What would make you go to war/ or kill

[Amandil]

What kind of Elven Warrior would never go to war?

[Elenka]

Originally posted by Amandil
What kind of Elven Warrior would never go to war?

If I lived in a Middle-Earth type setting and I truly was an elven warrior, I'd probably fight. . But that'd be different. I'd be fighting generally evil things not other people. Besides, as an elf, you can have 2,000 years of perfecting your battle skills, and I'll bet that increases your chance of survival by a lot.

[Millane]

war is for weak leaders nowadays... what happened to the days when battle was honorable and depended on a mans skill instead of being able to pull a trigger or push a button, and the leader would go into battle with his troops (ahhh sighs thinking about GoNY)
anyways id kill for revenge i have thought about this often and if someone were to kill a family member/good friend i would kill them

[Amandil]

Elenka: So one of the reasons you wouldn't go to war is because you'd probably die? Humpf!

People killed people in Middle Earth wars. Morgoth had Easterlings fighting for him (at least), and Sauron had whopping amounts of Men fighting for him too.

I'd kill for anything I'd be willing to die for. How's that?

Millane: Pulling a trigger still takes a lot of skill. It's not easy shooting something else so that it doesn't shoot you first. It's hard enough shooting something that can only chew you up or run away. But I agree with you about leaders who sit behind the lines...

[Millane]

yes but the whole idea of guns in warfare is to be quick efficient safe and user friendly... the amount of study and practice a good swordsman would do compared to the amount of training a soldier would recieve would be years and years appart... hell my librarian and english teacher at school were both trained to fight as soldiers and most of it isnt just about operating a gun its about knowing your dangers and not about skill and technique...
hell anyone can shoot something...

[Amandil]

yes but the whole idea of guns in warfare is to be quick efficient safe and user friendly...

I dunno, I thought the whole idea of a gun was to kill a guy real good. It works better to send a lump of lead into a chest cavity faster than the speed of sound, than it does to try and whack him with a sword, doesn't it? It may turn out to be easier to do this once guns are built well and inexpensively, but I think the original impulse for using guns at all was range and stopping power. The first guns were for specialist soldiers only. The rest of the poor blokes took their farm implements to the field of battle and tried not to die.

hell my librarian and english teacher at school were both trained to fight as soldiers and most of it isnt just about operating a gun its about knowing your dangers and not about skill and technique...

Not much changes, it seems. Give em a weapon and send 'em to the front. Cannon fodder is cannon fodder, be it cannons that fodder them or massed cavalry or clouds of arrows. Medieval warfare, for most of the guys, wasn't an art form at all. That luxury was reserved for the aristocracy.

hell anyone can shoot something...

Clarification: Anyone can shoot a gun, but not anyone can shoot a given object with a gun. Sounds pretty much the same as spears, or axes, or bows 'n arrows, or swords, etc. Just cuz you can wave one around doesn't mean you can do what you're supposed to do with it. "Hell, anyone can dump a pot of boiling oil over the edge of a rampart..."

Medieval warfare was pretty much as lame as modern warfare: a whole lot of regular people being slaughtered under the orchestration of the rich and powerful.

[The Lady of Ithilien]

This is no reflection on your comments, Amandil; I've just been waiting for somebody to use the term somewhere, because I wanted to point out that:

1. Fodder is food for horses.

2. Cannons (and any of their modern equivalents) are machines and don't require food.

3. Thus, cannons will not starve to death if not "fed" on a diet of people (i.e., 'cannon fodder'). That erroneous image is what has made the silly phrase so popular among antiwar people (at least during the 60s and 70s in the West, where I've heard it the most). Rather, there will be cannons (or their modern equivalents) around for quite some time still, as the cure is a difficult one that can't be applied en masse.

There...got that out of my system.

[Millane]

Medieval warfare, for most of the guys, wasn't an art form at all. That luxury was reserved for the aristocracy.

no but it was up to the person whether they wanted to excel at being a better warrior... it was common among people especially among the Japanese...

