I wanted to highlight some of the points he made in remarks the other day to a British newspaper to clarify his position on Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s troop request, and why a large troop surge is needed. First off, he said the Taliban are much better fighters than the insurgents in Iraq. “The Taliban love to fight,” he said, and their operational skills have improved significantly over the past three years as they’ve learned and adapted to U.S. and NATO tactics.
The Taliban’s rapid adaptation — a theme we return to again and again here in our discussions of irregular warriors — is what makes them so tough on the battlefield. American units rotate in and out of theater. The Taliban stay and can work a group of new recruits up the skill chain pretty rapidly by exposing them first to small ambushes or sniping away at American outposts and letting them grqduate to larger firefights. If they survive the early engagements, they become quite experienced and skilled fighters. They are going up against the world’s most advanced military after all.
“One of the [Taliban’s] biggest strengths is that they’ve shown the ability to absorb and adapt to successive increases in foreign presence… and come back stronger,” Kilcullen said. He believes trickling in a few thousand troops at a time as reinforcements is a bad idea: “They’ll just take it in stride and adapt; they’ve done that four times already.”
So, given that we're looking at some pretty low-echelon engagements (it's not like the Taliban have massed tank battalions) what are some of the ways that game designers can account for these sorts of changes over time? Are you reduced to dealing with discrete engagements in which combatant ratings change (ie, different counters based on engagement time frame) or can you truly put together a mutating campaign-like series of connected scenarios?
What sayeth y'all?
By: Brant
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