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Comment by zhte415 | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr:

The abstract does a wonderful job. It is will worth reading.

Longbow was cheap and technically superior, but required training. Crossbow more expensive, required less training. Rulers of England less worried about rebellion, OK to invest in training. Rulers of France/Scotland not so happy because of fear to give potential of overthrow to the people (Scotland not in title, but in article along with France).

Perhaps an analogy could be painted with companies today. Those that churn, and those that nurture skills.

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If I remember correctly (and I'm still looking for a better source than this[1]), the Duke Of Wellington had requested a corps of longbowmen be made ready for use against the French in the Napoleonic wars, but was advised that no one with the skill needed to train them still existed (the training being the most difficult part of the technology). The last use of trained english longbowmen seemed to have been by some of the royalists during the English Civil War, and after the parliamentary victory practical knowledge of longbow archery as a military arm had been lost without anyone really noticing.

It's hard for me to imagine a pivotal art or technology being lost like that, but I'm willing to bet its not at all uncommon if we look across history. For another military technology example, the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered.

[1] http://everything.explained.today/English_longbow/

Actually one of the points made in the book Guns, Germs and Steel is that technology and inventions aren't developed because there is a need for them. Rather inventions pop up and disappear all the time through history in different cultures. But what makes the technology stay around is that it ends up getting used.

E.g. South America did invent wheels, but since there was no ox or horse to pull the invention had not real practical application beyond toys and never got developed.

So according to this view I guess technology is always in danger of disappearing if it isn't being used.

E.g. the Apollo moon rocket can't be build anymore because the engineers, companies and machines needed to build all the parts and assembly it are no longer around. One would have to recreate a 1960s American industrial base to do it.

I still find that a little mind-boggling, that in, say, pre-Colombian Mexico, they had wheeled children's toys, and nobody thought to scale that up and build a wheelbarrow or a two-wheel dogcart. I mean, they must have been using rollers on some level to maneuver the massive pieces of stone that they used in construction.

The Saturn V's F1 engine was just 3D scanned and reverse engineered by NASA and is the base for the new F1b engine coming online in the next year or so to power the new Space Launch System series or rockets.

Surely Llamas could have pulled some cargo. This says that an adult llama can pull cart loads of up to 200lbs: http://workingllamas.com/?id=93

That's significantly less than a draft horse, but probably roughly the same as a pony.

Actually, the issue there is terrain. Llamas are very agile and can carry loads to areas that neither horses nor carts can reach. Smaller loads, of course, but still much more than a person can carry.

Even today, horses aren't really a thing in the Andes, compared to say, Patagonia.

> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered.

That's the premise laid out at the start of the Top Gun movie. That the Top Gun school was created to bring back the art of dogfighting.

I highly recommend _Boyd: The Fighter Pilot that Changed the Art of War_ (http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780316796880). He was lead instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons School.

The previous commentator is right that there was a loss of air combat skill but the advent of jets and missiles lead to a diminished emphasis on Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) and over-emphasis on technology. Boyd was one of the "fighter pilot mafia" that pushed a return to basic combat flight skills and the improved kill ratios proved him and others right.

The book details the battles waged inside the Pentagon over ACM, the F-15, the F-16, the OODA Loop, the reformulation of the Marines into the tip of the spear they are today, and maneuver warfare in general. Boyd was in the thick of it all.

Interestingly, Gen. Schwarzkopf doesn't come out looking that great.

EDIT: added lots more about the book.

As an aside, I have wondered how universally true this was. For instance, did the USAF recognize a similar issue during this period?

USAF kill:loss ratios were as low as near 1:1 initially in Vietnam while Top Gun trained Navy/Marine Corps pilots were achieving 4:1 or better. The F4 was purpose-designed as a missile-launching platform and was initially fielded without any kind of cannon.

Remember they had reorganized to wage nuclear war. Many people thought that conventional fighting was dead, and that the Air Force of the future would be intercepting bombers with nuclear rockets.

A conflict like Vietnam was seen as a sideshow from a 1950s point of view, and wasn't really planned for.

So, the generals actually planned for the _next_ war, but ended up fighting the last war again, while the next one never came?

Wow, didn't expect the saying to be so wrong.

