Coordinate Plane Fill In The Blank: Fill & Download for Free

Thanks for the A2A. Here’s my capsule history of “how we got to the point that there were no muscle-powered weapons on the battlefield.” I’m going to restrict this answer to the battlefield, meaning land warfare.When people ask this question, in my experience, they tend to be asking about infantry firearms. You can tell that story, but in truth, it’s intertwined with the history of cavalry firearms and artillery. So we’re going to have to discuss all three, at least a little.Guns vs. ArmorWe’ll begin in the 14th century. You’re quite right that early handguns were not especially impressive compared to the alternatives from a killing standpoint. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, battles aren’t really about killing. We shouldn’t completely dismiss the shock value of firearms.That said, the most impressive firearms early on were cannon, which could knock holes in fortress walls and towers that trebuchets couldn’t, or at ranges that trebuchets couldn’t.Pause there for a moment, because it’s important. The 14th and 15th centuries saw very rapid iteration in body armor, with significant improvements sometimes every ten years. Missile weapons and armor have always been in an arms race (pardon the expression), but in the 14th century armor started to pull decisively ahead of existing man-portable missiles.The Battle of Agincourt in the early 15th century is often remembered as a triumph of the longbow over plate armor, but it wasn’t. It was a triumph for longbowmen, sure … who had to draw their swords and hammers and close to finish off their foes in hand to hand combat, in support of their own men at arms. These are foes, mind, into whom the English archers had poured their entire ammunition load at virtually point blank range. Agincourt was a fantastic use of archers precisely because King Henry took a weapon system (the longbow) that was so fantastically outclassed by the body armor of the time and made it work anyway. There’s a reason that Agincourt is also remembered as the apogee of the longbow in medieval warfare.So here you are in the 14th and 15th centuries, watching armor evolve to the point that it could shrug off dozens of shots by ultra-high poundage longbows and crossbows even at very short range. Where do you turn for an improvement in missile weapons to catch up? Longbows and crossbows are already at or near their technological limits for man-portable systems. You need something new … ahh, what about those gunpowder things? A system that can demolish fortress walls might offer similar benefits against armor in miniaturized form.And it did, more or less. Take another pause here. When people think about shoulder guns vs. plate armor, they tend to think one of two things:“Bullets ripped through plate armor and made knights obsolete!” or“Actually, plate armor could resist bullets all the way up to the 18th century! Haven’t you ever heard of a proof mark?”Both of these views have elements of truth, but they’re misleadingly wrong. Man-portable firearms and plate armor dueled for supremacy for about 400 years, until firearms finally achieved a decisive advantage some time in the 18th or early 19th century (an advantage that they would begin to lose in the late 20th century). The key for our purposes is that firearms were at least in the running for centuries after longbows and crossbows had lost the arms race.There are a lot of details you can get into here in terms of the specifics of firearm manufacture, the specifics of gunpowder manufacture, and the different tactical roles for long guns that came and went and came again. But that’s the high-level view: man-portable firearms put missile weapons back in the arms race against armor for a long time, even if they didn’t win it for centuries.The Tactical Role of FirearmsLet’s take a step back, though, and look at how guns were used on the battlefield. There are a few distinct stages here.In the very beginning, firearms were basically no more useful than crossbows, and used the same way: from behind cover.People sometimes forget this, or assume that firearms were uniquely bad at open field warfare. The truth is that in the 14th century every single missile weapon system was bad at field warfare. Nothing - not longbows, not crossbows, not spears, not slings, and certainly not firearms - had the firepower to simply mow down advancing force attacking on an open field. Sustained missile fire at close range could be deadly, of course - but that required some way to keep the enemy from simply swamping your missile troops. This was as true for longbowmen as it was for arquebusiers.The best cover, of course, was a permanent fortification. But field fortifications could