Has technology removed all honour and skill from warfare?

Recommended Videos

chimeracreator

New member
Jun 15, 2009
300
0
0
TestECull said:
Huh. I didn't know they had targeting computers and cell phones in the Civil War. Could have sworn the history books never mentioned General Lee calling up Microsoft tech support and asking why the fuck Windows keeps crashing every time his howitzers go off.
Nope, but if you ever heard the phrase, "keep your powder dry" you would know that devices have been malfunctioning for centuries.

Windage hasn't been a significant issue until ranges exceeded a hundred yards.
Given that the English Longbow had a range of 200 yards I would say that long range has been an issue for a while. That said, it is true that most of those archers missed because the goal was to hit anyone rather than an individual target.

The basic civil war era footsoldier carried waaaay less gear as his modern counterpart does. I think right now they're hovering around 90 pounds of shit in that backpack. Back in the civil war you carried a rifle, a sidearm, a powder bag, about 20 balls or so, and perhaps a day's food ration. That's pretty much it. His pack might have been 25 or 30 pounds.
Yep, I'm not denying that. They also tended to have to march for longer periods of time, ditto for ancient armies where in battle soldiers seldom carried more than what they needed at the moment. I am not saying that modern soldiers are not in better physical condition than most any ancient soldier, but that isn't to say that professional soldiers back in the day weren't in good physical condition giving the limitations of the time.

Yeah, they're real important when the prevailing tactic in use is "Line up shoulder to shoulder, point rifle at opposing crowd, pull trigger, hope they miss you."
You are aware that the introduction of the firing line was to create and enforce discipline right? The firing line allowed Europe to conquer all of Africa by maximizing the power to the power of the gun while providing an effective countermeasure against lower tech fighting methods. It proved highly effective against unmassed troops while the drummer was the only thing that could be heard by soldiers once the battle started thus allowing effective communication. Also as most fatalities were inflicted by the bayonet it was a logical adaption of the classic spear line. It may seem stupid now, but that's because modern weapons are more accurate over a longer range and artillery matters while cavalry and don't.

Group tactics amounted to more or less "CHAAAAAAEEERRRGGG" for over a thousand years. They only started to evolve when firearms got advanced enough to render such tactics stupid.
Nowhere near the skillset required of modern soldiers. Artillerymen of old only had to worry about LOS firing. Modern howitzer crews have to hit a target no larger than two feet by two feet several miles away, often over the horizon. Arty crews in the civil war had to hit a target several yards square from 75-150 yards away. WAAAAY lower skill cieling for the latter, pretty much just point and shoot.
As of WW1 trigonometry tables and slide rules were being used by artillery commanders to calculate firing ranges and angles. In medieval times trebuchets were built by siege engineers on the battle field. The Roman army won many of its battles not by shouting CHARGE but by steadily advancing while throwing javelins in an armored formation while forcing their enemy to charge into a wall of spears. Likewise the flanking maneuvers that broke these formations have been used as long as soldiers have fought in groups.

The skillset and fitness requirements of the modern soldier eclipse that of just a hundred years ago by a significant margin.
This is something we can both agree on.
 

JoesshittyOs

New member
Aug 10, 2011
1,965
0
0
I'm sorry, I just immediately assume that you've gotten this misguided and more fantasy like idea of "warfare" from TV or gaming. Perhaps it was the use of the word "skill".

There was never really much honor in it(and yes, I'm Amuhrican, so I'm aloud to spell it wrong). The person with the bigger stick generally ended up beating the other guy. You can throw fancy words like "honor" on it, but I'm sure most soldiers, then and now, will tell you there's really no such thing, and there never has been.

Skill? You ever try to fly a helicopter or a plane? Or learn how to hit a bullseye from a mile a way by judging wind speed and drop? Or nowadays, fighting an enemy you're probably not gonna ever really see?
 

thelonewolf266

New member
Nov 18, 2010
708
0
0
theparsonski said:
I'd personally rather fight a war with swords and spears and shit instead of guns, because it's true, nowadays you can have the most experienced, hardened soldier that there is, and all it takes is for him to step on an IED and it's game over. Look at the battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan warriors held off an army of Persians estimated to be around the million mark. If that was, say, 300 SAS men against even 2000 Taliban insurgents, I reckon the Taliban would end up winning.

It's actually a huge amount more about luck than it is skill nowadays.
I hope you realise that despite the claims of a Hollywood movie it was actually 7000 Greek troops against somewhere in between 100k and 300k Persian troops and the Greeks lost the battle.The reason they where able to hold them off so long was because of A:Having the best troops and B:possibly even more important positioning which is just as relevant now as it was then.
 

orangeban

New member
Nov 27, 2009
1,442
0
0
Oh yeah, modern warfare is totally skill-less, if there's one thing that is real easy and requires no training or skill, it's flying a plane/commanding a submarine/defusing a bomb/etc. etc.

