Alonso de Chaves on the shipboard use of the montante (Iberian two-handed sword)

All right, I’m not going to use this post to engage in a systematic or extensive discussion on the use of the two-handed sword in naval engagements. Instead, I’m just going to use it as a place to stash some stuff I’ve previously written down in a Facebook group post — which, as everyone knows, is simply not a very good way to preserve things for posterity. I’m basically just moving the information here to make it easier to find should I need to reference it again later.

The background to this whole thing was a discussion in an Indonesian HEMA chat group, where somebody brought up the subject of when and where the two-handed sword was used and I got rather irritated since most of the discussion just went around and around, bringing up modern ideas cooked up in the modern participants’ heads without backing them up with historical evidence. Eventually I started badgering people for sources, and fortunately one of them (the proprietor of Arpio Shop — go visit and buy one or two of their swords if you want to thank them for this) came up with a translated excerpt from a work titled Espejo de Navegantes, by a certain “Alonso de Chaves,” to the effect that the montante (the Iberian — that is, Spanish/Portuguese — variant of the 16th-century two-handed sword) was one of the most suitable weapons for boarding or defending a galley, somewhat linking it with Rule XI Simple (also known as the “galley gangway”) in Figueyredo. I felt like the excerpt probably came from a valid primary source, but it seemed incomplete and I wasn’t convinced that it actually referred to galleys or their gangways at all (“gangway” here being a slightly awkward translation of Portuguese coxia or Italian corsia, a subject of some debate among naval historians specialising in 16th-century Mediterranean warfare). So I started digging.

Thinking about the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, part two: so what were the drones good for?

So. To be clear, this was actually the thing I wanted to write about, but as usual I got distracted by the question of whether drone warfare has rendered tanks obsolete and had to split that off into a separate post. But then, if they haven’t made tanks obsolete, just what have they done instead?

Well, to begin with, I guess an overview of the previous conflicts over Nagorno-Karabakh is in order. Let’s just say that since the first war in 1988-94 established the front lines of the frozen conflict, the war had settled down into an affair of static lines akin to the Western Front of World War I. This is by no means unusual; many mid-sized regional wars towards the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have gravitated in this direction, including the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s, Indo-Pakistani clashes in the 1990s and 2000s, and the ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine from 2014 onwards. This tendency has been attributed to a variety of factors, but in most cases it’s either a lack of capacity to break the static stalemate or — where the capacity wasn’t lacking — a lack of political will to escalate the conflict to a degree that would justify bringing forth the capacity to break the stalemate, often partly due to fears of intervention by stronger neighbouring powers. As I understand it, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from the end of the first war in 1994 had largely been seen as a case of the former, since that war’s conclusion left the Azerbaijani government and military forces in disarray; indeed, the first few days of the war actually followed the familiar pattern of conflicts that had been observed before in 2016 and again in July 2020, where Azerbaijani forces mounted limited offensives against a relatively small section of Armenian (or Artsakh) trench lines and managed to secure small gains at the start of the fighting, but the Armenian/Artsakh forces would then mount counterattacks (often facilitated by the initial withdrawal from the territory gained by the Azerbaijanis, which allowed their artillery to fire more freely at pre-registered targets in the captured trench lines) that wiped out most or all of the Azerbaijani gains. Even after Azerbaijani offensives started pushing back the front lines by a significant extent in the south, their advance was still slow and gradual compared to the heavy casualties they were inflicting (and taking), and some external observers still had grounds to express skepticism that the invasion would lead to any lasting operational or strategic results two weeks into the war.

My take on the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, part one: no, the tank isn’t dead. (Not yet anyway.)

The recent news of Ukrainian strikes on separatist forces in Donbass with Turkish-made UAS has reminded me that I’ve never quite managed to put together my scattered thoughts about last year’s conflict between Azerbaijan and the Armenian-backed separatist Republic of Artsakh in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Of course, the thing is I haven’t really done a particularly in-depth study of the conflict, so most of my knowledge about it is second-hand at best. But even then I’m pretty sure I’ve learned enough to know that some of the ways the conflict has been presented in the popular imagination can be misleading at best (and outright wrong at worst). Note that I was actually planning to write this for an Indonesian audience, but I’m writing this in English first because I usually find it easier to sort out complex ideas in that language before translating them into Indonesian (as opposed to writing them in Indonesian from the get-go).

