Build Your Own Hezbollah
Sep. 8th, 2008 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynNoah Shachtman, over at Danger Room, reports on a suggestion by anonymous defense analyst to rebuild Georgia's forces based on a very interesting model, that of Hezbollah.
This is something I've thought about for a long time, and I have to confess that I probably should have written it down first. Then I could accuse others of plagiarism. That would be much more amusing.
But it's a really good idea, which, unfortunately, I doubt we'll go through with.
Let's be honest with ourselves; we're never going to build a nation like Georgia into something that can take on Russia. The difference in size, in population, and in economic ability are too great. And NATO wants no part in Georgia. For one thing, NATO wants very little to do with committing to a nation that is still in transitory flux, and has major unresolved ethnic issues. For another, Georgia is in a nearly inaccessible position. It's on the Black Sea (which is basically a Russian lake), isolated from Turkey by high, nearly impassable, mountains, and is very, very small. You could drive a tank column across the country in an afternoon.
In other words, it's a lot like Lebanon, when it comes to resisting the Israelis.
Whatever your opinion of the conflict between Israel and its various enemies, it is evident that Hezbollah has managed to come up with a military paradigm that can at least give the Israelis pause. The key here is not raw firepower, but flexibility, rapid movement, and most importantly, advanced weapon systems that are portable instead of simply expensive. Hezbollah's defensive ability does not allow them to hold ground, but rather function as skirmishers, delaying an Israeli offensive, and avoiding being pinned down. Logically, the Israelis have developed their own tactics to compensate, but those tactics depend on high levels of coordination and training that the Russians have not yet been able to match.
The advantages to this approach, over the conventional approach, are manifold:
1) It's cheap: For a nation with a GDP of $10 billion, this is a major concern. Against a giant the size of Russia, it's even a larger concern. Russia has approximately 17,000 tanks of the T-90, T-80, and T-72 families. That's a lot of firepower. Georgia obviously cannot afford 17,000 tanks of their own, but the cheapest of modern anti-tank weapons, the RPG-29, costs about $500 for the launcher, and $300 for the missile. The RPG-29 is a simple rocket (which means it has no guidance), but the cheapest of the western fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles, the Israeli Spike, is rumored to only cost $5000 per unit. At those prices even Georgia can buy a lot of missiles.
2) It's effective: Rumor already states that the Russians may have lost several tanks during the fighting in Georgia. If they did, then the probable culprit is not Georgian tanks, which did not appear to put up much of a show, but Israeli Spikes. If the Spikes are effective against even the redoubtable T-80 (and the RPG-29 is said to be effective against even the mighty Israeli Merkava), then we have a proven test of their tandem-warhead technology.
3) It's portable: One problem when you're David fighting Goliath, is that Goliath dominates the battlefield. Expensive weapon systems, with their huge appetite for ammunition and spare parts, are a pain to keep supplied in the best of conditions. When the enemy can dominate the air, then the task of supplying your own forces becomes ridiculously complicated. But an RPG-29 is cheap enough, and light enough, that each infantry company can carry enough to maintain themselves in the first days of the war, and the local police station can keep a month's supply locked in a shed in the back. This removes the massive logistical requirements of a more conventional anti-tank force, and segues neatly into the next argument.
4) It's easy to go commando: Russia's recurring nightmare is getting plunged back into Afghanistan. They hated Afghanistan the first time, and show no intentions of going through it a second time. An army armed, not with powerful ground weapons, but with light weapons that are very portable and cheap to replace, is perfectly capable of vanishing into the mountains and starting a running fight with any occupying force. Russia's nightmare is not a Georgia equipped with American tanks, but one armed with advanced anti-tank and anti-air weaponry that can up and vanish into the wilderness at a moment's notice.
5) It's non-offensive: Hezbollah has never even considered launching a full frontal occupation of Israeli territory. That's just not how these guerrilla forces work. The same would go for a Georgia armed in this fashion. Tanks are offensive weapons, capable of jumping deep into enemy territory. Airplanes can cross national boundaries with ease, rocket artillery can drop munitions kilometers deep into enemy territory. But missile-armed infantry are the most defense-oriented force that you can build without tying them down to concrete fortifications. It is easy for Russia to scare up panic on their behalf in the face of columns of Georgian tanks and artillery. It will be harder for them to do the same about long columns of Georgian recruits. Also beneficial, it will be difficult for the Georgians to do anything rash when their army moves at twenty miles a day, and is not equipped to attack cities, buildings, or any other defensive position.
All these are things that Georgia needs, but has to balance against the traditionalism of the armed forces, both ours and theirs, the fact that the US produces almost none of the equipment they would need, and the intransigence of politicians, especially when the dreaded Hezbollah is mentioned. Unfortunately, I think that the future of offensive warfare is going to be dim, especially given the massive paradigm shift away from the ability of nations to wage unrestricted conventional warfare successfully. I wonder if the people who say that war is now obsolete in the first world, that the age of operations is at hand, are correct.
Insurgent armies, with bad equipment, have given us a lot of trouble in Iraq. Armed with the weapons we could have bought them, they could have wrought disaster on our forces. We claim to have learned a lot about these irregular "hybrid" armies from our experience in Iraq. The question is, have we learned enough that we're capable of building one of our own?
