Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: What is scorched earth strategy?
The scorched-earth defense is a form of risk arbitrage and anti-takeover strategy.
Guerrilla warfare is a type of asymmetric warfare: competition between opponents of unequal strength. It is also a type of irregular warfare: that is, it aims not simply to defeat an enemy, but to win popular support and political influence, to the enemy's cost. Accordingly, guerrilla strategy aims to magnify the impact of a small, mobile force on a larger, more-cumbersome one. If successful, guerrillas weaken their enemy by attrition, eventually forcing them to withdraw.
Tactically, guerrillas usually avoid confrontation with large units and formations of enemy troops, but seek and attack small groups of enemy personnel and resources to gradually deplete the opposing force while minimizing their own losses. The guerrilla prizes mobility, secrecy, and surprise, organizing in small units and taking advantage of terrain that is difficult for larger units to use. For example, Mao Zedong summarized basic guerrilla tactics at the beginning of the Chinese "" as:"The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." At least one author credits the ancient Chinese work "The Art of War" with inspiring Mao's tactics. In the 20th century, other communist leaders, including North Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, often used and developed guerrilla warfare tactics, which provided a model for their use elsewhere, leading to the Cuban "foco" theory and the anti-Soviet Mujahadeen in Afghanistan.
Trench warfare occurred when a revolution in firepower was not matched by similar advances in mobility, resulting in a grueling form of warfare in which the defender held the advantage. On the Western Front in 1914–1918, both sides constructed elaborate trench, underground, and dugout systems opposing each other along a front, protected from assault by barbed wire, mines, camouflaged trapping pits, and other obstacles. The area between opposing trench lines (known as "no man's land") was fully exposed to artillery fire from both sides. Attacks, even if successful, often sustained severe casualties.
The Australians had continued to operate independently within Phuoc Tuy province, and while the war had become a series of big unit search and destroy operations in a war of attrition for the Americans, they had pursued their own counter-insurgency campaign. Regardless, differences of opinion between Australian and American methods had produced friction, and increasingly impatient with the Australian approach, in early 1967 the Commander US MACV, General William Westmoreland, had complained to the Commander Australian Forces Vietnam, Major General Tim Vincent, demanding a more aggressive approach. However, the Australians were convinced that deliberate patrolling techniques were more effective in separating communist forces from the population in the villages while working towards slowly extending government control, and such urgings went largely unheeded.
"Like them, we had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together, and how to defend ourselves." Israel could be a role model because it "had been forced to find solutions to the kinds of problems that large, wealthy, powerful states had never encountered".
During the War, the concept of shell shock was ill-defined. Cases of "shell shock" could be interpreted as either a physical or psychological injury, or simply as a lack of moral fibre. The term "shell shock" is still used by the Veterans Administration to describe certain parts of PTSD, but mostly it has entered into popular imagination and memory, and it is often identified as the signature injury of the War.
Guerrilla warfare is defined as fighting by groups of irregular troops (guerrillas) within areas occupied by the enemy. When guerrillas obey the laws and customs of war, they are entitled, if captured, to be treated as ordinary prisoners of war; however, they are often treated by their captors as unlawful combatants and executed. The tactics of guerrilla warfare stress deception and ambush, as opposed to mass confrontation, and succeed best in an irregular, rugged, terrain and with a sympathetic populace, whom guerrillas often seek to win over or dominate by propaganda, reform, and terrorism. Guerrilla warfare has played a significant role in modern history, especially when waged by Communist liberation movements in Southeast Asia (most notably in the Vietnam War) and elsewhere.
Japan's early WWII strategy towards the US, for example, made numerous assumptions that would lead the US Fleet to sail into the Western Pacific, to fight, on advantageous terms for the Japanese, a "Decisive Battle". Unfortunately for the Japanese, the US did not choose to make battleships its primary arm, fight for every Japanese outpost, use submarines only against the warrior targets of warships, or require a return to a fleet anchorage for regrouping. Intelligence was not a preferred assignment in the Japanese military, and their operations planners tended to make optimistic assumptions. An eccentric but incredibly creative US Marine, Earl Ellis, however, did foresee the US strategy for the Pacific in the 1920s, and set a standard for long-term estimates and net assessment
Poor bombing visibility and an increasingly critical fuel shortage eventually forced "Bockscar" to divert from Kokura and attack the secondary target, Nagasaki. As they approached Nagasaki, the heart of the city's downtown was covered by dense cloud, and Sweeney and the plane's weaponeer, Commander Ashworth, initially decided to bomb Nagasaki using radar. However, a small opening in the clouds allowed "Bockscar's" bombardier to verify the target as Nagasaki. As the crew had been ordered to drop the bomb visually if possible, Sweeney decided to proceed with a visual bomb run. "Bockscar" then dropped "Fat Man", with a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. It exploded 43 seconds later at above the ground, at least northwest of the planned aim point. The failure to drop "Fat Man" at the precise bomb aim point caused the atomic blast to be confined to the Urakami Valley. As a consequence, a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills, and only 60% of Nagasaki was destroyed. The bombing also severed the Mitsubishi arms production extensively and killed an estimated 35,000-40,000 people outright, including 23,200-28,200 Japanese industrial workers, 2,000 Korean slave laborers, and 150 Japanese soldiers.
