The Warden Collection (merged thread)

[Cole]

This thread is difficult. the conversation about the validity and applicability of a strategy keeps evolving into a sterile discussion between believers and non-believers. To improve the exchange of ideas, I propose a mental war game.

• We fast-forward the American Revolution War into the future. The thirteen colonies are under British rule in 2011.
• Everything on the ground (weapons, tactics, vehicles,...) remains the same.
• The British Crown receives five aircraft carriers, a manual on the application of the Five-Ring Strategy and John Ashley Warden III himself to lead the British forces at Her Majesty's service.
• The use of the aircraft carriers would double the monthly burden of the war effort, but only for the duration of the war.

My question is the following: under these circumstances, would the British forces win the War of American Revolution and keep the thirteen colonies under British rule?

Not a legitimate scenario because views of what is acceptable vary depending on who employs the air/seapower.

If the colonists hugged populations, hid in the woods, used anti-ship ballistic missiles and diesel electric subs that waited for carriers to come to them, and hidden mobile radar air defense systems that engaged carrier aircraft and then shut down radars and repositioned...game on for the colonists. Plus, a more evolved colonist would simply move more inland with his leaders, processes, populations, infrastructure, and land-based aircraft and TBM...thus outdistancing carrier attacks.

Don't forget jamming GPS, attack of satellites, and an EMP attack of Hawaii, Guam, and Alaska...err I mean Britain and Canada. Lots of inflatable decoys out in the open will be sure to waste multiple bombs, followed up by air defense ambushes.

If the air/seapower didn't care about the population and bombed cities, infrastructure, and processes into oblivion, and bombed houses of perceived leaders killing their families (but not the leaders)...the British probably win. But the U.S. would never do that today, or would they per Warden's methodology? Russia appears to have leveled much of Chechnya to suppress that revolution. Gulbuddin Hekmatyr shelled Kabul and Russian bombers killed 24,000 in Herat early in the war. Did any of these methods solve the undlerlying problem and is the leader and his colonist lead followers still in power?

Would the colonists become meek, passive zombies following this slaughter...or increase their resolve and guerilla activities, not to mention terror attacks in Britain?

The bottom line Warden seems to miss, is it is virtually impossible to understand the ASCOPE and PMESII (whatever it is) operational environment without troops on the ground to report and attempt to understand those conditions. In addition, following the precision attacks, the underlying tensions remain and are aggravated by the need to rebuild...not a condition likely to endear colonists to the "homeland."

Plus cannot believe that any CoG analysis would ignore the intrinsic value of attacking key targets of the adversary's military! In a China scenario, for instance, air-to-air becomes largely irrelevant if you succeed in repeatedly attacking runways and airbases killing the enemy's aircraft and related logistics on the ground rather than in the air. Isn't that a 5 rings approach, largely ignored in the emotional desire to fight the white scarf war? Plus those attacks of airfields do not have to occur using fighters or manned aircraft. The enemy obviously can use the same methodology to destroy our few land-based airfields for fighters in a place like the Pacific where they are far and few between and well within range of TBM and ASBM.