MIDEAST ARMS BALANCE: TILTING IN FAVOR OF THE ARABS?

LUTTWAK, EDWARD N.

MIDEAST ARMS BALANCE: TILTING IN FAVOR OF THE ARABS? EDWARD N. LUTTWAK The information Mr. Cams has presented reveals the full magnitude of the post-1973 arms revolution in the Middle East....

...Specialists interested in the specific sources of particular items will be referred to them upon request...
...To be sure, there were several hundred modern jet fighters in service with the air forces of both countries, and there were hundreds of Syrian and Egyptian pilots who had duly completed their training on these aircraft...
...Edward N. Luttwak, author and defense consultant, is associated with Johns Hopkins University...
...What this means for the military balance between the Arabs and Israel is that in the future the margin of Israeli superiority will be increasingly dependent on the strength of Israeli civil society, on its ability to offer a modern and educationally-productive environment for its younger generation...
...Aside from all the government-to-government training which is being provided (not least by the United States), European and American expatriates— and plain mercenaries serving on individual contracts—are training V^i W ^ CII1VJ Cl\* LUC4.ii _y njruig, vwmuui aircraft all over the Arab world...
...This amounts to a vast and poorly controlled flow of military expertise into the Arab world—some of which is no doubt reaching the Soviet Union, whose agents are active even where its diplomats are not...
...In either case, it is impossible to draw conclusions about relative military power merely by comparing equipment inventories...
...They could certainly fly, and some no doubt flew very well...
...but somehow they could not perform at all effectively in air combat...
...None of these attributes of real-world military power can be purchased abroad, and taken together they are of crucial importance...
...In the case of tank warfare there was also a clear differential, although a narrower one, reflecting the narrower gap in manpower quality between the Arab and Israeli tank forces...
...Weapons and trained operating crews do not, however, amount to effective military power in themselves...
...Before the oil crisis, Middle Eastern armies were still in many cases equipped with second-string equipment, but now both Arabs and Israelis have first-line equipment for their first-line forces...
...By then also it is quite likely that there will be trained operators for much of the equipment in Arab hands...
...as a result, simpler, less sophisticated systems can often be more effective than complex ones...
...Western governments continue to give the Arabs vast disposable funds by tolerating all the exactions of the oil cartel, and continue to give them free access to their most sophisticated weapons...
...The simplest and most common way of comparing opposing military forces is to count weapons inventories...
...Usually such comparisons are limited to listings of quantities of different types of weapons, such as tanks, combat aircraft, or naval vessels...
...or the listinqs may be broken down within types, by models...
...Since weapons are increasingly expensive, and the Arabs are increasingly able to pay for them, it is they who are winning the armaments race...
...Sources and Methods The data for this study have been compiled by W. Seth Carus of Johns Hopkins University on the basis of a very wide survey of all available unclassified literature, notably Congressional documents and the specialist journals...
...Such comparisons do not take into account the facts 1) that equipment possessed is often not incorporated into combat units, and 2) that there is often a lack of adequately skilled manpower to maintain and operate the equipment...
...EDWARD N. LUTTWAK The information Mr...
...For example, even after twenty years of experience with jet fighters, neither Egypt nor Syria had a genuine fighter force in the 1973 war...
...The air combat statistics of 1973 show that the Israeli Air Force shot down some fifty Arab aircraft for each air-to-air loss of its own, and even these figures are misleading since Israeli air losses to Arab fighters were mostly fighter-bombers laden with bombs, rather than interceptors deployed to meet Arab fighters...
...in the post-1980 period the Arab armies will be significantly better armed than the Israelis...
...The actual operational effectiveness of military forces is also critically dependent on a whole set of more subtle human ingredients: leadership, morale, unit cohesion, tactical planning, and above all, combat skills...
...Each weapon system has certain capabilities, the exploitation of which varies greatly, dependent upon such factors as manpower skill and battlefield tactics...

Vol. 2 • December 1976 • No. 3


 
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