Finally, the Extraterrestrial Smoking Gun. Click to enlarge.)

(CNN) Former Pentagon UFO official: ‘We may not be alone’

Quoting Luis Elizondo, “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone,” Luis Elizondo said in an interview on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.”

We’ve waited a long time for this moment, for irrefutable proof of extra terrestrial life. In 1976, NASA images from orbiting probes provoked  speculation of the existence of an ancient civilization on Mars, hundreds of millions of years ago, before the Martian atmosphere dissipated under the attack of the solar wind. Backgrounder at Marsmon.pdf.

The most powerful telescopes have been unable to resolve this question in a manner favorable to Martians. But this bombshell was not obtained through secret technology. It was the carelessness of a Groupon tourist who left her cellphone within reach of my teething puppy. When I tried to salvage the phone, my first step was to back up the images, some of which, she claimed, were “priceless.” In a weak moment, I took a peek, expecting nothing more than baby pictures.

All I can say is, Whoa!!! This is BIIGG. I transcribed a bit of audio off the phone:

“Welcome to the Monuments of Mars. I am your Martian tour guide. Follow me on your pink hover boards as we explore the monumental carvings of the ancestors of humankind, first spotted by you Earthlings in 1976. Please stay on the trail, and do not give Rover any occasion to eat you. Beer, wine, spirits, and postcards are for sale in our pressurized yellow tent.”

The rest is garbled. The words sound like, “Duck! A meteor!” But why such secrecy? It appears that Groupon wants to skirt possible travel restrictions by the Trump Administration. Currently, if you want to book a Martian Groupon getaway, it involves a subterfuge.  You book a day trip to one of California’s Channel Islands. A Martian “tic-tac” express picks you up right from the boat.

Once Mars is excluded from travel restrictions, things should open up a bit.

Yeah, she hates me for this.

(12×12″, Golden Molding paste and acrylic on panel.)

The North Korea ICBM threat is not visceral. With two brief exceptions, nuclear conflict has never been felt, but only imagined. Because it remains the subject of nightmarish contemplation, open source offers a meaningful fraction of the material chomped on by DoD and the White House. There is enough that we can imagine ourselves “in the room”, as flies-on-the-wall, as the U.S. response is debated at the highest levels. We begin with the technical in Part 1, and continue  in Part 2 with the political.

(CNN 12/16/17): Mattis says North Korea isn’t capable of striking the US. The CNN video sequence continues with statements by Tillerson and  McMaster. Quoting Mattis,

He added that the United States is still assessing the situation. "We are still examining the forensics, we're still doing the forensics analysis, it takes a while," he said.

A brief description of the forensics. The descending parts of the missile are tracked by radar at low angles relative to the horizon. This is challenging under the best conditions (imagine the haze you always see on the horizon).  Unless the tracking radar happens, by luck, to be near the splashdown point, it must cope with false reflections, atmospheric effects, and ionization.

As the descending parts pass through roughly 300,000 feet, they are enveloped in clouds of ionized, glowing gas, which reflect radar much more strongly than the objects themselves. This always happens, but is magnified if the parts have coatings  that vaporize – a complication.  It becomes difficult or impossible to know how large the objects actually are, and their individual identities frequently become lost. As they pass through 100,00 feet, the glowing cloud dissipates. Falling through dense atmosphere, how fast they fall provides estimates of how dense they are. But at this point, the smaller pieces are frequently lost. It may be impossible to distinguish between an upper rocket stage, and a reentry vehicle, and a fragment.

Air search radars and tracking radars do not provide visual images.  Radio echoes are interpreted by computer to provide user friendly displays. So where does the forensics come in?  Military radars have echo recorders. The U.S. maintains a large library of echo data from various targets. These are used for comparison, but an exact match is not the goal. So a paraphrase of Mattis’s statement could be, “We think the business end of the missile fell as a bunch of junk, but we can’t be sure.”

Quoting again, we have an opinion about how useful the missile really is:

"I'm highly suspicious about the capability of the Hwasong-15," retired Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and expert in aerospace and missile defense, said in an email....The red flag for O'Reilly and other missile experts is that the North Koreans keep shooting the missile almost straight up, and not in the parabolic arc of a standard missile trajectory, which is harder to achieve.

