Jon Davis

·
Sat
Amateur Military and Cultural Historian

What is the simplest military tactic in history?

Make the spear longer.

Spears are so universal to the human experience of warfighting that if your culture didn’t
develop one, then it died. We don’t even have archeological records of your culture because
of how irrelevant you are with your non-fighting foolishness.

That’s because the spear is a universally understandable, easy to use, easy to build means of
making one side’s warfighters lethal while robbing the lethality of the other side. Simply put,
if you can make the enemy experience the danger before you do, statistically, you’ll win. It
isn’t even a matter of skill, though skill helps. The technology gives you a strategic
advantage. The side that leverages the most strategic advantages wins.

So take that idea, how can we amplify the advantage of a spear?

Make it longer.

The Greeks mastered this more than others with their phalanx technique. The phalanx
involved row upon row of trained soldiers with long spears and daunting shields. The
shields were lined up as shield wall, while spears of not only the front, but the next few rows
protruded several feet forward of the shield wall. Imagine charging into that, knowing that
you first have to get through three rows of spear points before being greeted, probably
alone, with a massive shield and a well rested team of soldiers ready to take you down with
their sidearms.
Perhaps the most extreme version of this came from the Macedonians led by Alexander the
Great. They employed the sarissa, an 18 foot long pike. It was so large, that it had to be
carried in two pieces and assembled before battle.

One-on-one, it was nothing. It’s no big deal to take on something that difficult to manage,
but five rows of them end to end? Yeah, there’s a reason that they called Alexander “great”.
When you find something that works, you repeat it again and again, to where one leader
was able to bring together an empire stretching from Greece to India, Afghanistan to Egypt.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The concept of “keep the enemy in danger when I am not” can be expanded. Eventually,
someone got crazy and thought, “throw the spear”, and it worked. Now the reach wasn’t
just how long could you make the weapon be held, but how far could you make the
weapon’s reach. Take that idea further, and make your spears on purpose to be thrown and
we call it a javelin.

Take that idea even further and you have the little known weapon called the Atlatl. The
Atlatl’s a simple mechanical tool that leverages the means by which javelins get their force -
if you have a longer throwing arm, you can throw farther. The Atlatl extends the length of
the arm to do just that. With this, ancient warriors and hunters greatly expanded the
lethality of their reach.
At some point later, some forgotten genius, and it truly was a genius, figured out the animal
senue strung around a stick, and then using another pointier stick, was somehow a killing
weapon. Honestly, how did people figure out the bow and arrow? He had to invent
something like 10 things at once.

From there, ranged weaponry has evolved into more and more complex and capable
fighting weapons and ways to use them. Perhaps the most interesting of these being the
Mongol’s implementation of the Cantabrian circle. The Cantabrian circle is a technique that
usually pits horse mounted archers against infantry. The horsemen create a moving circle.
When their part of the circle nears the enemy formation, they lose arrows, then reload as
they cycle back to the rear of the circle, preparing their next shot. For the poor infantry, they
had no chance of either catching the circle, or getting away, while they are slowly picked off
by horse archers. It requires extreme horsemanship to pull off, and the Cantabrian circle
wasn’t only used by the Mongols. It’s actually named for the first people we know of to do it
in Spain. But with this method of “make the enemy unsafe while we remain safe” the
Mongols created the largest land empire in history in only three generations.

Also, sorry, the best I could do to show the Cantabrian circle was from the Rome Total War
video game.

Now that we’ve expanded that idea of spears into force projection, let’s just say that guns
are a thing, and skip a lot of history to today.
The longest recorded sniper kill happened in Iraq around mid-2017 by an unnamed
Canadian special forces operator. It was a miracle of circumstances, where an enemy mortar
team rained down destruction on an allied platoon. The sniper and his spotter were
positioned high above on an adjacent mountain that overlooked the mortar team. Thanks to
elevation, the sniper was able to “reach out and touch” the mortarmen at a distance of 3,540
m or 2.2 miles. Then he did it again to make sure the mortarman’s partner got the message,
saving the infantry team down below.

Over 2 miles. That’s just ridiculous. Add to the fact that the US military is working on
projects like a scoping system that inhibits your ability to pull the trigger if you aren’t on
target, drones capable of firing sniper rounds, and even a self-guided bullet  and we are
nearing the time of the 10 mile sniper shot.
Now, we need to talk “make the spear longer” to its extreme, and what we’re talking about
are long range missiles.
Missiles have made putting the enemy in danger while we are not into a whole new
category where a military can project force literally anywhere in the world with a single
weapon. For perspective, this map demonstrates the ranges of various Chinese ballistic
missile systems.
In the future, it won’t just be distance, but also speed — the hypersonic missile, a weapon
launched into orbit capable of reaching anywhere on the planet in a matter of minutes.

So, while I was especially liberal with the idea of what “make the spear longer” means, the
basic tactic of “make your enemy unsafe while you remain safe” is probably the most basic
idea in warfare. Those who master it, placing their troops in no danger, but still achieving
objectives against their enemies, win the strategic battles necessary for cultural survival. If
you can repeat the strategy of creating danger for others while you experience none, the
enemy must adapt, and until they do, you win.

I also wanted to point out Henrey Bradley who gave an amazing answer with his “Fix
Bayonnets” example. That was a cool story.