Military History Carnival #30

. . . is up and running at Cliopatria.

Israel and Iraq: The Wrong Question

ISRAEL AND IRAN:
EVERYONE IS ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION

by Garrett Jones

Garrett Jones is a retired operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent extensive time in the Middle East and Africa and is a graduate of the U.S. Army War College.


On the 19th of February 2012, the New York Times had an interesting article pointing out the logistical and tactical problems the Israeli Air Force would encounter if it were to try to interdict the development of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. [1] The conclusion reached by the author was that the problems involved precluded Israel from making an attempt at derailing the Iranian nuclear program through conventional military means. While I largely concur with the logic in the article, I do not believe the Israelis ever have seriously considered a conventional military strike as an effective way of stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The more
pertinent question is: Will nuclear weapons be used by Israel against Iran?

Since the beginning of Israel’s own nuclear weapons program, the Israeli doctrine on nuclear weapons has been to reserve the employment of nuclear weapons for attacks or potential dangers that threaten the existence of the Israeli state. This is best demonstrated by Israel’s reaction to Pakistan’s announcement that it had acquired nuclear weapons in 1998. While there was no celebration of the development of an “Islamic Bomb” in Israeli circles, nor was there any public talk of retaliation or military strikes. While Pakistan was not an ally or supporter of Israel, it also did not develop nuclear weapons with much regard to Israel at all.

The development of nuclear weapons was focused on the threat from India, not Israel. While key players in the Pakistani nuclear program may have taken steps to promote the spread of the “Islamic bomb” to other Middle East players, it has been the unwavering stand of the Government of Pakistan, and, more importantly, the Pakistani Army that nuclear weapons were for self-defense — “from India” being the unsaid but clearly understood source of any threat requiring the use of Pakistani nuclear weapons. This was the weapon system to prevent the neighboring Indian Army from simply overwhelming Pakistan with its superior size.

While both distance and the support of the U.S. for both Israel and Pakistan by the U.S. also mitigated the threat of Pakistani possession of nuclear in regard to Israel, it is clear that the Pakistani’s nuclear program simply did not rise to the level of an existential threat to the Israeli state. I do believe, however, that as an unintended consequence, the Pakistani nuclear program is the current greatest existential threat to Pakistan.

The possibility of Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands is of major interest to the United States, but such a development is a survival threat to India. While the Pakistani Army may publicly express concern about the U.S. staging a special operation mission to deprive them of their nuclear weapons should the command and control of Pakistani weapons be threatened, it is far more likely the Indian Army will be there long before the U.S. feels compelled to move. In view of the history of conflict between India and Pakistan, the addition of nuclear weapons to the mix means that the next conflict which is more than a border skirmish, is almost by definition an extinction event for Pakistan. It would hardly be rational for the Indians to leave a defeated enemy on its very border in possession of nuclear weapons in the wake of a serious bilateral military engagement. Pakistan cannot hope to be a victor in any prolonged military engagement against India. Pakistani’s nuclear weapons were meant to create a military stalemate with India. Stalemates are great as long as they work. Loose nukes in Pakistan are an Indian survival threat long before any U.S. targets are held at risk in such an ventuality. I fully expect to see India move to destroy the Pakistani nuclear program should any serious question of uncertainty over the control of Pakistani weapons arise.

Much the same view should be taken in regard to the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons. The question is not whether Iran should be permitted by the West to develop nuclear weapons. The true question is whether Israel determines the Iranian possession of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to the Israeli state. If it does, Israel will employ its nuclear arsenal to end the threat. If it does not, there will be no overt military action. The logistical and tactical problems outlined in the New York Times article dictate the use of nuclear weapons. What would have required hundreds of aircraft to neutralize with conventional weapons can be done by a handful of aircraft employing nuclear weapons. A nuclear mission against Iran is well within the capability of the Israeli Air Force.

Unfortunately, such a mission seems to be outside the limits of imagination of the West’s current national leaders. There has been little discussion of such an occurrence in public circles and I believe that reflects a lack of thoughtful consideration of the possibility. I believe most observers expect a violent and prolonged reaction against Israeli interests, and by extension the interests of Israel’s allies such as the U.S., should Israel carry out a conventional military strike against Iran. I believe it would be fair to say that such a reaction to a conventional strike will pale in comparison to the uproar caused by a nuclear strike. I also believe such a development would completely reset the relationship and positions of all the players in the Middle East peace process in an unpredictable manner. The current stalemate and fossilization of positions would be swept aside, for better or worse.

