Pondering: Ancient Military, Modern Doctrine
Image: Chris Chow
Looking for insight for an upcoming novel.
Okay, so. It’s thousands of years in the future. A global calamity has caused civilization to collapse. The population cratered to less than a billion people. Modern technological infrastructure was wiped out: power generation, mining, logistics, everything.
Eventually humanity recovered, up to a point. Right now, in the real world, all the world’s near-surface deposits of metals, oil, and most minerals are depleted; a society that lost modern infrastructure would no longer be able to mine iron, find or use oil and other petrochemicals, coal, and so on.
Metals in the fictional society still exist, though in limited quantities. They have to be “mined” from landfills, and the capacity to smelt steel without coal or oil is highly limited. Fortunately, landfills are largely anaerobic environments, so metals would still exist in unoxidized states, but can you imagine trying to smelt anything useable from, say, a stainless steel oven or a car frame without coal or oil?
No oil means limited plastics. Firearms exist, but without modern machining they’re quite crude compared to modern firearms. Computers? No. Electrical power in large quantities? No.
Thing is, the knowledge to make these things still exists; it isn’t lost. Many books and so forth survive (though not, obviously, computer records). People would know how electricity works, how to smelt high-quality steel, and so on; it’s just that without ores, without coal, without oil except for plant oils, it’s difficult to do on a large scale.
So: Horses and carts are the predominant non-pedestrian travel. Simple firearms exist but not in mass-produced, industrial quantities. It’s a weird society: technologically backward but with full knowledge of what has been lost.
My question relates specifically to military doctrine and combat tactics.
Horse-mounted calvary and foot soldiers, armed with swords and mmmmaybe simple cartridge firearms brings to mind, say, Revolutionary War or Civil War tactics...but in this world, the knowledge of modern combined arms tactics, military doctrine, and small-unit tactics still exists, it wasn’t lost, only the technological infrastructure was lost.
So, what would military units look like? What would military tactics and strategy look like? Definitely not Civil War, but not modern either. How would industrial military techniques and doctrine adopt to that level of technological infrastructure?
I’d love to hear your ideas!