Sunday, August 13, 2006

Talking War on the Net
There is loads and loads of discussion about the Lebanon/Hezbollah/Israeli thing. What is interesting is the derth of anaylsis of the military and socio-political events going on. Its far more indepth that you would find on TV and very interesting. Thake the reliable War Nerd;

The rest of you idiots actually seem to take Cooper [CNN journalist] seriously when he talks about how the IDF is going to "expel Hezbollah from Southern Lebanon." Christ, Hezbollah IS Southern Lebanon. You might as well try to expel ants.

Indeed. This was the point I too war making - that Hezbollah came from Israeli occupation, so to think a few weeks of bombing is going to remove them when they withstood 18 years of occupation is weak to say the least. War Nerd goes on;

As long as the IDF was beating up on Hamas down in Gaza, it could hide its weakness most of the time...facing Pals with nothing but rifles and old RPGs. It's easy to look tough rolling through refugee camps in the world's most heavily armored tank....But as you may recall, those tanks got a real different reception when they chased Hezbollah's raiding party back into Lebanon after the Hezzies killed three IDF soldiers and kidnapped another two...the first Merkava steamed over the border. Guess how far it got. Ten meters. Ten goddamn meters. Then KABOOM! A Hezbollah mine or shaped charge turned it into a very expensive oven, with four crew killed. Another IDF soldier died trying to rescue them. So within a few minutes the IDF had lost eight men. As far as I know, Hezbollah's losses were zero.

So now we are talking Fourth generation warfare (4GW) - the type of 'war on terror'(tm) thing that emerged from the cold war. Over at Global Guerrillas, there is a good discussion of where all this is going;

Hezbollah's performance in a set-piece battle with the Israeli military (arguably once, a top notch conventional military) is an excellent example of how non-state groups have radically improved their ability to conduct tactical and strategic operations...The central secret to Hezbollah's success is that it trained its (global) guerrillas to make decisions autonomously (classic 4GW), at the small group level. In every area -- from firing rockets to defending prepared positions to media routing around jamming/disruption -- we have examples of Hezbollah teams deciding, adapting, innovating, and collaborating without reference to any central authority. The result of this decentralization is that Hezbollah's aggregate decision cycles are faster and qualitatively better than those of their Israeli counterparts.

So, as Queen stated; We're just waiting/For the hammer to fall.

1 comment:

Phoenix Insurgent said...

Good ol' War Nerd. Never PC but so seldom wrong.