Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
You release them and they are back in the front line before you know it.
General Stone releases 10,000 detainees and only 40 return. What I'd like to know is what percentage were dead to rights fighters, and what was the median length of their detention.

You detain them until the war is over. You do understand the futility of just releasing captives don't you?
Well, the hypothesis is that released insurgent can tell his friends, family, and neighbors about the folly of resistance, assuming the message is loud and clear and he gets it. Put another way, a low recidivist rate amongst detainees should correlate to some size web of resources unavailable to the enemy in the future. Given I can only find fragments of evidence from a single case in history, I freely admit this is nothing more than a hypothesis.