 I built myself a stand for the whiteboard. Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another edition of Toodalidge in Blood. Okay, so today's battle is the Battle of Lectra. I think that's how you pronounce it. I could be wrong. Again, if you want a full historical context of this battle, please check out a link down in the description below because we're not gonna do that here. We're just gonna talk about the battle itself and modern lessons that we can learn from it. So this battle took place on the 6th of July, 371 BC. And this was a battle between Sparta, I'm sure you've heard of them, and Thebes, which was a city in the Grecian area. So basically what we have here is we are on one side, we have the, again, not sure to pronounce that, Baotian League, Baotian League, led by the city of Thebes. And they're coming in with about 7,000 hoplites and about 1,000 and a half cavalry. And on the other side you have Sparta with 10,000 hoplites and 1,000 cavalry. I know who you think wins, but you're wrong. To understand this, you have to understand a little bit how hoplite warfare works, okay? So if you're not familiar, this was kind of the dominant fighting practice of the Greeks for quite a long time until Rome really wiped them off the map. And basically they fought in hoplite formation. So what you had is you had a huge circular shield that would cover you from about the shoulder to about your knee. So you held this huge shield in your left arm and then you had a spear and you held your spear in your right arm, which was about eight-ish feet in length, I think, somewhere around there. And what you would do is you'd fight in close order formation, right? So I would hold my shield, I'd tuck in here, I'm able to stab and the next guy next to me, his shield covers that gap. Well, because everybody has their shield in their left arm and their spear in their right arm and I don't have protection here, everybody had a tendency, of course, to try to scoot to the side to get further into my friend's shield, right? And as I'm scooting, well, now I'm leaving this guy open so he's scooting, so everybody's constantly scooting right a little bit. And as a result, hoplite formations tend to have a right-hand drift. That's gonna be important for understanding how this battle works. So typically what most armies did, what all armies did for hundreds of years, because this is the way they fought for a very long time, to counteract that is you would put your best troops to anchor the right, okay? The right wing was considered the place of honor, so the Spartans, that's where you're putting your king, the Athenians, that's where they're putting their generals, like that's where your best troops, your crack troops are gonna go is on that right-hand side to try to anchor that right wing to prevent drifting. So what usually ended up happening, despite putting your best guys in the right to try to prevent this, what usually ends up happening is your whole line is starting to drift right and their whole line, they're doing the same thing because they're trying to prevent their guys from drifting right. So they put their best troops on the right-hand side, you put yours on the right-hand side, and everybody's slowly drifting to the right, and so the hoplite formations just tend to fight in this big kind of slowly rotating circle, right? So you're gonna, really, you're getting in there, you're trying to push the enemy off the field, of course stab them in the face when you can, which again is difficult because everybody's wearing like helmets and shields and breastplates and there's a lot of armor involved, right? Great heavy troops, the hoplites. There's, again, we can go down that historical rabbit hole but we're not gonna, but it's cool. So this is what ends up happening, is this big, slow conglomeration of the slowly rotating as these formations hit each other, and everybody's trying to prevent that right-hand drift, but again, it's just kind of what happens. So keep that in mind as we get to this battle because that'll be important. So what you have here is you have a Sparta lines up with their 10,000 Spartans on this side. Thebes lines up with their 7,000 Spartans on this side. The cavalry come out and do a little skirmish but it doesn't matter, it's not important to the outcome of the battle and we don't really care about it for our purposes. So as the infantry come out, the Spartans line up like normal, okay? They anchor their king and their best guys on the right-hand side, they have the rest of their troops lined up and they're about 12 ranks deep, give or take, okay? On the opposite side, Thebes lines up a little bit differently. So they take their sacred band, there's cool little stories about the sacred band, they're eventually wiped out by Alexander the Great, but crack troops of like 300 homosexual pairs. It's a really interesting historical tidbit, doesn't matter. So here's the deal, they're led by their sacred band, which are they're really good guys and they put their best guys over here and they overload their left flank with their best guys and they run at about 50 ranks deep. They take the rest of the guys and they're only about two or three ranks deep, right? So me and then like two guys behind me or me and one guy behind me, right? So it's a very shallow line when you get into a big shoving match. And they run that in kind of an echelon-like formation, again, to try to prevent contact as long as possible. Think back to our last battle that we just did, right? With Skippy Uafrikanas and how he was able to fix the enemy in place by never actually fighting them. That's a similar concept to what's going on here. So Thieb lines up about 50 ranks deep and they put their best guys against their best guys, right? Well, you can see how this is gonna go, right? So as they approach, eventually they make contact first. They're able to completely destroy the best troops of the Spartans and break their right wing. The king dies, he's mortally wounded, I