I admit I don’t know much about how well various military faction do. Anyway with these reports of Iraqis ambushing a maintainence brigade made me curious. How good of a tactic would it be to have teams of commandos or whatever pretend to be a lightly armed repair team or a bunch of medics. The point would be to trick the enemy into attacking what’s really a much better armed and trained team of soliders than a simple repair brigade. Actually I’m not even sure if this is a illegal tactic or not but still I was curious if this tactic is even feasible.(Since they wouldn’t be able to carry howitzers or anything big like that.)
It’d probably be illegal (According to the Geneva Convention) to have combatants disguised as medics. Repair Crews, or any other usually non-combative units (Cooks?) might be a different story, however. But in any case, it’d probably just be an inefficient of manpower and resources that could be better spent just protecting the REAL Repair Crews and Medics.
And, as a side note, I misspelled “Repair Crews” as “Reaper Crews” at one point. Which has no relevance aside from the fact that it sounds really cool.
Ranchoth
“Commandos” as you say aren’t used in big battles like that.
If you were going to go through all that effort to disguse a regular force to look weak… well, you might as well just use that regular force to attack them. There’s really little benefit to such a trick - it might work once or twice, but what do you really accomplish? Nothing on a large scale, and it’d take a lot of effort.
As SenorBeef said. Besides, while every news report I’ve read said that the repair crew was “ambushed” it sounds to me like they just took a wrong turn and drove into an Iraqi force (does anyone have a report to back up this “ambush” claim?)
Well I wasn’t thinking of it as being a way to take out large amounts of enemies. I was thinking more along the lines of using it to put some worry into enemies using devious tactics.(IE they’d have to worry that this “easy propaganda” victory is a ruse to get them out in the open. So hopefully they would lay back for awhile.) Of course if the maintainence brigade just blundered into Iraqis it’s probably not such a great tactic.
I would think that one problem would be that to effectively impersonate a REMF unit the special forces would have to expose themselves in a way which would give the enemy the first shot.
That violates the very first rule of elite unit tactics. You always hit them first, and hardest, and then get the hell away. Inviting the first shot would surrender initiative and invite casualties among your most valuable assets.
However, there are alternatives, of a sort. The Soviet Union devised modestly successful tactics in Afghanistan. A supply train going through a suspected dangerous area would be heavily guarded. If and when it was attacked, large numbers of air, ground, and airmobile forces would be standing at the ready and would seal off the area and kill everyone the Soviets could find. Attacking Afghani units often suffered over 50% casualties when ambushing supply columns. That did not, however, prevent the Afghanis from continuing such attacks. (See: Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, Firepower in Limited War)
It seems to me that they call it ambush when soldiers drive into prepeared enemy forces while thinking that they are in friendly territory.
Well, the difference is that an ambush is when enemy forces have good reason to believe that unsuspecting soldiers will wander by sometime soon. If an Iraqi truck accidentally drove across the Kuwaiti border and was picked up, we wouldn’t say that we ambushed them. Ambush implies that you are lying in wait for someone. If you are just sitting on your butt waiting for orders and an enemy soldier wanders by and you kill him or capture him that isn’t an ambush.