from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 04 Jul 2009 08:46 PM PDT

WWII was the high point of the long Western history of war. In
it the best armed forces of industrial civilization collided and fought
for years, deploying the latest technologies and throwing unprecedented
numbers of of men, tanks and planes into the battle. It was the kind of
war never to be repeated again.

For the following decades the US and the USSR, the
victors of the war, would develop increasingly better military
technologies and stare across the globe at each other armed with large
quantities of weapons that could never be used. Instead both sides armed
smaller countries and in that way fought restrained proxy wars with each
other across the world.

The UN armies in Korea and the American
army in Vietnam fought as if they were refighting WW2 against another
large well armed Western state, much as British armies invaded Afghanistan
and fought using the same neat squares of men and cavalry charges that had
served them so well in the Napoleonic wars. Great generals adapt to a
battlefield, ordinary generals fight by the book resulting in terrible
losses until they finally learn to adapt. This is how it was for the
Americans in Korea and Vietnam and for the Russians in Afghanistan and
Chechnya.

Israeli and American soldiers emerge from a complex
lineage. The American army was born from militias and Indian fighters who
copied the tactics of their Indian allies and enemies, firing at the
British from behind trees, moving quickly and attacking unexpectedly.
Tactics the British, who relied on using large forces to seize and hold
territory, could not usefully respond to. While the British took entire
cities, including New York, they found that they could not control the
land without hunting down and defeating the Colonial armies. Relying on
their usual tactics, they paid a high price for simply trying to move
armies across upstate New York. The Americans had learned to adapt and
make do with limited resources and spur of the moment decisions. Their
boldness and adaptability paved the way for transforming the ragged bands
the British regulars had sneered at, into the army the mightiest empire in
the world couldn't defeat.

The Israeli army emerged out of the
original Shomrim, civilian patrols who watched farms and orange groves,
carrying crude rifles, riding horses and even disguising themselves as
Arabs to protect villages and homesteads from Arab raids. Refined by Orde
Wingate, an eccentric officer despised by the British high command, he
initiated many of the tactics the Israeli army still uses today including
officers leading from the front, small units that operate off the land and
use simple misdirection to strike at the enemy. These are still main
features of Israel military tactics today.

From the war of 1948,
the IDF increasingly adapted itself to fighting not bands of Arab
fighters, but large well-armed Arab armies. The Yom Kippur War was to
Israel and the Arabs what WW2 was to Europe, a massive devastating
conflict that brought home the message to the Arabs that the war could not
be won by large scale military assaults. Instead the fighting would be
left to terrorist groups, a return to the same kind of armed bands the
predecessors of the IDF had fought during the days of the Mandate. The
kind of armed Indian bands that the Colonial Settlers had cut their teeth
fighting.

The last two wars in Lebanon were so costly precisely
because the IDF was fighting Arab bands again, though they may have been
disguised with Marxist and Islamist tags, and its generals had forgotten
that the key to defeating them lay in the tactics of those young men who
dressed like Arabs and rode on horseback to intercept murderous groups of
Arab bandits. Increasingly the last decade with the creation of a
Palestinian state demanded a reeducation in the way of such a
war.

When American soldiers wanted to find out how to engage in
urban warfare in an Arab city, they watched Israeli soldiers operating in
Jenin and put those same tactics to use in Fallujah cutting open holes in
houses, blasting their way in and taking the enemy by surprise. Israel's
war with Palestinian terrorists has provided much of the tactical and
occasionally even technological methodology for US forces in Iraq. It's
why Israeli and American casualties fighting armed Muslim bands are far
smaller than that of Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and
Chechnya.

Israel and America have adapted, but the essential
way of war they are fighting is misguided. They may only be suffering 10
percent of the casualties relative to the enemy forces, but those are
still unacceptable losses when fighting an enemy force that does not care
about its losses.

Islamic terrorists in Iraq and now Lebanon have
taken a severe beating but they can always replace the lower ranked canon
fodder while the higher ranked terrorists are spirited from hideout to
hideout and emerge afterward crowing triumphantly, much as the Viet Cong
did. Israeli and American tactics allow for greater flexibility,
penetration and adaptation, but they still come down to fighting modified
guerrilla warfare against guerrillas and terrorists operating on their own
terrain. The enemy can always just retreat and wait, carry out a handful
of attacks, appeal to the world and wait till you leave.

An AP
headline read, "Victory for Hizbullah May Be Survival." By contrast
victory for Israel requires either eliminating Hizbullah or damaging it so
badly it won't pose a threat for some time. The latter might be more
possible if Hizbullah wasn't just a tool of Iran which can count on Iran
to aid and resupply it the moment Israel leaves. The former would require
conquering Lebanon. Similarly victory for America requires building a
stable Iraqi government that can hold its own, while victory for Iraqi
terrorists is as simple as preventing America from doing it.

Imagine one person trying to build a house of cards while all
the other person has to do is knock it down. That is essentially America
and Israel's military dilemma. The way out of that dilemma was essentially
closed to them in the latter half of the 20th century and that is a
massive saturation bombing campaign combined with an invasion that treats
everything on the ground as an enemy. It would have been the default
tactic of any military, but a domestic fifth column operating out of the
press and political institutions now make that impossible. While Islamic
terrorists are free to torture, mutilate and behead and still count on the
world's support, every American policing action and Israeli bombardment
results in shrill hysterical condemnation and media coverage.

By the Vietnam era the tactics regularly used by the UN forces in Korea were
the object of horror and condemnation (not however tactics used by the
Viet Cong.) Civilization had turned on itself and the intellectual elites
of the Western world were occupied in enthusiastically cheering on and
empathizing with its destroyers. But letting those very same people place
chains on your military doctrine to ensure the approval of public opinion
is utterly futile since these people will never approve and the crippling
result leaves your military trapped in a bloody and futile struggle with
armed bands that fade in and out of the conflict, always garnering
sympathy and never providing you with an actual victory.

And the
very people who chained down the military, treat your defeats as proof of
the futility of solving things on the battlefield, when it is only proof
of the futility of fighting wars with your hands tied behind your
back.

If the West is to reverse its own decline it must abandon
half-measures and when confronted with an enemy fully fight back. When the
enemy hides among a civilian population there will be significant
collateral damage but the reality is that the enemy could not hide
successfully among the civilian population if they did not have the
support of a major segment of that civilian population. German troops
could not hide in French villages. Israeli soldiers could not hide in
Palestinian villages firing shells. Enemy troops can hide in a location
because there is sufficient sympathy and allegiance on the ground for them
to operate there. That makes them part of the war and the enemy's
operations and makes them valid targets. You can't win a war against
guerrillas except by destroying all possible bases of support for them and
their infrastructure.

It is least often that soldiers lose wars and
most often generals lose wars by the extent that they tie the hands of the
men in the field. It would be good to remember that the extent to which we
are merciful to the enemy population is the extent to which we are cruel
to our own soldiers. In war against an enemy force that hides among enemy
civilians, we have a choice between their lives and ours. For a long while
now we've been choosing their lives over the lives of our soldiers and our
casualty rolls reflect that tragic betrayal.