by Keith Morrison ©2011 Keith Morrison

   To continue the recent columns of warfare and fighting, I’m going to start off by making a statement that no doubt will have some of the people reading this (given where it is published) up in arms, but has to be stated nonetheless in order to get to my main point.
   Humans are special.
   Now there’s obviously some anthropocentric bias in that statement given that I—and everyone reading this that I’m aware of—happen to be a member of the genus Homo, but I’ll make the argument regardless because it’s relevant to the subject of physiology and why, before you can describe how your characters are going to fight, you need to consider how they’re built. The problem is when the author has clearly non-human characters, with non-human physiologies, conducting combat and warfare exactly the same way humans would. The main cause of this, I believe, is that the authors are human, so they don’t consider what, for them, is a trivial thing, is unique to their species, and is something no other animal on the planet can do nearly as well, if at all.
   And I’m not necessarily talking about our intelligence, either, but our purely physical abilities. We humans are remarkably unique animals.
   Let’s start with a simple exercise. Take a balled-up piece of paper—or anything at all, really—and toss it toward a garbage can or other target. Unless you have really poor hand-eye coordination, the odds are you’ll hit it on the first try, or at least come reasonably close. Nothing else on this planet can do that. The ability to throw with a combination of accuracy and power, and to do so from almost any position in almost any direction, is a purely human ability. Not even our closest relatives can do it! Apes, monkeys and chimps can certainly toss things, but the best they can do is get it moving in the right general direction, and if you watch them throw you’d note that they do so with the skill level we’d ascribe to human infants. Actually hitting something would be pure dumb luck.
   There’s two things going on there: The first is that our physiology, unlike that of any other animal in this planet’s history (save our own immediate ancestors), gives us the ability to do that. We have unmatched manipulative skills in our hands, mobile shoulders, and even big butts: for a hard throw, the entire body gets into it and the size and shape of our hip and upper leg muscles provide a critical component. The second is that we have an outstanding ability to instinctively calculate trajectories and automatically take that into account when launching our projectile at a target. So not only can we hit a target, we can hit a moving target, aiming and timing our throw so we’re throwing not where something is but where it will be. Obviously, the more practice the better, but it’s practicing and exercising an innate skill we already possess. As well, that means we’re good at catching things, because we can see a moving object and unconsciously calculate an intercept path, and also at dodging them to avoid an interception. We’re so good at this sort of thing that we don’t even need our hands and arms to do it, as anyone who has seen a professional soccer (football) game can attest.
   But because this is simply so ordinary to the vast majority of us, we don’t think about it. A game of dodgeball, or even a basic snowball fight, is a truly remarkable display of physical capabilities. If you take a look at many of our most sports and games, that capacity is actually astounding. Soccer, football, hockey, basketball, golf, baseball, curling, billiards, even marbles and drinking games like caps demand a level of coordination and skill that is utterly beyond what any other species on this planet can do.
   Second example: Humans have phenomenal endurance. It might not seem so to a modern couch-potato society, but humans are the animal kingdom’s equivalent of the Terminator—we just keep going and we don’t stop until the target is dead. This is called ‘cursorial hunting’; you see the antelope and you just keep chasing it until it drops from exhaustion. The antelope may be faster over the short term, but humans just keep jogging and walking after it until it physically can’t take another step and is easily overcome. In a more military context, infantry can march cavalry into the ground over a sufficient period of time, provided the cavalry doesn’t have enough remounts to give their horses rest on the move.
   Third example: Humans are the quintessential generalists, remarkably flexible in what we can do and where we can do it. While there are unquestionably animals that do better in a given environment than humans, no animal has the ability to do better than humans in all the environments and situations we function in. A chimp and an orang-utan can certainly climb trees much better than we can, but when they face a river, they’re not going to be swimming across casually (if at all), and a long stroll across open ground isn’t something they’d do very easily. A horse might outrun us, but it won’t be climbing a tree to catch us or get away from us, and so on and so forth.
   I bring all this up because our intrinsic physical capabilities are the fundamental basis of how we’ve learned how to fight and how we go to war, and if you have another creature with different physical abilities and evolution, by necessity they’re going to do things differently. This means that you simply can’t take your horse-mounted knights, replace them with centaurs, and have everything else be exactly the same.
   Let’s assume, for instance, that your characters are evolved from an ambush-sprint predator like one of the big cats. The ancestors of such characters will have been creatures that stalked their prey and did a burst run to take them down. Over time they developed tools like blades to supplement claws and teeth, but they hunted pretty much the same way; sneak in slowly, close fast, and take down the prey with an overwhelming assault. What does that mean? Well, for one, they’re unlikely to have endurance. Great sprinters, lousy marathon runners. That’s going to have effects on their society; your stereotypical inns and villages won’t be that far apart, because they just can’t cover that great a distance at any one time.
