RMA 1.0
by digby
Billmon, in another of his excellent essays on the Israel Lebanon crisis (aptly entitled “the Debacle”) points out what I think may just be the most important fact to emerge about our Really Big Adventure in the mid-east these last few years:
It’s a dismal situation for the Israelis — worse, in many, many ways, that what I would have called the worst-case scenario before the war started. This is what happens when your state-of-the-art blitzkrieg machine is exposed as a relic of a past century.
In 1870, when the Emperor Louis Napoleon declared war on Prussia, he was confident his armies could beat those of Kaiser Wilhelm I just as throughly as his famous uncle had whipped the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806. After all, everyone “knew” the French were the masters of modern military science. In Europe’s capitals the betting was on how long it would take the French to get to Berlin.
But the Prussians had undergone something of a revolution in military affairs since Jena. They’d reformed their Army, created the world’s first general staff and mastered the use of railways to mobilize reserves and move troops quickly to the front.
The result was Zola’s Debacle — an utter defeat for the French, in which their entire army, and their Emperor, were cut off, surrounded and captured at the battle of Sedan. The political and military balance of power in Europe was transformed forever.
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What is clear is that the failure of Israel’s blitzkrieg (and at the moment, it looks like a catastrophic failure, at least politically) will have enormous repercussions in the Middle East, just as the downfall of Louis Napoleon had in late 19th century Europe. By betting the ranch on a quick, decisive victory, the Anglo-Israeli alliance has committed both a crime and a mistake. The architects may escape punishment for the former, but I think the latter is going to come back to haunt them, and probably very soon.
I think the same can be said for the Giant — America. The Iraq invasion, too, has exposed the great military superpower as being incapable of handling the next generation of warfare. Everyone had an inkling of this after Vietnam, but I suppose that many assumed the US had managed to regroup and learn from its mistakes. We Americans were certainly led to believe the military had done so — we’ve been bombarded with propaganda for years about how the new generation of officers had a completely different understanding of assymetrical warfare and the military’s relationship to the political institututions it served.
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