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WB: The Reckoning + Alphonse & Gaston
Billmon:
But until Hizbullah clarifies its intentions, I think the Alphonse & Gaston shtick is going to continue — long past the point where it strikes even me as funny.
II. Alphonse & Gaston
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If the goal is to restore trust, and public confidence in the state and its armed forces, then Israel’s military and political elites are going to have to come clean and admit the full scale of their failure — and explicitly renounce the long-obsolete notion that Israel’s security can be guaranteed by military force.
I. The Reckoning
If the force is under UN auspices (i.e. a UNIFIL bis, and not switched about to come under some other umbrella, as has been done in Afghanistan) they would always be constrained by the UN moral mandate, that is, they can keep peace, but not enforce it, they can defend themselves (iffy!), cannot intervene in conflict in any way.
Which is why people endlessly bash UN forces as useless, because they can’t even directly stop the massacres of civilians – all they can do is what police or civil protection services do, such as organise evacuations and create cordons counting on a symbolic show of authority.
Their role often slips over to a humanitarian one – rather like what one saw US soldiers doing in Iraq in the early days after the invasion – guardind, driving, coordinating with NGOS, the Red Cross, the local police, distributing water and candy.
Some say that Kosovo provides an example of the success of such forces. Others argue against them. Massive non-local police are not a good idea – they are seen as intruders, under foreign command, not acting in the best interests of the population, etc. As the US in Iraq finally figured out, for example, trying to re-hire and train police… after it fired a large part of the police force and sent the rest to guard the pipelines in 2003.
A massive influx of young men who need large bases and consequent infrastructure – transport; matériel, food, gas, not to mention housing and communications – is extremely disruptive and arrogant. That depends of course on transport routes and the terrain, I don’t see S. Leb. as a good candidate for such an ‘invasion’. (?) The trickle down is also hard to handle – who gets to sell them chicken nuggets? Girls? (these problems always arise and are insuperable.)
A last point: these forces tend to stay locked in to their national groups, they make their own local arrangements, depending on the money they receive, which varies from minuscule to well worth it – swimming pools! They create a ‘little Germany’ (yikes, in this situation) or a ‘little Pakistan.’ The different groups don’t share a language, often don’t speak to each other at all, there is a pecking order that is very racist. The local language is almost always beyond them.
Central command is weak, or even non-existent, or not obeyed. Who is the central command, anyway? Looks like here it may be Alphonse and Gaston, the French back in their old stomping grounds, with a different role to be sure.
Just a few thoughts provoked by billmon’s post, based previous situations (Somalia, Kosovo, etc.) – I can’t tell one rocket from another but know about cultural sensitivity training.
Alll the parties involved (e.g. Hezb, the French) have very good reasons to be extremely wary.
Posted by: Noirette | Aug 17 2006 15:18 utc | 3
Via Juan Cole: Anthony H. Cordesman on the Israeli-Hizbullah war:
Preliminary Lessons of Israeli-Hezbollah War (pdf) (25 pages, but here is subjective selected essance) (emphasis in italic by Cordesman, in bold by me)
The Israeli emphasis on such kidnappings and casualties also communicates a dangerous sense of Israeli weakness at a military and diplomatic level. It reinforces the message since Oslo that any extremist movement can halt negotiations and peace efforts by triggering a new round of terrorist attacks.
The message seems to be that any extremist movement can lever Israel into action by a
token attack. Furthermore, there has been so much discussion in Israel of the Israeli leadership and IDF’s reluctance to carry out a major land offensive in Lebanon because of the casualties it took from 1982-2000, and would face in doing so now, that the end result further highlights the image of Israeli vulnerability.
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There is a very real prospect that even if the Israeli-Hezbollah War does not rekindle, it has generated forces in the Arab world that will thrust Israel into a broader, four-cornered struggle with radical Arab elements as well as pose growing political problems for moderate Arab states. The Hezbollah’s performance may well lead its hard-liners and the growing neo-Salafi Sunni extremist elements in Lebanon to keep up a steady pace of terrorist attacks. The Hamas and PIJ forces in Gaza will learn and adapt, and Israel may face a new level of conflict, or “front,” on the West Bank as the same anti-Israeli forces step up their activity there.
