Monthly Archives: May 2021

The Last Round?

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Back in the summer of 2006 Israel, then under the leadership of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, engaged on what later became known as the Second Lebanese War. Launched in response to border incidents in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed, six injured, and two more kidnapped, it lasted from 12 July to 14 August. About three times as long as the recent hostilities with Hamas in Gaza did. The total number of rockets launched at Israel was 3,970, comparable to that fired by Hamas in 2021. However, partly because the anti-missile defense system known as Iron Dome did not yet exist and partly because the Israeli Army invaded southern Lebanon and held some small parts of it for a time, the number of Israeli casualties, especially dead as opposed to injured, was much greater. About two thirds were military, the rest civilian. The number of Lebanese casualties, both Hezbollah and others, is not known. However, sources put it at between 1,000 and 1,500.

As so often in Israel, no sooner had the war ended than the daggers were drawn and many of the players started stabbing each other in the back. The prime minister, a civilian with hardly any military experience, was accused of not knowing how to run the operation. Along with his chief advisers, it was claimed, he was never able to make up his mind as to whether to use his ground forces and, if so, how and what for. The minister of defense, also a civilian with hardly any military experience, had failed. The chief of staff, an air force pilot who knew little about ground warfare, had also failed. The commander in chief, northern front, had failed. One division commander and several brigade- and battalion commanders had failed.

And that was just the beginning. Intelligence about Hezbollah, especially the bunkers where it hid its short-range rockets, had been defective. The troops were insufficiently trained and, in some cases, ill-equipped with out-of-date weapons. Mobilization had been slow and clumsy. Partly because there was no consensus at the top, the invasion of Lebanon had also been slow and clumsy. Cooperation between the ground forces and the air force had been defective. True, during the first few days the air force had performed magnificently. It knocked out practically all long-range Hezbollah missiles (as distinct from its short-range rockets which, being smaller and easier to conceal, remained largely intact); however, once that had been done it hit hardly any significant targets at all. All these problems, and more, were highlighted by the Winograd Commission of Investigation established for the purpose. Judging by its report Olmert had been one of the worst warlords ever, an idea that did little to help him when he was removed from office in March 2009.

Much of the criticism was justified. Since then much has happened in the Middle East. One thing, though, did not happen: However much it may have blustered about its “victory,” Hezbollah did not seriously attack Israel again. Not in 2008-9 when the latter pounded Hamas in Gaza in Operation Cast Lead. Not in 2014, when it did so again under code name Protective Edge. And not, of course, in May 2021. Each time, the pressure to stay in the game by “doing something” to hit Israel while expressing solidarity with the poor but brave people of Gaza must have been immense. Each time, it was resisted and things remained quiet on Israel’s northern border.
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War is not a game of tennis. Whatever the bean counters and the legal experts may say, what matters is not the number of points, games, sets matches, and so on won or lost by each side. Instead it is one thing, and one thing only: to wit, the political will that, embodied by the government, moves the troops, motivates the public, and drives the fighting. Looking back, it seems that, in 2006, the will of Hezbollah, and that of its leader Hassan Nasrallah (who, since then, has been fleeing from one secret bunker to the next), to engage Israeli military power was broken. Not completely, perhaps, and perhaps not forever. But for a decade and a half now, which by Middle Eastern standards is a very long time indeed.

As Olmert himself, speaking to the Knesset in the spring of 2007, acknowledged, I seem to have been among the very first to publicly declare that the war had been a victory for Israel. How did I reach that conclusion? By drawing a comparison with other armed conflicts of the same kind—the kind I, in The Transformation of War, called Nontrinitarian. Taking 1914 as a starting point, the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have witnessed hundreds of such conflicts. As the wars in Vietnam and the former Yugoslavia illustrate so well, what a very great number of them had in common was the extraordinary difficulty of bringing them to an end. Partly because chains of command were insufficiently strong. And partly because combatants and noncombatants were often indistinguishable. However that may be, each time the leaders on both sides agreed on a ceasefire, much less a signed a peace treaty, something or someone caused hostilities to flare up again. Often they did so not once but numerous times for years on end.

