Could Israel win a Prolonged War?

Yonatan

Banned
No, I'm disagreeing with this because for instance occupying the West Bank carved the most densely populated and modernized sections of the Kingdom of Jordan from Jordan, while occupying both the Sinai *and* the Gaza Strip was carving a lot of territory off of Egypt. The threat might be overblown as Israel sees it, but from an Arab POV the two attempts to grab the Sinai and the grab of the West Bank *would* create a mentality of imminent existential threat regardless of the reality.

I agree that it's certainly an action that makes sense from an Israeli POV, and I believe that no state ever voluntarily self-terminates so it's hardly wise or just to blame Israel for not doing what no other state has ever done.

Thank you. I accept your reasoning about Jordan, but as for Egypt you are talking about a giant desert, not that much population (unless you count Palestinians as Egyptians) and no infrastructure of any kind (tho there was some oil which Israel payed back Egypt for when it gave the Sinai back as part of the peace process several years after the yom kippur war.)

would you agree however that no one in the middle east takes the option of Israel conquering entire nations seriusly? I mean, in the OP, the theoretical combined arab army isnt fighting to stop Israel from taking say, everything between itself and Morroco? Libya, Tunis, Qatar, the UAE, etc are not under threat and they know it. why would they send wave after wave of soldiers for months on end?

As for how long Israel can fight, I will give you an example:
In 2006, the IDF used 52 artillery batteries, or 312 guns. those include the "rider" and "galloper" classes of Mobile Artillery, along with some older units for the reservists. as far as the mobile artillery goes, they work in teams of 2 vehicls, the artillery unit and an ALPHA, which is a small tracked truck used to carrying ammo. the main vehicle hs 40 shells inside, while the ALPHA has 80 more. that gives them 120 shots before they need a refill. during the war, the IDF used ~100,000 shells, which means every gun was resupplied three times, total. that is the amount of ammo a regiment has for for 3-4 days of combat. it was dragged for over a month. no war depot was opened during the war, for fear Syria will join the fight.

the majority of forces operating in Lebanon was the regular army, not the reserves. about 30,000 reservists were sent into Lebanon in the last 2 days of the war, achieving nothing.

All those mistakes were organisational flaws of the IDF, many of those have since been corrected. the US was sending ammo and fuel because it could afford to, and because it wanted the IDF to succeed.

as for how long the IDF can remain at full mobilasation? several months, exact number I honestly dont think anyone can tell you, yet its long enough to fight throuh whatever it has to face.

For example, say Syria decideds to recruit every able bodied man and arm them as best they can. short of ASB's spawning tanks out of thin air, the majority will be light infantry.
the majority of Syrian artillery is located near the border, most of it is old, and require considrable time to relocate. due to their doctrine they are also extremly close together since their accuracy is rather abysmal. this results in an interesting standoff:

The Syrian arty significantly outnumbered Israeli arty, yet the Israeli arty is by far more accurate and tends to be more scattared (mobile arty will mostly fire a few shots before relocating, with hundreds of meters to several kilometers between units of the same battery). as both sides begin shooting, within minutes the first MLRS start hitting Syrian targets while Syrian arty is at its strongest, laying waste to as many Israeli bases, ammo depots, roads etc they can, using cluster munitions to create minefields etc.
within an hour, the majority of the Syrian artillery has ceased to exist as a functioning entity. they have very little arty units not located near the border, and most of their best units (who are in short supply) are consentrated around Damascus. (this is without taking into account recent turmoil in Syria, which has significantly decreased its military ability, along with repositioning most of their arty and armored forces to fight rebels, leaving the border lightly guarded. If Israel wanted to invade, it would do so weeks ago).

This leads to the situatuation that even if the Syrian arty has managed to utterly annihlate the Israeli arty at the Golan, those are only a fraction of the IDF's arty force, yet the Syrian artillery corpse has effectivly ceased to exist.
I dont care how long the war would last, you cannot magic up a new artillery corpse out of thin air. nor can you easily replace the chain of command who died or were captured.

