Future War

Freakaholic

not just an addiction
Think you might be confusing Hezbollah with the people of Lebanon. What does Nasrallah have to say about the war? Does he think Hezbollah was victorious? (Remember Hezbollah were fighting a defensive campaign. To successfully defend something you want to fight off the enemy until thety leave you alone, right? That's what happened in Lebanon).

Wasnt Hezbollah the government of Lebanon at the time? If the people of Lebanon were massivley killed, then its is their loss of lives.

Can't an attacking force withdraw from attacks, causing more harm to the enemy than themselves, and still be considered victorious (not necessarily in this case, as i think Hezbollah is the clear winner, but in abstract), especially when theyre intention surely was never to invade, conquer, and occupy?
 

vimothy

yurp
Wasnt Hezbollah the government of Lebanon at the time? If the people of Lebanon were massivley killed, then its is their loss of lives.

Can't an attacking force withdraw from attacks, causing more harm to the enemy than themselves, and still be considered victorious (not necessarily in this case, as i think Hezbollah is the clear winner, but in abstract), especially when theyre intention surely was never to invade, conquer, and occupy?

Hezbollah is certainly not the Lebanese government! They are a shiite militia, founded, armed, trained and funded by Iran, and an important actor in southern Lebanon. Some members sit in the Parliament of Lebanon, howver they represent anti-Lebanese foreign powers (Syria and Iran: responsible for assassination of Lebanese politicians). Hezbollah is not Lebanon, Lebanon is not Hezbollah.

If the attackers goal is a raid and destroy mission, then an attacker would be successful if they acheived this. Israel, however, didn't acheive their goals, and Hezbollah even now continue to develop fire power for the next phase (coming soon, I expect) in their sturggle with Israel.
 
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Guybrush

Dittohead
Hezbollah is not Lebanon, Lebanon is not Hezbollah.

And, one is tempted to add, Lebanon is not Lebanon. ;)

‘Winning’ a war is not a clear-cut thing. One reason for many Vietnam vets’ bitterness towards the peace-movement was that they thought they were winning on the ground, but were robbed of victory by a non-understanding public. The infamous Tet-offensive, for example, was a major military defeat for the North Vietnamese, even though it doubtless was a victory in most other ways.
 

vimothy

yurp
And, one is tempted to add, Lebanon is not Lebanon. ;)

‘Winning’ a war is not a clear-cut thing. One reason for many Vietnam vets’ bitterness towards the peace-movement was that they thought they were winning on the ground, but were robbed of victory by a non-understanding public. The infamous Tet-offensive, for example, was a major military defeat for the North Vietnamese, even though it doubtless was a victory in most other ways.

Exactamundo, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Winning and losing are very different from the 4GW perspective, but also similar in other ways. And the Tet offensive is a perfect (4GW) example, military defeat becomes political victory. What does van Creveld say, "the weak defeat the strong"?
 

Freakaholic

not just an addiction
Hezbollah is certainly not the Lebanese government! They are a shiite militia, founded, armed, trained and funded by Iran, and an important actor in southern Lebanon. Some members sit in the Parliament of Lebanon, howver they represent anti-Lebanese foreign powers (Syria and Iran: responsible for assassination of Lebanese politicians). Hezbollah is not Lebanon, Lebanon is not Hezbollah.

If the attackers goal is a raid and destroy mission, then an attacker would be successful if they acheived this. Israel, however, didn't acheive their goals, and Hezbollah even now continue to develop fire power for the next phase (coming soon, I expect) in their sturggle with Israel.

sorry, i was a bit too imprecise, and possibly a bit off. i was unde the impression, from the media, that hezbollah had, through elections, gained control of the goverment and this is why the US and Israel do not recognize the government there and have stoppped aid, or something.

sorry, but i dont have time now for any real thorough fact checking, so let me know if my uninformed ramblings are of no use.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
sorry, i was a bit too imprecise, and possibly a bit off. i was unde the impression, from the media, that hezbollah had, through elections, gained control of the goverment and this is why the US and Israel do not recognize the government there and have stoppped aid, or something.

sorry, but i dont have time now for any real thorough fact checking, so let me know if my uninformed ramblings are of no use.

You're confusing Hizbollah (Lebanon) with Hamas (Palestine).
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
Regarding the original post: I see your point, but I think you are overstating the Islamist threat. With one important exception: their acquiring ‘The Big One’.

