To: Technocrat
There are some very good merc outfits with African experience.
Sandline and Executive Outcomes come to mind, and there are probably a few former Selous Scouts around who might not be adverse to becoming the nucleous of a merc battalion.
But:
have you any thoughts on how the logistics would be handled?
The nearest seaport is in Mozambique and is 250 km from the Zim border and i know of no merc outfit that has a CV or LPH from which to launch a commando.
If Mozambique or South Africa would be willing to be a party to such an adventure, they would be better politically advised to do it themselves lest they be accused on cowtowing to a neocolonialist adventure.
Perhaps a trek across the Kalahari?
Sorry, but it is not going to happen.
The last time mercs were used was in Sierra Leone which is on the coast and also the mercs were hired by an African government. They were busily cutting a swath through the RUF insurgents when African and world opinion forced their removal
17 posted on
05/10/2002 1:49:53 PM PDT by
Clive
To: Clive
A fascinating technical problem. The engagement would have to take place in three phases - one long and two very short, lightning wide-area strikes.
The long phase would be infrastructure and force assessment, combined with gradual insertion of the mercs. The critical piece of this would be getting about twenty truckloads of ordinance and heavy equipment through the border, but appropriate bribes in Mozambique and a quick "action" at a Zim border crossing, which would be quickly forgotten in the current chaos, should do the trick. Keep your core assets around the heavy hardware, stored on three separate farms, and then use the intelligence you have gathered to plan phases two and three as soon as possible after you get the key hardware in.
In phase two, you must first disable all communications in the country and out of the country. Explosives teams should simultaneously destroy every major cell hub, TV tansmitter, and satellite uplink station of any significance. Jammers should be hooked to the local electrical grid and run continuously until the power goes out. I expect that in your intelligence gathering, you will have discovered that there are only about 5,000 key "war veterans" and about 200 core armed/trained spetznatz to assist the leadership, which might have as many as 20 key people. (Sure, there might be over 100,000 assets available to this control apparatus, but that's for phase three.) You would want to initiate the operation when those key assets were at minimum dispersal, to achieve maximum initial kill and confusion. I would probably use 20 10-man teams to clean out the biggest concentrations of WV in the countryside, giving each team a maximum of four hours to clean out as many targets as possible in their assigned regions. I would assign a ten man team to each of the 20 key people, and three to Mugabe (two to create maximum distraction and diversion). Assuming a 90% kill in phase two before dawn, you could then proceed to phase three.
In phase three, you set up your mobile radio and TV transmitters and tell the story your Psy-Ops people have determined will align the majority of the population with what has happened. Using the captured weapons of the war veterans, you turn over territory as quickly as possible to sympathizers, withdraw to Harare (excepting the twenty mobile teams which turn into quick response units), and defend the person you have chosen to lead the interim government. If the country is salvageable, things should get better from there.
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson