Hat tip to ELP
Outright crazy civilians and something between crazy and inept soldiers. It's difficult to keep in mind how low you can go in regard to military skill, but such videos help. The initial movement of the AFV team to the entry point was already done stupidly. It only got worse afterwards.
This reminds me of what flabbergasted Americans said to Israelis in 1991, the meaning was approximately:
'So you bragged all these years about defeating these Arabs?'
S O
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http://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.de/2012/11/indirect-clown-fire.html
ReplyDeleteA kind of cultural thing.
"This reminds me of what flabbergasted Americans said to Israelis in 1991, the meaning was approximately:
ReplyDelete'So you bragged all these years about defeating these Arabs?'"
Of course, the funny or not-so-funny bit, according on where you stand, is that the "Most Powerful Armed Force In The History Of The World", the "Best Trained Army Ever", etc, etc... just lost two major (if probably rather irrelevant) regional wars in a row, against those same Arabs - well, Arabs and Afghanis.
And this with a disproportion of means and ressources (and even skills) that was even more insanely lopsided in their favour than whatever the Israelis ever enjoyed...
Hell, in comparison to the Iraqi urban insurgents and the Afghanis part-time militamen, the Viet Minh were the Red Army at its peak.
Yet, there doesn't seem to be any kind of soul-searching, just some new fads and quick fixes, such as the SF fixation.
Hopefully, there won't be any kind of wake-up call for the "Western" (US, really) way of war anytime soon, because it may well be as painful as it was during the first weeks of WWI, this is a salient point you often makes and that I'm not seeing much elsewhere.
Actually, the IDF woke up and changed a lot after the embarrassment in Lebanon 2006. I wouldn't count the Gaza nonsense as defeat; the mission was quite in general pointless, though. Whatever harrassment problems existed, they were in part cuased by own political mistakes (or worse than mistakes) and could have been addressed politically.
DeleteBTW, van creveld wrote two books about the IDF issue, "Sword and Olive" is a long takedown criticising the IDF in part for becoming too hardware-centric.
The Americans are busy improving SOPs and equipment, what's lacking is an adjustment of attitude. They didn't really leave their comfort zone in their approach of making war, instead they already felt pain when nearing the limits of their comfort zone.
The Russians also woke up after the South Ossetia conflict, which exposed a lacking combined arms approach in the air force and a couple weaknesses of the (very quickly reacting) army.
All this smells indeed a lot like the Boer Wars and the First Italo-Ethiopian War.
Saying Hezbollah won that war is like saying a pedestrian who spent 6 months in hospital beat the car who's windscreen he went through.
DeleteThey did surprisingly well, but have been very quiet since, and didnt so much as make a peep when the IDF refought that war against Hamas, with wildly different results.