Defeat in Detail
22nd July 2024
‘Defeat in detail’ is a military tactic of destroying an enemy force by engaging its small, isolated units one by one with a larger force.
This is a great military theory – and proven successful – but it requires that the enemy present his forces in small, dispersed packets ready to be defeated. This generally only happens if one is fighting an utterly inept foe or if the enemy’s units are forced to disperse due to unrecoverable circumstances such as the rout of a main force or the end of a conflict when the enemy lacks the forces to mass and fight.
In other words, no sane military is going to willingly present its forces to the enemy in small, isolated units. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the Navy and Marines seem determined to do. They seem committed to a war doctrine of small, isolated, individually weak units that will, in some unexplained and unfathomable manner, not only survive and avoid defeat in detail but will go on to exert an effect greater than the woefully weak sum of its parts.