Reply #42: I wouldn't be so confident

[tocqueville]

the air/land battle you are talking about doesn't work anymore

it "worked" in the Gulf War but didn't took Saddam out of power. If Saddam's army had been a real army wanting to fight the "liberation of Kuwait" had been a bloody affair. The US won a war against an army that surrendered to journalists. The Gulf War inflicted enormous pain to the Iraqi population and specially to the Kurds and the Shiites. It's only result was that 12 years after the war had to restart under fake pretenses and end up in a quagmire.

the Kosovo war was of the same type. It was won because the Russians stopped to support Milosevic and a part of the Serbian leadership thought that Kosovo wasn't worth the carnage. The losers were as usual the civilian population. The Serbian military came out intact with a few scratches. Be sure that the Iranians have learned about the Serbian deceit techniques and how to shoot stealth planes. Kosovo is relatively peaceful (practically no resistance and casualties under occupation) because of the skills of the occupying powers which are to 95% non-US.

Lebanon shows even more the flaws in the Powell strategy (The US haven't really learnt the lesson from Vietnam and are still fighting WWII with better toys). The Israeli failed to knock out the Hezbollah because the Hezbollah doesn't have a chain of command with electronics and bunkers and satellite stuff. They have donkeys and a population that support them. When they then attacked teh Hezbollah they had to retreat. Today I watched on French TV a singular event : the reporter was on the Israeli side and commenting over a file of tanks on a road about 300 yards over the border. Then came a RPG shot out of nowhere and blew out the first tank. A probably badly burned (he was all black) IDF soldier managed to escape. This was not staged !.

We are fighting ghosts said later an interviewed IDF soldier. So the airstrikes continue and the Qana "incidents" will multiply with all the outrage it causes. This is even more accurate for Iran. I bet that the Iranians have buried their stuff so deep and planted so much decoys that the strikes won't be very successfull. REtaliation in Iraq and Hormuz will be horrible. Invasion is out of question. Strategic nuking ? not probable.

Those who will create tomorrow's empires are the one that can answer militarily to asymmetric warfare and avoid civilian casulaties. Big toys' time is over, at least when it's not question of matching a similarly equipped power like the old USSR or tomorrow's China.