War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
acoup.blogI’m really appreciating the video game references - literally the article mentions the cost of elephants relative to horses in the Total War and Imperator series:
> Let’s take Total War: Rome II as an example: a unit of Roman (auxiliary) African elephants (12 animals), costs 180 upkeep, compared to 90 to 110 upkeep for 80 horses of auxiliary cavalry (there are quite a few types) – so one elephant (with a mahout) costs 15 upkeep against around 1.25 for a horse and rider (a 12:1 ratio). Paradox’s Imperator does something similar, with a single unit of war elephants requiring 1.08 upkeep, compared to just 0.32 for light cavalry; along with this, elephants have a heavy ‘supply weight’ – twice that of an equivalent number of cavalry (so something like a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of cost).
> Believe it or not, this understates just how hungry – and expensive – elephants are. The standard barley ration for a Roman horse was 7kg of barley per day (7 Attic medimnoi per month; Plb. 6.39.12); this would be supplemented by grazing. Estimates for the food requirements of elephants vary widely (in part, it is hard to measure the dietary needs of grazing animals), but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder – and remember, the preference in war elephants is for large, mature adult males, meaning that most war elephants will be towards the top of this range. Accounting for some grazing (probably significantly less than half of dietary needs) a large adult male elephant is thus likely to need something like 15 to 30 times the food to sustain itself as a stable-fed horse.
Can confirm.
Back in India, my grandparents had a driver who later won the lottery. He used the winnings to buy two elephants, what he thought were a good investment (elephants are regularly rented out for expensive sums to temples for functions and celebrations).
Now he's a driver once more. But he has two elephants tho.
I remember reading somewhere that Roman emperors would give troublesome patricians an elephant as a gift. If he let the elephant die it was a grave insult and the emperor would proscribe him and take all his stuff. And otherwise he’d be stuck paying for the upkeep of a useless elephant.
Many of his video game or (current, pop) cultural references seem to stem from the challenges he faces teaching students for whom these references are their only exposure to pre-modern ideas.
But they are fun. :)
I'll be honest though: I wouldn't have referred to numerous historical encyclopedias and visited countless museums to learn about history, if I hadn't started out playing a demo version of Age of Empires 2 when I was 6. Once I saw a map of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, and for the next two weeks, I was hell-bent on creating a Jerusalem on the map editor in AoE. And a few years back, on a work trip to Israel, I ended up visiting the city just to see the places I had built out nearly 2 decades earlier.
"Livy – who appears to be quoting Polybius, a contemporary of the battle – is quite clear what he thinks of the elephants, “For as new inventions often have great force in the words of men, but when tried, when they need to work, and not just have their working described, they evaporate without any effect – just so the war elephants were just a name without any real use.” (Liv 44.41.4, my rough translation)."
Livy's comments apply to so many things....
It’s interesting that his analysis of war elephants has a lot of parallels to his thoughts about chemical weapons. In the hands of a sufficiently advanced military, both are an expensive, complicated solution in search of a problem, and both are easily neutralized by a peer competitor.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
both are easily neutralized by a peer competitor.
This is what I was thinking the whole time. Rome was surrounded by peer competitors, and OP says their most effective use of elephants was against non-peer competitors like Spain or Gaul.
So why would competitors continue to use elephants? Not because Roma was susceptible, but because THEIR boarder competitors were susceptible.
Elephants were not worth it to defeat well-trained troops, but were more than worth it to defeat smaller, less disciplined armies/militias.
My guess is that Rome's peers were often using elephants to keep smaller competitors in check, and only used them against Rome because they happen to have them anyway.
IIRC, horses.
Cavalry can't be used around elephants unless the horses are specifically trained to be around elephants. Rome itself of the Republican/early Imperial era didn't use cavalry, although some of their allies did. As a hypothesis, those using elephants may have been fighting entities that used cavalry.
Perhaps not coincidentally the same can be said of chemical warfare -- not so great in large scale war, but fairly effective against poor, untrained militia and enforcing order through fear on civilian populations
> So why would competitors continue to use elephants?
Not specifically for Rome's competitors, but elephants were kept also for prestige reasons in other regions, as described in this follow-up article:
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part...
> It’s interesting that his analysis of war elephants has a lot of parallels to his thoughts about chemical weapons.
