From: fiddler@concertina.Eng.Sun.COM (steve hix)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: Registering "Assault Keys"
Date: 18 Nov 1992 20:20:51 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca.
NNTP-Posting-Host: concertina

In article <1ecb0eINNsgf@CATHY.NA.CS.YALE.EDU> yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin) writes:
>andy@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman) writes:
>>Tanks aren't useful to govts in a revolution because the revolutionaries
>>don't have fixed positions.  Since tanks are only useful for attacking
>>fixed positions or other tanks, tanks don't help the govt.
>
>Is this tired collection of homilies all you have to offer?  

Well...does it help that he's right?

>Just try
>telling someone who has been shelled point blank while running away that
>tanks are only useful for attacking fixed positions.  

It's sure hard for the guy getting shelled...but guerilla/irregular forces
tend to have little in the way fixed assets that they *have* to protect,
and so they aren't going to often want to try to stand up and slug it out
with armor.

There just aren't *enough* armor assets available to deal with a diffuse
opponent like that.  (At any given point, the armor might reign supreme,
but if there are too many point to cover...)

>And try telling the
>Marines who fought in the tunnels of Cu Chi -- such a vast network that it
>was never fully explored -- that guerrillas do not have fixed positions.

The tunnels at Cu Chi (and like installations) are most definitely the
exception.  If that weren't the case, Viet Nam would have been a much
different story...with fixed positions vulnerable to attack.

>They will laugh at you.

>There is nothing too much to argue about here.  We basically agree that the
>outcome of a guerrilla war does not hinge on who has the most tanks and
>airplanes.  It is only your exaggerations of this, like saying tanks are
>never useful, to which I am objecting.

He didn't say that they weren't useful, only that they weren't critical
to a governments success.  (You use the tool that is right for a given
task...hammers aren't *always* the tool of choice, and tanks aren't a magic
bullet.  You over-estimate their importance in some types of warfare.)

>I can't.  How is killing garbagemen going to further the aims of the
>revolution?  

Well...if the weather is hot enough?

Off-duty policemen, mayors, city councilmen, etc. would be much more
likely targets, and as vulnerable as your sanitation engineers.

>Cutting electric power lines would be a bit more productive,
>but to produce a change in government, the revolution would have to do more
>than just terrorize people.

You need to review your Guerrilla warfare manuals.  What do you think is
the main tool of beginning (especially successful) guerrilla movements.
(I could probably find a number of vietnamese who lived through the early
sixties and had direct and indriect contact with the sharp end of the VC.)

>>One can win without standing off anyone.  (Note that the VietCong LOST
>>every open battle they got into, including the Tet Offensive, yet they
>>still won.)
>
>You seem to believe in the myth of the revolutionary who appears out of
>nowhere, strikes, then vanishes without trace.  This is an myth to which the
>Vietnam war gave a great deal of publicity.  However it is still a myth, or
>at most an exaggeration.  In Vietnam we often found the enemy's base camps.

And how effective destroying those base camps was!  Norm!!  Pay attention
to what you're saying.

>Guerrilla tactics minimize these sorts of permanent structures, but cannot
>eliminate the need for them.  Thus the strategy of seeking out and
>destroying your enemy is not rendered impossible by guerrilla tactics; it
>merely becomes harder.  Every time a guerrilla band strikes, it takes a
>certain risk of being caught---or identified and placed under scrutiny, so
>that more can be caught.

These are well-known risks of guerrilla warfare, and ways of dealing with
these problems are also well know.

Look at Malaya (where the guerrilla movement failed) and see how differently
things might have turned out if

	1. The revolutionary movement were not almost completely ethnic
	   chinese, rather than mostly malay (the guerrillas stood out
	   from the main population).

	2. The British government had dealt with the problem like the
	   Americans did in Viet Nam.


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