Anyone can shoot a gun, but not anyone can shoot a given object with a gun.

ummm its not actually that hard... i would say that after you had fired off a few rounds you would become accustomed to it...

I dunno, I thought the whole idea of a gun was to kill a guy real good.

yepa thats where the efficiency kicks in...
when the civil war kicked in it was just so much easier to give a man a gun and lead him off to war rather than give them swords which they would have had to learnt really well because unlike what most people think it isnt just a one hit kill with a sword people can block...

[Insidious Rex]

Originally posted by Amandil
I dunno, I thought the whole idea of a gun was to kill a guy real good. It works better to send a lump of lead into a chest cavity faster than the speed of sound, than it does to try and whack him with a sword, doesn't it? It may turn out to be easier to do this once guns are built well and inexpensively, but I think the original impulse for using guns at all was range and stopping power.

Yeah pretty much. And now we are about to take a quantum leap forward along this same theme with the introduction of this "Metal Storm" technology. Imagine a gun that can shoot 90,000 rounds per minute. Currently the most powerful hand held weapons shoot something like 6,000 rounds a minute. So this would be some 15 times more powerful. And the word is they will move this number up to approx 1 million rounds per minute in larger guns. Something like this could turn an entire legion of men into swiss cheese in a matter of seconds. And you would need even less talent to be effective with it since the seperation between bullets is tiny.

[Elenka]

Originally posted by Amandil
Elenka: So one of the reasons you wouldn't go to war is because you'd probably die? Humpf!

Absolutely. I'm not one of those folks who run blindly into a fight. I evaluate my opponent, my chances of winning and how much it means to me before I charge head-long into something. After awhile, you can do all those steps in under 3.27 seconds, so it's a good system.

[Amandil]

Elenka: What's more important? That which you would kill for, or your own fear of being killed in the process? I'd hope you'd judge based on the first, not the second. I'd hope you wouldn't decide not to fight for "something worth dying for" (gag, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves!!) simply because it was likely that you would, in fact, die.

no but it was up to the person whether they wanted to excel at being a better warrior... it was common among people especially among the Japanese...

Uh, no. It was up to the aristocracy if they wanted to be a better warrior. Samurai were as aristocratic as knights were. The guy who held the glaive down in the ranks didn't have much choice at being a better warrior or not. He was a farmer with a pointed stick who was levvied whenever his feudal lord needed some "fodder" for the "dog" of war (is that metaphor any less annoying, Lady of Ithilien? ). After the battle, or the war, if he wasn't rotting he went back to the farm and fed the pigs, pruned the trees, etc. Japanese farmers were pretty much in the same boat as European ones.

ummm its not actually that hard... i would say that after you had fired off a few rounds you would become accustomed to it...

Have you fired a firearm before? And then have you actually hit anything with that firearm? Have you hit anything with that firearm precisely where you wanted to hit it? Doing that's called marksmanship, and marksmanship is one of the fundamental reasons the Nazis never invaded Switzerland. It's a Swiss hobby to be a crack shot, and the Germans knew that even with their assault rifles (which they pretty much invented) and belt-feed machine guns they would get their asses whooped because the Swiss could actually kill one man per bullet. That's hard, and the Germans couldn't get their soldiers to do that just by giving them a rifle and five minutes to practice.

In point of fact, the United States Army's decision to retire the M-14 battle rifle and the 7.62 NATO cartridge and instead adopt the M-16 assault rifle and the 5.56mm cartridge was due to the fact that it was too expensive to train soldiers to shoot straight. A battle rifle (like the M-14, or the FN FAL) can barely go to full auto without jumping around like a coney. Therefore, it shoots big bullets relatively slowly (7.62 NATO, which debilitate a human being with one hit). But the trick is to hit the guy with it. This is so difficult to do that it requires a hell of a lot of marksmanship training. But that costs a lot of money, and doesn't work when you take a regular guy and give him a rifle. It's a lot cheaper to give Joe Schmuck a gun that shoots little bullets (5.56mm) really fast, like an assuault rifle (M-16, AK-47, etc.). So this is what they did. (And, what they're trying to do even more to the extreme with this "Metal Storm" technology Insidious Rex is telling us about.)

