From: tedrick@triangle.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick)
Newsgroups: alt.war,alt.desert-storm,alt.politics.bush
Subject: Re: Colin Powell's Record (halting the pursuit prematurely)
Followup-To: alt.desert-storm
Date: 3 Sep 1992 09:06:12 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: triangle.berkeley.edu

Look, my point is simple. One of the fundamental principles of war is to
hit the enemy hard during the pursuit phase of a battle. Now if you may
be walking into a trap, or overextending your lines of communication, or
your forces are becoming disorganized, then there may be good reason to
halt the pursuit. But I can't think of a single battle in history when 
it profited the victor to halt the pursuit and let the enemy escape, 
when there was essentially no military risk in continuing the pursuit 
phase.

This particularly irritates me, because I was ranting and raving on this
group (ADS), the night before the battle was stopped, about the need to
throw everything we had into the battle, and to obliterate the remaining
Iraqi forces (I think the title of the article was "Pour it on!" or 
something like that if the stuff is archived somewhere). And in a 1985 
article (Eurocrypt 85) I listed premature halting of a pursuit as one of
half-a-dozen or so cardinal military mistakes. It's just *never* been
right to throw away the fruits of victory like that. It has always come
back to haunt the side that threw away the advantage.

I'm not deducing this from first principles, but taking the lessons of
history. But I think you probably could reason it out logically and come
to similar conclusions. There was one possible exception that I can 
think of, when Attila was allowed to retire after Chalons, if memory
serves, because it was desirable to leave him with some forces intact
in order that he would remain a threat to one of the parties on the
winning side, preventing that party from turning against his partners.
So if there was some political reason to leave Iraq with sufficient
forces to deter Iran from becoming greedy, for example, then I could see
it. But I don't think Powell used that argument.

In any case, after all the abuse that was dumped on my head by pacifists
at that time for advocating "pouring it on", its particularly galling
to hear Bush claiming noone at the time wanted the battle to continue.
I think he's deluding himself and ignoring the facts.

Even more irritating is hearing all the bleeding-heart media types
claiming that the fact that it was becoming a "turkey shoot" was
reason to call it off. When the battle becomes a turkey shoot,
that's the very time you need to push your own forces to the limit,
unless the enemy forces surrender.

I wonder if they would have complained about the "Marianas Turkey
Shoot" during WW2 if they had been there :-)

And another thing, before I exhaust my rage. Bush should have listened
very carefully to the commander on the spot (Schwarzkopf) before
interfering in the battle. Unless there were very compelling reasons
it was properly Schwarzkopf's call as to when to halt the battle.
This is another similarity to Hitler halting Guderian outside
Dunkirk (over Guderian's violent objections) and so on along the
lines in the 1985 article.

Not that anyone gives a damn what I think (and the feeling is
mutual I'm sure :-)

Really, Bush has no business commanding battles (I'm speaking
of his personality characteristics and lack of military knowledge),
so the poor guy has really been victimized by all us hawks who urged 
him on. But he ought to be smart enough to choose good advisors
and delegate the proper authority to them, then let them run the
show, as Reagan did. If the battle fails, then off with their heads,
but during the battle they ought to be allowed to use them :-)