The Winged Husaria: a model for competitive success

The former logo was the outline of the wooden-framed wing that was worn (singly or in pairs) by the husaria, the elite armored cavalry of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. (The problem was that few people recognized it as such; many took it for a Native American headdress.) They were the seventeenth century's equivalent of tanks and they were used pretty much the same way: to defeat the enemy through superior mobility and shock battle. They were apparently the sole exception to the rule that cavalry cannot defeat infantry that stands its ground; three thousand husaria under Chodkiewicz routed five times their number of Swedish musketeers and pikemen at Kircholm in 1605.*

Levinson Productivity Systems actually gets a lot of ideas from military history, noting that armies developed many techniques that later found their way into civilian use. Error-proofing of communications may have originated in armies, noting that communication errors can easily get people killed during wartime; Lord Cardigan's seemingly-insane charge at Balaclava, for example, resulted from a misunderstanding over which guns were to be charged. Frank Gilbreth cited military drills, with their emphasis on ease and rapidity of motion, as an inspiration for his own work in motion efficiency. The tactics and equipment of the Polish husaria have similar implications for modern competitive thinking:

Speed kills competitors. Shorter cycle times, make-to-order instead of make-to-stock, and just-in-time delivery allow a company to become a preferred supplier and win market share. We want our competitor to paraphrase Custer's last words at the Little Big Horn: "Where did all the Indians come from?"

Speed was a paramount element of Russian field marshal Aleksandr V. Suvorov's military doctrine: "The enemy doesn't expect us, reckons us 100 versts away, and if a long way off to begin with, 200, 300 or more– suddenly we're on him, like snow on the head; his head spins. Attack with what comes up, with what God sends; the cavalry to begin, smash, strike, cut off, don't let slip, hurra!" Suvorov may well have been the greatest military commander who ever lived, and he won sixty-three battles while losing none but...
...as described in Henryk Sienkiewicz's The Deluge, however, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was using this doctrine more than a hundred years earlier. Stefan Czarniecki (Tcharnyetzki) force-marched a large body of cavalry to attack the Margrave of Baden, an ally of Sweden. As Sienkiewicz described the engagement, the Margrave did not even know that the Poles were anywhere near him until they actually attacked his army. To paraphrase the hapless Custer, "Where did all the Poles come from?"

Czarniecki also showed innovative thinking by doing the supposedly-impossible, i.e. swimming his cavalry across the Pilitza River to strike the enemy from an unexpected direction.

Although Czarniecki left his infantry and cannon behind because these could not move as quickly as cavalry, the Poles also developed mobile horse artillery more than a hundred years before Frederick the Great recognized its merits. The Poles were the only members of the army that relieved Vienna (1683) who got their artillery into action against the Turks. The heavy guns of the other countries' contingents had no effect whatsoever because they were not fast enough to get into position to fire. The same concept applies, of course, to modern business systems and production equipment.

"The only Christian general they [the Turks] held in awe was Jan Sobieski, the King of Poland. But he, Kara Mustafa believed, was hundreds of miles away in Krakow" (Adam Zamoyski, The Polish Way, pp. 1-2). On 12 September 1683, the Turks were doubtlessly asking "Where did all the Poles come from?" while their Crimean allies chose discretion over valor the moment they saw the husaria emerge from the Vienna Woods.

Achievement of this kind of speed requires training, the kind of training that we now recognize as a key element of worker empowerment. Many cavalry charges were delivered at a trot or perhaps a canter because the riders could not maintain a formation at higher speeds. The husaria's ability to hold a knee-to-knee formation at a full gallop doubtlessly had to do something with the fact that boys of the Polish gentry practically grew up in the saddle.

Per Zamoyski, 16th-century Polish infantry could fire ten times as rapidly as Spanish infantry. Another way of putting this is that each Polish soldier was ten times as productive as his Spanish counterpart. It's very doubtful that the Poles had superior muskets (matchlock arquebuses in that era) so it probably involved superior motion efficiency. Also, Polish regiments had only one pike for every eight men, while most European regiments needed far more pikemen to keep the enemy cavalry off the musketeers. The Poles' overwhelming superiority in cavalry assured that enemy riders would never get anywhere near the infantry.

