Reply to post: Re: When did Scorched Earth ever work?

TSMC and China: Mutually assured destruction now measured in nanometers, not megatons

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: When did Scorched Earth ever work?

Scorched Earth worked very successfully against the French at the Lines of Torres Vedras in 1810, because the French Army of the time didn't bring any food with them, relying on stealing it from the locals.

Spotting the obvious issue with this approach, Wellington built a set of defensive lines that would force the French to lay siege to them and then systematically evacuated everybody (and their food) to behind the lines. This resulted in ~25k French soldiers starving to death, and the 30k starving survivors that staggered back to Spain were finished as an Army, which ultimately let Wellington push them back out of Spain into France.

The Emperor Alexander copied Wellingtons basic strategy on a much larger scale, with the addition of using profusive numbers of Russian cavalry to prevent small detachments from spreading out in combination with major battles. It didn't quite go to plan; the French took Moscow expecting the Russians to surrender, and were a bit surprised when the Russians simply pulled back and waited for them to starve. The French lost about half a millionish men; nobody really knows how many died. (including the French, as their record keeping was on a par with their logistics)

Amusingly, when the British army invaded France the (French) locals hid their food from their own army who would take it without compensation, and then sold it to the British army. See the moral of the story? Relying upon theft can end up going very badly. See Ukraine and Russia's invasion thereof.

Taiwan being ready to blow it's own fabs to bits has a deterrent effect, in that if China's only reason for invading is to invade and steal a small number of high value things, then having a plan for blowing the high value things to bits would remove any benefit to be had from invading, and so might have more of a military benefit to preventing an invasion than the potential number of people that might be killed. (Since the Chinese leaders may do a Putin, and not care about how many bodies the invasion generates if they win)

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