“RIPPLE SALVO #75… SANCTUARY…Steve takes issue with the Bear, and when Steve writes, Bear reads…everybody should…”
Bear,
It is impossible to defeat an adversary insurgent/terror force so long as it has a guaranteed sanctuary where it can safely plan, train, marshal resources, and from which it can launch attacks with impunity. This has been true since antiquity, and remains true today [hence, the Islamists in Afghanistan cannot be defeated unless they are expelled from or destroyed in Pakistan, the Central Asian FSU states, and Iran as well… good luck with that].
Airpower is very good at interdiction of conventional or insurgent forces provided they are either provided large, deep “kill boxes” along the full length of the border of the territory being protected/assisted, and the enemy is denied cross-border safe havens for their forces or from which they can provide air defense [and/or artillery] support for their forward elements “in country.”
As always, insurgent/terror warfare is the refuge of the weak, whether it is a minority group trying to gain independence from a dominant majority regime, a people rebelling against a foreign imperial occupier, or a revolutionary force rebelling against a more-or-less popular government. Insurgent/terror forces win by being willing to wage total war until they are either victorious or destroyed, while their adversaries — the central government — are constrained to wage limited war [by some combination of law, custom, and international pressure] and can reach the point where exhaustion, disgust over the destruction, abandonment by external facilitators [“allies” or “patrons”] or some combination thereof. This is true even if the CoIn side wins most or all of the “battles,” has heaped up a massive “body count,” and can claim with some justification to have “successfully terminated large-scale hostilities.” The insurgency is like a stubborn disease — a course of treatment may eliminate the visible symptoms and give apparent relief, but the root cause remains, and those “germs” or parasites remaining are the toughest, and will be even more lethal once the “treatment” has “successfully ended” and the “relapse” hits.
SteveD
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