O’Reilly is undeniably correct. Imagine throwing a baseball. There are three ways your throw can be off:

• Velocity.  If you throw straight up, the strength of the throw doesn’t matter; it comes straight down. If you’re trying to hit a patch near the fence, the strength of the throw is half the problem. For an ICBM, this is equivalent to the thrust of the rocket motor, and the exact time of rocket motor cutoff. Both require extreme precision.
• Vertical angle, (elevation). The straight upwards lob is easy. If you don’t throw it exactly straight up, the error coming down is mild, proportional.  But for a distance throw, the error is much more than proportional. For your ball to land on the patch near the fence, you have to coordinate the strength of your throw with a mentally calculated “keyhole” in mid-air. The ball must pass through the keyhole at the exact speed. This is a two-variable, mental calculation that some athletes can perform with astonishing accuracy.
• Bearing, compass-point,  or “azimuth” At 6000 miles, a 1 degree error in bearing is 105 miles.

But a wildly inaccurate Hwasong-15 still has some chance at successful delivery of  a nuclear warhead to the vicinity of U.S. population centers. Avoiding re-entry difficulties, a high altitude nuclear detonation would comprise a successful EMP attack.

The above should not be taken as second-guessing Mattis’s statement, which fits the difficult requirement of single-sentence brevity. But we can use it as an opportunity to examine the context of decision making at the highest level. The decision makers are served by pyramids of specialists and their analyses.  But the vast mass of  detail doesn’t survive. it all distills down to:

• A weapon of poor quality, but not proven to inevitably fail in all modes of use.
• An adversary who, the intelligence community has concluded, satisfies at least some of the definitions of sanity, but not all of them. Kim Jong-un has an unremitting blood lust.
• The assumption that the adversary is sane enough to lack confidence in his poor quality weapon, and to understand the consequences to him of use.
• Clandestine factors. Hinted at, there is no point in guessing. They could provide a pleasant upside, but we are primarily interested in limiting the downside.
• The risks of doing something.
• The risks of doing nothing.
• The domestic political climate.

The first three items result from foreign intelligence. They make an argument against immediate action that can be somewhat negated by reductio-ad-absurdum:

• As the quality of the ICBM improves, the chance that the Kim Jong-un will use it increases.
• The endpoint is a weapon that Kim Jong-un can use with confidence.
• But then he faces massive retaliation. Hence, the quality of the missile is irrelevant.

If you’re in the room, your response might be, “Let’s move on.” In spite of attempts at rationality, only Harry Truman’s sign can deal with it. But you wanted to be in the picture, didn’t you?

To be continued shortly.

In the meantime, can our adversary’s demands be met?

This blog has a small voice. Readers find it useful on subjects where rationality dominates, and strong opinions have not already been formed. If I have an opinion about the embassy move, it is of no interest to you. If I share my opinion, you are likely to filter future writings as “by that guy who believes that…”  This blog is about analysis, not belief.

So excluding opinion, what can be said about the embassy move that isn’t already obvious? By following an issue over a long period of time, sometimes, using the tools of analysis demonstrated in this blog,  something pops out. But “Who rules Jerusalem?” has been on everybody’s radar since at least 600 B.C.  Nevertheless, perhaps something can be drawn out  about possible near term mechanisms of change.

The individual human may have free will. But groupings of people behave statistically. Groupings that have been intensively studied since 9/11 are the pools of potentially radical youth. Every country has them. The members of these pools combine  tabula rasa minds, not yet filled with attitudes and beliefs that exclude the poison of terror, testosterone, and the youth that makes them generational cannon fodder. In any generation, a certain number of young men end up being born to die, a fate we try to exclude by improving their firmware. Unfortunately, a certain percentage are running version 1.0.