work, as the Hussites proved in the 14th century with their infamous “war wagons,” a term that sounds way more impressive than it actually was:Can’t stab me, I’m in a wooden box!The war wagon was the first high-profile successful experiment with deploying man-portable firearms in open battle. It has some obvious limitations, of course, first among them that ox- or horse-drawn wooden boxes are not exactly tactically flexible. They also require supporting infantry with melee weapons, or attacking troops can just walk into the box and kill the shooters: again, firearms at this point were only really deadly if you could manage to achieve sustained, close range fire.Obviating the need for sustained, close-range fire was the next major tactical evolution in firearms. It came in the realm of cavalry, with the wheel-lock pistol.To understand the importance of the pistol to cavalry combat, you need to understand how cavalry combat worked before pistols. You mustn’t think of medieval cavalry in open battle as simply charging at each other as if they were in a joust.In open battle, cavalry combat was much more free-wheeling, more like a dogfight between fighter planes but without the machine guns. If someone didn’t want to engage you, they could simply ride away, and you had to be quite careful about pursuing them too hard.And if they did want to engage you, well … you might get a perfect horse-powered spear hit and smash through their armor. But more often you didn’t, and then things got messy.Pistols changed all this. A pistol may have a short range, but it:Has a longer range than a spear.Has a longer range than a sword.Has a longer range than wrestling.Doesn’t require complicated, time-consuming maneuvers to wound an opponent (or his horse).Allows you to seriously threaten an enemy cavalryman who is riding away from you.Is small enough to carry as many as half a dozen loaded pistols on a single horse (try that with a crossbow!).Eric Lowe's answer to Which is the best weapon to use in a cavalry charge, saber or pistol? goes into some more detail about how pistols worked against heavily armored cavalry. Suffice to say that, to the absolute disgust of traditionalists (chiefly, though not exclusively, aristocrats), the pistol became the absolute king of cavalry combat. And that had all sorts of knock-on effects. If two forces showed up to battle, and only one of them had pistol-armed cavalry, the battle would very quickly devolve into only one side having cavalry.There are (again) a lot of details you can dive into here. For present purposes, the key thing to understand is that a mixed force of infantry and cavalry is very likely to defeat a force of infantry alone. The point isn’t that the pistol is a fabulous weapon against infantry. It isn’t. It is an abysmal weapon against infantry. But few infantry can withstand the shock of being engaged by enemy infantry and then being attacked to the flank or rear by cavalry, even if those cavalry are only armed with pistols and swords (and of course there’s nothing stopping your cavalry from busting out the lances once their pistols have done the job of defeating the other side’s cavalry).Let’s go back to shoulder guns now. Cavalry is running around, covered in armor, with pistols. Infantry can’t defend against that very effectively with pikes. Sure, pistols are short-ranged, but it’s not hard for a man on a horse to stay just out of pike reach if the infantry has no effective missile weapons of its own. Bows and crossbows? Well, that cavalryman still has plate armor.But shoulder guns … ah, now that’s another story. It’s one thing to pour pistol shot into enemy infantry from just out of pike reach if they only have pikes with which to respond. Toss a few shoulder guns into the infantry mix and suddenly staying just out of pike reach seems pretty suicidal to the cavalryman.Pike and ShotThe key to getting shoulder guns into the field without clumsy field fortifications turned out to be protecting the gunners with pikemen. By interspersing the two weapon systems into a single unit of infantry, the gunners and pikemen together were essentially cavalry-proof. This became the standard for infantry units in the 17th century.They turned out to be a highly effective combination against infantry as well. The rate of fire and effective range of shoulder guns was still too low to stop attacking infantry or cavalry all by themselves. This also made them not very effective at attacking enemy troops; there was no steady, credible pressure on the defender. Pikes could provide that steady offensive pressure (pikes don’t have to reload - and the state of shoulder guns at this point in history still required a very long time between shots; Jacob de Gheyn’s 1607 manual lists