Monthly Archives: February 2023

Guess What That Is

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As at least some of my readers surely know, Israel has long been all but unique in that, starting in 1948, it has conscripted women. Not all women, mind you, but only those who, simply by not declaring themselves to be religious, agreed be taken. Once they had been taken they were assigned to all kinds of auxiliary jobs like administration, logistics, and the like. Young and healthy, ere the feminist-mandated Love Police swung into action many had some fun with their male fellow conscripts as well as their commanders who, during Israel’s “heroic” period, were considered good catches. Their period of service—amounting, at one time, to 22 months instead of 36 for males—over, they got  out, married—those already married were exempt—had 2-3 children, and went on to live happily ever after. Happily, also in the sense that they did little if any reserve duty and were hardly ever killed or wounded in action.

Next came the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt, Israel’s largest and most powerful enemy. As the danger of large-scale warfare receded, the overall number of casualties went down. Partly for that reason, partly under the influence of the American model, a mighty wave of penis-envy swept over Israeli women. In- and outside the military they decided that, unless they filled every kind of male slot and did every kind of male job, ground combat included, they would never be as fully human as they claimed to be.

One of the most interesting examples, which first started making waves in 2017 and is still drawing attention, was a case of some IDF women made to serve as guards in one of the prisons where male Palestinian terrorists are being held. Not just women, but blooming lasses 19-20 years old. Inevitably there was some frater- sorora—nizing. Frater- sorora—nizing being prohibited, when caught the women blamed the prisoners who had allegedly harassed them by using coarse language, exposing their genitals, and the like. One or two even claimed to have been assaulted; making people wonder what kind of prison it is that, assuming the allegations are true, made such things possible.

Other female guards accused their superiors, claiming that they had been “pimped off” by the latter in the hope of gaining information for the prison authorities to use. Given that the prisoners were not just males but such as had been suffering from sexual deprivation for a long, long time, there is nothing surprising in any of this. Investigations were launched, commanders fired, prisoners moved to other facilities, and the like.

The latest idea? Straight from the mouth of the horse (former minister of defense and chief of staff General Ret. Beni Gantz). Replace all prison personnel, both male and female, by older professionals. As critics were quick to point out, though, doing so would mean three things. First, since professionals are much more expensive than conscripts, a considerable rise in cost. Second, an increase in the already large number of female conscripts the military does not know what to do with. Third, and to some most important, the loss of an opportunity for women to realize their full potential by imitating men.

And so the merry-go-round keeps turning. One just cannot satisfy those feminist ideologues. Not given what they want, or claim they want, they complain. Given what they want, or claim they want, they also complain. Why? Because, as Freud once said, what they really lack is one thing and one thing only.

Guess what that is.

Pussycats, Again

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Intended to spotlight some of the weaknesses of the modern Western militaries, this book was written in 2014-15. Judging by publicly available material, however, during the years that have passed since then many of the problems have become worse rather than better. Consider the following.

1. Subduing the Young

“Anxiety and depression [are] becoming more common among [American] children and adolescents, increasing 27 percent and 24 percent respectively from 2016 to 2019. By 2020, 5.6 million kids (9.2%) had been diagnosed with anxiety problems and 2.4 million (4.0%) had been diagnosed with depression. About 5 million kids also experienced behavior and conduct problems in 2020, a 21 percent increase from the previous year.”[i]

“39.2% of [British] 6 to 16 year olds had experienced deterioration in mental health since 2017.”[ii]

“Mehr-psychische-Erkrankungen-bei-Kindern-und-Jugendlichen,” in Deutschland.”[iii]

2. Defanging the Troops

“The U.S. and NATO exit from Afghanistan may seem simply an episodic defeat. In a broader context, however, the Afghan withdrawal adds to a series of U.S. failures, from Lebanon to the Arab Spring, Iraq, Somalia, Syria—all these adventures ended badly, and the situation left behind was worse. We find ourselves today with the same security problems we had 20 years ago.”[iv]

“In Berlin and other German cities, some Bundeswehr personnel say they prefer not to wear their uniform when traveling to and from work, in order to avoid aggressive stares and rude comments. And in Potsdam, a regional capital near Berlin [which, historically, has been closely associated with the Prussian military], local politicians have been debating whether it’s appropriate for city trams to carry recruitment advertisements for the Bundeswehr.”[v]

Last time my wife and I went to Gatow, the Luftwaffe museum near Potsdam, we were the only visitors. With Ukraine in flames, let’s hope that such attitudes at any rate are going away.