So far, each round of fighting in Gaza only led to the next round. What the most recent one may bring in its wake is hard to say. Too many players—not just Israel and Hamas but the PLO, Iran, and several other countries. Too many calculations, too much bitterness and hatred. I would, however, like to sound a cautiously optimistic note. Given how much stronger it is compared with its enemies, both in Lebanon before 2006 and later in Gaza, in carrying out this kind of operation probably the Israeli Army’s greatest problem has always been its inability to avoid “excessive” civilian casualties on the other side, which in turn would lead to difficulties with the UN as well as world public opinion. This time, by contrast, its intelligence and its weapons were sufficiently excellent do exactly that. They were able to hit—neutralize, is the polite term for this—quite a number of medium- to high ranking Hamas leaders both in their underground shelters and outside them without killing or wounding “too many” civilians. That, as well as Israel’s declared intention to change its policy and answer each provocation, however small, with overwhelming force, may well be why, so far, the cease fire has held.

It may take a long time, but all wars must end. Could it be that, over a decade and a half after Israel evacuated Gaza and Hamas launched its first rockets, what we’ve seen is the last of the fighting there?

Guest Article: The China Threat

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By

William S. Lind*

The December 4 Wall Street Journal’s op ed page headlined a piece by John Ratcliffe, U.S. Director of National Intelligence, titled “China is National Security Threat No. 1”.  Mr. Ratcliffe concluded his op ed by writing,

This is a once-in-a-generation challenge.  Americans have always risen to the moment, from defeating the scourge of fascism to bringing down the Iron Curtain.  This generation will be judged by its response to China’s effort to reshape the world in its own image and replace America as the dominant superpower.  The intelligence is clear.  Our response must be as well.

As is usually the case with op eds signed by prominent federal officeholders, the purpose of this piece is budget justification: intelligence agencies recently received a big budget boost for spying on China.  And Mr. Ratcliffe is right with respect to some aspects of our relationship with China.  It is an economic competitor, one that has pitted the enriching economics of mercantilism against the impoverishing economics of free trade.  More the fools us for allowing it to do so.

But on the whole, Mr. Ratcliffe and the rest of the dragon puffers are wrong.  They are wrong not because of bad intelligence about China, but because they miss the fact that for all Great Power rivalries, the context has changed.  Contests between Great Powers are no longer the primary force shaping the world.  Rather, what now shapes the world is the growing weakness of most states as the state itself faces a crisis of legitimacy.  Great Power contests now take place within this context, which means such contests are themselves counter-productive to all involved because they further weaken states, certainly the loser and often the winner too.  In effect, victories in state vs. state contests will henceforth almost always be Pyrrhic.

Just as Washington does not get this change in strategic context, neither does Beijing.  For China, which is, as Mr. Ratcliffe writes, attempting to become the top Great Power, the new context has at least three major implications:

  • First, as it penetrates other parts of the globe through initiatives such as its “Belt and Road” project, it will find its presence there undermined and its goals blocked by increasing disorder.  As states weaken, Fourth Generation war spreads, and Chinese efforts in the face of constant attacks by non-state elements will simply become unprofitable.  This mirrors the European colonial experience but will occur much faster.  In fact, it is occurring now, as China’s penetration into much of sub-Saharan Africa finds its efforts swallowed by spreading disorder.  Where states are weak or merely fictions, one gang among many, efforts by outside powers will produce only a bottomless investment pit.  The cost/benefit calculation will be as red as the east.
  • Second, where states are struggling to hold on to at least some shreds of legitimacy, an increasingly obvious Chinese role will threaten that legitimacy.  This, again, is already happening, especially in Africa.  Because one of the main factors driving Chinese expansionism is the need to provide jobs for Chinese people, Chinese projects hire little local labor.  That, plus a general resentment against outsiders, will also bog down, then reverse Chinese penetration.  The ugly Chinaman will get booted out, just as were the ugly American and ugly European.
  • Third, because the legitimacy of rule by the Chinese Communist Party depends on rapid economic growth in China, China too may suffer a crisis of legitimacy of the state.  Like most authoritarian regimes, China’s Communist government is strong but rigid.  It will seem impervious to disorder right up to the point where it collapses.  China seems to think it has tamed the business cycle, but neither it nor anyone else has done so.  History’s rule seems to be that if a government can prevent frequent, fairly small economic downturns, it gets less frequent but larger ones instead.  Anyone looking at the house of cards that is China’s public and private debt can see what is coming.  And China has a long history of internal fractioning.  No Chinese state can assume it will always hold together.  Were the Chinese state to fracture, that would not only be a disaster for China but for the rest of the world as well, including the United States.  Once again, the new context touches and changes everything.

