We Have Reserves: Difference between revisions

** [[Karmic Death|Whereupon the longbowmen shot all of]] ''[[Karmic Death|them]]'' [[Karmic Death|to death, too.]]

* Some [[WWI]] commanders would shoot those attempting to retreat without orders, or who refused to go over the trenches. It was a sort of preemptive punishment for treason. Although the number of men so shot is grossly overexaggerated, there were men who were under ''two'' suspended sentences of death for desertion or sleeping at their posts. The armies on all sides got so sick of this that many of them mutinied late in the war and refused to take place in any further assaults on the enemy, as it always just resulted in piles of bodies and minimal progress.

* During the First Gulf War, Saddam Hussein believed that the lesson from the [[Vietnam War]] was that Americans wouldn't support a war that would cost them 10,000 casualitescasualties. He, meanwhile, had hundreds of thousands to spare and none of his subjects could protest the attrition. It turns out that Vietnam was a very different set of circumstances, and Hussein [[Curb Stomp Battle|suffered as many as 30,000 dead]] and his armies were all but obliterated, while only inflicting 392 deaths on the enemy.

* In nature, reproductive strategies are split between animals that have a small number of young and raise them carefully, and ones that have lots of young (or, typically, lay lots of eggs) and don't care for them at all, trusting that there are enough that ''some'' will survive. The latter strategy is a lot less energy-intensive and is generally used by more basic and short-lived species, while the former is particularly common among some birds and nearly all the larger mammals..

* A more subtle phenomenon happens in a war between comparable powers: that is powers capable of copying or countering each other, rather then having an inimitable weapon like the [[Hordes From the East]] did, when one starts with a performance advantage and one with a material advantage. The casualty rise on the first will sooner or later reach a point where it will counter the performance, because for instance officers will bleed off and the turnover will include large amounts of [[New Meat]]. In the meantime the second power will start to [[Surpassed the Teacher|learn from]], [[Sink or Swim Mentor|the First]],; the excess of officers who have [[HAD to Be Sharp|seen and survived]] the first power's tricks will end up promoted. As a result performance changes until the materially superior power is also qualitatively superior.

** For instance, in the beginning of the [[World War 2II|Pacific War]], Japan was unquestionably superior in quality (it was also superior in material actually available but more was waiting to come on line for the Allies). They won a number of spectacular victories. In late 1942 through 1943 the odds were even but the Allies were getting better in both quality and quanityquantity. And after that the Allies pretty much had the whip hand.

* In the Strategic Bombing Campaign over Europe in [[World War 2II]] the US Eighth Air Force won by finally figuring out that trying to hit a "pinpoint" target from a heavy bomber was like trying to hit a nearby telephone line from a passing subway train by throwing a golf ball while being hit on the head with a golf club (and in any case the bomb was likely to land on some poor schmuck, which is one reason they headed for cities where there was a multiplicity of poor schmucks). In any event, tactics were changed to make the bombers the bait and provoke as many dogfights as possible on the assumption that Germans would run out of planes and pilots first.

*** There is an indirect relation between the two concepts. As a weaker army starts to be unable to take the stress of combat it will be tempted to draw on reserves until it is out. "We have reserves" really means "they have none." The result to use a gross allegory is rather like a starving man dissolving his muscle when all the fat is gone. When that point comes however there is no more need for attrition because the superior force can do basically whatever it wants to with it's reserves, and what it wants to do will usually be to launch a blitzkrieg. It is to be noted that there are all kinds of ways to arrange this some both more humane (so to speak) and more [[Guile Hero|clever and artistic]] then merely killing off [[Cannon Fodder]]. For instance in [[World War II]] The Allies made an effort to lure as many enemy units as possible to be out of place doing nothing when the blow fell, thus effectively getting the same results as a Verdun wannabee. This did not always work of course and there was a lot of hard fighting to do in any event. But that shows the link between [[We Have Reserves]] and the actual use of reserves-as well as how cleverness can subvert this trope.

[[Category:We Have Reserves{{PAGENAME}}]]