Quote Originally Posted by jcustis View Post
...by fire and maneuver. That way is through ensuring you put him on the horns of a dilemma. Call it using combined arms to "fix" him, but the result is the same. You force him to make a choice. Often it is a choice between staying and dying under the effects of HE (40mm, 60mm, 120mm, JDAM, etc.), or fleeing and facing the effects of effective and accurate direct fires.
Agree mostly. However, I believe it is better/safer/more advantageous to push him over his emotional tipping point and get him to withdraw/flee where he can become food for gunships and troops deployed in static cut-off positions. Having to winkle out enemy remnants who have decided to fight to the death can become hugely stressful and downright dangerous.

We are back to that old concept (from where I come from) where you find them, encircle them, flush them, pursue them and then kill them.

Take away one ingredient of that recipe, and you cannot maneuver effectively, in the Afghanistan context. There is too much deadspace and terrain (to include the human terrain) that allows the enemy to move along after contact is broken.
Yes, the Afghanistan context. You got to do what you have to to prevent them from making a clean break. How you do it there depends on a number of factors.

Now, this business of close combat also involves the task of deciding if you believe it is important enough to send a troop through the door of a dark, musty mud hut, when you can exercise tactical patience, sit back, and call those knuckleheads out to you because you have them surrounded.

I've used the point made by a former Ranger on another board here before. There is nothing that important, besides an American captive, that justifies assaulting a hut/building over here. Nothing at all.
I suppose this is an example of how warfare in Afghanistan is of a limited nature?

You must help me here Jon. Why is it so dangerous for a troop to follow the explosion of a bunker bomb through a door of a "musty old hut"? I would suggest that the biggest risk in so doing is that the building may collapse on him.

(Note: As I think I have stated somewhere here before why don't you fly in a flamethrower team when faced with this situation? Do you still have them somewhere? Man we could have done with those things in the cave situations we faced.)

Even if you do one or two rooms as an example eventually some troop is going to have to go into each room to ensure that everyone who was in there has in fact surrendered, yes?

Further we note that the Taliban are pretty smart at adapting their tactics to exploit the ROE and other restrictions ISAF self impose. They want to keep civvies around them knowing that ISAF don't want to add to the civvie body count. They send kids to do things knowing that they either won't be shot or will have the critical advantage when facing ISAF forces (who correctly) would not knowingly kill a child. Now can we add hiding out in huts knowing that troops will not ordinarily go in after them?