So what happens, when in the course of events, a modern private military company contracted by one side of a conflict, confronts a private military company contracted by the other side on the field of battle? What would that look like in modern times?
Of course who ever can pay the most, would conceivably get the best contract army, but if both sides could afford the best in the industry, what would that fight look like and what would be the deciding factors in victory?
Well one case study that I stumbled upon, was the case of the Swiss Guard versus the German Landsknecht back during the early 16th century. To sum it up, the Germans copied the model of warfare of the Swiss Guard, and then added new technology in the form of some really crude but effective muskets and cannons (arquebus and artillery), and gained as much field experience as they could when fighting other enemies to essentially prepare them for the eventual big battle with Swiss. The Swiss Guard was defeated because of this preparation, technology, strategy, and because of their arrogance and failure to apply Kaizen to their organization. The Swiss were successful for a long time, but they got cocky and just couldn’t believe anyone could defeat them. Famous last words. The Landsknecht built the better snowmobile, and knocked the king right off the mountain.
So to really boil this down, the Landsknecht were a better learning organization. They identified the best model of operation (the Swiss Guard model), copied it to the point of even wearing the same types of showy uniforms, and also found the latest technologies and used those to great advantage on the field of battle. It also took sound leadership to convince the troops that they could defeat the best of the best with that new technology and Swiss Guard-like organization and tactics. The Germans knew themselves and the enemy, and they won. Business can learn from this, and if a modern PMC ever has to fight another modern PMC on the battlefield, these very lessons will more than likely have to be re-applied to gain this victory. Especially now with the advent of the internet and the free flow of information–everyone has access to everything to include the best industry practices and successful models of operation. I almost think warfare will boil back down to just being faster, more organized, and more efficient than the other guy, who will more than likely be using the same stuff and ideas as you. The OODA loop will definitely apply. That, and the ability to be more creative and forward thinking than the other guy.
I also look at this from a strategist’s point of view. The Germans obviously had the Boydian style of thinking, when trying to figure out how to defeat the best of the best. They would have been the ones to use a little Clauswitz, a little Sun Tzu, and whomever else to really seek out what works and take pieces of everything to build the army they wanted. The prize for this battle, was increased reputation and more contracts for being the new leaders in the industry.
I guess we can give the Swiss credit for being the first to use the fife (a dorky little flute) for command and control in their battle against the Germans? lol –Matt
The Swiss (on the right) assault the Landsknecht mercenaries in the French lines at the Battle of Marignano.
The Swiss and the Landsknechts in the Great Italian Wars (wikipedia)
Until roughly 1490, the Swiss had a virtual monopoly on pike-armed mercenary service. However, after that date, the Swiss mercenaries were increasingly supplemented by imitators, chiefly the Landsknechts. Landsknechts were Germans (at first largely from Swabia) and became proficient at Swiss tactics to produce a force that filled the ranks of European armies with mercenary regiments for decades. Although the Landsknechts were never quite as redoubtable as the Swiss, they were much more readily available for hire, as after 1515 the Swiss pledged themselves to neutrality, other than regarding Swiss soldiers serving in the ranks of the Royal French army. The Landsknecht, however, would serve any paymaster, even, at times, enemies of the Holy Roman Emperor (and Landsknechts at times even fought each other on the battlefield, something the Swiss flatly refused to do in mercenary service). The Landsknecht assumed the bright, garish soldier’s outfits of the Swiss, and in fact soon outdid the Swiss in the flamboyance of their military dress.
The Swiss were not flattered by the imitation, and the two bodies of mercenaries immediately became bitter rivals over employment and on the battlefield, where they were often opposed during the major European conflict of the early sixteenth century, the Great Italian Wars. Although the Swiss generally had a significant edge in a simple “push of pike”, the resulting combat was nonetheless quite savage, and known to Italian onlookers as “bad war.” Period artists such as Hans Holbein attest to the fact that two such huge pike columns crashing into each other could result in a maelstrom of battle, and ghastly casualties on both sides.