The venerable bell curve predicts so many things, it is likely that if we throw enough young men into the grouping, the bell curve will reveal itself. On one tail of the bell lie committed pacifists. The other tail is made of out-of-the-box terrorists. In between lie the radicalizable. This is an ugly fact of human nature that we want to blame on bad upbringing. But in former times,  cannon fodder actually had a purpose. They died for the survival of their clans, just like the warrior ants seen battling to the death on pavements during warm spring days.

It is reasonable to conclude that the moving of Jerusalem will result in a shift of the parameters of the bell curve, enlarging the groups who make the radical transition all the way to the tip of the bell curve tail, to terror. This has has nothing to do with rational opinion. If individuals have free will, groups behave with something approaching determinism.

But the leaders of the countries of the Middle East are individuals with free will. They’ve seen too much blood to want another war. To these rational minds, the imminent threat is Iran. This is the logical barrier to conflict over Jerusalem.

To stateless extremists, these leaders present an obstacle, but also a mechanism, for actualizing a conflict over Jerusalem. The mechanism is assassination. Three leaders are in particular danger. In order of vulnerability:

• King Abdullah II of Jordan.
• Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
• Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

Abdullah is the most vulnerable because of

• Presence of radical elements in  the Jordanian military,  demonstrated at lower echelons, with implications for upper echelons.
• Proximity of Jordan to the locus of conflict.
• Heterogeneous population of mixed loyalty.

That Abdullah is alive today is due to an intrusive mukhabarat, not flag waving patriotism.

Prince Salman is vulnerable because the process of transforming Saudi Arabia into a modern state entails intermediate instability.

El-Sisi is vulnerable to the radical tail of the bell curve. Egypt has a complexity of society that facilitates  concealed radical elements. But as the assassination of Anwar Sadat demonstrates, the same complexity provides Egypt with inertial stability against radical change.

Reuters: Yemen humanitarian situation likely to worsen with Saleh death: Mattis. Quoting,

(But)one thing I think I can say with a lot of concern and probably likelihood is that the situation for the innocent people there, the humanitarian side, is most likely to (get) worse in the short term,” Mattis said. He did not explain his reasoning.

Mattis likely spared an explanation because there is no compact version suitable for a statement of record. But like many issues involving humans, many related explanations have the virtues of being partly true.  It is possible that, in the interest of efficiency and specialization, Mattis does not involve himself on the microscopic level of knowing who is pointing rifles at who on opposite sides of a rusty chain link fence. But he knows how things go.

It puzzles me a little that with all the resources journalists accumulate, Reuters did not anoint some experts, who could then be asked, in view of their presumed expertise, to provide an expert opinion as to what Mattis is thinking. Is it because:

• Every reader knows the answer to what Mattis is thinking?
• Nobody knows the answer?
• Everybody disagrees about the explanation?
• Some or everybody agree that the reasons are unknowable?
• Everybody has their own ideas of why, but are unsure whether their ideas are identical or similar to Mattis’s reasoning?

Suddenly, the question seems very intimidating. Does one has to be an Einstein to know why the fact that Ali Abdullah Saleh got whacked will impede the delivery of aid to Yemen? Certainly not!

First, a warmup. The gang problem in the U.S. offers a strong analogy for closeup study. The chronicle begins with the excellent book, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld , by Herbert Asbury, an accurate portrayal of how things worked up to about 1915. Then the Italian Mafia, through large scale organization and ethnic specialization, squeezed out the small neighborhood gangs.. In 1957, at the Apalachin meeting, the Italian mafia established a national organization, what Joe Valachi so famously called “a second government.”

It was during this time, up till the Feds broke their back with RICO, that the Mafia successfully and extensively co-existed with legal government. The “families” were like the tribes of Yemen. The Mafia is still around, but the bloody and unstable history of the Italian Mafia, before the law finally gained the upper hand, informs well about Yemen.

We don’t even have to get intellectual and read books, because movies will do. When the leader of a mob family got hit, there was a war, and revenues went down. Then somebody would impose a peace on the survivors. Revenues would go up, somebody would get greedy, and there would be more killing.

