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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (269120)7/2/2002 10:57:41 AM
From: Thomas A Watson  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 769667
 
As an Engineer who makes cost tradeoff studies. The cost of supporting humans in remote locals is enormous and that cost IMHO reduces dramatically the ability of focus and limited resources to plan new strikes.

If I had 5000 to 10,000 extra folks around that I really could do nothing with and my side were suffering pressure from every side. If my ass was worth million bucks, I would be paranoid as I really only know the loyalty of a few and can only wonder at the range of loyalty and outright stupidity distributed in an extra 5000 to 10000 of whom I can only know a small subset. In this phase of the war for the terrorists, grunts, ignorant believing grunts have little value. You need cunning and smart guys and there are just not that many born. So the grunts are a net negative in the equation of attack capability vs the day in and day out consumption of resources.

As more months and months go by and failures and captures become known and no attacks occur, you got one monster morale problem.

In engineering, there is always a point where adding more people to a project causes delay. More time is required to cut bait and less time is available to fish. The best fishermen spend more time cutting bait and baiting hooks and keeping hooks out of each other. That's the universal human condition.

In life simple examples abound.
You go camping, you want to set up the tent that you can set up in five minutes. But this time you want to teach a group of young people or even adults who have never seen a tent before. It takes how long, three times, five times ten times as long. And then you spend ten minutes taking it down and setting it up again the right way.

As Skipper of a Sea Scout Ship and a soccer coach and designer of many systems that were to be used by others it so so obvious the cost.

In soccer to give all playing time you eventually sub a weak player for a much stronger player. You really end up diluting the overall unified strength of the team and give up a goal and the game. It happened to me dozens of times.
But the game of soccer lost leaves one alive to play another day. Terrorist's don't have that luxury.

So I cannot think of any advantages to culling the 5000 to 10000 at the time. In general the smartest and most cunning would escape anyway and be free of the dumb feedme grunts.