ELi5: In ancient wars, how did the commanders know if they are winning a war while they were in the chaos of the war?

Question

ELi5: In ancient wars, how did the commanders know if they are winning a war while they were in the chaos of the war?

In: Other

Answer 1

Other comments aside, one can lose a war by winning it and vice versa.

War is a matter of data management. You have a checklist of things you think you’d want to accomplish and you feel like you’re winning as you check off items on your list.

Unfortunately the other guys got a list and they may not have the same items on the list.

And one of the big things is to trick somebody into wanting something that makes your life easier instead of harder.

So in the oldest terms you really measured by literally how much geographical space you have your guys standing on, or how many bushels of barley you manage to get away with. How many people are starving. That sort of thing.

And there’s a big difference between strategy and tactics. Tactics is something that happens in the battlefield and strategy is something that happens in the planning for the most part.

As war got less and less orderly, particularly over the last 200 years or so, things got trickier and trickier to assess.

So for instance you think about Hitler marching into Russia, he thought he was winning as he took all this land because he was making tactical advances. but Russia is vast and cold and inhospitable, and the Russians were destroying the infrastructure as they withdrew, so eventually there was a long dangly bit stuck way deep into Russia that Russia just cut right the heck off of the German military.

Nazi Germany was winning the tactical war but they were defeated by their failure of strategy. They couldn’t feed their people. They couldn’t live off the land. They couldn’t get bullets to the front line. They couldn’t send reinforcements. And once all their people were lined up in a big line stretching from Germany towards Moscow winter cut them off at the base.

So Hitler thought he was winning but he was being tricked into losing by the illusion of wins.

So battles were mapped by flags and people in different colored uniforms and little markers on maps. But even today wars are unwieldy things that people only imagine they are in control of.