The Downside of Being the World's Greatest Military

No matter how good any particular commando or group of commandos are, they are still human.

I ran across a couple of people today who said something to the effect that "Israel has one of the best-trained militaries in the world, why do they need to bomb civilian locations to get Hezbollah fighters?  Why don't they go in there and find them with their special forces, and thus reduce the amount of civilians killed?"

The thing about a statement like that is that it immediately indicates the person isn't very knowledgable about things military.  Now, I wish I could provide a link to someone who wrote that in an article or said it in a town-hall meeting or something -- but I think such sentiments are usually found in ordinary Americans -- or ones who don't write articles on foreign affairs for a living, anyway.  So I want to direct this to people like that.

When two or three relatively isolated fighters shoot a rocket from the backyard of a house in southern Lebanon, or from the roof of an apartment building, there is a very small window of opportunity that opens for a very limited amount of time if you're the Israeli military.  This is because as soon as that rocket is fired, within minutes, the terrorists have dismantled their equipment, packed it up in their van, and are on their way to the next firing location.

You can't eliminate such threats with commandos.  When the rockets get fired, real-time satellite imagery records the infrared bloom ... the target is identified and mapped out on a grid, and within seconds, a firing location is transmitted to the fighter-bombers circling in the sky.  If they are close enough, the will line up the target and fire a guided munition at the source.  That's how you get them.  By the time you give the coordinates to the group of commandos -- even ones who are air-mobile -- the terrorists will be long-gone by the time they arrive, and thus more Israeli citizens will die from Katyusha rockets and more Israeli buildings will suffer expensive damage.

So the next time you criticize western military tactics, remember that all the hype from films and television shows combined won't make any single commando any more superhuman than he is already is.