twenty-eight steps to perform between shots).Pike-on-pike warfare was nothing new in the 17th century, of course. The pike had been the standard infantry weapon since the 16th century, and a great deal of skull sweat had gone into figuring out how to counter a solid wall of opposing pikes. There were the old solutions: fight on uneven terrain to break up the solid wall; flank the pikemen - these solutions are as old as the 4th century BCE. Newer experiments included using greatswords to sweep the enemy pikes aside and allow your own pikemen a safe window in which to attack (the German doppelsoldner concept), as well as giving men concave shields and swords to allow them to wade through the pikes and sow enough confusion that your own pikemen could attack (the Italian/Spanish rodelero concept).These all worked to some degree, but none of them could hold a candle to having a bunch of shoulder guns discharge into the enemy at point blank range, killing enough of the enemy pikemen (thus disrupting their wall of pikes) to allow your own pikemen to surge forward.The shoulder gun-and-pike situation might have come about simply as a natural evolution of the pike-on-pike infantry problem. As it actually happened, the utility of shoulder guns as a defense against pistol-armed cavalry was probably the catalyst, and military thinkers realized only later that a shoulder gun could actually serve the same tactical role as a greatsword or a rotella (which, if you phrase it that way, is not exactly obvious).We should stop here and emphasize that “pike and shot” tactics are not merely tactics. They require your entire society to have certain governmental features. Shoulder guns were still quite expensive at this point, not only in terms of the cost to produce the actual gun but also in terms of the industrial base necessary to produce gunpowder in the quantity and quality necessary to make the guns worth anything (a great deal of the early advancements in shoulder gun firepower were not advances in the guns at all, but rather in the gunpowder). Not only that, the whole concept requires both the gunners and the pikemen to be able to operate as a seamless unit. And that requires more than individual skill; it requires time - time spent working together, training together, getting to know and trust each other.All of that takes money. Prodigious amounts of money. The kind of money that medieval kings and lords simply didn’t have.It’s no coincidence that pike and shot tactics arise in conjunction with the move in Europe towards increasingly powerful central governments (increasingly powerful kings, mostly). Deploying a pike and shot army literally required transforming your entire society. The idea is simple enough; the execution is deeply complex.The Spanish were the first to really get this down, but other European nations followed quickly enough. Which of course leads to an obvious stalemate: if all our pikemen have supporting gunners, how can anybody advance on each other?Field ArtilleryThe answer is to turn to the very earliest type of gun: artillery.The basic problem with using cannon against infantry is fairly straightforward. Cannon are, by definition, big guns. Indeed, their very bigness was their major selling point; small guns don’t knock down fortress walls. Big guns are heavy and slow. Their ammunition is heavy, and thus you tend not to have a whole lot of it. They’re also incredibly expensive, and thus you tend not to have a lot of cannon. How does any of this make for a good anti-infantry weapon?In a sense, the answer is that it doesn’t. When people think about cannon balls plowing into infantry, they often wonder how many men a single cannon can possibly kill. After all, it’s not like they explode or anything. The slightly more learned will tend to answer that cannon balls can kill multiple men per shot, as the ball plows through multiple ranks of men or bounces along the ground taking off legs and limbs. Which is true; solid cannon shot will do that. But still, in the grand scheme of things, cannon balls simply don’t kill that many men.But again … battle is not about killing. It’s about fear.And the one thing that cannon can definitely do that shoulder guns can’t is shoot a long, long way.This is the real essence of the field artillery concept: that the point of a cannon is not its bigness, but its range.It doesn’t matter that half a dozen cannon can’t possibly kill hundreds of enemy infantry. What matters is that they can kill any infantry … from up to ten times the range of the infantry’s longest-ranged weapons. That’s terrifying. Being under fire, without any ability to shoot back, has always ranked as one of the most terrifying experiences a soldier can have.The first real field artillery appeared