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Net Warfare - a Real Army Of Davids
NO, "Net Warfare" does not refer to Greenwald and Co. This is a serious think-piece by the Times on the military concept of a hybrid between a conventional and a guerilla army; the hook is the Hezbollah-Israeli showdown. They describe, hmm, an army of Davids:
United States officials worry that theyre not prepared, either, for Hezbollahs style of warfare a kind that pits finders against hiders and favors the hiders.
Certain that other terrorists are learning from Hezbollahs successes, the United States is studying the conflict closely for lessons to apply to its own wars. Military planners suggest that the Pentagon take a page out of Hezbollahs book about small-unit, agile operations as it battles insurgents and cells in Iraq and Afghanistan and plans for countering more cells and their state sponsors across the Middle East and in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The United States and Israel have each fought conventional armies of nation-states and shadowy terror organizations. But Hezbollah, with the sophistication of a national army (it almost sank an Israeli warship with a cruise missile) and the lethal invisibility of a guerrilla army, is a hybrid. Old labels, and old planning, do not apply. Certainly its style of 21st-century combat is known on paper. The style even has its own labels, including network warfare, or net war, and fourth-generation warfare, although many in the military dont care for such titles. But the battlefields of south Lebanon prove that it is here, and sooner than expected. And the American national security establishment is struggling to adapt.
We are now into the first great war between nations and networks, said John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a leading analyst of net warfare. This proves the growing strength of networks as a threat to American national security.
In a talk that Mr. Arquilla calls Net Warfare 101, he describes how traditional militaries are organized in a strict hierarchy, from generals down to privates. In contrast, networks flatten the command structure. They are distributed, dispersed, agile, mobile, improvisational. This makes them effective, and hard to track and target.
A net war differs from all previous wars, which were about brute confrontation of forces, mass on mass what Matthew Arnold called bloody contests of ignorant armies meeting on the darkling plain.
Net war is the battle of the many, organized in small units, against conventional militaries that organize their many into large units. These network forces are not ignorant. They are computer literate, propaganda and Internet savvy, and capable of firing complicated weapons to great effect.
...
Hezbollah spent the last six years dispersing about 12,000 rockets across southern Lebanon in a vast web of hidden caches, all divided into local zones with independent command.
They dug tunnels. They dug bunkers, they established communications systems cellphones, radios, even runners to carry messages that arent susceptible to eavesdropping, said one military officer with experience in the Middle East. They divided southern Lebanon into military zones with many small units that operate independently, without the need for central control.
To attack Israel, Hezbollah dispersed its fighters with no distinguishing markings or uniforms or vehicles. Fighters access the weapons only at the moment of attack, and then disappear. This makes preventing the attack all but impossible. It is a significant modernization of classic guerrilla hit-and-run tactics. Israel has been unable to significantly degrade the numbers of rockets because of this approach. Hezbollah fired more than 100 a day at the start of this conflict; they are still firing more than 100 a day, despite Israeli bombardment.
Hezbollah still possesses the most dangerous aspects of a shadowy terror network. It abides by no laws of war as it attacks civilians indiscriminately. Attacks on its positions carry a high risk of killing innocents. At the same time, it has attained military capabilities and other significant attributes of a nation-state. It holds territory and seats in the Lebanese government. It fields high-tech weapons and possesses the firepower to threaten the entire population of a regional superpower, or at least those in the northern half of Israel.
I am having no trouble getting very gloomy about the lebanon problem - I am not sure how Israel can "win" this round, and I can't imagine a lot of positive outcomes if they don't.
Posted by Tom Maguire on July 29, 2006
Kathianne said:Glad to see they are looking at the new parameters. Links at site:
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2006/07/net_warfare_a_r.html
I don't think that is all, there is more. On the other hand, the world does not turn a blind eye to their tactics, too many are looking for 'root causes' while ignoring the reality behind them. It's not ignoring as much as denial.dilloduck said:The hizbullys succeed only because the world is willing to turn a blind eye to thier tactics and the civilains they use as shields are powerless.
Kathianne said:I don't think that is all, there is more. On the other hand, the world does not turn a blind eye to their tactics, too many are looking for 'root causes' while ignoring the reality behind them. It's not ignoring as much as denial.
The use of civilians, is a problem of those fighting them. If they ceased to 'have an effect', they would cease being used. It brings the argument back to can we do what it takes to win?
Hey, for every 'Israel' substitute US, it becomes more clear. Same problems we are running into in Iraq.rtwngAvngr said:Are you referring to their perception of the state of israel as an unjustly created entity?
And furthermore, is israel worth it?
Kathianne said:Hey, for every 'Israel' substitute US, it becomes more clear.
Kathianne said:I don't think that is all, there is more. On the other hand, the world does not turn a blind eye to their tactics, too many are looking for 'root causes' while ignoring the reality behind them. It's not ignoring as much as denial.
