Why is it so easy for a larger force to fall for the Pincer Movement?I

[Pisces Axxxxx]

I'm watching a documentary right about the Battle of Marathon. In this documentary, The Persian lines pushed through the Athenian center but it was a trap and the Athenians on the far right and left flanks suddenly enveloped the Persians now in between them. The Persians then were sorrunded and the Athenians counterattacked them.

 

This reminds me of a documentary I watched of Hannibal years ago. In this documentary, they show cased the battle of Cannae in which Hannibal intentionally ordered the center of the Cartheginian forces to fall back. The documentary showed a computerized image of a line gradually become a crescent shape formation as the Romans pushed through. Once it fully formed into a crescent, the documentary states the Cartheginans flanked the Romans and slaughtered them in this battle.

 

The movie Kingdom of Heaven depicts a Cavalry charge between the Muslim and Crusaders. Numerically outnumbered, the Crusader cavarly were able to crush the center of the Muslim cavalry but immediately the Muslim cavalry enveloped the Crusaders and formed a crescent formation and flanked the Crusaders, winning the battle. Granted in this example (and yes the stuf I read on the real battle this scene was based on), the Muslims really outnumbered the Crusaders by a large margin abd trying to gain a momentum with a direct charge so typical of Western armies was probably the Crusaders best chances of winning this battle because even if they tried some other tactic, the Muslims would have ended up sorrunding them with their numerical superiority any way.

 

I am very curious. When the Hannibal documentary showed the Crescent diagram, it seemed such an obvious trap. Why did military commanders including highly competant genrals time and time again for fall such an obvious movement?Why do they insist on attacking the center despite even in cases where they tended to have far more troops than their opponents who used the Pincer Movement like in Marathon and Cannae?

 

It should be obvious they'll be flanked if they only push through the enemies' center formations!

[Bryaxis Hecatee]

My answer will be three fold, and only valid (if valid indeed) for the classical world, not the later periods. 

 

1) tradition : fighting in the west was, for a long time, a single line of fighters with the best men on the right side of each line in order to break the weaker side of the ennemy formation. In such a fight, line depth was more important than line width. Flanking was not considered because the risks of breaking the unit cohesion and weaken the line was too great. Non-western tradition tradition cultures did not choose this way to fight, and that includes the Gauls (more northern tradition, center attack, individual based instead of unit based) and the eastern armies whose infantery (the main forces) was usually the weakest force and where the cavalry would try to fall on the ennemies flanks.

In the western tradition the cavalry was deemed less important, more usefull for reconaissance and preventing ennemy cavalry's attacks on the flanks. . 

 

2) command and control : often generals would fight with the men, loosing strategic overview on the fighting. Beside dust and the lack of suitable eminence close enough to the battle (mostly happening in a plain) did prevent them from gaining a view. The macedonian military structure under Philip and Alexander was exceptional on the quality of it's command and control structure. Basicaly other armies had units commanders following a main plan but being autonomous and having knowledge only of their limited sector, including the senior general which, at this point, was not much more than a local unit commander. 

 

3) once ennemy lines began retreating, soldiers will simply walk further to get to break the ennemy formation and cause the root which will cause the final victory. Thus the commander may well be unable to order the stop or the retreat. An exemple of such a situation is Caesar's defeat at Gergovia's siege. 

 

So both cultural and practical aspects prevented commanders from detecting an envelloppement and take countermesures. 

[caldrail]

In the ancient world, there was a high degree of emphasis on trickery when trying to gain advantage on the battlefield. There had to be really because command and control were in their infancy, if they existed at all, and thus surpising the enemy meant he couldn't do an awful lot to prevent the situation going bad. Most people have this image of generals in a tent pointing daggers at maps, but that scenario simply didn't happen back then. Both sides either had a pre-prepared plan or formed up to fight with less of a gameplan (to say the least).

 

In reference to Cannae, Paullus and VArro were able commanders but I don't recall either being especially good. In any case, Rome far preferred cautious commanders who didn't take risks, both to prevent military disasters (you have to laugh) and also to put men in charge who weren't dangerously ambitious with lots of armed men.

 

With such a large combined army the Romans rotated supreme authority daily. Varro was in charge on the day and considered the lesser of the two men. Whilst he might have listened to Paullus' advice, Paullus had no choice but to defer to Varro's decisions that day. The Romans far outnumbered the Carthaginians and in all probability felt no need to be clever - complex battle plans were very risky without much real time communication, not to mention a time when generals often fought alongside their men rather than lead from a tent way off at the back.