The Israeli-Hezbollah War has shown all forms of hostile state and non-state actors that Israel and Israelis are vulnerable. Syria and Iran have strong incentives to keep up covert pressure. Both Sunni and Shi’ite transnational movements have a new incentive to attack Israeli targets inside and outside of Israel.
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One key lesson that the US badly needs to learn from Israel is the Israeli rush towards accountability. … What is interesting about the Israeli approach, however, is the assumption by so many Israeli experts that that major problems and reverses need immediate official examination and that criticism begins from the top down. Patriotism and the pressures of war call for every effort to be made to win, not for support of the political leadership and military command until the war is over.
The US, in contrast, is usually slow to criticize and then tends to focus on the President on a partisan basis. It does not have a tradition of independent commissions and total transparency (all of the relevant cabinet and command meetings in Israel are videotaped).
Worse, the US military tends to investigate and punish from the bottom up. At least since Pearl Harbor (where the search for scapegoats was as much a motive as the search for truth), the US has not acted on the principle that top-level and senior officers and civilian officials must be held accountable for all failures, and that the key lessons of war include a ruthless and unbiased examination of grand strategy and policymaking.
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Civilians are the natural equivalent of armor in asymmetric warfare, and the US must get used to the fact that opponents will steadily improve their ability to use them to hide, to deter attack, exploit the political impact of strikes, and exaggerate damage and killings.
The very laws of war become a weapon when they are misinterpreted to go from making
every effort to minimize civilian casualties to totally avoiding them. Civilians become cultural, religious, and ideological weapons when the US is attacking different cultures. The gap between the attacker and attacked is so great that no amount of explanation and reparations can compensate.
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Mapping all potential target areas for important political and religious points is difficult to impossible, and real-time location of civilians is absolutely impossible. High intensity operations cannot be designed to support humanitarian needs in many cases. Moreover, battle damage technology methods and technology against anything other than military weapons and vehicles, or active military facilities, remains too crude to clearly distinguish how much collateral damage was done or how many civilians were hurt.
The key issues for the US are what can be done to change this situation to reduce civilian casualties and collateral damage, and how can the US learn from the IDF’s experience as well as its own. In all but existential conflicts, understanding these issues involves learning how to fight in built-up and populated areas in ways than deprive the enemy as much as possible of being able to force the US and its allies to fight at their level and on their own terms.
The goal is also to learn what cannot be done, and to avoid setting goals for netcentric warfare, intelligence, targeting, and battle damage assessments that are impossible, or simply too costly and uncertain to deploy.
No country does better in making use of military technology than the US, but nor is any country also so incredibly wasteful, unable to bring many projects to cost-effective deployment, and so prone to assume that technology can solve every problem.
The US needs to approach these problems with ruthless realism at the political, tactical, and technical level. It needs to change its whole set of priorities affecting tactics, technology, targeting, and battle damage to give avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties and collateral damage the same priority as directly destroying the enemy. This means working with local allies and improving HUMINT to reduce damage and political impacts. It also means developing real time capabilities to measure and communicate what damage has actually been done. The US must use the information to defeat hostile lies and exaggeration but also to improve performance in the future.
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Israel does face prejudice and media bias in the political dimension of war, but — to put it bluntly — this is as irrelevant to the conduct of war as similar perceptions of the US as a crusader and occupier. It is as irrelevant as complaints that the enemy fights in civilian areas, uses terror tactics, does not wear uniforms and engages in direct combat. Nations fight in the real world, not in ones where they can set the rules for war or perceptual standards.
Israel’s failure to understand this is just as serious and dangerous as America’s. So is Israel’s focus on domestic politics and perceptions. Modern nations must learn to fight regional, cultural, and global battles to shape the political, perceptual, ideological, and media dimensions of war within the terms that other nations and cultures can understand, or they risk losing every advantage their military victories gain.
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Israel also pushed proportionality to its limits by attacking civilian targets that were not related to the Hezbollah in an effort to force the Lebanese government to act, and failed to explain the scale of the Hezbollah threat in defending its
actions.
