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To be perfectly honest, the piece(s) slightly annoy me because I think much of it falls into the perennial old wine/trendy bottles category.

First (as both Cameron and Weizman note) "mouse-holing"...

I doubt that Hamas will damaged enough for any of that to happen. Moreover, for Fateh to reassume of Gaza "on the backs of Israeli tanks" would make them look like the worst kind of collaborators in...

Ahh yes, the Arab-Israeli conflict in less than 140 characters :D

ANALYSIS / Two years on, IDF starting to look like an army that can fight a war, Haaretz, 12/07/2008.

I didn't get into that issue, but you're correct. The primary driver of Palestinian economic growth in 1967-93 was access to the Israeli economy (for both goods and labour), coupled with petrodollar...

I had a few problems with the study, to be honest.

First, as the author notes, "tactical success" (insurgents stopped/killed/etc) is far from being the same as "strategic success" (which is what...

In order to keep things neat (and since this was originally an IDF COIN discussion), I've posted by response to this Lebanon thread.

I largely agree, Tequila. I do, however, think Hama/1982 does illustrate the utility of massive, raw brute force--when coupled with sustained and effective authoritarian controls. However, the fact...

I think we rarely have a collective opinion ;) I'll give it a shot, though.

From the perspective of Israeli national security interests, a very much shorter air campaign, with much less targeting...

I'm dubious that this can be done, frankly. The IDF certainly didn't manage it in the 1990s--quite the reverse.

I think Israeli strategy (such as it was) in 2006 was to tip the party's cost-benefit analysis, in the hope that the Lebanese population would exert pressure on Hizballah to cease activities that...

This is hardly the case: every major Palestinian population center in the West Bank is ringed by checkpoints. Vehicular traffic is so restricted that the norm is to exit the taxi on one side, line up...

I'm not entirely sure how one distinguishes between the two. After the failure of quite ambitious Israeli efforts to establish a compliant Lebanese government in 1982-83, they certainly gradually...

I think its a fair question, whether we define COIN as all military operations aimed against insurgencies, or whether we consider only FM 3-24-type operations to be COIN. I would use the broader...

Don't get me wrong--I'm not at all arguing that the IDF lacks operational or tactical skill (although I do think that there were a number of tactical and operational weaknesses evident in 2006)....

In a thread on British policy in Northern Ireland (and parallels or non-parallels to Iraq), Wilf made a passing comment that stuck with me today:



I think it is an interesting question how...

To be frank, I'm still rather doubtful at this stage that anyone in the press really knows what happened in eastern Syria.