There is simply no proof that warfare in small-scale societies was a rarer or less serious undertaking than among civilized societies. In general, warfare in prestate societies was both frequent and important. If anything, peace was a scarcer commodity for members of bands, tribes, and chiefdoms than for the average citizen of a civilized state.
THREE
Policy by Other Means
Tactics and Weapon
From Chapter 2, it is clear that primitive war, like its civilized counterpart, engages the efforts of a considerable proportion of the populations concerned and is even more frequently resorted to than among modern states. But if this warfare is conducted in an unserious fashion and has little effect on the societies involved, archaeologists and historians are justified as regarding it as a minor and peripheral activity.
Perhaps no aspect of prestate societies has been treated with more condescension by civilized observers than the way such groups have conducted their wars. The methods of primitive war have been characterized as undangerous, unserious, stylized, gamelike, and ineffective. These methods are seen as mere customs rather than tested techniques for obtaining positive results. They supposedly bear only a puerile resemblance to the complex, deadly military science of civilized warfare. In such analyses, primitives are described as taking special pains in tactics and weaponry to minimize casualties and destruction. Primitive warriors are accused of neglecting precisely the means and methods that have proven so brutally effective in civilized warfare. Certainly, a smaller, equalitarian society with a simple technology and subsistence economy has to conduct warfare differently from a modern, highly organized state with a complex technology and surplus economy. But as we shall see, such a difference does not necessary mean that tribal warfare has been safe and ineffective.
TACTICS AND LEADERSHIP
As noted in Chapter 1, Harry Turney-High made important distinctions between the tactics used in civilized warfare and those employed in primitive warfare. He judged the latter to be equal or superior to its civilized counterpart in its devotion to the offensive, its use of surprise, its scouting and intelligence, its utilization of terrain, and its tactical mobility. At the same time, he found four main deficiencies: inadequate training, poor unit discipline, and weak battlefield leadership; poor logistics, leading to an inability to sustain campaigns; no strategic planning beyond the first battle; and tactical defects, including poor coordination of fire and movement, no specialized warriors or units, poor concentration of force, overreliance on a single formation, and weak security and defense. He related most of the superior features of civilized warfare to the centralized coercive power, surplus-concentrating economies, and large organized populations of urban states.
As Brian Ferguson points out, recent cross-cultural research indicates that there is no Rubicon dividing the tactics of states from those of nonstates; instead, one finds an evolutionary continuum.1 Turney-High himself acknowledged countless exceptions to his dichotomy. Indeed, one cross-cultural survey indicates that the greatest tactical “deficiencies” are observed in the simplest societies, whereas some chiefdoms may display none. While Turney-High’s military horizon may have proved illusory, the fact remains that the warfare of nonstates differs by various degrees from that conducted by states, especially urban ones. These differences may affect the degree of military success or failure enjoyed or suffered by a society, and they are closely correlated with sociopolitical and economic organization. These essential variable features can be roughly categorized as matters of command and control or of logistics, which correspond (not coincidentally) to the anthropological headings of social organization and economy.
The war parties of most nonstates, compared with civilized armies, have lacked unit discipline. The discipline of state military formations is the consequence of unit (as opposed to just individual) training, hierarchical subordination, and physical compulsion. In some respects, of course, tribal warriors were much better trained for war than are their civilized counterparts. Their preparation usually spanned their whole childhood instead of the few weeks or months that civilized warriors train before facing combat. From an early age, warriors constantly practiced wielding real weapons and dodging missiles, receiving criticism and advice from experienced warriors, and being inured to deprivation and pain by means of various ordeals and rites of passage. Yet such training zfocuses entirely on the individual, not on the group or on teamwork. It also establishes no sense of subordination to leaders or plans, which require group or unit training. The drilling in unit tactics and the group training practiced by a few chiefdoms on the Pacific Northwest Coast and in Polynesia were a rare feature even at this level of social organization.2 To maintain a close formation in combat and maneuver effectively requires just the trained discipline that primitive warriors have rarely possessed.
Many commentators have also noted the weakness in command of primitive war parties. While many groups had battlefield leaders who were men of renown and redoubtable fighters, these individuals usually led from the front by example and exhortation. They seldom exercised any central control over the behavior of the individuals they led in active combat. “Fight-leaders” among the New Guinean Mae Enga ran back and forth between the front line and an observation point to the rear—exhorting, encouraging and fighting in the former and assessing the situation in the latter.3 Although cowards were often shamed, they, like those who failed to heed the suggestions of their leaders, were not physically punished. Any punishment for flight or heedless-ness was administered, if at all, solely by the enemy. Attempts to punish physically a warrior in an egalitarian society would be foolhardy and disruptive, since the culprit would have the support of kinsmen in resisting or retaliating for such abuse.