   Because of the way they hunted, it’s quite possible that they don’t have the instinctive human ‘feel’ for projectiles either. Even after they evolve into bipeds, their ability to throw might not be as great, and their hunting tactics make missile weapons unnecessary in any case. Pikes and swords, that they can do. Throwing spears and slings and arrows might be something they simply can’t handle very well, and it might take until the advent of gunpowder before they had projectile weapons they could get their heads around. And forget about things like grenades, which would be just too damn dangerous to consider. Their primary tactical goal would be to sneak into position and then close fast, get within arm’s length as soon as possible, because that’s what weapons they’ve got.
   Now take a gander at your classical centaur. We’ll assume that their human-type torso grants them human-type throwing capabilities, so that’s a wash. We’ll even give the centaurs greater-than-human speed and endurance over flat ground. Greater size and strength, so they can wield bigger weapons with longer ranges. Sounds great, right?
   Right! Until you ask them to climb a tree… or sail a ship…
   Centaurs will not want to fight in rough terrain. They’ll loathe forests. They’re not going to be scaling any battlements, mining under the enemy walls, or ascending the masts to adjust the sails before battle. Their fortifications won’t be multi-story keeps, nor will they have high walls. Why? Because they can’t use ladders, and any kind of steps or ramping would by necessity be much more space-consuming than something those ‘weak’ humans could use to reach the same elevation. Creeks with steep banks that would be a minor nuisance to a bipedal infantry army on the march, will be damn near impassable barriers for centaurs without some creative engineering. Compared to humans, your centaur military is going to be very much concerned with choke points like fords and passes, and they’ll be more reliant on infrastructure to deal with them.
   ‘Special operations’ might be something centaurs don’t even consider, simply because they don’t have the physical flexibility humans have. Swim quietly across a river to a fortress, scale the wall, sneak around the interior to scout it out, then climb back out to report? No problem for us walking, throwing, swimming primates. For someone with a horse for a butt? Not so much.
   And, as I said, don’t even think about naval operations. Let alone flying.
   So, let’s consider two hypothetical armies, felinoids and centaurs. We’ll give them both the same technology level, say pre-gunpowder; competent commanders, aware of the weaknesses and strengths of both sides; and put them at odds. What could we expect?
   Well, the centaurs are going to want to operate in open terrain. They’ll know they have an advantage in projectile weaponry, and while they might be equal in sprinting they have the edge in endurance. They know the ‘catboys’ can operate in a greater range of environments, thanks to their bipedalism, so the centaurs will try to avoid situations where that advantage can assert itself. There’s also a problem due to centaur anatomy: they’ve got that long horse body that’s vulnerable from the sides if they have to try and manoeuvre, whereas the felinoid bipeds are certainly more agile. If they get close enough for sword, they’re going to want to do so where their personal flanks are very much protected.
   Ideally, then, the battle the centaurs want is one where they can face the enemy as cavalry: Nice, open terrain where they can mount horse-archer attacks, firing from outside the cats’ sprint ranges, drawing them open and, if necessary, hammering home as a solid wall of steel.
   On the other side, the felinoids know that fighting the ‘horseys’ in open ground in a face-to-face clash is insane—the centaur superiority in projectile weapons alone guarantees that. The felinoids need close-range fighting where they can strike at the enemy’s (literal) flanks, where they can attain local numerical superiority on separated units or individuals, allowing their greater manoeuvrability and tactical flexibility to come into play, in a situation where the advantage in projectile weaponry and open-ground endurance isn’t applicable.
   If this sounds familiar, well, as stated, the centaurs are cavalry, and will fight that way. The felinoids are going to be guerrillas and fight that way. Their physiologies are going to play a role in how they fight each other.
   At this point, someone may argue that I’m making all sorts of assumptions about their physical capabilities. That’s the point: I am. And those assumptions lead to certain probable outcomes in how these races fight. It doesn’t matter if my assumptions are different from yours; any assumptions will have consequences of some kind, so your assumptions will have consequences that you should consider, especially if those assumptions make your characters significantly different from humans in physiology, let alone psychology. To be perfectly blunt, if you have a non-human character and they’re not thinking and doing things in a non-human manner, all you’ve done is take a human and put them in a furry or feathery suit. And then what’s the point about writing about them instead of a regular human in the same situation?