Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIb: Officers
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
I think the fact this article is this high up, without having any comments, suggests that plenty of HNers, like me, just upvote uppon seeing the blog name.
There was something about the writing that made me read the whole post and it had a large impact on how I interpreted all news coming out of the war and in whole it was incredibly prescient, given it was published less than 24 hours after the first bombings.
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-...
The logistics and economics of the ancient world: fascinating.
Many other posts and collections about ancient (European, mostly) and pre-modern statecraft and institutions are also fascinating.
The "hook" or lens of looking at these topics through video games (and what they get right and wrong) is a nice way to get into the subject.
https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictator...
I think I found those via HN too.
Then have a drink whenever you read "Clausewitz".
Yes, it is fun to map social structure onto armies and then be all judgmental about the inequality. Or you can study the actual practicalities of war. Top of the list: Officers need to be able to communicate with people at a distance. They need to be able to read. Until very very recently that meant they had to be from the upper classes.
Soldiers in the past also didn't do "basic training" as we know it today. If you want a soldier to obey orders then those orders better come from someone who held some sort of prior authority over the solider. Military discipline requires structure. When turning farmers into soldiers the only way to keep them in line is to utilize an existing structure, ie social class. Farmers (the bulk of soldiers) will obey orders from their landlords. They won't obey some random person just because some other random person tells them to.
Just after the soviet revolution the Russian army toyed with setting aside social class, even attempting democratically-elected officers. It did not go well. They quickly reverted to the old system.
The quote is actually not judgemental, just descriptive. Your second paragraph seems to quite aptly explain why the structure of armies matches the structure of society. That claim of armies mirroring society is a very common claim on this blog, and your explanation is indeed the explanation this blog has given when expanding on why armies mirror their societies.
On the video games front, that’s a big part of his writing: using pop culture as an entry point to learning about history. So yeah he kind of needs to lay it out in order to compare it to history. Usually smoother for movies and shows because there’s a narrative to work with vs just mechanics.
Hoplites were mostly a citizen army, phalanx were professional soldiers and Roman legions (in classic era) were professional army with many specialists troops especially engineering.
You need different numbers of officers not for the battle but for other tasks.. War for 99% isn't battle but engineering, logistsics etc..
Just as an example Jululis Cesar in Gaul had build a bridge over Rhine twice and it took them just a few days.. Hoplites from Anabasis were just wandering around looking for an existing bridge.
The article is in a series about "how does a general command an army in battle". Within that series this article is about the role of officers, in battle.
The officer numbers are mentioned to explain how armies acted. But how armies wanted to act is not used to explain why officer numbers were the way they were.