Firearms made troop numbers count quadratically rather than linearly in battle

Evidence

Lanchester recognized that long-range weapons would alleviate the “available space” constraint of hand-to-hand combat. Guns could be fired from a distance, and this meant that multiple soldiers could concentrate all their fire on the same target. If one army was larger than the other, the extras didn’t have to sit idly by, waiting in the wings. Their effectiveness could be brought to full force immediately because they could all fire at the enemy at once. Now, when he calculated the rate of attrition of opposing armies, he found that the effects of force strength—numbers of soldiers—mattered a lot more than they had before. The rate of loss of an army equaled the effectiveness of each soldier times the number of soldiers squared (these models, not surprisingly, are called his “square laws”). To put this difference into perspective, if one army in ancient times was five times the size of another, as the French were at Agincourt, it would have been five times as powerful. Now, because of the multiplicative effects of troop number, this same army would be twenty-five times as powerful as its opponent. — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 235

Categorization

• XREF: The squared-scaling of concentrated fire connects to the reader’s earlier work in this very book on how armor and weapons scale with body size in animals. — connects to: Concentrated fire makes quantity of soldiers beat individual weapon quality — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 236

Related

• Concentrated fire makes quantity of soldiers beat individual weapon quality (similarity 0.87)
• Group numbers can substitute for individual armament in warfare (similarity 0.82)
• Concentrating simultaneous fire disfavors large weapons while duels favor them (similarity 0.80)
• Concentrated longbow fire let outnumbered English forces defeat armored knights (similarity 0.79)
• The shift to long-range weapons fundamentally changed the rules of military engagement (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Concentrated fire makes quantity of soldiers beat individual weapon quality #exemplifies (0.75) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 236