baltuch@BINAH.CC.brandeis.edu (03/15/91)
From: baltuch@BINAH.CC.brandeis.edu 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. It suddenly became clear to me that is wasn't at all clear to me why this should always be so. Now my question: Is there a inherent "geometric" advantage of encirclement? I could see why the encircled army would have say more trouble manoeuvering and be a more vulnerable target but on the other hand its forces are more concentrated whereas the encircling army has to stretch itself to cover more ground. Is there a well known rule of thumb saying that the proportion of encirclers to encircled should be in a p:q ratio for encirclement to succeed? (Just like they say 3:1 = attackers:defenders ratio is necessary for offensive to succeed...) Another possibility of course is that encirclement simply cuts lines of communications and thus sooner of later the encircled army simply runs out of ammo, fuel and toilet paper... and there's nothing more to it. So which is it? Please *email* to baltuch@binah.cc.brandeis.edu Thanks Jacob Baltuch
phipps@solitary.Stanford.EDU (Geoff Phipps) (03/18/91)
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 -- -------------------------------------- Geoff Phipps phipps@cs.stanford.edu