🚀 go-pugleaf

John M Atkinson (jatkinso@ANTISPAMgmu.edu) wrote:
: %Time broke the US resolve.  Any war, dragged on for an indefinite period
: %of time, with no definable goals, and a limited subset of actionable
: %fronts that don't effect an enemies supply lines and moral resolve will be
: %lost.  War is not about taking land, its about crushing your enemies will
: %to fight.  If you take his will, you've won the war.

: Depends on which historian you listen too.  Most will pinpoint the first few
: months of 1968 as the point where US resolve was broken, but it's such an
: arguable point.

Nevertheless, it was lack of resolve, lack of a clearly defined objective
that lost that war, brought on by partisian warfare and PC bombings.  But
then again, there was so much more to that complicated conflict - still to
say that the Vietnam war was lost because the PAVN had tanks is laughable.
IF you recall, the PAVN gots its forces soundly defeated all over Vietname
turn Tet.  They lost the battles - the conventional battles, but they won
the war because they broke our will to fight.


: %supposition that the deciding efforts the war were caused by the radical
: %under current fin the colonies at the time (read the radical partisians
: %running around killing anyone and everyone that was Pro-British).

: Not really-they tied down a lot of resources, but if you look at, for instance,
: the campaign in the South, you see that not much got done until they had a
: continengt of Regulars, and a commander who knew how to use the Regulars and
: local militia in combination.

You should know, as a soldier, that even the smallest effort of force if
it draws away a larger force is effective in winning the battle.  Thats
the entire premise behind resisting when captured, it takes far more
people to keep you captive if your not cooperating than if you were just
passive and playing by the rules.  All those folks keeping you from
getting out *aren't* fighting the war - and might as well not even be in
the war.

Wars are not won with simple firepower or force of arms.B

: %: Not an insurgency.  A PR campaign. 
: %
: %I'd call throwing the British out of India an insurgency, but I will
: %conceed that that PR played a huge role in Mr. Ghandis succesful route of
: %the British.

: You have to kill someone to have an insurgency.  Otherwise it's simply political
: action.  

Uh... if you recall they *did* kill people - Police officers during a few 
protests that got way out of hand. And Ghandi went on a hunger strike to
stop it, got the strike ended as a result, got arrested, went to jail -
got out... and so on.  

M. Shinn