Re: Retrograde skirmishers

>No... I don't think aircraft of any sort would qualify as
skirmishers in the
>sense I'm thinking, i.e. where you don't confront much of
anything head on
>and just hit and flee.  Fighters of whatever sort (whether in
real life or
>in FT) are very head-on war materials.

What sense are you thinking, then?  "Skirmishers", to my mind,
connotes relatively lightly armed units, faster than the
opposing units, which depend for survival on avoiding rather
than absorbing damage.

See also Archer Jones' book, the title IIRC is The Art of War in
the Western World.

>> Even had it been BB's, though, the Allies didn't win just by
>> figuring out how to sink them, they won by committing the
>> resource required.  Resources that would otherwise have gone
to
>> the ground war.
>
>No... it pretty much _was_ by just figuring out how to sink
them.  Destroyer
>escorts were so cheap that, even before entering the war, the
United States
>gave away a hundred of the suckers to Britain basically for
free.

(Snip description of North Atlantic campaign).
Sorry, that turns out not to be the case.  Figuring it out was
important, of course, but without the materiel, there would have
been nothing to apply the knowledge with.  The U boats didn't
start sinking just because some scientist said "Hey, here's a
blueprint for a device I call ASDIC."

If the US had 100 DDE's to give in exchange for base leases,
that doesn't mean they were free to the US, it just means we had
enough industrial capacity to build them.   One could argue that
the defeat of the U boat campaign in the Atlantic, and the
success of the sub campaign in the Pacific, was in both cases
simply a victory of the larger industrial capacity over the
smaller.  Along the lines of the Sherman vs Panther matchup--if
a the US loses 3 Shermans for each Panther the Germans lose, who
wins?  Answer--the US--because they build at a rate of 5 to 1.