At the beginning of the day, Xie Baoshu walked out of the cabin.

At this time, outside, the sky is getting dark, and there are not many people anymore. Xie Baoshu walked out and found that there was wolf smoke on the ground. There are also quite a few guards, who are guarding the city walls. In order to resist the sneak attack of the demon clan, he was stationed day and night.

Unlike modern times, information and communication technology in ancient times was extremely backward, and it was difficult for information and orders on the battlefield to be quickly transmitted layer by layer. Although in the ancient command system, commanders needed to convey orders according to different colors and styles of flags and various musical instruments, "beating drums to march and singing gold to collect troops", in fact, this limited communication technology can transmit very little information.

The army is divided into units and teams, and the commander only needs to give orders to the commander at the next level, which makes the transmission of information easier and more effective. After receiving the order, each grassroots unit will carry out corresponding tactical actions in accordance with the order and give full play to its role to the greatest extent.

Xie Baoshu has been to modern times and knows that war is completely different.

Even if there were monks in ancient times, it was not very convenient to pass on the news.

Because there are many people, when there is a war, the front may not be able to take care of the back. And there are monsters all around, and sometimes it's hard to get the news back.

Only when the grass-roots units complete the corresponding tactical actions can the war be carried out in an orderly manner. If there is no battle array, the army can only be like a vicious dog to tear each other apart, and the coordination of various arms and weapons also needs enough space to deploy, which needs to be carried out through the array, otherwise the knee of the friendly army may be injured by their own arrows, and the waist may suddenly be shot by a teammate, and a machete is inexplicably inserted in the head, but the opponent is not intentional.

In addition, battle formations are generally used in conjunction with tactics to target enemy weaknesses. The "General Essentials of the Martial Arts" once discussed the role of the battle formation, holding that the correct use of the formation, "first bias and then the army, fill the gaps, and use it to take advantage of the opportunity to win", can "because of the suitability of the situation in the mountains and rivers, talk about the importance of riding on foot, do not be arrogant or narrow, live according to the formation, often treat the other with me, often treat the other with me, often treat the other with me, often treat the other with me, and often treat the other with the hunger of the other", so as to gain an advantage over the enemy.

In the case of the Macedonian phalanx, the front row, including the flanks, the heavy infantry acted as a meat shield, reducing casualties through armor and shields. However, the heavy infantry in the front row needs to take on defensive tasks, and it is difficult to take care of the attack, so the soldiers in the back row need to assist in the "output". The soldiers in the Macedonian phalanx only need to hold the Sarisa spear to keep the formation forward, and the overall safety of the phalanx can be guaranteed.

The formation has a variety of tactical purposes, such as the formation of two cavalry on the left and right behind the forward, acting as the mobility of the whole team, and its exterior is surrounded by infantry units to prevent the opponent from attacking. In wartime, relying on the difference in mobility, cavalry and infantry alternately fight to maintain physical strength, and advance in the shape of geese to outflank the opponent's left and right flanks at the same time, and the replaced unit can still be used as a reserve to prevent the opponent from raiding.

The scale of the battle array is large and small, 100 people can form a formation, and 100,000 people can also form a formation.

For example, during the Great Sui period, the number of participants reached 140,000 and 930 people, and the scale was extremely large. But if we discuss it more broadly, the formation of military deployments is also of profound significance for larger-scale group battles.

The battle formation is a kind of tactical deployment, and when the professional military system has not yet been established on a large scale, because the army comes from different systems, the problem of coordination within the army needs to be solved by the commander-in-chief. In addition to arranging different tasks for each branch, each performs its own duties, and the most common is to reduce the problem of running-in through formation and deployment, which are often used together.

For example, in the Zhou Dynasty, the military system was still the hereditary military system of slave owners and aristocrats, and when the princes wanted to recruit the soldiers and horses under their jurisdiction, they needed to use the battle array to arrange the positions and functions of the soldiers and horses of each department, otherwise the soldiers were scattered and disorganized, and it was difficult to form sufficient combat effectiveness.