Despite the competition from the Landsknechts, and imitation by other armies (most notably the Spanish, which adopted pike-handling as one element of its famed Tercios infantry formations), the Swiss fighting reputation reached its zenith between 1480-1525, and indeed the Battle of Novara, fought by Swiss mercenaries, is seen by some as the perfect Swiss battle. Even the close defeat at the terrible Battle of Marignano in 1515, the “Battle of Giants,” was seen as a victory of sorts for Swiss arms due to the ferocity of the fighting and the good order of their withdrawal. Nonetheless, the repulse at Marignano presaged the decline of the Swiss form of warfare — eventually, the two-century run of Swiss victories ended in 1522 with complete disaster at the Battle of Bicocca when combined Spanish and Landsknecht forces decisively defeated them using fortifications and new technology. It can be argued that it was arrogance — overconfidence in their own supposed invincibility — which defeated the Swiss as much as the armed forces of their enemies, for at Bicocca, the Swiss mercenaries, serving the French king, attempted repeatedly to frontally storm an impregnable defensive position, only to be mown down by small-arms and artillery fire. Never had the Swiss suffered such awful casualties while being unable to inflict much damage upon their foe. Arrogance and overconfidence were at play here, but another consideration was economic — many of the Swiss mercenaries were still farmers, and needed to return home from campaign quickly in order to work the fields. This meant they often rushed, unthinking, into ill-advised battles in the hopes they would crush the enemy of their employer, collect booty, get paid, and march home to work their fields.
History of the Landsknecht
The first Landsknecht regiments were formed by Maximilian I. He called upon Georg von Frundsberg, known by many as the Father of the Landsknechts, to assist him in their organization. They later went on to fight in almost every 16th century military campaign, sometimes on both sides of the engagement. The landsknechts, formed in conscious imitation of the Swiss mercenaries (and, initially, using Swiss instructors), eventually contributed to the defeat of the redoubtable Swiss whose battle formations, overly-dependent on hand to hand fighting, became vulnerable to the increased fire power of arquebus and artillery. French artillery or Spanish firepower dealt serious blows to the Swiss formations, and the Landsknecht pike blocks were there to fight off the depleted Swiss attack columns once this had occurred.
The Landsknechts, although rather conservative themselves in weapons usage, and always containing a large majority of pikemen, were more predisposed to the tactical employment of firearms than the Swiss were because Landsknechts relied less on the precipitous rush to close combat and, as Imperial soldiers, they also often fought in formations mixed with Spaniards, who made widespread use of the arquebus and, later, musket.
The landsknechts typically came from Swabia, Alsace, Flanders, and the Rhineland, but ultimately the regiments were made up of men from all parts of Europe.
Their battlefield behavior was highly variable. Sometimes, such as at the Battle of Pavia, they performed very well, being instrumental to the Emperor’s victory. However, on many other occasions, (such as in the later Italian Wars, French Wars of Religion and the Eighty Years War) their bravery and discipline came under severe criticism, and the Spanish elements of the Imperial army regularly derogated the battlefield usefulness of the Landsknechts — the Duke of Alba is said to have hired them only to deny the Dutch enemy of their service, and that he put them on display to swell his numbers and did not intend to fight with them. The Huguenots scorned their landsknecht mercenaries after these were immediately routed by the battered Swiss mercenary pike block they had been sent to finish off at the Battle of Dreux.
Organization
The regiments often expanded from 4,000 to 10,000 men according to circumstances, or even larger — the Black Band, generally considered to have been a regiment of landsknechts, were 17,000 strong when raised by the French in 1515. It was this flexibility which allowed them to be used in various battle conditions. Oberste (colonels) were given recruiting commissions by the Emperor to form regiments, with a lieutenant-colonel and various regimental staff, and units divided into Fähnleins (companies) with a Hauptmann (captain) in charge, as well as lieutenants and Fähnriche (ensigns). Other ranks included majors of the court-martial and officers in charge of camp followers.
The Tross were the camp followers or “baggage train” who traveled with each Landsknecht unit, carrying the military necessities, the food and the belongings of each soldier and his family. Members of the Tross were made up of women, children and some craftsmen.
Weapons
Landsknechts were trained in the use of the famous long pikes and used the pike square formations developed by the Swiss. The majority of Landsknechts would use pikes, but others, meant to provide tactical assistance to the pikemen, accordingly used different weapons. For example, an experienced Landsknecht could be designated a Doppelsöldner, and instead of wielding a pike as did more recent recruits, would employ a six to eight foot long halberd or partisan, or, more famously, a Zweihänder, a two-handed sword as long as 6 feet (although it was generally called at the time a Beidhänder rather than a Zweihänder). These great war swords could be used to hack off the heads of enemy pikes; or more likely to knock the pikes aside, creating disorder among the tightly arranged enemy pikemen in order to break through their lines.
However, this tactic seems to have been of limited value, and was possibly dropped after around 1510 (although pictorial evidence of the use of these swords in the front lines exists until at least late into the 16th century) – their Swiss adversaries had specifically prohibited it when they went over to widespread use of the pike in the early 15th century, because the weapon was too large to use in constricted pike warfare. “Doppelsöldner” meant “double mercenary”, because they were paid double the wages of their less experienced counterparts.
