
The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics - _Microft
https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/
======
Waterluvian
"Let’s be clear on this point: ancient and medieval warfare was mostly about
sieges." I also learned years ago that when medieval battles actually
happened, the goal was to rout the enemy, not actually fight them and kill
each other.

I find these points illuminating because it reminds me that people back in the
day were not primitive idiots. There was a very sensible logic to how they
waged war. Ultimately, everyone back then wanted to live comfortable long
lives like we do.

~~~
dragontamer
Mass killings of troops certainly happened: Hannibal's famous "Battle of
Cannae" actually destroyed an entire Roman Legion (70,000 killed, 10,000
captured out of ~80,000 troops). They were just very rare.

Another point: After losing so many troops in a singular battle, the Romans
changed their tactics. Instead of grouping their entire army as a massive
80,000-man strong Phalanx, they split up their armies into smaller groups, so
that their eggs weren't all in one basket anymore.

Hannibal's trick to encircle and kill many roman troops in a single battle was
never going to be repeated: the Romans learned of their mistake and made the
necessary reforms to protect their troops.

\-----------

The Battle of Cannae would go down in history as a military example of how to
line up all your troops for potential slaughter. Future generals and
tacticians would forever know of that battle and how to avoid those
conditions.

Most generals and soldiers would seek a battle of annihilation: if destroying
the entire enemy force is possible they will attempt it. The problem is, its
very, very difficult to achieve in practice.

As such, simply routing the enemy, is sufficient for most military goals.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_annihilation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_annihilation)

~~~
gwd
To be clear, the key word in the quote above is _medieval_. He specifically
says large battles were far more common in the ancient world:

> Pitched battles were far more common in the ancient world (think Persia,
> Macedon, Rome, etc) – this is a product of the larger size and greater
> organizational capabilities of those armies.

~~~
bernawil
Isn't it kind of a useless distinction? I mean it's not like there are so many
periods of pre-gunpowder history. We have ancient, medieval and that's it -you
could add bronze age but we have so much less records-.

The whole "battles were rare, sieges where common" is a trope I believe some
YouTubers started, but I don't think there's any solid pattern. Ancient armies
pillaged the countryside to provoke encounters. Steppe peoples did pitched
battles all the time because they didn't build walls. Medieval Europe may have
had more sieges than battles because of religious homogeneity, but you can see
how that model falls down soon in the thirty years war: if you don't engage
the enemy they'll loot and pillage you to oblivion. Your people see how you
are unable to protect them and desert you.

~~~
smallnamespace
No, there is a very clear difference between warfare in the classical and
medieval eras (in the West), and it dovetails with the collapse of large-scale
political authority and the ability to muster large armies.

Another distinguishing factor is the widespread building of castles. During
the classical era, fortifications were _less_ useful because there were
powerful states that could capture them anyway. But when even the nominal king
or emperor had trouble mustering a force of fifty thousand men, the castle vs.
the siege (and the raid) dominated most warfare. During the classical area
many of those same places would have been sparsely populated, and certainly
not well fortified.

~~~
nickik
Castles were less useful because you didn't need internal military structure
to defend against the people from one province over. Roman cities for 100s of
years didn't upgrade their city walls, even communities in Gaul stopped living
in hill cities and so on.

Defensive structure really only made sense in specific border regions. There
however large empires certainty did invest in such defenses. Border cities
that were ready to be under siege and that could host an arriving army.

------
xg15
Slightly OT:

I'm surprised that more sophisticated management of supply lines never seems
to have caught on much in RTS games. The basic practice still seems to be that
logistics are handwaved away and your units just spawn wherever you want (or
where your factory is) provided you have enough money in the bank.

I could imagine a game quite fun where you actively have to transport troops
and resources to the front and where building, running (using automation) and
defending/attacking supply lines is integral part of the game. I guess the
result would be something like a cross between Command & Conquer and Factorio
or Transport Tycoon.

The handwaving of logistics can also lead to some surreal moments in RTS
single-player campaigns when the hero characters somehow manage to bring huge
armies with them wherever they go, even if the story establishes that a place
is difficult to get to even as a small group.

Kudos for Blizzard and the design of the Zerg here, which turns that kind of
awkwardness into an actual part of the story.