Not the only example of this: Towards the end of the Vietnam war, the US had developed a fairly comprehensive counter-insurgency (COIN) program. By Iraq 2, they were pretty much only equipped for state on state warfare again and had to relearn COIN - and were actually doing an okay job by 2008. Ironically, given the withdrawal from Iraq, they're probably going to have to relearn it again the next time they're forced to put boots on the ground.

It happens quite regularly. Military forces have to adapt to the problem of the day.

Who paid for the training? Rememeber that you didn't have national armies in those days. If the sponsors of the training became unwilling or unable to fund it, it would just go away.

Lots of modern examples exist. We build unneeded submarines specifically to maintain production capability for some advanced welding techniques.

No one, that's the beauty of it.

Commoners trained themselves, in times of war, sample bias of the soldiers returning home loaded with treasure was incentive enough to put a generation of kids to practices for hours. In times of peace, the nobility subtly encouraged their people to participate by the way of organizing archery contests with prizes.

It was very popular, in a sort of proto sport way. I read once that an early version of football was banned by the English crown because it distracted the peasants from their archery practice.

The paper mentions laws banning leisure activities that weren't longbow practice. Worth reading.

> the art of dogfighting was deemed to have been lost for a brief period between WWII and the air war over Vietnam, and had to be re-engineered.

The air war in Vietnam was radically different from WWII so I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The art wasn't lost, the state had just changed so radically that it was no longer applicable and new strategies had to be devised.

In WWII the dogfighting was typically between interceptor aircraft engaging bomber escorts at high altitude. You won the day by either out maneuvering or out gunning your opponent. At the end of WWII, arguably the best dogfighter in service was the P-51D Mustang which was incredibly fast at the time with a top airspeed of ~430 mph and was equipped with 6x 50 caliber machine guns. It was designed as a high altitude bomber escort and was one of the fastest and most maneuverable aircraft of the time with a high offensive yield.

In Vietnam with the introduction of long range air-to-air missiles and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), close air-to-air combat was thought to be a thing of the past by the US. Tactics had shifted from bombers escorted by fighters to extremely high altitude bombers which hoped to avoid missiles by sheer range, and close ground support aircraft like the A-1 Skyraider and A-6e Intruder which utilized low altitudes, slow air speeds, and high maneuverability to avoid being engaged by SAMs. Fighter aircraft like the F-4 would provide theater support and engage enemies at range using air-to-air missiles. These tactics were designed around engaging the Soviet Union or other Super Powers, the Vietnamese however were utilizing Mig-17s, which still prescribed to the WWII method of air engagement, and was a natural evolution of the WWII fighter being fast, maneuverable, and heavily armed for air-to-air combat. What you ended up with were a bunch of aircraft ill suited for engaging one another.

The A-1 and A-6 could fly incredibly low and slow in comparison to the Mig-17 and with much greater maneuverability at low speeds making it difficult for the Mig-17 to engage them with missles. The Mig-17 would have to perform slicing runs with machine guns which made it vulnerable to those aircraft coming and going. The Mig-17 could easily outpace them however making it difficult for either US aircraft to act offensively.

The F-4 could offensively engage the Mig-17 at range and could easily out run it if necessary but the F-4 was far less maneuverable and lacked on-board machine guns making it ill suited for a close range dogfight. The gun pod on an F-4 was initially hampered by the fact that it couldn't operate at low speeds because it was air turbine driven and also lacked lead sighting so the gun was inaccurate at high speeds. F-4 pilots used a spray-and-pray approach if engaging a target in close air combat. The F-4 though was not an easy target for the Mig-17 because it was equipped with electronic counter measures and raw engine power that dwarfed the Mig.

In the end completely new tactics had to be devised and lots of lessons were learned from the mistakes in Vietnam but there really wasn't a losing and rediscovering of an art.

The "art" or "skill" wasn't lost, just not available promptly in battalion-size units.

> It's hard for me to imagine a pivotal art or technology being lost like that, but I'm willing to bet its not at all uncommon if we look across history.

