Historical Facts

Modern War
Modern war is the product of three distinct kinds of change-administrative technical and ideological. Not all of these can be seen in any straightforward was as ‘progress’, though they seem to be irreversible.

Nor have they developed at the same pace.

Military technology has produced the most striking and indeed terrifying symbols of modern war: the machine gun, the rocket, the atomic bomb.

The increased in power and sophistication of weapon system has been exponential.

Between the first general adoption of efficient forearms in these seventeenth century and the production of breech-loading guns and smokeless propellants in the middle of the nineteenth, the pace of change was slow.

Improvements in technique (professionalism, training, and tactics), rather in technology, brought the most substantial results. Later the balance altered.

Technological change may appear to be an independent process, governed only by an extent of scientific knowledge and the limits of science and manufacturing.

But military institutions have tended to be conservative than other social groups. Soldiers have seldom been in the forefront of technological development, and more often reluctant to welcome new weapons.

Tradition has always been important in fostering the esprit de corps of fighting units, and can lead to fossilization.

So can the tendency – actually increased by professionalization, which removed young princes and nobles from high command – for senior officers to be substantially older than their junior.

They are many striking examples of failure to embrace new technology, none perhaps more disastrous than that of the imperial Chinese navy, which could have had the world’s most advanced naval artillery in the early sixteenth century, but rejected it in favor of traditional ramming and boarding tactics.
Modern War

War in History
War has been a sensational topic. Warfare concentrates and intensifies some of our strongest emotions; courage and fear, resignation and panic, selfishness and self-sacrifice, greed and generosity, patriotism and xenophobia.

The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity, improvisation, cooperation, vandalism and cruelty.

It is the riskiest field on which to match wits and luck: no peaceful endeavor can equal its penalties for failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success.

It remains the most theatrical of human activities combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce and even low comedy.

War displays the human condition in extremes.

It is thus not surprising that the first recovered histories, the first written accounts of the exploits of mortals, are military histories.

The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs record the victories of Egypt’s first pharaohs, the Scorpion King and Narmer.

The first secular literature or history recorded in cuneiform recounts the adventures of the Sumerian warrior king Gilgamesh.

The earliest written part of the Books f Moses, the “J-strand”, culminate in the brutal Hebrew conquest of Canaan.

The annals of the Chinese, Greeks, and Roman are concerned with wars and warrior king.

Most Mayan hieroglyphic texts are devoted to the genealogies, biographies and military exploits of Mayan kings.
War in History

The Habsburg Bid For Mastery
France was an early leader in applying the new military technology in Europe, Spain and Portugal led the way it exporting it abroad.

By the mid sixteenth century the Portuguese has established forts and trading stations along the coasts of Africa, India, China and the East Indies and South America and the Spanish had carved out a large empire in the New World.

These outposts, which return great wealth to the Iberian Peninsula, would not have been possible without some vital military innovations.

The Portuguese and Spanish reached the Americas, Asia and Africa by utilizing oceangoing, sail-driven galleons; they never could have made it in the oar-driven galleys of old.

Once they arrived, steel blades, crossbows cannons and arquebuses allowed the Iberians to make short work of native opposition.

Even after half a millennium, the feats of the conquistadors defy belief. Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec empire with eight hundred men and eighty horses.

Francisco Pizarro defeated the Inca Empire with just 180 men and eighty horses. Native allies and the spread of European disease helped a great deal, but it was the Spaniards’ military technology that made the difference – otherwise the Aztec and Inca Empires would have been overthrown long before their native enemies.

The Spanish infantry proved almost as effective on the battlefields of Europe. In 1525 they inflicted a crushing defeat on the French at the Battle of Pavia (near Milan), ensuring that the Habsburg, not the Valois, would dominate Italy.

The head of the House of Habsburg was an Emperor Charles V. He had no conscious design to dominate Europe but his web of inheritances and acquisitions was pushing him in the same directions as those latter-day conquerors.

His domains encompass Spain, Germany Austria, Alsace, France-Comte, Bohemia, Hungary, the Netherlands, much of Italy, and the Americas.

Like his father, King Philip II saw himself as “God’s standard bearer,” defender of Christendom against “infidels” without and “heretics” within.

The battle pitting Reformation vs. Counter-Reformation was only one of many that convulsed Europe during the early modern era.

