Military
Judging from the quick and crushing victory in World War III, it can be safely assumed that the Yellow Empire has the most powerful military in the world. Their doctrine rests on defeating their enemy quickly through the use of surprise and overwhelming force, similar to German blitzkrieg tactics in World War II. After the initial victory, their military turns into an army of occupation; this leaves them vulnerable to guerrilla warfare from local partisans, who have more success against them than conventional armies have had.
The Yellow Army's technology is world-class. Jet propulsion and atomic weaponry, in particular, have been extended throughout the entire Yellow military, even though both technologies were very new at the time the books were published.
The following is a partial list of Yellow weapons used in the comics.
- Shark; a jet-driven fighter, which can fly as high up as the stratosphere, it is the workhorse of the Yellow Air Force and is well represented in all three episodes.
- Red Wing; Colonel Olrik's personal aircraft, a jet-driven version of the American Flying wing. The Yellow appear to have an affinity for the flying wing design, as bomber and carrier variants of the Red Wing also appear intermittently throughout the comics. (The original aircraft is stolen by Blake, Mortimer and Sergeant Ahmed Nasir during an escape, and later shot down by pro-British guerrillas).
- Super bazooka; a rocket launcher that fires five hundred rockets per minute; similar to Soviet Katyusha launchers. Featured at the Lhassa arsenal during the opening pages of the book, it is later used at the battle of the Straits of Hormuz.
- Dragon; a flame-throwing tank, weighing a hundred tons and strong enough to flatten a bunker. Appears in the opening pages of the book, but is never seen in battle.
- ICBM; years before this happened in real life, the Yellow Empire has developed an arsenal of nuclear-tipped rockets with global reach, enough to destroy the world if launched. Basam Damdu nearly fires the rockets at the end of the books, but they are nuked by British Swordfish before they can be launched.
- GX3; a green-colored chemical gas, deployed by the Yellow at the battle of the Straits of Hormuz, almost bringing them victory. The filters in gas masks are useless against it; when Yellow forces go into a combat zone infected with GX3, they carry oxygen masks instead.
Read more about this topic: Yellow Empire
Famous quotes containing the word military:
“We’re in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)