Milstack Saturday (21 September 2024)
The best articles on military subjects I read (or listened to) in the past week
Most of the coverage of the recent explosion of several thousand pagers (and other pieces of consumer electronics) in Lebanon offers readers little more than cheerleading for one side or another. However, in the course of digging through far too many painfully partisan posts, I found a few articles that, marvelous to say, actually shed light on the event.
The Extraordinary Military Power of Keeping Secrets provides a nice précis of the way that pagers work, as well as a theory about the way that Israeli secret agents might have placed explosive charges in a large number of them.
Weaponizing Technology discusses malware could be used to cause the batteries in cell phones (and, perhaps, even beepers) to burn rapidly, thereby causing explosions that occur without the aid of explosives.
I also found, hors de Substack, a piece by the formidable Michel Goya, French Marine and scholar of la guerre de ‘14. Colonel Goya argues that, whatever the technical means of causing the explosion of the pagers, opération bipeurs, as he calls it, served two purposes. First, it provided a degree of compensation, both psychological and organizational, for the embarrassment inflicted upon Israeli intelligence by the attacks of 7 October 2023. Second, it inflicted injury of a kind that guaranteed retaliation, thereby providing a pretext for a major Israeli incursion into Lebanon.
The second part of Sharpening our Military Command says that Western armies ought to replace large staffs full of functionaries with small groups of adaptable, articulate, well-practiced virtuosi. Over at la Voie de l’Épée, the aforementioned Colonel Goya employs makes the same point. In particular, he compares the headquarters of present-day French formations, stuffed, one might say, like a Strasbourg goose, with the substantially slimmer staffs of their Ukrainian counterparts.
A pair of interviews with Mark McGrath allows listeners two very different ways to learn about the ideas of America’s greatest military theorist, John R. Boyd. If you like economics or software development, you will probably want to start with Connecting DevSecOps to Boyd’s Theories. If you prefer a more personal approach, you should begin with Scanning Your Environment for Mismatches. (Mr. McGrath is, among many other things, the Boyd enthusiast who was kind enough to interview me for his own podcast, No Way Out.)
Over at The Connecting File, Marine Gunner Ray Browne describes the perils of the ‘do it once and check the block’ approach to training. In the same newsletter, Major Mike Hanson, also of the American Marines, shares his methods for making Mossad-proof maps.
Did I miss anything? Please use the comments section to post links to recently published articles that might interest readers of The Tactical Notebook.
For Further Reading:
To Subscribe, Share, or Support:
On small HQs. I was chief human factors geek on a bunch of UK studies into command systems ISR etc in the 2000s. Every time we found the benefit of the new gadget was far outweighed by trimming the staff. In general a 40% reduction cut information processing times and errors by about a third. But there was no department of common sense or making good use of evidence, just lots of departments of buy more stuff. Gave up after 10yrs of MOD apathy.
I disagree with your thumbnail summary of Goya’s interesting article. His view on your second issue is that Israel has created a strategic dilemma for Hezbollah, giving them three choices: partial compliance with UNSC 1701, albeit 18 years late, by withdrawing north of the Litani River, going to a hot war or just taking it with perhaps some desultory retaliation that Israel can ignore.
Goya rules out the first as too humiliating - without commenting that this reinforces the utter uselessness of the U.N. that resolution was the basis for ending the Second Lebanon War in 2006. The second is ruled out as suicidal which leaves the third.
I think what is going on is the proverbial “escalate to deescalate” scenario. Israel can no longer tolerate Hezbollah quite literally across the border and seeks its withdrawal north of the Litani. Of course, Iran will not permit its proxy’s disarmament, the second prong of res. 1701, that will be for others to accomplish.
Israel is signaling that Hezbollah will be paying an increasing price for having begun an unprovoked war against Israel on October 8. Their realistic choices are (1) the U.S. and maybe France (which maintains its 19th century pretense of being Lebanon’s security guarantor) convince Hezbollah to withdraw thereby avoiding war or (2) face a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the IDF that will destroy the country they pretend to protect.
Nasrallah cannot know if (2) is a bluff. While he’s sorting all this out from his bunker, Israel is systematically picking off his top echelon and targeting missile launchers, presumably on the theory that without adequate launchers, Hezbollah’s vaunted missile inventory is worthless.
Missing from Goya’s analysis on wars of attrition is a grappling with the anomalous situation that since its reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty, Israel has never been allowed to fight to the type of victory the Allies had in WWII. Only such an obviously comprehensive victory can discredit genocidal ideologies. Instead, Israel’s adversaries know that the “world community” will save them from such a fate so they can fight again. From all indications, that was a fundamental premise of Hamas’ October 7 massacre.
It seems to be the case that October 7 has changed Israeli calculations of what it can tolerate and has determined that the status quo ante is gone never to return. Destroying Hamas and Hezbollah’s grip on those they rule with an iron fist would be a godsend to the people of both Gaza and Lebanon. No one in the West seems to have the moral clarity or perhaps interest even to begin to make the case.
Finally, it would have been refreshing to read any analysis of a hypothetical French response to a continuous missile and rocket bombardement from Belgium (supported by Germany or Russia - to find an Iranian analogue) that was commenced in solidarity with a nationalist uprising in Corsica and made France evacuate the residents of its northern departments.