Westmoreland vs. Giap.
This is coolbert:
General Giap is an amateur that was able to beat the professionals?
Here is what General Westmoreland had to say about that:
"Let me also say that Giap was trained in small-unit, guerrilla tactics, but he persisted in waging a big-unit war with terrible losses to his own men. By his own admission, by early 1969, I think, he had lost, what, a half million soldiers? He reported this. Now such a disregard for human life may make a formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius."
An enemy that is so profligate with the expenditure of manpower, such as the Russians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, etc., DO make for formidable adversaries. BUT NOT GENIUS!!
"It doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black, only that it catches mice!!"
Is that appropriate in this context?
coolbert.
1 Comments:
It may be desperation, callousness, stupidity or ignorance, but it isn't genius. Of course, I am speaking from the Western viewpoint. In the Korean War, the PRC had no problem sending thousands of their men into a meatgrinder, knowing they would get killed by artillery, air strikes, long distance rifle fire, machine guns, etc...long before they got to within grenade throwing or submachine distance of an American just to prove that they meant business. But from my view, they just wasted those men. It would have been better to train them (and Russians, NVA, etc...) and see who had special skills like recon, sniping, demolitions, etc...and use these people to their full effectiveness. Is a man with sniping ability best used for charging at US troops with a bayonet after a weeks train journey from his home in Fukien Province to the front in Korea or is he better used to shoot US officers after some training when he was weeded out of the mass of recruits? With a system that just throws men into combat and considers everyone the same, you will never know. Of course, these nations realized that and had to play catch-up with specialized troops. My $0.02
1:35 PM
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