With the development of military equipment toward refinement, informatization, and unmannedness, the gap between the combat capabilities of the armed forces of poor and weak small countries and the world's large countries is getting wider and wider.
However, a while ago, in the absence of air power, the Afghan Taliban successfully controlled most of the country and marched into Kabul with great force, relying only on ground troops.
And the embarrassment of the withdrawal of us troops can't help but remind people of a very vivid sentence - imperialism fled with its tail between its legs.
This makes people wonder why imperialism, with such advanced weapons and tactical tactics, cannot always defeat the seemingly fragmented guerrillas. In particular, the US military, which has always paid attention to the supremacy of air firepower, large-scale electronic warfare suppression, and dealing with the poorly equipped civilian armed forces in the ravines, is it not a drizzle, why did it take 20 years, 2.26 trillion US dollars, the Afghan regime changed from the Taliban to the Taliban?
From the urban side, originally, a large part of the Afghan army's salaries were borne by the Pentagon. However, at the beginning of this year, when the US government announced that it was going to withdraw, it chose to directly throw up its hands, and the responsibility for paying military salaries fell coldly to the Afghan government. However, the unprepared Afghan government could not come up with a budget in this regard, and the salaries of officers and soldiers could only be dragged on for months.
To make matters worse, along with the U.S. military, there were also supporting U.S. defense contractors. As a result, the Afghan government forces with advanced equipment immediately fell into the dilemma of unable to maintain armaments and insufficient weapons and ammunition.
The government forces equipped with weapons in the United States must rely on the United States to transfuse blood in real time, otherwise they will collapse immediately
Here, there are no wages, and the weapons are paralyzed; over there, the Taliban have released a "recruitment" policy - as long as the government forces take the initiative to "surrender their weapons", they can get 5,000 Afghan yuan (a total of 400 yuan) for the road, and then they will not be blamed.
Coupled with the fact that the ideological and organizational construction of the Afghan government forces in peacetime is sloppy, as a result, the Taliban have encountered almost no decent resistance in urban areas and have advanced smoothly.
Moreover, Afghanistan, a pre-industrial society with a very low level of urbanization and a predominantly rural area and population, has a strong Taliban rear.
A father in northern Afghanistan is riding home on a donkey with his children
However, what is more noteworthy is the special geographical environment here - the mountainous valley.
Afghanistan's plateaus and mountains account for 4/5 of the country's area, while the rest of the sporadic plains are almost deserts.
Historically, of all the modes of land combat, the world has recognized as the harshest and most difficult combat environment, that is, mountain warfare, especially plateau mountain warfare.
The main reason why mountain warfare is difficult to fight is that most of the modern equipment, including air power and ground armor, is difficult to play a role here, and it is even easy to be used as a target first. In this case, most of the time, in order to seize the point and transport supplies, the only way to rely on the model of people + small arms is to rely on a lot of animal power - donkeys and mules.
Between people and donkeys, deep feelings
What is very telling is the donkey unit of the US military in the 21st century.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. Rangers, who had long since abolished their horses, once again took the initiative to cooperate with the donkey and became the "Rangers" who pulled the reins.
In terms of riding donkeys to catch cars, the US military is quite serious, he once collected donkeys in many ways, established a donkey school in the Sierra Nevada Mountains similar to the terrain of Afghanistan, and concentrated on training THE US military to ride donkeys and drive animal power vehicles.....
This is because in the mountainous environment of the Afghan plateau, many areas belong to karst landforms, like a labyrinth of caves scattered through the mountains, resulting in many blind spots for observation and combat, and the militants are easy to hide - the US military is in the open, the Taliban are in the dark, and the battlefield is in a translucent state to the Taliban.
In this environment, it is difficult for armored forces to drive in, even if they drive in, their mobility is greatly reduced, and they are easily ambushed from both sides, and because of the limited pitch angle, the armor cannot effectively return fire, and can only be passively beaten.
To make matters worse, air power is often whipped beyond its reach.
The Taliban have been hiding in caves to observe secretly, and what they have is time;
On the US side, the fixed-wing flight mechanism has a short time to air, and most of the time it can only strike at the "point target", and you have to hurry up after the fight. Even if it is a large-scale carpet bombing, blowing up the mountain, the Taliban hiding in the cave will not be greatly affected, and it will still be alive and well.
Such a cave is very suspicious
In this regard, the Soviets tried it.
