More powerful military in the 1860s: CSA vs. Great Britain

More powerful in the 1860s?

  • CSA

    Votes: 7 3.6%
  • British Empire

    Votes: 189 96.4%

  • Total voters
    196
Is this even a question?
Britain hands down. They were the reigning Global Superpower while the CSA was a barely functional mess of idiots who only managed to survive as long as they did because they had a couple of moderately talented generals fighting an army riddled with incompetence.
 
Is this even a contest? The British didn't have a huge amount of peacetime soldiers on hand (I think it was 50,000 to travel around the empire at any time), but had a much larger, far superior industrial capacity and military infrastructure and it could fill its ranks if needed.
 
Obviously the naval side is unquestionably Britain, but I think OP was perhaps thinking of the pre-Crimea British army, which had an establishment of 130,000 and almost no reserves. By the early 1860s, looking just at the UK and not the empire, the army has an establishment of closer to 220,000; the militia, refounded more or less from scratch in 1852, brought more than 95,000 men to a minimum of 21 days training in 1863; the volunteers have an enrolled strength of 162,935, and the yeomanry have around 15,000 men. These forces are armed with weapons that Confederate soldiers fought to get their hands on, like the P53/P60 Enfield, or probably didn't know existed, like the Armstrong 12pdr.

Looking beyond the material aspects, the British regular army is a long service force (standard enlistment term of 10 years with the option to re-enlist for another 11; most did); the effect of having experienced NCOs rather than having to build from scratch should not be understated. I think we also underestimate the effect that Crimean and Indian service had on the quality of both the senior leadership and the battalion-level officer corps: British officers who purchased their commissions weren't inherently any less competent than Confederate officers who were promoted through political influence or election. We also play down the fact that the British army had a significant programme of musketry training, which there wasn't time, experience or money for during the American Civil War.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
For doing what?

And when?

Otherwise, it is like asking if the Roman Empire was more powerful than Arminius' Germans, or the Afghans in the 1840s... Or the "free world" and the North Koreans in the 1950s and/or the North Vietnamese in the 1960s.

Or the British Empire and the Viceroyalty of La Plata in 1806-07.

The answer is "yes, but..."

Best,
 

jahenders

Banned
Britian is clearly far more powerful. If they were inclined to fight, Britian would quickly blockade CSA, then capture most major coastal cities, then maybe do some river naval action to capture a few key river points. They could quickly impede all CSA imports and much of their production and seize several of their largest cities.

That being said, however, they would NOT be inclined to send land forces anywhere beyond the CSA coast (and maybe a few nearby river cities). Raising, transporting, and supplying the 50-100K troops necessary to contend with a CSA army in-land is not something they could easily do without denuding their forces elsewhere.
 
The British military was never that impressive vis a vis their power as a state, but they where entirely capable of beating the CSA.
 
This is really funny, especially in the disparity of voting. It's like asking "Who's a bigger military power in 2014, the USA or Belgium?"
 
This is really funny, especially in the disparity of voting. It's like asking "Who's a bigger military power in 2014, the USA or Belgium?"

Belgium isn't a growingly failing state, so it should be something along the lines of : who's a bigger military power in 2014 : the USA or Egypt?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
I guess if you dropped the entire British Army and the entire Confederate Army (ca. 1863) onto some magical plain where they had to fight each other, the Confederates would probably win. But in the real world, to say the Britain was massively more powerful than the Confederacy is simply a concession to the obvious.
 
I guess if you dropped the entire British Army and the entire Confederate Army (ca. 1863) onto some magical plain where they had to fight each other, the Confederates would probably win. But in the real world, to say the Britain was massively more powerful than the Confederacy is simply a concession to the obvious.

Even that's a statement riddled with asterisks. Because really to compare this even on the most simplistic way you need to compare naval power to and various other things.
 
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