Principles
of Group Combat
By:
John Jordan
Jester of Anglesey
Copyright 1992, all rights reserved.
This is a brief discussion of the central concepts of small unit fighting
in the medievalist setting. This article is not a definitive guide and
should not be read as such. Rather, it is an attempt to stimulate thought
and discussion on this subject. In other words, if you've got something to
say about this, then get together with some other folks and write an
article about it. This article represents the opinions of Jester of
Anglesey and no one else. That being said, read on…
Work as a team,
Everything else we discuss will be subordinate to this principle. We are a
mercenary group which fights in melees. While individual fighting skill is
to be encouraged and admired, we fight as a group, not a collection of
individuals. By cooperating effectively we can overcome opponents who, on
an individual basis, are more skilled than us.
There are many facets to teamwork. Foremost among these is trust. Each
individual must trust everyone else to do their part in an intelligent
manner. This allows each person to focus on a single task, confident that
they can devote their entire attention to that task and not have to worry
about their back. Trust is something that is earned over long periods of
association and carries over into aspects other than combat. For example:
if you can't be trusted in camp, how can you be trusted on the battlefield?
The association that produces trust also allows you to understand people,
to know them. Only by talking to people, by being around them can you
begin to understand how they think, why they act the way they do. In
battle, this familiarity will translate into an increased ability to
cooperate. If you know that Bob McBob is an aggressive SOB who believes
the best defense is a good offense, and you have fought with him before,
then you can have a pretty good idea of how he will react in battle. Know
the people you fight with, your enemies as well as your friends.
Never fight as an individual so long as one friend remains alive. Work
together to get the kills and accomplish the group's mission. No action on
the battlefield should be wasted. Use your attack, for example, to create
an opening for someone else. You may not kill your opponent, but by moving
his shield out of position you make it possible for the spearman two people
down to gut him like a fish. In the same vein, watch for the opportunities
that your comrades create for you. By working together two mediocre
fighters can get as many or more kills than a good fighter who fights as an
individual. Every action you take should be intended in some way to help
the group.
Communicate,
Talk to the people around you. Let the spearman know that you are coming
up on their left to support them. They might appreciate a hint about the
four bad guys charging from behind them. Identify targets for them. Let
them know when you're dead by dying loudly. If you need help to take out a
bad guy, let the folks around you know. Pass on verbal commands from your
commanders. Do not yell out orders unless you are echoing a command or you
are in charge, you'll just muddy the waters and confuse people (like me).
Fight the way you planned,
Initiative is the ability to dictate the terms of a battle. By making the
enemy fight on your terms, you automatically gain an advantage. You know
what you are going to do and he has to try to figure that out and react.
He has to do two things, you only have to do one. In the military they
have a saying: "Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative." Never let the
enemy push you around. We are the wolves, they are the sheep.
Don't let the enemy use his resources,
Tie up, destroy, or render ineffective the enemy's best assets. Examples
of this include: pinning a unit that relies on mobility, ganging up on a
particularly effective warrior, scattering or killing the archers,
separating a leader from his unit, or going around the flank of a unit that
relies on a tight shield wall. This will force the enemy to deviate from
their battle plan and allows you to seize the initiative. Battle plans are
often built around resources, when those resources are in some way removed
the enemy plan falls apart and they are forced to improvise. A good unit,
one that practices together on a regular basis, can recover from this, but
hodgepodge units formed of groups who don't know each other will be plunged
into uncertainty and confusion. Because our plans are based on
organization and tactics we are less susceptible to such actions, and
because we practice together on a regular basis we can recover more
quickly.
Aggression,
In his book "A Brief History of War", author John Keegan explores the time
when warfare stopped being a ritual and became a business. It happened
when farmers, to whom hunting was a ritual to supplement food and who
practiced herding on a small scale, encountered nomads, to whom hunting was
a matter of survival and who practiced large scale herdin. Since hunting
was the model for warfare, the nomads quickly dominated their opponents in
a tactical sense. We can carry this principle forward in time and apply it
to our situation. We must place ourselves in the role of the hunter and
dictate the terms of the engagement. We place our opponents in the role of
the prey and force them to react. We herd them into groups, separate
individuals from the group, and cut them down. We drive the herd to a
location of our choosing and slaughter them. We do this by acting
aggressively, by initiating action and executing it ruthlessly and
decisively.
All actions on the battlefield should be carried out as violently and as
ruthlessly as safely possible. A melee is not a tournament. We do not
greet an enemy, ask him if he's comfortable, and then commence fighting.
We sweep down on our foes like a storm. We overwhelm them, knock them
down, and never give them a chance to rest or recover. If we can't go
through them, then we slash them as we move by or around. When we are gone
the wounded survivors should be trying, unsuccessfully, to figure out what
just happened to them while we are halfway across the field cutting another
unit to pieces.
Avoid a fair fight,
A fair fight, for this purpose, is defined as a conflict between two
opposing groups of approximately equal skill and status. A fair fight is
like a coin toss, you've got a fifty percent chance of winning or losing.
