War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
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> Let’s take Total War: Rome II as an example: a unit of Roman (auxiliary) African elephants (12 animals), costs 180 upkeep, compared to 90 to 110 upkeep for 80 horses of auxiliary cavalry (there are quite a few types) – so one elephant (with a mahout) costs 15 upkeep against around 1.25 for a horse and rider (a 12:1 ratio). Paradox’s Imperator does something similar, with a single unit of war elephants requiring 1.08 upkeep, compared to just 0.32 for light cavalry; along with this, elephants have a heavy ‘supply weight’ – twice that of an equivalent number of cavalry (so something like a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of cost).
> Believe it or not, this understates just how hungry – and expensive – elephants are. The standard barley ration for a Roman horse was 7kg of barley per day (7 Attic medimnoi per month; Plb. 6.39.12); this would be supplemented by grazing. Estimates for the food requirements of elephants vary widely (in part, it is hard to measure the dietary needs of grazing animals), but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder – and remember, the preference in war elephants is for large, mature adult males, meaning that most war elephants will be towards the top of this range. Accounting for some grazing (probably significantly less than half of dietary needs) a large adult male elephant is thus likely to need something like 15 to 30 times the food to sustain itself as a stable-fed horse.
Back in India, my grandparents had a driver who later won the lottery. He used the winnings to buy two elephants, what he thought were a good investment (elephants are regularly rented out for expensive sums to temples for functions and celebrations).
Now he's a driver once more. But he has two elephants tho.
But they are fun. :)
Livy's comments apply to so many things....
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
This is what I was thinking the whole time. Rome was surrounded by peer competitors, and OP says their most effective use of elephants was against non-peer competitors like Spain or Gaul.
So why would competitors continue to use elephants? Not because Roma was susceptible, but because THEIR boarder competitors were susceptible.
Elephants were not worth it to defeat well-trained troops, but were more than worth it to defeat smaller, less disciplined armies/militias.
My guess is that Rome's peers were often using elephants to keep smaller competitors in check, and only used them against Rome because they happen to have them anyway.
Cavalry can't be used around elephants unless the horses are specifically trained to be around elephants. Rome itself of the Republican/early Imperial era didn't use cavalry, although some of their allies did. As a hypothesis, those using elephants may have been fighting entities that used cavalry.
Not specifically for Rome's competitors, but elephants were kept also for prestige reasons in other regions, as described in this follow-up article:
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part...
Well, both technologies find themselves in the same situation; they are well understood by the militaries of their day, and those militaries have no interest in using them. It's not surprising that the same results might come about for the same reasons.
While I do agree with much of what this guy has to say about elephants, he is totally wrong about chemical weapons. We don't use mustard gas because it would indeed require tons of gas and be ineffective, but chemical weapons have evolved in the last 100 years. Modern chemical weapons do not need tons.
Novichok literally translates to "new thing". Such nerve agents were developed in the 60s/70s/80s. Infinitesimal amounts of this stuff will kill. Hazmat suits and gas masks are irrelevant when one gram might contain 5000 lethal doses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok_agent#Effects_and_cou...
Bret gives the example of the Tokyo terrorist attack that released sarin in several crowded subway cars... and killed 12 people. Grenades would have killed far more people far more quickly... and that's the point: chemical weapons are far less effective at delivering death than explosives are.
Edit: Wikipedia gives 7mg/m³ for a lethal concentration for one of the Novichok agents, 28mg/m³ for sarin.
But to simplify, cluster mutinous are more effective vs troops than a single large detonation. Similarly, rather than starting from a single source you want to spread the weapon from a large number of points. By comparison to 7mg/m3 a 1 metric ton weapon could ideally cover a square kilometer to a thickness of 30m and concentration of 30mg/m3.
Notably, exposure time plays a major role in lethality so covering a wider area makes it much harder to escape from.
Estimates of the death toll range from at least 281 people[3] to 1,729.[14] and 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in 3 hospitals supported by MSF[5]
However, it was considered safe enough for the UN to inspect the area the next day.
Also you're badly overlooking the obvious. In full "...killing 12 people,[1][2] severely injuring 50, and causing temporary vision problems for nearly 1,000 others"
In both the posts about elephants and chemical weapons, the theme is the same: they are not useful nor practical given the circumstances so the states make the rational decision not to use them.
I’m certainly no expert, so I’m not going to go any further with “is this poison poisonous enough”, but that wikipedia article at least doesn’t seem to make the case.
But to simplify, you don’t just release a gas on it’s own you need a dispersal system like an explosive.
The most recent example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack which killed or incapacitated ~5,000 with a few rockets. It also acted at least in the short term as area denial which can be extremely useful.
PS: In terms of fighting a near parity army, simply using tents separated by sandbag walls makes bombs or rocket strikes significantly less effective. Add even the threat of chemical weapons and things become significantly more difficult. http://armymomstrong.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/2-milita...
Though the strategy worked, Persian side still lost as the Islamic army regrouped and specifically targeted the carriage harness to topple the rider, blinded the elephants and made them run amok causing disarray within Persian faction or straight away killed the elephants with skilled warriors[1].
The Romans on the other hand... lots of hubris and underestimating. There were some brilliant strategies employed by the Arab generals that are even thought in military schools to this day. For example, the time when Khalid bin Walid conquered the walled city of Antioch - without siege weaponry, but by drawing the Romans out by cunning.
I thought African elephants were larger than Asian elephants?
The White African Elephants of the Savanah, to which we all are familiar were never domesticated.
- the (bigger) african bush elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant)
- the (smaller) african forest elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant)
That would be a highly unusual trajectory.
Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it takes to rear a calf in captivity.
And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the animal would be.
It should be pounds, not Kg. "Elephants eat roots, grasses, fruit, and bark, and they eat a lot of these things. An adult elephant can consume up to 300 pounds of food in a single day"
From: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/a/african....
TLDR; Despite being theoretically SUPERBADASS (my words), elephants are only somewhat effective against prepared armies, but are expensive and hard to maintain, especially compared to horses.
Legend has it that the founders of Rome were raised by a she wolf! A lot of roman cultural items have an imagery of the she wolf.