Later, Dudayev, the first-generation leader of the Russian Chechen rebels, drove a pattern bomber on his Muslim "brother" on the battlefield of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and carried out carpet bombing, but it still had any effect.
What's more, the activity cost of the fixed-wing fighter is extremely high, one minute is the cost of a car, its activity is only for high-value targets, every day to drive out with those who hide in caves wearing slippers, take AK's scattered soldiers to go back and forth, the cost performance is too low.
Then, the relatively low-cost helicopter gunship, it is still difficult to efficiently bomb the militants in the ravine, and the survival rate is still very worrying.
In the American movie "First Blood 3", Rambo rides a horse into a natural cave to escape soviet helicopter bombing
In terms of climate, The windy sand in Afghanistan is large, which can cause some trouble for helicopter take-offs, landings and flights; more tragically, because the helicopter's relatively low speed and altitude relative to fixed-wing aircraft make it vulnerable to ambush.
Some common low-cost weapons, such as anti-aircraft machine guns, small-caliber anti-aircraft guns, RPGs, and even grenades, can pose a great threat to helicopters, making the US military have to "black hawk fall" without moving.
Moreover, whether it is the Soviet Army in the 80s or the American Army in the 21st century, their helicopters have always been the daily ambush targets of guerrillas.
Guerrillas often launched undulating attacks as helicopters landed or took off — laying positions (usually valley terrain) in hidden locations around the helicopter landing area in advance, secretly forming a tight fire encirclement. When helicopters take off and land, these firing positions pour out a lot of light weapons fire and RPG rockets.
Helicopters that were ambushed
More than three decades ago, when the guerrillas tossed the Soviet army, which claimed to be fulfilling its "international obligations," it was already playing well.
By the beginning of the 21st century, the Americans under the banner of "war on terror" came again. Although the U.S. military holds more advanced weapons and equipment and more rigorous and full preparations than the Soviet army, they can still barely control the big cities, and the Taliban that drill the ravines still have no way, spending an average of $100 million a day, and can only look at the mountains and sigh.
It can be seen from this that to fight mountain warfare, it is mainly necessary to rely on people and light weapons to go deep into it and toss around.
As mentioned earlier, modern armored transport vehicles are often helpless in the face of the rugged and dangerous mountain environment of Afghanistan, and the risk of helicopters being shot down is also very high.
What's worse is that they often face the dilemma of "looking at the mountain and running a dead horse" - from the map, it seems to be quite close, as if it is a mountain to reach, and it is really stupid to walk - the mountain with a straight line distance of five kilometers has to walk for almost a day.
Especially in the later US army, the soldiers also had to carry forty-five kilograms of field equipment, relying on their own "11 road" to cross the mountains and mountains, and no matter how fierce the people were, it was difficult to eat.
In 2016, the U.S. military carried about 120 pounds (about 54 kg) per soldier.
At this time, the small donkey with strong endurance and climbing more and more rugged terrain comes in handy - put equipment and supplies on the donkey, lead the donkey to the mountain, and then when it reaches the designated location, it will circle the enemy. With donkey comrades-in-arms, not only do they save physical strength on the way, but they are also quiet (specially trained to restrain the habit of regular chirping), and it is not easy to expose.
For example, a Soviet veteran who fought in Afghanistan put it very clearly: "An Afghan resistance fighter with a donkey is more effective than a Soviet tank with 3 soldiers." ”
Later, the US military called the donkey "The Helicopter of Afghanistan".
Needless to say, the camouflage of the soldiers is quite "harmonious" with the coat color of the donkey.
Originally, the US military also felt that the animal power car was too dirty, and once developed a "mechanical dog" and a "mechanical donkey". But in actual combat, it was found that they not only had poor adaptability, the failure rate was quite high, and the noise was very noisy to use, and finally they put down their bodies and went to seriously learn the craft of dealing with small donkeys.
During this period, in addition to the Aforementioned US Military "Donkey School" in Nevada, the National Army Strategic Delivery Center set up by the Americans in Afghanistan also shouldered the work of training military donkeys. There, at least 200,000 donkeys have received "modern military training" from the U.S. military, can understand bilingual commands, and do not scream with excitement because they are hungry or frightened.
Having said all this, everyone must also see that although the mainstream of modern warfare pays attention to preemptive air strikes and non-contact combat, in some special environments, terrible nature is matched with unusually tenacious opponents, and the process and final result of the war are often quite embarrassing - the resounding name of "Imperial Cemetery", which is not blown.