Picky, picky, picky...

[gridlore]

A few years ago I picked up The Future of War by George and Meredith Freeman. I'd never gotten around to reading it until today.

Imagine my feelings when I found not one, but two gross historical errors in the first few pages of the first chapter!

The first whopper is comment about the conquistadores "revolutionizing" warfare with their "primitive guns." By the time the Spanish were tap-dancing all over Mesoamerica, guns had been the staple of European war for almost 150 years.

Then the authors declare that guns came to dominate the battlefield because of their superior range. Bollocks! Any good bow or crossbow outranged early guns! A lonqbow is accurate and deadly out to several hundred feet, a distance not matched by guns until the late 19th century. Guns became dominant for one reason: it is far easier to train a musketman than it is to train a bowman.

I'll keep reading, but so far I'm unimpressed.

Comments

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

Firearms very quickly came to outperform bow arms in energy delivered to the target, which was another factor in their rapid adoption. The only thing that really slowed firearm adoption were rate-of-fire and reliability problems, both of which gradually dwindled as technology improved.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

I agree that the book sounds fishy. A lot of "military futurist" stuff is half Gosh-Wow-Think-Of-Possibilities and half "Oh, that's just history, no need to get it right, it's obsolete anyway."

But I must disagree with "guns became dominant for training reasons."

The primitive musket had a slower rate-of-fire, less range and less penetration power than either the longbow or the crossbow. (The former requires both high strength and long training; the latter requires neither, particularly with mechanical aids such as the windlass.) I've seen the math worked out in books by Van Crevald and Keegan, among others.

The crossbow's failure was largely due to cost of manufacture and difficulty with keeping a large flock of them maintained in a preindustrial society. (I should also mention that they were banned as "unchivalrous" because they gave a footman a fair chance against armored cavalry.)

The real reason why muskets became dominant lies not in ease of training -- as it took extensive drill to learn to clean, prime, load, aim and fire a musket, especially in the first century or so they were in use -- but in two other factors:

1) NOISE. Musket fire was LOUD and scared horses. It also scared the enemy's soldiers. Thus the premium placed on march order and discipline. A general (who could only command as far as his eyes could see) could assess the relative morale of a unit by observing how closely they stuck to marching drill. The morale effects of gunfire (both positive and negative, depending on who was doing the shooting) were significant.

2) POWER. The advancement from bow/crossbow to firearm was the addition of stored chemical energy. A longbowman needs to be able to draw up to 150 pounds and do so repeatedly for hours. The musket only requires a steady arm and the willingness to risk a broken shoulder from recoil. Exhaustion, which was a serious issue with the melee and muscle-powered weapons, became much less of a factor in infantry combat. (Of course, when the combat closed to 'cold steel,' the short pike called the bayonet became very important. Although one wonders why it took so long to invent the socket bayonet instead of the plug bayonet . . .)

The longbowman had to be a "sturdy" peasant, accustomed to hard labor and moderately well-fed. The musketeer could be (and often was) the dregs of the new urban streets or displaced sharecroppers -- or as in America, the prosperous middle-class merchant or yeoman farmer who worked more with mind than with hands.

I must also add that the longbow represented a design near the pinnacle of muscle-powered projectile weapons. The modern composite / compound bow with ceramics, pulleys and wire bowstrings is a bit better, but only incrementally.

The crude musket was the first step in a continuous advancement of firearms designs that made each successor more reliable, lighter, more accurate and longer-ranged, more lethal, removed drawbacks such as recoil and excessive smoke, and culminated in the next near-pinnacle, the high-powered semiautomatic rifle with optical sights firing a cased smokeless powder cartridge.

Please continue posting. I enjoy the occasional moment of dabbling in military history.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

It does sound weak, but is it possible that the authors are sometimes referring to guns in their broader context, rather than simply as small-bore ammunition such as rifles and pistols? Artillery pieces such as cannons are guns, too, and can have far superior range to longbows.

You left out...

[seawasp]

... and because they're cool. They go BOOM and throw fire and make smoke and stuff. A bow... goes "TWANG". See?