Other Landsknechts would use the arquebus, the precursor to the musket. When the Landsknechts were first formed, arquebusiers composed up to an eighth of the total number of soldiers, but the number gradually grew to be about a quarter.
The universal Landsknecht weapon was a short sword called a Katzbalger, carried in addition to the Landsknecht’s main weapon. Indeed, the Katzbalger was seen as the very symbol of the Landsknecht, Swiss illustrators being careful to depict it to indicate that a mercenary was a Landsknecht rather than a Reisläufer.
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Ascendancy of Swiss field mercenaries
During the Late Middle Ages, mercenary forces grew in importance in Europe, as veterans from the Hundred Years War and other conflicts came to see soldiering as a profession rather than a temporary activity, and commanders sought long-term professionals rather than temporary feudal levies to fight their wars. Swiss mercenaries (Reisläufer) were valued throughout Late Medieval Europe for the power of their determined mass attack in deep columns with the pike and halberd. Hiring them was made even more attractive because entire ready-made Swiss mercenary contingents could be obtained by simply contracting with their local governments, the various Swiss cantons—the cantons had a form of militia system in which the soldiers were bound to serve and were trained and equipped to do so. It should be noted, however, that the Swiss also hired themselves out individually or in small bands.
The warriors of the Swiss cantons had gradually developed a reputation throughout Europe as skilled soldiers, due to their successful defense of their liberties against their Austrian Habsburg overlords, starting as early as the late thirteenth century, including such remarkable upset victories over heavily-armoured knights as Morgarten and Laupen. This was furthered by later successful campaigns of regional expansion (mainly into Italy). By the fifteenth century they were greatly valued as mercenary soldiers, particularly following their series of notable victories in the Burgundian Wars in the latter part of the century. As a result, bands of men, sometime acting independently, other times under the banners of their cantons, marched off to foreign lands to fight in the causes of others, for pay. The native term Reisläufer literally means “one who goes to war” and is derived from Middle High German Reise, meaning “military campaign.”
The Swiss, with their head-down attack in huge columns with the long pike, refusal to take prisoners, and consistent record of victory, were greatly feared and admired—for instance, Machiavelli addresses their system of combat at length in The Prince. The Valois Kings of France, in fact, considered it a virtual impossibility to take the field of battle without Swiss pikeman as the infantry core of their armies. (Although often referred to as “pikemen,” the Swiss mercenary units also contained halberdiers as well until several decades into the sixteenth century, as well as a small number of skirmishers armed with crossbows or crude firearms to precede the rapid advance of the attack column.)
The young men who went off to fight, and sometimes die, in foreign service had several incentives—limited economic options in the still largely-rural cantons; adventure; pride in the reputation of the Swiss as soldiers; and finally what military historian Sir Charles Oman describes as a pure love of combat and warfighting in and of itself, forged by two centuries of conflict.
The Swiss and the Landsknechts in the Great Italian Wars
Until roughly 1490, the Swiss had a virtual monopoly on pike-armed mercenary service. However, after that date, the Swiss mercenaries were increasingly supplemented by imitators, chiefly the Landsknechts. Landsknechts were Germans (at first largely from Swabia) and became proficient at Swiss tactics to produce a force that filled the ranks of European armies with mercenary regiments for decades. Although the Landsknechts were never quite as redoubtable as the Swiss, they were much more readily available for hire, as after 1515 the Swiss pledged themselves to neutrality, other than regarding Swiss soldiers serving in the ranks of the Royal French army. The Landsknecht, however, would serve any paymaster, even, at times, enemies of the Holy Roman Emperor (and Landsknechts at times even fought each other on the battlefield, something the Swiss flatly refused to do in mercenary service). The Landsknecht assumed the bright, garish soldier’s outfits of the Swiss, and in fact soon outdid the Swiss in the flamboyance of their military dress.
The Swiss were not flattered by the imitation, and the two bodies of mercenaries immediately became bitter rivals over employment and on the battlefield, where they were often opposed during the major European conflict of the early sixteenth century, the Great Italian Wars. Although the Swiss generally had a significant edge in a simple “push of pike”, the resulting combat was nonetheless quite savage, and known to Italian onlookers as “bad war.” Period artists such as Hans Holbein attest to the fact that two such huge pike columns crashing into each other could result in a maelstrom of battle, and ghastly casualties on both sides.
