CHAPTER 7

THE TYPICAL INVASION: PART FOUR: SHOOT TO KILL, TAKE NO PRISONERS AND TO HELL WITH NEGOTIATIONS

This next point covers most of you. It certainly covers the Gorgonians, the Sondrak and Dronn and his group.

Mindless violence. It may sound ironic to criticize mindless violence when we’re talking about invading a planet, but let’s review each of your attacks.

You began by surrendering the uncontested high ground of space, you threw away the element of surprise, and your first strikes looked flashy, but did very little real damage to Earth military capability.

Incredibly, despite all that, each of you still had a chance to claim a quick victory. Your first strikes were impressive. So impressive, they might have convinced the human governments that further resistance was futile.

But we’ll never know.

None of you took the opportunity to contact the planet’s leaders and offer a temporary cease fire while you work out the details of surrender. You didn’t even make a temporary cease fire to consolidate your positions.

Instead, once your so-called invasions finally got around to the business of actually invading you shot at everything and everyone and spared no one in your path. Did you think taking prisoners was pointless? Don’t prisoners have vital information like, oh, the location of the remaining military units? Can’t captured generals order other troops to lay down their arms? Can’t captured leaders issue a formal surrender?

It looks like you were so confident in victory you didn’t need the Earthlings to surrender. At first, that might seem reasonable. You had the energy weapons. You were burning everything in your path. Your enemies must have seemed like vermin beneath your feet. Right up to the point where the humans blew you the hell up.

Let’s pull back a little bit and talk big picture. There is a psychological malady that occurs during wartime. It usually infects the civilian population of a nation or planet engaged in a war, and it has certain stages. During the first stage, people convince themselves that the enemy won’t fight back at all, that they’ll crumble during the first shots. In the second stage, they believe that, even though enemy is putting up a fierce fight, they will eventually lose because they are somehow morally inferior. They won’t lose because of superior strategy and tactics, but due to some character flaw. The final stage usually occurs after the first two stages are proven to be ridiculous. The subject turns into a raving genocidal freak convinced that the war would be over if the army would just massacre everyone they came across and laid waste to the countryside. The final stage is usually suicide, as the “morally inferior” enemy marches through the capital.

Keep in mind this is a mental state that normally afflicts amateurs. You are supposed to be professionals.

“Take no prisoners!” is the call of an amateur. Any wannabe warrior on my side of the lines starts yelling that, I make sure he takes a trip to the infirmary. If I’m in a really forgiving mood he won’t lose a limb.

With these previous invasions it was like you guys were firing your weapons just to use them. You should only have been shooting at anything that was shooting back, period. What else should you have been doing? How about, you know, capturing something? Vital points, key terrain features, important structures. And why do we do that? So our enemies will be in such a bad position that they have no choice but retreat or surrender.

But if you’re not interested in surrender, why even bother with position or high ground? Why not just sit in one spot and let the Earthlings keep coming at you in waves? Let them keep trying to destroy you until they succeed! Which is what they do eventually. This attitude of “no mercy” and “take no prisoners” leads to defective military thinking. It’s wasting valuable time and energy on people and objects that no longer pose any threat.

The worst thing is that this attitude usually instills in the enemy the opposite of the desired effect. A brutal, “no prisoners” campaign can briefly unnerve some people; the key word being: briefly. In those moments immediately after the slaughter, you can convince some to surrender, if you offer terms. The rest will fight even harder.

But if you offer no terms, then surrender is off the table. The Earthlings will fight to the last because you’ve given them no alternative. Rather than a quick and easy victory, you’ve bought yourselves a long and brutal struggle.

And remember, you’re the ones who are light years away from reinforcements and resupply.