Sure, Israeli forces moving into Syria will encounter heavy opposition due to the fact the best units are located closer to Damascus, but Syria cannot keep its forces in a coherent fighting phase for very long after its main defence lines have fallen. and they will not take months to fall.

In short, a long arab-Israeli war is ASB in its very nature. regardless of how long armies can remain moblized they will wear each other down to fast for fresh recruits having any influence on the outcome.
 
And why did they get too heavy if the Israelis were able to conduct a conventional protracted war all hunky dory? If Israel was in fact so capable then it's worth asking why it adopted tactics to short-circuit one if it was in fact winning it.

BH Liddell Hart said that the deeper the strike the greater the long term benefit. Why on earth would any country slug it out with artillery over the canal when it can send bombers and commandos deep into the enemys territory to gain long term benefits? Even Egypt saw this and requested Scuds to be able to strike Israel, but were denied by the Soviets. It`s known as escalation dominance, it`s how smart countries fight prolonged wars.
 
Thank you. I accept your reasoning about Jordan, but as for Egypt you are talking about a giant desert, not that much population (unless you count Palestinians as Egyptians) and no infrastructure of any kind (tho there was some oil which Israel payed back Egypt for when it gave the Sinai back as part of the peace process several years after the yom kippur war.)
Not saying anything against you, but how is 80 million people "not that much population?"

Anyway, i started this thread and before I could reply there were 7 pages of a flame war.

I was simply asking if after the Israelis release their modern form of Blitzkrieg on the their Arab enemies, and the Arabs decide to not give in and instead keep rebuilding their armies and reattacking;

will Israel eventually get bogged down?
I mean as i've just stated Egypt alone has 80 million people thats 10 million more than 10 times the population of Israel;

Can people discuss Israel without someone getting banned?
 

Yonatan

Banned
Not saying anything against you, but how is 80 million people "not that much population?"

Anyway, i started this thread and before I could reply there were 7 pages of a flame war.

I was simply asking if after the Israelis release their modern form of Blitzkrieg on the their Arab enemies, and the Arabs decide to not give in and instead keep rebuilding their armies and reattacking;

will Israel eventually get bogged down?
I mean as i've just stated Egypt alone has 80 million people thats 10 million more than 10 times the population of Israel;

Can people discuss Israel without someone getting banned?
I was talking about the sinai being a giant desert with a small population, not all of Egypt.
as for the arab armies rebuilding, this isnt ww2.
you cannot simply build a new division in a matter of months, ask Maccauly how long it takes. if you mean to say the arab armies attack one at a time, with little respite in betweem, that could work assuming Israel doesnt decide to strike at them after 1-2 countries try that trick. but other then Egypt and Syria no other army is big enough to be a threat. (Turkey and Iran invading are asb)
 
Not saying anything against you, but how is 80 million people "not that much population?"

Anyway, i started this thread and before I could reply there were 7 pages of a flame war.

I was simply asking if after the Israelis release their modern form of Blitzkrieg on the their Arab enemies, and the Arabs decide to not give in and instead keep rebuilding their armies and reattacking;

will Israel eventually get bogged down?
I mean as i've just stated Egypt alone has 80 million people thats 10 million more than 10 times the population of Israel;

Can people discuss Israel without someone getting banned?

I`d say that events from 1967 to 1973 go a way toward showing how such a scenario would play out. Israel would strike out to secure the sort of geography that it can defend with the least amount of resources and then if the border fighting got too heavy it would conduct deep strikes to divert attention away from border atrittional tactics.
 
BH Liddell Hart said that the deeper the strike the greater the long term benefit. Why on earth would any country slug it out with artillery over the canal when it can send bombers and commandos deep into the enemys territory to gain long term benefits? Even Egypt saw this and requested Scuds to be able to strike Israel, but were denied by the Soviets. It`s known as escalation dominance, it`s how smart countries fight prolonged wars.

A Nazi whitewasher is hardly the best source for good military maxims.
 
A Nazi whitewasher is hardly the best source for good military maxims.

Old Baz is a recognised visionary military theorist, his book on the indirect approach is one of the most important of the 20th century. Thus he is one of the best sources for military maxims.
 
Old Baz is a recognised visionary military theorist, his book on the indirect approach is one of the most important of the 20th century. Thus he is one of the best sources for military maxims.

And he's a Nazi whitewasher who played a major role in the transformation of the Wehrmacht from barbarian horde to golden boys subject to Dolchstosslegende Mark II, especially with regard to Erwin Rommel. Thus he is not exactly an objective source as a historian.
 
Essentially Israel is in a prolonged war, since the Arab powers have refused to make peace with it. I am not being facetious.

Israel is able to survive a prolonged war because the Arab powers can't project enough power to defeat Israel. Arab economies are not able to maintain a large enough army near Israel to attrit the IDF. They have boycotted Israel from the very beginning, and occassionally embargoed Israeli's friends and trading partners. Yet, they aren't able to do damage to the Israeli economy. By every conceivable measures except in natural resource rents, the Israeli economy is far stronger than all the Arab economies put together.

Israel does not need to attack the Arabs to win. It just needs to control its immediate surroundings enough to prevent the Arabs massing an army capable of destroying it, and that it is able to do. The goals of the two opponents are completely different. Israel just wants to survive, not rule over all the Arab lands. The Arab war goal is not to survive, but to destroy Israel. They have the much harder task.

It should be noted that Israeli victories could all have been far better than they were historically. To preserve the balance of power during the Cold War, the US kept restraining Israel. There is no reason why Israel could not have raised their flag in Amman, Damascus, or Cairo except for American political pressure.

While Israel could not have occupied those areas indefinitely, they have never needed to. The Arab militaries have never been able to threaten Israel sufficiently to break the Israeli economy. Instead, Israeli could destroy any real conventional threat and devastate the economy of their Arab neighbors if needed.

If the Arab powers ever got serious and decided on a fight to the finish, right now with their current capabilities, the Israelis would have tanks in the nearby Arab capitals and destroyed all the armies sent to fight them. Then they could occupy the Sinai, control the Suez Canal, and probably permanently occupy more land (to a limited degree, say some more empty desert around Israel and the immediate area east of the Jordan River), all at little cost compared to the damage they just inflicted on the Arabs.

The periphery Arab states would not be able to do much additional damage as they could not project force anywhere near Israel, for if they did the Israelis would just destroy it as easily as they did the Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians.

And what could the Arabs do in response? Not trade with them? They aren't doing that already. Not recognize them diplomatically? They aren't doing that already either. Refuse to make peace? They aren't doing that already too. Support terrorism? They tried that, and have failed. In other words, they couldn't do zilch.

If the Arab-Israeli War got hot again, it would just lead to worse Arab results and better results for Israel. The Arabs know this, which is why they haven't done so.
 
And he's a Nazi whitewasher who played a major role in the transformation of the Wehrmacht from barbarian horde to golden boys subject to Dolchstosslegende Mark II, especially with regard to Erwin Rommel. Thus he is not exactly an objective source as a historian.

I wasn`t quoting him as a historian, but as a military theorist. Do you deny the wisdom of the statement?

I`m not interested in the overblown Nazi stories, nobody can meet the standards of objectivity that some people expect and it`s a standard technique to deride people to discredit their quite valid points.
 
I'm intrigued by this so am looking into a couple of bits.
My gut feeling is that the concept of a high intencity prolonged war between the Arab League and Isreal is ASB.

For all the sabre rattling, the Arab league, in my opinion, does not want in any shape or form, a war of any sort with Isreal, and the main proponant for the destruction of Isreal (Iran), isn't even a member of the Arab League.

Having had a look through the membership of the Arab League, I can see only 2 members that would consider persuing an attack against Isreal, (Syria and State of Palastine), and neither are in a position to fight a prolonged war.Syria might consider it for the same reason Argentina attacked the Falklands, but I suspect it would be the last nail the current regime's coffin. As for the argument about using nuclear weapons in conflict making a state a pariah - depends if they win and who their freinds are really. Hasn't dented the prestige of the only nation to use any fission explosives in anger at all so if the situation occurred that Isreal felt it neccessary to use nuclear weapons, I think political consequences would be the last of their worries.