~~~
Kinrany
Sid Meier's Colonization has this, to a degree.

1\. Gold can only be used to buy from European powers. You can't buy goods or
units in America, you have to physically move them there with ships or wagon
trains.

2\. Civilians and combat units are the same. Any civilian can pick up a musket
and become a soldier.

3\. Defeated units don't die. They rout and are "demoted": a dragoon loses
their horse and becomes a soldier, and a soldier loses their musket and
becomes a civilian.

4\. You can build roads and temporary colonies. Each colony has free storage
space.

My favorite tactic was to build a siege camp near the enemy colony, connect it
with my colonies with a road, then use it as a supply base. I'd just spam
dragoon attacks for as long as I had spare horses.

I'm sure this wasn't the optimal strategy, but it worked on "easy". More
importantly, Colonization seems to be the only game where this is at all
possible.

~~~
Razengan
That sounds amazing. I never really got to play Colonization but I pored over
it a lot in magazines.

~~~
pjc50
These days it's pretty much abandonware, or $2 on Steam at the moment.

------
the_af
Whether I agree or disagree with them, I find this kind of analyses of
fictional battles very fun to read. And this particular blog seems to be full
of fascinating articles (I recommend the one about how a "medieval/fantasy"
battlefield ought too look like after a battle -- spoiler: most depictions are
inspired by the aftermath of WWI battles; battlefields after medieval battles
would look pretty much unspoiled).

A few years back there was a humorous review of the Battle of Hoth from
"Empire Strikes Back" that was pretty cool:
[https://www.wired.com/2013/02/battle-of-
hoth](https://www.wired.com/2013/02/battle-of-hoth)

~~~
b0rsuk
Be sure to check the ones about Paganism/Polytheism! The mind-blowing thing
about paganism is that unlike the 3 major religions of today, it didn't start
with a holy book (orthodoxy), but with rituals. It's like a caricature of
scientific method. We did so and so, and the harvest was good. Therefore, the
ritual works. There is little point in learning who exactly the gods are or
what they think. The important thing is not offending any of them, knowing
which is responsible for what, and making deals with them. As long as the
(sacrificial) ritual seemed to work, it would be repeated with the slightest
detail. If it didn't, they would experiment. They were very open to change in
practice, because with no word of god to rely on they knew they could only
take imperfect glimpses into nature of gods.

~~~
zipwitch
Ann Leckie's fantasy novel _The Raven Tower_ is set in a world where such
pagan gods are real, and dives right into a description of how human tribes
will spend generations _training_ them to respond favorably.

------
vector_rotcev
Jut in case anyone doesn't do the date-math/scroll down past the comments, all
5 of the following blog posts are finished and linked to half way through the
comments (ctrl+f: pingback).

~~~
gadtfly
Parts II-VI:

[https://acoup.blog/2019/05/17/collections-the-siege-of-
gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/17/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-
ii-these-beacons-are-liiiiiiit/)

[https://acoup.blog/2019/05/24/collections-the-siege-of-
gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/24/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-
iii-having-fun-storming-the-city/)

[https://acoup.blog/2019/05/31/collections-the-siege-of-
gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/31/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-
iv-the-cavalry-arrives/)

[https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of-
gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-
v-just-flailing-about-flails/)

[https://acoup.blog/2019/06/14/collections-the-siege-of-
gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/06/14/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-
vi-black-sails-and-gleaming-banners/)

~~~
hef19898
Highlight of part three for a logistocs geek like myself: Romans and Greeks
had standardized ammunition, not just rocks that happened to lay around. _That
's_ how you build empires! And roads and aqueducts, of course...

EDIT: While the siege of Helm's Deep was perfectly done in the film, the Siege
of Minas Tirith feels more like Holywood, very well done Hollywood but the
difference between the two is deffinitely there.

------
dreen
It seems the author also missed the fact orcs are perfectly alright with
cannibalism, which further alleviates the supply problem, perhaps even to the
point of not requiring the supplies at all (a few thousand orcs eaten along
the way wont make much difference). I doubt this has much precedent in
history.

~~~
arethuza
It does remind slightly me of Amundsen's approach on his south pole expedition
of killing dogs and feeding them to the men and the other dogs.

Lord Curzon was rather rude to him about it.

