Cologne: Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own

... said Josef Stalin as his massive, but qualitatively inferior Red Army rolled the Nazis back all the way to Berlin even though they took massive casualties along the way.

Here's a new tidbit on the New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Cologne.

The men (who attacked the women), speaking Arabic and seemingly either drunk or high on drugs, moved around in large groups among a gathering of around 1,000 male migrants and deliberately targeted women. The men easily outnumbered the 190 police officers on duty, who were quickly overwhelmed.

5-1 odds can be dealt with only if you've got superior firepower and are willing to use it. If you're not willing to use it, it's light infantry close combat and overwhelming numbers will, well, overwhelm you.

Meanwhile, at the Mall St. Matthews in Kentucky, there was a similar situation.

Chain-reaction brawls involving up to 2,000 people erupted in one of Kentucky's largest malls Saturday night, forcing the entire mall and businesses in the surrounding area to shut down, police said.

In that case, there were 50 cops and 2,000 rioters. That's 40-1 odds. At that ratio, unless your superior firepower involves mass-effect, standoff weapons (think AC-130 gunships), you're toast. In fact, at that ratio, the last thing you want to do is draw your sidearms and fire. Escalating the situation is not a one-sided affair. As soon as the 2,000 think they`re threatened, it's going to go from a riot to a massacre followed by a sacking of the mall.

Bonus bit from Cologne:

The report by a senior officer added: ‘When we arrived [at the square] our vehicles were pelted with firecrackers. On the cathedral steps were a thousand people, mainly of immigrant background, who were indiscriminately throwing fireworks and bottles into the crowd.

‘Women literally had to run the gauntlet through the mass of drunk men in a way you can’t describe ….many came to officers shocked and crying to report sex assaults. We were unable to respond to all the offences. There were just too many.’

The Cologne attacks made me think of my previous objections to allowing the immigrants into Europe - you were essentially importing large numbers of enemy light infantry. Now we can see what the results of that look like.

Fortunately, we can count on the fact that the immigrants are to stupid to take any lessons from these attacks and see that with localized numerical superiority, they can get away with practically anything.

Err, we can count on that, can't we?

Wehrmacht soldiers in Russia, ca 1941. The finest army in the world at that time.
They lost.