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China appears to be repeating the mistake Japan made in the 1930s.  Japan attempted to build an empire just as European states had done, by conquest, but that era had passed.  China now seeks in similar fashion to become the top Great Power when that position has lost much of its meaning and will soon lose the rest.  Spreading state failure endangers the state system itself, and a successful defense of that system requires an alliance of all states, an alliance that must begin with the three current Great Powers, the United States, China, and Russia.  Russia acts as if it may have at least some understanding this is the case, while Washington and Beijing show none.  Nor does Mr. Ratcliffe, the Director of U.S. National Intelligence.  Is there in fact any intelligence in U.S. National Intelligence?

 

*William (”Bill”) S. Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4th Generation Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 25.1.2021.

Under Fire (2)

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Note: This article was first posted in July 2014. Almost word for word.

 

My wife and I live on our own in a townhouse a few miles west of Jerusalem, within range of the rockets from Gaza. Several times over the last few days the alarm was sounded. We react by leaving the living room, which has glass doors facing the garden. Should a rocket explode nearby, then flying shards will cut us to ribbons. So we move into the stairwell which, made of reinforced concrete, offers good protection. We are lucky to have it, for my wife has had her knee operated on and could not run if her life depended on it. I suppose something similar would apply to hundreds of thousands of others both in Israel and in Gaza. We wait until the sirens stop wailing—a hateful sound—and we have heard a few booms. Then we check, on the news, whether the booms originated in rockets being intercepted by Iron Dome or in such as have not been intercepted hitting the earth. A few telephone calls to or from our children, and everything returns to normal until the next time.

And so it goes. One gets up each morning, sees that the surroundings look much as usual, heaves a sigh of relief, and prepares for the coming day. Yet for several days now, much of Israel has been under fire. That is especially true of the southern part of the country. Over there ranges are short and incoming rockets smaller, harder to intercept, and much more numerous. There are several dozen wounded—most of them hurt not by incoming rockets but while in a hurry to find shelter. As of the evening of Tuesday, 19 July [2014], following eight days of fighting, just one Israeli, a civilian, has been killed by Hamas fire.

Several factors explain the low number of casualties. First, the rockets coming from Gaza are enormously inaccurate. They hit targets, if they do, almost at random. Second, the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system works better than anyone had expected.  The system has the inestimable advantage in that it can calculate the places where the rockets will land. Consequently it only goes into action against those—approximately one in five or six—that are clearly about to hit an inhabited area. The outcome is vast savings; in some cases, realizing that the incoming rockets are not going to hit anybody or anything, the authorities do not even bother to sound the alarm. Third, civil defense seems to be working well; people obey instructions and are, in any case, getting used to this kind of thing. Fourth, as always in war, one needs luck.

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Israel’s lucky run will not last forever.  Sooner or later, a Hamas rocket that for one reason or another has not been intercepted is bound to hit a real target in Israel and cause real damage. Imagine a school or kindergarten being hit, resulting in numerous deaths. In that case public pressure on the government and the Israel Defense Forces “to do something” will mount until it becomes intolerable.

What can the IDF do? Not much, it would seem. It can give up some restraints and kill more—far more—people in Gaza in the hope of terrorizing Hamas into surrender. However, such a solution, if that is the proper term, will not necessarily yield results while certainly drawing the ire of much of the world. It can send in ground troops to tackle the kind of targets, such as tunnels, that cannot be reached from the air. However, doing so will almost certainly lead to just the kind of friendly casualties that the IDF, by striking from the air, has sought to avoid.

Whether a ground operation can kill or capture sufficient Hamas members to break the backbone of the organization is also doubtful. Even supposing it can do so, the outcome may well be the kind of political vacuum in which other, perhaps more extreme, organizations such as the Islamic Jihad will flourish. Either way, how long will such an operation last? And how are the forces ever going to withdraw, given the likelihood that, by doing so, they will only be preparing for the next round?

And so the most likely outcome is a struggle of attrition. It may last for weeks, perhaps more. Humanitarian efforts to help the population of Gaza, however well meant, may just prolong the agony. In such a struggle the stakes would hardly be symmetrical. On one hand there are the inhabitants of Gaza. Increasingly they have their lives turned upside down by the constant alarms, strikes, and people who are wounded or killed. On the other are those of Israel who, though their lives have also been affected, have so far remained remarkably calm and resilient under fire. Though some areas are badly affected, the Israeli economy has also been holding up well.

