|
|||
First, your enemy has the ability to interdict movement of supplies. This rarely means that he can cut the flow to zero, but it means he can substantially reduce it, leaving the front line units low on ammunition and fuel and potentially starving for lack of food. In addition to the obvious primary effects of such shortages (you can't fire artillery shells if you don't have any) it also can have a severe effect on morale. Second, it means that you will be much less successful mounting an attack. When your enemy controls the skies, he can overfly your positions and keep track of what you're doing. To launch an attack, you have to create a local superiority of force of at least 2:1, and depending on circumstances you may need as much as 5:1. To do that, you have to move reinforcements into place prior to the attack. If your enemy sees you doing this, he can reinforce the same part of the front, preventing you from achieving the necessary preponderance of force. Third, and perhaps most important of all, it presents you with a horrible dilemma: what do you do with your forces? If you concentrate them for strength on the ground, they become a reasonable target for air power. But if you spread them out sufficiently to defend against concentrated air strikes, then you won't have sufficient strength to defend your positions, let alone launch an attack. It's no accident that the only major offensive that the Germans launched on the western front in WWII after the invasion of Normandy was launched in the middle of horrible weather in the winter, during an interval when American and British air units were grounded. It's equally no accident that the Battle of the Bulge started going really badly against the Germans once the weather cleared and allied air units were able to fly again. It has been American doctrine to achieve air supremacy in any theater where it expects to fight ground operations, and it has done so in every war since 1935. That is very expensive; a modern and formidable air force costs an enormous amount of money. (Of course, there's a saying that "the most expensive thing in the world is the second best air force.") With the development of precision guided munitions and "improved munitions" (i.e. cluster bombs) the advantage conferred by air supremacy has only grown. This is a "rich man's war", but the US has always been willing to expend equipment and money to save lives -- that, too, is standard doctrine. (For instance, no nation in WWII consumed as much artillery ammunition proportionally as the US did, if for no other reason than because no-one else could afford to.) One possibility for the progress of the war in Afghanistan is for the US to start providing close air support for Northern Alliance troops. This would require us to attach forward air controllers to Northern Alliance formations, to coordinate air strikes with precision. That would mean deploying perhaps 50 controller teams (3-5 men each). That would serve as a force multiplier, permitting the Northern Alliance to win against Taliban formations with comparable numbers of men. In the face of that, the Taliban would not be able to hold their ground. This article states that their long term strategy is probably to fight a guerrilla war, which in essence means to give up control of the cities and go into hiding. There are problems with this; the analogy to history is imperfect. Like all war, guerrilla war requires supply. It doesn't use as much as a standard field formation in battle, but the supply needs are non-trivial. All successful guerrilla wars require either a sympathetic civilian population or support from an outside country willing and able to smuggle supplies into the nation. The easiest way to do that is from a sympathetic neighbor; the second easiest is by ship over an uncontrolled coast line. The hardest way is for the sympathetic nation to drop supplies by air; that's expensive and requires that your enemy not have air supremacy. The Mujahideen were able to maintain a guerrilla war against the USSR because Pakistan was sympathetic, and supplies flowed over the border. The Viet Cong maintained a guerrilla action against the US using a flow of supplies from North Vietnam. If the population is sympathetic then they will supply food and clothing to the guerrillas, which means that only ammunition and weaponry will need to be smuggled from outside, a tremendous advantage which was also enjoyed by both the Mujahideen and the Viet Cong. This does not, in itself, guarantee victory; what it does is to largely mitigate the possibility of defeat. The Mujahideen held a stalemate against the USSR until the US got actively involved and began to supply them with weapons capable of nullifying Soviet air supremacy. Once that happened, they were able to begin counter-offensive operations. Equally, the Viet Cong maintained a stalemate against the US but never really won. (The war was won, by not by the Viet Cong.) The Taliban strategy is thus fatally flawed; there's every reason to believe that they will get little support from the people of Afghanistan, and there will be no foreign benefactor to provide them with arms. Every nation with a border on Afghanistan hates the Taliban; A 
| |||