New Unit - What is it?

[Watchman]

I don't think Kugutsu is asking after evidence or if it was done, he's wondering about the why.

Which I do as well at times. For example much later Mughal war elephants might for example carry a well-armoured arquebusieur in the howdah - but the mahout still wore about loinclotch. Given how important the guy was for the continued functioning of the war elephant team it seems very counterintuitive he was left so vulnerable in such an exposed position, and one can only assume there were valid reasons for doing so because pretty much everyone seems to have done it.

Armouring the fighting-crew in the howdah/tower makes perfect sense though. The sides of the structure obviously protect their legs and lower body, but in order to use their weapons - whatever those now happened to be; javelins appear to have been extremely common, even among "archer" peoples, which is another question mark - they'd have to expose their upper bodies, arms and heads to enemy missiles and on occasion probably also sufficiently long spears.

One suspects the elephant-riders were trained specialists and in any case they were both important for the continued effectiveness of the elephant team (since their job included keeping infantry trying to swarm the beast preoccupied) and far as one can tell virtually impossible to replace in battlefield conditions in the case of casualties, ergo minimizing losses among them would come across as solid military thinking. Moreover, given the expenses incurred by a single battle-trained elephant to its owner the cost of providing the fighting crew with decent body armour would obviously be so low in copmarision as to be nigh irrelevant, and any beast large enough to be able to carry both the fighting-platform and its occupants on its back would presumably not even notice the weight added by body armour.