/s
 

freaper

snuggere mongool
Apr 3, 2010
1,198
0
0
That's a very romantic view you have of the past. I'm fairly confident that the soldiers of 200 years ago and the modern warrior both were equally reluctant to go to war.

I also don't see any more honour in gutting an eighteen year old farmer's son with a swing of your sword than shooting another poor soul in the head.

As for skill; tactics and strategy are much more valued now than personal skill. Mostly because of the difference in warfare, and because of the higher number of bodies soldiers the state has access to. In the military you're still trained as much, if not more than a knight would've been in the sixteenth century. Both using their melee weapon of choice, with the same amount of years of experience, I'm almost certain the soldier of today would win in a fight.
 

SextusMaximus

Nightingale Assassin
May 20, 2009
3,508
0
0
theparsonski said:
I'd personally rather fight a war with swords and spears and shit instead of guns, because it's true, nowadays you can have the most experienced, hardened soldier that there is, and all it takes is for him to step on an IED and it's game over. Look at the battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan warriors held off an army of Persians estimated to be around the million mark. If that was, say, 300 SAS men against even 2000 Taliban insurgents, I reckon the Taliban would end up winning.

It's actually a huge amount more about luck than it is skill nowadays.
Figures are more like 5600 vs 2.6million. Far more Persian casualties but still decisive Persian victory.
 

Wintermoot

New member
Aug 20, 2009
6,563
0
0
by definition honor died in WWI this was the first war where soldiers could get gunned down by planes or killed by gas both are impersonal ways to die.
IMHO honor in war is respecting the Versailles treaty and easily identifying between enemy soldiers and civilians (both not present in the Vietnam war) and I partly agree with honor at least having changed between the ancient world and now.

About training if anything the courses to learn how to be a soldier have increased allot soldiers have to run for kilometers with a heavy bag (even heavier if you are a medic) and allot of soldiers don,t make the cut. I,m not a soldier myself but I saw documentaries of it on TV.
 

FernandoV

New member
Dec 12, 2010
575
0
0
I'm here to fill the required quota of people saying something cynical about war.

What is honorable about killing someone who disagrees with your way of life? That is war, so with that said, fuck it, send our army of remote controlled drones to missile the fuck out of lower tech nations.
 

Gatx

New member
Jul 7, 2011
1,458
0
0
I think it still takes skill to fire a gun, and even to fire a nuke would take a different set of skills, possibly more political or diplomatic, but still.

And all this talk about honor and glory with warfare is bullshit.
 

SEXTON HALE

New member
Apr 12, 2012
231
0
0
Never had much use for honour but its a shame the sword and shield aint what it used to be.
There is definitly a degree of skill involved in learning how to care for and handle a gun but I would definatly think it would be easier for me to take down the guy with the sword in front of me rather than the guy with the gun two hundred feet back.
 

unbreakable212

New member
Feb 4, 2012
55
0
0
Honour (Yes im english so I spell it as "Honour"!) has no place on the battlefield, only after the fighting is done does any form of honour appear, for example if one force captured prisoners, were they executed or ransomed? Honour on a battlefield would get you killed pretty quickly.

It takes skill the handle the equipment we have at our disposal today, no way would I personally be able to maintain a rifle to keep it in working condition unless I knew how to, neither would I be able to fire the gun reasonably accurately as I have no training with the weapon. Soldiers have this training and with the training a set of skills based on modern warfare. Medieval warfare professional armys and soldiers had the training and skills to make them effective with weapons in that time period. Skill is still required, but the tools have changed.
 

Thespian

New member
Sep 11, 2010
1,407
0
0
I was about to tear the OP apart based on it's "honour" claim, but you clarified what you meant by honour pretty soon. So fair enough..

And hey, maybe it's true. I don't think it matters though, does it?
 

Dastardly

Imaginary Friend
Apr 19, 2010
2,420
0
0
Champthrax said:
As per the title, do you think that as we have advanced technologically, the honour and martial skill aspects of warfare have been greatly diminished?
I understand your sentiment, but I think there are some fundamental problems it presents.

1. Mainly, there's the idea that "honor" has ever really been the point. Watch kids play, and watch them make up games. Each child will tend to make up rules that make the game more favorable to themselves. Well, that's how the archaic "rules" of war got decided. All that "honorable" meant was that the opponent was being forced to face our strengths.

So, for instance, a lot of war was built around favoring whichever side had more people. Line up and shoot, line up and shoot, whoever runs out of people first loses. Then some folks figured out, "Hey, if we change things a bit, we can win even though we're smaller." Guerilla tactics were decried as "dishonorable" by the folks that favored face-to-face combat... because face-to-face combat was where they themselves were strong.

