Introduction

Decisive victories are something that must be used only when fighting enemies you don't like or during practice battles between your teammates. If you don't like an enemy, for personal reasons or otherwise, you would theoretically want to beat them in the war by as much as possible. So, you'll want a decisive victory.

You should not try to gain these types of victories in skirmishes on the front lawn, or fun wars. These are meant to get you the least bit wet and soak the enemy as much as possible although sometimes soaking the enemy takes place as a secondary role.

Your Instrument

Your army is your instrument. It can be as well trained, well organized, well disciplined, and well armed as you wish. To achieve a decisive victory, large numbers do not help. In fact, sometimes they may hinder you because it takes more to control more and it may be harder to conceal them. Hence, it is easier to achieve a decisive victory with a couple of handpicked soldiers rather than a whole mass of regulars. However, you could use the masses for distractions & threats, etc.

The Approach

Human resistance is worse than any type of terrain. Swamps are not as formidable as human resistance. What I am getting at, is that if there is a gravel trail leading directly to your opponents base, but it has double the number of troops you can allow to go on an attack party guarding it, you should go on a route less direct, more concealed, and far less guarded.

When you prepare to attack, you want to travel light, but please make sure you bring extra water and cache them before you attack. I suggest 3-4 liters per person. Plus, have all of their weapons fully loaded, and air-loaded, plus three or four water balloons a person to. Put the water balloons & extra water in the primary cache, and put your back-up weapons spread out in a different one(s).

You must be very sneaky about your maneuvers. The Wise General should be wise enough to conceal their soldiers well enough so that the enemy doesn't even know that your troops have even left your base yet!

You must take a path that offers alternative objectives Napoleon I of France called this "a plan with branches". It is also imperative that you try as hard as possible to not charge into the enemy while their guard is up. Also, take the route the enemy would least expect you to take. At your command area, calm down, and think for a few MINUTES where you would guard if you where the enemy.

You should always take an indirect approach.

Tactical Offensive/Defensive

One of the steps to gaining a decisive victory is to upset the enemy's balance. This is difficult to explain, but it is best summarized as this: If the enemy does something that makes you do both of the following, they have upset your balance:

* Make you exclaim something like "Oh crap!" or "Blast!" and made you yell.
* Rush to where they just attacked.

Your goal should be to make the enemy do this. This can be accomplished by seizing something that they needed (like their water source) or flanked their rear, for instance.

When designing tactical offensives, it is always a good idea to first seize something like their armory or water supply with some skirmishers (lightly armed troops) and then have your actual fighting troops pop out somewhere else once their troops are in deep fighting your skirmishers.

Sun Tzu said, "do not let other men compel you, you must compel other men. Many other strategists have seconded that motion by claiming, the most effective method of warfare is one that lures or frightens the opponent into a false move, so that his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow."

The average water war commander may send his troops out at first sight of enemy soldiers. You could use this to your advantage. You could pretend to put troops only armed with backup weapons within 100-250 feet of the enemy's base. But when they get within firing range, pull out the big guns from hiding.

However, 99.8% of the time, you can get the enemy to be on the offensive by displaying some sort of weakness or profit for the enemy to attack. 99.8% of the time, you can get the enemy by going on defense by making annoying, small, guerilla raids on their base. You must do this all over the base to get them to disperse their forces that is, on the flanks and the rear at least. Or, you can attack something more economic, such as their water supply or commander or line of retreat (assuming they are attacking your base or you have already drawn them out far enough from their base).

Isolation & Concentration

You could also apply to old maxim of divide and conquer. This generally works when you are outnumbered. A British admiral by the name of Lord Nelson used this as the basis of his naval tactics. When he was outnumbered (sometimes by two to one), he would try to flank the sides or rear of an enemy fleet so that he could concentrate all of his firepower on one ship before fire could be returned. When fire was returned, or his objective was achieved, he would back out.

Sometimes, he would draw away part of the force and achieve what is called local numerical superiority. For instance, if there where 28 ships against his 20, he drew away ten of them and achieved a local numerical superiority of 2:1.

If you can do this in water wars, it works great. However, flanking an enemy doesn't work as well physically as it does in the real army. However, it does help upset the enemy's physiological balance.

Water balloon launchers work great at long-range concentration. I suggest each squad or army should have at least one or two of those WB launchers that require two to three users and fire more than 200 yards.

Intelligence & Recon

It is absolutely essential that you know your enemy before you attack them! You can use lightly armed scouts, and even spies should you have a big enough water war. Try and find out the enemies numbers, defenses, weapons, base location (if you don't already know it), and other critical stuff like that which you need to form an adequate strategical plan before the battle with spies. Any other information you might need has to be obtained through field scouting. Have fun, kids!

Guerilla Warfare

Guerilla warfare is basically a hit-and-run strategy. It has much to do with camouflage and stealth. The optimal environments for guerrillas are dense trees (especially pine trees) that are tall. This should help make the woods even darker. Then, guerrillas should have the art of camouflage down. They should have the best camouflage they can. They also should not mind at all crawling on the ground among insects, dirt, annoying weeds, and pine needles.

The two most important maxims to remember about guerilla campaigns are i) Divide and conquer (see above isolation & concentration), and ii) Dispersion. It is pointless to concentrate all of your guerrilla attacks upon one thing because eventually they will learn [hopefully]. Thus, for your guerilla attacks to have the biggest effect, it must have a big target net.

Deception

"all warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive, when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder & crush him."

--Sun Tzu
The Art of War

Sun Tzu hit the nail on the head when we said that. Deception is probably one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, that a Wise General must remember in warfare especially of the liquid kind.

Many of us may have heard of Emperor Justinian of the Byzantine Empire in the 500 A.D. But, do you recall the actual man responsible for the Byzantine Empires expansion? Probably not his name was Belisarius. He's not very famous among commoners or light military historians. You have to search deep to get information on him and one of the last places you'd look would be on this web site about water blasters.

Anyway, Justinian was jealous of Belisarius, and so he gave Belisarius a small army of a little more than 9,700 troops to defend Jerusalem, now the richest city in the east, against the imperious & powerful Persian Empire. The Persians had a 200,000-man army. So, Belisarius built a fortification upon a point on the Persians route and fooled the Persians into thinking he had stumbled upon a fortress of a great and powerful army. The Persians had only two options because if they kept going, the fortress would cut off their communication and the great army would flank their rear and they would be crushed, or they could turn around and try again another day.

He also instructed the soldiers out side of the fortress to spread out and keep moving at all times so as to magnify their numbers. The natural carefree behavior of the troops and Belisarius's light air attitude helped deepen this by making the enemy think that Belisarius had nothing to worry about. Then, he also had some of his cavalry make little, annoying raids upon the Persians rear. This made the Persian commander, with almost twenty times the strength of Belisarius; make a hurried retreat back to Persia. That must've made him feel embarrassed when he found out how big the great army really was!

Hence, the Persian Empire, whom could've easily crushed Belisarius, was defeated with out a drop of blood spilled all thanks to deception.

A key thing to remember about deceiving your enemy is what impression you want to make. Do you want to appear strong, or weak? Typically, you want to appear the opposite of what you really are (i.e. if you're strong, pretend to be weak and vice-versa).

Pretending to be weak means hiding your main weapons in a place that is well concealed yet easy to access and coming within enemy vision and wielding your back-up weapons and trying to act foolish by wasting your ammunition and not following orders and screaming and yelling and talking about crud and getting into fights with your soldiers.