 

The Roman plan at Cannae was simple - just steamroller the hap;ess Carthaginians and trample them underfoot. Such a large formation is however unwieldy and Hannibal had the foresight to exploit that. Firstl;y his' thin punic line' would look weak and very tempting from the other side, and by retreating, would draw the Romans on. The stronger side formations only had to maintain place - as the cohorts marched past, they began to turn to face them, thus causing disruption and disorder in the mass Roman formation. By winning the cavalty bout, it allowed Hannibal to close the Romans into the trap.

 

Varro had not forseen the disorder that would result at the edges. Hannibal was in all likelihood hoping he wouldn't. Those cohorts in the middle would have been blithely unaware iof difficulty until the mass of men began to squeeze them together, with a resulting loss of any command and control whatsoever (indeed, it was reported that Roman legionaries were refusing orders from centurions they didn't recognise)

[Onasander]

To give you a cognitive answer, the cytoarchitecture of the right dorsal lateral juxtapositioned unfavorably with the supplamentary motor area.

 

The best commanders would of operated out of the SMA, with strong exchange between the left and right hemisphere allowing for lightening fast, calculas style split second decision making that takes everything into consideration..... think Napoleon and Hannibal. However, given the closeness of both SMAs, the mental dialectic would still be pliable to reference to other personality types, that is hopefully represented in the command staff quick to advise to commander when he is eyeing the battlefield. He can make alot of calculations fast, but cant think like thinkers based in the Thalamus can (think Tony Stark's genius and dependancy of Pepper, his wife/personal assistant who processed information differently).

 

The Right hemisphere controls alot of our visual processing, but its neural chemical processing is saturated in testosterone and serotonin, making it impulsive and territorial. Its also can be factually specific, and operate on a faith basis..... which in more civilized times wasnt a contradiction, but in our modern quagmire republics we fight politically tooth and nail to seperate the two, and some idiots to deride faith and try to extinguish it culturally and legally, which is a bad idea, given this amounts to a cultural lobotomy.

 

The right hemisphere also structures hierarchy (though its the left that creates the fanatical acceptance or rejection we have for people).

 

Guess which cognitive style the majority of Roman commanders were? Thats right, not the SMA centric, but the right hemisphere, especially the Right Dorsal Lateral .

 

So instead of a SMA mastermind playing 7 moves ahead as Hannibal strived to do, studying the enemy, the dumb dumbs sent numbskulls all too sure of themselves, who knew their rank and position in society, knew a roman army was invincible, had a range of tactical finesse and were gung ho to meet the enemy head on, Robert Lee style at Frederickburg.... There is the enemy, and that is where I am going.... that kind of attitude.

 

This works well enough against uneducated barbarians desiring loot, rape and lemons, but not against a well educated commander from a military caste seeking to destroy your civilization via his wits alone...... if failed horribly. The reason why is the SMA is more aware of the overall thinking of the brain than any other personality type and can simulate in his head who the two personalities based in the right hemisphere alone can think and interact than they can each other or the SMA. Such commanders have a unfail advantage.

 

If Hannibal could offer statistical facts (notoriously weak guals in the center), and string it with other facts to bait and control the commander (if we kill the guals and take the center, the enemy will be broken and unable to support either wing with the other, and likely rout) then he can control the Romans impluses.

 

It comes down to timing, timing if left hemisphere, which the SMA has ample access to, as well as strategic thinking (mostly the left dorsal lateral)....

 

The Romans died as the dogs they were. I feel no pity for them, they favored just one type of citizen, one type of commander. It wasnt until Scipio Africanus began the long, trying process of thinking out of the box, getting into Hannibals head, emulating his cognitive functions, which takes a long time (Hannibal had his whole life to become this cognitively intergrated) that the Romans managed to properly use their resourses in novel ways and collapse Hannibals empire.

 

It is not a easy trick to get a enemy army into a pincher position. It only emerged as doctrine with the Prussians under Fredrick the Great. Its the basics of most US Infantry Troop Moving Procedures, with how the teams move and support within the squads, but I can't recall too many stories of that happening short of ambush situations or cross fire from buildings.

 

The classical ideal of the pincher movement is as rare as ever, but elements of it are still valid, and may still remerge in it's full glory from time to time. Just likely will be rare outside of special forces, so we wont hear of it much. All you need are some deep thinkers and some meatheads, and you got yourself the essential elements.