Would mission command, squad tactics etc. make sense in an ancient or medieval setting?

Question

In my setting I want my isolationist, low-manpower city state or duchy to turn the tables on an invading empire --which employs rigid/ritualistic tactics similar in spirit to the phalanx-- through overwhelmingly superior military organization.

Now any drastic changes to massed cavalry and infantry lining up and smashing at each other took the horrifying combination of highly advanced firearms and a world war fought with traditional tactics. That being said I do not see firearms as the block here.

Training and communication seem like bigger issues to maintain cohesion as opposed to just lining people up and telling them to march in a direction. Which are also solvable in such a setting without hand-waving.

So is there anything I am failing to consider?

Answer 1

The place to look would be the Prussian reform movement of the late Napoleonic wars. This is one of the few armies in history to manage anything close to what you are asking for. What this suggests is that you have three primary problems in your setting:

Economics

Why did no one in northern Europe field Phalanxes? Or why was Rome able to adopt the maniple? For these two questions, the answer is economics. These tactical developments required time to train in. This time could not be spent farming, so required agricultural surplices over substance farming that northern Europe could not provide. So you will need to answer the question of where the food and equipment comes from, for a significant proportion of your population to spend there entire lives learning, training and preparing for war, in addition to spending there entire professional lives as soldiers. This was a big constraint in armys up until the renaissance. Rome is one of the few known large states to have a professional army prior to the renaissance. Your Phylanx using invading empire can afford to have its troops at home in the key periods of spring and autumn to farm. Only coming out to campaign in the summer when the crops are growing.

Note that going from Phylanx level to the level of initiative you are talking about is something that will take decades due to the need to first educate enough people to do the training, and then train all of your soldiers from what is effectively primary level education.

Culture

The next problem is culture. Initiative in an organization interacts directly with the culture of authority and rewards. Do people expect there leaders to consult them and listen to their ideas, or do they expect to by punished for speaking out of place? You need a state where the individuals involved feel engaged in the goal of the campaign. Since your setting is an invasion, patriotism should help here. However, they can't be motivated purely by patriotism, as this would not explain how the army would have fostered initiative prior to the invasion, as this is not something that is easy to introduce. As for rewards, you need a society with a minimal level of meritocracy so that the people given these lower ranked positions actually are competent enough to run a squad and want to take risks so they can advance. Finally you need enough education that you have a large enough pool of competent people to command such positions. Most classical cultures didn't educate enough people to provide such a pool.

Weapons

In order for initiative to be useful, you need a way to translate that initiative into damage. This means that you smallest unit of combat must be capable of performing enough damage to overcome an opponent groups defense. This means something ranged like a bow or gun. Its only really in the late 19th into 20th century that guns become accurate enough and have high enough rates of fire for a group split into squads to perform enough morale damage to break a groups charge.

Answer 2

Ancient armies were not stupid. Their tactics balance their goals, their constraints, their information available, and their resources available...just like ours do today.

Medieval tactics were generally built around horses as the kings of the battlefield. Infantry formations were designed to protect from fast-moving cavalry attacks (pikemen, for example). When horses and archers were superseded by more-deadly artillery and machine guns and tanks, the infantry formations changed from massed formations to dispersed formations.

It's a wonderful thought that a small unit could peel off a larger formation to take advantage of some weakness, but it rarely worked in practice: Small infantry units would be hacked apart by much-faster cavalry, decimated by arrows, and finally rolled-over by a larger infantry formation. Mass was not power - mass was survivability. Mass and maneuver together were power.

You can fight a medieval battle based on mobility and surprise and economy of force over the more common mass (look up Jomini for the principles of war). Usually this means sowing confusion among the enemy, using deception to mislead the enemy generals, and using a shorter decision cycle than the enemy in order to act/react faster than they can. However, that kind of fight requires greater training and preparation...and one of the key constraints of most combatants is the cost of those preparations.

Historically, if you can afford to pay a smaller force to train for months, then you can also afford to pay a much larger less-trained force. Recall that the biggest killer in medieval wars was disease, not combat. Also surprise can be very hard to achieve, especially if enemy spies see your army training. The smaller force tends to have less capacity to absorb the unexpected. So it's not surprising that many leaders chose to go for mass over more complex strategies. Simplicity in an era of slow and unreliable communications can also be a big advantage.

Generally, most of medieval Europe was too impoverished and squalid to be worth the monumental cost of a Big-Empire campaign of invasion and conquest. Instead, think about small campaigns to influence succession, or to force a neighbor to part with a barony or two. Different combatants, whether ancient or modern, may have different political goals for the conflict...and while both may want to extend their influence, that influence might not involve conquest at all. If that's confusing, then you just haven't read enough Shakespeare.

Answer 3

The situation with the ancient Greek Phalanx is ore complicated than the OP seems to think. the Phalanx isn't "just" a tactical formation, but also encapsulates the social order of Classical Greece as well. One might wonder why the Greeks evolved such a formation given the argumentative and relatively individualistic (for the time) culture of classical Greece.

Members of the Phalanx were mostly middle class farmers, with some townspeople and tradesmen thrown into the mix. The arms and equipment were about equivalent to buying a new car in Purchasing Power Parity terms, firmly excluding the poor, while horses were rare and far more expensive in ancient Greece, so the domain of the aristocracy. A wall of fully equipped farmers with bronze helmets, 3' diameter shields locked together and protected by bronze breastplates, greaves and other metal armour was essentially immune to the weapons that the poor could bring to battle (stones, javelins etc.) as well as the thrown javelins of the aristocratic cavalry (stirrup mounted shock cavalry was 1000 years in the future).

