Horse Archers

Laser-guided bunker busters are not exactly the most effective ordinance you want to use against horse archers.

who has the funds to do all of that. Or the manpower to operate the airport, produce the planes and fuel them.

it's not as cost effective as horse archers were to steppe nomads.

It will remain an archetype for always, I'm sure, just like a cell is an archetype that will remain.
Even though applications derived from or tied onto the arch and arrow, will look different such as a rifle.

In case you want a more completed picture keep on reading:

In Göktürk script, the symbol for arch is a literal depiction of an arch, the symbol for an arrow is a literal arrow, and the symbol for throwing (also horse) is a literal arrow exiting an arch.

So in a way it will remain very effective, has increased in effectiveness and will continue to evolve even further.

The US needs billion-dollar planes and million-dollar missiles to kill one measly horse archer, steppeniggers kill other horse archers with one well-placed arrow. Typical really.

Further, these symbols stand for syllables making up the Turkic language, so they aren't as numerous as there are objects, but very limited similar to latin alphabet, with the main difference that the script can be tied back onto actual objects, certain fundamental archetypes they represent.

many years and billions of dollars to train a pilot, build and equip a plane and keep it working and fueled.

Not nearly as effective as a horse archer

Further, in the picture it says, since some letters look similar to other scripts, while ours stands in direct connection to the physical reality, one might ask the question what derived from what.

english longbowmen were pretty fucking OP desu
>agincourt

Every type of warfare depends on the lifestyle of the people waging it. I dare say that it would be easier for a country to industrialize to a point of having tanks and planes than to spend a few generations breeding adequate horses and training men to fight like Mongols.

Very nice but you still haven't answered who would win.

Effectiveness means accomplishing the mission.

*goes on defense*
*loses in 15 seconds*

Defend what?

The oldest evidence for horse breeding is located in (I believe to remember west-northern) Kazakhstan.

idk, your people?

Steppenigger warfare is absolutely useless on the defense. Which is why the Ruskies and the Chinks massacred whole tribes once the battle goes south for Steppenigs

it's the very Foundation of the culture though.
there's no extra effort added, they'd be breeding horses anyway. Not the same thing with fighter jets

now imagine if they could ride horses

your water supply
>will there ever be something as effective in the art of warfare???
Castles
>muh mongols took down castles
No they didn't , they took down cities, and it was the Chinese who actually did the heavy lifting.
The Koreans managed to hold a castle against the mongols successfully.
>Longbows>horse archers
>stands on hill
>"we will raid your village"
>*lives in motte and bailey*
Horse archers are supremely over rated.

the people can just move away, or come back later when the invasor realizes they can't hold the steppe.

you just have to throw a body of someone with a disease over the walls and then there's the castle and the village ruined.

>People can just move away
Oh sure, just move away.

Just move away from a fast approaching Cossack/Chinese cavalry force that had just recently fucked most of your men in the battlefield and are now heading towards your slow-moving ass with all your children, tents to pack up.

they would be shit because those bows aren't made for cavalry and its much more efficient to have anti cav stakes and infantry in a chokehold

they are more accurate that way, and can put more force

>t.ghengis khan

Horse gunners.

You must be dumb. The reason he's asking is because there was essentially no defense against a horse archer based army. There are defence against jets, tanks, machine guns, etc... horse archers steam rolled through everything. Hes asking if there is anything past or present that was as effecrive. Jets can get shot down real easily, tanks can get fucked with a simple mine, etc...

Steam ships and Airplanes were undoubtedly just as revolutionary. It's just that both sides had them.

Massed archers are the standard counter to horse archers

I think you're missing the context of the question. Is there anything nowadays that had the same effectiveness as horse archers in medieval times? Not really. Maybe an air force. Tanks would be the answer if they weren't so sluggish. Could machine guns mow down an army of horse archers? Of course, but that's not the point of the question.

>horse archers rule battlefields for centuries
>gunpowder invented
>armies start to use mounted rifleman aka dragoons
>they never make a real impact

Why? Is it because horses are just too hard to control with the loud gunfire all around?

how about a nuke then you pedantic wanker

Colt revolvers.

Horse archers aren't as op as you think they were. They are a useful tool for open warfare but their role is to harrass the enemy and prevent infantry from moving freely into advantageous positions. Against massed foot archers they get btfo by higher density higher poundage higher rof volleys, because horse archers simply can't compete with their firepower and they are a lot harder to armor. They exist to control the battle field and do a good job of that but without lances or heavy cav or other similar units it's very difficult for them to actually win battles against a balanced enemy army.
Dragoons aren't mounted gunners, they are mounted infantry. They are less like mounted archers with firearms and more like a smaller but highly mobile infantry unit

They were very effective on open plains like the steppe regions. Any steppe army that advanced beyond had to adapt and add other strategies too

Are you fucking retarded? First of all, dragoons fight on foot. Second of all, horse archer army counters nothing, but Reiters absolutely btfo pikeman units.

and those weapons demand a very vulnerable supply chain, and that's another problem

because with gunpowder there comes all the logistical complications that trouble every army you can think of.

