THE WAR THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

The 1973 Arab-Israeli WarOLLI Fall 2017, Week 8

Frank Chadwick

HOW THE WORLD CHANGED

Five Ways the World Changed(and two other things)

1. Military Tactics and Operational Art2. Superpower Confrontation

3. Middle East Balance of Power4. Israeli Security

5. Israeli Internal Politics

• Recommended Readings• Some closing thoughts

1. MILITARY CHANGES

Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy• Last duke of an independent Burgundy, and one of the foremost

soldiers and military thinkers of the 15th Century.• Widely successful campaigner and on his way to an enduring place in

military history.• Aside from introducing artillery to his army, he relied most heavily on

the armored spearhead of his day …

Mostly what knights had to contend with, when they weren’t fighting other knights, was ill-armed and poorly trained infantry.

In 1476, Charles marched on the Swiss. The Swiss had no heavy cavalry and no artillery, only infantry. But they were armed differently than most infantry in Europe.

• The repeated humiliating defeats of Charles by Swiss pike men not only destroyed Charles’s reputation as a military genius, it also revolutionized European military practice for the next two centuries.

• Infantry now had the weapon which enabled them to stand up to and defeat the charges of heavily armored cavalry. Infantry again owned the battlefield.

From World War Two, until October of 1973, the tank owned the battlefield.

In 1973, the Arab armies, particularly the Egyptian Army, showed the world the equivalent of the Swiss pike.

The combination of short-range RPG anti-tank rocket launchers with the long-range punch of anti-tank wire-guided missiles (ATGMs), such as the AT-3 “Sagger” used by the Egyptians and Syrians, gave infantry the ability to stand up to enemy armor on their own.

• Since 1973, modern military units have returned to combined arms teams built primarily around infantry, not tanks.

• (The 1990 Gulf War was probably the last major exception to this general trend.)

• Tanks remain an important part of the arsenal by virtue of the enormous firepower they carry, but infantry’s greater versatility, and new ability to defend itself against tanks, has restored it to primacy in modern armies.

• The tank is not dead, any more than cavalry disappeared from the battlefield after the introduction of pike-equipped massed infantry. Its role is more limited, and it no longer dominates most battlefields.

2. Superpower Confrontations

• US nuclear alert and aggressive posture toward USSR during the crisis made both sides reassess what they had at stake and what they were willing to risk.

• USSR made it clear that it was unwilling to go to war on behalf of the Arab states, or even risk war by inserting Soviet forces into Egypt or Syria.

• Near-simultaneous end of the US involvement in Vietnam, and the growing Soviet realization it had won nothing in Southeast Asia, caused a further general reassessment.

• Beginning of the end of third-world superpower proxy wars. Too much to lose and too little to gain.

• Renewed emphasis on the conventional balance of forces in Europe, where “all the marbles” were. US conventional arms buildup. New generation of military combat vehicles appeared about ten years later. (M1 Abrams, M2 Bradley, AH-64 Apache)

3. Middle East Balance of Power

• Conversion of Egypt from a Soviet to a US client, and confirmation of Jordan as a west-leaning state at peace with Israel, largely removed the Soviet Union as an important player in Middle East diplomacy.

• The USSR continued as a major arms supplier, but increasingly as a means of acquiring hard currency as opposed to attempting to exert political influence in the region.

• Post-USSR Russia seems interested in again becoming a political player, backing its sole remaining client in the region, Syria.

• In general, the balance of conventional military power now so overwhelmingly favors the West that it has become nearly irrelevant. The critical components of power are now political, economic, and ideological.

4. Israeli Security

• Removal of Egypt (and eventually Jordan) from the front-line belligerent Arab states effectively eliminated the external military threat to Israel.

• Stabilization of the border on the Golan, and Syrian prevention of guerrilla infiltration, limited Israeli frontier security issues to Palestinian refugee-based raids across the Lebanon border and from the Gaza Strip. In the absence of a general agreement with respect to the Palestinian population, those two remain stubbornly volatile.

• Since 1973, Israel has gone to war twice, in 1982 and in 2006, both times invading Lebanon to try to suppress anti-Israeli guerilla movements.

