Israel doesn’t understand 4GW
William Lind has a very interesting post at Defense and the National Welfare. It begins:
So far, Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip has produced no surprises. On the physical level of war, the IDF is triumphing. The Palestinians are suffering about one hundred people dead for every dead Israeli. To a 2GW military, which is what Israel’s formerly Third Generation army has become, that is the main measure of victory.
On the moral level, the picture is reversed. Hamas is almost assured of victory. As Martin van Creveld has observed, all it has to do to claim victory is survive, which it will. That claim will not just be propaganda: for Hamas to survive everything a modern state military can throw at it is a legitimate victory. In fact, it will not only survive but be strengthened by a world-wide flood of sympathy, which will translate in part into new recruits and more money.
In the end, if Israel wants to stop Hamas’s rockets, it will only be able to do so by making a deal with Hamas. Since that was equally true before the war, the question of why it was fought will soon present itself. The real reason is a tad sordid: the current Israeli government is trying to split the “get tough” vote to prevent Likud from winning the next election. The same motivation lay behind last weekend’s “discovery” that Mr. Olmert asked the U.S. for permission to attack Iran. The parties in the current Israeli coalition government are in effect saying to Israeli voters, “Why vote for an oaf like Bibi Netanyahu when you can get the same thing from us without the endless embarrassments?”
What all Israeli parties and the IDF seem to share is that they don’t get 4GW. They have repeatedly been defeated by Fourth Generation forces but they do not learn.
The problem goes beyond John Boyd’s framework of moral-mental-physical, with the moral the most powerful level of war and the physical the weakest. What Israel cannot grasp is that in the face of 4GW, all states should be seen as allies…