think later dies and they're able to really crush this right wing. And so once these guys break and or are dead, then all these other formations, which are allies, they're not all necessarily from Sparta, Spartans, right? They decide, you know, to hell with this and they break and they run and they leave the field. So what you end up happening here is you have a victory for Thiebs with only 7,000 hoplites against Sparta. And again, you've heard the legends of Sparta with good reason, who has more guys because they were able to overload the side and blow out the right wing of the Spartans. So what are the modern lessons we can learn from this battle? The first one is localized superiority or massing combat power, right? We're just gonna go with localizing superiority. So what Thiebs was able to do was able to have localized superiority. They obviously did not have superiority, like number superiority, right? They did not have number superiority over the entire battle because they had 3,000 less guys than the actual Spartans, right? So what are you gonna do about that? So what they did and what they were able to do very effectively was localized that superiority, meaning that in one section of the battle, the section that mattered the most, they were able to have superior numbers. This is a very common modern day tactic when we talk about light infantry tactics in the modern world, right? We want to have localized superiority, meaning in this fight right now where we're at, that's where we want to have superior numbers. We may not have superior numbers all over, we may have superior numbers all over, but right now we're outgunned, that's a problem, right? You want to have localized superiority. So being able to arrange and amass your combat power so that where it counts and where you need it, that's where you have the localized superiority, regardless of what you have over the field at large. There's a lot to be said about that in modern light infantry tactics, because we don't necessarily mass troops the way we used to prior to the days of World War I, right? Because once artillery and stuff started getting in and now we have airplanes and helicopters, you don't mass troops and just have like 100,000 guys hanging out in the field like you used to, because hey, someone might just drop a bomb on them and now you're really in trouble. However, we are still trying to localize superiority, meaning that where we're having the fight right there, we want superior numbers. So if we know that there's a squad of bad guys over there in that village or town or house or whatever, we'd prefer to probably send a platoon against it, right? Because we want to have localized superiority. So again, keep that concept in mind and here's an example of how they were able to achieve it even in a situation where they did not have superior numbers. It actually gets more impressive the more you think about it. Lesson number two, command and control. So Thebes was able to decisively remove the command and control structure from the Spartans. You've got to remember again, back in the day when everybody's fighting on the field, if the king goes down or the general goes down, that's a huge morale blow for the entire army. That is often the case. For example, when Alexander the Great invaded Persia, he decisively several times went directly for the king, even though he was massively outnumbered by the Persians, he himself, along with his elite troops, made a end run charge directly towards the king. The king ended up fleeing the battle, I believe it was at least twice, and the whole army of fleets. And again, Alexander was massively outnumbered in those battles, but he was able to go after the command and control. Same thing here. If you can destroy their command and control structure, then that's going to cripple their ability to continue fighting. And that's exactly what Thebes did. Again, in a modern context, right? If you don't have command and control, if the squad leaders or platoon leaders or general or whoever isn't able to effectively give orders because they're dead or they're just out of communication, well then that's a huge problem for the rest of the army. Either from a morale perspective, as is very much the case here when everybody's fighting on the same field together, or from just an orders organization perspective in more modern conflicts. The third lesson that we can learn here is just the outside the box thinking. This kind of deal had never been done before. Nobody ever said before, hey, what if we just completely loaded up our left flank and tried to blow up their command and control structure? Obviously they didn't use those terms at the time, but nobody had ever thought about that before. And on top of that, the fact that Thebes ran the rest of their guys in an echelon formation to try to delay contact with the Spartan line as long as possible is another outside the box thinking. As far as I know, and I totally could be wrong about this, this is the first time any kind of echelon formation is used, at least in recorded history. So this idea that you're gonna run this whole echelon in order to delay contact, because if this was just a straight line, this plan might not have worked. You don't make contact the same time, the Spartans would quickly blow out your entire left center of your army, and now you'd be in real trouble because you'd get totally flanked here as they come in, right? That's a huge, huge problem. But by putting it in an echelon, they were able to delay that contact so that this had time to work, so that their hammer train of doom had time to work and kill the king and take out their command and control structure. Again, the more you think about it, it's really subtly brilliant. And this is how Thebes was able to cripple Sparta, thereby ending their homogene over the Greek states. I hope that was helpful, looking forward to seeing you again when we continue to learn modern tactical lessons from old battles. Do brave deeds and endure.