From the outbreak of the Korean War and the invasion of South Korea (also known as the Republic of Korea) by the North, the North Korean People's Army had enjoyed superiority in both manpower and equipment over both the Republic of Korea Armed Forces and the United Nations forces dispatched to South Korea to prevent it from collapsing. The North Korean strategy was to aggressively pursue UN and South Korean forces on all avenues of approach south and to engage them aggressively, attacking from the front and initiating a double envelopment of both flanks of the unit, which allowed the North Koreans to surround and cut off the opposing force, which would then be forced to retreat in disarray, often leaving behind much of its equipment. From their initial June 25 offensive to fights in July and early August, the North Koreans used this strategy to effectively defeat any UN force and push it south. However, when the UN forces, under the Eighth United States Army, established the Pusan Perimeter in August, the UN troops held a continuous line along the peninsula which North Korean troops could not flank, and their advantages in numbers decreased daily as the superior UN logistical system brought in more troops and supplies to the UN army.
Trench warfare has been infrequent in recent wars. When two large armoured armies meet, the result has generally been mobile warfare of the type which developed in World War II. However, trench warfare reemerged in the latter stages of the Chinese Civil War (Huaihai Campaign), the Korean War (from July 1951 to its end), and at Dien Bien Phu and other later locations and engagements during the Vietnam War. During the Cold War, NATO forces routinely trained to fight through extensive works called "Soviet-style trench systems", named after the Warsaw Pact's complex systems of field fortifications, an extension of Soviet field entrenching practices for which they were famous in their Great Patriotic War (the Eastern Front of World War II).
James Fearon, a scholar of civil wars at Stanford University, defines a civil war as "a violent conflict within a country fought by organized groups that aim to take power at the center or in a region, or to change government policies". Ann Hironaka further specifies that one side of a civil war is the state. The intensity at which a civil disturbance becomes a civil war is contested by academics. Some political scientists define a civil war as having more than 1000 casualties, while others further specify that at least 100 must come from each side. The Correlates of War, a dataset widely used by scholars of conflict, classifies civil wars as having over 1000 war-related casualties per year of conflict. This rate is a small fraction of the millions killed in the Second Sudanese Civil War and Cambodian Civil War, for example, but excludes several highly publicized conflicts, such as The Troubles of Northern Ireland and the struggle of the African National Congress in Apartheid-era South Africa.
In 1999, the Kargil War between India and Pakistan became the first direct conflict between two declared nuclear powers. As the war progressed, the first hint of the possible use of a nuclear weapon was on 31 May, when Pakistani foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmad made a statement warning that an escalation of the limited conflict could lead Pakistan to use "any weapon" in its arsenal. This was immediately interpreted as an obvious threat of a nuclear retaliation by Pakistan in the event of an extended war. The leader of Pakistan's senate noted that "the purpose of developing weapons becomes meaningless if they are not used when they are needed." Some experts believe that following nuclear tests in 1998, Pakistani military was emboldened by its nuclear deterrent cover to markedly increase coercion against India.
Volcanic bombs are extrusive igneous rocks ranging from the size of books to small cars, that are explosively ejected from stratovolcanoes during their climactic eruptive phases. These "bombs" can travel over away from the volcano, and present a risk to buildings and living beings while shooting at very high speeds (hundreds of kilometers/miles per hour) through the air. Most bombs do not themselves explode on impact, but rather carry enough force so as to have destructive effects as if they exploded.
The primary application to date has been military (i.e. nuclear weapons), and the remainder of explosions include the following:Only two nuclear weapons have been deployed in combat—both by the United States against Japan in World War II. The first event occurred on the morning of 6 August 1945, when the United States Army Air Forces dropped a uranium gun-type device, code-named "Little Boy", on the city of Hiroshima, killing 70,000 people, including 20,000 Japanese combatants and 20,000 Korean slave laborers. The second event occurred three days later when the United States Army Air Forces dropped a plutonium implosion-type device, code-named "Fat Man", on the city of Nagasaki. It killed 39,000 people, including 27,778 Japanese munitions employees, 2,000 Korean slave laborers, and 150 Japanese combatants. In total, around 109,000 people were killed in these bombings. (See "Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" for a full discussion). Nuclear weapons are largely seen as a 'deterrent' by most governments; the sheer scale of the destruction caused by a nuclear weapon has prevented serious consideration of their use in warfare, rendering the concept of total war completely useless.
