Re: Afghanistani Warfare.

[Gurth <Gurth@xxxxxxxxx>]

According to Jacob E Boucher, on Thu, 13 Sep 2001 the word on the street was...

> And so begins the process (well, shifts into high gear) where armchair
> generals such as ourselves jerk off over our pet warfare theories and
> doctrines...

I wouldn't say I'm doing that... The way I see it, you're being overly
confident in your own abilities (as, IMHO, Americans often are -- that's
not a flame, so please, nobody take it as one...).

> Here's a hint, Gurth.  The US Army of today is *not* the US Army of 1965.
> Because the Lieutenants of the Vietnam war are the Generals of today, and
> they know full well the dangers of a prolonged, unpopular conflict. 

OTOH it's very common for a military to forget the lessons of one war, only
to have to re-learn them the hard way during the next one.

> The army is [...] I certainly hope far more enthusiastic.

See my previous post on this. They may be enthusiastic _now_, but ask them
after a few months in a country like Afghanistan if they still want to go
out and get the enemy, or if they'd rather be somewhere else entirely...

> And, as modern police technology has shown us, using "gizmos" to find
> people on bicycles is actually a *good* idea.  The tech works, if there is
> a will and the skill to use it.

True, provided you can _make_ the tech work for you, and your enemy doesn't
develop some kind of countermeasure to it. Ingenuity is something you
shouldn't underestimate.

> Your arguments are the same naysaying that bombarded the military before
> the Gulf War, fearing that we'd get into "another Vietnam".  Well, the
> ground war lasted about 1/1000th the time as Vietnam did, and was a lot
> more successful. 

May I remind you that that was, to a large degree, because you were
fighting a demoralized army who sat in static positions in some of the
best tank country in the world? Going after the Taliban would mean trying
to go after an extremely well-motivated army in some of the worst fighting
country in the world. This is not a comparison you can make, IMHO.

> I will not claim that US lives won't be lost

There's the problem right there: you are talking about just "US lives"
instead of "large numbers of US lives." We, the western world, want to
fight wars in which nobody dies, especially not on our own side -- as soon
as the coffins start coming home, there'll be an outcry to pull back.

But the opposition in the kind of war you're talking about doesn't care
about losses on their own side, as long as it'll help drive the foreigners
out. 58,000 dead Americans in Vietnam, 50,000 dead Russians in Afghanistan,
against a million or so Vietnamese and I don't know how many Afghans, yet
who withdrew from the war?

> and it wouldn't be a hard fight, but I also wouldn't rely on any negative
> hypothesis formed by how A) America fought in Vietnam or B) how the
> Soviets fought in Afghanistan.  That was then, and this is now.

My view is based mainly on how the _Afghans_ fought in Afghanistan. Even
though they're basically fairly primitive tribesmen, they've managed to
hold off the world's superpowers on more than one occasion (the British
in the 19th century, the Russians in the 20th) so why would a new war be
any different just because it's the high and mighty USA that's involved now?

-- 
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