in the 17th century, right around the time that all of Europe had definitely gotten on board the pike and shot train. As cannon went, they were quite small, shooting balls that weighed a measly three pounds. That’s nowhere near heavy enough to threaten a fortress; heck, it isn’t even heavy enough to threaten a well-built sailing ship. But it is heavy enough to smash through any body armor ever made (there’s a pretty credible argument to be made that this is why infantry ultimately stopped wearing body armor), and to get a nice long range. By making the shot so small, the guns could be as light and as fast and as cheap as possible, the ammunition plentiful.This didn’t make the problems of cannon go away, but it did minimize them. It minimized them enough that this is the moment when firearms could first truly be said to “dominate” the battlefield: in the 17th century, with the advent of field artillery. For the next 200 years, everything in battle revolved around cannon, and their unparalleled ability to inflict fear upon enemy troops.I am, once again, skipping over lots of detail in the evolution of cannon. Once the field artillery concept was proven in the early 17th century, there was a lot of experimentation with the exact construction of cannon, different types of cannon carriages, as well as different sorts of shot (exploding shot, chemical shot, grapeshot, case shot, canister shot, the list goes on), all aimed at making field artillery longer-ranged, more reliable, more mobile, and/or more deadly. But the basic truth remained that the true value of field artillery was the ability to bring infantry and cavalry under fire from a very long ways away.Digression:In a sense, cannon dominated the battlefield almost from their inception. The French won the Hundred Years’ War because they were the first to really organize the logistical train necessary to make their cannon truly efficient. They were also the first to realize that one gigantic cannon was not as effective as a coordinated battery of smaller cannon (“small” being a relative term here; we’re still talking about smashing fortifications). That insight made every single fortification built over the past thousand years obsolete, which is the sort of revolution in military technology that doesn’t come along very often. Following the Hundred Years’ War, fortresses stopped being about walls and more about forcing enemy artillery into a maze of kill zones and keeping them away from the actual buildings of the fortress. These were the famous “star forts” first seen during the Renaissance.And yet … in another sense, the centralization of power I talked about was more important than changes in the shape of fortifications. The new, more centralized states could field much larger armies than before, and thus threaten more of an enemy state’s countryside than before. Fortresses didn’t become obsolete; a bypassed garrisoned fortress could still wreck an attacker’s supply train and make marauding very costly. But larger armies increased the sociopolitical pressure to meet and destroy them in the field, before they could spread out over your countryside like a plague of locusts. So in this sense, the cannon-driven revolution in fortifications doesn’t quite qualify as “dominating” the battlefield.End of digression.The Disappearance of PikeThe disappearance of pikes from infantry units was a gradual process, driven by a few factors. One was the continual, gradual improvement in shoulder guns: the longer-ranged, more accurate, and more rapid-fire shoulder guns became, the fewer pikes were needed to protect the gunners.The second is evolution in infantry-cavalry combined-arms doctrine. Pike and shot doctrine left cavalry - the most prestigious of the combat arms literally since Roman times - feeling rather obsolete. A great many experiments were tried to make cavalry effective once more against infantry. Many of the best of them involved the cavalry and infantry working in very close coordination, providing infantry with shock value that had once been provided by pike.The third is improvements in bayonet technology. Bayonets don’t ever really replace pikes, mind. A musket with bayonet is nowhere near as good as a proper pike - it’s way shorter and harder to use, and doesn’t even weigh any less. However, as pikes became less necessary (because shoulder guns became deadlier), bayonets could be good enough to fill the smaller and smaller niche of the pike on the battlefield.The major innovation in bayonet technology was the so-called socket bayonet. The first bayonets were plug bayonets, so called because you literally plugged the muzzle of your gun with your bayonet:Obviously, you cannot fire your gun without removing the plug bayonet. This might seem