Re: Merc Guild

John Atkinson wrote:

> --- Eli Arndt <eli_arndt@wattosjunkyard.com> wrote:
>
> > I know this was likely meant in jest, but I still
> > find it highly inappropriate.  I mean gimme a break
> > being Arab has nothign to do with it.  It's bad
> > training, bad leadership, bad supply and a whole lot
> > else.  Being arab has little to do with it.
>
> If all Arab states field really bad armies, I'm
> guessing there's a causation here.  I mean, the Arabs
> havn't fielded a respectable army[1] since they
> started hiring Turks to do all their heavy fighting.
>

The israeli's won the '73 war due to a bit of luck and a LOT of
logistical support from the US.  The Arab league could handily defeat
the israelis, but the US was another whole kettle of fish.

The Syrians and Egyptians were hampered by poor doctrine that was
penny-wise and pound foolish.  Tank commanders that stick their heads
out of hatches tend to fall victim to snipers, but tank commanders that
look out through vision blocks tend to not see anything.  However, the
doctrine employed by the egyptians at the Suez canal rolled over the
Bar-Lev (hebrew for Maginot, near as I can tell) line as if it was a
live-fire exercise.  The israelis were lucky because the syrians could
not believe that a mountain pass was undefended, so they took their dear
sweet time to carefully crawl through it.  It took the so much time that
the israelis were able to meet them before the figured out that it was
undefended.

So, I would say that the arabs have not fielded a respectable army since
1973, when they ripped the heart out of the isreali tank corps (400
tanks in the first three days) and made a serious dent in the IAF (120
aircraft, in a comparable time frame).	They may have been able to
finish the job, but right about the same time that the US brought its
full logistical support behind Israel, the USSR abandoned Egypt and
Syria.