Well, both technologies find themselves in the same situation; they are well understood by the militaries of their day, and those militaries have no interest in using them. It's not surprising that the same results might come about for the same reasons.
>>in order to produce mass casualties in battlefield conditions, a chemical attacker has to deploy tons – and I mean that word literally – of this stuff.
While I do agree with much of what this guy has to say about elephants, he is totally wrong about chemical weapons. We don't use mustard gas because it would indeed require tons of gas and be ineffective, but chemical weapons have evolved in the last 100 years. Modern chemical weapons do not need tons.
Novichok literally translates to "new thing". Such nerve agents were developed in the 60s/70s/80s. Infinitesimal amounts of this stuff will kill. Hazmat suits and gas masks are irrelevant when one gram might contain 5000 lethal doses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok_agent#Effects_and_cou...
Well, how much does it take to create a cloud of poisonous gas that is sufficiently concentrated to induce lethality and also spreads reasonably quickly that people can't escape it?
Bret gives the example of the Tokyo terrorist attack that released sarin in several crowded subway cars... and killed 12 people. Grenades would have killed far more people far more quickly... and that's the point: chemical weapons are far less effective at delivering death than explosives are.
Edit: Wikipedia gives 7mg/m³ for a lethal concentration for one of the Novichok agents, 28mg/m³ for sarin.
Dispersal is a well studied problem: https://fas.org/programs/bio/chemweapons/delivery.html
But to simplify, cluster mutinous are more effective vs troops than a single large detonation. Similarly, rather than starting from a single source you want to spread the weapon from a large number of points. By comparison to 7mg/m3 a 1 metric ton weapon could ideally cover a square kilometer to a thickness of 30m and concentration of 30mg/m3.
Notably, exposure time plays a major role in lethality so covering a wider area makes it much harder to escape from.
How long does the gas cloud last, in various wind conditions?
Really depends on local conditions, but as a benchmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack
Estimates of the death toll range from at least 281 people[3] to 1,729.[14] and 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in 3 hospitals supported by MSF[5]
However, it was considered safe enough for the UN to inspect the area the next day.
Please provide a link when quoting from elsewhhere.
Also you're badly overlooking the obvious. In full "...killing 12 people,[1][2] severely injuring 50, and causing temporary vision problems for nearly 1,000 others"
That's not the main point in the series on chemical weapons though. The main point is that modern armies are mobile and well equipped ("the modern system") and that chemical weapons are only well suited to stationary, fixed opponents that are poorly equipped. However, if you are fighting fixed position, poorly equipped opponents there are better and cheaper alternatives that pose less of a risk of self-harm (and war crimes).
In both the posts about elephants and chemical weapons, the theme is the same: they are not useful nor practical given the circumstances so the states make the rational decision not to use them.
The wikipedia article for sarin gas is also extremely frightening, but the example Bret gives of the Tokyo subway attack shows that it’s probably less effective than advertised in a modern military context. The bar isn’t “is this stuff deadly”, it’s is it deadly enough to overcome the expense, complication, and incompatibility with highly mobile modern doctrine to make it worth using on a militarily relevant scale over conventional options.
I’m certainly no expert, so I’m not going to go any further with “is this poison poisonous enough”, but that wikipedia article at least doesn’t seem to make the case.
The tokyo attack was unprofessional. A military attack would be exponentially more effective. Sarin is also tame compared to some of the more nasty stuff out there.
How would militaries be exponentially more effective? As far as I'm aware, the military can't magically change the laws of gaseous diffusion.
A major avenue of research in chemical weapons was efficient delivery. https://fas.org/programs/bio/chemweapons/delivery.html
But to simplify, you don’t just release a gas on it’s own you need a dispersal system like an explosive.
Well, yes, that's kind of the point: given the ability to deliver a explosive to your enemy's position, what makes it worthwhile to include (generally expensive and inconvenient to tranport) chemical weapon material rather than additional explosive and maybe some shrapnel. If it's that the area remains dangerous longer, then congrats, you have impaired your own ability to maneuver into or through that area once the enemy retreats.
WWII shows the absolutely mind boggling amount of bombs you can drop on an area without actually killing that many people. After buildings have already been hit once they make repeated strikes less effective. Chemical weapons are pound for pound vastly more deadly, especially as a follow up and more importantly disable people tying up resources for medical treatment and evacuation.
