Quote:
|
Originally Posted by fearn
Hi Kriss,
4) As others have pointed out, armor is hot, and this matters in the tropics. Given how fast things rot in hot, humid conditions, I suspect that keeping a complex piece of armor in good working condition (with non-rotting padding underneath) might be more trouble than it's worth. I don't think it's an accident that most Indonesian swords are sheathed in wood, not leather, and one can only speculate on the pleasures of keeping leather straps or leather-based armor in any sort of shape under tropical conditions.
5) There are many types of war, and heavy armor works best in pitched battles. If the main form of warfare is raiding through thick jungle, then armor would be a positive disadvantage. It makes noises, blocks your senses, and slows you down. Draeger's book on Indonesian fighting arts talks a bit about the types of battles fought, and there's a lot more about raiding than there is about European style battles, as I recall.
|
I put my money mostly on these two, at least as far as continental SEA is concerned. The largest killer in the Burmese campaigns into Thailand (and a large factor for the English during the Anglo-Burmese wars) was heat and disease. Moving long distances in armor just was not healthy. Throw in the rust and rot factor and it might not have been worth the investment. Even the dry season was pretty wet, and not infrequently a siege lasted into the wet season, or a retreat happened during the wet season. With regard to 5), there were two principle tactics in SEA warfare (let me exclude what the Khmer did back in the day, because I don't have info on this): fast strikes, and seiges. Pitched/set battles were avoided, and even when there were such battles, such as attempts to relieve or break a seige, the main tactic was speed and manuverability, not heavy infantry tactics. None of this particularly favors, or requires, much in the way of armor.
Here is another thought. To the extent SEA groups picked up the idea of armor from Europeans, such as the Portuguese and Dutch, this would have been less likely on the continent because contact with Europeans came much later, and was not so much in the nature of conflict as it was in islandic SEA. Prolonged contact wasn't established until the mid to late 17th century, pretty much, and the links were commercial. In the late 17th cen there were a few mix-ups with the Portugese, a couple isolated encounters with the British and French in the 18th, all of which were really naval conflicts that lead to some land action, and of course the Anglo-Burmese wars in the 19th century. By then, armor had fallen out of use in Europe, so what you see is the assimilation of musket and cannon technlogy and tactics.