Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military From: emery@aries.mitre.org (David Emery) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: Panama Message-ID: <12696@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 2 Jan 90 02:47:55 GMT References: <12604@cbnews.ATT.COM> Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM Organization: The Mitre Corporation, Bedford, MA Lines: 41 Approved: military@att.att.com From: emery@aries.mitre.org (David Emery) >From: shaig%shum.Huji.AC.IL@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Shai Guday) >It is still unclear to me why the US opted for a large >scale involvement, to which I currently see no end, rather than >a clean "surgical" operation by elite forces, with a large scale >followup dependent upon a successful accomplishment of (1). >Any opinions? Yeah. People who talk about "surgical" operations like this really haven't thought about what that means. Unfortunately, "Mission Impossible" operations work on TV. Kidnapping a head of state, particularly one as crafty as Noriega, are basically impossible to do. There's too much that can go wrong. Noriega deliberately did his best to prevent such an operation from succeeding. For instance, no one but Noriega and maybe his driver knew where he was night after night. In military operations, the concept of "minimum necessary force" is complete . It's been established time and again that the way to save lives is to use overwhelming military force. Consider: You're a Panamanian Sentry, and you've been listening to a lot of anti-American propaganda. All of a sudden, a U.S. paratrooper shows up. So, you shoot him. Now change the scenario. A platoon of U.S. paratroopers shows up, with all kinds of automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and maybe even a tank or such. What do you do? Unless you want to be a dead hero, you surrender without firing a shot. Personally, I think we did this one "right", based on what I've heard so far. We put in plenty of troops, to insure that we had overwhelming superiority where we needed it, and we didn't scrimp. As a (former and current part-time) U.S. Serviceman, that's the way to do this, to save U.S. lives, and also Panamanian lives. The major complaint I have so far is the U.S. failure to control looting, but that's mostly a political decision and not a military decision. dave emery emery@aries.mitre.org