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From: mcgp1!flak@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Dan Flak)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Low Tech Warfare (1 of 5)
Message-ID: <11729@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 27 Nov 89 03:54:30 GMT
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Organization: McCaw Cellular Communications, Inc., Seattle, WA
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From: mcgp1!flak@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Dan Flak)


                    LOW TECH WARFARE - PART I

Americans live in a robot society. Rather than do work ourselves,
we build machines to do the work for us. We fight wars with
machines rather than people. We often solve simple problems with
complex solutions and it's difficult for us to imagine what good
honest hard physical labor can do.

During the Vietnam conflict, a great deal of emphasis was spent
trying to interdict the maze of road networks know as the "Ho Chi
Minh" trail. The effort met with mixed results.

RF-4C aircraft gave interesting "before and after" pictures of
airstike missions. The expectation was that without heavy
equipment, which we knew the enemy didn't have*, the road could
not be repaired. About 2 hours after a road cut, reconnaissance
photographs showed a team of approximately two dozen workers with
shovels and rakes working with the gravel provided by the bomb to
fill in the crater. About 4 to 6 hours later, the road would be
completely repaired.

It appears that the local residents of the area paid part of
their "taxes" in labor. By day, they were farmers, when an
airstrike was in progress, they were gunners, when the airstrike
was over, they called in their neighbors from miles around (or
went to a neighbor down the street) to work on the road, when the
NVA came through they were inn keepers, when a convoy stopped by,
they operated a truck stop.

* At Diem Bien Phu, the French commander decided that encamping
in a valley surrounded by mountains was not a dangerous
situation. The Viet Minh did not have heavy artillery, and even
if they did, they didn't have the heavy equipment to get it up
into the hills. They did have the artillery, (U.S. surplus given
to them in WWII for use against the Japanese), and as film
documents showed, they used ropes, chocks and "coolies" to get
the artillery pieces up the mountains.

With this in mind I was still surprised when I asked my Korean
liaison for assistance in moving a stack of pallets (about 500
lbs) from one section of the ramp at a remote airfield to another
to make room for incoming aircraft. I expected him to scrounge up
a fork lift. Instead he got 10 ROK privates (5 per side) who
grabbed hold and "shuffled" the pallets into position.
-- 
       Dan Flak - McCaw Cellular Communications Inc., 201 Elliot Ave W.,
    Suite 105, Seattle, Wa 98119, 206-283-2658, (usenet: thebes!mcgp1!flak)


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