In the short term, the aid distribution system in Yemen has been disrupted. The following is one possible situation in Yemen now. Formerly, Saleh’s fighters would take trucks down to the port. Their trucks would be loaded with the understanding that in return, Saleh’s fighters would not shoot at Houthi trucks. Now the Houthis won’t allow what were Saleh’s trucks to be loaded, because (pick one or more):

• The Houthis don’t know if they are loading the trucks of fighters who will retaliate for the hit on Saleh.
• The Houthis know that Saleh’s men lack the gumption to shoot at them because they have no leader to order them to shoot.
• The Houthis will now try to split the tribes formerly allied under Saleh by selective provision or denial.

Feel free to add to the list. The possibilities are endless. The most important aspect is not the precise ground knowledge, but the modes of conflict.

Secretary Mattis shows an awareness that, in conflicts prior to Iraq, was the domain of cultural specialists. Had the establishment been as aware during the attempted reconstruction of Iraq, the current situation in the Middle East would have a different shape. We’ve learned some things.

This is why I wonder at the lack of commentary in the Reuters article.  It leaves an uncolored void in the public record. It risks public forgetting of a lesson learned at great cost.

As with Skinner’s Operant Conditioning of Russia, the web counter implies some interest in the challenge of Yemen. I thought of that idea while contemplating rats being tickled — and laughing. I then began to imagine –  strictly in my imagination –  Sergey Lavrov  laughing.

If you enjoy the writing, the broad assemblage of information, and perhaps  even the humor, I’m looking for a gig.

I am within commuting range of NYC.  Email: contact at this domain name.

We continue from Yemen, Saleh, and Civil War, Part 1.

Edit: When I wrote this last night, Saleh was still alive.  Now watch for the tertiary conflict.

(BBC) Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former leader, killed in Sanaa fighting. I first addressed his endurance as a survivor in (Jul 2014) It’s a People Game.

The peculiar relationships anticipated in Part 1:

• Saleh, a Shia, (is)was now in conflict with a Shia based “renewal” movement, with little noted about what the Sunni tribes are thinking or doing.
• In the north, the Sunnis remain underrepresented. Yet such is the tribal sociology that Hadi, a Sunni southerner, could not find the support to repel the Houthi surge.
• The de facto border closely follows the border prior to unification.
• The previous reasons for the unification of the north and the south, economic opportunity and pan-Arabism,  are no longer operative or influential.

And,

• Aden has an indigenous civic and military movement. It does not  want to be part of a unified Yemen. Although this became manifest with the Battle of Aden, the feeling of cultural irritation preceded Saleh’s departure by many years.
• Taiz, also sophisticated and multicultural, containing disparate elements could be a bloodbath, — or not.
• Saleh’s record was that of a traditional tribal chieftain: extreme, divisive, intolerant, and  by Western if not tribal standards, corrupt.

So now that Pan-Arabism has so distantly dissipated, Yemen looks less like a nation, and more like the last misbegotten child of the British Empire. Had the British drawn the line of their Aden Protectorate a  little further inland, to include Taiz, the political culture of South Yemen might have survived the 1986 civil war.

Conclusions:

• Ali Abdullah Saleh (is)was not the guy to run this country, if in fact there is a single country to run. He is useful in the short term. He (has) had the personality of a minor satrap, as whom he could continue to exercise his talent for staying alive.
• Yemen is better off as two countries. In the modern context, this means two regions with separate governments that compete for recognition.
• Without the benefit of the Saudi microscopic knowledge of Mansour Hadi, and his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, he fits the template of a leader of a reconstituted South Yemen.

There are actually three conflicts:

• Primary. Houthi versus non-Houthi.
• Secondary. north versus south.
• Tertiary, potential.  Zaydi versus Sunni in the north. 

Saleh’s political talents may have impeded the natural-for-the-region tertiary conflict. It may occur if his talent for survival wears out. Well, it has. A legacy of my participation in the IARPA Forecasting World Events program is a NY Times photo of Saleh, taped to my basement wall. I guess it’s time to take it down.

With lower population density, absence of the tertiary conflict potential, and the civic, if not national feeling of Aden, the  south has potential for natural stability. This is best actualized by splitting it off.

