The first time I heard the term 'Guerilla Warfare' was while studying history, when they taught us about Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Since Shivaji's army was small as compared to the Moghul army, the Maratha's adopted the tactics of guerilla warfare, which basically means you render yourself invisible to the enemy by either camouflaging or hiding yourself and then launching an attack. It really seemed a cool way to to get that one-up over the enemy when David was fighting Goliath!! Then down the ages in 2000-2001 after 9/11 I heard President Bush saying that the Taliban were indulging in guerilla tactics and attacking US forces from the mountains of Afghanistan and that they were cowards!!! (I am not saying that the Taliban are not cowards, but those who use guerilla tactics are not cowards too!!)
Later a couple of weeks back I read this
report in the Sunday Times about the use of unmanned aircrafts like 'Predator' armed with Air-to-Ground missiles known as 'HellFire'. These aircrafts are operated from 2 bases, one in Balad near Baghdad which handles the take off and landing of the aircraft and the other base is in Nellis near Las Vegas which handles the rest of the flight mission. The HellFire missiles are around 5.33 feet in length and when fired travel at a speed of Mach 1.1 before hitting the target. The war head is shape charge and blast fragmentation type!
In all the three cases given above the attacker is still invisible to the enemy!!! How ironic, all thro' the ages, no matter how advanced our technology gets, the principle still remains the same!
Another example is the mythological Laxman Rekha drawn by Laxman, brother of Lord Ram, in order to protect Sita from the demons, as he went to look out for his brother Ram. The Pentagon is researching on the use of
non lethal weapons which includes the creation of a high intensity electromagnetic/microwave field, which makes the water molecules in your body heat up for a fraction of a second creating a burning sensation and forcing the enemy to flee! How cool to see the enemy heat up!!! :-)
Saturday, October 16, 2004