Project- Influences of Roman military on modern day riot control

[Densus]

My point throughout this has been that you can't give orders from the front, not only do you have no situational awareness in order to make decisions to give orders but only those immediately next to you will hear you. I have plenty of experience of commanding units by voice from the rear in an environment where the crowd are screaming, bricks are hitting shields, vehicle engines are running, police sirens are going etc etc. The sheer noise in a riot situation makes it impossible to use radios to control units so everything has to be done by voice. Even as a company commander I was much more likely to run over and tell a platoon commander what I wanted his platoon to do rather than try to speak to him on the radio, something I couldn't have done if he had been in the front rank.

Same with standards, if you are more than a couple of files down from the standard in the front rank you are not going to be able to look at it without looking away from the man in front of you who is trying to kill you. When someone is trying to kill or injure you they become your entire world and you are not going to be looking around you.

I will put forward a slightly different example. A little over 20 years ago a small group of Viking reenactors in the UK decided that they wanted something more physical and more competitive than the type of fighting being done at Viking events, more akin to a competitive martial art. They didn't get a lot of interest initially in the UK but they did in Poland. Eastern Style fighting was born and Wolin became the world's number one venue for it.

Those Brits and Poles involved at the beginning had no form of military or police training and as Wolin grew they had to experiment how they would control the battle. Initially they were all in the front rank, these were the guys who wanted a harder, more competitive fight and they believed that commanders at the front was what was indicated by the sources. But as the numbers grew they found it just didn't work, they were completely unaware of what was happening outside their immediate vicinity, they had no form of control and had no influence over how the battle developed. It became pure luck which side won.

So they took themselves out of the front rank and in behind the line and have commanded from there ever since, because it works better. They can see what is going on, understand the overall situation, communicate with each other and those in the fighting line, deploy reserves and plug gaps. The Jomsburg side adopted the system first and remained undefeated until the Slav/Mercenary side adopted the same system a couple of years ago.

In this video you can see Igor, Alban and others controlling the Jomsburg side (on the left as we look at it) from the rear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu2GOGxicc4 From that position in that one battle they; stopped an attempt to penetrate their shield wall, turned their entire shield wall through 90 degrees and deployed reserves to stop an attempt to outflank them.

If you guys are telling me that the sources explicitly say that the Centurions always fought in the front rank then I have no problem believing that. I am just trying to understand why they would have chosen such an ineffective method of using the most experienced commanders they had on the battlefield.