In the early years of the Tang Dynasty, too, the integration of the army from local feudal towns led to difficulties in command and coordination between the different systems. In order to solve the problem of coordination, Tang Taizu and Tang Taizong began to emphasize the importance of the formation map in the military command system, and each department performed its own duties according to the formation map, and the army did not have the problem of coordination between different systems in most group operations, which was completely different from the situation at the end of the Sui Dynasty.

On the battlefield, the two warring sides lined up in neat military formations, impacting, squeezing, and colliding with each other. The soldiers at the front of the army formation are generally the first to bear the attack, and the casualty rate is often much higher than that of the rear row, especially when the cavalry is attacking the army formation, the high-speed collision is even more tragic, and it is likely that the first few rows of soldiers on both sides will all be killed.

The question, then, is, since they are all soldiers, why are some of them in the front? Some of them are in the back? Are they arranged according to certain principles or are they purely random? Why are the soldiers in the front willing to stand in the first row knowing the danger?

Generally speaking, due to the uneven quality of military personnel, commanders mostly put elite veterans who are well-equipped and experienced in combat in the front row.

The enemy was led by dozens of the most combat-ready soldiers when they charged, followed by the rest of the troops. All you need to do is concentrate your firepower to wipe out these dozens of people, and the remaining enemy forces will be scattered no matter how many they are.

The soldiers in the middle and front rows are generally elites with relatively strong combat effectiveness, and ordinary soldiers can't go if they want to. The soldiers in the front row have at least seen the big scene, and when they see the enemy coming aggressively, they will not run away, and they have the most basic professional ethics.

Moreover, war with bows and crossbows is the norm, and there are not many opportunities for direct melee combat in both armies. When fighting, they usually use bows and crossbows to shoot from a distance, or blockade and encircle, waiting for the opponent to run out of food and grass, and will not easily engage in a head-to-head duel.

In a big battle, this kind of blockade, harassment, and temptation may occupy most of the time, and the real decisive battle is very short. As a result, in most cases, the damage taken by soldiers comes primarily from ranged weapons such as bows and crossbows. Under the long-range projectile coverage of the bow and arrow, the chance of hitting the arrow is the same regardless of the front row and the back row. The front-row soldiers are usually better protected and relatively safer.

In addition, the military formation often changes the formation according to the actual needs in the operation, for example, the Tang Legion is divided into three lines of horizontal columns, alternately fighting according to the battlefield situation, the ancient cavalry is also divided into many squads to take turns to impact when impacting, and it is rare to rely on the same group of people to put the whole field in the front row, after all, people and horses have to rest in continuous combat. From this point of view, everyone's chances of survival are equal, and since it's their turn, they don't have any complaints.

And usually, an elite unit that has won many victories has a strong confidence in defeating the enemy, and some of the most famous units in the history of warfare that are good at frontal confrontation have never lost in a head-on collision with the enemy for most of their careers, and even have a very disparity in casualty ratios.

Countless experiences have convinced them that as long as they maintain a neat formation and never waver, the final defeat must be the enemy, and in this case there is naturally no reason to escape.

There are three types of warfare: calculated warfare, sacrificial warfare, and confused warfare. If the enemy is also very strong after the fight, and the two sides are evenly matched, it is probably equivalent to the desperate battle that Qi Jiguang said. In this case, experienced veterans understand that they can only hold on, and once they can't hold on, they will collapse first, and the only end is to be slaughtered by the enemy.

Of course, all of the above are professional armies that can get on the battlefield and kill the enemy, and are above the average level. But in countless wars of mankind, large and small, many times the protagonists of the wars are amateurs with no combat experience.

They can't accurately predict the outcome of a war, and may judge the contrast between enemy and enemy forces only from the comparison of numbers, but vision can sometimes deceive people, and the so-called allusion to the grass and trees is exactly this truth, and generals who are good at using troops often take advantage of this.

