By the middle of the twentieth century automotive technologies equaled or surpassed the horse’s tactical mobility and greatly exceeded its operational and strategic mobility. Accurate, rapid-firing, easy-to-use small arms gave an infantry soldier the confidence to withstand a cavalry charge, which negated the horse’s psychological effects. And automotive technology combined with armored protection and modern small arms and cannons produced a superior mobile firing platform. When these elements were brought together during World War II military mounted forces were eliminated almost overnight.
Though horse cavalry continued to exist in military forces that were not international powers, neither the horses nor their riders were pitted against technologies that exceeded the abilities of the horse. Many countries in the developing parts of the world retained horse-mounted forces into the 1980s and 1990s. Such forces most commonly were used against partisans and guerrillas in countries where few roads existed and where the surrounding countryside—grasslands, mountains, jungles, or swamps—severely constrained the use of vehicles. Militaries like that of Rhodesia in the early 1980s made use of horse-mounted units such as Greys Scouts to track and attack antigovernment guerrillas. In Latin America several armies used mounted forces in to the 1990s to pursue outlaws, drug runners, and insurgents. The horsemanship and horse mastery in these military forces, benefiting from the latest techniques of veterinary science and horse training were superb. Through these forces, the history of the military horse and rider continued to the doorstep of the twenty-first century.
War horse and rider stepped into the twenty-first century in the fall of 2001, when the United States deployed Special Operations Forces to Afghanistan. The United States emplaced a Special Forces Operational Detachment A (ODA) with the Northern Alliance, a rebel force opposing the rule of the Taliban regime, which was allied with the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization. The army’s Special Forces, with almost no intelligence regarding the rebels they were going to team up with, were inserted deep into the mountains of northern Afghanistan by MH-47E Chinook helicopter. Just after sunrise on October 19, 2001, the high-technology aircraft released its cargo of commandos into the one of the last remaining bastions of steppe horse culture in the world. Here, the horse was still an important military tool.
The first indication that the ODA team leader, Captain Mike Nash (a pseudonym), had that his mission was going to be challenging in ways the American army had not experienced in 60 years, was the arrival of their ally, General Dostum, at the linkup point:
About 20 horsemen came galloping up. They were armed to the teeth, looking pretty rough. . . . [They had] your typical Soviet small arms—light machine guns, AK-47s, RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. And they come galloping up on horseback. And about 10 minutes behind them, another 30 horsemen arrived with General Dostum. This was his main body of his personal body guards, coming there to meet us. . . . This was our first chapter in the Wild, Wild West events that we would participate in every day. [Dostum] jumped off his horse. He shook our hands. Thanked us for coming. Led us into his little base camp.1
American intelligence was unaware that Dostum’s force was a horse-mounted unit. This was the ODA’s first introduction to the horse culture of Afghanistan. It was a culture that had links to the Persian armies of Darius and Xerxes, when the land was called Bactria. It had been conquered by Alexander the Great’s companions and had provided horses and men for Genghis Kahn’s army as it marched into Persia and on to the Euphrates valley. The southern steppe, just to the north of the area of operations, is where scientists believe the first contact between horse and man occurred and where the concept of the war horse and rider originated.
Captain Nash and his team were to work with General Dostum’s army to help them defeat the Taliban. Dostum’s army consisted of 2,000 horsemen armed with modern small arms. The enemy was equipped with relatively modern tanks and artillery. Captain Nash would support Dostum by using laser guidance systems to direct precision bombing attacks by the U.S. Air Force. Nash’s team were experts in hi-tech warfare. But they were not experts in the manner in which Dostum’s army traveled—exclusively by horse. Many of the ODA’s 12 highly trained commandos had never been on a horse.
Fortunately, Captain Nash was one of the few U.S. army officers who was also an experienced horseman. He had grown up on a cattle farm in Kansas and been a rodeo rider in college. He had a solid working knowledge of horsemanship and was able to ensure that his team’s inexperienced riders were at least safe. Nash noted that the Afghan mounts were “tough little mountain ponies, like American mustangs from out West.” As they were all stallions, there was constant biting and kicking going on among the horses and they were not easy to manage, even for experienced riders. The saddles were small and tight, and the stirrups were short and barely big enough for the American’s heavy-soled combat boots. The Afghans used a simple broken snaffle bit to control the horse, which meant riders had to develop a feel for the task, and the traditional short stirrup style of the steppe was not easy for a novice to use. Nash’s instructions to his men were simple: “Keep your feet light in the stirrups. . . . If anyone is thrown by his mount and has a foot caught in the stirrup and the horse doesn’t stop immediately, the nearest man has to the shoot the horse dead. . . . You’ll be killed if you’re dragged on this rocky ground.”2 Nash was also smart enough to understand the problems associated with overburdening the horses. Packhorses and donkeys were used to carry the team’s rucksacks and heavy equipment. One of his first acts was to request quality saddles for his men—either U.S. army–style McClellan saddles or lightweight Australian endurance saddles. He knew that with 70 pounds of equipment per man, the saddles had to be lightweight. He specifically requested that the army not provide him with the popular American stock saddle, which can weigh as much as 40 pounds.
