PART TWO: WEEKLY ROUNDUP….ON BAD STRATEGY AND GEORGE FRIEDMAN
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“Preparing for a worst case scenario by retreating back to indefensible borders is like preparing to be attacked by tying your hands behind your back and downing a handful of sleeping pills.”
BAD STRATEGY
Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.) has achieved a middling reputation among people who don’t know any better as the go-to organization for intelligence and analysis on just about anything. There’s rarely a topic in the news that the organization doesn’t sound off on, either through its own website or in the form of published “reports.” (Stratfor also used to be quoted quite a bit by legacy news organizations, though that seems to have died down in recent years.)
So says J.R. Dunn at American Thinker. Copies are still available of George Friedman’s 1991 book, “The Coming War with Japan.”
From Library Journal
Friedman and Lebard remind us at the beginning of their book that this century has already produced unlikely turns of events. Who in 1960 could have predicted that America 20 years later would be in retreat, defeated by the Vietnamese and reeling before the Iranians? If war with Japan seems impossible, the authors nevertheless deliver on their book’s title with an alarming and usually plausible scenario that takes Japan and the United States on a downward spiral from trade friction to protectionism to armed showdown over markets and raw materials. Friedman and Lebard do not shrink from categorical assertions in the future tense–words like “inevitably” and “inexorably” dot the landscape
Maybe there should have been a few less inevitablys in the mix considering that around this time the United States found itself drawn into growing conflicts in the Middle East.
If the worst-case scenario is the basis for planning, then Israel must reduce its risk and restructure its geography along the more favorable lines that existed between 1949 and 1967, when Israel was unambiguously victorious in its wars, rather than the borders and policies after 1967, when Israel has been less successful. The idea that the largest possible territory provides the greatest possible security is not supportable in military history. As Frederick the Great once said, he who defends everything defends nothing.”
The latter might make more sense if we were talking about the Sinai. How any strategic expert could argue that the 1948 borders are more defensible than the 1967 borders is beyond me considering that we are talking about a relatively small amount of territory that is potently strategic.
Does George Friedman really think that splitting Israel’s capital in half and handing over the other half to the enemy will make the country easier to defend? An inevitable war with Japan seems downright sensible compared to that.
The idea that Israel was winning wars because of the 1948 borders, but losing them because of the 1967 borders is plain bizarre. Israel only fought one conventional war on its territory since then and it won that war despite some strategic blunders at the outset. The determining factor in the Yom Kippur War was not the size of its borders, but the lack of preparation and the failure to launch a preemptive strike.
If Israel had started out with 1948 borders in the Yom Kippur War it would probably never have survived. It barely survived its War of Independence. It won the Six Day War by pushing outward.
Preparing for a worst case scenario by retreating back to indefensible borders is like preparing to be attacked by tying your hands behind your back and downing a handful of sleeping pills.
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