Clausewitz noted that defensive war is easier than attack, and surely neither Hamas nor Hezbollah will be rolling the tanks through the streets of Jerusalem. However, success in open battle is not necessary (or feasible) at this stage. What we are witnessing is engineered shifts in the balance of power. Israeli Defence Force doctrine states that one of the goals of the IDF is to project the image of overwhelming force in order to discourage further attacks by Israel’s many enemies. But Hezbollah have made the IDF look weak: defeatable. That is an important victory in itself, for jihadism in general and not just for Hezbollah in particular.

There is an important flaw in your argument here, I think. While last summer’s war certainly presented the Israelis as ‘weak’, it in no way suggested the Israelis to be ‘defeatable’ in a conventional respect—a fact all the surrounding states are painfully aware of. You mention this towards the end of your post...

As it stands, no terrorist group, no state or non-state actor, could fight and win a conventional war with the West. However, according to standard insurgency principles (by now: see Mao for the origins of this theory), and looking at jihad as the “long war”, we are at Phase I of its attack on the West: the Strategic Defensive. Jihadism will continue to build strength politically and militarily, wage asymmetrical 4GW, attack the political will to confront it, and try to shift the balance of power until it is strong enough to engage the West in conventional open battle.

...but seem to end up thinking they are just biding their time, waiting for their conventional armies to gain strength. The crux is: if (or when) they do raise the sufficient troop levels (a sticky problem in its own right), how do they preserve their assymetrical advantage? My guess? They cannot.

So, as I stated at the top, my only concern is for them to go nuclear. Or rather, for some advanced nation-state to end up in theocratic hands. We are only a brisk Pakistani coup d'état away from a major world crisis, for example.
 

Octopus?

Well-known member
Three pages in and nobody's even mentioned the hugely questionable politics inherent in the very first post? Well, with a hearty shudder I wish you all the best in your little tete a tete.
 

vimothy

yurp
Three pages in and nobody's even mentioned the hugely questionable politics inherent in the very first post? Well, with a hearty shudder I wish you all the best in your little tete a tete.

Ha - Maybe everyone's become a bit desensitized to my hugely questionable politics by now!
 

vimothy

yurp
Winning a war was never about winning the bodycount. Remember Pyrrhic victory?

To me, the biggest change in warfare seems to be the definition of "win".

Think that I missed something important here - being a bit pigheaded maybe.

What it means to win has changed, it's by no means the only thing that is different about 4GW, but the nature of victory is very different. I think that this fact applies less to the Lebanese confllict because Hezbollah really did match the IDF in some repsects and fought a very tight military campaign. Guybrush's example (the Tet Offensive) is in many ways the classic culture-centric recuperation of a severe military defeat. Ho Chi Minh used international anti-war networks, communist samizdat and western news media to project the image of an insoluble problem and of American brutality. US resolve crumbled and "the weak defeat the strong".

4GW is a revaluation of values. Categories are emptied of their meaning: "civilian" and "soldier" dissolve into one another, the battlefield expands, war is dispersed throughout society, you (i.e. we) lose by winning.

Seriously though, do you really think invading Iraq and Afghanistan has done any good?
Do you think that if we hadn't there would have been hundreds of 9/11 or 7/7 style attacks?

Swears obviously had a good point too which I mistook: are we succeeding? Are we winning? Is it of any use?

Well, you don't win anything by doing nothing. But there are certainly those who say that it is impossible to really defeat an asymmetrical oponent because if you do, you are seen as a bully. Going into Iraq maybe doesn't make sense from a 4GW approach (though it's different from a humanitarian viewpoint), at least, going in with 3GW tactics has proved rather fatal. The Western military is obviously not ideally designed to fight these kind of battles, however, it's not all hopeless - at least we have Petraeus (who literally wrote the book on COIN) in charge now. The French succeeded in Algeria (using a similar scheme to Petraeus').

Basically though if you want to be extremely harsh and reductive, I think that the removal of two terrorist regimes has made the worlds safer in anti-jihadi terms - perhaps not those two countries themselves (although their are successes: Kurdish Iraq for e.g.), because the Americans are now bogged down by an enemy they cannot really fight (for fear of loosing suppoort back home), using tactics they cannot overcome - currently the West is being out-manoeuvred in the WoT.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Was Saddam's Iraq a "terrorist regime"? He certainly terrorised his own people but I would say a regime would have to sponsor terror in other countries to fit that description. Was this the case? Bin Laden's anitpathy towards Saddam is well known and I can't imagine Saddam having much to do with Iran-backed Hezbullah either...
 

vimothy

yurp
Was Saddam's Iraq a "terrorist regime"? He certainly terrorised his own people but I would say a regime would have to sponsor terror in other countries to fit that description. Was this the case? Bin Laden's anitpathy towards Saddam is well known and I can't imagine Saddam having much to do with Iran-backed Hezbullah either...

