Hello.

We began the course with a discussion of what we meant

by war, how could we understand war as a social phenomenon.

We then moved to war on the individual level.

How do we explain what happens to these individuals?

What do they go through and how do we then account for them doing so?

That is, given the horror of war which I described.

How do we get so many people, ordinary men, if

you will, usually men, to do this over and over again?

Now, we're going to move up one level of aggregation.

And rather than talking about the individuals, what we're

going to do is talk about the war of armies.

That is war as more of an exercise between these collectives that I talked about.

I've been.

Talking again and again and again about how

important organization and collective effort is for war.

Now we're going to move to this level, and

we're first going to talk about the progress of war.

That is, how war has moved and changed over the last millennium.

What can we understand in a sense about this process of war looking

at it historically and try to figure out how that history of war.

Also parallels a broader history of the Western civilization.

Again, we're largely focused on the West.

So, the progress of war the millenia best is characterized by increasing complexity.

That is, that the operational task facing any

kind of army had become ever more complex.

This requires much greater organizational sophistication, and much more elaborate.

Forms of discipline.

So what we're talking about is this machine, this complex machine of killing

has become A, more sophisticated, requiring much

more discipline and ultimately much more lethal.

Now.

Each shift in the history of the progress of was has been

accompanied by revolutionary changes in operations,

in logistics, technology and social support.

These are in a sense, what is beknown in that it is

largely in reference to events going on in the 1990s and 2000.

The revolution and military affairs and there have been several

of these revolutions and we're going to try to map these out.

Essentially what we're talking about is a fairly linear, although there

are exceptions, but a fairly linear progression away from the individual.

And towards the constraints and requirements of the group.

That is, that we have become, we

have replaced the characteristics that we associate with

a successful warrior with the characteristics associated

with the best possible war machine.

The best possible.

War organization.

Now, these military revolutions have revolutionized

the type of soldiers used, the tactics

used, the levels of destruction and the kinds of state necessary to fight.

And I want to argue again that we're going

to be seeing these, you can see a parallel of

a lot of the history of the last 2

or 3 thousand years by looking at the various constructs.

So first let's talk about the structure of armies and

how the structure of armies has evolved over these years.

I'm going to borrow from John Lyn, a

fantastic military historian, and his sort of large

groups, which he talks about ancient armies, feudal

armies, stipendiary and contract armies, state commission armies.

And volunteer in technical armies.

And let's just go through each one and look at the kind of characteristics.

Again, we're talking about generalities here.

We're talking about there's going to be lots of exceptions, but just to

give you an idea of how this process of armies has changed.

So let's first begin with an ancient army.

And really we have two models.

It's either composed of what we might call

slave soldiers, or there's a citizen soldiers model.

Slave soldiers or slave armies are the products of empire.

These are largely composed by, a conscription,

in a sense, of subjects,

of the slaves, without the kinds of

rights that we're going to be seeing later on.

In a sense, this is not conscription, this is just

absorbing large parts of the population, and, forcing them forward.

A very different model is a citizen army and of course

we see the highlight of that in classical Greece and then we're

going to see a version of the Roman republic, we're much closer

to what we're going to see in the 19th and the 20th century.

Serving in the military is part of the price of citizenship.

And it, serving in the military also allows one to become a citizen.

It gives one the right to be a citizen.

These kinds of militaries are usually associated with a single weapon.

Most often a lance.

There is some arc, there is some use of archery.

Depending on the setting, you will have cavalry or you will have infantry.

But it's relatively simple maneuvers, and

a relatively unsophisticated manner of organizing these.

Partly because they're slave armies, you

cannot expect very much from individual soldiers.

What you want to do is to create an atmosphere where those soldiers can

just move forward and accomplish their task without asking a great deal of them.

Now, again we're going to be talking about later

on we're going to be giving a little bit more

detail about these, but we can talk about

the next shift, at least again in Western Europe.

Is the feudal army.

Now, this is characterized by the provision of military

service in exchange for something other than money payment.

A couple things are important here.

As we see with the collapse of the Roman

Empire or the decline of the Roman Empire, the

capacity, again, largely in the west, to organize these

large armies, to create these kinds of massive forces.

Declines.

What you get is a disaggregation of authority.

What you get is a provincialization of authority.

And along with that, you get a different kind of army.

You get an army where the military

institution itself brings few resources to the battle.

It serves mostly to provide leadership and a temporary cohesion.

This is armies, if you will, as a mafia families.

Where is simply, is simply, there is an exchange of obligations.

There is an exchange of loyalties.

The loyalties are personal.

But again, temporary.

It's a very primitive form of organization.

The discipline is lax, and you are relying to

a large extent on the individual characteristics of your warriors.

You are not in a sense.

Aggregating all these efforts into something that's

much greater than the sum of it's parts.

You are essentially summing up all of these parts.

Now, the technologies that make this central.

One of them being the horse.

The horse, this

period in western history is the highlight of the cavalry.

One, because you were having individual

warriors and you have relatively simple motions.

The fact that a knight or a warrior is on a horse.

Gives him much more power, this is the

high time of the kind of horse riding aristocracy.

To this you add this, the new kind of technology of a castle.

Castles are ways again of, they are an architectural

expression of the kind of disaggregation and division of authority.

No longer can you rely on a central state that is

able to impose these kinds of controls and create these large armies.

Now you have power that is dispersed

and therefore requiring these kinds of isolated.

Bastions where the kind of primitive technology is available to

the army is relatively useless against these kinds of fortification.

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Progress of War & Structure of Armies- Ancient and Feudal

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