Scenario: Acceptable US Casualties Against 3rd World Armies

[shahadi]

In Avi Kober's (2008) 'The Israel defense forces in the Second Lebanon War: Why the poor performance?' frames a compelling discussion whose nexus is that Western soldiers fighting a "non-existential" war are not willing to scarifice fellow soldiers to accomplish the unit's mission.

According to IDF’s Chief of the Manpower Branch Major General Elazar Stern, part of the explanation for the IDF’s failure in the war was over-sensitivity to casualties.

An investigation committee headed by Major General (res.) Yoram Yair found that during the war commanders’ sense of responsibility for the lives of their troops over shadowed their commitment
to fulfill their missions.

The ‘post-heroic’ style of warfare, which characterized the Israeli conduct of the Second Lebanon War, is not a new innovation. Post-heroic warfare has two main rules: (a) the avoidance of casualties to your own troops, and (b) the avoidance of killing enemy civilians.

Its roots are demographic, social and moral, and it is characteristic of Western democracies conducting non-existential wars in which their readiness to sacrifice is relatively low, as per Edward Luttwak who penned the term "post-heroic warfare." Accordingly, when an IDF company attacked the mountain town of Bint Jbeil in the Second Lebanon War, losing eight men in one night, that number was perceived in Israel and broadcast around the world as a disastrous loss.

Juxtapose the scarifice of American forces on D-Day, an operation deemed "existential" where most reports put fatalities at 29000 while all of Iraq war we find reports of 4800 deaths.

Or, consider the lines of Americans during the weeks following December 7, 1942 against the paltry number of volunteers following 9/11.

Hence, we may have an additional tool, "non-existential" or "post-heroic" warfare to understand the complexities of what are acceptable casualities today.

Kober is from the Department of Political Studies and, BESA Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.