Close order formation
infantry tactical formation
A close order formation is a military tactical formation in which soldiers are close together and regularly arranged for the tactical concentration of force. It was used by heavy infantry in ancient warfare, as the basis for shield wall and phalanx tactics, to multiply their effective weight of arms by their weight of numbers. In the Late Middle Ages, Swiss pikemen and German Landsknechts used close order formations that were similar to ancient phalanxes.
Around the American Civil War (1861–1865), such organizations of soldiers became uncommon since improvements in firearms and artillery had made any such dense formation increasingly hazardous and less effective. The technological concentration of increased firepower to fewer soldiers had rendered the close order formation obsolete by the end of the 19th century. Modern infantry now use skirmish order, which is effectively the opposite of close order.
Antiquity
Images from the Sumerian kingdom from the 3rd millennium BC clearly show men with spears in close order formation. That tradition continued in the ancient world with the phalanx formation of the Greeks and later the Ancient Macedonians. The Greek phalanx fought with the aspis, a large round bronze faced shield and a large spear. The frontage per man was the width of the shield (about 3 ft), and the normal formation depth was four to eight men.
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This entry incorporates text from “Close order formation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.