silly, but from a certain point of view, it makes perfect sense. A plug bayonet places the blade in line with the barrel, making it easy and intuitive to use. And on top of that, if you’re a gunner in a pike and shot formation and you need to engage in melee combat at all, the situation has probably become far too desperate for you to need to reload.But recall that one of the roles of the pike in a pike and shot unit is to allow steady offensive pressure; pikes don’t need to reload. In order to get rid of the pikes entirely, you’d need to invent a way for a gun to become a melee weapon without making it useless as a gun. Enter the socket bayonet, which does not plug the muzzle of your gun:As a design for a melee weapon, this is pretty stupid: it’s like a pike, but heavier and less ergonomic, and the point isn’t even in line with the shaft. If the niche of the pike has shrunk to a small enough size, though, it works.In point of fact, it worked almost exactly as required. The role of a bayonet is not actually to kill people (and bayonets have killed very few people over the course of history, as the records of army surgeons have always attested). The role of the bayonet is to make a man who has discharged his musket feel like he is still armed: to give him the bravery to continue to advance. Again, combat is about fear: in this case, the fear that the troops charging with fixed bayonets won’t stop, and we’ll actually have to engage in bayonet combat. Virtually all bayonet charges resulted in either no or very perfunctory hand-to-hand combat, and even fewer actual bayonet casualties. But a man without a bayonet is very unlikely to keep up that steady offensive pressure. He’s going to stop to reload his gun.By the 18th century, pikes had disappeared from the infantry almost completely, replaced with deadlier shoulder guns and bayonets. The infantry still worked like a pike-and-shot unit, for the most part: on the offense, steady forward pressure with the pointy sticks, given some extra kick by close-range shoulder gun fire; on the defense, keeping enemy troops at bay with the pointy sticks to allow time for sustained close-range fire to drive them off. The only real differences were the details of the ranges involved and the fact that the pointy sticks and guns were now held by the same men.[EDIT to add:] Why Not Bows?The question occasionally arises: once body armor had been dropped, why people didn’t re-adopt bows? After all, they had much higher rates of fire than muskets, and comparable effective ranges, so … no-brainer, right? I’ve even heard it said (although not with citations, so don’t quote me on this) that Wellington asked for archers in the 19th century.There are a few answers one can give here. The standard answer is that it takes forever to train a longbowman. There is truth to this, but we should be careful about what we’re imagining. As an archer friend of mine is fond of pointing out, you don’t actually need a super-high poundage bow to kill a man, or to shoot far. This is sometimes a surprise, but think about hunters: nobody takes a 140+ pound bow to kill deer. Hunting bows draw easily half of what a medieval war bow drew, and they still manage to put down large game from battlefield distances. Likewise, a perusal of these distance records should convince you that my friend is correct when she says you don’t need a high-poundage bow to shoot way farther than you’d ever need to on a battlefield.What you do need super-high draw weights (and correspondingly massive arrows) for is armor penetration. (Side note: true, even a super-high poundage bow had a low chance of penetrating good plate armor. But it still had a chance, and against not-so-good or obsolete plate armor, its chances improved somewhat. A low-poundage bow, on the other hand, would begin to struggle even against the previous-generation plate that a not-so-wealthy man-at-arms could afford.)But what if soldiers had already stopped using body armor? Couldn’t we gain a sudden advantage by switching to moderate-poundage bows? After all, we wouldn’t need the incredible strength training required to draw medieval-style war bows.There’s still something to be said for disparate training times here. After all, even the post-Renaissance central governments were sensitive to costs, and if you’ve ever taken up traditional archery from scratch, you’ll know that it still takes quite a long time to be able to hit a target even 50 yards out reliably with a hunting-poundage bow.But there are other considerations as well that I think sometimes get short shrift. And there must be … otherwise, why would societies without guns who came into contact with European guns have been so eager to trade for them, or acquire their capabilities