff work as well as the staff work can be conceived and organized. It's an open question how much of the Mighty Host recruiting was from that segment of the population though, particularly when it's also vital for the arms manufacturing part of the economy and making up for the loss (outside of smuggling) of Charisian manufactured goods for agriculture.

And last, Harchong's got that large and efficient bureaucracy. The education geared to passing the civil service tests, if it's genuinely useful for the bureaucrats and genuinely a good measure of their aptitude for it, should provide those with it a flexible background for acquiring new skills and relaying information. The problem here, again, isn't that Harchong hasn't got people with the (basic, fundamental) skills the Mighty Host needs - it's that it may not have identified them when it went recruiting, it may not have recruited heavily from that segment, it may not be able to spare that segment for the Mighty Host, and the numbers of people with those skills the Mighty Host could desperately use fall grievously short of what the Mighty Host will get.

I don't think we should have a picture of the Mighty Host as 1.3 million men marching in a tight bunch carrying fine rifles they know how to use only as pikes and pitchforks, aiming to crush the heretics under their bodies through sheer mass. They will have much more training than that, and much more awareness that that's not how this war can be fought. But if they're not going to be at that extreme, they're not either going to be at the other extreme of 1.3 million bright-eyed riflemen, fully able to deploy in open order as individual snipers or well-articulated corps. They'll have a huge range of preparedness to adopt new tactics and organization, a wide variety of weapons, and officers and NCO's from a diverse set of backgrounds.

It may be the military organization on Safehold about which generalizations are least safe.

Weird Harold wrote:

n7axw wrote:There is no evidence that they were trained as pike units prior to that.

A unit equipped with pikes can't move without training in movement with pikes. The result of trying to move a unit equipped with pikes without training them on drill first is a keystone cops moment at best and total disaster at worst.

This is true, but what does that have to do with the new recruits to the Host, who don't have pikes?

Can't remember who said it, but while history doesn't repeat itself, it does rhyme. Safehold fans might want to think about the American Civil War Union MG McClellan who trained the new Army of the Potomac prior to its commitment in the Peninsula Campaign in 1862. That Army was well organized and trained but its senior leadership was not up to the task against Confederate Generals Joe Johnston and Robert E. Lee although many regimental and brigade commanders showed promise that was realized later in the war. Our favorite celery cuncher is a student of history and might have remembered this historical example as well.

Also might want want to think about the effect on its econonomy and war effort that Harchong would have felt if it did impress/draft its skilled workers and tradesman. This being the centenial of World War I, I am reading or re-reading a lot of history books on the subject and all of the powers, expecting a short war, took many of these skilled craftsman out of their factories. Later these craftsman had to be released back to industry when it became clear to all that the war wasn't going to be over by Christmas.

Same thing happened in World War II. Germany demobilized many divisions so that its soldiers could return to industry after the fall of France in June 1940 even though it was still planning the invasion of Great Britain and doing contingency planning against the USSR. The U.S. and the many British Commonwealth countires exempted many categories of workman from their drafts (if they had one) to avoid cripling their industrial base. The only thing that allowed Germany to field such a large portion of its population into its armed forces while maintaining its industrial base was the wholesale recruitment (voluntary and involuntary) of millions of replacement workers and slaves from its occupied countries and territories.