Horse archers had no issues like that. They could refuse to engage the army and move straight to their supply chain.

Not to mention weather and possibility of malfunctions and so on

>American education.

>helicopters
effective in every terrain
>horse archers
basically useless in 80% of the world

extremely hard to develop, deploy or maintain.
One of the reasons horse archers were revolutionary is that there was no logistical nightmare to make use of them.

Horse archers can harass the supply line of the enemy archers and win a mini-battle of attrition.

But I agree with you, that's a very accurate analysis

deserts as well. basically 2/3 of the known world

depends heavily on the terrain
if the area does not innately support large herds their horses will starve if they remain in a single location

he's not wrong though

didn't the arabs wreck them with camels in desert encounters?

also you can't just assume every sq mile of the planet is equal in value, otherwise the most effective military unit is an oceangoing ship

I agree they were vulnerable to the terrain, but when in valuable terrain they could work without supply lines.

I'm not talking only about the steppe nomads, but horse archers in general. In the Iranian Plateau and the Levant horse archers were effective as well.

>here was essentially no defense against a horse archer based army.
>horse archers steam rolled through everything

>he is not wrong
American education can be interpreted differently by various people. Some will understand it as lack of basic knowledge, I understand it as lack of common sense.

He is wrong, because what he says doesn't make any sense. Speaking with European theater in mind, horse archers achieved nothing, and were pushed back. Saying that they steamrolled through everything is even more retarded. And you literally don't need even one archer in your horse army, to use the very same basic tactics, like possibility to ignore your enemy and just raid everything, or to move 200km per day.

And if you thing Mongols were successful, because they had full horse archer army, I have very bad new for you.

It doesn't really seem to matter what we bring up, because you always add arbitrary restrictions on top. We've presented plenty of innovations that were just as effective and revolutionary, if not more so.

complex supply chains, assembly lines, machine power and engineering are all integral parts of the industrial lifestyle. If you're not mass producing tanks then you make tractors instead.

stop moving the goalposts faggot

Actually those are fair points, I agree with you

>will there ever be something as effective in the art of warfare???
Yes. No serious military power has used horse archers for years. Mongols etc saw success because they were fighting peoples who had no experience with horse archery. Once said peoples had experience against horse archers, and reformed their militaries accordingly the story changes.

Also mongolboos are the most insuffareble faggots there are. Worse than wehraboos. Fucking John Green and his "le exceptions XDDdadssad so unique" memery

>china and persia had no experience with horse archery
The retardation, it hurts

Poland copied the Hungarian military reforms (which basically added up to having more armoured infantry, cavarly, crossbowmen and building more fortifications) and beat the mighty unbeatable horse archers

>LE SEMANTICS LE ME SMART LE U DUMB xDDD ME AM SMART
Good argument friendo, definitely of such keen insight that it warranted to call someone a retard. Tell me how did you come to posess such intelligence? I was talking about the European states like Hungary, Poland and Russia that cleary showed a lack of understanding how to fight against the mongols. I have no idea why China and Persia couldn't manage them.

But anyways your post adds little to nothing to the discussion at hand, other than you got to feel smug for a few seconds. You didn't answer OP's question, in fact you just obfuscated it by implying the Chinese and Persians had experience against horse archers yet still lost. So by your logic the Chinese and Persian should have also used horse archery (if it is so inherently good that it can't be countered even if you know how it functions) or that the steppe peoples were just superior in other ways.
"The retardation, it hurts"

> horse archers achieved nothing, and were pushed back

Horse archers achieved a ton under capable leadership like Subutai.

Horse archers, just like most types of soldiers, function poorly when poorly led. They also function poorly when not employed as a part of a combined arms force.

Alexander's Phalangites were invincible, because they were well led, their flanks guarded by equally well trained Hypaspists, and their advanced covered by peltasts before contact. The Diadochi Phalangites sucked because they were not as well trained, not as well led, and their generals fell for the "muh phalanx" meme and neglected all the critical support elements, which let the Legions exploit disruptions in the phalanx created by rough terrain and cut them to pieces.

When the Mongols invaded Europe the first time, they could call upon various auxiliaries from Beijing to Baghdad in addition to their horse archers. When the Golden Horde invaded Europe later, the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire deprived them of auxiliaries that shored up Mongol weaknesses, and they had a much smaller power base to draw upon.

