Peter from Germany sends this interesting link, to a retired Swiss paratrooper’s suggestions on how to defeat an invader with overwhelming conventional superiority.
The English translation is a little rough, but the writer’s ideas get through. And they will sound familiar to anyone who’s been following the news from Iraq. Either the Ba’athists have been reading the Swiss or vice versa. Sample:
An opponent has to occupy the country, if he wants to rule over the axes. Therefore, he has to station troops at all the important locations and must observe the axes. His troops and material make him vulnerable.How should the opponent behave, if he does not find an army, but is opposed at the same time by a large part of the population who is armed and capable to cause casualties through needles pricking. (The necessary war material is stored and available.)
The opponent will not find any location in Switzerland where he can feel secure! The occupying power will react with searches, arrests, methods of repression etc. The hatred for the intruders could still get greater. This situation is ideal for my concept.
Sort of like the Nazis vs. the Yugoslav partisans. But the Nazis did manage to clear large areas of Yugoslavia of partisan activity via the simple expedient of killing the entire male population of those areas. Applied genocide works wonders against a guerilla army...
If you're not willing to commit genocide, on the other hand, a partisan army is quite difficult to defeat. Stalin took close to five years to defeat the UPA in the Ukraine after the defeat of Hitler, and a) he was willing to commit genocide to do it, and b) the UPA was utterly abandoned by the West thanks to Stalin's propaganda that the UPA was Nazi remnants. That does not bode well for U.S. chances in any of its West Asian wars...
-BT