2. There's also the idea that simply being skilled at warfare makes on honorable. I can be extremely excellent at killing people, but also a complete bastard. I could be the most honorable person on the planet, but be awful in a fight. "Honorable" combat tends to favor whoever's biggest, not whoever's more honorable or right. War would be won by whoever is better at war, and that's not necessarily what you want.

3. Is the purpose of war to convince the other side that you're right? To show them how honorable you are? Or is the purpose of war to remove the opposition? Not necessarily exterminate them, no, but at least make the fight too expensive for them to continue. You'll never convince the other side to see it your way. If you could, there wouldn't be a war between the two of you. You can just hope to cripple their ability to oppose or destroy you. If that's the case, what is there to be gained by handicapping yourself to appear "honorable?"

4. A lot of ideas of up-close combat are highly romanticized. When someone was facing death at another man's sword, do you think he hesitated to throw dirt in that man's face? Do we believe that fights looked like the carefully-choreographed sequences we see in movies? You want to see a more realistic fight, watch a fencing match: messy, and over in seconds. And that's two somewhat-equally-matched experts in controlled conditions.

Champthrax said:
You may be the best marksman in the world, but it won't save you if you step on a landmine or a plane drops a bomb on you. All your years of training were meaningless, and you will never even realize you are dead. The only equivalent to this, in ancient warfare might be a catapult shot landing on you, but if you were paying attention even this can be anticipated.
There's also this problem: War isn't about one warrior proving himself against another. War is about whether or not your side wins. As a combatant, you're just a part of that machine, like one bullet in a gun. Some poorly-made bullets hit, some well-made bullets miss.

What did you want to happen with this "best marksman in the world?" Should he be killed by another marksman who was better? Is that the only honorable death for him? (Or switch that for "swordsman," if you like) If he's the best in the world, and I want to kill him, why on earth would I face him on his own terms? Instead, I'll steer him away from his strengths and toward mine.
 

phantasmalWordsmith

New member
Oct 5, 2010
911
0
0
Warfare is a means to an end, honour and skill are trivialities. Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons; hopefully for a greater good cause. Hopefully, technology will eventually make warfare obsolete entirely. That's something to look forward to.
 

BiscuitTrouser

Elite Member
May 19, 2008
2,860
0
41
dyre said:
My definition of "honour" involves the fair treatment of prisoners and civilians, not putting yourself at unnecessary risk so you can stab the guy in the face instead of shooting him from 200 meters (and I doubt the guy would be so happy about "honourable defeat" while his insides are spilling out.)

In that regard, modern warfare between developed nations is usually a great deal more honourable than it was in the past.
This. Ask khengis Khan about honor. Ill wait. Oh what he beheaded you, burned your family and took ALL the women?! What a surprise!

"Honor" is a twisted thing to introduce to war since lets be honest, youre killing someone. I dont give a flying fuck how "polite" you are. Youre KILLING ME! Im angrier about that shit more so than how you do it or how "honorable" you are. The only REAL honor to be shown is to non combatants and prisoners. Who back in the day were ransomed, slaved or executed. And if the ransom failed you got to choose between those two. Honor was NOT in abundance back in the day. Torture of prisoners, very PLAIN torture, executions and rapings/lootings were not only a given they were encouraged.

Armies pillaged and destroyed and burned everything they came across. In this age we are forced to remove all civilians from a war entirely due to sociatal pressure. I think thats a billion times more honorable than you trying to kill me "skillfully" or "politely".

Also personal stake in war in the past? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Dont make me laugh. You think your average peasant would give literally a SINGLE SHIT about which noble had a tiff with another noble or which noble wanted more land? No. He was handed a spear, given some shitty leather and told to go disembowel some other nobles peasants for literally NO given reason. For honor or for god. Usually those two. He didnt even get to volunteer. It was militia or starve.

The majority of armies comprised of yoemen and militia who were basically slaves to most nobles. Yoemen, the highest rank a commoner could achieve, at least got some nice gear like bows and real knives/shortswords but couldnt usually become the "awesome swordsman" you often fantasize about. That was left to rich nobles sons who wanted to play at war.
 

Dogstile

New member
Jan 17, 2009
5,093
0
0
3quency said:
English soldiers smeared shit on their swords to give enemies infections.

War hasn't become less honourable, it's always been brutal and unpleasant it's just quicker these days (well kinda).
Pretty smart when you think about it. Even if you lose any enemies that got tiny cuts might die from it.
 

Commissar Sae

New member
Nov 13, 2009
983
0
0
Honour has never really been a big part of warfare. Sure you had the occasional honourable warrior there fighting for peace and justice, but for every one of those you have maybe a thousand guys out there fighting for greed.

Granted there were also a few warrior societies that prized honour over things like reason. The early samurai would often settle conflicts with a duel rather than open war, since it was viewed as more honourable for the general. That honour failed spectacularly against the mongols though, who just filled the general full of arrows as soon as he got near enough to challenge their general.

Skill is still important however, just depends on the battlefield.