Free Republic

Former IAF Chief Maj. Gen. (res.) David Ivry says, in a new article, that Israel needs to rethink the concepts of ‘deterrence’ and ‘decisive victory’, which are less relevant in today's assymetrical battlefields. “Limited-scale, asymmetrical conflicts have become the norm. All-out wars between states where both parties invest all of their national resources in an attempt to achieve a decisive victory have become less relevant,” writes Ivry, who is now President of Boeing Israel, in a paper for the BESA Center. “David Ben-Gurion’s conceptual trinity of ‘deterrence’, ‘early warning’ and ‘decisive victory’ is no longer fully valid,” he explains. “These...

New Threat from N.Korea's 'Asymmetrical' Warfare North Korea has over the last 10 to 20 years been developing what is called an "asymmetric strategy," which involves focusing on areas, however small, where South Korea is inferior to the North or lacking altogether. One part of this strategy is submarines. The North is believed to have a fleet of around 70 submarines, including some 20 1,830-t Romeo-class subs and 20 330-t Shark-class subs. The subs had been considered only a minor threat, due to their age, noisy engines and inability to operate in the shallow coastal waters of the West Sea....

Current and potential U.S. adversaries seek to employ asymmetrical weapons, such as improvised explosive devices and cyber warfare, as a means to confront U.S. military superiority in conventional conflict, Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III said here Jan. 21. "Our dominance in conventional warfare has led adversaries to seek new avenues to challenge us," Mr. Lynn told military and civilian attendees at the 38th Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis-Fletcher Conference on National Security Strategy and Policy. The nature of armed conflict, Mr. Lynn said, has changed since the Cold War era, when military doctrine was developed to deal with...

As the uses of force in Somalia, Kosovo and Iraq show, Western armies are very concerned about protecting the lives of their soldiers, and to that end are willing to risk many civilian lives. They also find acceptable the notion that civilian lives can be forfeited in order to attain important military goals. Israel’s Gaza operation clearly shows that Israeli commanders successfully followed the requirements of the administrative model of the principle of proportionality. The IDF required commanders to take humanitarian law into account in the planning stages of the operation. Legal advisors were involved in the planning of many...

Asymmetrical conflicts are fought between a state following the laws of armed conflicts or international humanitarian law, and organizations that almost never follow these rules and have very little incentive to do so. While the Geneva Conventions and their protocols were framed in an era of “classic” military engagements, when wars were fought between nations and by armies that observed the rules of armed conflict, we should examine whether these norms are suited to modern armed conflicts. In practice there exist two very different approaches to the interpretation of the principle of proportionality: the human rights model, which gives preference...

LONDON [MENL] -- Iran has created a women's insurgency force meant to help annex Iraq. Iranian opposition sources said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has established a female unit for operations in Iraq. The sources said IRGC's Quds Force has been training women for the Bader Brigade in Iraq to infiltrate the Baghdad government. Membership in the women's unit has been limited to Shi'ites, who would conduct special operations in Iraq, the sources said. They said IRGC sought to establish Shi'ite women sleeper cells within the Iraqi government and security forces. "The unit would work toward the ultimate goal of...

In a conventional war, if one side has tanks, fighter jets, submarines and similar weapons, while the other side does not, who wins? The answer is obvious. In an unconventional war, if one side has suicide bombers, license to kidnap, torture and violate the laws of war while the other side must refrain from deploying such weapons and abide by all the rules, who wins? The answer, I'm afraid, may be equally obvious. The United States is now engaged in what is called an "asymmetrical war," a conflict in which the two sides fight in different ways and using different...