Category: War

Even before the vulnerability of tanks to drones was exposed in the Russia-Ukraine war, I couldn’t figure out why militaries were still paying for these dinosaurs.

A tale of two tanks… (2019):

… why do we have human-occupied tanks as part of our military? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have robotic/remote-controlled vehicles? Also, what chance do tanks stand against far more nimble anti-tank helicopters and airplanes (e.g., the Mi-24 or the A-10 Warthog)? Is the idea that we use tanks against lightly armed opponents, such as ISIS?

The war in Ukraine proves Isoroku Yamamoto right? (2022):

One feature of the war, as I understand it, is that the Russian military has had a lot of armored vehicles, e.g., tanks and ships, and these have proven vulnerable to inexpensive weapons on the Ukrainian side.

Who could have predicted this? Isoroku Yamamoto, one of the greatest thinkers and strategists of World War II (had Japan followed his advice, it would not have chosen to fight the U.S. to begin with). Admiral Yamamoto was an enthusiast for naval aviation starting in 1924 and correctly predicted that heavy expensive battleships would be almost useless going forward, vulnerable to submarines but especially to swarms of comparatively light and cheap airplanes. (And, of course, the great admiral was ultimately killed by U.S. fighter planes in 1943.)

I’m wondering why the U.S. Army wants to pay to keep 5,000 tanks in its inventory. If we’re fighting a peasant army equipped only with rifles, these tanks are obviously useful, but then we don’t need 5,000 of them. If we’re fighting a big battle in Europe, doesn’t the Russian experience in Ukraine show that the last place anyone would want to be is inside a tank and its illusory protection?

We’ve recently learned that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by a tank (see, for example, “IDF releases footage of tank firing shell that killed Sinwar, pictures of weapons found in home”; there seem to be some alternative versions out of the fog of war in which this Palestinian leader (also UNRWA school employee?) was instead killed by a rifle bullet (“gun violence”)). Does this success rehabilitate the tank’s value in battle? Or does my question about why we need 5,000 of them still apply?

Separately, where on the Mall will President Kamala Harris put the Yahya Sinwar Memorial? Will Minneapolis put a Yahya Sinwar Boulevard next to George Perry Floyd Square? Will Dearborn, Michigan or Hamtramck, Michigan be renamed “Sinwar, Michigan” to honor the fallen fighter?

From “Israel unveils new Barak tank with AI, sensors and cameras” (Defense News, Sep 20, 2023):

(Maybe there could be a “Barack Hussein” variant of this tank and it would spread peace at the Nobel level?)

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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)

Related:

• “The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.” — Arthur Travers Harris, after people complained that the bombers he commanded had destroyed Dresden

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Palestinians have run a master class in victimhood since October 8, 2023. Westerners accept that there has been a “genocide” in a part of the world whose population is growing. The Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) has demonstrated that it is possible to convince Westerners that civilians have been targeted and massacred merely by setting up a “health ministry” that will release a death toll without distinguishing between soldiers and civilians. (It is unclear why there would be an actual health ministry in a Palestinian area given that taxpayers in the US and EU fund all health care for Palestinians via UNRWA.) A Westerner will read that 41,000 noble Gazans have been killed by the evil Israelis and his/her/zir/their brain processes that as “41,000 civilians suffered the unjust fate of being killed”.

It seems now that the Lebanese, who declared war on Israel in 1948 and never accepted a peace treaty nor recognized the state of Israel, have learned from the masters. “Israel pounds Lebanon, pressuring Hezbollah after killing its leader” (Reuters, September 29):

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said more than 1,000 Lebanese were killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks, without saying how many were civilians. The government said a million people – a fifth of the population – had fled their homes.

The noble Lebanese suffered a pager/walkie-talkie attack on September 17-18, 2024 and, therefore, the “two week” period above includes people who were killed or wounded by their Hezbollah-purchased devices.

Separately, the article is interesting for portraying the Lebanese as united behind Hezbollah:

“We lost the leader who gave us all the strength and faith that we, this small country that we love, could turn it into a paradise,” said Lebanese Christian woman Sophia Blanche Rouillard, carrying a black flag to work in Beirut.

“You won’t be able to destroy us, whatever you do, however much you bomb, however much you displace people – we will stay here. We won’t leave. This is our country and we’re staying,” said Francoise Azori, a Beirut resident jogging through the area.

And it looks like the Lebanese are on track for the fully funded lifestyle that Palestinians have enjoyed for 76 years:

The U.N. World Food Programme said it had launched an emergency operation to provide food for those affected by the conflict.