Religious rivalries melded with dynastic ones to produce a particularly bellicose age.

Between 1480 and 1700 England was involved in 29 wars, France in 34, Spain in 36 and the Holy Roman Empire in 25.

As their names imply – the Eighty Years’ War, the The Thirty Years’ War – many of these struggles were quite protracted.

All this fighting also led to the development and deployment of new tools of wars, especially cannons, muskets and galleons.

By the mid-sixteenth the Habsburg had seized for the French the early advantage in utilizing these innovations, but their lead and with it their empire – would be challenged by increasingly assertive competitors such as England, Holland and Sweden.

The ensuing battle for control of Europe and eventually the entire world would be decided in substantial measure by mastery of the tactics and technology of the Gunpowder Age.
The Habsburg Bid For Mastery

Gunpowder in Europe History
The first record of gunpowder in Europe dates from 1267, while the first record of guns from 1326.

By the end of the 1400s, thanks to advances in iron and copper mining, metallurgy and gunpowder manufacture, Europeans were making firearms in great quantity and great variety, from enormous cannons to handheld arquebuses.

If one of the essential characteristics of modernity is the substitution of chemical for muscle power, then firearms may be regarded as the first modern invention.

The spread of gunpowder was not welcome by everyone. The nobility, in particular, did not like weapons that rendered obsolete old notions of chivalry and if allowed, as one contemporary complained, “so many brave and valiant men” to be killed by “cowards and shirkers who would not dare to look in the face the men they bring down from a distance with their wretched bullets.”

Firearms were by no means a European monopoly – Mogul India, Ming China, Safavid Persia, Choson Korean, Ottoman Turkey and Tokugawa Japan also made effective use of them – but Europe early on became the worldwide leader in their production and development.

China and many other non-Western countries continued producing guns but by 1500 their weapons were markedly inferior to those being crafted in the workshops of Europe.

Even the siege guns used by the Ottoman to conquer Constantinople in 1453, including two titanic cannons firing stone projectiles weighing more than eight hundred pounds, were created not by a Turk but a Hungarian in Sultan Mehmed II’s employ.

The most immediate impact of firearms, once they became more reliable, was to end the military ascendancy of the horse archers of central Asia. Cavalrymen equipped with bows and arrows were no match for infantrymen armed with guns, and since the Mongolian nomads could not manufacture firearms of their own, their reign of terror came to an end.
Gunpowder in Europe History

The Mongol Conquests
Over the course of the centuries preceding the great revolutionary movement of the eighteenth to the twentieth century, terror was practiced above all in times of war, and almost always through recourse to the military apparatus rather than that of the police. The army has always been a formidable instrument of state terror.

Before the emergence of modern totalitarian systems, nomad warrior societies practiced large-scale terrorism with fearsome effectiveness. Of all such tribes, the Mongols were the best organized the most terrifying, and the most destructive. At the height of its power, the Mongo Empire was the largest of all time, encompassing practically the entire Eurasian continent.

The Mongols under Genghis Khan had at their disposal a military instrument that was superior to every other army of its time. This superiority was a product of their Spartan way of life, their immersion in the military arts from earliest childhood, their military organization, their mobility, and undisputed preeminence in the rigors of discipline. One further asset available to them was the systematic practice of terror against peoples.

By comparison to sedentary society, nomad society is demographically quite feeble. Thus, the superiority of the nomad warrior had nothing to do with numbers. It was through the concentration of forces and the element of surprise that nomads sought to overwhelm their adversaries as well as through the psychological impact of their attacks on populations ill prepared for such a scourge. They therefore relied in the terror they inspired in civilian populations and armies to prevent uprisings in their wake. Thus terror became a basic tool of nomad strategy of conquest.

Tamerlane was Genghis equal, in military terms, his every operation enjoying success, even though he sometimes met the same adversaries in battle on several occasion. The key characteristics of his style of warfare was his frequent assaults on great cities, including, Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo, Delhi and Ankara. His adversaries were far from negligible.

The systematic use of terror against towns was an integral element of Tamerlane’s strategic arsenal. When he besieged a city, surrender at the first warning spared its people their live. Resistance on the other hand, was brutally punished by the massacre of civilians, often in atrocious circumstances. When the sack of a city was complete, Tamerlane raised pyramids of decapitate heads. In the 1397 taking Isfahan, a city of about half million inhabitants, observers estimated the number of dead at 100,000 to 200,000.