3. Feminizing the Forces

In Finland, we are told, “conscription was opened to women on a volunteer basis” [sic!!!].[vi]

“The [Norwegian] military women in our study reported physical illness and injuries equal to those of military men, but more military women used pain relieving and psychotropic drugs. More military women aged 20–29 and 30–39 years reported mental health issues than military men of the same age. In the age group 30–39 years, twice as many military women assessed their health as poor compared to military men. In the age group 40–60 years, more military women than men reported musculoskeletal pain.”[vii]

“Over 7,000 U.S. service members… have died in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere” (as of July 2021).[viii] Now Women form about 16 percent of the U.S military, but only a little under 3 percent of those killed in action. Yet there are proportionally more female officers than male ones.[ix] Clearly, when it comes to gaining a commission women, very few of whom engaged in combat, have an advantage over men, many more of whom do.[x]

Compared with their male colleagues, female soldiers have it easy; less exposure to enemy bullets, less strenuous training, less hazardous work, various measures intended to help them cope with pregnancy and childcare, etc. American military women, unlike many civilian ones, are regularly screened for both physical and mental health. Nevertheless, we are told, “women in [the American] military more than twice as likely to die by suicide as Civilians.”[xi]

4. Constructing PTSD

By one 2020 study, “83% of all US veterans as well as active duty service men and women have experienced PTSD since the 9/11 attack, as a result of their military service.”[xii] Nevertheless, to this day no one has been able to define just what PTDS is, what causes it, who is more (or less) susceptible to it (and why), how it should be treated (assuming, indeed, that it is a medical problem at all), and so on. Other problems associated with it are overuse, overlap with other psychological problems and, last not least, the very real danger that, turned into a political issue, it will lose any scientific meaning it may have; which, as this volume has argued, in Germany it did.

Statistics on the prevalence of PTSD among military personnel do not show that the problem is getting worse. On the other hand, it is not getting better either.

5. Delegitimizing War

Some people hold that killing is a worse sin than allowing oneself to be killed. However, that only applies to individuals. Those responsible for the lives of others cannot afford to adopt it; for them, in fact, doing so is a crime. Now that any illusions about the future disappearance of war (e.g. F. Fukuyama, “The End of History,” 1989) have themselves disappeared, that remains as true as ever.

Conclusion: Hannibal intra Portas

We live in a period when life without terrorism, some of it internal, some international, has spread to the point where it has become almost unimaginable. True, a look at the statistics will show that, globally speaking, the number of casualties due to terrorism has not increased over the last decade.[xiii] However, measures taken to prevent it a certainly have. Not a port, not an airport, not a power station, not a mine, not a large-scale installation anywhere that is not being protected against it. Sometimes successfully, but perhaps more often not.[xiv]

Finally –

In 2014-15 American troops were still holding out in Afghanistan and Iraq and French ones, in Mali. Now, having achieved absolutely nothing, they are all gone. Meanwhile major war has broken out in Europe—the very Europe which for decades on end, was widely regarded as so peaceful as to be almost completely war-proof.

Need I say more?

 

[i] Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, Research Update: Children’s Anxiety and Depression on the Rise,” 24.3.3022, at https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2022/03/24/research-update-childrens-anxiety-and-depression-on-the-rise/

[ii] The children’s Society, “Children’s Mental Health Statistics,” at https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/what-we-do/our-work/well-being/mental-health-statistics.

[iii] www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/124350/, 3.6.2021.

[iv] S. Pontecorvo, “How Western Errors Let the Taliban Win in Afghanistan,” 2.10.2022.https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/02/kabul-airlift-taliban-win-afghanistan/

[v] M. Karnitschnig, “Germany’s Soldiers’ of Misfortune,” Politico, 15.2.2019, at https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-biggest-enemy-threadbare-army-bundeswehr/

[vi] YLE News, 4.11.2021, at https://yle.fi/news/3-12169597.

[vii] BMC, “BMC Women’s Health,” 17.10.2019, at https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12905-019-0820-4.

[viii] Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, “Costs of War,” at https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed

[ix] See Council on Foreign Relations, Demographics of U.S Military,” 2020, at https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military.

[x] See, for the figures, “United States Military Casualties of War,” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war.

[xi] W. Huntsberry at https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/07/25/women-in-military-more-than-twice-as-likely-to-die-by-suicide-as-civilians/

[xii] Cumberland Heights, PTSD, at https://www.cumberlandheights.org/blogs/ptsd-statistics-veterans/.

[xiii] See H. Ritchie and others, “Terrorism,” 2022, at https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism#how-many-people-are-killed-by-terrorists-worldwide.

