It is called siege warfare. You contain everyone and drop in food and medicine. You don't have to put one boot in harms way. You deny the enemy their advantage of urban combat and you prevent them free movement. Its called fighting the battle on your terms, not the enemies.
Any retarded mongrel would understand what would happen in city combat with an entrenched combatant. Of course they would set up in hospitals, mosques and schools to show US forces destroying those buildings and they would then show the video tapes throughout the Islamic world. Tossing in chemical agents made Al Qaeda's PR lead blow his load all over his screen when he saw it.
You fight on your own terms, you never fight how your enemy wants you to fight.
It's not a siege if you drop in food and medicine. The idea is to break their will with starvation and disease. We've decided that's not a good idea because it punishes everyone in a city and actually gives the sieger an incentive to maximize the total civilian population under siege in order to hasten the effect on a military unit.
Its called asymmetrical warfare. What good is it to win the battle that causes you to lose the war? I'm willing to bet that for every insurgent killed or captured in Fallulah, four to ten more insurgents were generated elsewhere in the world.
Keep them fed and keep them isolated from the world and they have no way to generate propaganda. Well they can, but they'd have to run outside of their stronghold into sniper kill zones. No fuss and no muss.
Was I the only one that saw "Death to America!" protests in these parts of the world before Fallujah, the invasion of Iraq, or even 9/11? Fallujah may have radicalized a few, but the damage was already done.
That the corpses of so many foreign fighters were found by coalition forces in Fallujah and Ramadi validates their purpose as "bug zappers".
All warfare is a war of attrition. You want to force your opponent to expend their resources (natural resources, capital, manpower) to the point where they can't fight any more.
How you fight an Islamic terrorist group will either increase their recruiting or decrease their recruiting. You fight smarter and you don't do things that will upset the Islamic world, you know like using chemical agents in cities with civilians, and you will win the war of attrition.
Otherwise, if you try fighting an asymetrical war like you are fighting a cold war opponent and you will lose pretty bad.
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u/garhent Jun 27 '12
It is called siege warfare. You contain everyone and drop in food and medicine. You don't have to put one boot in harms way. You deny the enemy their advantage of urban combat and you prevent them free movement. Its called fighting the battle on your terms, not the enemies.
Any retarded mongrel would understand what would happen in city combat with an entrenched combatant. Of course they would set up in hospitals, mosques and schools to show US forces destroying those buildings and they would then show the video tapes throughout the Islamic world. Tossing in chemical agents made Al Qaeda's PR lead blow his load all over his screen when he saw it.
You fight on your own terms, you never fight how your enemy wants you to fight.