This has happened quite a bit throughout history, actually. Complete social collapse, as has happened many times throughout history, can have a really bad effect on technological innovation. Focusing specifically on the Roman empire (because that's what I'm more familiar with), here are three off the top of my head:

* The various methods to making various different kinds of concrete have been lost and rediscovered several times [0]. Early concrete-like materials were used as far back as 6500BC by the Nabataeans. In both Roman and Egyptian times it was re-discovered that adding volcanic ash to the mix allowed it to set underwater. The Roman methods for making concrete were lost again following the collapse of the Western empire and were not rediscovered in Europe until the 1400s.

* Roman roads were extremely well engineered [1], to the point that some are still around today. While this wasn't "lost" per se (we could always go dig up a Roman road and see how it was made), the Roman road system in Europe deteriorated because of lack of resources and skills to maintain them. [2]

* The Romans made extensive use of plumbing [3], but much of that was again lost in Europe after the fall of the Western empire. The Roman Empire had indoor plumbing, meaning a system of aqueducts and pipes that terminated in homes (at least of wealthy people) and at public wells and fountains for people to use. [4] Lead pipe was used (okay, so maybe that part wasn't so great), and there were sewer systems [5]. Even the word "plumbing" derives from the Latin word plumbum for lead. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, plumbing development virtually ceased for centuries except for isolated cases of plumbing installed in palaces and castles.

These three things are so integral to the modern world we probably don't even think about them much, just assume they were always there. But not too long ago (at least on the scale of human civilization), they weren't.

TL;DR the Romans were awesome engineers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads#Construction_and_e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_road_transport

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sa...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_water#Pipe_materials

Re: roads under the Roman Empire

Apparently, in France, when they tried to build some of the high-speed train lines, they discovered some Roman roads which were forgotten/buried.

The reason they found them was that they were trying to make the lines as straight as possible between the cities they were supposed to link. The Romans had actually done the same and with great precision several hundred years earlier !

Yes, the Romans really were awesome engineers. They were even more awesome when you realize that they were completely hamstrung by the utterly idiotic Roman numeral system! Can you imagine doing complex calculations in that?

I guess they also might had some math tricks that made it easy, tricks that you may now count as another "art" lost. But then would you try to rediscover some art about how some people dealt with something imperfect (because they had to) or you would rather look for something better that doesn't require clever tricks in the first place? Now I come to think that (at least) some loses present opportunity value in themselves!

I'm pretty sure Roman Numerals arithmetic algorithms weren't lost, I looking for the source but in the meanwhile here's some of them: http://turner.faculty.swau.edu/mathematics/materialslibrary/...

The Sharpe author Bernard Cornwell wrote a couple of novels set in / around Agincourt and from memory there are a few extras to throw in - but I love your last sentence's conclusion

1. The extra training was enormous - thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock, not Kevin Costner.

2. The "cheap" idea is misleading - in preparation ofr agincourt a huge amount of the English economny was turned over to making arrows. During Agincourt an estimated 3/4 million arrows were fired. When looking at economics of ranged weapons, don't compare Bows to guns, think RPGs

3. Agincourt changed everything for a generation. Thanks to mud, foolishness, and yes, longbows, France lost an entire generation of aristocracy in one day. The english were being chased out of the country and suddenly ... owned everything.

4. finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster, you are not tied down to a specfific class of army recruits and you dont have to feed Arnie.

> thik of an army of a thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers - these guys cold deliver hundreds of foot pounds from their arms. Robin Hood would have been built like The Rock

As a nitpick: No, he would not. You don't achieve anything near build of Arnold or The Rock without steroids (both have admitted to steroid use), nor do you achieve it with more endurance focused training rather than maximising load for a low number of reps. Big and strong, sure, but much more compact.

A boxer would be a more natural comparison.

Maybe professional arm wrestler would be even more apt.

Here is Devon Larratt (225 lbs) easily beating Hafthor Bjornsson ("The Mountain" from Game of Thrones; 419 lbs) without breaking a sweat. Specialization wins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkkL-bAH8H4

You need some pretty specific muscles for bowmanship, which don't really equate to a bodybuilder's physique. That goes both way, I wouldn't be sure whether Arnie in his best days could draw a 150 lbs bow, and I'm dead certain that Daffyd Longbowman didn't look like a candidate for Mr. Universe.

But you still had some pretty healthy specimens, which brings to mind one important factor that's often forgotten: It's not like archers were suddenly useless when they couldn't fire their bows anymore. They were decently well armed and armored, and if you're swarmed by guys with mauls (and possibly deep in mud), your fancy chain & plate doesn't really help you all that much.

The wreck of the Mary Rose has provided numerous well preserved skeletons of well trained longbowmen, and sailors (for comparison) and allowed studies of the effect upon their body. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17309665 - they found a significant difference in the lower arm bones of archers and non-archers.

Very interesting. I see that asymmetry is one of the indicators: "In fact, on one of the skeletons we have looked at, the surface area of the joint between the lower arm and elbow is 48% larger than on the joint on the other arm."

I believe there was a lot of arm-and-hand labor in being a sailor, but without the bias that archery creates.

> finally, crossbows really are the better weapon - once you start factory-making them, your army can be raised and trained faster

But the army you raise is less effective; quantity vs quality.

A country which did not want or could not afford to train longbow men may have had a deeper flaw: its model. Perhaps the real reason England could beat France had been a long time in the making: a strong economy, and politically society that afforded it a more equipped better trained army.

I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.

> I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.

There are many, many, many examples throughout history of this happening. In WWII, the British kept the European theatre alive until the Americans finally showed up. I learned in a Quora thread that opposing soldiers thought the British incredibly disciplined and reliable, while the Americans were absolutely nuts, making up in sheer bravado what they lacked in training.

People will fight very, very hard to save their political system when they are personally invested in it.

In the French Revolutionary wars, the generals led from the front of the army. Absolutely fearless, total badasses, fighting for the glory of the French Republic. Things changed of course after Napoleon grabbed the brass ring, but Napoleon did not make the army himself, it was the efforts of his revolutionary predecessors that forged the army that Napoleon commanded.

Strongly democratic nations enjoy virtual invulnerability in battle, particularly when defending.

The political stability is important when creating a national army that could conceivably be usurped by internal threats. The economy is essential for that oft-overlooked aspect of conducting a war, managing the supply train. Unless you're the Mongols, everything you use to wage war has to be maintained, and fed. Democratic countries simply do this better than autocratic ones.

> Strongly democratic nations enjoy virtual invulnerability in battle, particularly when defending.

Tell that to all the smaller countries overrun by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. (Or the native north-American tribes.)

(Lots of them did put up a great defence, though.)

> I wonder if the advantages of a democracy - political stability and a (usually) advanced economy - also translate into the modern battlefield.

Yes. There was an article that reached the top page here about the cultural/organizational problems of information-age Arab armies from the perspective of a US Army soldier who had worked with several. Let me see if I can dig it up.

http://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars

At Agincourt, England beat France on pure fluke. We were effectively running away to Calais when the French trapped the English and attacked. The battle was lost more than won - the French just bunched up and got stuck in mud, and got slaughtered

It was not a reflection on any economic models.

Ps on the crossbow front - the cost of arrows relative to the firing mechanism is key

The quote from Stalin comes to mind, quantity has a quality of it's own.

Yep I also thought of that as I wrote that line. I wonder how that sounded to his cannon fodde^H^H^H soldiers...

It probably didn't sound like anything because it's most likely a misattribution (see the more detailed answers here: https://www.quora.com/Who-said-Quantity-has-a-quality-all-it...). Not saying that Quora or Wikipedia are authoritative sources, but many of this sort of alleged quotes by Stalin are usually either what someone thought Stalin might have said, or coined by Western authors writing about Stalin and later misattributed to him.

Most references I've found point to an American saying this quote (or similar) in the 70s.

That last sentence is the conclusion of 'The Logic of Political Survival', by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, et al.

Unfortunately, I haven't gone through it in ten years, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have some faulty methodology.

> Perhaps an analogy could be painted with companies today. Those that churn, and those that nurture skills.

Those that nurture skills would only be powerful in their own niche, and unable to significantly project power without a cohort of allies?

In the age of the longbow, England dominated the British Isles, whose other denizens were significantly smaller in population and economy. The French, on the other hand, kicked England out of the continent, and were a continental power. The English won some key battles, but at the end of the age of the longbow, the scorecard was in France's favour.

You forget that there is no citation of any of medieval sources that support their claims. I cannot believe that rulers decide on something important like war technology without leaving history trails in literature.

Not entirely; see, for example, page 703.

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