The Israeli government will receive condemnation and hostility from the other players in the Middle East no matter what sort of military action it takes against Iran. By the same token, Israel’s supporters in the U.S. are likely to back any action Israel takes, if it is cast in the form of the preservation of the Jewish state. “Never again,” reflecting the unique history of the founding of the state of Israel in the wake of the Jewish holocaust after World War II, is probably the most powerful phrase in Israeli politics. It is a slogan which will unite all parts of the political spectrum in Israel and the supporters of the Jewish state internationally.

No private citizen is truly in a position to judge the rationality and the intentions of a government such as is now in control of Iran. The opacity of lines of responsibility and decision making processes in Iran make such a judgment properly within the purview of national intelligence organizations of the various sovereign governments. With that said, the public statements of the Iranian leadership lead me to believe that they will not be diverted from their goal of achieving nuclear weapons. The same public statements also do not engender much confidence in the rationality or judgment of Iran’s leadership.

The history of the Israeli state and its location in a sea of enemies has in an almost unique way trained the leaders of Israel to think the unthinkable. If Israel determines the Iranian nuclear program is in fact a threat to its very existence, then it will strike, and strike in such a manner as to be successful. This will require nuclear weapons. If Israel determines it can live with Iran as a nuclear state, then expect there to be no overt military action but a continuing series of low-level sabotage and covert intelligence actions.

I believe the West and the current U.S. administration are again engaged in a failure of imagination. I do not think the current crop of Western leaders fully understand that Israel may well believe itself to be facing an extinction threat. This may simply be because since the end of the Cold War those currently exercising power in the West have not been faced with such a dilemma. In a very real way, they may not have sufficient practice in both “thinking the unthinkable” and preparing for the consequences of the “unthinkable.”

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Notes

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/world/middleeast/
iran-raid-seen-as-complex-task-for-israeli-military.html?_r=2


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New York University Seeks Elihu Rose Scholar

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow
Department of History
Arts and Science

The Department of History at New York University invites applications for the Elihu Rose Scholar in Modern Military History. The successful candidate will be appointed as an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow effective September 1, 2012, subject to budgetary and administrative approval. The appointment will be for one year, with the possibility of renewal for up to three years. Applicants who hold assistant professor positions at other universities are eligible to apply and may indicate their preference for a one-semester or one-year appointment while on leave from home institutions. The committee welcomes applications from military historians working on any geographical area. The Rose Scholar will teach one course per semester in military history, including one course on a major conflict of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The Rose Scholar will be provided with funds in support of research and to organize public events on military history. Applicants must hold a PhD in History at the time of appointment and must have received the doctorate no earlier than 2007. To apply, please visit https://history.fas.nyu.edu, to submit a cv, a letter of application, three references, and a writing sample (article, book chapter, or dissertation chapter). Review of applications will begin on February 28, 2012. NYU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Naval War College Seeks Professor

The Naval War College is advertising for an associate professor in the maritime history department. As the ad makes clear, the individual hired to this position will eventually become the next Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History.

What the ad does not say: the King Professor runs the department; Maritime History is a small department of three or four people; it is a writing and research department; there are no teaching obligations to this position; and the pay is pretty darn good.

Complete details are here.

I Chose a Gun

General Petrus J.M. "Peter" van Uhm is the current Chief of the Netherlands Defence Staff. In November 2011 he spoke to an audience of scientists, artists and businessmen, etc., complimenting them on their commitment to building a better world and noting the instruments they had chosen to do it: microscope, pen, brush, camera, money, etc. He then states that he too is committed to building a better world, and then--as a soldier walks out on stage with a semi-automatic rifle and the audience titters in anticipation--explains why "I chose a gun."

One of my History of War students pointed out this clip to me in light of our frequent classroom discussions about the code of the warrior.


(Hat tip to Mike Kitching)

Reconstruction as an Insurgency

Mike Few, the editor of Small Wars Journal, recently interviewed me about Reconstruction as an insurgency. Here's his first question and my response:

Mike Few: Traditionally, social scientists, viewing conflict through the lens of the state, prefer to quantify wars as resulting in a win, loss, or tie; however, history shows that the construction, reconstruction, or deconstruction of the state following a conflict is often a long process with mixed results. Why did the Civil War not end after Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to Union Gen. William T. Sherman at Bennett Place, Durham, NC and General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the rural town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia?

Mark Grimsley: It’s important to acknowledge that in an important sense, the war did end in 1865, because the federal government’s two goals—the restoration of the Union and the destruction of slavery—had both been achieved. White southerners gave up the idea of an independent Confederacy, and they showed every sign of accepting the lenient terms for return to the Union offered by the administration of Andrew Johnson. The Republican-controlled Congress, however, believed that more stringent terms were necessary to achieve the fruits of victory. In the words of Richard Henry Dana, a prominent Republican, they insisted on holding the former Confederate states in “the grasp of war” until the political dominance of the Southern elite was eliminated. A key component of their plan to accomplish this involved the imposition of universal male suffrage for African Americans. Essentially, the Reconstruction insurgency was a successful effort to break the grasp of war and restore what Southern conservatives termed “Home Rule.”