But even though maintenance of lines, adherence to plans, and obeisance to leaders seem not to have been habits ingrained by upbringing or special training in prestate warriors, this does not mean these behaviors were absent. The reputation for courage (and, more important, for success) in combat that primitive war leaders possessed inspired confidence in the efficacy of their advice and plans. As a result, these plans were usually followed—but only while they continued to succeed. In circumstances where chiefs or state rulers wielded the power of physical coercion, adherence to plans and commands was compulsory, not voluntary. Conversely, where physical coercion and subordination were decentralized in the nonmilitary sphere, warriors’ obedience and subordination were voluntary—but not necessarily absent. As Turney-High noted, only states can devote time and resources to training officers and drilling soldiers to obey their orders, and “only men with the patience of civilization will submit to it.”4 It is not a mystical patience that makes civilized men easier to reduce to strict subordination and military discipline; it is their habituation to hierarchy and obedience as a result of being raised in a state, which by definition is a polity with class stratification and monopolized coercive powers. These social features also appear, but to a lesser degree, in chiefdoms; hence trained units and practiced maneuvers occasionally occur among such societies. The weak command systems common in primitive warfare merely reflect the prevailing level of social organization.
Few primitive societies could sustain active combat or continuous maneuvering of their war parties beyond a few days, simply because ammunition and food were soon exhausted. In New Guinea, certain groups fought battles lasting for several days or even weeks, but only because the fighting was so local that troops could retire each evening to their own homes and return replenished the next dawn. In instances where fighting became protracted and the crops suffered from neglect, truces might be arranged so that these could be tended. Thus in one instance of warfare between Jalemo villages in New Guinea, an informal truce developed after several weeks of fighting so that men could take care of their gardens; otherwise, famine would have resulted on both sides. When the new crops were ready to harvest, the fighting was resumed.5 Most nonstate societies did not produce the surplus food or popul
ation necessary for prolonged episodes of combat. But they nevertheless could and did maintain a state of war with frequent battles and raids over very long periods, lasting in some cases for generations. Although their episodes of combat were briefer, they might be much more frequent than in civilized war. The weak logistics of primitive societies affected only their ability to sustain combat and continuous maneuvering, not necessarily their capacity to conduct war.
Without logistic support sufficient to continue combat or maneuver beyond the first encounter, what need did prestate societies have for strategic (as opposed to tactical) planning? Without centralized leadership empowered to enforce compliance with strategic designs and without units trained to execute them, such planning would have been pointless. Most tribal groups had the logistic and leadership capacity to conceive and execute plans for battles and raids. Furthermore, ruses, maneuvers to the flank or rear, and coordinated movements by separate parties were commonly planned and executed by war leaders and warriors of even the simplest societies.6 One Murngin Aborigine group in Australia defeated another by faking a rout by a small party, which led their disordered pursuers onto the group’s main body concealed in some woods. The same tactic, employed by the Oglala Sioux and planned by Chief Red Cloud, was catastrophically successful against the U.S. Army’s Fetterman command in 1866 and was the keystone of one of the few Indian campaigns (a successful one) against the United States.7 A common tactic in New Guinea was to infiltrate a party, before or during a formal battle, and to attack from the flank or rear when the enemy was fully engaged to the front. Indeed, one of the earliest representations of warfare—between two small parties of Spanish Neolithic archers (Figure 3.1)—depicts a simultaneous center advance and flank attack. During the first Indian-colonist war in New England, some allied Indians suggested a plan to the colonists for a surprise attack on a hostile village, with a blocking force set in ambush; one historian, who served in Vietnam as a marine, judged that “in all the years since 1637 no one has really improved on this plan.”8 That such plans sometimes went awry can no more be held against the planning abilities of primitive leaders than can be those of civilized leaders when these were thwarted by weather, incompetence, “the fog of war,” or (most often) an uncooperative enemy. And just like the soldiers of Grant in 1864 or of the German general staff in 1914, when their plans were thwarted, tribesmen had to resort to opportunism and a strategy of attrition. Tribal warriors or their recognized leaders conceived and executed plans to exactly the degree of elaborateness and sophistication that their social organization, cultural proscription of leadership, and economic surplus permitted. In this regard, they were no different from civilized soldiers and commanders.
Figure 3.1 Neolithic cave painting of battle between two groups of archers, Morella la Villa, Spain. (Traced from photo in Watkins 1989: 15)
Other tactical strengths and deficiencies of primitive warfare were determined by social and economic organization. Concentrating force at a weak point in an enemy’s or one’s own defenses requires coherent subunits to move and central leadership (with the power to order movements) to observe such spots. As we have seen, many nonstate societies were too few in numbers to subdivide war parties and too egalitarian in social organization to accept powerful leaders. Moreover, societies without specialization in the economic realm were unlikely to develop specialized warriors or units. Again, the point of comparison is social and economic, not directly military.