Maybe the lowest-hanging fruit out of all those media takes is the sensational idea that, thanks to the proliferation of armed UAS and loitering munitions, now “the tank is dead” or “tanks have been rendered obsolete” somehow. It’s almost not worth debunking since we’ve been seeing the same idea touted repeatedly with every new development in antitank weaponry, tactics, procedures, or whatever, and it has been proved wrong pretty much each and every time. Seriously. It’s just about as old as the tank itself, starting with the equivocal performance of British tanks in their combat debut at Flers-Courcelette (1916). The next major episode was probably the one related to the development and adaptation of dive-bombing to attack enemy bunkers/strongpoints and tank reserves gathering behind the front in the 1930s; this is pretty comical in hindsight since we now know from the German experience in the Spanish Civil War and World War II that yes, dive-bombers worked well against enemy tanks, but they were only really effective when there were also friendly tanks to exploit the disruption they caused (see the thing about combined arms below). Then it surfaced again with nuclear warfare in the 1940s and 50s, and once more it turned out to be quite comical in hindsight since people soon realised that tanks were some of the most survivable weapon systems on the nuclear battlefield if equipped with the appropriate CBRN protection. Antitank missiles in the 1960s and 70s presented a much more serious threat, but most certainly not an insurmountable one; for instance, Israeli tankers during the Yom Kippur War (1973) didn’t need all that long to develop countermeasures against the 9M14 Malyutka (AT-3 Sagger) missiles used by their Egyptian adversaries, such as the “Sagger dance” (driving in zigzags and other irregular movements to make it more difficult for the missile operator to track the tank) and simply returning fire at known or likely launch sites in the hopes of disrupting the missile operator’s concentration. These countermeasures may not have entirely negated the threat but at the very least they managed to restore some measure of parity between the tank and the antitank missile team in terms of their ability to neutralise each other. And of course US experience in the (Second) Gulf War against Iraq clearly highlighted the repeating theme that antitank missiles (whether launched from the ground or from the air) tended to work best when there were also friendly tanks around.

I guess the main issue with this kind of “tankz is ded” reporting comes from the naive assumption that tanks are supposed to be invulnerable or something. The fact is they never were; there have always been weapons capable of gaining asymmetric advantage over the tank for as long as the tank itself has existed. Indeed, developments in tank warfare (not only in terms of technology, but also tactics and arguably even rear-area procedures like repair and refuelling) were usually driven by the need to overcome these threats. The Western Allies in World War II learned to smother German anti-tank guns with artillery fire or airstrikes (or both) as soon as those guns revealed their position by opening fire. The Germans similarly learned to disperse and camouflage their tanks more carefully to reduce the risk of being spotted and targeted by Allied airpower (including — or maybe especially — artillery observation aircraft). When the Israelis decided to design and produce their own tanks, those tanks (i.e. the Merkava series) incorporated the lessons from the 1973 encounters with antitank missiles by incorporating features to disrupt missile guidance (such as smoke projectors) and to resist the shaped-charge warheads commonly used by both infantry antitank weapons (such as the Soviet/Russian RPG-7) and antitank missiles. Even the US Army in the 21st century is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into admitting that maybe its armoured and mechanised assets need to be protected by a much larger number and variety of short-range air defence (SHORAD) assets after all, what with the possibility of fighting without air supremacy on one hand and the increasing threat from unmanned platforms on the other.

The other side of the coin is that tanks have never been particularly effective when they weren’t used as an integral part of a combined-arms system anyway. Both the Soviets and the Germans learned this the hard way during the Spanish Civil War; numerous tank offensives failed when the defenders successfully separated attacking tanks from their supporting infantry by laying down mortar and artillery barrages that the tanks could drive through with minimal losses but the infantry couldn’t. With the friendly infantry lagging behind, the tanks became extremely vulnerable to ambushes by antitank guns at long ranges and enemy infantry up close. Similarly, British defensive tactics during the North African campaign in World War II emphasised that infantry facing an enemy tank attack shouldn’t try to stop the tanks on their own, but rather let the tanks pass and then engage the supporting infantry so that those enemy infantry would get separated from the tanks; this way, antitank defences in the rear would have had an easier time dealing with the Axis tanks (and the British frontline infantry might even be able to turn around and attack the tanks from the rear once they had succesfully driven off the Axis infantry). Later in Normandy, British shortages in infantry replacements during the Normandy campaign forced them to launch Operation Goodwood as a very tank-heavy offensive with inadequate infantry support, with the result that the British tanks took far heavier losses than they should have. Much later, during the Iran-Iraq War, there was the unfortunately little-known tank battle near Susangerd (1981), where a major Iranian tank attack proceeded with practically no infantry support (since the infantry, already numerically inadequate, was stuck behind a bridge destroyed by Iraqi air attack) and was massacred by dug-in Iraqi tanks and mechanised infantry.