themselves (think of the samurai’s eagerness to adopt even quite primitive firearms)? After all, those societies already had trained archers. What other reasons did they have to give them up?The first answer is damage. It’s a common trap when considering weapons (especially on the Internet) to get obsessed over how much “damage” a weapon causes, when in reality damage is often a minor concern. However, a musket ball really does do a lot more damage than an arrow. Again, the experience of bow hunters is instructive. You can drop a deer quite quickly with an arrow, if you manage to hit some very specific targets (through the eye, in the heart). But most places you can hit a deer with an arrow - even “vital” organs - cause the deer to run away and bleed to death some time in the next hour.Now, men are not deer. A man who has been shot with an arrow might retire out of self-preservation, or stop fighting due to the sheer shock of having been shot. Or he might not. Musket balls rip people open, and give them much less choice in the matter. You can get some idea of this here (you can ignore the stuff about cut bar bullets, although that’s certainly interesting):Now, again, damage isn’t everything. It isn’t even necessarily the most important thing. That said … a round lead ball stands a much greater chance than does an arrow of rendering a soldier physically incapable of fighting, and that’s certainly something armies would consider relevant.But there are other considerations as well. One is cavalry: cavalry holds on to body armor a lot longer than infantry does, even into the 19th century. A hunting-poundage bow might be able to wound unarmored enemy infantry, but what about enemy cavalry, which very well might still be armored? Where is the archer’s long pointy stick, to keep enemy cavalry at bay? You can’t put a bayonet on a bow, after all. Sure, you could issue the archers pikes, but then they’ve got to carry bows and pikes, which is clumsy and cumbersome. Or you could give some soldiers bows and some pikes, but that significantly reduces the firepower gains from giving everybody bows. Thus, switching from firearms back to bows reduces a soldier’s anti-cavalry abilities.It also, in a significant sense, reduces their anti-infantry capabilities. Recall the steady offensive pressure that is still so significant to anti-infantry tactics at this point. How do bows provide that? We’re back to the problem of archers not having pointy sticks. Oh, you could give them small, easily portable hand weapons, like swords and bucklers (the traditional medieval answer to, “How do we make our archers hand-to-hand capable?”). But as lousy a weapon as the bayonet is, it does pretty well against weapons that are shorter than it (like swords and bucklers). A sword and buckler can prevail over a bayonet with training and skill. But the whole point of giving our infantry melee weapons is to give them the confidence to keep going forward so that nobody has to fight hand to hand. It does not inspire a lot of confidence to tell your men, “Okay, if you actually get into melee, you’ll be at a disadvantage … but you can still win, with training and skill!”I don’t think that any of these factors, by themselves, was enough to deter people from re-adopting archery once infantry stopped wearing body armor. Together, though, I think they make a compelling case for battlefield archery simply not being worth it.Rapid-Fire RiflesAs I said, cannon would continue to dominate the battlefield - either as field artillery or as siege artillery (and, although beyond the scope of this post, as naval artillery) - until the 19th century. The dominance of cannon was brought to an end by a major improvement in shoulder gun technology: expanding ammunition.Rifles are a very old concept in shoulder gun technology. Since at least the 17th century, people understood that if the interior of a barrel puts a spin on the bullet fired through that barrel, the bullet will be much more accurate (and thus, combat effective at much longer ranges). The obvious problem is that a barrel that puts a spin on the bullet on the way out must also spin the bullet on the way in, which made loading a rifle something like screwing the bullet into the gun. This took a long time. Sure, you could make the bullet much smaller than the interior diameter of the barrel to load faster; smoothbore guns already did. But without a tight fit, the bullet wouldn’t contact the interior grooves of the barrel properly and thus not spin, which defeats the whole purpose of the rifle. As a result, for about 300 years rifles were relegated to roles where they didn’t need to shoot quickly, such as snipers, scouts, and skirmishers. For troops expected to engage in heavy fighting, a moderate