USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011122.0544 (On Screen): "Doctor, it hurts when I do that." "Well, don't do that." A well run army learns from its mistakes and its triumphs. One essential aspect of any operation is to analyze the results to see what can be learned from it. Did something work? Figure out why, and see if it can be made better and used elsewhere. Did something fail? If so, figure out why and don't do it again. Information from one part of the war will be sent to other parts of the theater, and slowly your effectiveness against the enemy will grow.

A good example of that is that "Thach Weave". Thach was the commander of a fighter group on a US Carrier who was among the first to face the legendary Zero fighter with his F4F Wildcats. The Zero was an uneven design, with strengths and weaknesses. It was extremely maneuverable and at low speeds could dogfight better than any other plane of the war. But it was a fragile plane and didn't have any armor or self-sealing fuel tanks, so it was a firetrap. Likewise, it was not heavily armed, with four .303 caliber machine guns and one 20 mm cannon. Relatively speaking, the F4F could not turn as well at low speeds, but it could dive faster. It was much better armed, with six .50 caliber machine guns, and the cabin and engine were armored. Its airframe was much stronger and could sustain damage much better, and it did have self-sealing fuel tanks, so hits on the tanks didn't automatically start a fire, or condemn the plane to landing in the ocean when all its fuel leaked away. What Thach realized was that the most advantageous situation for the Wildcat against the Zero was a head-on shoot-out, with the planes flying directly towards each other with guns blazing. Usually in such a case the Wildcat would win. (Being on the Zero's "six" would have been better but that didn't appear to be possible except by luck.)

Wildcats flew in pairs, and the Thach Weave meant that if either fighter realized that it or its partner was about to be tailed by a Zero, he'd say "Break" into his radio. The two planes were flying somewhat apart, and they'd turn towards each other and start circling in opposite directions. While this wouldn't shake the Zero, it meant that the Zero couldn't line up for a shot, and it meant that it would eventually face the other Wildcat face-on, usually to the detriment of the Zero. If the first pass didn't work, they'd keep circling and try again. Eventually they'd either kill the Zero or the Zero pilot would give up and pull out.

It was a brilliant maneuver and quite successful at letting the Wildcat fight the Zero on advantageous terms, even though in most regards the Zero was a superior plane. It maximized the advantages of the Wildcat and minimized the advantages of the Zero.

And once it was proved in combat, knowledge of it was spread to the entire theater, and things stopped going quite as well for the Zero. (It wasn't always possible to use it, of course, and the Zero continued to be dangerous.)

That Taliban don't seem to be doing that. They don't seem to be learning from their mistakes. The US used accurate close air attacks controlled by Forward Air Controllers at Mazar-e Sharif, and entire sections of the Taliban front line were obliterated, by carpet bombing or cluster bombs or daisy-cutters. So what did they learn? Apparently little, because they're using exactly the same kind of deployments now at Kandahar and we're doing the same thing to them there.

Or caves: After six weeks of bombing, it should be apparent now to anyone on the ground there that a cave is no longer a safe place to hide; if the US finds it, we'll use GBU-28 "Bunker Buster" bombs on them, among other things. So for weeks, cave complexes have been getting destroyed. Meanwhile, in the collapse, the defenders of Jalalabad pulled out of the city and moved into the mountains, to a cave complex there from which they're going to start a guerrilla war. Apparently the location is known; I don't think it's going to exist for much longer.

It's becoming clear that individual Taliban soldiers (especially the "foreign guests") can be quite deadly, but the Taliban army is completely inept and its failure of command is emasculating the power of its soldiers. They aren't really an army; they're a loosely disciplined armed mob. Their hope in this war was that we would commit huge numbers of ground forces and try to fight them infantry-style. If that had happened, it would have maximized the Taliban strengths and minimized their weaknesses. Since we haven't done that (because we're not stupid) that means that they're meat on the table. We can't write them off yet, but we need to proceed about like we have been for a while yet, and continue to use attrition bombing to weaken them. (discuss)