Over a three-week period, Captain Nash and his team helped General Dostum and his horsemen fight their way through the Balkh Valley and into the strategically important city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The Afghans were extremely protective of the Americans, surrounding them with special guard details. The U.S. soldiers’ primary task was to direct air power against Taliban positions. They did this with GPS, laser range finders, and digital satellite radios. After the enemy’s bunkers and tanks were destroyed, the Afghan fighters would then charge the positions on horseback. Nash described a typical attack: “Once they closed with the Taliban, their technique can best be described as the swarm. They were at the gallop, firing their assault weapons, not accurately, but it was scaring the hell out of the Taliban. And they would simply ride down any Taliban that attempted to resist against them or refused to surrender. And we had a front row seat to this every day.”3
As the enemy was pushed back, Nash and his men kept pace, often spending 12 hours a day in the saddle. In mid-November General Dostum’s forces occupied Mazar-e-Sharif and the terrain changed so that the ODA could continue to support the Afghans while operating out of vehicles. To the American public, this largely ended the brief return of the military horse. In reality the Afghans continued, as they do to this day, to rely on horse-mounted forces when resources, terrain, and weather require it.
The war in Afghanistan is indicative of the likely future requirements for military horses: isolated situations, probably of short duration, in undeveloped environments. And their occurrence will be unpredictable. The U.S. army was unprepared for the need for commandos to have horsemanship skills. Some other modern armies would be better prepared to employ horses for military purposes. The German, Austrian, and Swiss armies all maintain a military horse capability to support the operations of their mountain forces. An example is the German army’s Gebirgstragtierwesen (mountain animal transport unit) 230. The unit is equipped with mules and Haflinger mountain horses. Their mission is general transportation support to mountain troops under terrain and weather conditions that preclude wheel or air support. They also use the Halflingers for mounted reconnaissance in mountains or deep forest ter
rain. The unit has been used to support peacekeeping missions in the Balkans.4 The Austrian mountain troops perform a similar role and also use mules and Haflingers to execute their missions. The mountain horse support units of the Swiss army use Freiburger Swiss mountain horses. The Swiss force is unique because it is a reserve force. The horses, more than 500 of them, are issued to individual soldiers who are paid a stipend to support the horse. The horse is stabled privately by the soldier, and it is his so long as the horse remains fit, meets army care requirements, and is present for duty at reserve training.5
The modern military uses of the horse are limited in scope, but the impact of military horsemanship is still strongly in evidence in the modern horse community. One of the most direct influences is on urban mounted police techniques. Police horses are used for patrolling and riot control. The training techniques for police horses are quite similar to the techniques used to train cavalry remounts. Horses must be acclimatized to the diverse and frightening sights and sounds of a busy city. For riot control, police remounts are trained to remain under control amid the stress and confusion of mass-es of people even when assaulted by sign-waving, bottle-throwing protesters. War horses faced similar distractions in the middle of a melee. A police horse must also be willing to move, often at a canter, against a crowd of rioters. This action, and its associated training, is similar to a small-scale charge. The effect that the police are trying to achieve is the same as a cavalry charge: to psychologically shock the crowd into a panic—effectively dispersing it. The intimidating size, speed, and combined mass of the police horses can disperse a crowd without physically coming in contact with it. The great psychological advantages that horses give the police in controlling large crowds make it an ideal nonlethal law enforcement tool.
Perhaps the most publicly visible legacy of the military horse is in the world of horse sports. The major international horse sports are the three Olympic horse disciplines: dressage, show jumping, and eventing. Today’s professional civilian equestrians and their expensive carefully bred and trained horses are essentially measuring and testing themselves against the standards set for the war horse and his rider over the course of 3,000 years of military history. The formal salute to the judge that begins the competition is a direct link to the military roots of horse sports. Dressage’s relationship to the military is through the extensive use made by mounted forces of high school dressage training techniques. The European military seat of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the standard military double bridle are still integral to modern dressage. Show jumping as a sport began as a military entertainment and competition among officers. Modern jumping techniques are directly the result of the military experiments of the Italian Captain Federico Caprilli. The equestrian sport most directly connected to the military is eventing. Eventing, still known in many European countries as “the military,” was specifically designed to compare and test cavalry chargers in the late nineteenth century. Its components, show jumping, dressage, and a grueling distance course followed by a cross-country obstacle course, were all designed to ensure that the winner was the best all-round war horse. All three of these sports, when they were incorporated into the modern Olympics in 1912, were originally only open to competitors who were serving military officers. This did not change until after World War II, and not until 1952 did significant numbers of civilian equestrians compete in the Olympic horse events.
