(This is a reprinted article by Donovan Walls) (2020)
Human beings aren’t so different from the many types of creatures that roam the planet, One of the universal traits shared by so many species is this. Fight or flight or freeze.
In a situation that presents danger, living creatures will perform one of these actions. Fight, meaning we leap into action and confrontation. Flight, meaning we try to remove ourselves from the danger. Freeze, where we are facing an unfamiliar situation and do nothing.
As the last several thousand years of recorded history has shown, humans have yet to grow beyond these basic instincts. It’s a part of who we are.
The brilliance comes in exploiting this mindset in a military situation. Consider a classic military tactic.
Encirclement.
The idea of encirclement is simple. Use your forces to surround an enemy and isolate them. Cut off their means of supplying themselves with material and reinforcement. Strangle them as you make sure that you don’t run low on supplies. It’s classic thinking for military warfare, especially in regards to sieges.
But I want you to think of that in terms of what I just told you. “Fight, flight or freeze”.
If you take away an enemy’s ability to retreat, you are actually giving them a subtle advantage.
This might be hard to understand for people who don’t expect to face life or death situations. Facing a scenario where you have a high chance of dying without chance of survival is less stressful than a situation where you might survive. Why is this? Because it’s less complicated.
if you make your enemy think they can’t escape, you remove the “flight” option. And you have increased the chances of them choosing “Fight”.
I’ll use a real world example to explain this better. Pirates.
Now back in the days when piracy was men in giant wooden ships sailing through the Caribbean, there were several unspoken rules of piracy. One of the most important of which was FLAGS. A lot of successful pirates had their own heraldry, much like Noble Houses of Europe.
Pirates would hide their flags from plain sight. They would only unfurl their banners when stalking targeted ships. They would suddenly spring the flag from cover, displaying to their prey their intent to rob and plunder.
Now if you were some poor merchant ship who was suddenly ambushed on the high seas, your greatest fear was seeing THIS flag.
This is the Pirate flag of the infamous Edward Low
If you saw a RED Pirate flag unfurled that meant you were in serious trouble. Pirates who used red flags intended no mercy for their prey and were going to kill and do unspeakable things to whomever they captured, even if they surrendered and begged for their lives. Red flag pirates were torturous, murdering bastards who would probably laugh as they set you on fire or tossed you into the sea with weights tied to your ankles.
What you wanted to see was THIS pirate flag.
Pirate flags that had white (or lacked red generally) were from pirate crews who were more reasonable. Generally if you surrendered to these pirates (either immediately or after a short battle), the worse they would do is steal your valuables, most of your food and maybe abduct some of your crew. After that they’d let you go peacefully. They would usually kill you only if you fought to try to stop them. If you happened to be belligerent and refused to give them your supplies, they would probably torture you or threaten to torture you.
Defeating your opponent isn’t just skill at arms. There’s a mental component to combat and sometimes you can defeat an opponent before you even cross swords.
If you are a pirate with a red flag, here is what your opponent is going to be thinking.
“Okay that pirate ship is coming for me. If I surrender or do nothing, they are definitely going to kill me. If I fight back, they MIGHT kill me. But if I fight back, maybe I’ll kill them before they kill me. I might even be able to win and go home. I think I’m going to fight back.”
If you are a pirate with a non-red flag, here is what your opponent will be thinking.
“Okay that pirate ship is coming for me. If I surrender or do nothing they are probably going to let me go free if I let them steal everything. If I fight back I might be able to win. If I fight back though, I could lose, be captured and then tortured to death in front of friends. Combat is unpredictable, I could be killed fighting before the battle is over. If I die I won’t be able to go home, get a drink, make love to a woman and live a peaceful life. I think I’ll take my chances with surrendering.”
Contrary to what you may think, it is a poor sign of a warrior to seek battle over capitulation. Fighting is unpredictable. On the high seas, pirates defined success by captured treasures, not the number of people they killed. Sailors knew this. This is why when pirate offered fair terms their enemies surrendered almost immediately.
If you back a man into a corner, he will fight to survive. If you back a man into a corner and give him a way to escape unharmed, there’s a good chance that man will take the escape route.
This is why professional armies don’t massacre their prisoners. It’s why armies take prisoners in the first place. If you have an enemy surrounded, that enemy faces a choice. Fight and likely die or surrender and likely live. It’s much harder to have a man fight knowing he can surrender than fight until he stops breathing.
Facing death when it’s the only option is easy. Facing death when you want to survive is hard.
Now here comes the brutal part.
If your goal is to annihilate your enemy, in body and in spirit, then as your enemy runs through that corridor of escape you strike HARD. Your enemy thinks they are safe. That they still have a clear path to run away. Then you attack them at their most unsuspecting. Take advantage of their weakness.
This is a tactic that is used in battles of annihilation. Where the objective is to annihilate enemy spirit, not just manpower. There are countless examples of this used in history. But there is one example that chills my very soul when I think back on it.
It was the year 1812. Napoleon had just realized he couldn’t conquer Russia. Napoleon’s campaign to dominate the largest European kingdom had ground to a halt. He could win on the battlefield, but an extended conflict would ultimately accomplish nothing. The Russians refused to surrender, even when their own capital had been seized and the Tsar had fled. Facing an impossible situation, Napoleon ordered a withdrawal.
Now the Russians could have counterattacked, encircled Napoleon and tried to capture him with their superior numbers and knowledge of the land. What they did was worse. They let the French walk back the way they came.
The French army marched back through lands they had already conquered. These areas had been picked clean of food. In their places was less than nothing. Napoleon’s grand army, the largest on Earth at that time, was cut off from supplies. This was literally as the Russian winter was beginning.
But they could still escape. The Russians were only behind them. So they started walking back.
[KEY: Yellow line represents French invasion into Russia. Black line indicates retreat. The thickness of the line represents amount of men.]
All the while, the Russians bled them with raids. Mounted horsemen, Irregular militias. Pin prick attacks from a thousand directions. But never a concentrated military attack. The Russians kept bleeding the French. Bit by bit by bit.
The French couldn’t turn around and retaliate. The invasion had failed and now all they wanted to do was go home. They thought they would be safe if they just kept walking west. And they kept getting more and more hungry. The weather became worse and worse.
This is when the Grand Army began to break down. Deserters abandoned the army in droves. Their equipment was insufficient for fighting in winter and broke down in unrelenting cold. And the Russians kept circling their flanks. Never surrounding them. Never stopping them from retreating.
So the French kept walking west. There was still a chance they probably thought. If they endured a few more days, a few more hundred miles, they could make it. They kept weakening themselves. Structure and order were undone as desperation infected the French ranks. They lost whatever advantage they may have had fighting the Russians directly and weakness began to suffocate them. Hunger, disease and deprivation on a massive scale.
The retreat from Russia lasted from October to December of 1812. By the time the Grand Army had entered friendly territory, they had been reduced to barely 20,000 emaciated survivors.
And that’s how you destroy an army of 700,000 men. You give them hope of escape.
Article by: Donovan Walls
