From Agincourt to Beirut
By Herald Boas, writing for Amac (Association of Mature American Citizens)
IN 1415 the retreating English army, led by Henry V, defeated a much larger French army at the Battle of Agincourt by using the longbow against their charging enemy. The English inflicted enormous losses in the thousands while themselves losing only a few hundred men.
This English “band of brothers,” as later immortalized by Shakespeare, were not the first to use the new weapon that had probably been invented by the Welsh a century before. But the longbow had never been used so dramatically and effectively as it was on that medieval Gallic field.
For as long as there has been warfare, warriors have sought victory through innovations in weaponry. Early on, advances in simple weapons like knives, bows and arrows, spears, and the sling shot (introduced by the pre-IDF biblical David) tilted ancient battles. Later, swords, chariots, catapults, small boats and early ships dominated the fight.
Those weapons eventually gave way to crossbows, armor and chain mail, then gunpowder and bullets, guns, cannons and artillery. In more recent history, single-shot muskets evolved into repeating rifles, machine guns, armored tanks, airplanes, poison gas and chemical warfare, rockets and missiles, flamethrowers, and jets. In just the last decade or so, drones and lasers have emerged as new battlefield technologies.
Along with new weaponry, an entirely new front in warfare has emerged – cyberspace.
And now, the Israeli army has thrilled their friends, stunned their critics and demoralized their enemies with an astonishing and devastating military operation that on successive days blew up by remote control the pagers, walkie-talkies, and other communication devices used by the Hezbollah terrorist army while killing and wounding large numbers of its officer corps.
This was not the first use of this technological strategy, but never before had it been used on such a large scale and with such precision overcoming seemingly unsurmountable obstacles.
Similar to Agincourt, Israel’s attack inflicted tremendous damage to the enemy at apparently minimal cost to its own troops. By sabotaging undetected a variety of simple devices, it has provoked ongoing anxiety and fear among Israel’s military opponents as they struggle to regain their basic command communications.
Israel is bringing to a close their primary operations against the Hamas terrorists who had so brutally invaded Israeli border settlements almost a year ago and savagely murdered more than a thousand Israelis including civilian women and children. Now, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are shifting their efforts to another front, its northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah, another terrorist proxy of Iran (the country behind the various contemporary assaults on Israel) has been firing rockets and drones into the northern regions of Israel.
Tens of thousands of Israelis were forced to leave their homes when Hezbollah began these cross-border attacks, and the Israelis understandably feel it is now time to stop the assault from across the Lebanese border.
Limited tit-for-tat warfare had been taking place during the past year, with Israelis blowing up rocket storage and launchers and military supply convoys from Iran and eliminating Hezbollah commanders and other leaders in response to the chronic Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel. Israel increased the level of its response as a signal to Iran and Hezbollah, but the terrorists seemed to be ignoring the hint.
Therefore, the Israeli leadership, with widespread Israeli public support, has shifted its priorities to the Lebanese border. Most observers seem to think the pager explosion operation is only the opening salvo in a larger operation to end the violence on the Lebanese border. In fact, the IDF followed up the first day of pager explosions and a second day of walkie-talkie explosions with a massive targeted bombing campaign. This campaign eliminated about 20 of the top Hezbollah commanders and strategists in a single strike.
Hezbollah has a much larger force and many more rockets than Hamas. It had seemed ready to expand its efforts in the north. Not waiting for its enemy to strike, the IDF preemptively acted to cripple temporarily Hezbollah’s command and communications structures. Having done so, it not likely this is the end of the story in Lebanon.
But whatever happens next, Israel has dramatically and impressively brought a major innovation to warfare, another innovation which echoes what took place on the fields of Agincourt more than 500 years ago and which repeats the process of military invention that is thousands of years old.