But how do we keep out the Iranians?  The geography of South Yemen, and common culture, facilitate economic integration with Saudi Arabia. As a model, consider the Red Sea bridge to link the Sinai with Egypt.

A strategy for North Yemen is more difficult and indirect. The tertiary conflict potential is like unexploded ordinance. But effective control of South Yemen, and the waterways adjoining the ports of North Yemen, convert the problem to almost one of internal control. Isolated from Iran, North Yemen may become amenable to variations on the manipulations used so successfully to build the British Empire.

Britain did not conquer the Mughal Empire by primarily military means.  India was won by a combination of economic development, suborning of local rulers, and attractive additions of Western culture to  the indigenous. The one obstacle that did not then exist is cultural militancy on the national scale. That did not occur until the dual creations of Mahatma Gandhi, and JInnah’s Muslim League. 

It remains to be seen whether Saudi Arabia can rescue itself. It it succeeds, then it can surely (?) rescue Yemen.

Saleh, who was significantly responsible for the collapse of Hadi’s government and the preceding years of discord in Yemen, was about to become  a useful, if expendable proxy. Now the Saudi task becomes harder. Watch for the tertiary conflict.

This  does not look like an indigenous “Juche” development. A missile is a fusion of diverse technologies into one goal. Even more than the recent 9/3/2011  “thermonuclear” device test, it demonstrates simultaneous deployment of too many new technologies at once, with a launch record that has in the same interval switched from pathetically bad to amazingly good.

Engineering in the advanced industrialized states doesn’t work that way. Improvements in the many systems that comprise a missile are phased in, one or  a few at a time. The Hwasong-15 demonstrates:

• Gimbal based thrust vectoring, which requires a new control system. In control characteristics, it is entirely dissimilar from vernier rockets.
• A new rocket motor on those gimbals.
• An improved guidance system, which interacts with the gimbal control system.
• A new rocket structure, with different, unknown vibrational modes.

Vibration is a problem with all rockets. Stressed to the limit, they tend to vibrate and shake to the point of destruction. See pogo oscillation, just one of the many kinds. All that vibration, combined with unstudied  “poles”, i.e., singularities of the complete control system, can make a rocket turn around and come right back at you.

So  how does one control the vibrational modes, which cannot be known with authority before flight, when a new guidance system is interacting with a new control system? This kind of challenge would normally be broken into digestible pieces.

If the 9/3 nuclear test is a bought design, the possible sellers are quite limited. One naturally suspects elderly Russian scientists, with other possibilities in the countries that combine nuclear weapons with mercenary opportunity.

The possible sellers of  the missile design are more numerous. Since criminal intent can be found in developed countries, Japan cannot be excluded.

Who makes a rocket with two motors, two gimbaled engines, and a diameter close to 2.4 meters?

In  (9/11/2017) Withdrawal from Iran Nuclear; Mattis Plan; More Aggressive U.S. Strategy,  it’s noted,

• Support the government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in Yemen. There is a note of hope, with reported cracks (Stratfor) between Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthis. It’s surprising this took so long, since Saleh was originally the Houthis’ chief persecutor.

With the detention of Mansour Hadi, the above now seems questionable. But a plural approach is still more likely to succeed. The de facto division of Yemen closely follows  the borders of the two Yemens before voluntary unification in 1990. In 1994, the south had buyer’s remorse and revolted, but lost.

Respecting the north,

• The Houthi movement, which threatens the West as a proxy for Iran, is  not exclusively Shiite, although it originated from an offshoot of Shi’ism,  Zaydism (Fiver Islam).
• The Zaydis (Fiver Shi’ism), always a minority, dominated Yemen as a kind of warrior caste for a thousand years. The last dynasty, the Mutawakkilite, was Zaydi. The heads of state that followed were Zaydi, until the advent of Mansour Hadi, a Sunni.
• In recent history, pressure from the Zaydis has caused a migration of Sunnis towards the south.
• The current alliance in Yemen against the Saudi led coalition contained, since it just fell apart,  (Reuters: Saudi-led air strikes support Yemen’s Saleh as he shifts against Houthis), somewhat incompatible Sunni and Shia elements,  susceptible to proxy manipulation in advance of tribal interests.
• The north  is economically more viable, if the term can be used for such a pathetic situation. It contains the highlands with the greatest rainfall, and the depleting oil reserves, still the main source of revenue.