The modern strategic bomber role appeared after strategic bombing was widely employed, and atomic bombs were first used in combat during World War II. Nuclear strike missions (i.e., delivering nuclear-armed missiles or bombs) can potentially be carried out by most modern fighter-bombers and strike fighters, even at intercontinental range, with the use of aerial refueling, so any nation possessing this combination of equipment and techniques theoretically has such capability. Primary delivery aircraft for a modern strategic bombing mission need not always necessarily be a heavy bomber type, and any modern aircraft capable of nuclear strikes at long range is equally able to carry out tactical missions with conventional weapons. An example is France's Mirage IV, a small strategic bomber replaced in service by the ASMP-equipped Mirage 2000N fighter-bomber and Rafale multirole fighter.
The Irgun committed the attack in response to Operation Agatha, known in Israel as "Black Saturday". British troops had searched the Jewish Agency on June 29 and confiscated large quantities of documents directly implicating the Haganah in the Jewish insurgency against Britain. The intelligence information was taken to the King David Hotel, where it was initially kept in the offices of the Secretariat in the southern wing. In order to destroy the incriminating documentation, the Irgun therefore determined to destroy that wing of the hotel.
It has been suggested that the police treatment of the siege as a terrorist attack may have led to errors such as making no attempt to negotiate with the gunman as would have been normal practice in other hostage situations. One commentator, Guy Rundle, questioned whether the police may have used a "crude rule" that "we don't negotiate with terrorists" that affected their procedures. It might also explain the use of high calibre weapons in a small enclosure against a lone gunman. These factors may have directly led to the deaths of Johnson and Dawson.
The "scorpio" is a torsion catapult powered by torsion springs, a kind of ballista. It used a system of torsion springs to propel the projectiles. Scorpions could be designed to fire stones or arrow-shaped missiles of various sizes. Scorpions could be large enough to damage city walls during sieges, but the term typically refers to the smaller battlefield artillery, which were manoeuvrable enough to be taken on campaign, were light enough to be deployed in numbers on the top levels of wooden siege towers, and compact enough to be used on parapets, earthworks, and palisades. Depictions of this kind depicted are on Trajan's Column. Though the scorpion, like other ballistae, could resemble large crossbows, their design and propulsion is quite different.
The U.S. officially classified all 3,649 military and civilian casualties and destruction of military property at Pearl Harbor as non-combatants as there was no state of war between the U.S. and Japan when the attack occurred. Joseph B. Keenan, the chief prosecutor in the Tokyo Trials, says that the attack on Pearl Harbor not only happened without a declaration of war but was also a treacherous and deceitful act. In fact, Japan and the U.S. were still negotiating for a possible peace agreement which kept U.S. officials very distracted when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. Keenan explained the definition of a war of aggression and the criminality of the attack on Pearl Harbor:
Blair ordered Operation Barras, a highly successful SAS/Parachute Regiment strike to rescue hostages from a Sierra Leone rebel group. Historian Andrew Marr has argued that the success of ground attacks, real and threatened, over air strikes alone was influential on how Blair planned the Iraq War, and that the success of the first three wars Blair fought "played to his sense of himself as a moral war leader". When asked in 2010 if the success of Palliser may have "embolden[ed] British politicians" to think of military action as a policy option, General Sir David Richards admitted there "might be something in that".
From the start of the War on Terror in 2001, Blair strongly supported the foreign policy of George W. Bush, participating in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was particularly controversial, as it attracted widespread public opposition and 139 of Blair's own MPs opposed it.
Efraín Ríos Montt utilized this method in the Guatemalan highlands in 1981-1982, though scorched-earth tactics were first used under the previous president Romeo Lucas García. Upon entering office, Ríos Montt implemented a new counterinsurgency strategy that called for the use of scorched earth to combat the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca rebellion, known as Plan Victoria 82 or, more commonly, by the nickname of the rural pacification elements of this strategy – Fusiles y Frijoles (Bullets and Beans). Ríos Montt's policies resulted in the death of thousands (most of them indigenous Mayans).
In World War I, Imperial Russian army forces created a zone of destruction by using a large-scale scorched-earth strategy during their retreat from the German army in the summer/autumn of 1915. The Russian troops, retreating along a front of more than 600 miles, destroyed anything that might be of use to their enemy, including crops, houses, railways and entire cities. They also forcibly removed huge numbers of people. In pushing the Russians back to their homeland, the German army gained a large area of territory from the Russian Empire (in an area that is today Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and Lithuania).
Aryeh Neier, the executive director of Americas Watch, wrote in a 1984 review about the scorched earth approach: "This may be an effective strategy for winning the war. It is, however, a strategy that involves the use of terror tactics—bombings, strafings, shellings and, occasionally, massacres of civilians."
Notable historic examples of scorched-earth tactics include the Russian army's strategy during the failed Swedish invasion of Russia, the failed Napoleonic invasion of Russia, William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea in the American Civil War, colonel Kit Carson's subjugation of the American Navajo Indians, Lord Kitchener's advance against the Boers, the initial Soviet retreat commanded by Joseph Stalin during the German Army's invasion of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, and the subsequent Nazi German retreat on the Eastern Front.