IMPROVISATION IN WARFARE

Sometimes – often, maybe – we have a vision of historical conflict as something that’s rather neat and ordered. We imagine right-angled blocks of sarissa-armed men marching in step toward a patiently waiting foe, chiselled cavalry troopers charging down a dusty defile with pennants streaming in glorious John Ford Technicolor, or grizzled USMC sergeants showing the green replacements that “everything’ll be fine if you jus’ stick with me, kid…”

By Chris King

A place for everything and everything in its place. The trouble is, of course, that this is rubbish. Plans in conflict don’t often work out, and the right things are very rarely in the right places. What we have instead is a rich and characterful history of engagements being fought by people who really didn’t expect to be fighting them. The first way in which we might conceptualize this idea of ‘fish out of water’ might be simply those who find themselves out of their normal martial environments. The most obvious examples are probably those sailors who find themselves quite literally ‘out of water’, from the Athenians forcing their least capable (and presumably most expendable!) oarsmen to fight hand to hand armed with wicker shields and whatever they could find at…

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Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy (Digital) - 1 Issue, WSS 122

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