The US must not repeat this mistake. It must develop clear plans and doctrine regarding proportionality and be just as ready to explain and justify them as to show how it is acting to limit civilian casualties and collateral damage. Above all, it must not fall into the trap of trying either to avoid the laws of war or of being so bound by a strict interpretation that it cannot fight.
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Either the Israeli political leadership, the IDF top command, or both seem to have chosen the worst of all possible worlds. They escalated beyond the air campaign in ways that could not have a decisive strategic effect and dithered for weeks in a land battle that seems to have been designed largely to minimize casualties and avoid creating a lasting IDF presence in Lebanon. In the process, the IDF had to fight and refight for the same villages and largely meaningless military objectives, given the Hezbollah’s ample time to reorganize and prepare.
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Israel is notoriously better at defeating the enemy than at translating such defeats into lasting strategic gains. But the same criticism can often be applied to the US. As a result, the lesson the Israeli-Hezbollah War teaches about conflict termination is the same lesson as the one the US should have learned from its victory in the Gulf War in 1991 and from its defeat of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A war plan without a clear and credible plan for conflict termination can easily become a dangerous prelude to a failed peace.
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One key point that should be mentioned more in passing than as a lesson, although it may be a warning about conspiracy theories, is that no serving Israeli official, intelligence officer, or other military officer felt that the Hezbollah acted under the direction of Iran or Syria.
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The issue of who was using whom, however, was answered by saying all sides—the Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria—were perfectly happy to use each other. Israelis felt Nasrallah had initiated the Sheeba farms raid on his own and that Iran and Syria were forced to support him once Israel massively escalated. Israeli officials did not endorse the theory that Iran forced the Hezbollah to act to distract attention from its nuclear efforts.
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The US and Israel quote figures for the cost of these arms transfers that can reach the billions, and talk about $100-$250 million in Iranian aid per year. The fact is that some six years of build-up and arms transfers may have cost closer to $50-$100 million in all. The bulk of the weapons involved were cheap, disposable or surplus, and transfers put no strain of any kind on either Syria or Iran.
This is a critical point, not a quibble. Playing the spoiler role in arming non-state actors even with relatively advanced weapons is cheap by comparison with other military options. The US must be prepared for a sharp increase in such efforts as its enemies realize just how cheap and easy this option can be.
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Like insurgent and terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan—and in Arab states like Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other states threatened by such groups—the Hezbollah showed the ability of non-state actors to fight their own form of netcentric warfare. The Hezbollah acted as a “distributed network” of small cells and units acting with considerable independence, and capable of rapidly adapting to local conditions using media reports on the, verbal communication, etc.
Rather than have to react faster than the IDF’s decision cycle, they could largely ignore it, waiting out Israeli attacks, staying in positions, reinfiltrating or reemerging from cover, and choosing the time to attack or ambush. Forward fighters could be left behind or sacrificed, and “self-attrition” became a tactic substituting for speed of maneuver and the ability to anticipated IDF movements.
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The value and capability of such asymmetric “netcentric” warfare, and comparatively slow moving wars of attrition, should not be exaggerated. The IDF could win any clash, and might have won decisively with different ground tactics. It also should not be ignored. The kind of Western netcentric warfare that is so effective against conventional forces has met a major challenge and one it must recognize.
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It should be noted that by August 10th, the IAF had flown some 8,000 fighter sorties and 1,600 attack helicopter sorties … The IDF evidently fired well over 20,000 artillery rockets, targeting interchangeably with air strikes, and with precision GPS locations allowing the same 10-meter accuracies for much of its artillery.
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It has also been clear from Douhet to the present that the advocates of airpower tend to sharply exaggerate its ability to influence or intimidate leaders and politicians, and act as a weapons of political warfare. There certainly is little evidence to state that such IAF strikes did more than make Lebanese leaders turn to the international community for support in forcing Israel to accept a ceasefire, provoke Hezbollah leaders to even more intense efforts, and produce a more hostile reaction in the Arab world. The advocates of escalation to intimidate and force changes in behavior at the political level are sometimes right; far more often, they are wrong. More often than not, such attacks provoke more hostility and counterescalation.
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Posted by: b | Aug 18 2006 16:15 utc | 5
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