Despite the competition from the Landsknechts, and imitation by other armies (most notably the Spanish, which adopted pike-handling as one element of its famed Tercios infantry formations), the Swiss fighting reputation reached its zenith between 1480-1525, and indeed the Battle of Novara, fought by Swiss mercenaries, is seen by some as the perfect Swiss battle. Even the close defeat at the terrible Battle of Marignano in 1515, the “Battle of Giants,” was seen as a victory of sorts for Swiss arms due to the ferocity of the fighting and the good order of their withdrawal.
Nonetheless, the repulse at Marignano presaged the decline of the Swiss form of warfare — eventually, the two-century run of Swiss victories ended in 1522 with complete disaster at the Battle of Bicocca when combined Spanish and Landsknecht forces decisively defeated them using fortifications and new technology. It can be argued that it was arrogance — overconfidence in their own supposed invincibility — which defeated the Swiss as much as the armed forces of their enemies, for at Bicocca, the Swiss mercenaries, serving the French king, attempted repeatedly to frontally storm an impregnable defensive position, only to be mown down by small-arms and artillery fire. Never had the Swiss suffered such awful casualties while being unable to inflict much damage upon their foe. Arrogance and overconfidence were at play here, but another consideration was economic — many of the Swiss mercenaries were still farmers, and needed to return home from campaign quickly in order to work the fields. This meant they often rushed, unthinking, into ill-advised battles in the hopes they would crush the enemy of their employer, collect booty, get paid, and march home to work their fields.
Organization and tactics of early Swiss mercenary contingents
The early contingents of Swiss mercenary pikemen organized themselves rather differently than the cantonal forces. In the cantonal forces, their armies were usually divided into the Vorhut (vanguard), Gewalthut (center) and Nachhut (rearguard), generally of different sizes and often echeloned back with respect to each other. In mercenary contingents, although they could conceivably draw up in three similar columns if their force was of sufficient size, more often they simply drew up in one or two huge columns which deployed side by side, forming the center of the army in which they served. Likewise, their tactics were not very similar to those used by the Swiss cantons in their brilliant tactical victories of the Burgundian Wars and Swabian War, in which they relied on maneuver at least as much as the brute force of the attack columns. In mercenary service they became much less likely to resort to outmaneuvering the enemy and relied more on a straightforward steamroller assault.
Such deep pike columns could crush lesser infantry in close combat and were invulnerable to the effects of a cavalry charge, but they were vulnerable to firearms if they could be immobilized (as seen in the Battle of Marignano). The Swiss mercenaries did deploy crossbows, handguns and artillery of their own, however these always remained very subsidiary to the pike and halberd square. Despite the proven armour-penetration capability of firearms, they were also very inaccurate, slow-loading, and susceptible to damp conditions, and did not fit well with the fast-paced attack tactics used by the Swiss mercenary pike forces.
The Swiss remained primarily pikemen throughout the sixteenth century, but after that period they adopted similar infantry formations and tactics to other units in the armies in which they served. Accordingly, their tactics became less unique, and they took a normal place in the battle line amongst the other infantry units.
End of Military Ascendancy of Swiss Mercenary Pikemen
In the end, as proven at Marignano and Bicocca, the pike attack of the Swiss mercenaries proved to be too vulnerable to firearms wielded by Spanish and Landsknecht arquebusiers and the earthworks and artillery of the French. These arquebusiers and heavy cannons scythed down the close-packed ranks of the Swiss squares in bloody heaps — at least, as long as the Swiss attack could be bogged down by earthworks or cavalry charges, and the shooters were backed up by Spanish and/or Landsknecht pikemen to defend them if necessary from the Swiss in close combat.
Other stratagems could also take the Swiss pikemen at a disadvantage. For instance, the Spanish rodeleros, also known as Sword and Buckler Men, armed with steel rodelas and side-swords, often wearing a helmet and a breastplate, were much better armed and armoured for man-to-man close combat than the Swiss. Accordingly, they could heavily defeat the Swiss if their pike column could be disorganized so that the rodeleros could dash under the unwieldy pikes of the Swiss and stab the lightly-armoured, shieldless Swiss infantry. Landsknechts, using a formation similar to that of the Swiss, were defeated with terrible slaughter by the Spanish rodeleros at the Battle of Ravenna. It should be noted, however, that this required disorganization of the pike column, and Swiss pike columns which retained good formation were able to heavily defeat Spanish rodeleros formations in battles such as at the Battle of Seminara.
Link Here for the Swiss Guard
Link Here for the Landsknechts