New enemy gains on the Pentagon

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Xpost with Editorials/

WASHINGTON Pound for pound and pounding for pounding, the Israeli military is one of the world's finest. But Hezbollah, with the discipline and ferocity of its fighters and its ability to field advanced weaponry, has taken Israel by surprise.

Now that surprise has rocketed back to Washington and across the U.S. military.

U.S. officials worry that they are not prepared, either, for Hezbollah's style of warfare - a kind that pits finders against hiders and favors the hiders.

Certain that other terrorists are learning from Hezbollah's successes, the United States is studying the conflict closely for lessons to apply to its own wars. Military planners suggest that the Pentagon take a page out of Hezbollah's book about small-unit, agile operations as U.S. forces battle insurgents and cells in Iraq and Afghanistan, and plan for countering more cells and their state sponsors across the Middle East and in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

IHT

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[sofa king]

2. Oh, so they want more Special Forces.

Too bad nobody thought of that sooner.

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3. That, and good, reliable enemies for theatrical micro-militarism are hard to find.

The IDF-Hezbollah conflict is one of the best from that point of view, 30 years old and both sides are as good as new, nobody is tired of it, either side could crank it up again any day.

[Keystonecops]

4. Micro-militarism maybe

but the US could use the strength of conviction in its own ideology that both the IDF and Hezbollah both have on behalf of their own sides.

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5. Ideology is not a good substitute for intelligence, better weapons, and better training.

It is true that the US military, as an institution, is corrupt, incompetent, and moribund; but the solution is not gritting your teeth and believing even harder that things are really OK and that all the political chicanery that surrounds military affairs is good for "defense". It has rotted from the top, not the bottom. There was what looked like a serious attempt at reform after VietNam, but we threw all that in the crapper after Gulf War I in pursuit of global hegemony - a most stupid idea - and boy does it show now.

The IDF does not impress me either, though like the US they still maintain a meaningful technological edge.

I don't have a reading on Hezbollah, they gave a good account of themselves in 2006, but four years can be a long time.

On the record, Hezbollah has or had the clear edge on training and perhaps quality of personnel, motivation, so there, in terms of "strength of conviction", we can agree. They have showed a lot of smarts in the past. Motivation is always a big deal in military matters, which is why "wars of choice" so often go bad, and why we are always being told our national security is at stake when it is not.

[Keystonecops]

6. Agreed. My teeth are ground to nubs, but...

it's a pity to see a perfectly good empire flushed down the toilet. I don't have much against the military per se, just the fact that US society is so divided right now, over often marginal issues like abortion. There must be a way to get this country back on track. It's a tricky time as the right wing and the domestic enemies within their ranks could become radicalized to the point of violence, which will force our side to respond with the repressive apparatus the Bushies put in place. The result is an even more divided society, which can only benefit external opponents.

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7. True, we could have done much better, and it would have been worthwhile,

for us, and for the rest of the world too, a great, perhaps even unique, opportunity squandered in pursuit of a mess of pottage. Had we chosen to rule as first among equals, an empire of laws and principles and order instead of an empire of force and money, we could have had a long and glorious run, a win-win. And it really is and was a failure of our myopic political system. George Kennan saw it clearly after WWII, and for a short while it looked like he might be listened to. Any chance we might have now to salvage something from the rubble depends foremost on a thorough political reformation. But I'm not optimistic about that happening soon.

The military has its place, just like police and the courts, and I have nothing against them as such, and I can't say I think it is their fault the way things have gone, they serve the political classes, not the other way around.

[Keystonecops]

8. But it ain't over yet!

Good things are happening with digital democracy and citizen journalism. I think a model could be developed for crowd-sourcing on military and intelligence tasks as well. The problem is creating a baseline of what is "normal" citizenship, and what is normal for an individual to expect of a state, and vice-versa.

When it became clear to me that the world was going to hell, some decades ago, I began thinking on this. I don't by any means have a complete answer, but I'm working on one, and I do have a tenuous grasp of the problem.

Most of the problems in life come down to technology. The public debate about abortion really took hold following the invention of the birth control pill, a technological advance. Some of this debate probably switched when ultrasound produced images of fetuses with expressions on their faces. Meanwhile, abortion has been going on for millenia, but was never a front burner issue. I'm convinced that the Tea Party movement, and the recent discovery by its proponents of the Constitution, is really about technology. While liberals were horrified by the warrantless wiretapping debacle, conservatives held the line put down by their party, confident that the apparatus would only be used against muslims, black people, and liberals. Now that power has shifted, it has dawned upon them that the apparatus has no political leaning, and that America truly is a democracy when it comes to bugging its citizens.

While self-interested technocrats talk about technology as being liberating, it's actually the opposite. Technology has enabled the oppression of the world we live in. Suicide bombers, for example, were not a recent phenomenon--only the killing power of their weapons changed. I remember reading an account of the seige of Malta in 1503 (?) which was a classic muslim-christian conflict (really about business with a little religion mixed in) between the templars and the Ottomans. Many of the front-line of the muslim attackers, the janissaries--new soldiers--, were essentially suicide bombers, armed with pikes and swords, dressed in the white of their death shrouds. Meanwhile, of course, we have the classic crusader garb of white with a red cross--another group dressed in their death shrouds, demonstrating their dedication, and making it easy for them to be rolled into a ditch during mop up. Jews, apart from being openly slaughtered by Christians at any opportunity, didn't figure into it as enemies of Islam. In fact, after the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Spain a decade earlier, it was the Turks who took them in. I could beat this topic to death, but you get the picture: it's all about technology.