While most primitive warriors were enthusiastic deliverers of “fire” (commonly at the maximum effective range of their weapons), they seldom combined it with steady movement in a determined advance or phased retreat. Such movements or delayed retreats, which bring warriors into the killing zone of enemy weapons, require trained and enforced discipline to overcome the combatants’ wholly rational objection to facing such extremes of risk. In fact, when civilized units have advanced into this killing zone, commanders have usually posted a line of “file closers” at the rear whose purpose has been to kill any man who ran back or failed to advance as ordered. The movements that did occur in prestate battles usually involved the back-and-forth skirmishing seen in Dani battles, where the distance between battle lines never substantially closed (Plate 1). Hand-to-hand fighting between groups, rather than between scattered individuals or “champions,” seldom took place in band and village societies; it was more common in chiefdoms. Many primitive combats were just firefights unless one side “broke.” Only then would clubs, axes, and lances be used to dispatch any enemies caught.
Some scholars (most notably Turney-High) have claimed that prestate tactics overrelied on surprise because poor security was supposedly a characteristic of primitive warfare. Security entails alert watches, especially in the hours just before dawn; and these, in turn, require disciplined guards who fear punishment for dereliction. Even the most disciplined civilized armies must severely punish the common crime of sleeping on guard duty. At the same time, the small scale of raiding parties, the most frequent threat in primitive warfare, made security very difficult to achieve. Small groups of men, moving at night, would be difficult for anyone, warrior or soldier, to detect before they committed violence. (As a matter of fact, animals, having more acute senses, less love of sleep, and an instinctive appreciation for the risks of life, are far superior to civilized or primitive humans at security—hence watchdogs and the famous Capitoline geese.) The Dani of New Guinea erected watchtowers that they kept manned with small groups of ready warriors; but even this system could not prevent small raids from succeeding. At best, a group could hope to deter such raids by ensuring that, once the raiders had exposed themselves, they did not escape. Since scholars usually give prestate warriors high marks for scouting and intelligence, it seems contradictory to suggest that they were easy to surprise. Conversely, if poor security was a frequent feature of tribal warfare, then surprise attacks should be very effective; and if they were so effective, then in what sense could tribesmen be criticized for overrelying on them?
Turney-High’s accusation that primitive warriors used “improper” formations or only the simple line, sometimes bent into the “surround,” is rather mysterious to anyone familiar with the battle maps of military history, which almost invariably consist of two lines of rectangular unit symbols facing each other. For example, the Mae Enga used a very reasonable formation that put shield-bearing spearman forward, with unshielded archers firing between and over them.9 Nevertheless, Turney-High asserts that use of correct formations is the key feature, the acid test, that distinguishes real civilized war from primitive war.10 However, when he has an opportunity to elaborate on tribal warriors’ failure to observe this principle, he gives no examples, claiming instead that it is hard to generalize and that the “correct formation must be determined for each engagement.”11 Consequently, it remains impossible to understand what formations uncivilized warriors should have been using or what is so improper about the ones they did use.
All the supposed tactical deficiencies of prestate warfare have been a direct consequence of the weaker authority of leaders, more egalitarian social structure and values, lower level of surplus production, and smaller populations of nonstate societies. Hence the gradualistic differences one finds in the conduct of warfare as preserved in ethnographic and historical records are not traits reflecting the sophistication of military knowledge or technique but features almost exactly mirroring social organization, economic efficiency, population size, and the cultural values correlated with them. To argue that the warriors or war making of a village society is ill-disciplined, weakly led, constrained by inadequate logistics, “unprofessional,” disorganized, and so on is to state a tautology: these terms describe not how they make war but how they live. There is as much simple truth as hyperbole in Turney-High’s declaration: “Warfare is social organization.”
Many students of warfare share a delusion that war is an independent realm of selection. Their idea is that the raw competition involved in warfare s
elects for weapons and techniques that increase the probability of military success. These more efficient arms and methods then spread by diffusion and trade or by the propagation of the societies that master them at the expense of those that do not. But one cross-cultural survey found a higher correlation between military sophistication (a compound of features judged more efficient) and political system than between military sophistication and military success.12 If competitive selection is the moving force behind military sophistication, then societies that are successful (that is, are expanding their territory) and that go to war most frequently (that is, are experiencing the most intense competition) should be the most militarily sophisticated, independent of their political and economic systems. But this is not the case. A reanalysis of the same data indicates that political and economic organization, in combination, are excellent predictors of military sophistication, whereas the frequency of war and military success are very poor predictors of it.13 Statistically, these data imply that socioeconomy is three times more important than competitive selection in determining military techniques. The poor correlation of military success and war frequency with military sophistication also implies that perhaps the most sophisticated (read “civilized”) tactics and techniques are not necessarily advantageous in every setting. These results alone hardly provide sufficient grounds on which to decide such a large and complex question so it will be considered further later on (especially Chapters 5 and 6).
In any case, in the widest view of warfare, competitive selection seems to play a relatively minor role in creating the differences observed between various societies’ methods of making war. Instead, a society’s demography, economy, and social system provide the means for and impose limits on military technique. For example, the Plains tribes did not develop armies equal in size, training, and discipline to those of their nation-state foes; did not centralize leadership; and did not conduct prolonged campaigns or ruthlessly press their advantages after victories. These failures were not the result of their being dim-witted or heedless of the stakes involved, but of their having neither the economic nor the social means to do otherwise.
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