I guess this hijacks the thread but....
I was a mortarman (Indirect Fire Crewman for the Army) I spent the first six years of my career as a Fire Direction Computer back in the days when we did all the ballistic and meteorological computations by hand or with some special slide rule style firing tables, some charts and other firing tables in book form. We were the computers.....
The tactical world has an entire vocabulary of it's own in which many words or phrases have very specific meanings that usually don't mean exactly what somebody outside of the combat arms community would assume.
After adjusting artillery or mortar fire onto the target we don't "beat the s*@t out of it", we (please insert George Carlin's voice here.....) "fire for effect".
Depending on the target and desired effect, the fires for effect might be illumination rounds, smoke. high explosive etc. Then there are a wide variety of fuzing options. Depending on the target size, population or shape the number of rounds might be 1 or 300. So "fire for effect" and "desired effect" become easier to work with in the abstract.
My professional preference for dismounted troops and thin skinned vehicle (truck) was to "shake 'em and bake 'em" with a mix of high explosive set for "super quick" or "proximity" fuzing and white phosphorus. Very few units have the toughness to keep working on their own mission when they get hit with that combination. If they stay on their feet or in their trucks the HE will get them, if they drop to the ground the WP will fry them. Note that "shake 'em and bake 'em" is not exactly a doctrinal term
Tankers "service" targets by hitting them with the "main gun" or machine guns (co-axial or the flex mount on the turret roof) depending on what the target is. The "main gun" is the cannon, the co-ax is the machine gun that shoots parallel (co-axial) to the main gun and is slaved to it for aiming.
We don't need to wipe out an enemy unit to "destroy" it. We need to inflict enough casualties in a short enough time to stop it from doing what its commander wants it to do and keep it from interfering with what our commander wants to do. If we do that, it's "destroyed" for our operational purposes. Sometimes the other guys are wiped out, sometimes we just need to inflict 20-30% casualties in a few minutes.
If we "clear in zone" we always seek to kill ,capture or displace every single one of the enemy in a zone. That is more like what an outsider would expect from the term "destroy".
Combat arms troops usually don't like to refer to being heavily outnumbered. You are more likely to hear a term like "We will be operating in a target rich environment" at the operations order. We heard that a lot in reference to the Warsaw Pact forces in West Germany as in "If the Third Mongolian Hoard crosses the border and comes through the Fulda Gap we will be in a target rich environment" Jeez, Captain, just say it-"We will be badly outnumbered!"
The list of doctrinal terms and graphics fills a book about 1-1/4" thick.
Lance
