Some Disassembly Required: High-Tech Goes to War Against 7th-Century

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The origin of the rocketry term Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) is shrouded in mystery but it’s just the funny engineer’s way of saying the rocket blew up. What you’ve been witnessing in southern Lebanon these last several days is the Rapid Scheduled Disassembly of the Hezbollah terrorist organization, involving thousands of explosions instead of just one big one.

The RSD got started last week with Israel’s three-part virtual decapitation of Hezbollah’s organization. That is, if “decapitation” is the correct word when exploding pagers removed Hezbollah bits a bit further down than their large heads. That was followed up, as I’m sure you know, the next day by exploding walkie-talkies. When Hezbollah’s remaining leadership began to meet in person to overcome their crippled comms, the Israeli Air Force bombed the meetings.

*chef’s kiss*

Now that Hezbollah is disorganized, almost leaderless, and deathly afraid to communicate with one another, Israel is going after its terrorist infrastructure — aided by some of the highest tech in service.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel is “destroying thousands of missiles and rockets aimed at Israeli cities and Israeli citizens.”

“If the terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, insists on continuing to launch rockets and drones at Israel to demonstrate solidarity with Hamas — a decision that has cost his organization and Lebanese citizens dearly — Israel’s current attacks will prove advantageous in the event of a ground invasion of Lebanon,” Lazar Berman wrote on Monday.

Check this out:

“This is what happens when you f*** with the people of Einstein and Oppenheimer: you make science & technology your enemy,” one X user replied. “Not a wise move these days.”

“What Israel has been doing in the north for 10 months now is attriting Hezbollah, surveilling it, building detailed centimeter-level 3D lidar maps of every inch of its heartlands,” author Saul Sadka posted in an X thread one month ago (!!!), eerily accurate in predicting what would follow in September. “Humans and AI have analyzed every olive tree, every field, and every mosque to identify weapon storage locations.”

If you want to do the deep dive, read Sadka’s full thread, starting here.

Imagine spending two decades slowly and ruthlessly building up your missile arsenal, only to find that those damn Jews know where everything is and can target it with pinpoint precision.

Hezbollah renewed its war with Israel on Oct. 8 — just one day after Hamas launched its terror invasion of southern Israel and while its terrorist cells were still murdering and raping and kidnapping their way through every settlement they could reach. Everything Hezbollah is getting, they deserve.

And they’re getting it, in the H.L. Mencken-approved manner, good and hard.

Unlike the densely populated Gaza Strip, there aren’t a whole lot of civilians left in southern Lebanon to serve as Hezbollah’s human shields and/or propaganda corpses. The IDF enjoys the freedom to act with speed and decision and, at least so far, seems to be fully exercising that freedom.

“If this is so easy, Mr. Smarty-Pants,” I can hear you ask, “why couldn’t the U.S. or NATO militaries subdue Afghanistan in 20 years?”

Because that was a different mission in Afghanistan. We quickly (and wrongly) transitioned from defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda to trying to pacify an Islamic land.

A tiny number of Western forces, aided by the local Northern Alliance, toppled the Taliban government in just six weeks. In the first six months of fighting, some 15,000 Taliban were killed or taken prisoner for 12 U.S. Americans killed in action.

T-W-E-L-V-E. That is not a typo.

For an even more modern perspective, the Western coalition forces lost 3,579 soldiers/marines/airmen (2,420 Americans) fighting Muslims for 20 years in Afghanistan. That’s how many Russians die every two weeks in Ukraine.

Muslim armies, particularly Arab, don’t fight modern wars very well — partly for cultural reasons, partly because large Muslim countries like Egypt and Iraq in the 1960s followed the top-down Russian model of military organization. From its inception after World War II, the Israeli military patterned itself on the Western model. Oddly enough, the Western model was based on Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg technique of individual initiative, massed firepower, and armored mobility to confuse and paralyze the enemy.

(Individual initiative by low-ranking soldiers is required to make it all work, but in the Russian/Arab model, nothing gets decided without at least a major or, preferably, a colonel getting involved.)

So the Israeli army uses concepts originated by German officers like Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian in the 1920s and ’30s and happily adopted by the Nazis to astonishing success in 1939-1941.

“Rommel, you magnificent bastard — I read your book,” indeed.

But there is a world of difference between defeating Muslim armies and conquering Muslim lands. The first can be done with relative ease, as we’ve seen time and again since 1948. The fact that tiny Israel still exists is a testament to that fact. The 96-hour Operation Desert Saber (the land campaign component of the Gulf War — Desert Storm was the weekslong air campaign) was just the icing on a lopsided cake.

But history shows that the only way to conquer a Muslim land, as opposed to defeating a Muslim army, is to go medieval on them — literally.

The only successful example I can think of over my first cup of coffee is the Reconquista of al-Andalus by the Christian kingdoms of Portugal, León-Castile, and Aragon. Making the Iberian peninsula Christian again only required 750 years, mass expulsions, forced conversions, and ample bloodshed.

But all that is a conversation for another essay.

The important thing to note today is that, despite one obstacle after another thrown in its way by the Biden-Harris administration, Israel is performing spectacularly on the Middle Eastern front of the proto-Third World War. Sadka noted — this was even before the IDF began the anti-Hezbollah offensive in the north — that “Iran is being stripped of its stand-off proxy armies that it built to scare Israel and the West away from its nuclear program, a program that is at a very advanced stage.”

“When people look back in a century, they won’t remember the Iraq War, but they will recall the leaders who needlessly coddled and appeased a paper tiger doomsday death cult, and allowed them to build doomsday weapons. Leaders who gave the bomb to madmen to whom M.A.D. does not apply.”

Those are the stakes. After years of dithering, Israel finally seems willing to do what must be done.

Now all we need is an American president with the fortitude to help Israel see it through — and that president is not named Biden or Harris.

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