on Weaver, after he failed to appear in Court for his "sawed off shotgun" charges, even when they KNEW where to find him. The 30 year Jap "holdout" (ww2) said he survived all the searches for him because he never spent more than 24 hours in the same area. He didn't necessarily move far, but a mile is along ways in the jungle. In thick cover, it's easy to miss seeing a prone man that you nearly stepped uoon.
Guys are WEAK on math. If you are searching for prone man, wearing a field-made "ghillie suit" (poncho, hammock, local vegetation) you can't walk much faster than 1 mph and you can't look at more than about 10 yd wide strip in front of you. 10yds widex1/4 mile is one acre. So you can search 4 acres an hour (maybe, if the area is fairly flat and open) There's 640 acres in ONE square mile. By yourself, you can search at most 50 of them in a day. If it's thick cover, you can't really search 10 acres a day, and that's if the guy AINT dug a shallow depression, so that there's not even a "hump" where he's laying. So you'd need at least a dozen man squad to search 1 square mile (in one day), and you might well need a 50 man platoon. All it will take to elude you, is for the guy to be 3/4 mile to one side, and he's beyond your search. At night of course, he can be 10-40 miles gone, (depending upon terrain and his fitness) That's IF he didn't make or find a raft, and get on the river, didn't find a bicyle, horse, etc. If he manages to get a vehicle, of course, he can be hundreds of miles gone in one night. and he doesn't need to be more than 50 miles gone to elude any "local" search.
Nobody has enough manpower to do much of a search at all, really, not even with dogs and infared and thermal, for a man who is properly equipped. With a Mylar bag, he can hide his body-heat, and with subsonic ammo and a can, he can make the searchers HATE the job of finding him, killl the dog handlers, and the dogs, etc.
Guys are WEAK on math. If you are searching for prone man, wearing a field-made "ghillie suit" (poncho, hammock, local vegetation) you can't walk much faster than 1 mph and you can't look at more than about 10 yd wide strip in front of you. 10yds widex1/4 mile is one acre. So you can search 4 acres an hour (maybe, if the area is fairly flat and open) There's 640 acres in ONE square mile. By yourself, you can search at most 50 of them in a day. If it's thick cover, you can't really search 10 acres a day, and that's if the guy AINT dug a shallow depression, so that there's not even a "hump" where he's laying. So you'd need at least a dozen man squad to search 1 square mile (in one day), and you might well need a 50 man platoon. All it will take to elude you, is for the guy to be 3/4 mile to one side, and he's beyond your search. At night of course, he can be 10-40 miles gone, (depending upon terrain and his fitness) That's IF he didn't make or find a raft, and get on the river, didn't find a bicyle, horse, etc. If he manages to get a vehicle, of course, he can be hundreds of miles gone in one night. and he doesn't need to be more than 50 miles gone to elude any "local" search.
Nobody has enough manpower to do much of a search at all, really, not even with dogs and infared and thermal, for a man who is properly equipped. With a Mylar bag, he can hide his body-heat, and with subsonic ammo and a can, he can make the searchers HATE the job of finding him, killl the dog handlers, and the dogs, etc.