The Olympic equestrian events represent the ultimate athletic test of the horse and rider. In the 1930s an American horse named Jenny Camp was a typical American remount horse without a distinguished lineage, bred only for army service at the Front Royal, Virginia, remount depot. Jenny Camp was 15.3 hands tall, and a bay three-quarters Thoroughbred. At the Fort Riley, Kansas, cavalry school, she was being used to train cavalry officers, and it was thought she might make a fine polo pony. Purely by accident the officers discovered that the horse was a very proficient jumper, and she was included in the mounts that the U.S. cavalry was preparing for the Olympics. She was 6 years old at her first Olympic appearance in Los Angeles in 1932, and 10 when she appeared in the 1936 games in Berlin. Jenny Camp, by most measures a typical remount, won two silver medals and one gold medal in the Olympics—one of only three horses in the history of the games to win medals in consecutive games. Had it not been for a lucky accident, this superb horse might have been issued to any private on a dusty army post in the American Southwest. Jenny Camp illustrates the top-quality horses that a well-run army remount system could routinely produce in the last decades of the horse-mounted cavalry. The science of breeding superb horses, the science that produced the world’s most famous horse breeds, Trakehners, Dons, and Andalusians for military service, is another part of the legacy of the war horse.
One other visible reminder of the pageantry of the war horse and rider is the dozens of governments that maintain horse ceremonial units. Usually these units are uniformed and equipped as the famous national regiments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most famous of these is the British Household Cavalry, which is manned by serving soldiers of the modern British army. These ceremonial units may not be perfect historical replicas of the original uniforms, but they nonetheless capture the grandeur and spirit associated with the war horse that made the cavalry the most popular branch of the military. And they convey an aura of martial majesty embodied in the war horse that no piece of modern military equipment can match.
Now and again a concerned citizen or horse enthusiast writes a letter to a newspaper, a legislator, or an army general suggesting that there is still a viable military use for the horse. This is true, as suggested by the horses of the European mountain troops. But the time of large-scale military use of the horse is over. All horse lovers should understand that probably the most fortunate thing that has happened to horses in the history of our relationship with the animal is that the horse finally is obsolete as a military weapon. The horse’s military role exposed these magnificent animals to the best of mankind, represented by superlative horsemen like the Prussian general von Seydlitz and compassionate and dedicated horse peoples such as the Cossacks, and put the horse at the very center of many of the great moments in human history. It also exposed the horse to all the horrors of mankind’s most wasteful, painful, and often purposeless endeavor—warfare. The plight of war horses in combat was even worse than the soldier’s: they had no choice and no understanding of their situation, yet suffered and died in the thousands because of their selfless and faithful service.
APPENDIX
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: THE ANCIENTS
1. The discussion of the family Equidae and how it is scientifically classified is extracted from Clutton-Brock, Horse Power, 17–25.
2. Ibid., 24.
3. Anthony Dent, “The Predomestic Horse,” in Encyclopedia of the Horse, 14. Types of horse are not universally agreed on, although Dent’s four types are generally accepted. Other authors add additional types to the list, see, for example, Dossenbach and Dossenbach, The Noble Horse, 30–31.
4. Dossenbach and Dossenbach, The Noble Horse, 103, put the time period between 3000 and 2000 BC, but the earlier date is probably more accurate according to Clutton-Brock, 56.
5. In “Domestication and the Early Horse People,” Encyclopedia of the Horse, 16–17, Dent discusses the diversity of possible original domestication of the horse and the virtual impossibility of determining conclusively a single point of origin as well as the impossibility of determining which geographic area and specific tribe or group was first. He does postulate that the type 2 Norse horse may have been the first domesticated by northern hunters already familiar with domesticated reindeer somewhere in north-central or eastern Asia.
6. Clutton-Brock, Horse Power, 56.
7. David Anthony, “The Opening of the Eurasian Steppe at 2000 BC,” in The Bronze Age.
8. Clutton-Brock, Horse Power, 68.
9. All the consulted sources agree that Ur provides the first evi
dence of use of horses as part of an organized military establishment, Clutton-Brock, Horse Power, 69; Anglim et al., Fighting Techniques, 80–81; and Keegan, History of Warfare, 157.
10. Clutton-Brock, Horse Power, 71–72.
11. Anglim et al., Fighting Techniques, 81.
12. Keegan, History of Warfare, 155.
13. This discussion of Kikkuli is taken from Legacy of the Horse, “The First Horses.” The other source that gives a small amount of background on Ann Hyland’s research is “Kikkuli Method of Horse Training,” Splitters Creek. Ann Hyland in The Horse in the Ancient World, 39, also addresses this particular aspect of the Kikkuli texts. She provides a detailed discussion of exactly what the equivalent distances are for a “danna” and an “iku.” Her conclusion is that a “danna” equals 1,640 yards and an “iku” equals approximately 15 yards .
14. Cotterell, Chariot, 50.
15. Legacy of the Horse, “The First Horses.”
16. This description of the heavy chariot is a distinction made by Mark Healy in his study of the Egyptian army in New Kingdom, 21–22, and various color plates.
17. Short discussion of horse armor found in Healy, New Kingdom, 62.
18. Anglim et al., Fighting Techniques, 81.
19. Colin Walters, “Late Roman and Byzantine Egypt,” in Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations, 57.
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