(Everyone in Lebanon has been “affected by the conflict” (that Lebanon started in 1948) and, therefore, everyone in Lebanon is entitled to free food paid for by US/EU taxpayers. Note that about 10 percent of the Lebanese population is already registered with UNRWA as “Palestinian refugees” and, therefore, already getting free food, housing, health care, education, etc.)

If we follow the dogma of revealed preference, it seems that being at war with Israel and receiving international aid is preferred to being at peace with Israel and having to go to work every day.

Here’s some 2019 propaganda from the U.S. State Department:

Since 2007, the United States has provided nearly $5 billion in assistance, investing in the development of Lebanon’s sovereignty and stability through economic growth, education, poverty alleviation, refugee and humanitarian assistance, and local level public service provision. American assistance spans military, internal security, demining, justice, education, public services and economic growth.

“In few places in the world can we so positively help to build institutions,” said Michelle Ward, management officer at Embassy Beirut. “In Lebanon, we have a real opportunity to partner with the Lebanese on development, defense and diplomatic engagements.”

Lebanese public awareness of U.S. government assistance is perhaps greatest regarding support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) where the U.S. government has invested more than $2.29 billion since 2005, training more than 32,000 LAF soldiers in the U.S. and Lebanon. The LAF has developed its role as a broad, cross-sectarian and nationally unifying force able to protect against external and internal threats. Lebanon is the only government in the region to have defeated the Islamic State group of Iraq and the Levant unassisted.

The Lebanese have $500 million/year of military assistance from the United Nations (previous post) and, apparently, billions of pre-Biden dollars from the U.S. for military assistance. Yet the Germans say “The Lebanese state lacks power to contain the escalating conflict between Hezbollah and Israel unfolding on its territory. Its army is notoriously weak too.” This is especially perplexing given that we know that diversity is the sure path to strength. With a diverse mixture of Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shiite Muslims, plus all of that cash from the US and help from the UN, why isn’t the Lebanese state one of the world’s strongest? The Germans say that assembling people who don’t share a common religion is a huge mistake in Lebanon (but it is a great idea in Germany?):

This weakness has historical roots. “Lebanon was founded in the early 20th century as a state of Christian Maronites in alliance with the French as a protecting power,” says Markus Schneider, who heads the Friedrich-Ebert foundation’s regional project for peace and security in the Middle East in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

“The birth defect was that it included large areas of non-Maronite populations from the outset,” Schneider told DW. “Confessionalism was a compromise in order to integrate other sections of the population. This however prevented the emergence of a strong nation state.”

This confessional structure became further entrenched in the Lebanese civil war that erupted in 1975, pitting the country’s three largest denominations — Shiites, Sunnis and Maronite Christians — against each other. After the end of the civil war in 1990, a system was established to better balance the interests of the individual confessional groups.

The term “confessional” here means “a group of people with similar religious beliefs”. Lebanon cannot have “a strong nation state” because it is a mixture Christians and Muslims. European nations and the U.S., however, will become far stronger as Christians and Muslims are mixed.

The Lebanese government hasn’t been entirely ineffective. It managed to order and enforce a Science-inspired lockdown on October 2, 2020:

Lebanon Followed the Science and had 416 excess deaths per 100,000 population from 2020-2021. Sweden deplorably rejected the Science and had 91 excess deaths per 100,000 during the same period. (Lancet) (For comparison, the Science followers of New York State suffered from 205 excess deaths per 100,000.)

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Hezbollah has been having some difficulties lately in Lebanon, a country that should be a near-ideal host for an anti-Israel organization (almost as good an ideological fit as within Harvard University, Columbia, Dearborn, Michigan, or Minneapolis). Lebanon declared war on Israel in 1948, never accepted a peace treaty (unlike Egypt and Jordan), and never recognized the state of Israel. 80 percent of Lebanese polled were happy about the October 7 attack by Hamas, UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Israel. In theory, almost everyone in Lebanon hates Israel and Israelis and wants to stay at war with Israel. Yet… someone inside Lebanon has apparently been feeding helpful information to the IDF. Without finks inside Lebanon, how is Israel able to identify Hezbollah-affiliated structures suitable for its precision bombs? Are the informers Lebanese Christians (a shrinking minority, gradually being replaced by Palestinian immigrants)? Lebanese Sunni Muslims who don’t want to be ruled by the Shiites within Hezbollah? Junior Hezbollah members who want all of the senior leadership to be killed so that they can advance within the org chart?

