Quote Originally Posted by Starbuck View Post
Question here for the peanut gallery: Does the difference between insurgents in Rhodesia and those in Afghanistan depend on scale? Are we picking the right battles?

A typical Rhodesian TTP, from what I have seen, involved massing for raids against White settlements.
Not the typical Rhodesian, rather the typical insurgent. They would gather a bunch together to take on lone homestead which were pretty well secured, seldom press home an attach and disappear to fight another day. They disappeared because they knew that by first light there would be trackers dropped to follow up put some distance between them and the contact area by morning.

Questions:

1.) How often were the insurgents detected and acted upon?
The commanders had to analyse the intel and see where their best efforts were to deploy troops. If the Selous Scouts were in your area there was a certainty there would be intel coming on which deploy and kill.

2.) What was the terrain like around these settlements? How close were they to villages?
They lived close to the villages for food and sex. Moving around to spread the foot load across all the villages in the area. The distance depended on the lie of the land. 200, 300, 400m?

3.) How does the "body count" compare to Taliban raids against, say, COP Keating and Wanat?
I don't know these raids. Were they Taliban raids against your COPs?