From: yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: Registering "Assault Keys"
Date: 17 Nov 1992 21:49:50 -0500
Organization: Yale Computer Science Department
NNTP-Posting-Host: cathy.na.cs.yale.edu

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

>Rifles to snipe from cover or even concealment are a nice start.
>("Cover" and "concealment" define the relevant features.)  Most every
>essential service in a modern society is very difficult to protect.
>(Some can be disabled without even being attacked.)  If Yarvin can't
>take it from there....

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

>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.)

The statement about the Viet Cong is only true if you consider large-unit
actions.  I can dig up plenty of instances where a small American force cut
and ran.  And as to what happens when a military force decides running away
is its only option, I refer you to several instances where approximately
sixty Rhodesian SAS personnel completely destroyed guerrilla camps of over a
thousand men, aided vastly by the fact that the idiot guerrillas did not
stand and fight but instead ran out of the camp and into ambushes where they
died like flies.  When the SAS ran into enemy forces who were present in much
smaller numbers but who did fight, they had a considerably harder time.

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.
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.


--
Norman Yarvin						yarvin@cs.yale.edu
 "The voters have spoken, the bastards ..." - anon.
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns