What Tacitus Can Teach Us about the War on Terror

The 1st-century historian wrote a detailed description of a war fought between the Roman empire and North African insurgents led by a former Roman soldier named Tacfarinas. The Romans enjoyed superior resources, training, and equipment, but Tacfarinas’ forces achieved great success against them with guerrilla tactics. Nevertheless, Rome eventually won. The lessons for the U.S. war on terror, and Israel’s wars with Hamas and Hizballah, are evident. Jakub Grygiel writes:

Tacfarinas . . . in Tacitus’ evocative phrase . . . began to scatter the war, sowing terror and disruption here and there, retreating and advancing, moving to the front and then to the rear of Roman forces. . . . A relatively small rebellion became a ubiquitous war, engulfing a whole region and creating a series of challenges to the defending army. . . .

Perhaps more importantly from the political perspective, . . . Tacfarinas realized that he did not need to kill Roman soldiers to defeat them. . . . He could simply chip away at Rome’s authority and its reputation for power by mocking its forces militarily, showing that its mighty legions could not win against an enemy that they could not fix in place. . . .

The Romans had to become more like Tacfarinas’ confederation of tribes [in order to win], and so began to fight him with tactics not dissimilar from his. . . . The broad goal was to make the [insurgents] as afraid of a raid as the Romans were, while at the same time limiting their mobility by fortifying potential targets and key roads.

Read more at American Interest

More about: Ancient Rome, History & Ideas, Israeli Security, Military history, War on Terror

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF