Today is the one-year anniversary of the fighting started by the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on October 7, 2023. The dragged-out low-intensity nature of of the battles over a 76-year period seem to show the potential for humanitarian aid to make wars last forever. See Florence Nightingale opposed the Red Cross:
How could anyone who sought to reduce human suffering want to make war less costly? By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable.
The Japanese and Germans didn’t get humanitarian aid in the early 1940s and they were quite happy to unconditionally surrender and not wage new wars against the people with whom they’d previously fought (at least so far). The majority of Palestinians polled, on the other hand, want to continue fighting Israel because, apparently, being at war with Israel isn’t an unsustainable lifestyle.
The desire among Palestinians to wage war isn’t new, of course. These are the folks who responded to Hamas’s promise to wage war by electing Hamas. What is new since October 7, 2023 is Israel being attacked by an enemy who is 1,000 miles away, i.e., Yemen. Israel has responded to Yemen’s missile attacks with a few feeble air raids, but the Yemenis aren’t discouraged. Israel doesn’t have the right aircraft to travel that kind of distance carrying enough bombs to change minds in Yemen or to destroy enough infrastructure that Iran can’t resupply Yemen with missiles.
(The Yemenis are another group of humans who can stay at war forever because all of their basic needs are met by international do-gooders. The UN feeds at least one third of Yemen (source) and the Yemenis have turned all of these external inputs into more Yemenis. The population was about 20 million when the civil war began in 2004 and today is estimated by the UN at close to 40 million.
US and EU taxpayers who have no children are always happy to work some extra hours to enable Yemenis to have one of the world’s highest rates of reproduction.)
The first question is whether strategic bombing is still practical in an age where missiles are, apparently, widely available. Could B-52s operate over Yemen, for example, with protection from fighters? If the answer is “yes”, wouldn’t it make sense for Israel to invest in a modern fleet of bombers?
I think it would be interesting to adapt the Airbus A380 to serve as a bomber. The B-52 isn’t any stronger in terms of handling g loads than an airliner. It carries just 70,000 lbs. of bombs and is a huge maintenance and fuel hog. The A380 can hold 330,000 lbs. of payload (the 747-8F can hold about 295,000 lbs.) and both aircraft can easily make the round trip from Israel to Yemen while fully loaded.
Since Israel doesn’t have $trillions to print and burn as the U.S. apparently does, perhaps the country could engineer an A380 or 747-8F to carry freight most of the time but be readily convertible to strategic bomber when it is time to eliminate Yemen’s military capabilities.
If the answer is that old-school bombers are too vulnerable to widely available missiles then perhaps Israel needs to figure out a way to deliver B-52 or Airbus A380 loads of explosives in some other way. But what would that be? Missiles that are launched from Israel? Missiles that are launched from a ship? Drone aircraft? (the Yemenis recently shot down a $30 million American MQ-9 Reaper (AP) so this doesn’t seem like a good approach unless the drones can be mass-produced at low cost)
Great idea! I believe that in 1948 Israel did re-engineered Douglas civilian transport planes to bomb attacking Jordan with makeshift bombs made from garbage cans, or it could be an urban legend. Israel has some military transport aircraft that should be able to open back door in flight and deliver load of ammunition. But it looks like that decades of IDF officers studying in US military academies affected IDF procurement. IDF now too orders most expensive staff while much more affordable robust useful solutions are being offered by Israeli companies to foreign buyers who actually use them for defense and offense.
It appears that for western economy, striking user air force is more productive and less overall expensive then launching long range one-time use rockets.
More and better “diplomacy” to reduce aid to Yemen and/or get the United States to strike Yemen in a meaningful way would likely be more effective and quicker.
Practically speaking, strategic non-nuclear strike is done by Israeli F-35’s and F-15’s, both of which have the range w/ aerial refueling, if not the payload. Guided weapons cut the need for heavy payloads, assuming good targeting.
F15 striker version should be able to carry 8 + tons bomb/missile load with its 2 engines.
“The dragged-out low-intensity nature of of the battles over a 76-year period seem to show the potential for humanitarian aid to make wars last forever. ”
Shatner was already there, signed the guest book, and left.
Original Star Trek series, A Taste of Armageddon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbsXklGF_WM
I’d be in favor of the people in this part of the world to try and do something useful, rather than constantly warring with each other. The whole area seems to be have a lot of people who can think of nothing better to do than to hurt other people. I find this very odd for people who are supposedly religious.
As a counter-example, Canada hasn’t tried to pick a military fight with the US in a while.
To be clear, I am not against defending your country. Switzerland is a good model for this.
Israel was doing just that, being another peg in western economic system. And what did it give to it, except a couple of billionaires and and a load of loosing value $$ that became Bidies?
Lukewarm support from US on whom it now fully depends and who is also strengthening the other side and who holds wild anti-Israel anti-Semitic rallies and embargoes from other western nations, after attack in which over 0.01 percent of its population were murdered, many of them young productive people engaged in globalist festival, others being peacenik kibbutzniks.
Agree that Israel needs armed population but it needs more then that. Before it relied on US for air-force it was making own air fighters. It was also making own long range missiles. By the way, Switzerland buy Israeli military equipment when it needs it, not clear for what.