Ten years ago, on the 20th anniversary of The Battle of Mogadishu, I shared some of the lost lessons of “Black Hawk Down”. The first lesson seems apropos:
Technology Does Not Guarantee Success
The Centra Spike signals-intelligence team was pulled off the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in order to assist the search for Aideed.
These highly sophisticated technological assets were ultimately ineffective because they could not pick up the lower-level technology used by the Somalis. Aideed communicated with his militia with couriers and dated walkie-talkies too low-powered to be detected by America’s sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment.
Retired US Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton called Israel’s handling of the recent Hamas attacks a “classic failure of technology”:
“What Hamas did, what their leadership did, was apparently they moved off of the normal modern communications links that we take for granted every day, and went back to what you did in the 19th century: face-to-face meetings, they went and used couriers instead of going in and using the telephone or the cell phone,” he said.
https://vultureofcritique.wordpress.com/2023/10/11/claims-partially-or-wholly-false/
This was not an intelligence failure. This was either “let it happen on purpose” or more likely “make it happen on purpose.”
I’m sure there was *some* boots on the ground intelligence, but (a) Cry Wolf (b) Elint has been so successful in the past that the intel of someone who was there and saw it happen has been downgraded.
Air, Space, Intel, and Cyber are new, cool, sexy, ‘smart’, incredibly expensive, career makers, post-career-lucrative-opportunity providers, and infamously prone to failure.
Ground Force engineers digging trenches, running razor wire, building obstacles and fortifications, and laying mines, are the opposite of all of that.
Everybody wants to be cool, so nobody wants to do that stuff, and nobody wants to listen to the guys that do.
Until the cool guys fuck up so bad that people wake up and remember the old ways are the best ways.
Telling other people to alter the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter is, has always been, and will always be, cool, sexy, smart, pleasant, and highly paid. Actually doing the altering is quite another matter indeed. “No one wants to work for scraps,” cries der Ewige Boomer.
It’s a good thing the Soviets didn’t do exactly all the above [no radios, in fact no written orders] for Operation Uranus or the Germans might have lost Stalingrad.
It’s a good thing we didn’t get rid of most of our USA EW [electronic warfare, like DF and jammers] for CyberSecurity….a lot of midwits would be poorer except for cybersecurity.
OTOH as we discovered the Russians did keep up with EW, not that we haven’t been telling people since 2015. Russian Cybersecurity is don’t hack Russia or we’ll shove a soldering iron up your Bum.
To return to Israel, some American assault rifles would have been nice in some of those settlement houses, but we must have gun control and be progressive …and have raves directly up against the fence.
When this is all over it will come out that someone was warning and wasn’t listened to as usual.
“Until the cool guys fuck up so bad that people wake up and remember the old ways are the best ways.”
Go down to the basement and short out the power grid at work. Because until the cool guys aren’t getting unlimited fiat 1/0 money they can fuck up into infinity.
That’s what Infinity money means: Infinite Fuckups.