Perhaps because the number of Gazans killed and wounded is fairly small, international reaction, which is always hostile to Israel, has been relatively muted. One reason for this appears to be that no outsiders have what it takes to push either side towards a ceasefire. In a struggle of attrition it is the last ounce of willpower on both sides that will decide the issue. So far, it does not seem that the willpower in question has been exhausted on either side.

Conquistadores

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Conquistador Voices: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas as Recounted Largely by the Participants, K. H. Siepel, ed.,  Kindle edition, 2015.

We do not have to accept at face value all the claims made by New Age historians for whom everything Colored is good and everything White, bad if not positively devilish. Witness the Conquistadores’ own accounts as recorded in their written works and, interlaced with the editor’s comments providing the context, assembled in the volumes under discussion. Following Columbus, the most important among them were Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (cowhead, in case you are interested), and Hernando de Soto. Most were scions of the Hidalgo, i.e minor nobility, class. With the notable exception of Pizarro, who was illiterate and remained so throughout his life, by the standards of the time most were fairly well educated. Again with the notable exception of Pizarro, a true never-do-good who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, all were more or less comfortably off even before they started on the grand adventure. The one that, for good or ill, would leave their names engraved on the historical record.

All insisted on their absolute devotion both to the Church and to the Emperor in whose name, and on whose behalf, they claimed to be acting. Thus motivated they purchased ships—often by borrowing—enlisted crews, gathered supplies, embarked, and sailed westward across the ocean. Having either hit on unknown lands or heard of them, they went on until they found what they had sought or thought they did. There they killed. They raped (by present-day standards, not by contemporary ones; most of the women with whom they slept were not simply captured but put at their disposal by the Indian caciques, or minor chiefs, they met and subdued). They robbed. They enslaved, using the victims as porters and forcing them to go on grueling marches from which few of them returned. They tortured—at least one Inca chief had his feet fried in boiling oil. Countless others were racked, crucified, burnt, and what not. Most important in the long run, they brought along deadly diseases and, deliberately or not, spread them, resulting in the deaths of millions of people. They depopulated entire districts. They committed genocide.

All that is a matter of record. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel a sneaking admiration for the men—except for a few translators, especially Cortes’ Dona Marina, a Mexican princess who early on cast her lot with him, there were very, very few women among them—who, seeking their fortune, did all those things. All were leaders, born and bred. As indeed they had to be, given not only the obstacles they had to overcome but the frequent tendency among their men to disobey orders, split off, and engage in conspiracies of every kind; as, for example, Pizarro’s own brothers did. All were possessed of what can almost be called superhuman energy, courage, determination, and ruthlessness. It was these qualities above all that enabled them to operate thousands of miles from home, at the far end of lines of communication that caused months to pass from the moment a missive was sent to the time an answer was received (if it was). All set foot on unknown lands. There everything –the climate, the geology, the flora, the fauna, the people—was strange and, as often as not, menacing and even dangerous. To make things worse, often they were deaf and mute in the sense that they could not communicate with the natives and either pass information to them or receive it. What information they did receive—mainly concerning the objectives they sought, the routs to those objectives, and any resources and obstacles found on the way—was often misleading.

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Facing critical shortages, at times the Conquistadores manufactured their own; as by hammering nails into armor (or the other way around) and building ships to replace those that had been lost. At times they suffered great cold, at others terrible cold. At times they went naked, or practically so. At times there was a bonanza of food; at others, so scarce was the latter that they were forced to eat insects (this was long before anyone thought of them as “superfood”), lizards, roots, grass, and the bark of trees. On some occasions they were reduced to cannibalism. Well aware of how few they were, they looked after their injured comrades as well as they could. Their doing so may have done something to keep their numbers up; it certainly helped maintain morale.

Ploughing my way through all of this, I could not help but compare the Conquistadores with some others. Including, above all, the Western forces that, during the last few decades, repeatedly invaded Asian countries but failed to achieve their objectives or even hold their own.  On that, though, I’ve already written in Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West.

All these virtues apart, Siepel’s book reads exceptionally well. Once I had started I could hardly pull myself away from it, resulting in the present post. It also made me think—once again—about why certain human enterprises succeed and others, fail.

Highly recommended for anyone interested not just in the Conquista but in human nature as a whole.