Why Aren't Native Americans Afraid of American Cannons?

During the Cold War, tactics courses in military schools also taught numerical calculations of the enemy's personnel numbers and the amount of weapons and vehicles in order to plan operations. These numbers were compared with the number of personnel, vehicles and weapons of our own army, and this was called relative combat power calculation. Relative combat power was one of the basic principles taken into account in planning to decide what kind of operation to carry out and how to carry out this operation.

This calculation could not be made solely on quantity. Quality was also taken into account, and the forces of the parties were calculated by multiplying the combat effectiveness coefficients of each weapon (how objective these coefficients are is debatable) by the total amount of that weapon. However, after the Cold War, and especially in recent years, this turned out to be unrealistic.

For example, the Taliban, who did not even have a single gun or tank, fought with the USA, the world's largest economic and military power, for 20 years. If relative combat power was calculated, the Taliban's power was too small to be taken into account compared to America's power. But at the end of the war, which lasted about 20 years, America left Afghanistan as if running away and handed the country over to the Taliban. So the Taliban won the war.

Moreover, the USA left hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons, vehicles and ammunition to the Taliban. Thus, the only thing that the USA, which fought for 20 years and spent trillions of dollars to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban, achieved was to equip the Taliban army, which previously had no weapons other than old Soviet-era weapons, with modern weapons.

This is a simple demonstration that the combat culture, doctrine, concepts and tactics of the enemy you are fighting against can change the entire calculation of relative combat power. Although in our youth, intangible factors such as the war culture, discipline and training of the armies and the doctrines implemented by the parties were also taken into account in the comparison of forces, but it was not thought that innovative doctrines and concepts could be implemented.

That's why planning (in my opinion) has become so cliché and has almost turned into a simple mathematical calculation. Since this calculation was taken as basis in their situational judgments, all armies believed that they could gain superiority over other armies by increasing the number of weapons and procuring more technological weapons. In other words, it was thought that the calculated concrete power would determine which army would win.

Since the Warsaw and NATO pacts (especially the leading states of these pacts, the USA and the USSR) had the most personnel, vehicles and weapons, no one believed that any state or organization (the Non-Aligned or a completely independent country) could combat or even defeat them. .

Since war was thought of in this way, strategy also became mechanical. In other words, the artistic aspect of strategy, which is a science and art, was neglected and the scientific aspect came to the fore. Since science was based on positive values, subjective factors (subjective values such as the culture, history and belief systems of the warring parties) fell into the background in the comparison of relative combat power. This situation reduced the war to a crude power struggle and fueled a race over the number of nuclear weapons and armored divisions.

However, history is full of examples of how armies with better weapons and more soldiers can sometimes be defeated by very small armies. Due to the West's powerful propaganda mechanism, only Western versions of such successes are known. For example, everyone knows the battle in which 300 Spartans defeated the Persians, a movie of which was made but it is not even clear whether it is a legend or real.

However, both the Taliban incident and the 300 Spartan-like wars have occurred in many societies. Some weak forces, such as the Taliban, were able to continue fighting for a very long time, even if they could not defeat the strong side like it. Because even though one of the sides was strong, it could not achieve a decisive victory that could end the war in winter. The reason for this is generally war culture, that is, doctrine.

One of the best examples of this is the wars fought by American Indians first against the British and then against the Americans after they gained their independence, which lasted for more than 300 years. Like the British, the Americans were not able to suppress the natives until the end of the 1800s, despite the great massacres they committed. Even into the early 1900s, some indigenous tribes continued to engage in local conflicts.

What interests me most about the wars between American Indians and the US army are the examples that show that having higher technology and more powerful weapons than the enemy is not enough to win a war. For example, the native tribes, who had no heavy weapons or cannons and mostly fought with bows and arrows and axes, were never afraid of the cannons of the American army and did not suffer heavy casualties due to the cannons.

This was because the natives did not stand in one place long enough for the US Army to focus its artillery fire on them. The locals, who fought mostly with their horses, generally approached the enemy quickly, set an ambush, attacked, and when the enemy gathered and started to resist, they moved away at the same speed, like the horse-drawn nomadic tribes of the Turkestan geography. Moreover, they did not retreat as a group while moving away, but came together when each warrior fled to a different direction and left the field of vision and fire.

Therefore, the American army could not fire cannon effectively against the natives, and the power of this weapon was of no use. There is a beautiful story in Lawrence H. Keeley's work titled "War Before Civilization" that explains why American Indians were not affected by cannons and their perspective on cannons.

In 1870, upon the invitation of the American government, Sioux tribe leaders came to visit Washington D.C. Government officials took them to see a huge shore cannon on the banks of the Potomac River to demonstrate the power of the state and intimidate the native chiefs.

They had this very large diameter cannon fired in front of the locals. The Sioux watched the cannon make a loud noise, but they were not impressed at all. When the Americans, who were surprised by this situation, asked "why they were not affected", they answered: "Yes, this is a terrible weapon, but no native warrior with sense would stand in front of such a weapon with his horse while it is firing!..."