The book does not, unfortunately, describe how the Poles achieved this enormous firepower. A book on 18th-century British tactics, however, provides a possible answer. Instead of firing by ranks--a practice that would, in the matchlock era, have required the soldiers to march to the formation's rear to reload--three ranks of Redcoats would "lock," or close up tightly, so that all three could fire simultaneously. Then the men took one step back into looser order so they could reload. Firing was done by platoons so a battalion or regiment would always have fire in reserve to deal with a rush by the enemy. It is conceivable that the Poles used a similar procedure.

Suvorov's infantry would later maneuver in formation at speeds up to four miles an hour, again because of thorough training that enabled the men to stay in orderly ranks while moving so quickly. Motion pictures often depict formations of soldiers taking almost baby steps (the Mexicans in the Alamo movie starring John Wayne are an example). The movie extras' limited training actually compels them to march exactly like many real 18th and 19th century soldiers who were recruited for a shilling a day (or its equivalent) and given only rudimentary drill. Suvorov's infantry could of course run rings around such opponents.

Ergonomics also delivers speed and other competitive advantages. The Poles used saddles of Eastern design, which were far more comfortable for the horses. Polish cavalry could, according to Zamoyski, travel 120 kilometers (more than 70 miles) a day without killing the horses. The sabre (szabla) also was designed with ergonomics in mind. "It was the curved Eastern sabre, modified by the Hungarians and further adapted by the Poles in the sixteenth century until it reached a combination of length, weight and curve which gave it a uniquely high ratio of cutting power to effort expended" (Zamoyski, The Polish Way, p. 155).

Lean thinking: if it doesn't add value, it's waste. The kopia, a lance that could outreach infantry pikes, had a hollow cross-section that made it light without sacrificing much strength. Most of a cylinder's strength comes from its circumference. The material in the center adds mostly weight (waste, muda) but little value (structural strength).

Radoslaw Sikora's page at http://radoslaw_sikora.webpark.pl/WitrynaHtml/tekst/armors.html shows lean thinking and ergonomics in the design of hussar armor:

The armor of medieval knights was not capable of stopping gunfire (at least not consistently) because the metal plates necessary to do so would have been prohibitively thick. The Poles understood the concept (expressed later by Frederick the Great) that "he who tries to protect everything protects nothing." The hussar breastplate was accordingly quite thick (5 to 10 millimeters) which protected the hussar's chest and abdomen from most forms of gunfire. Although the limbs were largely unprotected, the chest is the obvious aiming point and it is perhaps the easiest target to hit. A winged hussar's armor weighed only 30 to 45 pounds, probably less than a modern infantryman's backpack.
The waist of the hussar cuirass was segmented (like the Roman lorica segmentata or segmented breastplate) to make it very easy for the soldier to move his body in the saddle: an example of "human factors" engineering!

Recall the previously-mentioned scarcity of pikemen in Polish infantry regiments. A pikeman who is standing around waiting to defend musketeers from enemy cavalry is not adding any value (shots fired at the enemy). He has to be there, sort of like a quality inspector at the end of a production line whose function is to keep defects from reaching the customer, only because of some deficiency in the system (e.g. the one that allows defects to be produced in the first place).
The invention of the bayonet (sometimes attributed to the French engineer Sebastian Vauban) made each musketeer his own pikeman, thus eliminating waste (non-shooters) from infantry units.

Teamwork and Organization: the husaria charged in knee-to-knee formations, so the entire front line of a Banner (squadron) struck the enemy as a single entity. Then the Banner's second line did the same thing to any survivors. The irresistible shock was quite capable (per Nobel Laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz) of overrunning ten ranks of enemy soldiers. Achievement of such victories obviously required an organization whose members were trained to work as a team.

Riding a horse is an excellent lesson in management. Horse and rider form an organizational unit and anything that prevents one from fulfilling his role in this relationship defeats both. The manager (rider) must convey confidence and determination to the workforce (horse) to achieve results. A horse can sense when the rider is not confident about going over a fence, and the horse will stop short or go around the obstacle. A workforce can similarly sense when management treats lean manufacturing or total quality management (TQM) as a "program of the month" as opposed to something that "has to happen if we're going to survive and prosper."
Rudyard Kipling's The Rout of the White Hussars describes how something that frightened the riders (a dead man on a horse) caused the entire unit to flee in terror. An opponent can also defeat cavalry by frightening the horses. Camels were used for this purpose in ancient times and the husaria used their wings, along with cloaks of leopard, tiger, and wolf fur, to terrify enemy mounts that were unfamiliar with them.