The most recent example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack which killed or incapacitated ~5,000 with a few rockets. It also acted at least in the short term as area denial which can be extremely useful.
PS: In terms of fighting a near parity army, simply using tents separated by sandbag walls makes bombs or rocket strikes significantly less effective. Add even the threat of chemical weapons and things become significantly more difficult. http://armymomstrong.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/2-milita...
Military munitions are engineered dispersal devices. They do a far far better job than plastic bags and umbrellas.
Is it nastier than a conventional explosive weapon, though, at least for military purposes?
Yes. A conventional explosive kills in the immediate area. These things pollute, killing for days/weeks/months.
That's not even the main thrust of his arguments against why chemical weapons are useless.
If anyone is new to his blog and finds this series entertaining, his series on Sparta is amazing and incredibly insightful: https://acoup.blog/tag/sparta/
During early wars between Islamic army vs Persian army in 634 AD, war elephants were crucial strategic weapons employed on the Persian side to rattle the horses of their opponents as the horses of Islamic army had never seen an elephant before.
Though the strategy worked, Persian side still lost as the Islamic army regrouped and specifically targeted the carriage harness to topple the rider, blinded the elephants and made them run amok causing disarray within Persian faction or straight away killed the elephants with skilled warriors[1].
To be fair to the Persian elephants, a large part of the Islamic victory against Persia was not because of any superior skill but because of severe infighting among the Persians. When the Arabs invaded, Persia was literally in the middle of a civil war. Soldiers and generals would betray their commanders midway during battles, and there was often zero coordination.
The Romans on the other hand... lots of hubris and underestimating. There were some brilliant strategies employed by the Arab generals that are even thought in military schools to this day. For example, the time when Khalid bin Walid conquered the walled city of Antioch - without siege weaponry, but by drawing the Romans out by cunning.
I would like to see wild elephants in a national park in the US. You can't really say they are not part of the eco system when mammoths only disappeared during the last ice age. Its basically the difference between a hairless cat. There are still plants around that relied on elephants to propagate them (osage orange)
"Moreover, the Roman elephants were smaller African elephants, effectively useless against the large Asian elephants the Seleucids used"
I thought African elephants were larger than Asian elephants?
There were two kinds of African Elephants; one from North Africa were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation. North African elephants were very small and lightly built compared to Asian varieties.
The White African Elephants of the Savanah, to which we all are familiar were never domesticated.
There were three african species, now there are two:
- the (bigger) african bush elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant)
- the (smaller) african forest elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant)
> were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation
That would be a highly unusual trajectory.
Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it takes to rear a calf in captivity.
And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the animal would be.
My guess is that these elephants weren't actually domesticated, but rather tamed. That is, as with Asian elephants, they were captured in the wild rather than raised in captivity.
Was over-exploitation really the key factor in North African elephants going extinct? I always thought it was due to increasing desertification + the expansion of human settlement in North Africa, but that's just idle speculation
I was just coming here to comment on this. The blog is "Unmitigated Pedantry" after all so I think this kind of detail would be appreciated
It is mentioned in one of the captions.
"...but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder..."
It should be pounds, not Kg. "Elephants eat roots, grasses, fruit, and bark, and they eat a lot of these things. An adult elephant can consume up to 300 pounds of food in a single day"
From: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/a/african....
Definitely interesting, but the post isn't about elephants vs wolves (no wolves are mentioned!) but about why the Romans didn't adopt the use of elephants in war.
TLDR; Despite being theoretically SUPERBADASS (my words), elephants are only somewhat effective against prepared armies, but are expensive and hard to maintain, especially compared to horses.
The Wolves are representative of the Romans!
Legend has it that the founders of Rome were raised by a she wolf! A lot of roman cultural items have an imagery of the she wolf.
Oh, of course. Sigh. Thanks.
The wolves in this case are the Romans themselves (The wolf being a symbol of Rome thanks to the Romulus and Remus myth). republican light infantry wore wolf pelts, and legionary standard bearers wore animal pelt headdresses, including wolves.
Thanks!
And the elephants were explicitly linked to three war-elephant using states absorbed by the Roman Empire, Carthage, Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Empire.