~~~
elygre
But to be blunt: who was Lord Curzon?

~~~
kubanczyk
Some British official. Probably best known as a namesake for the current
eastern border of Poland (known as Curzon's line), of which he wasn't an
architect or proponent.

~~~
zipwitch
In popular culture "Curzon" is probably most familiar to _StarTrek:DS9_ fans
as Curzon Dax, the predecessor of the Jadzia Dax. [https://memory-
alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Curzon_Dax](https://memory-
alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Curzon_Dax)

(The character - a diplomat - was very clearly inspired by Lord Curzon.)

------
Animats
_Operations is the level of analysis between tactics (how do I fight when I
get there?) and strategy (why am I fighting at all?)._

The USMC calls that "campaigning". See MCDP 1-2 [1]. Campaigning is about
which battles to fight and where. Strategy includes economic and diplomatic
issues, but campaigning is purely military.

Military history can be divided into two parts - before machine guns, and
after machine guns. Before machine guns, bunching up was good tactics. After
machine guns, it was terrible tactics. Too much of WWI was about learning that
the hard way.

[1]
[https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201-2%20...](https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201-2%20Campaigning.pdf)

~~~
Balgair
> Military history can be divided into two parts - before machine guns, and
> after machine guns. Before machine guns, bunching up was good tactics. After
> machine guns, it was terrible tactics. Too much of WWI was about learning
> that the hard way.

Terribly good point! I want to refute you, but I'm not really coming up with
much. Automatic rifles are just devastating. How did you come to this
conclusion?

~~~
a1369209993
> but I'm not really coming up with much.

War elephants are a _slight_ exception - the best tactic against them seems to
have been spreading out and killing the driver with arrows or javalins - but
it's less that bunching up was bad tactics and more that it wasn't enough;
phalanxes could _repel_ elephants fairly well, they just weren't good at
actually taking them out of the fight.

------
7sigma
The posts on sparta are a joy to read as well

[https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-
sparta-p...](https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-
i-spartan-school/)

~~~
gerikson
They are how I discovered the blog. Eye-opening.

~~~
Balgair
Yes, it was a heck of a good dive! The conclusion, extremely briefly, is that
Sparta is to be learned from, not emulated. The gist of Sparta is less like a
well balanced, yet brutal, place, and more like an extreme version of the
Lord's Resistance Army of central Africa, only with more rape and child abuse.
If they were around today, we'd 'liberate' them in a heartbeat.

------
mcguire
" _Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in
multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly
long column of troops into several more manageable ones. ... The larger
problem is terrain – we’ve seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it
is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and
difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an
east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black
Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn’t
exist._ "

Er, hatetobeapedanticfanboi, but...

There is a road north-south through Ithilien, and also a road east-west from
Minas Morgul to Osgiliath. Where they cross was marked by the headless statue
of the king. Frodo and Sam couldn't use the north-south road because of the
large number of troops moving on it, including those moving up from the south
to attack Minas Tirith.

" _BOOK NOTE: In the film, Jackson has split the host of Mordor into three
groups (the fleet, the Haradrim and the Orcs) each of which moves and arrives
as a single unit. As discussed above, this is insufficient to resolve the
overwhelming logistics problems of such large armies. However, the books
largely resolve this issue._ "

Sigh. Pedanticfanboimode wasted.

" _Naval supply, by riverboat or by ship, is far more efficient than overland
supply (moving supplies by water is roughly twenty times more efficient than
moving the same supplies by land in the pre-modern era)._ "

I want the reference for that.

From part II:

" _As Clausewitz says (drink!), “Everything in war is very simple, but the
simplest thing is hard.”_ "

Yeah. A Clausewitz drinking game.