We want to win, so we do every thing that we are allowed to do according to
the SCA rules of warfare to gain any advantage we can. It isn't pretty, it
isn't chivalrous, but it is effective. We are here to fight according to
the rules, and we are also here to win. So we pick off two opponents with
four of our fighters, or we bring in spears to pick a wounded shield-wall
to pieces, or we mob Sir So-and-So with three guys while the rest of us
wipe out his squires. Some people will argue that this is contrary to the
spirit in which we fight in the SCA. I disagree. No one criticizes Sir
Whitebelt when he maneuvers his opponent into opening up his guard. We are
simply applying the same concept to group combat. We don't have to cheat
or be unsafe to gain an advantage, we just have to be smart, quick, and
practiced.
Maintain unit cohesion,
It is impossible to define a standard of unit cohesion because it varies
according to the circumstances. The order for a woods battle will be very
different from that of a bridge battle. In general, you should be close
enough that you can support the person to either side of you, so that your
group of two, three, or four people can support the other group of people
on either side of you. You should be close enough that the enemy can't
break your line and split the group. But you should also be far enough
apart to avoid losing room to maneuver. Only through constant practice as
a group can we personally learn this. The only constant to this concept
is, fight as a member of a team, not as an individual.
Be aware of what's going on around you,
In order to judge where you must be, you must pay attention to the
situation. Where is the enemy? Where are your comrades? Where does
terrain limit movement? Is that other unit on our flank about to get
crushed? Which way are we moving now? The best phrase to sum up this
concept is the one used by military forces around the world; "Stay alert
and stay alive".
Someone has to be in charge,
"For God so loved the world that he did not send a committee." It's an
old joke, but true nonetheless. Democracy is a wonderful system that works
well in times of peace, but it's unsuited to warfare. Time counts on the
battlefield, so there's no time to reach a consensus. Listen to the
commander and follow orders. If you don't like the commander, tough! If
you're going to be an individual and run off and do your own thing once the
fighting starts, then you're going to get some of us killed. Let me sum up
with another quote, attributed to Benjamin Franklin after the signing of
the Declaration of Independence: "We must all hang together, or we will
assuredly hang separately."
Stay mobile,
Mobility is key to success on the battlefield. It allows us to pick where
we will fight, when we will fight, and under what conditions we will
fight. It can be used to string-out a tight unit or pack together a loose
unit. If we can't go through it we can go around it. All other factors
being equal, the unit with the most mobility will tend to win the fight.
Once we pin a unit, we can cut them to pieces at our leisure. If a unit
can't pin us down, they can't kill us.
Sometimes you have to leave your buddies behind,
This is a touchy subject, but must be covered. We are a unit. If the
unit wins, we all win, if an individual wins, the group can still lose.
Nobody likes to leave a friend behind (no one that I'd associate with), but
sometimes it is necessary. If that person has run off to fight on their
own or lost their mobility due to a wound then they are on their own. The
unit must remain mobile, and cannot do this with a gimp. Speaking for
myself, I would be ashamed to have the unit lose because it was trying to
protect me. Better to lose one or two warriors than five or ten.
This also applies to the enemy. Leave the gimps. A man on his knees can
still fight and kill. If we gimp five or six of the enemy then we can take
them out of the equation simply by rotating our front to focus our attacks
on our unwounded foes. A smart foe won't let this happen, but most of them
will. Do the math: Ten on ten. We gimp three and rotate our front so
that the gimps can't attack us. Ten on seven. Once the entire unit is
dead or gimped we can leave all of them where they lay and move on to
attack another unit. Don't over focus and let a pocket of gimps cripple
our force. Leave them, destroy their buddies who can still walk around,
and come back to them later when we can take our time and pick them apart
with spears.
Take small bites and keep chewing,
To defeat twenty warriors with ten, we kill two of them with four of
ours. Do it suddenly, violently, and above all, quickly. This is known as
concentrating our forces to achieve local numerical superiority. The odds
are now eighteen to ten. We do it again, and again, and again. We use our
mobility, string them out and isolate individuals, gimp one and leave him.
Soon the odds will be eight to ten and we will be able to overwhelm them.
To do this we must apply all the aforementioned principles. We must be
smooth, practiced, aggressive, and fast.
Fight on the oblique,
Because SCA combat is primarily oriented towards tournament style fighting
in which two individuals (or two small groups) square off and slug it out,
people in the SCA tend to carry this attitude into a melee. When faced
with an opposing force they seek to come face to face with an opponent and
fight. The SCA rules further encourage this by preventing attacks from the
rear or a blind flank. It is still possible to hit someone where they
aren't looking (the best place to hit someone from). We do this by
attacking on the oblique. Simply put, if you are part of a battleline
facing an opposing battleline, then you should not attack the person
directly in front of you. Instead, fix the person in front of you, get
them to focus on you, and then attack the opponent one or two down from
you. If you can't do that, then engage the opponent in front of you and
get him to open up to an attack from another member of our group.
On a larger scale this means not hitting a battleline head-on. Hit them
from an angle. In this way all of our forces can engage a portion of their
forces. We gain local superiority in numbers, we dictate the terms of the
engagement and force the enemy to adjust, and we keep one of our flanks
open in case we need to maneuver.
Don't do stupid things,
If you forget everything else, remember this. |