http://sweetness-light.com/archive/afghan-troops-enter-taliban-town

SGT Dave
“If you shoot too soon, it’s a meeting engagement; be patient and it becomes an ambush.” – Wise old SGM

it is actually possible that they did cave and this is simply people making the best out of a good situation. Even in a military hierarchy, the left hand sometimes don’t know what the right hand is doing.

The yo yo effect of abandoning cities and areas is that the people start learning not to trust you simply in order to survive once you are gone. Like all tactics, it is only useful up to a point of reptition, then the law of diminishing returns occur. As a technique, it is very hard on the civilians and local potential allies in the abandoned regions, and thus is not a tactic you want to be using to sustain your overall strategy.

The general principle behind why such tactics, as Dave described, is effective is because decisive battles decide wars. Indecisive battles do not decide wars because people on both sides still have most of their war assets. Only extreme circumstances would motivate any one side to surrender when they still have something left to fight with. A decisive battle pits the entirety of each side’s resources into one fight, with the loser losing most or all of his assets. This forces defeat immediately or at least very soon.

Tet was decisively concluded in favor of the Americans and the South Vietnamese. The war was won by the NOrth Vietnamese, however, because Tet was seen as a decisive defeat for the US. Even if your tactics are effective for a particular decisive battle, like Hannibal’s was, you must still subordinate tactics to strategy and strategy to logistics.

Are you saying that it’s possible that the British didn’t cave months ago when they vacated the area?

Fallujah 1 is the propto-typical example of politicians caving and putting the mess on the military to solve. Which the military did solve in Fallujah 2.

It makes sense, since I know that it’s very difficult for conventional forces to do a clean sweep of loosely affiliated terrorists.

Generally, it is a good idea to expect that the high command of the various military hierarchies around don’t know what they are doing. The farther away the leadership is from the site of conflict, the less realistic their picture of the conflict will be. In some instances, this kind of perspective is necessary for the “big picture”, but that doesn’t constitute the majority of such cases.

In point of fact, it would actually be very hard to create a Fallujah on purpose because then it would be leaked if the entire chain of command was on the same page. Somebody would leak it since the chances of any secret getting out doubles with each new person that knows of it.

Fallujah 2 was the way it was because it was “unintentional”. Thus the terrorists put most of their eggs in one basket because they knew the US was in doubt about how to deal with Fallujah. Faking this kind of weakness would be an information operation that the US is notoriously not very good at in the 21st century.

You would almost have to keep such things separate from the people at Washington DC, and hence the reporters in DC.

As an intentional action that leaves a weakness so that the enemy exploits it and you therefore ambush them in turn, you would also need to inform the locals about your operations so that they can prepare. Again, more chances for leakage. If you don’t inform the locals, then they will be just as surpirsed by the terrorists as the terrorists will be surprised when you finally attack them.

Terrorists are always plentiful. It is the local auxiliaries that are valuable. Any operation that requires sacrificing some of the locals becomes inevitably bad strategy.

Such cold blooded decisions are made by combat commanders all the time, concerning which troops will be the ones doing the dying in any particular situation. However, an operation large enough to group together a large portion of the enemy’s assets goes far beyond the tactical decisions made by on site commanders.

Disinformation operations are always a more cost effective means of deceiving the enemy than offering the enemy up actual allied assets as a gambit. I doubt both that the British and American high commands have the fortitude to make such cold blooded analysis in addition to being unable to purposefully construct deception ops on a regional theater scale.

The operation being discussed in the post, seems to be one that was limited by logistics and intelligence. You want to have all your forces ready to attack and the targets already assessed before you move. That, however, takes time. Time the enemy may take to fortify themselves. Which would result in a decisive battle if you push the assault through as the attacker.

There are a lot of ways to make use of the principle of seeking decisive battles. Most of them are simply unintentional occurences that competent people then take advantage of. Instead of trying to control chaos by planning everything out, you just take advantage of new things.

That is why I don’t tend to favor any intentional strategic move to create a weakness through pulling military presences out in order to create a vacuum. You are likely to outsmart yourself with such.

I do like decisive battles and deceiving the enemy, though. Which is why I prefered the SF method used in Afghanistan to the armored column push used in OIF 2003.

Try to look weak, certainly. Then the enemy will attack and you can destroy them. Terrorists won’t attack a force they know to be strong and well supplied, for example. That is why they prefer children and civilians.

Q-ships used for anti-piracy also used the same principle of appearing weak in order to close decisvely with the enemy. None of such things actually created a real weakness on purpose.

That’d be like Bush letting 9/11 occur in order to get the support against Al Qaeda. Or Churchill not preparing a city’s defenders because the Enigma code showed an attack against Coventry.

It is not just ethically questionable, but it is also bad strategy. There are always better ways to win, if people are good enough.

SGT Dave
“You really don’t want to know where THAT inspiration came from…”