The use of civilians, is a problem of those fighting them. If they ceased to 'have an effect', they would cease being used. It brings the argument back to can we do what it takes to win?
rtwngAvngr said:But we're not israel.
How about we stop all immigration of muslims into our nation. WOuld you be for that? Or is that racist?
Kathianne said:Hey, for every 'Israel' substitute US, it becomes more clear. Same problems we are running into in Iraq.
Remember how the media stopped showing visuals of WTC/911, that was to keep us from 'striking back.' It may be time for the media to use its powers in a better way than they've been doing.
The enemy is much better at propaganda than the US.
Kathianne said:As I said, which is why you didn't quote:
I certainly would be for 'more intensive background checks,' for any type of visas. I do not applaud the 'exchange of students' currently being pushed.
Hezbollah is our enemy, too
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | July 30, 2006
ACCORDING TO a pair of Gallup polls released last week, 83 percent of Americans say Israel is justified in taking military action against Hezbollah, while 76 percent disapprove of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel. Yet when asked which side in the conflict the United States should take, 65 percent answer: neither side. Indeed, 3 in 4 Americans say they are concerned that the US military will be drawn into the fighting, or that it will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the United States.
Gallup's numbers suggest two things. First, that most Americans, sizing up the warfare in northern Israel and southern Lebanon, recognize that Hezbollah is the aggressor and that Israel is fighting in self-defense. And second, that most Americans believe this fight has nothing to do with the United States.
Welcome to Sept. 10.
For years Osama bin Laden had preached that it was ``the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill" Americans. His adherents had responded by blowing up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and slamming a boat laden with explosives into the USS Cole. Yet most Americans paid no attention to Al Qaeda and its threats -- until 3,000 people lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.
Has nothing been learned from that experience?
Hezbollah's barbaric assault on Israel -- kidnapping soldiers who weren't engaged in hostilities, firing waves of missiles into cities and towns, packing rockets with ball bearings designed to maximize suffering by shredding human flesh -- is part and parcel of the radical Islamist jihad against the free world. Nothing to do with the United States? It has everything to do with the United States. Hezbollah hates Americans at least as implacably as Al Qaeda does, and rarely misses an opportunity to say so.
``We consider [America] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples," railed Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, at an enormous rally in February 2005. (Video of Nasrallah's speech, which was broadcast on Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV, can be seen at www.memritv.org.) ``It is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources. . . . Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: `Death to America!' "
And from tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters came the answering cry: ``Death to America! Death to America! Death to America! Death to America!"
These are anything but empty threats. Prior to 9/11, Hezbollah was responsible for more American casualties than any other terrorist organization in the world. Among its victims was Army officer William F. Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut who was abducted by Hezbollah in March 1984 and who died after 15 months in captivity of torture and illness.
And the young Navy diver Robert Stethem, singled out during the 1985 Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and brutally beaten before being shot to death.
And William Higgins, a colonel in the Marine Corps and commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, who was seized by Hezbollah in February 1988, tortured, and eventually hanged. As Michelle Malkin noted last week, the tape of Higgins, bound and gagged and swinging from a rope, was one of the first publicly disseminated jihadi snuff films.
And the 241 Marines murdered by Hezbollah on Oct. 23, 1983, when a suicide bomber drove a truck rigged with 12,000 pounds of TNT into their barracks at the Beirut airport.
And the 19 US servicemen killed in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
For more than two decades, Hezbollah's Shi'ite fanatics, backed by Iran and sheltered by Syria, have made it their business to murder, maim, hijack, and kidnap Americans with the same irrational hostility they harbor for Israel. Yet when Tony Snow, the Bush administration's gifted spokesman, was asked July 19 whether the president believes ``that this is as much the United States' war as it is Israel's war," he answered, ``No," and then tried to change the subject. A moment later the question returned: ``I don't think you really answered the part about why is this not our war?"[/COLOR]
Snow's incredible reply: ``Why would it be our war? I mean, it's not on our territory. This is a war in which the United States -- it's not even a war. What you have are hostilities, at this point, between Israel and Hezbollah. I would not characterize it as a war."
9/11, it was said time and time again, ``changed everything." No longer would Americans walk around with eyes wide shut, oblivious to the threat from the Islamofascists. Not our war? Listen again to the Hezbollah hordes: ``Death to America! Death to America!"
They're serious about it. Why aren't we?
:clap1:Kathianne said:I do not applaud the 'exchange of students' currently being pushed.
Kathianne said:
Kathianne said:Where did it say that?
Kathianne said:I said that where?
Do you want the US to use the same background checks for immigrants and visitors as Israel does?
Kathianne said:I would leave the parameters up to those that are supposed to be doing that job, not that they seem to be doing it.
Kathianne said:No, I don't. But pray tell, what are your ideas?