Another question regarding mobilisation and keeping a force in the field, but here's a question: how many volunteers do you think would come in from around the world to defend Isreal? American and European Jews, Isreali supporters, anti Arab extremists etc?
Would that be enough to keep a significant army in the field for an extended period? Also, it's been mentioned that Isreal would need to pay for a war and this would bankrupt them, what about the Arab states? Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the suppy of "free" weapons has disappeared, could for example, Egypt afford to lose one of it's main industries, (tourism), and then spend on the kind of weapons they'd need to defeat Isreal? The short answer is no.
While this situation may change, I don't see it happening soon.

 
I wasn`t quoting him as a historian, but as a military theorist. Do you deny the wisdom of the statement?

I`m not interested in the overblown Nazi stories, nobody can meet the standards of objectivity that some people expect and it`s a standard technique to deride people to discredit their quite valid points.

It is when they do this to make those points valid. :rolleyes:
 
So the maxim `the deeper the strike the greater the long term benefits` is invalid because of the essentially contested idea that BHLH was some sort of Nazi?
 
So the maxim `the deeper the strike the greater the long term benefits` is invalid because of the essentially contested idea that BHLH was some sort of Nazi?

No, it's invalidated because the whole concept is a deeply flawed one in the first place. Barbarossa itself is the prime example of how the deeper the strike, the worse the long-term disaster, given that the Germans overextended themselves and ensured the Soviets had a very simple by comparison logistical task where they had rather more complex ones than they were able to withstand, while Liddel Hart's abilities in real history are somewhat overshadowed by his doing so much to create the myth of the Clean Wehrmacht.
 
What about the activities on Malta in WW2? They were far removed from the front lines but were considered vital. Or the Uboat offensive on the US coast, or Pearl Harbour, or the Soviet offensive in Manchuria, or the parachute drop on the Mitla Pass in 1956. All of these were deep strikes with great long term benefits.

As for your particular example, it took until the end of operation Bagration in late 1944 for the Soviets to push the Germans out of the Soviet Union, so obviously Operation Barbarossa had great long term benefits in the context of Total War. But either way your issue lies with Baz` theory, which has little to nothing to do with the essentially contested accusations of his Nazi sympathies. So I presume you threw the Nazi bit in for a bit of colour.
 
What about the activities on Malta in WW2? They were far removed from the front lines but were considered vital. Or the Uboat offensive on the US coast, or Pearl Harbour, or the Soviet offensive in Manchuria, or the parachute drop on the Mitla Pass in 1956. All of these were deep strikes with great long term benefits.

As for your particular example, it took until the end of operation Bagration in late 1944 for the Soviets to push the Germans out of the Soviet Union, so obviously Operation Barbarossa had great long term benefits in the context of Total War. But either way your issue lies with Baz` theory, which has little to nothing to do with the essentially contested accusations of his Nazi sympathies. So I presume you threw the Nazi bit in for a bit of colour.

It took until Bagration in a sense, but if the Germans had stopped further in the USSR their own situation would have been relatively stronger. Driving deep into the Soviet interior, damn the consequences, was a major aspect in shaping the logistical situation for both sides. The reality is that Israel is not Germany, the Arabs are not the USSR. If it throws itself into a deeply vulnerable set of overextended armies to a point where even a badly weakened enemy can inflict a Battle of Moscow on it.........
 
If the Germans stopped shorter they could not win the total victory that was needed in the circumstances. They were aiming to break the Soviet Union and that was anchored in the person of Josef Stalin in Mocow, which incidently was the transport hub of the Soviet Union.

As for Basil; Guderien also read the writing of De Gaulle, does that make Charles a Nazi sympathiser?
 
A for Israel, what Arab force has showed they could threaten the core of Israel? Israel has approached Damascus and surrounded an Egyptian army by operating in Africa but the reverse hasn`t happened. At best the Arabs have captured a strip of territory that was formerly theirs but had it retaken in the following days.
 