rate of fire and moderate accuracy/range remained more important than a very slow rate of fire and good accuracy/range.In the 19th century expanding rifle ammunition was invented. This was a bullet that began much smaller than the interior diameter of the gun, allowing it to be loaded quickly. However, it had a hollow at its base that caused the expanding gases of the gunpowder charge to mushroom the bullet inside the barrel, causing it to grip the rifling grooves and spin. No spin on the way in, spin on the way out: and suddenly shoulder guns could have the best of both worlds. Rifles with expanding ammunition could match the fire rate of smoothbore guns with twice the effective range or more.The effect on the infantry:field artillery relationship should be obvious: suddenly field artillery doesn’t outrange infantry by nearly so much. Now, this is not to say that field artillery suddenly became obsolete. It remained an essential and deadly combat arm. It is to say that the absolute dominance of artillery over infantry came to an end about the middle of the 19th century.The threat envelope of these new faster-firing rifles was so large that it signaled the death knell even for bayonets. This is not to say that people immediately abandoned bayonet charges once expanding ammunition was invented. The American Civil War was fought right at the introduction of the new technology, and people hadn’t really adjusted to what it meant. A great many bayonet charges were attempted during the American Civil War. Some of them even succeeded (by which I mean “actually drove the enemy of,” not “managed to reach the defending unit”). But pulling off a successful bayonet charge was a much harder, and much bloodier, task than it had been.If you want to place an official moment in history when infantry stopped trying to charge and started gunning down its opponents even on the attack, the advent of rapid-fire rifles is probably where you want to look. At the same time, the exact moment in the so-called Age of Rifles that this took place is something reasonable people can disagree about. Arguably it didn’t happen until World War I, fully fifty years after the American Civil War first showed what rapid-fire rifles could do.Final Disappearance of Hand WeaponsWhat I don’t think is really arguable is that hand weapons generally didn’t disappear from the battlefield until World War I. Even in the Age of Rifles, cavalry continued to use muscle-powered weapons such as swords and lances - often alongside pistols and carbines, but still, they carried hand weapons and expected to use them, and actually did use them. Americans sometimes forget this, since both Union and Confederate cavalry in the American Civil War generally eschewed hand combat (honestly, a few very gallant actions notwithstanding, cavalry on both sides in the American Civil War generally left fighting to the infantry and artillery. As one of my friends who served in the modern U.S. cavalry once put it, American cavalry has a long and storied tradition of boldly riding towards the enemy and … taking a look).In the world at large, though, 19th century cavalry still engaged in hand combat on a fairly regular basis. This should come as no surprise: cavalry doesn’t have to spend as long traversing the kill zone of a rifle as infantry does.Was this just a vestige of a bygone age? Well … maybe. Cavalry had to work very hard to defeat enemy infantry alone in the Age of Rifles. But that is no surprise. Cavalry had to work very hard to defeat enemy infantry alone in the 18th century … and in the 17th, and in the 16th. Even Alexander the Great had to work very hard to defeat enemy infantry with cavalry alone. The story of cavalry has - with very few exceptions - always been the story of combined arms. And even in World War I, cavalry charges could and did succeed against machine gun nests if properly coordinated with other combat arms.Undeniably, though, World War I was the last gasp of hand weapons as a major armament of any combat arm. After that, the kill zones of infantry and artillery weapons were simply too great even for cavalry - even working with infantry - to close to hand to hand range.Hand to hand combat didn’t disappear, of course. It continues to happen, sporadically, even today. But following the Great War, all combat arms attacked and defended primarily with the gun.

