Stardate 20011011.2130 (On Screen): According to this, heavy offensive bombing is now in progress. It mentions that
Unlike Iraqi and Yugoslav troops, which tried to scatter when targeted by American air campaigns over the past decade, the Taliban forces have appeared to hunker down and remain concentrated in their encampments, the officials said.
"This particular adversary is not reacting in ways we've seen in other conflicts," a senior official said.
I wonder if it may be because they don't really know what they're up against. Their experience with defending against bombardment will have been from Russian bombing and more recently with artillery and mortar fire. I suspect that the Russians were primarily using high explosives, and that's certainly what their artillery and mortars are firing. What you get is small number of concentrated explosions which have a wide area of lethality if you are out in the open. But if you're dug in, in a trench or deep foxhole, then your best chance of survival is to stay down. If you get up and run, you'll be caught by shrapnel. Stay in your hole and it will go over your head unless you take a direct hit. But that's not the case with cluster bombs.
A cluster bomb is a large package which falls to a certain height, and then bursts and scatters a huge number of bomblets over a wide area. Each of those is sort of like a super-duper hand grenade. Men in trenches and foxholes are not protected, because the bomblets scatter all over the place and are likely to fall in with them. Pretty much the only way to survive a cluster bomb is either to be underground or in an armored vehicle, or to not be within the scatter zone. If you don't have a bunker or a tank, therefore, the best thing to do is to run and hope you can clear the area of effect before the bomb goes off. I suspect the reason that the Taliban's forces are not scattering is that they truly don't know any better. (And at the rate they're going, they're not going to get the opportunity to learn, either.) (discuss)
