#phoenicis

I'm going to begin with a label that the hawks would no doubt be immensely offended by, and which the ravens would shrug and accept as fair: but it applies to both of them equally. Phoenicis and Kilvas are scavenger kingdoms.

This becomes obvious when we consider the primary defense strategy of both nations. Neither has what we would consider a conventional army, comparable to the armies of the three beorc nations. Even Gallia has an army along the beorc model, even though it's not very good at following it. A Gallian army can be fought - albeit with difficulty - according to the traditional model of advance, retreat, holding land, seeking a pitched battle, and so on. Not so for either of the bird tribes. Even if they wanted to, neither tribe is equipped to fight a pitched battle or hold territory. The warriors of each tribe carry very little equipment, cannot build or defend fortifications, can't fight in close formation on the ground, and of course are poorly trained for that sort of fighting. If an enemy army closes in, the hawks or ravens will flee. This is important: the hawks and ravens must always refuse pitched battle.

Normally that limitation would be damning. Sun Zi's famous Art of War says: 'Appear at points which the enemy must hasten to defend; march swiftly to places where you are not expected.' (6.5) This is good advice and pretty basic strategy: if you wish to force your enemy to fight you, you must simply attack a point the enemy must defend. Find something the enemy cares about enough to need to defend, and attack it! As long as the loss of an army is less bad than the loss of the thing you threaten, the enemy will commit to defend it. A traditional example of such a point is a capital city. Very few armies will ever refuse to fight in defense of their capital. By following this strategy even extremely mobile enemies can be brought to battle and defeated.

The problem is that this doesn't really work against the bird tribes, because their homes - the isles of Phoenicis and Kilvas themselves - are to be frank, worthless. There are no valuable resources on those islands. The hawks and ravens can abandon them and return at any point. Occupying either island is logistically difficult: they need to be supplied by sea in the face of bird tribe raiders. To cut a long story short, Phoenicis and Kilvas are not worth invading. There is nothing there worth taking. If they really wanted, a Begnion fleet probably could sail up to and conquer either island, but they'd soon be forced to leave. They could never root out the birds completely from the mountainous terrain and there is no profit to be extracted from either island. The attempt would be expensive in both gold and men and ultimately a waste of time.

So: the homes of the bird tribes cannot be attacked. Their only vulnerability is their people. They can be defeated if they sustain heavy casualties as a tribe. However, both tribes are completely mobile. They can flee faster than any potential attacker. Nealuchi comments to Elincia in 2.4: 'No one can hold a candle to the speed at which the raven tribe retreats.' He's not joking, nor is he being self-deprecating. (Well, maybe a little.) It is genuinely something to be proud of. If you want to attack the raven tribe and the ravens don't want you to, you will be foiled at every turn. They can always fly away faster than you can pursue.

(There are a few possible exceptions, which I'll go over here. The Holy Guard. The Senate Dracoknights. The wyvern knights of Daein. And the dragons of Goldoa. All three beorc aerial formations and the dragons can fly and could hypothetically try to chase down the bird tribe. However, all of these exceptions have weaknesses. The dragons are few in number and the birds are far more agile. The birds can simply scatter in all directions and avoid casualties. The beorc formations also lack the numbers. By pursuing the bird tribes too far, they risk being mobbed by larger flocks of birds, which they can't handle. The aerial formations are equipped to defend ships and ground forces, but not to carry the attack to the bird tribes.)

So far we've established that the bird tribes are very good at running away and their homelands can't be attacked. We need to add one last weakness to them before we can consider their strengths, and this weakness is that the bird tribes really aren't equipped to attack prepared enemies either. I simply don't see how a bird tribe army would be able to take a beorc fortress, for instance. They're actually a bit worse off than the Gallians here. On the ground, they are quite hopeless fighters in bird form; and if they try to fight in humanoid form, they are effectively beorc with the added disadvantages of no weapons, no armour, and huge clumsy wings getting in the way. They can fly over an enemy fortified position and drop rocks or other missiles, but that's about the limit of their abilities; and Ashera forbid the enemy should have archers or wind mages! Even just a beorc army in the field is probably too tough a nut for the bird tribes to crack. They are vulnerable to return fire, a prepared beorc formation cannot be effectively attacked, and dropping missiles is a limited tactic at best. Contrary to what computer games might suggest, it's very difficult to make an enemy break only with missile fire, at least with medieval technology. (Even at Agincourt, the classic example, the majority of French soldiers died in melee, not from bowfire. Even the Mongols, the archetypal 'invincible horse archers' relied on their well-trained infantry and heavy melee cavalry to finish off their opponents.)

At last, the strength of the bird tribes, and it's just one word: mobility. Much as no one can hold a candle to the speed at which they flee, neither can anyone hold a candle to the speed at which they advance, raid, or circumvent enemy strong points. They are extremely well-suited to avoid battle and attack only the weak. Indeed, as we see in Path of Radiance, this has been their primary military activity for years, raiding and attacking beorc ships. They attack juicy targets, if they look weak, and back off if resistance is stronger than anticipated or if a beorc aerial formation arrives to drive them away. (See chapters twelve and thirteen of PoR. The ravens flee as soon as the Holy Guard appears.) The bird tribes are pirates, and this works well for them. They avoid any major casualties and they obtain serious profits. Begnion is willing to put up with this for as long as it's cheaper to just accept the losses than consider invading the bird tribes or (more plausibly) attaching military escorts to their merchant ships. Instead, the defense of sea-borne trade is left primarily to mercenaries.

Perhaps it's just me, but I get a sense from the council of laguz kings in chapter fourteen of Path of Radiance that Reyson and Tibarn are aware of and frustrated by the hawk tribe's military limitations. They raid Begnion ships and kill everyone aboard in retribution for Serenes because that's all they can do. Naesala's barb - "Instead of proclaiming that you will attack none but Begnion ships, just admit that you don't have the power to do more!" - is cannily chosen. Phoenicis cannot attack Begnion itself, and that must be galling.

While Kilvas seems entirely at ease with these raids, and indeed is cleverly expanding into the black market and intelligence businesses to increase its power, piracy doesn't fit well with the warrior ideals of Phoenicis. Tibarn is an honourable warrior, isn't he? For a certain value of 'honourable'?

Well... warrior societies throughout history don't actually tend to be all that high-minded about this sort of thing. The Knights of the Round Table are an exception: that's why their mythology is so powerful, because militarily strong leaders should act like that but in practice we all know that they don't. It's not unusual or surprising for a dedicated warrior culture to always prefer to attack the weak. A Viking comparison should spring easily to mind. Even the Spartans attacked and enslaved the weak; and never attacked the strong unless they had any other choice. True warrior societies tend to be bully societies, so it's not surprising that Phoenicis is also such a society. Its survival depends on its ability to raid weak Begnion ships.