If the Germans stopped shorter they could not win the total victory that was needed in the circumstances. They were aiming to break the Soviet Union and that was anchored in the person of Josef Stalin in Mocow, which incidently was the transport hub of the Soviet Union.

As for Basil; Guderien also read the writing of De Gaulle, does that make Charles a Nazi sympathiser?

Guderian was a blatant liar and fraud who got away with it so the USA could justify putting the treacherous idiots who lost WWII for Germany back in charge of the West German army (where if a war broke out those sorry assholes would have just lost yet another war the way they lost their first one). The Germans didn't have the ability to win either a short war or a long war, Israel's in a worse situation where its over-mobilization *will* begin to produce economic issues and logistical disasters so the only thing the Arabs would have to do if they were able to act in a purely military fashion is keep retreating and engaging in a sequence of small battles until Israel is overstretched and out of fuel and ammo, at which point they start dropping the hammer and using the kind of infiltration tactics a light force can use to rip the heart out of a much more heavily armed force.

A for Israel, what Arab force has showed they could threaten the core of Israel? Israel has approached Damascus and surrounded an Egyptian army by operating in Africa but the reverse hasn`t happened. At best the Arabs have captured a strip of territory that was formerly theirs but had it retaken in the following days.

The Palestinians, if they ever found a leader who could actually do something, given that Israel won't ever let go of the West Bank or Gaza Strip until this problem ultimately becomes irresolvable for it. Admittedly the Palestinians like the other Arabs about as much as Israel does, and the crude reality, too, is that IOTL we're speaking of short wars where the superpowers stepped in to forestall embarrassments to their proxies. In a longer war, both Israel and the Arabs would expect that they'd have to fight their battles, not having the USSR or the USA save their asses.
 
Essentially Israel is in a prolonged war, since the Arab powers have refused to make peace with it. I am not being facetious.

Israel is able to survive a prolonged war because the Arab powers can't project enough power to defeat Israel. Arab economies are not able to maintain a large enough army near Israel to attrit the IDF. They have boycotted Israel from the very beginning, and occassionally embargoed Israeli's friends and trading partners. Yet, they aren't able to do damage to the Israeli economy. By every conceivable measures except in natural resource rents, the Israeli economy is far stronger than all the Arab economies put together.

Israel does not need to attack the Arabs to win. It just needs to control its immediate surroundings enough to prevent the Arabs massing an army capable of destroying it, and that it is able to do. The goals of the two opponents are completely different. Israel just wants to survive, not rule over all the Arab lands. The Arab war goal is not to survive, but to destroy Israel. They have the much harder task.

It should be noted that Israeli victories could all have been far better than they were historically. To preserve the balance of power during the Cold War, the US kept restraining Israel. There is no reason why Israel could not have raised their flag in Amman, Damascus, or Cairo except for American political pressure.

While Israel could not have occupied those areas indefinitely, they have never needed to. The Arab militaries have never been able to threaten Israel sufficiently to break the Israeli economy. Instead, Israeli could destroy any real conventional threat and devastate the economy of their Arab neighbors if needed.

If the Arab powers ever got serious and decided on a fight to the finish, right now with their current capabilities, the Israelis would have tanks in the nearby Arab capitals and destroyed all the armies sent to fight them. Then they could occupy the Sinai, control the Suez Canal, and probably permanently occupy more land (to a limited degree, say some more empty desert around Israel and the immediate area east of the Jordan River), all at little cost compared to the damage they just inflicted on the Arabs.

The periphery Arab states would not be able to do much additional damage as they could not project force anywhere near Israel, for if they did the Israelis would just destroy it as easily as they did the Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians.

And what could the Arabs do in response? Not trade with them? They aren't doing that already. Not recognize them diplomatically? They aren't doing that already either. Refuse to make peace? They aren't doing that already too. Support terrorism? They tried that, and have failed. In other words, they couldn't do zilch.

If the Arab-Israeli War got hot again, it would just lead to worse Arab results and better results for Israel. The Arabs know this, which is why they haven't done so.

I tend to disagree, but good point.:)
 
Top