The expressions of the Peters brothers showed resentment. "We weren't
jesting."
"Neither was I," Homer rapped. He looked around at the rest, including
Bey and Kenny. "What happens to a modern mechanized army when it runs
out of gasoline? What happens to a water-cooled machine gun when there
is no water? What use is a howitzer when the target is a single man in
ten acres of cover? Gentlemen, have any of you ever studied the
tactics of Abd-el-Krim or, more recently still, Tito? Bey, I assume
you have."
He had their attention.
"During the Second War," Homer continued, "this Yugoslavian Tito tied
up two Nazi army corps with a handful of partisans--guerrillas. The
most modern army in the world, the German Panzers, tried to ferret him
out for five years, and couldn't. There are other examples. The
Chinese operating against the Japs in the same war. Or one of the
classic examples is Abd-el-Krim destroying two different Spanish
armies in the Moroccan Rif in the 1920s. His barefoot men, armed with
rifles, took on Primo de Rivera's modernized Spanish armies and
trounced them."