[HN Gopher] War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
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War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
Author : plat12
Score : 91 points
Date : 2020-10-23 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| jungletime wrote:
| I would like to see wild elephants in a national park in the US.
| You can't really say they are not part of the eco system when
| mammoths only disappeared during the last ice age. Its basically
| the difference between a hairless cat. There are still plants
| around that relied on elephants to propagate them (osage orange)
| nickbauman wrote:
| _" Moreover, the Roman elephants were smaller African elephants,
| effectively useless against the large Asian elephants the
| Seleucids used"_
|
| I thought African elephants were larger than Asian elephants?
| rendall wrote:
| I was _just_ coming here to comment on this. The blog _is_
| "Unmitigated Pedantry" after all so I think this kind of detail
| would be appreciated
| strulovich wrote:
| It is mentioned in one of the captions.
| z3phyr wrote:
| There were two kinds of African Elephants; one from North
| Africa were domesticated and became extinct due to
| overexploitation. North African elephants were very small and
| lightly built compared to Asian varieties.
|
| The White African Elephants of the Savanah, to which we all are
| familiar were never domesticated.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > were domesticated and became extinct due to
| overexploitation
|
| That would be a highly unusual trajectory.
|
| Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never
| domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to
| capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it
| takes to rear a calf in captivity.
|
| And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to
| extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the
| animal would be.
| DavidAdams wrote:
| My guess is that these elephants weren't actually
| domesticated, but rather tamed. That is, as with Asian
| elephants, they were captured in the wild rather than
| raised in captivity.
| smogcutter wrote:
| It's interesting that his analysis of war elephants has a lot of
| parallels to his thoughts about chemical weapons. In the hands of
| a sufficiently advanced military, both are an expensive,
| complicated solution in search of a problem, and both are easily
| neutralized by a peer competitor.
|
| https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
| padobson wrote:
| _both are easily neutralized by a peer competitor._
|
| This is what I was thinking the whole time. Rome was surrounded
| by peer competitors, and OP says their most effective use of
| elephants was against non-peer competitors like Spain or Gaul.
|
| So why would competitors continue to use elephants? Not because
| Roma was susceptible, but because THEIR boarder competitors
| were susceptible.
|
| Elephants were not worth it to defeat well-trained troops, but
| were more than worth it to defeat smaller, less disciplined
| armies/militias.
|
| My guess is that Rome's peers were often using elephants to
| keep smaller competitors in check, and only used them against
| Rome because they happen to have them anyway.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| > So why would competitors continue to use elephants?
|
| Not specifically for Rome's competitors, but elephants were
| kept also for prestige reasons in other regions, as described
| in this follow-up article:
|
| https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-
| part...
| mcguire wrote:
| IIRC, horses.
|
| Cavalry can't be used around elephants unless the horses are
| specifically trained to be around elephants. Rome itself of
| the Republican/early Imperial era didn't use cavalry,
| although some of their allies did. As a hypothesis, those
| using elephants may have been fighting entities that used
| cavalry.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >>in order to produce mass casualties in battlefield
| conditions, a chemical attacker has to deploy tons - and I mean
| that word literally - of this stuff.
|
| While I do agree with much of what this guy has to say about
| elephants, he is totally wrong about chemical weapons. We don't
| use mustard gas because it would indeed require tons of gas and
| be ineffective, but chemical weapons have evolved in the last
| _100 years_. Modern chemical weapons do not need tons.
|
| Novichok literally translates to "new thing". Such nerve agents
| were developed in the 60s/70s/80s. Infinitesimal amounts of
| this stuff will kill. Hazmat suits and gas masks are irrelevant
| when one _gram_ might contain 5000 lethal doses.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok_agent#Effects_and_cou...
| smogcutter wrote:
| The wikipedia article for sarin gas is also extremely
| frightening, but the example Bret gives of the Tokyo subway
| attack shows that it's probably less effective than
| advertised in a modern military context. The bar isn't "is
| this stuff deadly", it's is it deadly enough to overcome the
| expense, complication, and incompatibility with highly mobile
| modern doctrine to make it worth using on a militarily
| relevant scale over conventional options.