• 1982: PLO• 2006: Hezbollah

• Since 1973, there have been three “intifada” uprisings in the West Bank and two major military campaigns waged against the Gaza Strip.

• Absent a serious external conventional threat, Israel is more secure than ever in its history, but remains unable to find a solution to the Palestinian question.

5. Israeli Politics

• Backlash against the unpreparedness for the war ended the Labor Party’s dominance in Israeli politics and began a pronounced slide to the right.

• Increased security from external attack was accompanied by a hardening of the government’s position with respect to the occupied territories and the Palestinian residents.

• Conservative governments brought not only a pugnacious foreign policy, and a hard line against Palestinian self-determination, but also new economic policies.

• Since Likud’s ride to power, the Israeli economy has grown significantly. But in distribution of wealth, Israel has gone from being among the most even in the developed world to being one of the most uneven, and it now has one of the highest poverty rates in the developed world.

6. Recommended Readings

• Overall Histories• Dupuy, Trevor N. Elusive Victory. Harper & Row, 1978. ISBN 0-06-011112-7.• Herzog, Chaim. The War of Atonement. Greenhill Books, 1975. ISBN 1853673072.• Rabinovich, Abraham. The Yom Kippur War. Schocken, 2004. ISBN 0-8052-1124-1.

• Israeli Memoirs• Adan, Avraham “Bren”. On The Banks of the Suez. Presidio Press, 1980. ISBN 0-89141-043-0.• Kahalani, Avigdor. The Heights of Courage. Praeger, 1992. ISBN 0-275-94269-4.• Orr, Ori. These Are My Brothers. Create Space, 2017. ISBN 978-19745720524.

• Arab Perspectives• Asher, Dani. The Egyptian Strategy for the Yom Kippur War. McFarland, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7864-

4253-9.• el Badri, Hassan, Taha el Magdoub, and Mohammed Dia el Din Zohdy. The Ramadan War. T.N.

Dupuy Associates, 1978. ISBN 0-8824-460-8.• Pollack, Kenneth M. Arabs At War. University of Nebraska Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8032-3733-2.• el Shazly, Lt. Gen. Saad. The Crossing of Suez. American Mideast Research, 1980. ISBN 0-96-

0456201 [The best book available on Egyptian force structure and preparation for the campaign.]

• Nice Maps• Levi, Abraham. Bazak Guide to Israel. Bazak Israel Guidebook Publishers, 1979. ISBN

0-06-090643-X. [Very detailed maps of the Huleh Valley and western Golan Heights.]• Razoux, Pierre. La Guerre Israélo-Arabe d’Octobre 1973. Economica, 1999. ISBN

2717838139. [Includes the best set of overall situation maps of the war in print.]• Russian Language Web Articles

• Granovskiy, Oleg, АОИ на 1973г: Часть 2. Организация Сухопутных войск (IDF in 1973, Part 2, Organization of Ground Forces),http://www.waronline.org/IDF/Articles/IDF73/idf73_army.htm

• Granovskiy, Oleg, АОИ на 1973г: Часть 3. Вооружения Сухопутных Войск (IDF in 1973, Part 3, Armament of Ground Forces),http://www.waronline.org/IDF/Articles/IDF73/idf73_army_weapons.htm

• Zohar, LTC Avraham, Сдерживающий бой на Голанских высотах, 7 октября 1973 года (Containment Battle on the Golan Heights, 7 October 1973),http://www.waronline.org/IDF/Articles/golan.battle.htm.

7. Closing Thoughts

• 1973 not only revolutionized military thinking and led to a major pivot on the part of the superpowers. It also opened the door to a realignment of middle eastern politics. The resulting political and diplomatic events effectively insure Israel’s security against conventional military invasion.

• But we end where we began: the Question of Palestine. • The West Bank remains under military occupation and military law, a

condition recognized in international law as a temporary expedient pending establishment of civilian authority. But it has now been in that “temporary” state for fifty years--seventy per cent of the entire history of the State of Israel. Until an equitable solution to the Question of Palestine is found, there will not be peace.

THANKS EVERYONE!

Thanks for being a wonderfully attentive class, and for sharing my passion for this conflict and what it has meant to the region and the

world.