Elite troops are not innate, so how can we build ordinary troops into elite troops? Moreover, it is human nature to be afraid of death, and if elite veterans are faced with a situation of certain death, they may also weigh the pros and cons and have the idea of escaping. How can we firmly restrain soldiers in the forefront of the military formation? In the final analysis, it is necessary to rely on strict military discipline. The so-called strict military discipline is nothing more than generous rewards and heavy punishments.

Common rewards in the army are generally beheading, beheading, capturing the flag, first ascending and other reasons, in many dynasties, the reward for beheading the enemy is extremely rich. Qin Fa won the first rank of the enemy's armor and added a knight.

The Tang Dynasty also adopted this method, Xuande nine years, the south to kill the full of thieves: anyone who beheads more than three thieves and the first thief is promoted to one level;

The soldiers standing in the front row, the probability of cutting the enemy's head is naturally much greater, but this will also cause some chaos, where the good men in the battle, there are only a few people, every time the head is killed, often dozens of hundreds of people come to report the merits, and then I don't want you to retreat together to report the merits, so that the soldiers look at each other and mistakenly think that they are defeated, and everyone is gone. In order to prevent others from stealing the merits, the soldiers in the front row often retreated to the back with their heads to report the merits, resulting in the defeat of the whole army.

There must be brave men under the so-called heavy reward, and such a generous reward is enough to make people rush to it. But then again, this is a minority after all, and most of the time someone is still needed as a meat shield to resist the powerful impact of the cavalry, and there seems to be no chance of getting a reward at this time, and not everyone wants money and death.

What really makes soldiers dare not leave their posts without permission under any circumstances is the harsh military law. The military law of the Tang Dynasty stipulates that "when you are in battle, you will not be ordered by the main general, and those who leave the team will be killed." ”

The Tang Xuanwu Guard stipulates that if a person retreats first against the enemy, he will be beheaded. If the first commander does not retreat and the soldiers retreat, and dies, the family of the first commander will be compassionate and the remaining soldiers will be beheaded.

In this case, if you escape, you will basically die, and there is still a chance of life if you are desperate, even if you die, your family can still get a generous pension, after all, this account is something that everyone will calculate. All in all, under the stimulus and constraints of generous rewards and strict military laws, soldiers can only obey military orders absolutely on the battlefield, no matter what position they are placed in. Those who survived the harsh test of war gradually became experienced elite soldiers. Ordinary battles could not shake them in the slightest, and even if they encountered a strong enemy army, they could only grit their teeth and persevere to the end until one side's will to fight completely collapsed.

Therefore, the most likely situation in a war is that one side fights more smoothly, because the defeated side is relatively rookie recruits to fight veterans with rich combat experience. The result is simply to help the enemy gain experience, morale, and confidence. Of course, if a strong army suffers heavy casualties in a certain battle, it is easy to collapse, because there are no core veterans who can stand in the first row.

Looking at a war that has already taken place in ancient times from the perspective of hindsight, the victory and defeat of the war, the process and the comparison of forces are clear. But it was impossible for the warring parties to know this information at the time. It's like playing a game without opening a map, and you need to constantly scout to get some inadequate information, whether true or false.

Although many armies have a claimed number of troops before they go on the expedition, most of them are bluffs, and you would be too honest to take them seriously.

Even if we know the approximate total number of troops sent by the enemy, the number of troops allocated to each specific battlefield is different, and it is necessary to conduct specific investigations. Moreover, the means of information and transportation are backward, and the concentration of troops cannot be uniform, usually the outposts have already been fired, and most of the troops are still on the way, and they do not know when they will be put into the battlefield. Therefore, for the commanders of both sides, the battlefield situation is changing rapidly, and it is necessary to constantly carry out reconnaissance work to find out the real-time strength of the enemy in front of them.

But it's not a good job. First of all, it is impossible for the opponent to take the initiative to tell you, generally speaking, the commander with the troops does not want the other party to grasp his own situation, the bluff of the few troops is afraid that the opponent will find out, and the one with a large number of troops wants to hide the strength and suddenly hold back a big move. Secondly, it is also unreliable to expect visual inspection when the two sides play against each other.

