That certainly didn't help but having to move Jordan's armored units out of cover in full view of hostile air power wasn't any use either.
Actually the comparison is a very good one. You are also showing some heavy blinders here. The Wehrmacht along with the Imperial German Army and the Prussian army did best with very short wars where quality of personnel was everything. Of course the Wehrmacht of 1944 wasn't the same as 1939-41, how could it? The Wehrmacht of 1944 had been at war and bleed for years and years.
What has the IDF fought in its entire history? Very short wars where the effects of attrition really don't come into play. The closest to that was the 1967-70 but that was very low intensity.
The reason the Wehrmacht was ground into dust is because they were hugely out numbered in terms of manpower and gear. Fighting 2/3 of the worlds industrial might for 4 years really isn't going to end well. Despite this the Wehrmacht ran up a rather one sided body count.
Back to the IDF, if they had to fight high intensity combat for years at a time they would start to run into real problems.
Michael
Ah, no. The real Wehrmacht was brilliant on the tactical level but a bunch of drooling, lice-picking idiots at anything else in a military POV. The Wehrmacht was laughably idiotic and stupid at the intelligence level, as the Soviets and WAllies showed over and over again. At the operational level it could function only if its enemies were stupid. At a strategic level it had no function whatsoever.
Again, comparing the IDF to the Wehrmacht is an insult....to the IDF. They're so far superior to Hitler's mob of rapists, butchers, murderers, criminals, and thieves that it ain't even funny.
Whitecrow, my point is that the Israelis won IOTL due to OTL circumstances that are mundane tactical ones, not from some nostrum about Arabs being inherently prone to deception and unwilling to engage in headlong slugging, or Jews thinking five years ahead with their minds while Arabs are too stupid to fight wars. Your argument does not rely on military factors but on pseudo-reality-based arguments of culture and blanket generalities that don't really apply to OTL and certainly won't to any ATL where Israel is a Soviet ally in the era of the Vietnam and Korean Wars.
Yup very heavy blinders are showing, calling the Wehrmacht a bunch of names in terms of their war crimes which I admit there is justification for doesn't negate the armed services military skill. You are using an 'appeal to emotion fallacy' or put another way calling the German army a bunch of nasty names no matter how richly deserved detracts from its military skill.
You want a debate on the nazis send me a pm.
Michael
Actually you are rather totally wrong here. The record speaks for itself. The arab armies did suffer from lying up and down the command structure, they did suffer from horriable poor officers un willing to act on their own or break from a plan that is going down in flames. The list goes on.
Again it wasn't that the IDF was a force of bug eyed aliens with ray guns (since SF likes to pounce on of hand comments) its that the arab armies were just that bad in relative terms.
How does replacing the USSR with the USA change anything?
Throughout all this, I don't think that Israel would be too socialist. If its leaders were smart, they would be more like India: leaning towards the Soviets, accepting military help, and being a strategic asset in the region, but not signing the Warsaw Pact or stationing the Red Army in its territory. Israel could thus keep its army free of Soviet influence.
A side effect of this relationship would be that the results of Israel's weapons development, both independent and from espionage against Western companies, would probably find its way to the Soviet Union, which would enable the Soviet army to have technological parity with the West. Since it is now equal in terms of weaponry, the West must outnumber them or at least match them in numbers. Expanding and cementing NATO becomes all the more crucial.
Avoiding reparations from West Germany is probably essential. It was a god send to the Israeli economy, but it also tied the Israeli economy and state, along with the ruling Mapai, to Western Europe.