[Edit] " _Book Note: In the books, Denethor is nowhere near this stupid (this
will be a theme)._ "

I'm glad somebody else saw this. Jackson _really_ screwed up the plot arcs of
the humans in the movies.

~~~
ranger207
>I want the reference for that.

Another post [0] says that "The usual estimates for transit costs derive from
Diocletian’s Price Edict, a late Roman law setting standard prices for things,
including transport."

[0] [https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-
real-c...](https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-cities-
have-curves/)

------
gwd
Good quote:

> One of the real lessons the study of the past has to teach us is – to quote
> L. P. Hartley, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently
> there.” What I mean by that is that so much of how we assume all societies
> work and all people think is just how our society works and we think.
> Properly done, the study of the past can disabuse us of this silly notion
> and show us that smart people in different times and different places did
> things all sorts of different ways. But this lesson is ruined if we
> construct caricatures of the past wherein people living long ago were just
> big stupid brutes with big stupid weapons.

------
hef19898
just finished the first post. All I can say is well written and to the point!
Logistics is totally underrepresented in history (infrastructure and the like)
and especially military history. When it comes to the annoying "relaibility"
discussions around WW2 tanks on Youtube I just wished some would explain the
basic principle of RAMST, Reliability-Availability-maintainability-
Supportability-Testability. Yet, nobody seems to get it. Military historians
remain historians, and RAMST is more of an engineering discipline and fanboys
don't want to. And I guess modern day professionals in that field are just to
busy with modern day systems to actually worry about the old stuff. I know
that I were during my short stint in that field.

~~~
NickNameNick
Have you watched many of Nicholas Moran (The_Chiftain)'s videos?

He likes to comment on the ergonomics of operating and maintaining tanks. But
he also discusses why the USA mainly build medium tanks during ww2, and how
and why they were more maintainable than their european contemporaries. (An
ocean away from their factories, they had to be)

~~~
hef19898
Sure know his videos! It really shows that he has some operational experience.
Something others covering the same subject don't.

What I am missing is an detailed view on that aspect from true, modern day
experts. But for that you would need more than one person to cover it in a
meaningful way.

------
postsantum
I can't recommend enough this book which retells the story from the position
of Mordor. It made me always remember how genocide, politics and bootlicking
can be turned into heroic stories by victors' propaganda.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer)

------
boudewijnrempt
I'm reminded of Mercedes Lackey's magically dwindling army in the Storm
trilogy; where millions of invading soldiers turn into tens of thousands
without much casualties. Also, I guess I've gained a bit of appreciation for
WWI English officer training; apparently it was good enough to make Tolkien
invent proper campaigns.

Heck, I'd like to see someone compare 14 day campaigns from WWI that Tolkien
could have known about and see which one he reproduced in his books.

------
HenryKissinger
Next up: How Gondor won despite a complete lack of air support (see: winged
wraiths) and superior enemy armor (see: Mumakil).

~~~
nephrite
Flying wraiths lack firepower, so they provide no real air support. Just fast
transportation/communication.

~~~
me_me_me
Strafing runs in WW2 were almost completely ineffective but all infantry were
reporting huge morale loss when they were happening.

~~~
saiya-jin
Strafing was quite effective against vehicles, trains, landed aircraft etc.
But yes against infantry it didn't make much sense, something about going too
fast in shaky airplane trying to hit tiny ants running randomly left and right
because they noticed the plane well before plane noticed them

------
tobyhede
Orc supply logistics is eased somewhat by the ability of the Orc armies to eat
the defeated and if required, each other. In the latter case the strong orcs
eat the weak, preserving the elite and veteran parts of the army. There is a
strong hierarchy within the various Orc subtypes, and an argument could be
made that the Orc army marches as its own supply.

~~~
perlgeek
I don't think the book mentions any green, fertile farmland in Mordor, nor do
the movies show any.

So even if the Orc-eats-Orc or Orc-eats-Man "supply" might work for a short
campaign, the biomass must come from somewhere, initially.

~~~
tobyhede
Book explicitly mentions slave farms in the East.

But yes, cannibalism and human forage is not sustainable, but might stretch a
10 day supply to 15.

~~~
zipwitch
I think it's great slave farms in Southern Mordor, around the inland sea of
Nurnen.
[http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/n/nurn.php](http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/n/nurn.php)

(There may also have been farms in the East that I'm not remembering. The East
was definitely under Sauron's thumb, although perhaps not so firmly as he
would have liked.)

