And, it's alot harder to hide from a sniper team than an aircraft.
Let me be more specific. Replacing a leader with a
competant leader is sometimes easiser said than done. Of course someone is going to step up, but when you take out leader, after leader, after leader morale will suffer among the enemy ranks. Morale is also a combat multiplier. Therefore, when you create an environment where not even the senior leadership is safe from enemy fire, you have denied the enemy of one of his important combat multipliers.
These tactics aren't, "practically impossible", and I'm not just pulling all of this out of my ass. It's been proven time and time again on the battlefield. The Confederate Army is a perfect example of how attrition among an army's officer corps can have an adverse effect on the army's performance on the battlefield.
Once again, good in theory. And how exactly do you tell who is the enemy, when one moment, they pop a few rounds, the next, they are "running in terror" from the big bad US troops. Thats the problem. If we could notably distinguish the enemy from the civilians, there would be no problem. Iraq and Afghanistan would have been won, and everything would be as close to being back to normal in that region as possible. But, we
can't tell who is the bad guy and who isn't.
It's not a theory. It's been proven to work thousands of times over the centuries, or at least since firearms were introduced into warfare. An unconventional enemy isn't, as you say, "impossible", to defeat. Historically, unconventional forces have proved that they can't sustain effective offensive operations, without the support and combined efforts of a conventional force. Unconventional forces/assymetrical forces are only economy of force. That's it. They do have the advantage of blending in with the local population, because they don not wear distinctive uniform items. However, at some point, for them to be effective, they must come out in the open, with their personal weapons and engage friendly forces. They have to move from one place to another, carrying their weapons. scout/sniper teams are primary employment to deploy on this type of battlefield. It's not hard to spot the enemy. He's the one with the rifle. And, yes, it will be more time consuming than a conventional war might be, but it's not impossible to defeat an enemy of this kind. We've already done it once, to a better trained, more motivated and better supplied enemy.
That's why you imploy tactics and SOP's that take away the effectiveness of the enemy's tactics. It's called, "adapting to the environment", and American soldiers do it better than any soldier in the world.
Don't be fooled by the spin you've been taught. Guerilla fighters have to practice the same principles that any other infantryman does. They have to initiate and break contact just like any other infantry unit and the lack of uniforms isn't going to give them any kind of advantage.
Weapons have to smuggled in large enough numbers to do some good. Carrying one weapon through at a time isn't going to have any kind of positive effect on the enemy's war effort.
Did you notice that you said that in the past tense?
You're wrong. You don't have to kill everyone in the country to take aways a unit's will to fight. If that were the case, there would be several million armed fighters in Afghanistan than just a few thousand. I think you're under the impression that
everyone in the country is a part of the Taliban, which is far from the truth.