A more clunky response, since you mention social scientists, would be to point to the Correlates of War Study, which defines a war as any event that results in a thousand or more battlefield deaths each year. If you substitute “deaths from political violence” for “battlefield deaths,” then several years during Reconstruction would come close to meeting this standard. In Louisiana alone, for example, an estimated 2,500 people perished between 1865 and 1876.

Full interview

Progress Report

I'm now about 2/3 of the way through the process of migrating the blogs from my old web provider to the new one. The really welcome development is that I've reached a point where malicious script is no longer a problem. That means I can resume making regular posts. I look forward to doing that.

Military History and the American Historical Profession

Brian Carroll, a visiting professor at Central Washington University, is teaching an interesting course concerning (you guessed it) military history and the American historical profession.

Among the assigned readings were several posts from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. The only problem, of course, was that his students couldn't access the posts because I'd taken BTOOTSA offline. But not to worry. They're all here on War Historian, immediately below this post.

Military History: Past, Present, and Future

A guest post by John Maass, a graduate student at The Ohio State University

This post was originally published on February 23, 2006. John has since completed his PhD and is now a historian at the US Army Center of Military History.

In the twentieth century, there have been three separate and somewhat distinct strands of military history, although in the early part of this period, the distinctiveness of each was not nearly as pronounced as it is today. These three strands are popular military history, academic military history, and military history as used by professionals in the field of national security/defense, uniformed officers, academy instructors, etc. I will outline the characteristics of each and their current trajectories below.

Popular military history is characterized by an emphasis on battles and campaigns, on the heroics of military leaders, and “grand narratives.” In the first half of the twentieth century, almost all military history was written in this fashion, by academics and popular authors alike. Notable examples of non-academic works include Douglas Southall Freeman’s R.E. Lee and Lee's Lieutenants, Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, and novelist Shelby Foote’s massive three-volume narrative of the Civil War. There were also numerous studies of Napoleonic and World War II battles, campaigns and leaders, including David Chandler’s work on the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler biographies written by John Toland, Alan Bullock, et al.

Academic historians also employed the narrative technique to provide a solid framework for their stories and for good reading, such as Douglas Edward Leach, Samuel E. Morison’s multi-volume narrative on the US Navy in World War II, and James I. Robertson’s Civil War books. These works used stirring narratives, focused on the combat and the drama of events, and usually portrayed somebody as the readily identifiable hero. They were largely celebratory or laudatory in tone, even while depicting the “losers” of wars like the Confederacy and its heroic generals.

Some of this largely uncritical tone may have been influenced by the consensus school of history that dominated academic writing from the WWII years through the mid-1960s, and before that the proper subject of military history was seen as focusing on the leaders and their battles: War, this generation seemed to be saying, is after all about fighting. Military historians also tended to conceptualize warfare as progressing toward greater sophistication. As academic historian Dennis Showalter has expressed it, military history remains the "last stronghold of the Whig interpretation" of history.

Popular military history and its emphasis on combat and leaders today remains, well, popular. It also sells very well in the bookstores, and as Jeremy Black has pointed out in his recent book Rethinking Military History (Cambridge, 2004), much of what gets written about military history is dictated by what publishing houses are willing to bring out to the market. Traditional “trumpet and drums” military studies sell, not an unimportant consideration to publishers and authors alike. This is the type of military history the general public wants to read—chronological narratives that tell stories about war and the men (rarely women) who fought them.

The Types of Military History

This was originally a two-part post, published on December 26, 2006 and January 30, 2007.

In the spring of 1979 I took my first military history course with Allan R. Millett, whom many readers will recognize as one of the most distinguished names in the first generation of academic military historians; that is to say, those self-identified military historians who began teaching and publishing circa 1970. Allan had a standard opening lecture that focused on military historiography, especially what he usefully denominated the five basic types of military history.

The first he called inspirational military history. Works in this category emphasized human qualities, sought to elicit an emotional response, and usually centered on combat. They were essentially humanistic morality plays. Many campaign narratives and military biographies (as well as some autobiographies) conformed to this type.

Next came national military history. This could be viewed as a subset of inspirational military history but merited a separate category because of its notable appeals to patriotism and nationalism. This type was more or less obviously designed to strengthen allegiance to the state by emphasizing the costs of national traditions and values: "Freedom Isn't Free" with footnotes.