[xiv] P. Knoope, “20-Year Fight against Terrorism Proves a Costly Failure,” Clingendael Spectator, 6 September 2021, at https://spectator.clingendael.org/en/publication/20-year-fight-against-terrorism-proves-costly-failure

 

Tanks Here, Tanks There

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Now that, following decades of non-use, tanks are once again making headlines in Europe, readers rightly demand a short explanation of their origins, development, and role in modern warfare.

Tanks, meaning mechanically-propelled, tracked, weaponized and armored, fighting vehicles, first made their appearance on the battlefield when the British and French armies deployed them in 1916. They went through their greatest days of glory in 1939-45 when the principal belligerents—Germany, the Soviet Union, Britain and the US—all produced them by the thousand (Japan also had them, but in nowhere like the same number or quality). Tanks took a prominent role both in the Arab-Israeli Wars (1948-1982) and in the two Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003-2011). At times, so great was their hold that popular opinion in particular tended to see them as the very symbol of warfare.

1916-1918. Almost from the beginning, tanks fell into two basic kinds: heavy ones, intended to lead the infantry as it tried to occupy and cross the enemy trenches, and light ones meant for follow up operations once those objectives had been achieved. The former moved slowly and were armed with cannon. The latter were faster and were often armed with no more than machine guns. The Germans also built tanks. However, so small were the numbers that came off the assembly lines that they hardly affected the conduct of the war.

1919-45. As World War I ended all the world’s main armed forces experimented with tanks. The outcome was a very large number of different models, including one with no fewer than five turrets and another that could move on rails as well as roads and open terrain. Nevertheless, by the mid-thirties the basic elements that make up a tank had been determined and become well-nigh universal. Including a single turret-mounted gun, a hull, and a suspension system; a configuration that, later on, came to be known as a main battle tank.

During the 1930s Germany pioneered armored divisions. Tanks apart, they were made up of artillery, anti-tank guns and infantry. All under a single headquarters, and all provided with the necessary supply, maintenance and repair services. Strongly supported from the air, they enjoyed their most spectacular successes in 1939-42 when they overran most of Europe and came within a hair of winning World War II both in Russia and in North Africa. Later, in 1943-45, they played an equally important role both on the Eastern and the Western Fronts. The tank’s development may be gauged from the fact that, by 1945, some Soviet ones mounted an awesome 122 mm. gun, a far cry from the 37 mm. that had been the norm even as late as in 1936-37. As guns grew so did the turrets that carried them, the hulls and suspensions that carried the turrets, the armor that protected them, and the engines that drove the lot.

1945-73. Tanks continued to increase in weight and power, finally stabilizing at about 60 tons. Increasingly during this period, it was the Israelis who took the lead in waging modern, mobile, tank-centered warfare. Not only did they fight and win two wars—1967 and 1973—but they started building their own tanks from scratch. Other tank-building countries, Germany with its Leopard II included, sought some kind of balance between firepower, protection and mobility. Not so Israel which, as befitted its limited manpower, put protection first. This approach proved itself during the 1982 Lebanon War when not one Israeli tankman was killed inside his tank.

1973-2022. The period saw any number of technical advances, starting with smoothbore cannon (instead of the traditional rifled one) and ending with the kind of anti-missile missiles designed to prevent enemy missiles from hitting the tank’s own armor. Both in 1991 and 2003, tanks spearheaded the Western invasions of Iraq, easily defeating the fleets of older, Soviet-built, tanks fielded by the latter country. However, even as the tracks churned away in the desert warfare was changing. As more countries either acquired nuclear weapons or the ability to build them relatively quickly, large-scale conventional war appeared to be on the retreat. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, its place was taken by asymmetric war, insurgency, guerrilla, terrorism, or whatever it may have been called. As these forms of conflict showed, in them the role tanks could play was limited, often almost nonexistent.

2022-23. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 his generals used tanks to spearhead their forces. And rightly so because Ukraine, with its wide-open, flat terrain, presents invaders with ideal tank country. But that did not mean a return to World War II. As also happened to the Israelis in Gaza e.g, Russia’s tanks were not used in their “classic” role of taking on enemy tanks and opening the way to large-scale maneuvering deep behind the front. Instead they served as close artillery support, helping infantry to advance street by street, building by building, in urban terrain; more like Stalingrad than like the vast maneuvers that led up to it and, now carried out by the Russians, followed it.

The future. Do current events in Ukraine harbor the return of large-scale conventional warfare and, with it, of tanks? Some experts think so and are even now designing all sorts of futuristic fighting vehicles. All this is good and well, but it ignores the fact that the one reason why the current war can be waged at all is because Ukraine’s arsenal, like that of Iraq before it, is limited to conventional weapons. One can hear the hard men in the Kremlin say:

Tanks here, tanks there. We’ve got

The atom bomb, and they do not.

