Re: Merc Guild

--- Richard and Emily Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
wrote:

> 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.

Handily?  

> 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.  

Sure.  A set-piece battle fought mostly by infantry
and artillery.	Then they got into a series of
maneuver battles where their tankers again looked
bad--their infantry fought with more skill than they
used to, and the mass use of Saggers temporarily
nullified the fact that their tankers weren't worth
much at all.  But then the Israelis mobilized enough
troops to put up a fight, and then it was the bad old
days of '67 all over again.

> 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.

The Syrians were fought to a standstill.  In exchange
for two Israeli brigades on the Golan Heights, they
gutted three of their divisions.  Another push at the
right time would have made it, but the casualties they
had taken bled what audacity they had out of them.

> 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

So out of curiousity, what was the score of T-62s left
smoking in the desert?	Or BMP-1s?  Sure, when you
outnumber your opponent enough you can win--but even
with total operational and tactical surprise (proof
that no matter how good you are, and the Israelis are
very good, you can get caught with your pants down)
and massive weight of numbers, the Arabs couldn't
strike far enough or fast enough to disrupt Israel's
mobilization schedule enough to win.

John

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