The second big question… Israel recently blew up an underground bunker in which Hassan Nasrallah and colleagues were working. The bunker was underneath six substantial size apartment buildings in a neighborhood where, supposedly, everyone loves and supports Hezbollah. The apartment buildings were destroyed, yet hardly any residents were killed. Supposedly, the building residents were told to evacuate just prior to the 2,000 lb. bombs being dropped. If true, why didn’t the Hezbollah commanders underneath the apartments learn that everyone was fleeing and go somewhere else? (as Hamas has apparently done in Gaza) Did they overestimate the survivability of their bunker?

A related question is what happens to Hezbollah now. The organization has the support of the United Nations. Here’s the Secretary General saying that Israel needs to give Hezbollah time to regroup and rebuild:

I’m gravely concerned by the dramatic escalation of events in Beirut in the last 24 hours.

This cycle of violence must stop now.

All sides must step back from the brink.

The people of Lebanon, the people of Israel, as well as the wider region, cannot afford an all-out war.

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) September 28, 2024

Hezbollah also has the support of whoever is running the United States (Kamala Harris and Joe Biden?). Here’s the official whitehouse.gov statement, a couple of days before Mr. Nasrallah met his 72 virgins, in which the Biden-Harris administration officially called for a 21-day ceasefire during which Hezbollah could regroup and rearm:

we call for an immediate 21 day ceasefire across the Lebanon-Israel border to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement

“diplomatic settlement” presumably meant that Hezbollah would remain in power indefinitely. Are there any rival Lebanese groups, e.g., organized by Sunnis or Christians, that are powerful enough to disarm Hezbollah and take over governance of southern Lebanon (where the $500 million/year UNIFIL in theory guarantees that no organization like Hezbollah can thrive)?

Here are the locals mourning a lesser Hezbollah leader early this month (source):

Photos like these, in which the entire neighborhood turns out to support Hezbollah, leads me to the final question of this post… why doesn’t Israel simply destroy all of Dahiyeh, the portion of Beirut from which Hezbollah draws its support? Lebanon is in a declared state of war with Israel so it wouldn’t be a violation of any “international law” to bomb part of Lebanon (just as, apparently, nobody at the UN ever said that it violated any law for the Lebanese to be firing rockets and missiles at Israel for the past year). If the neighborhood that is the core of Hezbollah support were gone, the folks who live there would have to resettle in parts of Lebanon where overt support for Hezbollah might not be as popular.

On the intersection between Hezbollah and Kamala Harris:

Hezbollah is now unburdened by what has been

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) September 28, 2024

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“U.N. peacekeepers take cover as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel trade attacks” (from state-sponsored NPR, July 2024):

Literally in the middle of this confrontation is the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, created in 1978 after Israel invaded the neighboring country. Despite the name’s indication that it would be temporary, UNIFIL has become one the longest-serving peacekeeping missions in the world.

UNIFIL took NPR on a recent patrol along the blue line — the cease-fire line painstakingly delineated in 2000 after Israel withdrew following an invasion in 1982. Occasional thuds signaled the daily artillery and rocket attacks since Iran-backed Hezbollah began attacking Israel to support Hamas in the war in Gaza.

The U.N. soldiers conduct regular patrols along the de facto border, both alone and with the Lebanese army monitoring the now regular violations of the 2006 U.N. cease-fire agreement. That accord, drawn up after a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah, established a demilitarized zone along the blue line. Violations are reported to the U.N. Security Council.

The attacks on Israel are conducted by Hezbollah and its allies, rather than the Lebanese army. But under the U.N. plan — which envisioned Lebanese government forces securing Lebanon’s border rather than Iran-backed Hezbollah — UNIFIL deals only with Lebanese government forces.

The UN peace experts consume an annual budget of $500 million. Wikipedia says that, in exchange for the $billions spent over the past few years, they’re supposed to “restore international peace and security” and “assist the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area”. Maybe they’ve accomplished the latter goal indirectly because Hezbollah is the legitimate and popular government of the majority of people in Lebanon? But what about “restore international peace”? What do these peacekeepers do when Hezbollah sets up rocket facilities right next to them? (I think the majority of Hezbollah attacks on Israel are launched from the territory that UNIFIL nominally patrols.)

“The United Nations Completely Failed in Lebanon” (Foreign Policy; October 2023) sheds some light on what the goals of this expensive operation are.

U.N. Resolution 1701, which has been in force since 2006, was supposed to ensure the disarmament of Hezbollah as well as the demilitarization of the region south of the Litani River, which is located about 20 miles from the demarcation zone between Lebanon and Israel known as the Blue Line.