Dear XAT Aspirant,XAT is considered one of the toughest b-school entrance exam and rightly so. Its syllabus and pattern is unpredictable and it has an essay part which is missing in many other top b-school entrance examination consists of five sections divided into two stages.PAPER 1(STAGE 1)-140 minsQuantitative Ability & Data Interpretation -26 QuesVerbal Ability-23 QuesDecision Making & Analytical Reasoning-29 QuesPAPER 2(STAGE 2)- 35 minsGeneral Knowledge/Essay writing-25QuesThe above data is as per XAT 2016. In terms of the changes in the marking scheme of XAT 2016, there is negative marking of 0.05 marks after 13 un-attempted questions.There is also negative marking of 0.25 marks for any wrong answer.SYLLABUS INCLUDES-Verbal AbilityEnglish Grammar based questions; English Proficiency; Analogy, Fill in the Blanks, Para jumble, Reading ComprehensionLogical ReasoningFact Inference Judgment, Passage Conclusion, Statement ArgumentDecision MakingConditions and Grouping Test; Data Arrangement Test; Complex Arrangement; Decision Making in a situation; Case letsQuantitative Ability & Data Interpretation Elementary Mathematics; Arithmetic:- Number System, Ratio and Proportion; Additional Topic in Arithmetic:- Problems on Trains, Clock and Calendar, Mixtures and Allegation; Unitary Method; Time and Distance; Commercial Maths; Profit and Loss, Interest; Geometry; Triangles, Circles; Mensuration; Algebra Permutation and Combinations; Sequence And Series; Trigonometry Heights and Distance; Linear Programming; Coordinate Geometry Cartesian Plane and lines; Probability; Case lets, Table Chart; Data SufficiencyGeneral KnowledgeEconomics, finance, national and international current affairs are a few of the many topics on which questions are placed in this section. Questions are also based on conventional GK. In-depth and regular reading of GK helps more as sometimes a few GK questions in XAT appear more tricky and need intensive reading.Essay WritingEssay writing in XAT is the test of writing skill of an aspirant. This section needs a well worded essay on the contemporary or abstract topic. Test taker has to write essay on one topic but sometimes there is choice to choose between 2 topics and sometimes there is no choice at all.The test taker is supposed to write after giving a thought and produce a better piece of writing in 20-25 minutes. Ideal size of essay is around 300-400 words. Essay in XAT plays important role in the final selection PI round as questions are based on it.ALL THE BEST!

There isn’t any specific book or ‘best’ book that can guarantee you a good rank in JEE. Each book in the market has its own pros and cons. What is more important is for you to select the preliminary book which you are comfortable with, solve it completely and then go for any additional books you want. The following is a list of books one can use for both JEE(M & A):NCERT Mathematics:No JEE Preparation is complete without properly studying this book. Every Aspirant will probably say this. Properly solve the exercises & Miscellaneous problems. NCERT Exemplar contains a right mix of objective and subjective problems with other types like fill in the blanks, match the following, T & F etc. Solve it properlyArihant Skills in Mathematics Series: Contains 6 books altogether.Algebra by SK GoyalTrigonometry by Amit M Agarwal.Vectors And 3d Geometry by Amit M Agarwal.Play with Graphs by Amit M Agarwal.Integral Calculus by Amit M Agarwal.Differential Calculus by Amit M Agarwal.Coordinate Geometry by SK Goyal.Arihant series is a good series with lots of solved+unsolved problems with plenty of illustrations and proofs.3. Cengage Publications: Contains 6 books authored by G TewaniCalculusAlgebraTrigonometryCoordinate GeometryVectors and 3D GeometryGraphs for JEE(M & A)Its just like the Arihant Series. My Advice is to pick out any one of these series. Both are excellent book series with good theory as well.4. New Pattern Mathematics by SK Goyal: A hefty book with over 8000 problems.5. Problems plus in IIT Mathematics by A Das Gupta: It contains one subjective and one objective book, both being very good.6. Comprehensive Mathematics for JEE(Main & Advanced) by Tata McGraw Hill: Again a hefty book like the 4th one with exhaustive amount of problems.7. If you are looking for practice on a monthly basis, then you can go for either of these two magazines:MTG Magazines.Arihant Spectrum.8. Coordinate Geometry & Plane Trigonometry by SL Loney: Classic books with different variety of problems and excellent theory. But they are purely subjective, mind you.9. Higher Algebra by Hall & Knight and Problems in Calculus of one variables by IA Maron: Again Subjective books.10. There are other publications by GRB and all but I only recommend the above ones.Of course, please don’t start buying all these. As I said earlier go for a single good book, practice it thoroughly and then go for any additional ones.Again it is not the book that decides your rank in JEE but your dedication and perseverance towards the subject will help you a lot.P.S : You can get 8 and 9 in the internet as they are public domain books in Internet Archives.