Caroline Glick on 'Failed Doctrines'

the martial gods of the copybook headings always have their day

Yesterday we touched base on some cautious notes about what people might be trying to push as lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War. What are some thoughts about the Gaza War that started after the slaughter of the innocents on October 7th, 2023?

Well, it took half a year for me to get to it, but let’s look at Caroline Glick’s DEC 2023 article, Rising from the Ruins of a Generation of Failed Doctrines.

Why do I keep bringing things like this up? Simple.

The national security arena is thick with overly credentialed, arrogant, cocksure people who have little life experience outside academia and think tanks who really, really want to be something they’re not. What drives them? Same thing that has driven similar people since the dawn of time; proximity to power, status, money, and comfort by offering comfortable theories to solve hard problems.

If the demand for brilliant ideas exceed the supply, they are more than happy to tut-tut lesser beings and create Tommorowland out of whole cloth. They are clever imps, and hungry people can be gullible.

Sometimes these people are at the front, but usually they are more comfortable whispering in the ear of others with their hand on the levers of power.

Let’s look at some of the errors that Israel made that enabled evil to rage across the Gaza border. There are lessons here not just for Israel, but all nations who are looking for a cheaper, easier way out of the box humans have found themselves in since we first saw someone taking from berry bushes we relied on to feed our family.

Two underlying assumptions guided Israel’s security establishment for the past generation. The first asserted that with the end of the Cold War, the era of conventional wars had ended. In the present age, brains, rather than brawn, would rule the roost.

…

…the second underlying assumption that guided Israel’s security establishment for the past generation. This assumption, also championed by Barak, asserted that Israel’s most important strategic asset was the United States.

That tickles two bits people always want scratched to be distracted by when faced with the very real requirements of war.

The first allowed politicians to be sold that all that money and personnel costs to maintain the forces required to keep the horrors away were no longer needed, as the 1s and 0s would allow both to be dismissed.

The second let the same people allow the burden now to be carried by others later - again increasing the comfort of leaders in the present, and shifting a much greater risk to the future and others. Stewardship is for suckers and the unenlightened, you see.

See a pattern?

The bill came due, as it always does;

…the IDF shut down multiple reserve divisions. It cut its artillery forces by 50%. Armored brigades were shut down. The reserve force was reduced by 80% between 2003 and 2017. The non-commissioned officer corps was gutted. The bulk of the IDF budget and nearly all the U.S. military aid were diverted to the Air Force—the strategic arm of the “small, technological and lethal” IDF.

The doctrine was repeatedly exposed as a farce, but to no avail. The air force didn’t defeat the Palestinian terror factories in Judea and Samaria in 2002. The ground forces did. The air force never had a response to missiles from Hezbollah to the north and Hamas to the south. Without regional brigades defending the borders, Israel’s “peacetime” borders with Jordan on the east and Egypt at its west became highways for weapons smugglers.

Brick’s warnings fell on deaf ears until the “small, smart army” fallacy was obliterated by Hamas invaders on Oct. 7. Israel’s multi-billion shekel “smart fence” was felled by bulldozers. Its automatic response system was obliterated by RPGs. Hundreds of soldiers manning these worthless technological wonders were slaughtered or kidnapped. Everything failed.

The Smartest People in the Room™ assured them all was well.

When this war ends - or at least this stage of a “war” that may never really end - this reality will have to be addressed, and probably looks like it already is.

The failure of the second assumption should ring loudly in Europe as well. The Russians have made this apparent.

Under the spell of Barak’s U.S. dependence doctrine, Israel gutted its domestic military production capabilities. Nearly everything that it had produced domestically—from uniforms to rifles to bullets, to artillery and tank shells—was shut down. Thousands of military industry workers lost their jobs. Knowledge was lost. The contracts moved to the United States. Even projects developed jointly by Israeli engineers financed by America were transferred to the United States for production. So it happened that Israel’s Iron Dome missiles are solely produced in the United States.

Along with Barak, the dependence doctrine’s biggest champions were the air force generals. Under their leadership, Israel’s air force effectively became a U.S. asset. The air force cannot operate without U.S. platforms, spare parts and bombs. All air force ordnance is made in America.

But even during the 1990s and 2000s, the writing was appearing on the walls telling us that things were changing in America. A generation after the United States emerged from the Cold War as the sole global superpower, it struggles to contend with the threat of China, which surpasses it in several key technologies.

Under the spell of globalization, the United States gutted its industrial base. Even if it wanted to, today it is hard-pressed to repeat the 1973 airlift in real time.

It will take years, but it appears Israel is already taking steps to return to a better place. She, rightfully, sees the USA as not as solid as it once was.

As I have been warning our friends for decades; the USA is just one election, national disaster, or political disruption away from coming back home. Plan for it, but hope it does not come to pass.

…the Defense Ministry let it be known that it is moving to correct the situation. On Tuesday, Ynet reported that the Defense Ministry is initiating what it refers to as “Independence Project.”

According to the report, the Defense Ministry is launching a crash program with Israel’s military industries and major industrialists to make Israel independent in everything related to ordnance. In the initial phase, Israel will begin producing bombs for its aircraft. Jerusalem also intends to expand its production of tank and artillery shells, as well as assault rifles and bullets. Separately, there is increased discussion regarding the establishment of a missile force as an independent arm of the IDF. The force would reduce reliance on the air force and develop more versatile, more easily defended missile launch platforms and massively expand Israel’s missile and drone arsenals.

She includes a little note about America that is worth a ponder. No surprise to long-time readers here;

Since the early 2000s, hard-core cultural Marxist progressives have seized control over the U.S. education system at all levels. As a result, young Americans are emerging from high schools and universities with values unlike anything we have ever seen.

The new American values are built around a division of humanity into two classes: oppressor and oppressed. “Oppressors,” young Americans now believe, are evil and must be punished. “Oppressed” are pure and must be empowered. The United States is the chief oppressor. Its social and economic orders must be radically transformed to expiate its sins.

Israel (America’s “mini-me”), and Jews generally, are presented as a microcosm of all things oppressive.

The implications of this progressive indoctrination present America with an existential challenge. If allowed to continue into the next generation, the United States will be destroyed.

From Harvard to California to Asheville, the Jew-hate we’ve seen is something nine months ago, I had thought we would not see in the USA in 2024. It didn’t happen by accident. We know where it is coming from and who is enabling it. Glick is not wrong.

… Biden and his top aides have made clear that their goals are not the same as Israel’s. They do not seek the eradication of Hamas and the return of the hostages. They seek the end of the war and the return of the hostages. And at the end of the war, they want to rebuild Gaza. They want to use the war’s end as a means to compel Israel into a “peace process.” The goal of that process is to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, and Judea and Samaria, led by terrorists from the Palestinian Authority which, like Hamas, seeks the annihilation of the Jewish state.

In Lebanon, the administration seeks to prevent war, even though doing so will leave Hezbollah with its capacity to invade the Galilee and destroy strategic targets all over Israel with its massive missile arsenal.

As for Yemen, the United States has demanded that Israel take no offensive action against either the Houthis or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ overlords directing Houthi operations from their spy ship in the Red Sea.

Half a year after that writing, this still holds true.