Respecting the south,

• The area has been the recipient of Sunni migration south due to Zaydi pressure.
• The south contains Aden, formerly a great port of the British Empire. Unlike the rest of Yemen, it was exposed for centuries to cosmopolitan influences. Retaining a whiff of the multicultural,  it gave birth in 1967 to the one and  only communist Arab state.
• Excepting the southwest corner, the rest of of the south (and east) is too empty to support any political culture at all, except for terror statelets.
• Cosmopolitan influence extends as far inland as beleaguered Taiz, which now as then lies just beyond the former border of north and south. The designers of Britain’s  Aden Protectorate, concerned with safeguarding shipping lanes of the Empire, saw no need to include it. Military  weakness of the coalition currently prevents it.
• Up to the actual reunification of the two Yemens,  the popular answer to the question “why unite” likely reflected the tail-end of Pan Arabism. But the  more important reason, from the southern  p.o.v. was that before 1990, the south looked to the north for economic opportunity. Yemen was poor, but not quite as desperately poor as it is now. And there was thought to be oil on the borderlands, an unjustified hope.
• The merger of the north and south, first mooted in 1978, was in a state of indefinite delay.  It was seemingly hastened by the South Yemen civil war, internal to South Yemen, which resulted decimation of the senior leadership. By some accounts, this catalyzed the merger.

By now, you have the experience of staring at an optical trick intended  to induce double vision. You ask the optometrist to insert another lens, but it doesn’t help.

Keep these lists handy. Pairing them reveals some peculiar relationships. To be continued shortly.

• (Reuters, 11/24/2017) Militants kill more than 230 at mosque in Egypt’s North Sinai
• (USA Today, 10/21/2017 ) 54 Egyptian police killed in ambush, officials say
• (Al Jazeera, 9/11/2017) 18 soldiers killed in ISIL ambush in Egypt’s Sinai

This is slaughter. The inability of Egyptian forces to evade ambush,  even when in offensive operation against ISIS, presaged today’s mosque slaughter. The level of combatant casualties presages collapse of the command structure. It may have already occurred.

Perhaps political obstacles obstruct effective support of an important linchpin of moderation in the Middle East. The perception of the Egyptian army as an acceptably professional  force may also disguise the obvious problem. Remedies to consider:

• The immediate option is  to provide Egypt with an intensive air surveillance intelligence product for the Sinai area.
• An extended option is  development of air mobility, or at least adaptation of the older U.S. AirLand Battle doctrine to Egyptian conditions.
• Possible  weaknesses in basic infantry tactics, as they are now applied in Egypt, rendering units vulnerable to the ambush, should be explored. One small unit rule from Vietnam was, “If at all possible, don’t walk down the road.”

This is an emergency. Political obstacles must be surmounted.

Edit 11/25. (Reuters) Egypt military carries out air strikes in area of Sinai mosque attack: security sources. Since Egypt had no awareness of the disposition of ISIS forces before the attack, it is implausible that awareness required for precision targeting would develop afterwards.

So what is the likely decision process of the military in  targeting  a map rectangle near al Rawdah? It is almost predictable that an unsophisticated military, confronted by a severe threat such as ISIS, resorts to targeting by coincidental association. Rules of thumb as to what is typically found in a rectangle are applied. If the bombs aren’t hitting sand, which may occur out of political necessity for “show”, high collateral casualties and limited damage to the enemy result.

We continue from Saudi Arabia Versus Iran; the Saudi Decision Process; Part 1 and Part 2, which established as an “almost-fact” that Prince Salman is the sole author of policy both foreign and domestic. The Iranian decision process is quite different. But let’s put that off to consider the two countries as competing regional powers. What are their relative strengths and weaknesses?

The question has feet all over the place:

• Military orders of battle; quality of units.
• Geography.
• Sociology; revolution fervor or hidden schism, tension or calm; national feeling.
• Indigenous resources.
• Alliances.

