Politicians and the public are convinced that spending more money on weaponry automatically raises an army’s effectiveness on the battlefield, though recent wars in Ukraine and the Middle East tell a contrary story.
Yet only a year later in 2024, Ukraine quietly pulled the Abrams tanks out of the front line because they were too vulnerable to cheap Russian surveillance and attack drones. “There isn’t open ground that you can drive across without fear of detection,” said a senior US military official.
Drone attack
In common with other technical innovations in time of war, the Ukrainians speedily emulated the Russians. Soon neither side could drive a vehicle within five miles of the front line without risking drone attack. Infantrymen complained that they were having to walk about nine miles to reach their frontline positions.
The defence has gained supremacy over the attack in the Ukraine war, producing a stalemate with the drone playing a role in stopping offensives similar to that of the heavy machine gun in the First World War. Almost overnight, all those vastly expensive armoured vehicles in which modern armies had expected to move their troops have become obsolete, like horse cavalry waiting to take part in the battle of the Somme.
The Ukraine war started 40 months ago on 24 February, 2022 with the Russian invasion, and Israel’s Middle East wars began 20 months ago with the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, 2023, which provoked a multi-front Israeli offensive. The two wars have combined to destabilise the world to a greater degree than is generally appreciated.
Too complicated for politicians
The disappearance of the Russian air force from Syrian skies opened a corridor for Israeli planes to fly unimpeded to and from Iran this month, establishing Israel as the dominant power in the region.
square PATRICK COCKBURN Trump is now embroiled in a religious war – and a forever one
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The French First World War prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, famously said that “war is too important to be left to the generals”, but it is also too complicated and unpredictable to be left to politicians.
By my count, five British prime ministers were destroyed or fatally weakened by foreign wars, most of them in the Middle East, since 1900, while in America the political casualty list over the past half century includes four US presidents.
Until recently, he was speaking bizarrely of British and other Nato countries sending “boots on the ground” to Kyiv to enforce a ceasefire in the war, though Russia says it is fighting to prevent Ukraine from joining Nato. Perhaps political leaders more than most people have “an inner Napoleon” trying to fight his way out.
Command wire
The furious dispute about the efficacy, or lack thereof, of the B-2 bombers dropping 30,000lb (13,608kg) bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities in “Operation Midnight Hammer”, which sounds like the name of a pornographic movie, reflects a very human desire to reduce the complexities of war to the possession of a single war-winning super-weapon. As these are always gigantically expensive, defence ministries and companies are enthusiastically keen on them, ignoring cheaper weapons as ineffective.
In Iraq after the American invasion, I met a member of a US army bomb disposal team that dealt with the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that were causing massive American casualties.
Eager to rebut any suggestion of a parallel between the Iraq and Vietnam wars, the US army had withdrawn a military manual issued during the Vietnam War on how to defuse an IED or dismantle a booby trap. The soldier I spoke to complained that he had to buy one of these old manuals in a second-hand bookshop. The Pentagon was ultimately to spend $40bn developing an IED-proof armoured vehicle.
Civil society as a whole becomes the target: homes, shops, schools, hospitals, electricity and water supplies are systematically destroyed, so even if Hamas or Hezbollah are still in charge, they preside over ruins and cemeteries.
Despite the shaky ceasefire, the same fate now threatens Tehran and other Iranian cities.
Further Thoughts
This was certainly an intelligence coup for Mossad – probably helped by the US – though the Israeli foreign intelligence agency was evidently assisted by huge security lapses on the part of Iran. Most of those who died should have guessed that they were marked for assassination, yet some were staying in their own homes, or those of relatives, or in buildings associated with their work. Even on the last day of the war, a nuclear scientist was killed in his father-in-law’s house after his own had been attacked earlier, killing his 17-year-old son.
Much also depends on how far Iran foresaw the possible elimination of its scientists and senior military commanders, making sure that none of them were irreplaceable. Obvious though this precaution should have been, the fatal sloppiness of Iranian security suggests that they repeatedly allowed themselves to be caught by surprise. The same pattern was evident in Damascus on 1 April, 2023, when eight top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers (IRGC) were killed in an Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy complex in Damascus.
But then there seems to have been a turning point in 2020, when the head of the IRGC Quds force, Maj-Gen Qassem Soleimani, was killed by an American drone in Baghdad. Since then, the Iranian leadership has been repeatedly caught by surprise and looked as if it did not know how to respond to increased Israeli aggressiveness. This bafflement increased with the start of the US-backed Israeli offensives in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, sparked by the 2023 Hamas attack.
Possibly the IRGC and Hezbollah were misled by hubris stemming from earlier successes, explaining why they were so often caught by surprise.
The most penetrating and well-informed insight into the Prime Minister that I have seen comes in an article about him in the New Statesman by Tom McTague, the magazine’s new editor, who spoke repeatedly to Starmer formally and informally over a period of months.
Starmer’s dullness is in part a reflection of him presenting himself as a calm and pragmatic manager, working on behalf of the British people “to clear up the mess” left by the Tory government. He wants to make the existing system work better, approaching problems like the competent civil servant that he used to be as head of the Crown Prosecution Service. The difficulty is that the electorate expects more than this, and just running the country a bit better than Boris Johnson or Liz Truss is not going to deliver enough. McTague concludes that Starmer may be a normal person “but these are not normal times”.
McTeague writes: “The biggest failure of all – according to the most influential aides in No 10 – has come over the winter fuel benefit, because its cut became a proxy for deeper questions of purpose. ‘Rachel [Reeves] goes in and the Treasury tells her the taps have been turned on and you need to get a grip,’ says one adviser. ‘Rachel gets a grip, but voters conclude we’re not on their side.’ Having failed to tell a story [about what Labour wants to do], in other words, voters do not know what the adviser calls ‘the most fundamental question in politics’: whose side are you on?
Clunky opportunism like this deepens popular cynicism about Starmer and the Government, and is at odds with his image “as a dry, mechanical technocrat”. Asked what he considers sacrosanct, he answers “human dignity”, which is as nebulous as expressing strong support for “motherhood”, and as a core principle is contradicted by welfare cuts now being curtailed which pushed 250,000 people into poverty.
Cockburn’s Picks
It is some time since I read Primo Levi’s great memoir If This is Man, and I owe this horribly apposite quote to Jeffrey St Clair in Counterpunch:
“The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.”
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