Am I playing into your hands? No, not quite. The reason why governments are developing guns with higher rates of fire and smaller, less effective cartidges is because it requires too much money for soldiers to gain the requisite skill to use rifles with sufficient proficiency. So it's not guns that contribute to a decline in warrior excellence. Guns can require a very difficult and lengthy process to develop something called marksmanship, a finely honed skill pertaining to a warrior who wields a projectile weapon of a certain muzzle velocity. The older the gun, the truer this is. Government accountants don't like the amount of time and money it takes to train warriors to develop this skill. It's way cheaper and quicker to give a conscript a hose that sprays bullets.

So in the end, I suppose current warfare (if conceived in the typical conventional large conscript army vs. large conscript army sort of way) is becoming less skilled...but not because they don't use bladed weapons, but because they choose rate of fire (with the attendant less effective cartridge) over marksmanship (with the attendant more effective cartridge). Guns can be the weapon of choice for highly skilled professional warriors. They needn't be the brain-dead "spray and hope" type weapons that governments with money seem to prefer. (Which is ironic -- most impoverished countries are still using the old battle rifles -- I just saw some Nepalese maoist rebels toting FAL's and Lee Enfields -- which means they're probably better shots than the Marines!)

Something to chew on, anyway.

[Duddun]

I'd kill if someone I loved was in danger. I'd go to war never. Except for if the cause was something i severely believed in.

[Millane]

The guy who held the glaive down in the ranks didn't have much choice at being a better warrior or not. He was a farmer with a pointed stick

umm ill stick to the japanese examples but thats entirely wrong who do you think fought with Bo and Sickle and perfected these? the farmers could become great fighters and many did and that is why the Bo and Sickle found there way into fighting among the elite not just the peasants...
One great example of this is Musashi. he may have been born into the samurai class but not very high in the order and he didnt stay with it... Musashi not only became the greatest man with a sword in Japan but probly the world, he did not just up himself to this by his social class but by years and years of studying and practice with a sword... not only did he become the best but he introduced a whole new fighting technique, blocking with the wakisashi and attacking one handed with the katana. and wrote the book of five rings... and you tell me that that was all done by aristocracy?

[Amandil]

who do you think fought with Bo and Sickle and perfected these? the farmers could become great fighters and many did and that is why the Bo and Sickle found there way into fighting among the elite not just the peasants...

The bo and sickle certainly were glorified farm implements; I don't question that. But are you sure it was the farmers who glorified them? I doubt it. I suspect that some warrior caste (or ninja clan) member noticed how handy or funky the farmer's tools were when being used by the poor sops in some battle, and they souped the implements up to be wicked weapons and developed fighting techniques with them (same deal with the glaive and the bill-hook in Europe, I submit). Farmers don't turn their hoes into weapons resembling hoes because they've got nothing better to do. Nor do farmers spend their afternoons training with their hoes trying to perfect their fighting technique. Farmers are too busy farming for that. Only the aristocrats, who have all that free time because other people are farming for them, have the time to train with weapons -- even the weapons they borrow off their poor serfs. Have you ever farmed before, Milane?

One great example of this is Musashi. he may have been born into the samurai class but not very high in the order and he didnt stay with it... Musashi not only became the greatest man with a sword in Japan but probly the world, he did not just up himself to this by his social class but by years and years of studying and practice with a sword... not only did he become the best but he introduced a whole new fighting technique, blocking with the wakisashi and attacking one handed with the katana. and wrote the book of five rings... and you tell me that that was all done by aristocracy?