After the massacre, Tamerlane had some fifty pyramids built, each comprised of thousands of heads. In doing so Tamerlane hoped to persuade other besieged city to surrender at firsts notice. The tactic did not always work, and many towns still refused to capitulate. After the rape of Isfahan however, Tamerlane moved on to Shiraz, which offered no resistance. By his reckoning, this approach prevented bloodshed, at least among those reasonable enough to lay down their weapons without fight. The practice of terror remained methodological at all times and he took pains to spare elites, theologians, artists, poets, engineers, architects and so on.
The Mongol Conquests

The Ethiopia – Eritrea War (1998 – 2000)
Much of the progress made by Ethiopia and Eritrea in the decade since independence was undermine and even reversed at the end of 1997. In November, Eritrea introduced its own currency to replace the old Ethiopian birr. The new currency, the nakfa, represents not just an historic break with Ethiopia, but an economic one too – annulling the de facto currency union that had been in operation until then.

A despite over Eritrea’s whole exchange-rate system followed, and in early 1998 bickering began over bilateral trade relations. Resulting tensions between the countries escalated into a major military conflict that erupted in May June 1998 over a disputed border post near Badme.

Eritrea then occupied the town of Badme, followed in June by the towns of Shiraro, Zala Ambassa and Tsorena. An interim settlement proposed by the OAU was accepted by Ethiopia. At the same time, a much criticized mass deportation of people of Eritrea origin began from Ethiopia. After Ethiopia’s recapture of Badme in February 1999, Eritrea agreed to accept the plan. However, the fighting continued with major battles occurring on the Tsorena-Zala Ambassa front.

In June 2000, after a further ten months of failed international diplomacy in which Eritrea refused to approve changes to the peace plan proposed by the UN and OAU envoys, Ethiopia launched a major offensive that recapture all territory. It was on to occupy parts of central and western Eritrea as well. An amended settlement was then accepted by Eritrea which implemented a ceasefire and the installation of a OAU-UN buffer zone on Eritrean soil.

In December 2000, a formal peace settlement was signed in Algiers. In April 2001, a 25km deep demilitarized strip which ran the length of the internationally recognized border on the Eritrean side, was set up under UN supervision.
The Ethiopia – Eritrea War (1998 – 2000)

Horsemen Swarm from Asia
The steppes of central Asia in ancient times provided a vast belt of grazing land for tribes of nomadic herdsmen. They were highly mobile people who lived according to the rhythm of the season, following the wandering of their sheep, goats, horses, cattle or yaks. Theirs was a cold and forbidding landscape of mountains and bare plains. They had no writing and they made no stone built cities. Moreover, as wanderers they had no use for cumbersome furnishings, using only lightweight household items, chiefly of wood hides and cloth.

What is known of the nomads survives in a scattering of graves, and in texts written by observes from the settled civilizations to the east and west. The Greeks knew the Asian nomad loosely as Scythians, applying term more specifically to a group who, from the 7th century BC, set up a kingdom north of the Black Sea.

The Scythian women were rarely seen, but kept confined to their wagons and circular tents; these tents made of felt stretched over a wood framework and known as yurts, can still be seen in central Asia today. The men wore kaftans, distinctive pointed headgear and trousers – a major invention of Asian horsemen and one that made riding more comfortable. They also carried swords, shields and a bow and arrow case.

Notorious among ancient peoples for their cruelty, the Scythians were said to blind their slaves to make them easier to manage, and to drink from cups made from enemies’ skulls.

The Greek historians Herodotus described many of the Scythians’ outlandish customs, especially their burial rites which included the ceremonial slaughter of wives, servants and animals. The burial of kings, he said, took place in a great square pit. The royal corps was embalmed, its belly slit open, cleaned out, and filled with chopped frankincense, parsley and anise before sewn up again. With the bodies of slaughtered attendants and horses were piled mounds of golden vessels.

Herodotus also described that the Persian great Kings, decided to invade Scythia. With Persian King himself in command, the Persian army of 700,000 soldiers marched across the Danube to the Russian steppes. The Scythians steadily retreated while the Persians pursuit. It was indeed very strange war to Persian. There was nothing to be captured and held - no citied, no buildings, no plunder, nothing but the rimless steppe. He was fighting air.
Horsemen Swarm from Asia