Stardate 20030425.1828

(Captain's log): Maurice writes (in response to this post):

".....it's true that they won in 1967, but the reason was that they stole a march on the Arabs."

So what was the reason they won in ' 73 when the Arabs stole the march?

In that case it was mainly due to the vast superiority of their officers and noncomms. Because of that, they were better able to improvise on the battlefield and to take advantage of opportunities large and small when they see them. The Arab forces they faced tended to be extremely poor at that kind of thing; the Arab command structure in general in all the Arab militaries tends to be deeply flawed by comparison. (And this is the case with all militaries in the world which use Soviet doctrine.)

As a general rule, you can tell how good an army is and how well it will do on the battlefield by looking to see how much responsibility and authority it gives to its sergeants. And as De Atkine points out: "a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army has as much authority as a colonel in an Arab army". The Israeli army's sergeants are about the same as ours in terms of level of authority.

It's important that sergeants be relied on, but the reason that's the fast way to check is because the role of sergeants in an army is part of a broader basic attitude about how an army should be organized, how wars should be fought (if they must be) and how planning and decision making is done. Good armies constantly improvise; bad armies stick with a plan even when it's failing, and don't react rapidly to changing circumstances, if they even react at all.

Any military which pulls decisions upstairs will tend to be fragile in combat, and to not react well to the unexpected. Decisions take too long and there's too much chance of the wrong ones being made. An army which pushes authority downwards can get "inside the decision curve" and leave the upstairs army one or two steps behind through most of the critical phases of battle. Because of that, it can have a victory in hand before the upstairs army even knows what happened to it.

In the early days of the Yom Kippur war, it actually went rather badly for Israel, during the period when the Egyptians were carrying out their original plan. It was actually a very good plan, and as long as it lasted it went quite well.

They managed to make a lot of crossings of the Suez canal and to fully capture the east bank of it, pushing the Israelis back into the Sinai.

But once the Egyptians had achieved that goal, the plan ran out. They were then totally incapable of exploiting the situation, or of reacting to the unexpected Israeli counter attack in their center. The Israelis managed to get back to the canal there, and then made their own crossing to the west bank. They then moved columns north and south and had, by the time of the cease fire, managed to surround one of the Egyptian forces and were within a few hours of surrounding the other one. That counter attack and the exploitation of it afterwards was improvised by the front line commanders, with details being worked out on the fly by officers and non-comms at all levels. There's every reason to believe that no Arab army is capable of that to this day. De Atkine makes clear why. It's not a racist statement, it's an observable fact. It's caused by institutional issues and cultural issues which go to the core of the kind of thing which causes the Arabs to fail in so many other ways.

The Egyptian military by 1973 was actually much better trained than it had been in 1967. But by the nature of their command structure and military culture, they could only really do well when things went as they had been expected to go. They were not capable of reacting to the unexpected, either of dealing with surprising setbacks or of exploiting surprising opportunities.

Israel, like the US and UK, has a military based on pushing responsibility and initiative downwards. It trains for initiative and rewards it. Arab armies, such as the Syrian and Egyptian armies in 1973, tend to pull initiative and power upwards and try to train their lower level forces for mindless obedience. The problem is that mindless obedience ceased to be a virtue in an army around the beginning of the 20th century.

The US Army and US Marine Corps demonstrated that kind of initiative and flexibility all through the war in Iraq, but never more so than when our forces finally began the attack on Baghdad. The original plan had been for a relatively conservative and slow process of occupying the city. But the general commanding 3rd Infantry had reports, from aerial recon and from spies and special forces inside Baghdad, and possibly from other sources, which seemed to indicate that the defenders of Baghdad had not prepared anything remotely resembling a competent defense. So he tossed the plan. In fact he tossed all received wisdom from the last hundred years about how one assaults a city, and tried something completely new. Which was, by the way, also very successful. It succeeded because it was audacious, because it caught the defenders by surprise, and because the defenders were idiots. It was the right response to the local situation, and be damned to received wisdom.

Miracle weapo