If you could magically put the Yuan dynasty next to Poland, Europe would be fucked.

yeah, the technical

>What is mud

Guns work pretty good

wow two whole battles that they won (with the help of mud)

Yes, walled hills. Also, helicopters.

...

True story

This tbqh

To expand on this, it wasn't just their horse archers that made Mongols and other steppe cultures successful. They certainly made good use of horse archers as harassing skirmishes but you need to dismount to actually take and hold ground. (To an extent it depends on whether your goal is to kill the enemy per se or to take their land and resources and keep them.) Moreover, the famed mobility of the army as a whole was about more than just "lol we can shoot while riding away". It was more that even their heavy cav always had multiple remounts and the infantry were effectively dragons. That was what gave them mobility/speed in a larger strategic sense.

> I have no idea why China and Persia couldn't manage them.

it's because they're like... effective

They did ride horses. Many English yeomen were wealthy enough to bring a horse along on campaign. In battle they would ride ahead with the knights and other cav and set up in advanced positions, dismount, and shoot.

Those are fertile plains rather than deserts. I mean there's deserts in both places but in the desert you ideally want camels, not horses, unless you have a LOT of supplies.

Have you tried jets? They're pretty god damn overpowering. They go fast as hell and can blast shit with missiles. They're like the modern horseback archers.

China and Persia have been using horse archery since before mongols even existed. Also, in the case of the mongol conquests, "Persia" means the dynasty of the turks of Khwarezm who were basically another steppe people. What we have here is different peoples all using horse archers to complement their other troops (even the mongols) and one of this peoples wins. And not always, mamluks (also from the steppe, also used horse archery) won.

tl;dr Mongol invasion of Asia cannot be used in any way to prove or disprove the superiority of horse archery.

So you basically agree that horse archers are a meme much like phalangites, which is what everyone is trying to tell to OP and those who think like him. Of course they are useful when they're doing their work, that's why they're used to begin with, but they're useless by themselves.

this. horse archers are a meme

No mud no win

*blocks your path*

*takes advantage of 3 way Chinese civil war, collapse of the Kievan Russ, post-Caliphate/Turkic Invasion Middle East.*

*invades Europe, starting a mass migration of Slavic and Germanic tribes that leads to the end of the Roman Empire*

3 way Chinese civil war?

Well to be exact it was 4 way.
1) Song Dynasty. The reigning imperial dynasty of the time.
2) Jin Dynasty. Founded by Jurchen invaders who invaded Northern China vs. the Song and who subsequently claimed Mandate of Heaven, thereby pretenders to the Chinese throne.
3) Western Xia Dynasty. Founded by the rebel Li Jiqian who led the Tangut minority to rebel against the Song and established their own dynasty.

China was in a very bad shape at the time. So was the rest of Asia.

Oops forgot the Dali Kingdom. Which was a minority that broke away from the Song Dynasty

Right, I didn't know the Tanguts were considered Chinese. Did they claim to be the true son of Heavens?

Also very nice reproduction. What's the source?

...

The Xia dynasty occupies this odd place of being a breakaway state, but at the same time incorporating Mandate of Heaven Memes.

Unlike for example the Dali Kingdom, they called themselves a dynastic entity.

Also its from some Chinese social media, from a weibo page of reenactors posing for heritage locations in China.

The threat of the horse archer is never coming back. The reality is that the reason they were so dangerous is because they could shoot at us and we just had to stand there and take it since we didn't field much missile weaponry back in the day. Once guns came along and regardless of their accuracy we just gave EVERYONE a gun, then suddenly their advantage was gone and they'd get torn apart.

Give a horse archer a gun and he's honestly kinda shittier because of how guns were back then. Give an infantryman a gun and his lethality is multiplied several times over.

horse archers spread like memes desu

beware the Kara-Khitai, they are without honor

if horse archers steamrolled everything, why wasn't every army made of horse archers?

You understand arrows don't just appear right?

The real question is whether or not a single fighting method will ever be as overplayed and memed up as this one.

>he reason he's asking is because there was essentially no defense against a horse archer based army.
There were plenty, which is why they lost battles and wars.

They're fucking awful at taking fortresses, useless in the woods, useless when pinned by a river, unable to deal with heavy infantry and archers acting in concert with each other, and are terribly fucking vulnerable to heavy cavalry on better horses.

They are literally a one trick pony. Dangerous on the steppes, very easily countered anywhere else.

>When the Mongols invaded Europe the first time, they could call upon various auxiliaries from Beijing to Baghdad in addition to their horse archers.
They only auxiliaries they brought were Chinese siege engineers. Stop making shit up.

but they were a key part of the civilization for other purposes, they'd be producing it with or without war. Being at war wouldn't change their habits of production, there was not really a supply line.

when a most effective conquers the world

theoretically speaking every weapon system is a one trick pony