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Seeing how the War on Terror could easily become bogged down by the mere nature and recalcitrance of the enemy, I remembered a quote from "The Thirty Years' War" by Geoffrey Parker. This war took place in Germany from 1618 to 1648 and eventually involved all of Central and most of Western Europe.
This quote is "As long as an almost landless ruler like Amalia of Hesse could maintain 10,000 and more men in arms, despite 25 years of continous hostility on the part of the Holy Roman Emperor, the war in Germany might indeed last forever."
Terrorist groups, by combining judicious use of modern weapons techonology with an alarming lack of personal conscience, do damage to materiel and morale in a volume vastly disproportionate to their actual numbers. This makes it extremely difficult to erode the resource base required for a terrorist group to wage its war, because it doesn't need a large base of resources to begin with. To keep it's war going, all a terrorist group really needs to do is keep inflicting damage, have a great deal of faith in its cause, and an incredible amount of patience. That doesn't mean that they will win, but it does mean that they can delay final defeat seemingly indefinitely.
In fact to make another allusion to the 30YW above, it is rather significant that that peace finally happened after most if not all of the most recalcitrant personalities (Emperor Ferdinand II, Count von Tilly, Duke Albrecht von Wallenstein, King Gustavus Adolphus, Count Frederick V of the Palatinate all come to mind very quickly) were dead. Given the natures of Osama bin Laden, Cleric al-Sadr, and others running similar gangs of thugs, it may come down to killing every single one of them because they would literally rather die than admit defeat they can't win.
Doesn't bode well, does it?
Doug H.
This quote is "As long as an almost landless ruler like Amalia of Hesse could maintain 10,000 and more men in arms, despite 25 years of continous hostility on the part of the Holy Roman Emperor, the war in Germany might indeed last forever."
Terrorist groups, by combining judicious use of modern weapons techonology with an alarming lack of personal conscience, do damage to materiel and morale in a volume vastly disproportionate to their actual numbers. This makes it extremely difficult to erode the resource base required for a terrorist group to wage its war, because it doesn't need a large base of resources to begin with. To keep it's war going, all a terrorist group really needs to do is keep inflicting damage, have a great deal of faith in its cause, and an incredible amount of patience. That doesn't mean that they will win, but it does mean that they can delay final defeat seemingly indefinitely.
In fact to make another allusion to the 30YW above, it is rather significant that that peace finally happened after most if not all of the most recalcitrant personalities (Emperor Ferdinand II, Count von Tilly, Duke Albrecht von Wallenstein, King Gustavus Adolphus, Count Frederick V of the Palatinate all come to mind very quickly) were dead. Given the natures of Osama bin Laden, Cleric al-Sadr, and others running similar gangs of thugs, it may come down to killing every single one of them because they would literally rather die than admit defeat they can't win.
Doesn't bode well, does it?
Doug H.
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