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Originally Posted by Triple C
I am well aware of that. However combat incapacitation from non-lethal wounds is far less than a reliable means to stop the enemy, providing only a softening effect on him. As you have noted yourself, the Romans would not have routed had the Parthians failed to secure an extraordinary quantity of missiles. If out of ammo, the missile armed army would be at a tremendous disadvantage, especially if your enemy could negate your mobility by either A. possess equal mobility or B. fighting on the defensive.
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When a crossbow bolt pierces a scotum and breaks the left arm of a legionaire, that legion has lost some of its combat power. Multiply that by thousands and you have a problem. I don't need to kill you to make less effective.
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Yes I am aware of that. However the Romans had fought armies with combined arms capability before. Having a weak infantry core between your cavalry may very well be a fatal vulnerability when exploited properly.
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The only enemy that Rome ever faced that knew how to use a combined arms army was Hannibal. He only lost at Zama because Scipio manage to convince the Numidian Cavalry to change sides.
The Seulecids and Macedonians have forgotten that it was the cavalry arm, not the phalanx, that made Alexander so lethal.
The Gauls, Macedonians, Greeks, and Germans were mainly infantry types.
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That is sort of subjective. I hope you don't take this as a cheap shot but the same could be said about Roman defeats vis-a-vis the Parthians. This type of argument is easy to make but hard to prove.The historiography painted an utterly unflattering picture of Crassius as a military commander. The Romans did have screening cavalry at the time and as many historians had pointed out, Crassius's heterodox deployment of the legions at Carhae denied his own army of freedom to maneouver. The Romans made as many offensives as the Parthian during the Roman-Parthian Wars which suggests to me that the Rommans were at least on an equal tactical footing with their adversaries. The Romans reguarly built field fortifications at 24 hour intervals on forced march, the discipline of which was far beyond the grasp of any medieval European armies. I have not researched Chinese armies during the Han period enough to know how well the Chinese compared to the Romans in this respect, but I doubt they could.
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Mark Anthony invaded Parthia with 100K troops and lost 1/3 that number without ever fighting the Parthians in a pitch battle. The main problem I have with the Roman army is they use a 1 size fits all approach to war, the heavy infantry. Don't get me wrong, the legion was very good. However, it took the Romans 400 years to figure out that what works against barbarian infantry does not work against cavalry base army of the Parthians and Sassanids.
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Furthermore the advantage of an combined arms army can be illusory. The clash of shock troops dedicated to face-to-face combat against light infantry that was used to ellusive tactics at a distance often proved an extremely unhealthy experience to the latter. In the Greco-Persian Wars the Persians, who had light cavalry in large numbers lost to the Greeks who had no real cavlry to speak of, almost every time they failed to achieve gross numerical superiority. Darius deployed a far more diverse army in troop types than Alexander the Great, whose army was basically composed of shock troops and mounted shock troops. The results of known battles do not prove to me conclusively the superiority of one type of army to another as far as technology and tactics are concerned.
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Terrain is what did in the Persians against the Greeks. Alexander was a special case. He was a genius and he commanded the Persian army, he would still have won.