Which nation can prevail on the battlefield, now, and at at various times in the next ten years? Let’s look at just the first element of the list.

Orders of battle, paper or real, can mislead.  The history of the U.S. military is one of competent leadership, seldom dipping below the mediocre. U.S.  analysis of past battles includes the study of weapons performance, resulting in emphasis on superior quality. Other wealthy nations that attempt to copy the U.S. military have been so inspired.

But the psychology of U.S. forces and some other Western forces has been difficult to copy. There is nothing obvious about U.S. society that produces superior soldiers, yet it does. A social comparison that helps to estimate the quality of a foreign army does not exist. So let’s cut the Gordian knot with a novel assumption: the signal indicator of military potential (not  a combat strength factor, as would be computed in comparing orders of battle)  is the manpower of units that most approach simple infantry units, with transport by trucks or, at best, by armored personnel carriers.

These units sleep in the mud. They get blisters, trench rot, and they get to see their buddies die close up. They throw grenades, take on tanks with small arms, dig foxholes, carry the wounded, and step over the dead and dying. Why would someone want this job? The motivations are doubtless a mix:

• Patriotism.
• Ideological or religious motivation, including martyrdom.
• Mythic structure within living memory.
• Enhanced personal identity.
• Sense of achievement.
• Absence of other opportunities.
• A personal force multiplier — a weapon.

The force multiplier of the foot soldier is a small thing. The other list factors hold sway. But in other military specializations with greater personal force multipliers, they are not as necessary,. A jet pilot can die suddenly, and alone, but the rest of the experience can’t be compared to life in the trenches.

According to CSIS, in 2007, the regular Iranian Army had about 700,000 men, of which there  were seven infantry divisions.The size of a division varies. A large logistics “tail” is typical of Western divisions. Minimizing this, the total infantry component of Iran may be around 120,000. Our Gordian-knot clipper does not require precision. The IRGC has about 100,000 lightly armed  members, plus 15000 in the Quds Force, Iran’s  “special forces”, which are logistically even lighter. This provides an estimate of about 220,000 “grunts”.

Saudi Arabia doesn’t have any infantry divisions, with a possible exception of a  “Guards” unit. Since even the U.S. Army has a sizeable infantry, there must be a reason other than utility for the absence of an infantry. In Saudi Arabia, the attractions of the list don’t work for infantry. No Saudi in his right mind wants to hump a pack and a rifle.

During the 1991 Gulf War, the Saudis were criticized by the U.S. military because their barracks were air conditioned.  The U.S. argument was that the air conditioning deprived Saudi troops of  essential conditioning to the environment. Readers in the U.S., which has many hot locales, know this well. They also know that when the power goes out, life in many parts gets very hard very fast. Living in barracks in the middle of the Arabian desert without air conditioning is a form of torture. Such is war.

Nevertheless, the making of an effective army is not as much about physical toughening as motivation. In one study, the Israeli army found no correlation between physical conditioning above a norm, and performance in battle.

Suppose we’ve managed to get the troops into the field. Why do they fight? It only starts with “God, King, and Country”. It really gets going when your buddy gets killed. The grunt fights for his friends. This is why troops who have been “blooded” fight better than  greens. Part of it is from experience, and part of it is vengeance. Of the troops who landed on D-Day in World War II, 90% were dead by the end of the war. You might think it kinder to rotate the survivors out of the theater,  but it was not done, because blooded troops fought best.

This is why, out of conscience and regard for the lives of our troops, we endeavor to give them the best weapons possible. Other nations do this too, but lack the structure of personal motivation that makes a good soldier.

Our Gordian knot-clipper points to the existence of a sizeable Iranian infantry component as a sign of potency absent in Saudi Arabia. The Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988  provides the mythic structure. Iranian youth were motivated to acts of suicidal bravery by religious martyrdom. In the West, we tend to deprecate this motivational strategy, having found that the soldier who intelligently risks his life is a better soldier than one bent on self destruction. But the martyrdom of the list is still present in a way that facilitates Iran’s deployment of poorly equipped yet highly effective militia.

Next: Implications for conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran.