Arms
AirLand Battle Doctrine
The US Army has recently adopted an aggressive new warfighting doctrine called AirLand Battle. Its precepts now constitute the Army’s basic “how to fight” principles for a decade of “intense, deadly, and costly” battles. The Middle East is one of three major theaters—along with Europe and Korea—in which the Army intends to use its doctrine.
On the Beach
There are two kinds of beaches in US defense planning. The first is the shoreline that US Marines typically storm in a real or rehearsed military intervention. The second belongs to the domain of the nuclear strategists. When their “limited” nuclear war games go astray, simulating escalation into all-out thermonuclear war, the strategists privately label this outcome a “beach,” after the title of Nevil Shute’s popular novel of nuclear apocalypse, On the Beach. In this era, when two military superpowers envelope the globe with the reach of their nuclear weapons, the question inevitably arises: Is it possible for the Rapid Deployment Force to storm the beaches of the Persian Gulf without leaving all of us on the beach of nuclear annihilation?
US and Israeli Weapons in Lebanon
I visited Muhammad Sannoun, fourteen and a half years old, at his home in Burj al-Barajna to ask him why he had touched the triangle-shaped cluster bomb that had blown off his right arm. “It looked like some kind of aluminum cup painted red on the top, yellow on the bottom, with a black casing on the sides,” he said. “I wanted to open it to see what it was.” Mohammed and two other children accompanying him found the bomb outside a bakery in Burj al-Barajna where they were buying bread, and all suffered shrapnel wounds from the explosion.
Egypt’s Military
Egypt’s armed forces number well over 300,000 men, the largest in the Arab world or in Africa. Some two thirds are in the army, and most of the rest in the air force. Since 1952, the top political leadership has been drawn from the armed forces. Since 1968, there has been a “demilitarization” of the top political structures. A recent study calculates that the proportion of cabinet posts held by military officers declined from 35 percent under Nasser to 15 percent under Sadat.
Challenge from Israel’s Military
The Israeli army — or the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — has assumed since the 1967 war an increasingly prominent role in Israeli society. Today the IDF is the single largest factor in Israel’s economy. Its officer corps, once a highly motivated and ideologically cohesive elite trained in the ideology of Labor Zionism, has lost much of its original character, becoming more privileged and professionalized. Elements in the IDF higher echelons now more openly challenge Israel’s civilian political leaders on a broad range of critical issues, further evidence that a major change has occurred in the status and function of the military in Israeli society.
Chronology: US-Egyptian Military Relationship
1974
February 28 Kissinger and Sadat, in Cairo, announce US-Egyptian diplomatic relations to resume, following June 1967 rupture.
March 18 State Department announces US Navy will help clear mines from Suez Canal.
April 18 Sadat announces Egypt ending 18 years of reliance on Soviet arms.
April 19 US “senior official” says US has no “current plans” to sell Egypt arms.
May 24 Limited USSR arms shipments reported resumed to Egypt.
June 12-14 Nixon visits Cairo. Communiqué stresses economic aid, nuclear technology exchange.
War Games for the Eighties
For most of the 1970s, the possibility of US military intervention in the Persian Gulf region inspired military training exercises designed to simulate combat experience in a hot, desert environment. The course of events in Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in 1979 has lent a new urgency to these intervention preparations, reflected in the formation of the Rapid Deployment Force. Already in 1980 there have been several large-scale military exercises designed to simulate not only desert fighting conditions, but also the logistical command and control problems that a multi-service project like the RDF entails. I observed two of the largest of these maneuvers, Gallant Eagle at Fort Irwin, California, in March and Operation Red Flag at Nellis Air Base, Nevada, in June.
The Carter Doctrine and US Bases in the Middle East
On Thursday, July 10, a squadron of 12 brown and green camouflaged F-4E Phantom fighter-bombers landed at Cairo West Air Base after a non-stop 13-hour flight from Moody Air Base in Georgia. A week earlier five C-141s and 28 C-5s airlifted some 4 million pounds of equipment and supplies and more than 500 US Air Force personnel from Dover Air Base in Delaware to Cairo West; this was the first Middle East dry run of the Air Force’s “bare base” capability.