This is something I've thought about for a long time, and I have to confess that I probably should have written it down first. Then I could accuse others of plagiarism. That would be much more amusing.
But it's a really good idea, which, unfortunately, I doubt we'll go through with.
Let's be honest with ourselves; we're never going to build a nation like Georgia into something that can take on Russia. The difference in size, in population, and in economic ability are too great. And NATO wants no part in Georgia. For one thing, NATO wants very little to do with committing to a nation that is still in transitory flux, and has major unresolved ethnic issues. For another, Georgia is in a nearly inaccessible position. It's on the Black Sea (which is basically a Russian lake), isolated from Turkey by high, nearly impassable, mountains, and is very, very small. You could drive a tank column across the country in an afternoon.
In other words, it's a lot like Lebanon, when it comes to resisting the Israelis.
Whatever your opinion of the conflict between Israel and its various enemies, it is evident that Hezbollah has managed to come up with a military paradigm that can at least give the Israelis pause. The key here is not raw firepower, but flexibility, rapid movement, and most importantly, advanced weapon systems that are portable instead of simply expensive. Hezbollah's defensive ability does not allow them to hold ground, but rather function as skirmishers, delaying an Israeli offensive, and avoiding being pinned down. Logically, the Israelis have developed their own tactics to compensate, but those tactics depend on high levels of coordination and training that the Russians have not yet been able to match.
The advantages to this approach, over the conventional approach, are manifold:
1) It's cheap: For a nation with a GDP of $10 billion, this is a major concern. Against a giant the size of Russia, it's even a larger concern. Russia has approximately 17,000 tanks of the T-90, T-80, and T-72 families. That's a lot of firepower. Georgia obviously cannot afford 17,000 tanks of their own, but the cheapest of modern anti-tank weapons, the RPG-29, costs about $500 for the launcher, and $300 for the missile. The RPG-29 is a simple rocket (which means it has no guidance), but the cheapest of the western fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles, the Israeli Spike, is rumored to only cost $5000 per unit. At those prices even Georgia can buy a lot of missiles.
2) It's effective: Rumor already states that the Russians may have lost several tanks during the fighting in Georgia. If they did, then the probable culprit is not Georgian tanks, which did not appear to put up much of a show, but Israeli Spikes. If the Spikes are effective against even the redoubtable T-80 (and the RPG-29 is said to be effective against even the mighty Israeli Merkava), then we have a proven test of their tandem-warhead technology.
3) It's portable: One problem when you're David fighting Goliath, is that Goliath dominates the battlefield. Expensive weapon systems, with their huge appetite for ammunition and spare parts, are a pain to keep supplied in the best of conditions. When the enemy can dominate the air, then the task of supplying your own forces becomes ridiculously complicated. But an RPG-29 is cheap enough, and light enough, that each infantry company can carry enough to maintain themselves in the first days of the war, and the local police station can keep a month's supply locked in a shed in the back. This removes the massive logistical requirements of a more conventional anti-tank force, and segues neatly into the next argument.
4) It's easy to go commando: Russia's recurring nightmare is getting plunged back into Afghanistan. They hated Afghanistan the first time, and show no intentions of going through it a second time. An army armed, not with powerful ground weapons, but with light weapons that are very portable and cheap to replace, is perfectly capable of vanishing into the mountains and starting a running fight with any occupying force. Russia's nightmare is not a Georgia equipped with American tanks, but one armed with advanced anti-tank and anti-air weaponry that can up and vanish into the wilderness at a moment's notice.
5) It's non-offensive: Hezbollah has never even considered launching a full frontal occupation of Israeli territory. That's just not how these guerrilla forces work. The same would go for a Georgia armed in this fashion. Tanks are offensive weapons, capable of jumping deep into enemy territory. Airplanes can cross national boundaries with ease, rocket artillery can drop munitions kilometers deep into enemy territory. But missile-armed infantry are the most defense-oriented force that you can build without tying them down to concrete fortifications. It is easy for Russia to scare up panic on their behalf in the face of columns of Georgian tanks and artillery. It will be harder for them to do the same about long columns of Georgian recruits. Also beneficial, it will be difficult for the Georgians to do anything rash when their army moves at twenty miles a day, and is not equipped to attack cities, buildings, or any other defensive position.
All these are things that Georgia needs, but has to balance against the traditionalism of the armed forces, both ours and theirs, the fact that the US produces almost none of the equipment they would need, and the intransigence of politicians, especially when the dreaded Hezbollah is mentioned. Unfortunately, I think that the future of offensive warfare is going to be dim, especially given the massive paradigm shift away from the ability of nations to wage unrestricted conventional warfare successfully. I wonder if the people who say that war is now obsolete in the first world, that the age of operations is at hand, are correct.
Insurgent armies, with bad equipment, have given us a lot of trouble in Iraq. Armed with the weapons we could have bought them, they could have wrought disaster on our forces. We claim to have learned a lot about these irregular "hybrid" armies from our experience in Iraq. The question is, have we learned enough that we're capable of building one of our own?