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Old 11-08-2004, 02:10 PM   #1
Boromir88
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1420! MOSS an MUSE

In the ROTC program, the soldiers are taught these 8 "tactics" that could either help you in a war, or quite frankly hurt you. The acronym for these are MOSS and MUSE.

M-Mass
O-Offensive
S-Surprise
S-Secrecy

M-Manueverability
U-Unity
S-Service
E-Economics

Mass is the overwhelming of one's troups. Where a person simply tries to overwhelm their opposition by force. Offensive deals with of course being the "attacker" not the defender. Surprise is self-explanatory. Secrecy deals with keeping stuff from your enemy, keeping "private" messages, or information like where you're men are going, where you are stationed, where you are hiding an underground base, things like that.

Maneuverability, is like, how well you position your troups, sort of like "strategy," how you place your troops, and how "maneuverable" are they. Unity deals with the chain of command, knowing who your higher ranked officers are, and knowing that you have to respect them and follow their orders. Service simply means how "willing" are you to go out there and fight, maybe you might want to say "morale," are you willing to do this, or not. Economics deals with the supplies, the supply of money, ammo, weaponry, proper equitment...etc.

Now all these things can either hurt or help your chances when we are talking about a war. For example, you can try to use sheer numbers (mass) to overwhelm your opponent, but that isn't going to work all the time, maybe the other soldiers are "better trained" then you, or better equipped. For example, the battle of Thermopylae, 300 Spartans holding off a barage of Persian forces, I think we all pretty much know that story. We know the Spartans ended up losing, but point is it also deeply hurt the Persian army, by having to commit the amount of troops they did to finally defeat the Spartans.

Another quick example then I'll get to my discussion point. Secrecy, in order to communicate with other divisions, generals, whatever, you have to relay secret messages, sometimes you'll have to hide in a secret base. That's all good, because your opponent doesn't know where you are at. Problem is, if they ever get a hold of that "secret information," you're pretty much screwed.

So now onto my point. Analyzing certain battles of Middle-Earth, whether it be Pelennor fields, Siege of Minas Tirith, Helm's Deep (or even could be something form the Sil, like the fall of Gondolin). I would like to discuss how MOSS and MUSE, helps and hurts these battles, for either side. As a quick example.

The Morannon-Sauron see's this small host march out on his black gate, and he empties his land, and goes purely on the offensive, hoping to overwhelm them. However, Frodo and Sam happen to sneak in undetected, since there is nobody back in Mordor, and are able to complete the task, so being on the "offensive" ended up hurting Sauron more then it helped him. I hope you all get the point .

Last edited by Boromir88; 11-08-2004 at 02:13 PM.
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