Great video.
There are a few reasons that have somewhat been covered already, but I'll go into a little more detail here.
The first is that historically, there's always been somewhat of a waxing and waning between static, defensive type warfare and dynamic, offensive type warfare. For a period, one will be in ascendancy until people respond to that, either with technology or new tactics (often with the latter following from the former). This back and forth has always occurred, even in the modern era. A classic example is the differences both in terms of technology and tactics between WW1 and WW2.
Another trend in warfare has been that until the modern advent of guerrilla warfare and the ethical constraints placed upon large, powerful nations, the advantage has continually shifted towards the population of settled people with heavily centralised states. Basically, agriculture produces more calories per square kilometre (even if from less diverse food sources), and those regions also tend to be more bountiful in other resources such as wood. People want to live where there's reliability, even if they're serfs and so on. This means you can have a much larger population in a smaller area. Obviously, that means more soldiers, so unless the nomadic enemy has vastly superior technology (including siege weapons) and tactics, they're simply going to be unable to compete head to head and recover their losses after each battle. In relative terms, they may lose fewer people, but in absolute terms, they just won't be able to sustain the losses. For example, imagine the nomads lose two out of their ten soldiers and the settled people lose three out of their twenty. The nomads can't keep that up for long.
Now, for a while the nomads could inflict greater casualties because of their technology (and tactics). However, eventually they lost that technological edge (and thus, tactical edge) for another very simple reason. Nomads simply couldn't produce enough excess resources to enable a highly specialised and stratified society with a strong division of labour. At some point, they just couldn't keep up with innovating new military technology, and at a point beyond that, they couldn't even keep up the ability to simply steal/copy someone else's technology because their nomadic lifestyles prevented them from building and maintaining production facilities. When they conquered settled peoples, they often ended up becoming assimilated into the culture they conquered (e.g. the Mongols conquering China and founding the Yuan Dynasty) in order to rule the territory and its people.
Also, whilst settled people are not immune to succession crises, nomadic people seem to be more susceptible and often more deeply affected. This is probably due to the fact that the cultural values of nomads make them fierce warriors but not good governors. In turn, they tend more towards cults of personality than institutions that can far more easily weather succession crises.
Quote: (01-24-2015 08:16 PM)Dalaran1991 Wrote:
Finally, the Scythians were fucking badass group of steppe nomad, but if I remembered correctly they got ass kicked by the romans. Why?
There are a few reasons that have somewhat been covered already, but I'll go into a little more detail here.
The first is that historically, there's always been somewhat of a waxing and waning between static, defensive type warfare and dynamic, offensive type warfare. For a period, one will be in ascendancy until people respond to that, either with technology or new tactics (often with the latter following from the former). This back and forth has always occurred, even in the modern era. A classic example is the differences both in terms of technology and tactics between WW1 and WW2.
Another trend in warfare has been that until the modern advent of guerrilla warfare and the ethical constraints placed upon large, powerful nations, the advantage has continually shifted towards the population of settled people with heavily centralised states. Basically, agriculture produces more calories per square kilometre (even if from less diverse food sources), and those regions also tend to be more bountiful in other resources such as wood. People want to live where there's reliability, even if they're serfs and so on. This means you can have a much larger population in a smaller area. Obviously, that means more soldiers, so unless the nomadic enemy has vastly superior technology (including siege weapons) and tactics, they're simply going to be unable to compete head to head and recover their losses after each battle. In relative terms, they may lose fewer people, but in absolute terms, they just won't be able to sustain the losses. For example, imagine the nomads lose two out of their ten soldiers and the settled people lose three out of their twenty. The nomads can't keep that up for long.
Now, for a while the nomads could inflict greater casualties because of their technology (and tactics). However, eventually they lost that technological edge (and thus, tactical edge) for another very simple reason. Nomads simply couldn't produce enough excess resources to enable a highly specialised and stratified society with a strong division of labour. At some point, they just couldn't keep up with innovating new military technology, and at a point beyond that, they couldn't even keep up the ability to simply steal/copy someone else's technology because their nomadic lifestyles prevented them from building and maintaining production facilities. When they conquered settled peoples, they often ended up becoming assimilated into the culture they conquered (e.g. the Mongols conquering China and founding the Yuan Dynasty) in order to rule the territory and its people.
Also, whilst settled people are not immune to succession crises, nomadic people seem to be more susceptible and often more deeply affected. This is probably due to the fact that the cultural values of nomads make them fierce warriors but not good governors. In turn, they tend more towards cults of personality than institutions that can far more easily weather succession crises.