None of these mean that the tank is useless. It’s still a very powerful platform when used properly, and one thing people tend to forget is that the tank tends to be more survivable than the infantry as a general rule. Casualty statistics from Normandy show that infantry soldiers were at least twice or three times as likely to get wounded or killed than armoured vehicle crews (especially tank crews) under similar combat conditions. It’s something we see during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict too. Reliable casualty figures are hard to come by, but let’s be lazy by using the total military deaths quoted in the Wikipedia article (4025 reported killed on the Armenian side, 2908 on the Azerbaijani side) and compare them to vehicle losses documented through OSINT (open-source intelligence) at Oryxspioenkop. And to tilt the odds against the tank, let’s unfairly assume that all tank crews were killed when a tank was destroyed and half of them were killed when the tank was damaged or captured (let’s say three men dead per destroyed tank and one and a half for every one damaged or captured), even though the real survival rates were probably rather higher than that. This gives us about 580.5 tank crewmen lost on the Armenian side (let’s round it up to 581) and 132 on the Azerbaijani side. Even with this unfair weighting, tank crewmen only made up less than 15% of the deaths on the Armenian side and less than 5% on the Azerbaijani side. These numbers were no doubt significantly lower than the percentage of comparable losses among the infantry. (And yes, I know I should be comparing them proportionally instead — whether the tanks made up a higher or lower percentage of the losses than the percentage they made up among the forces actually involved in combat — but data on that is even harder to some by.)

Bottom line? No, the use of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) and loitering munitions as seen in the Nagorno-Karabakh war hasn’t rendered tanks obsolete. If anything, it has given a savvy commander an additional item to add to the usual toolkit of combined-arms warfare — alongside the tank and other less novel weapon systems. But then how do the new weapon systems work within this context?

Well, it’s getting quite late here (going all the way into the early morning hours, as a matter of fact), so I guess I’ll save that for another time.

Tactics for Dummies: Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part IV: Why Do We Need Units?

Now, I guess, would be a good time to synthesise the things I’ve previously explained in Part I and Part III (the latter of which would have been Part II if not for the digression on wedges). And for that we’re going to move to a slightly larger scale. Let’s use this line, with four groups of nine individuals each:

Now imagine we’re marching the line forward — but whoops. There’s an obstacle lying in the path of the blue group.

This is where the division of the line into several sub-units really comes in handy. Instead of the entire line getting stuck at the obstacle, now it’s only the blue unit that has to solve the problem of how to get ahead. In this case, let’s use one of the simplest solutions, where the blue leader moves to the clear end of the blue sector while the other units continue forwards.

From this point Blue Leader can resume the march while the rest of the unit “snakes” in into a file behind them. This time I’m going to remove the shadow of the units’ old positions to declutter the image.

Thoughts on the (not-so-)new Indonesian “Tank Boat” (North Sea Boats/Lundin X-18 Antasena)

The so-called Indonesian “Tank Boat” (officially named the X18 Antasena) has been in development for quite a few years now — in fact, I remember seeing an early mock-up at the IndoDefence exhibition as far back as 2016, and news about its initial development date back even further. But it’s back in the news in late May 2021 with the conclusion of its sea trials and live-fire tests (though not with the turret and armament shown in most of its promotional materials — more on this later). So I guess this would be a good time to gather my thoughts about it in one place.

First, a picture to show what it looks like. And no, I didn’t forget to remove the NSB logo and menu bar by mistake — I specifically left them in there to show that it’s a screengrab from Lundin/NSB’s official site. I hope it counts as fair use, but in any case do visit their site for the official specs.

On Reconnaissance and Battlefield Intelligence in Valkyria Chronicles (Operation Cloudburst/Battle of the Bridge)

For today’s post, I’m going to take a trip down memory lane and talk about Valkyria Chronicles, a game I used to play — or to be strictly correct, one I mostly used to watch while other people played, though I played a fair amount of it myself. I’m choosing it because some of those gaming sessions sparked interesting discussions about military science and its representation in popular culture, and none more so than the fourth chapter in the game (titled Operation Cloudburst, with the actual combat mission being named Battle for the Bridge). And I’m not even going to discuss the entire chapter or mission here — one scene from the briefing alone should give us plenty of material to go by.

