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The Emperor on the Battlefield: Napoleon's Worth as a Military Commander
eBook
ISBN/EAN: 9783954895076
Umbreit-Nr.: 5468204
Sprache:
Englisch
Umfang: 116 S., 3.74 MB
Format in cm:
Einband:
Keine Angabe
Erschienen am 01.06.2013
Auflage: 1/2013
E-Book
Format: PDF
DRM: Digitales Wasserzeichen
- Zusatztext
- This book seeks to explore two working hypotheses: Firstly, that Napoleons alleged military superiority in terms of skill and battlefield competence over his peers can be empirically quantified and proven. Secondly, that the results of Napoleonic warfare can be predicted by applying the theory of Contest Success Functions to these battles.To address these claims this book is organized into four sections:Theory:The first of the conceptual sections summarizes the theoretical underpinning behind the economical understanding of conflict. This so called second approach and its merits are outlined and the history of these theoretical concepts is explained. Chapter three introduces the Ratio Contest Success Function (RCSF) put forth by Tullock and the Difference Contest Success Function (DCSF) employed by Hirshleifer, the concepts for predicting probabilities of success in conflict theory.History:The fourth chapter gives a brief report on warfare during the Napoleonic ages. A special emphasis lies on an analysis that evaluates if the key parameters have been homogenous over the time and what kind of technology was employed during these battles. The results are then compared with the demands of conflict theory. The fifth chapter then explicates the data set. The different variables that could be obtained are introduced and at last the scope of the further analysis is specified. This is done by picking the variables that can actually be used for an in-depth quantitative.Modelling:In the four chapters that deal with the actual modelling, the theory is applied to the historical data to yield the results we need to verify the working hypotheses. After the two different estimators used have been introduced in chapter six, the chapters seven and eight deal with utilising each of the estimators to answer these questions. The results from the estimates are interpreted and are compared in chapter nine. In addition, chapter nine attempts to weigh the explanatory value of the two approaches and places them in the historical perspective.Résumé:Chapter ten answers comments on Napoleons personal worth on the battlefield and applies the findings of the empirical work to three short case studies. The subsequent summary then merges the results of the whole study and concludes with follow-up questions for future research.
- Kurztext
- A deeper understanding of how consumers think, feel and act is vital to the success of management and provides valuable information for managerial decision making in many areas of business. One key to this understanding is brand knowledge, which is the representation of a brand in consumers' minds. Unfortunately, a substantial amount of relevant knowledge within people's minds is unconscious and cannot be retrieved, accessed and recalled by consumers. As a consequence, certain methods of retrieval are required, such as projective techniques. The method this book works with is the collage technique, an expressive projective method. The aim of this book is to create a multi-layered approach that facilitates the interpretation of collages without the need of any additional information given by the participants, based on metaphor analysis, color theory, a communication model and structural analysis.
- Autorenportrait
- Oberleutnant Diplom-Volkswirt Felix Christoph Lotzin was born in Hamburg in 1985. After his Vordiplom in Volkwirtschaftslehre at the University of Mannheim in 2006, he joined the army.Having completed his studies in Volkwirtschaftslehre, Politikwissenschaft and Geschichtswissenschaft at the Helmut-Schmidt-University in 2010, he is now a Diplom-Volkswirt. His already in early times formed fascination with the historical period of the liberation wars inspired him to calculate Napoleons military abilities utilizing econometric methods.
