From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Nov 14 2001 - 13:44:54 MST
dwayne wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> >Cities are easy to take, given overwhelming military superiority.
>
> Wow.
>
> Where on earth did you get this idea?
Not from long experience, you can be sure of that... it comes mostly from
my scant readings. Note that I did specify overwhelming military
superiority, including one-sided air support and so on. My impression
from my scant readings is that it's hard to root enemy guerilla troops out
of a countryside since they will not obligingly concentrate in front of
your superior firepower, or indeed present themselves for attack at all.
A city is a clearly defined target where you can make full use of
overwhelming force, though fighting house-to-house once you've taken the
city can turn into another guerilla problem. But, again, that's *after*
you've taken the city. I never heard that guerillas had the reputation of
being able to make a stand and defend a target from superior enemy forces;
in fact, from what I've heard that's exactly what guerillas don't do.
"Enemy advances, we retreat." That's why I was nonplussed by all the fuss
over the taking of Kabul.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:11:58 MST