He cetainly allowed wanted terrorists to hide in his country, sponsored suicide bombers in Israel ($20,000 a time), launched scuds at Israel, started wars with his neighbours, attacked minorities with chemical weapons, tried to develop nukes, made lots of noise...

Also, people do talk about how "Saddam was a secularist and al Qaeda are religious" - yet secularism, like socialism, doesn't mean quite the same thing in the Middle East as it does in the West. For instance, read the works of the (Christian founder of Baathism), Michael Aflaq, on the genius of Mohammed. Or consider baathist, secular Syria and their ally shiite theocratic Iran, or the Iranian funding of sunni insurgents in Iraq, or consider Saddam's increasing moves towards an Islamist-baathi axis, or even the Islamist-leftist axis in the West (and Egypt for another e.g.).

It's all about biding one's time isn't it? That's the nature of taqqiya, dissimulation - a common jihadist theme, use one enemy for now to defeat the more pressing one, then move on to him later. So jihadists in Afghanistan were happy to take US$ while fighting the Soviets, then moved on to the US after the Soviet threat had been dealt with. Jihadists want a caliphate, an Islamic empire under sharia law, first of all - they can sort out petty differences (killing or enslaving all other Muslim factions) later.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I agree with what Octopus said, there are so many things to disagree with in the original post.
But even ignoring that, further on Vimothy says

Of course, if terrorists would just leave us a lone if we left them alone, everything would be gravy and we could happily let them oppress and torment the Muslim world (the dream of many anti-warriors?) as they have done in the past. However, we know, we know that that isn't what will happen. Remember 9/11?
Surely you don't think that 9/11 occurred in a vacuum completely out of the blue? Even if you do think that you must realise that it is controversial and that you have to justify that statement. To me it seems to be completely beyond the pale to suggest that September the 11th was some kind of year zero in terms of west-east (or civilized-terror as you would have it) interaction - wouldn't it be truer to say something along the lines of "after all the years of non-leaving-alone we've done we can't just leave them alone 'cause they might be a bit annoyed"?
 

vimothy

yurp
I agree with what Octopus said, there are so many things to disagree with in the original post.
But even ignoring that, further on Vimothy says


Surely you don't think that 9/11 occurred in a vacuum completely out of the blue? Even if you do think that you must realise that it is controversial and that you have to justify that statement. To me it seems to be completely beyond the pale to suggest that September the 11th was some kind of year zero in terms of west-east (or civilized-terror as you would have it) interaction - wouldn't it be truer to say something along the lines of "after all the years of non-leaving-alone we've done we can't just leave them alone 'cause they might be a bit annoyed"?

Right, of course, I can see why rich scions of the Saudi elite (like bin Laden) would be annoyed at Western "intervention" (such as it has been) and the movement Western cash into the Middle East.

Didn't Galloway make the same point in his NYC debate with Hitchens, "I believe those planes came out of a swamp of our own making"? Of course, the New York audience went wild, "we did it, hooray!"

What about disagreeeing with my original post?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Bin Laden is a religious nutter with a Muad'dib-sized messiah complex. The fact he (or his family) made his fortune trading oil with America does not endear it to him in the least - as far as he's concerned, they're just infidels, and if they've helped him make the money he uses to fund his global jihad, they're stupid infidels. But of course, he knew that already.

What bin Laden taps into in the minds of the Muslim-in-the-street - in both the Arab middle east and the wider world, including Britain - is a hatred of "the West" (which is, of course, no more a single entity than "the East") which has some causal basis in American foreign policy. Of course, it's (as always) much more complicated than that: taking into account the Soviet invasion of Aghanistan and the supression of the Chechen independence struggle, anti-Muslim prejudice in India, Britain's involvement in the histories of both Iran and Iraq, the Israel/Palestine situation and the perceived 'enforced secularisation' of Muslims in France and I wouldn't be surprised if some Muslims may be feeling like the whole world's against them. To balance that you have to take into account that the vast majority of violence committed against Muslims is perpetrated by other Muslims.
 
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