- Leseprobe
- Text Sample:Chapter 4, The Essentials about Napoleonic Warfare:During the discussion of economic conflict theory it emerged, that there are four aspects to every analysis of conflict on which light has to be shed. We established before, that the sources of conflict and the consequences do not belong to the topics of this thesis. In the last chapter we examined a way of modelling the conflict via the Contest Success Functions. Nevertheless there still does remain the question of the technology of conflict. Necessarily this question could not be answered in an abstract way, as everything can belong to it. We therefore need to discuss it directly along the lines of the conflict explored. The following chapter is based upon several historical works that are listed in the references in detail. Two of these were of special importance: The Art of Warfare on Land by David Chandler40 and Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon by Rory Muir. As a battle only forms a small cut-out of a war, war itself constitutes only one way of conflict. During a war everything can be an instrument to be turned against the enemy together they make the technology of this war. From the more subtle ones to the brutish attacks all have to be taken into account, when deciding what constitutes the technology. Recurring on the working hypotheses, we do not need to deal with the technology of these wars in total, but only with what could be applied during the battles that formed the culminations of warfare in these times. We now will have to examine the technology of Napoleonic era battles and will start with the armament of these times. The soldiers that could be fielded, the organisation of the armies and their tactics are examined afterwards.Armament:Although Napoleon is known to be one of the greatest generals of all time, he never was very interested in new technologies and how these could be applied to warfare. Since the times of Frederick the Great only small inventions had been made and generally the armies were still equipped with the same weapons. The infantry was armed with muskets and, in the case of the light battalions, with rifled guns. Special importance was laid upon the use of the bayonet, as the firearms were still clumsy and took long times to reload. Cavalry was equipped with sabres and pistols, the heavy ones still wearing armour and the light cavalry only protected by the normal uniform. Only the artillery equipment had changed noteworthy after lighter guns, the so-called field guns, had been introduced into service. The Royal French Army had been the first to utilize these advanced guns and soon the other countries had to improve as well. Nevertheless no big inventions were made during the Napoleonic era that had a notable impact on the armament of the troops fielded. Hence armament can be treated as having been homogenous in nature.Soldiers:Although the concept of conscription can be traced back to the Fyrd of Anglo-Saxon-England or even to the Ilkum of the Babylonian Empire, for some decades the armies had only consisted of professional soldiers. The military profession was often regarded to be one of the lowest forms of employment to choose, so that many soldiers had been forced into the ranks or were former convicts. This dramatically changed in France after the revolution had forced many officers of the Royal French Army most of them from the nobility to flee the country. The new armies were drawn from among the population by the system called levée en masse, the first conscription of modern times. Soldiers recruited by these means had a higher motivation and were noted for their patriotic attitude. As the other countries were forced to field bigger armies as well to cope with this situation, they adopted similar measures.45 As we will see in the discussion of tactics, this even entailed adopting new approaches to attack, as the new soldiers did not have the same military training the professionals fielded before had had. Anyhow the new tactics could be employed with the old troops as well, so that for the sake of this analysis only the numbers did differ. Hence we will not control for a difference between conscripts and regulars. Organisation:When Napoleon took over command of the whole French Revolutionary Army, the biggest organisational changes already had been implemented. By then Lazare Carnot, whom revolutionary France mandated with reorganising the armed forces, had already introduced the system of mixed divisions that were made up of infantry, cavalry and artillery and that were complete fighting units in themselves. Napoleon himself made changes to the staff system46 and introduced the army corps for the first time. The changes by Carnot and himself enabled him to use new approaches to strategy but did not change what actually happened on the battlefield when opposing forces had met. Thus these organisational changes need not to be taken account when conducting predictions for battles at the tactical level.Tactics:As we have seen, Napoleon was no great innovator as a soldier; rather, his genius lay in the practical field. He employed many new tactics and invented innovative ways of doing combat. There are two tactical manoeuvres that are most striking when Napoleons battles are scrutinized. Firstly, he often seized a central position and forced the enemy to divide into two parts, breaking up the fight into small battles against numerically inferior foes while pinning down the bigger part of the enemy with a small part of his own forces. After winning the first engagement he then would proceed to attack the main force, employing flanking attacks and massed numbers. His second stratagem was the envelopment, used against numerically inferior adversaries. He diverted attraction from his main force by employing a part of his army as a blocking force and then outflanked the enemy, thrusting into his flanks. Although these two strategies seem to be pretty obvious, they were not in these times, because most of the generals that were Napoleons peers still adhered to the believe in a rigid system of giving battle, manoeuvres without fighting and embanked wars. Thence we have to take the difference between Napoleon and his adversaries into account, at least until they were able to acquire and emulate these tactics as well.Conclusion:We can regard the technology vector we need for our further studies as consisting of two elements: The number of the forces involved and Napoleons presence. Argumentation that checking for Napoleons presence is necessary is pretty straightforward, he employed new tactics and strategies and other generals tried to emulate him. Therefore it is of interest to know how much the outcomes of the battles would be affected by him. If this would not have been the case, then his new approaches would have been useless and no one would have felt the need to emulate him. As we have seen above, the armament of the forces and their organisation in divisions were much alike among the warring factions, so that we can assume homogenous elements of effort. These elements can then be linked to the size of the force present at the battle, so that we can summarize the effort of the contestants as being the soldiers fighting. Hence the force size is the second component of the technology vector we can use to explain these battles.