Why were the huge Qing Dynasty armies so ineffective in the Opium Wars? They have to be the most one-sided wars in history.
>>64666880Qing army was essentially a late medieval army going against the most modern force of their time, they never stood a chance and real life is not a paradox game where you can doomstack 2 million men that are spread around a huge country mostly acting as a police force/hired thugs
>>64666880Turns out kung fu cultivation and ancient traditions doesn't beat guns
>>64666919They had plenty of guns, since they literally invented them.
>>64666991And the west perfected them instead of sitting around being primitive screwheads.
China invented the printing press like 1000 years before europe and did absolutly nothing with it.
Imagine being some chink fisherman conscripted to serve of a yunk and this thing paddles up against the wind.
>>64666880>Why were the huge Qing Dynasty armies so ineffective in the Opium Wars?Because it was an absurdly massive army.With no military police.Relatively little standardisation.No methods of truly quick communication.No methods of quick transport.Etc.Being big makes things harder.It's much easier to equip and teach 4000 men how to aim and care for a modern gun, how to operate and what to do in a nation the size of Slovenia...... than it is to teach and equip 400 000 men with guns, munitions, decent training, decent officer corps/direction and marshall the whole thing to effectively be where they need to be to defend a nation the size of the continental US almost solely on foot and horseback.Qing had 800k "enlisted" on paper. US Army has 450k active duty personnel and it's the biggest modern army on the planet. Air Force has about 300k.These guys have internet, satellite comms, radios, telephone network, an entire army of "managers" who just sit in office and talk shit through before contacting and placing people where they need to be.The gargantuan size is a disadvantage and ultimately what did the Qing modernisation efforts in. They tried to modernise just like the Japanese did.But the Japanese were building from an army of 30k soldiers (Meiji 6) which they could slowly have do their time in the army then join reserves, etc. and not worry about much anything.These guys were for defense of specific places and taking of specific places. For everything else they had ships, since they're on islands.Qing had a massive state which couldn't just throw away the entire gargantuan land army and focus on building a normal, smaller scale modern army from the ground up since they had Russians being Russians on their northern border. So they tried to juggle both modernisation and upgrading the old shit, which cost too much, dilluted their attention, etc. and ended up with the spectacular failures you now read about online.
>>64666904>>64666919>>64667268so how did ethiopia beat italy around the sametime?
>>64667320Because Italy had shitty soldiers, generals and weapons. Italy won in the end when they resorted to chemical weapons.
>>64667320Ethiopia was a tribal army, but armed with state of the art weaponry. They had modern breach loading firearms after a loalized divil war in a neighboring country that brought in American and European firearms en masse. They had 20mm explosive Maxim pom pom guns for Christ's sake.The country was entirely martial, and every man was supposed to be a warrior. In a sense, that was modern, because they were able to mobilize the country's entire male population. But it was based on tribal roots.So an entire country versus an overextended and undersupplied Italian expeditionary force, and it was over before it even began.
>>64667383He said same time, not WWII.
>>64666991The only thing having a ton of muskets meant, was that the Chinese were stuck using muskets until the end of WWII.
>>64666880They were mostly Han Chinese despite being dominated by a Manchu class, and the Han have been losing battles where they outnumbered their opponents 10-1 for all of human history.
>>64667320Ethiopia is also the most mixed race African population by like a factor of ten and has been so basically forever.
>>64667532>>64667320Ethiopians are descended from one of the tribes of Israel.its why they have never been conquered
>>64667540>its why they have never been conqueredthey were conquered by Italy in ww2
While they studied the blade and cultivated the dao, the west got strapped
>>64666880Most of the army used literal medieval weapons like swords, bows and halberds, the few nepo manchu units had garbage muskets with 1/3 of the reliable range and even worse reloading time compared to bong weapons.Raw numbers had never won anyone a single war