At the end of that 34-day conflict [in 2006], the U.N. updated UNIFIL’s mandate under Resolution 1701 and tasked it with establishing “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL,” between the Blue Line and the Litani River.

But since 2006, Hezbollah has instead fortified southern Lebanon, particularly towns and villages along the 120-kilometer-long (about 75-mile-long) demarcation line. It has built unauthorized firing ranges, stocked rockets in civilian infrastructure, built tunnels into Israel, and repeatedly stopped UNIFIL from accessing certain areas. The fact that southern Lebanon is mostly populated by Shiites—many of whom support Hezbollah—has created a security and intelligence buffer for Hezbollah.

It’s kind of fascinating that a 46-year track record of failure doesn’t lead to a loss of funding. There is no group of humans on this planet that is more deserving of $500 million/year from the UN?

Related:

• Are we in Year 14 of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants?
• Temporary Permanent Coronapanic
• a tunnel built by Hezbollah from the UN-patrolled area into Israel (2019)

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The always-interesting folks at DJI have climbed Mt. Everest with a 1 kg. drone:

(There is at least one cut so I think that there might have been a battery change at some point.)

Watching this video it seems clear that the drone was being operated from quite some distance away. If that’s the case, I don’t understand how political and military leaders can be safe going forward unless they want to live in tunnels. What stops an enemy, internal or external, from flying a lethal version of the DJI Mavic 3 a similar distance until a target is identified, e.g., while giving a speech outdoors or walking from a car into a building? If this technology had been available in 1961, for example, Cuba could have sent small drones to kill U.S. President John F. Kennedy after he sponsored the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Or maybe just the threat of Cuba’s drones, had they existed in 1961, would have caused JFK to refrain from sponsoring the Bay of Pigs Invasion. (I guess if we’re going to send DJI technology back in a time machine we’d have to consider the likelihood that the U.S. would have killed Fidel Castro with a drone before Bay of Pigs Invasion was planned.)

Will killer drones make high-profile political and military leadership jobs less desirable? If there were no fear of getting caught, for example, more than half of the Democrats I know in Massachusetts would launch one at Donald Trump. So if the technology were widely available, there is no way that Trump could be safe without living like Adolf Hitler in the spring of 1945. (I talked to some Democrats in Illinois after Oshkosh last month and they too expressed sadness that Trump hadn’t been killed by Thomas Matthew Crooks, the outsmarter of the Secret Service.) JD Vance has already been demonized by the corporate media as a “Project 2025” subversive and a threat to abortion care for baby. Mightn’t the two of them decide to retire to a golf course if Massachusetts and Illinois Democrats had a practical means of acting on their desires?

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Iran has been displaying its military power recently and its indifference to directives from the U.S. The country attacks the west in general and Israel in particular via support for the Houthis, Palestinian militant groups (Hamas, UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, et al.), and Hezbollah. Iran has also been supplying Russia with drones, thus taking the opposite side of the conflict with Ukraine from the US and Europe.

I’m wondering if the U.S. is ultimately responsible for Iran’s freedom to flex its military muscles. The biggest thorn in Iran’s side was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (eight years of war, for example). By killing Saddam Hussein and trying to run Iraq as our puppet state, the U.S. essentially functioned as Iran’s military ally. More recently, the U.S. has been helping Iran more directly:

• “Biden continues Iran’s access to $10 billion just weeks after its proxy killed three American soldiers” (3/14/2024)
• “Biden Allows Iran to Access Another $10 Billion Amid Gaza War” (11/15/2023)
• “Watch how the Biden administration is defending $6 billion deal with Iran” (10/10/2023)
• “Biden administration restores sanctions waiver to Iran” (Al Jazeera, 2/4/2022): “The waiver, which was rescinded by the Trump administration in May 2020, had allowed Russian, Chinese and European companies to carry out non-proliferation work at Iranian nuclear sites.”

Separately, in May 2024 Joe Biden criticized Israel for killing Hamas soldiers in ways that put non-soldiers (“Hamas voters”?) at risk (AP). This month, Joe Biden criticized Israel for killing a Hamas leader in a way that resulted in zero civilian deaths (Reuters). Maybe there is some ideal ratio of Hamas/non-Hamas deaths that Joe Biden thinks Israel should be required to achieve?

From state-sponsored NPR:

There isn’t a price tag on the above, but I have to believe that Saddam Hussein was able to keep the Iranian military busy at less than 1/50th the dollar cost of what the U.S. military will spend.

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