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From: phipps@solitary.Stanford.EDU (Geoff Phipps)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: tactics basics [?]
Message-ID: <1991Mar18.004704.24306@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 18 Mar 91 00:47:04 GMT
References: <1991Mar15.034821.7736@cbnews.att.com>
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From: phipps@solitary.Stanford.EDU (Geoff Phipps)
In article <1991Mar15.034821.7736@cbnews.att.com> baltuch@BINAH.CC.brandeis.edu writes:
>
>This must be a FAQ big time... but here goes anyway...
>
>Thru military history one reads of say army A beating army B
>by encircling it. Encirclement seems to be almost taken as a
>synonym of victory... ( cf the game of Go :-)  A attempts to
>encircle B and B attempts to "break the encirclement", etc.
  [deleted]
>Please *email* to baltuch@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
  Sorry, but I wanted to pontificate in public :-)

Interestingly Sun Tzu in "The Art of War" specifically warns against
encirclement.  He says that it just makes the defenders fight to the
death, infliciting many more casualties than they would have
otherwise.  He says that you should always leave a line of retreat for
the defenders.  Let them defend for a while, and thenm retreat along
this route.  Harry them the whole time they are retreating.  It is easy
to inflict heavy casualties on a retreating, disorganised force.

Some comments:
- Sun Tzu wrote in Ancient China.

- I think this doesn't work so well when you have a known (and
implemented) practise of taking prisoners and treating them well.
Surrounded enemies may then decide to surrender rather than die.
However, if they know that they cannot surrender, then they might as
well fight until they die.  Some people have argued that this is the
whole basis of the modern European convention of Prisoners of War.  If it
wasn't advantageous to take prisoners, then the Geneva convention would
never have been signed.  Form this I suspect that prisoners weren't
treated well in Sun Tzu's time.

-The Chinese generals in Burma in late WW2 followed that philosphy.  The
US general working with them (Slim?) was constantly amazed at how he
would work hard to set up an encirclement of the Japanese, and then the
Chinese would deliberately let them out.  The claim was that the Chinese
generals were following Sun Tzu's ideas.  Given that the Japanese
weren't likely to surrender en masse, it could be argued that they were
correct.  I don't know.

Geoff Phipps
--
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Geoff Phipps	phipps@cs.stanford.edu