Of course, there are some experienced soldiers who can judge the size of the opponent's troops by the naked eye, for example, in the pre-Qin era, you can know how many troops the opponent has by counting chariots. But sometimes vision can deceive people, and the allusion of the grass and trees is the best proof of this.

More importantly, there are many sub-battlefields in a big war, and it is unlikely that the main forces of both sides will all be deployed in one battlefield, and the generals with a little experience will not put all their troops into the front, "I look at the ancient people who are good at using soldiers, and there are still regular soldiers, strange soldiers, and ambush soldiers for a while to win, that is to say, outside the visible range of the naked eye, there may be a strong force waiting for the opportunity to move, once the estimate is wrong, the consequences may be catastrophic."

The most common way to know the exact number of opponents is to send a small agent or scout to directly investigate. He often had to dress up as civilians or even enemy soldiers, trying to get close to or blend into the enemy camp. Scouts are generally agile and preferably cavalry, and their main role is to spy from afar, in case the enemy is hiding in ambushes. On the ancient battlefield, the role of scouts was irreplaceable.

Once you arrive at the enemy camp and observe, you can roughly judge the strength of the camp from the number of tents. Generally speaking, the regular army has a fixed number of troops in each battalion, which may vary from era to era or from army to contemporary, but it is not difficult to estimate based on the experience of the time. The situation of the Tang army was that "each with 1,000 men as battalions, many soldiers outside, 27 curtains by length, 18 horizontal columns, and 6 sides to support the Chinese army."

If you have a good understanding of the enemy's troop formation, you can also judge the current strength by the number of flags.

Of course, it is also possible that the army encountered by the fine work does not play according to the routine. For example, the improvised nomadic army, even their Great Khan does not necessarily know how many there are.

For example, Rouran people "have no words, and use sheep dung to record the number of soldiers", in this case, unless the sheep dung can be counted again, otherwise the gods have no way how many people they have.

In addition to sending agents to spy on the enemy, they can also learn about the situation of the enemy through the interrogation of prisoners of war. However, this method is not necessarily reliable, first of all, if the identity of the captive is too low, the information that can be obtained from him is very limited, and it is difficult to guarantee that the other party will not provide false information or even deliberately design. The army of the Central Plains Dynasty went on an expedition to Mobei, relying on the locals to lead the way, and once they encountered the second child of the grassland king, it was easy to fall into a desperate situation, and the outcome was often very miserable.

If we want to know the exact strength of the enemy's troops, we cannot rely on just one channel, and experienced generals are often good at obtaining information from all sides and studying and judging it. In addition to the above-mentioned channels, the rank of the enemy's generals, the number of troops in each Kaifu military state guard, the pattern of the enemy's activities, and the logistical capability are all reliable reference data.

The two methods listed above are considered routine practices, which are relatively simple to operate but have little effect, and whether they are good or not depends entirely on luck. As the saying goes, a fortress is easiest to attack from within, and the best way to truly understand the enemy is to place a high-level inside line in the enemy camp. Compared with the previous method, the threshold of the inner line method is much higher, and a good inner line is hard to find, but once successful, it is a fatal blow, and there is no shortage of similar examples in history.

The Battle of Guandu and the Battle of Huangshui are famous examples in history of winning more with less. Both Xu You and Zhu Xu informed the opposing commander-in-chief of important information such as troop deployment, causing him to make a decisive attack, which not only determined the victory of a war, but also affected the trend of future history, which can be said to be a standard model of the internal line.

All in all, there is no absolutely reliable way to accurately count the enemy's forces on the battlefield, except for counting them in person. The so-called "water is impermanent, soldiers are impermanent", and the battlefield situation is changing rapidly.

Enemy situation judgment is also a dynamic process, which not only requires all-round enemy situation reconnaissance, but also needs to constantly reconnoiter and keep it updated. "Count more wins, less count no wins", and if intelligence work is done well, even if it cannot completely determine the outcome of the war, at least it can greatly tilt the balance of victory in favor of one's side.

A big war is about to start, and we must all do everything we can.

After all, Datang's opponents are not only demons, but also many other countries.

Before the big war, the preparations must be done well.