Chat GPT

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Years ago when I was still at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I used to teach a course named Early Modern Political Thought. Judging by the feedback mechanism’s results, it was the most successful course I ever gave—it regularly got 19 out of 20 possible point. So I repeated it many times. Focusing on original sources, we read parts of the works of Desiderius Erasmus, Nicolò Machiavelli, Emperor Charles V (the 1543 testament), Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Filmer, John Locke, and, when there were still some meetings left, Charles de Montesquieu.

Like most freshmen in most countries the students, most of them 21-22 years old and fresh out of the military, did not know anything about anything. To help them along while at the same time avoiding a waste of time, I made them do two things. First, prior to each meeting they were to read the assigned chapters. Second, each time we finished with one author and moved to the next one they were to present me with a short essay—about 1,000 words—explaining who he was, what he had written, and so on. I did not ask them for footnotes, but I did ask that they list the books or articles they had consulted. It worked; week by week, I would collect their essays, read them quite carefully, and annotate them; week by week, I saw their work improving.  They in turn were very grateful, even to the point of telling me that my course was the best of the lot.

Since then much has changed. Probably the most important change has been the rise of political correctness, a monster if ever one there was which has made teaching literature, history and social science almost impossible. That, however, is not the development I want to talk about here. What I do want to talk about is the following text. It was composed, not by a human being but by an AI mechanism and available at ChatGPT. Having duly checked in, I asked it to provide me with a short essay about Machiavelli’s life and work. Soon it came up with the following text:

Niccolò Machiavelli is considered one of the most influential political philosophers in history, with his ideas and theories influencing political leaders for centuries. Born in Florence, Italy in 1469, Machiavelli was a diplomat, political philosopher, and writer during the Renaissance period.

One of Machiavelli’s most well-known works is “The Prince”, a political treatise that explores the concept of power and how leaders can maintain it. In this work, Machiavelli argues that rulers should be willing to do whatever is necessary to maintain their power, even if it means acting in ways that are considered immoral or unethical. This idea became known as “the ends justify the means”, and it has been widely debated and discussed by political philosophers and leaders throughout history.

One of the key themes in “The Prince” is the idea of “raison d’etat”, or the belief that the needs and interests of the state should always come before the needs and interests of the individual. According to Machiavelli, a leader should prioritize the well-being and stability of the state above all else, even if it means disregarding the rights and freedoms of the citizens. This idea is reflected in Machiavelli’s famous quote, “The first rule of a prince is to be able to be not good, if that is required to maintain his rule.”

Another key concept in “The Prince” is the idea of “fortuna”, or the role that luck and chance play in the success of a leader. According to Machiavelli, a leader should be aware of the role that luck and chance play in their success, and should be prepared to adapt to changing circumstances. However, he also believed that a leader could influence their own luck by being proactive and making decisive actions.

In addition to “The Prince”, Machiavelli also wrote a number of other influential works, including “The Art of War” and “The Discourses”. In these works, he explored themes such as the importance of military strategy and the role of citizenship in a republic.

One of the main criticisms of Machiavelli’s ideas is that they promote immoral and unethical behavior. Some have argued that his emphasis on the needs of the state and the willingness to use any means necessary to achieve power can justify authoritarianism and the suppression of individual rights. Others have argued that his ideas are necessary in order to maintain stability and protect the state.

Despite these criticisms, Machiavelli’s ideas continue to be widely studied and debated by political philosophers and leaders today. His work has had a significant influence on the development of modern political thought and continues to be a major influence on political leaders around the world.

In conclusion, Niccolò Machiavelli was a political philosopher whose ideas continue to be widely studied and debated today. His most famous work, “The Prince”, explores the concept of power and how leaders can maintain it, and his ideas have had a significant influence on the development of modern political thought. While some have criticized his ideas for promoting unethical and immoral behavior, others argue that his ideas are necessary in order to maintain stability and protect the state. Regardless of one’s perspective, it is clear that Machiavelli’s work has had a lasting impact on political thought and leadership.

Not half bad, don’t you agree? A bit pompous, yes. A bit bland. As if someone had decided to leave out anything a little bit interesting, let alone provocative or innovative; which, judging by what has been published about the way the program was created, is just what “someone” had done. But presumably good enough to pass the Turing test. Logically put together, without many of the things I used to warn my student against for years on end; such as leaps of thought, repetitions, or obvious semantic and grammatical errors. Better stuff than many students can produce on their own. Certainly not without having devoted some thought to what to put in (and in what order), what to leave out, why, and how; and so on, and so on.

Which, after all, is precisely what the exercise I made them do was all about and why they enjoyed doing it as much as they did.