|
| I'm certainly no expert, so I'm not going to go any further
| with "is this poison poisonous enough", but that wikipedia
| article at least doesn't seem to make the case.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The tokyo attack was unprofessional. A military attack
| would be exponentially more effective. Sarin is also tame
| compared to some of the more nasty stuff out there.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Is it nastier than a conventional explosive weapon,
| though, at least for military purposes?
| jcranmer wrote:
| How would militaries be exponentially more effective? As
| far as I'm aware, the military can't magically change the
| laws of gaseous diffusion.
| Retric wrote:
| A major avenue of research in chemical weapons was
| efficient delivery.
| https://fas.org/programs/bio/chemweapons/delivery.html
|
| But to simplify, you don't just release a gas on it's own
| you need a dispersal system like an explosive.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Well, how much does it take to create a cloud of poisonous
| gas that is sufficiently concentrated to induce lethality and
| also spreads reasonably quickly that people can't escape it?
|
| Bret gives the example of the Tokyo terrorist attack that
| released sarin in several crowded subway cars... and killed
| 12 people. Grenades would have killed far more people far
| more quickly... and that's the point: chemical weapons are
| far less effective at delivering death than explosives are.
|
| Edit: Wikipedia gives 7mg/m3 for a lethal concentration for
| one of the Novichok agents, 28mg/m3 for sarin.
| Retric wrote:
| Dispersal is a well studied problem:
| https://fas.org/programs/bio/chemweapons/delivery.html
|
| But to simplify, cluster mutinous are more effective vs
| troops than a single large detonation. Similarly, rather
| than starting from a single source you want to spread the
| weapon from a large number of points. By comparison to
| 7mg/m3 a 1 metric ton weapon could ideally cover a square
| kilometer to a thickness of 30m and concentration of
| 30mg/m3.
|
| Notably, exposure time plays a major role in lethality so
| covering a wider area makes it much harder to escape from.
| autocorr wrote:
| That's not the main point in the series on chemical weapons
| though. The main point is that modern armies are mobile and
| well equipped ("the modern system") and that chemical weapons
| are only well suited to stationary, fixed opponents that are
| poorly equipped. However, if you are fighting fixed position,
| poorly equipped opponents there are better and cheaper
| alternatives that pose less of a risk of self-harm (and war
| crimes).
|
| In both the posts about elephants and chemical weapons, the
| theme is the same: they are not useful nor practical given
| the circumstances so the states make the rational decision
| not to use them.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It's interesting that his analysis of war elephants has a lot
| of parallels to his thoughts about chemical weapons.
|
| Well, both technologies find themselves in the same situation;
| they are well understood by the militaries of their day, and
| those militaries have no interest in using them. It's not
| surprising that the same results might come about for the same
| reasons.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| During early wars between Islamic army vs Persian army in 634 AD,
| war elephants were crucial strategic weapons employed on the
| Persian side to rattle the horses of their opponents as the
| horses of Islamic army had never seen an elephant before.
|
| Though the strategy worked, Persian side still lost as the
| Islamic army regrouped and specifically targeted the carriage
| harness to topple the rider, blinded the elephants and made them
| run amok causing disarray within Persian faction or straight away
| killed the elephants with skilled warriors[1].
|
| [1]https://youtu.be/r2cEIDZwG5M?t=3863
| fakedang wrote:
| To be fair to the Persian elephants, a large part of the
| Islamic victory against Persia was not because of any superior
| skill but because of severe infighting among the Persians. When
| the Arabs invaded, Persia was literally in the middle of a
| civil war. Soldiers and generals would betray their commanders
| midway during battles, and there was often zero coordination.
|
| The Romans on the other hand... lots of hubris and
| underestimating. There were some brilliant strategies employed
| by the Arab generals that are even thought in military schools
| to this day. For example, the time when Khalid bin Walid
| conquered the walled city of Antioch - without siege weaponry,
| but by drawing the Romans out by cunning.
| faitswulff wrote:
| I'm really appreciating the video game references - literally the
| article mentions the cost of elephants relative to horses in the
| Total War and Imperator series:
|
| > Let's take Total War: Rome II as an example: a unit of Roman
| (auxiliary) African elephants (12 animals), costs 180 upkeep,
| compared to 90 to 110 upkeep for 80 horses of auxiliary cavalry
| (there are quite a few types) - so one elephant (with a mahout)
| costs 15 upkeep against around 1.25 for a horse and rider (a 12:1
| ratio). Paradox's Imperator does something similar, with a single
| unit of war elephants requiring 1.08 upkeep, compared to just
| 0.32 for light cavalry; along with this, elephants have a heavy
| 'supply weight' - twice that of an equivalent number of cavalry
| (so something like a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of cost).
|
| > Believe it or not, this understates just how hungry - and
| expensive - elephants are. The standard barley ration for a Roman
| horse was 7kg of barley per day (7 Attic medimnoi per month; Plb.
| 6.39.12); this would be supplemented by grazing. Estimates for
| the food requirements of elephants vary widely (in part, it is
| hard to measure the dietary needs of grazing animals), but
| elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food
| per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian
| elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing
| and fodder - and remember, the preference in war elephants is for
| large, mature adult males, meaning that most war elephants will
| be towards the top of this range. Accounting for some grazing
| (probably significantly less than half of dietary needs) a large
| adult male elephant is thus likely to need something like 15 to
| 30 times the food to sustain itself as a stable-fed horse.
| fakedang wrote:
| Can confirm.
|
| Back in India, my grandparents had a driver who later won the
| lottery. He used the winnings to buy two elephants, what he
| thought were a good investment (elephants are regularly rented
| out for expensive sums to temples for functions and
| celebrations).
|
| Now he's a driver once more. But he has two elephants tho.
| bitbckt wrote:
| Many of his video game or (current, pop) cultural references
| seem to stem from the challenges he faces teaching students for
| whom these references are their only exposure to pre-modern
| ideas.
|
| But they are fun. :)
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Livy - who appears to be quoting Polybius, a contemporary of
| the battle - is quite clear what he thinks of the elephants, "For
| as new inventions often have great force in the words of men, but
| when tried, when they need to work, and not just have their
| working described, they evaporate without any effect - just so
| the war elephants were just a name without any real use." (Liv
| 44.41.4, my rough translation)._ "
|
| Livy's comments apply to so many things....
| ekanes wrote:
| Definitely interesting, but the post isn't about elephants vs
| wolves (no wolves are mentioned!) but about why the Romans didn't
| adopt the use of elephants in war.
|
| TLDR; Despite being theoretically SUPERBADASS (my words),
| elephants are only somewhat effective against prepared armies,
| but are expensive and hard to maintain, especially compared to
| horses.
| z3phyr wrote:
| The Wolves are representative of the Romans!
|
| Legend has it that the founders of Rome were raised by a she
| wolf! A lot of roman cultural items have an imagery of the she
| wolf.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_and_Remus
| ekanes wrote:
| Oh, of course. Sigh. Thanks.
| smogcutter wrote:
| The wolves in this case are the Romans themselves (The wolf
| being a symbol of Rome thanks to the Romulus and Remus myth).
| republican light infantry wore wolf pelts, and legionary
| standard bearers wore animal pelt headdresses, including
| wolves.
| ekanes wrote:
| Thanks!
| wavefunction wrote:
| And the elephants were explicitly linked to three war-elephant
| using states absorbed by the Roman Empire, Carthage, Ptolemaic
| Egypt and the Seleucid Empire.
| doytch wrote:
| If anyone is new to his blog and finds this series entertaining,
| his series on Sparta is amazing and incredibly insightful:
| https://acoup.blog/tag/sparta/
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