Let’s start with a little background information. The player takes the role of Welkin Gunther, a lieutenant in the militia forces of a fictional country called Gallia. For the most part Welkin commands Squad 7 of Captain Eleanor Varrot’s 3rd Militia Regiment. Readers with some familiarity might notice something odd here; why is a lieutenant commanding a squad, and why is he directly under the command of the regimental headquarters with several levels of command (most notably the platoon and the company, probably also the battalion) missing in between? On the other hand, what is a captain doing at the head of an entire regiment when it’s a command normally assigned to a much higher rank? I think some of the nuances involved might have been lost in translation from the original Japanese version of the game, and in practice it’s much easier to treat Welkin as a platoon leader (and his “squad” as more of an understrength platoon than a real squad) while Captain Varrot’s actual role in the game slots much more neatly into the billet of a company commander, which happens to be a good fit for her actual rank too.

At this point in the story, Gallia had been invaded by the neighbouring Empire, and the Imperial troops had seized large portions of Gallian territory in their drive towards the Gallian capital of Randgriz. The major Gallian city of Vasel lies along one of the principal avenues of approach towards Randgriz, and the Imperial invasion force had seized the Great Bridge of Vasel linking the two halves of the city before a counterattack by Squad 7 (in the previous chapter/mission) stopped them from expanding their bridgehead on the near bank. Now Squad 7 has been ordered to seize this momentum and launch a counterattack to retake the bridge. During the orders group with Captain Varrot, Lieutenant Faldio Landzaat — leader of Squad 1, Squad 7’s sister platoon in the “Regiment” — correctly remarks that the mission is suicidal since there’s no way that Welkin’s platoon would have enough mass to accomplish the task on its own. This then leads to the following exchange between Welkin and Varrot:

Tactics for Dummies: Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part III: Tactical Articulation

The previous posts in this series (parts one and two) have mostly been discussing how to handle single groups of fighting personnel. But sometimes the task at hand requires us to split the force into two or more smaller elements, and now we’re going to take a look (heavily simplified, as usual) into how it can be done.

Now imagine you’re the leader of this small group of combat personnel. Let’s mark you off from the rest of the people in this group as the gold/yellow pip.

Yes, yes, some of you might argue that you’re not stupid enough to volunteer for such an assignment, but bear with me for the moment.

Now assume there’s a hill in the distance that you’d like to occupy, but you don’t think you’d need the whole force to do it. So you grab a few people and lead them to that hill.

So far so good, right? But then you go back to the place where you left the rest of the group . . . .

Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part II: Wedges

No, not potato wedges. I know we’re all hungry but bear with me. Remember the previous post on changing formations between the line and the column/file? More specifically, this illustration on what happens when a line attempts to march forwards without redeploying into a file?

You might have noticed that the three figures in the centre were forming into a wedge. Indeed, this is what often happens when a line has to travel forwards a considerable distance without stopping to dress the formation — it tends to break up into a number of smaller wedge-like clumps, as shown in this illustration starting from a similar situation but taken one step further:

Tactics for Dummies: Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part I

This is going to be yet another redo of my old writing rants and tutorials on military stuff for fantasy and science fiction (and historical fiction to some extent, I guess, since the examples tend to be taken from history). It doesn’t correspond directly to any of the articles on the old site, though, since I realised there were some basics I had simply failed to cover there, and this is one of them. I’m going to call it “Manoeuvre is Hard.” Or maybe an even more dumbed-down version: “Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard.” Because it is. I know, I know. I don’t want to fall into the Clausewitzian cliché that everything in war is simple, but everything simple is difficult. The problem is that it became a cliché because it’s true.

For this first installment, we’re not even going to get into a battlefield at all. Or at least pretend that the opponent isn’t doing anything to harm us directly. They’re there, and we may feel their threat, but they’re not hurting us. Yet.

Now, one of the simplest kinds of fighting formations is the line. It puts the maximum number of people and weapons facing forwards where they can hurt the enemy (and, well, be hurt, but remember we’re pretending it’s not happening yet).

Looks like there’s nothing wrong, right? Not if the line stays and fights in place. But let’s say we have a line and the enemy is still some distance away. So we decide to march the line forwards. What happens?

Now the line is a mess. This is because a line formation is inherently difficult to control. One’s comrades are to either side and can only be seen by turning the head to the left and right (especially in a helmet that cuts down on peripheral vision), so each person or element within the line must split their attention between looking forwards along the line of march and to either side in order to keep track of the other elements. In addition, people have different natural walking/marching paces and they tend to drift towards their own most comfortable speed when they’re not paying extremely close attention to how far they’re falling behind or pulling ahead of their comrades on the line. This means a line has an inherent tendency to lose its alignment during a long movement unless it stops frequently to dress the formation. Marching in cadence or in lockstep helps, but the loss of alignment still happens eventually; and if the line halts to dress, it slows down its own progress, gives the enemy an opportunity to act while it’s halted, and all other kinds of nasty things. So it’s better to perform long marches in column formation instead — or, in this instance, a particularly simple variant known as the file.