The only reason Musashi could afford a sword in the first place was because he was an aristocrat. The only reason Musashi had the time to train himself to be the best swordsman the world has ever seen was because he wasn't out tilling the fields -- because he was an aristocrat. The only reason Musashi could write (a book) was because he was an aristocrat, not an illiterate farmer. Sounds to me like Musashi's particular social position (regardless of how high-up he was in the aristocracy) was a major contributor to his prowess with the blade. This fact is unaffected by the fact that Musashi gave up the trappings of aristocracy. He didn't start farming, did he?

[sun-star]

I probably wouldn't choose to go to war if I didn't have to, unless it was for a cause I genuinely believed in. That includes defending my country from a serious threat, as well - I think of myself as relatively patriotic . But I would be a terrible soldier, and I'd be no good at killing anyone either, except if I knew them to be really evil or about to hurt someone else. So I would go, but I wouldn't be any use

[Millane]

But are you sure it was the farmers who glorified them?'

yes as you said when the Feudal lords called on farmers to serve as soldiers they went and they fought with there farming impliments the sickle nun-chuckas or bo... being farmers they didnt follow honor codes in the way that samurai did and they often collected swords.

The only reason Musashi could afford a sword in the first place was because he was an aristocrat

Musashi got swords given to him... its very complicated though, go read Musashi. and he fought with Bokens a lot of the time...

Musashi's particular social sition (regardless of how high-up he was in the aristocracy) was a major contributor to his prowess with the blade

Musashi was a Ronin there isnt much of a social class being a Ronin and sleeping outside and living off donations is there?

[Amandil]

Boy, we're really on topic, aren't we?

Musashi was a Ronin there isnt much of a social class being a Ronin and sleeping outside and living off donations is there?

Don't confuse "social class" with "being classy." Farmers are a social class too. The point is that Musashi's social class (as despicable as it might be to the guys on top) allowed him to become an ace with the sword. Serfdom (another social class, which was not at all similar to Musashi's position as a ronin) does not facilitate weapons mastery.

yes as you said when the Feudal lords called on farmers to serve as soldiers they went and they fought with there farming impliments the sickle nun-chuckas or bo... being farmers they didnt follow honor codes in the way that samurai did and they often collected swords.

What I said was that farmers fought with farming implements, but the feudal lords and/or the warrior classes are the one's who "glorified" the farm implements. What I mean by "glorified" is that they (i.e., lords and warriors) treated the farmers' implements as weapons only. This often resulted in alterations to the implements so that they served the purposes of war more readily, and correspondingly served the purposes of farming less readily. Farmers do not do this. Perhaps more crucially, this glorification entailed training with these so-called weapons (i.e., glorified farm implements) -- developing new "martial arts" for them, or incorporating them into existing "martial arts" -- something which farmers do not do. As I tried to emphasize earlier, farmers don't do these types of things because the last thing on their mind is going to war. They are busy farming, and going to war is an annoyance at the very least (probably more than an annoyance). Farmers do not make a business of fighting. Leisure classes often do, including the sorts who sleep outside and live off donations. If farmers do not make a business of fighting, then why do they often get sent to war? They come in handy when you need to absorb some attrition...and this is the same whether the farmer (or pleb, nowadays) carries a rifle or a bow. (Just trying to move my post back towards the topic, a little.) Conscripts or levies do indeed collect weapons from the battlefield, but it's not at all clear that they take them home and train to become experts in said weapons. It's at least equally as likely that the said weapons ended up as mantlepieces, mathoms, or the cultural equivalent of such.

[Elf.Freak]

well, i would probably go to war/kill if my family or friends were killed/taken away against their will (i'm a very loyal person) or if anyone i knew was in desperate need

[Elenka]

Originally posted by Amandil
Elenka: What's more important? That which you would kill for, or your own fear of being killed in the process?

If it was REALLY something I believed in, sure, you'll find me right out there commanding a bunch of soldiers. But if I'm not sure how much it means to me....no. Then I'll move to Australia and wait the war out from there.

[Amandil]

Ahhh, I see. (So Australia's not going to war, then?)