Standing together as equals on the battlefield and unable to be defeated or driven off by the rich or the poor, Greek farmers could also stand together as equals in the Agora and eventually in the Ekklasia to create and enforce the rules and laws of their communities.

The Classical Phalanx was also able to co-opt the poor and aristocrats as part of the formation; for example cavalry tended to operate to protect the flanks, while "Peltasts" drawn from the ranks of the poor attempted to harry the flanks or disorganize the enemy Phalanx when it was on the move, and thus more vulnerable to being crushed by an organized advance by the opposing Phalanx.

Peltast

The Phalanx was also capable of some limited tactical manouevre, although only the Spartans, who drilled full time, were capable of really exploiting the possibilities of a Phalanx. The Theban Boeotarch Epaminondas also introduced very innovative tactics that turned the traditional Phalanx from a solid line of troops arrayed 8 deep into an articulated formation, defeating the Spartans using these tactics at the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC), and then invading Laconia and overthrowing Spartan rule there as well, before dying at the Battle of Mantinea (362 BC).

"Special Forces" also existed in various Greek polities during the period. The Spartans had a 300 man elite corps who served as the King's guard and stood at the right of the line to anchor the Spartan Phalanx and prevent it from drifting to the right, while the Thebans created the "Sacred Band", a 300 man strong striking force made of paired homosexual lovers. The Sacred Band detached itself from the main body of the Theban force during the Battle of Leuctra and struck the Spartan flank, preventing them from carrying out some sort of countermarch or manouevre while the main body of the Thebans bore down on them.

In terms of the concept of "Mission Command", independent commanders generally could only receive general instructions from their Ekklasia, and the various elements of a Greek Army would be unable to communicate with each other during the encounter, so the local Stratigoi would need to be able to assess the situation and take whatever action they felt was appropriate. The charge of the "Sacred Band", for example, is said to have been triggered by Pelopidas observing the Spartans beginning to countermarch, rather than any sort of command given by Epaminondas during the actual battle.

So although the idea of "Mission Command" may not have been formalized in the manner we think of it today, the basic elements of the concept did exist.

Answer 4

The constraints as written...are not the best so forgive me for taking the liberties of adding some variables since I think everyone else has done plenty on highlighting the strengths of something employing a phalanx as a conquering method and the use of cavalry and ranged units against it.

First of all I shall point out the latter two are very effective due to the fact the phalanx is fundamentally weak to having to pivot so a highly mobile enemy is one it isn't good against and the advantage of hitting a foe beyond their range is something i dont think requires elaboration.

Economics has come up a bit, and I'll just add a small note: conquest is expensive, and to use Rome the classic example as the...classic example there were quite literally entire periods where the economy of the nation existed solely to fuel the military conquest of other lands in hopes of an influx of the local populaces riches...maintaining an army is expensive - especially at great distance and/or inconvenient terrain. This is important because a small low-manpower state like you mentioned is highly unlikely to be a good target which would make the invasion very unpopular...history shows expensive and unpopular decisions typically leads to governments being overthrown.

This in turn means that while a well organized guerilla style engagement can bog down the invasion and "win" by using terrain for ambushes and even potentially "calculated" disasters like a manufactured landslide or dam break in very niche situations (low manpower really ties hands here), or even doing things like intentionally leaving things like fine wines and foods after "evacuating" that have been poisoned to ruin command structure...and appear to win. The ultimate victory will probably be because the empire decides the gains do not justify expense or the current emperor is deposed entirely.

However to not entirely toss the notion of our brave underdog to the wind...there is one other option and that would require us to take some inspiration from the Russians...you let a harsh winter wipe out the enemy and you harass the army just enough that it can't flee properly...Operation Uranus if you want a name. Essentially, your small army baits the enemy deep into their turf for a nasty winter to make a long march back, sends the bulk of the for around to encircle and harry them the entire walk back so they die cold, hungry and tired assuming your regular raids and attacks to keep the miserable the whole trip doesnt kill the individual first...but even this will be a very ugly "victory" for your underdog.

Answer 5

FRAME CHALLENGE:

I think your basic idea is flawed because since your invading military force employing a phalanx or similar formation is demonstrating the highest level, for that period of time, of military organization.

Their soldiers will need to be trained very well trained so they can recognize the trumpets, flags, shouted orders that tell the formation to start moving, stop moving, wheel left or right or rotate right or left. Also, the soldiers need to be trained to act properly in combat so the formation maintains its integrity during combat.

Your defenders can defeat the invaders through superior use of terrain and logistics and possessing greater es spirit de corps (commitment, resilience, and aggression).

If your invading army was less sophisticated and doesn't use phalanx-like formations then your question would be more consistent. For instance, their forces lined up in a battle line in groups by function -- archers, slingers, cavalry and infantry -- and then attack as groups and not in combined simultaneous attacks.

Answer 6

Communication technology is important. Modern tactics presuppose that radios are cheap, light and reliable. You can disperse a hundred small squads over some rough terrain and have them all keep in regular contact with headquarters, which may also be receiving reports from aerial or satellite surveillance.

If rapid communication means blowing horns, and detailed communication means sending runners, you can't coordinate a force like that. Not only do you get chaos, but each squad will feel alone and lose morale.