The Unravelling of the Israeli War Machine
A couple of years ago, the PoMo-blogosphere was going a bit nuts to the tune of an article by Eyal Weizman, published in UK art magazine Frieze, called ‘Israeli Military Using Post-Structuralism as “Operational Theory”’. In it, Weisman charts the IDF’s growing engagement with post modernist architectural writers and — especially galling to the PoMo left — legendary French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. According to Weizman,
The reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory
Which in many ways sounds like the ideal reading list for any university programme, or just the tags of an average thread over at Hyperstition. One can understand the reaction of superstitious leftists, though. Reappropriation of the post-Structuralist, post-left canon seems almost preordained. “Guy Debord is being read by the IDF to help them oppress Palestinians” — on some primal, conspiratorial level, that makes a kind of sense. And of course, this appropriation was also evidence of the essentially unradical nature of Deleuze and Guattari to both traditional leftists and newer strains of Zizeck and Badiou reading refuseniks. If Foucault had said that, “”someday this century will be known as Deleuzian,” here was the perverse proof.
They should all be pleased, then, to learn that the IDF’s obsession with hard to understand, wordy French philosophers was part of the reason for the strategic and operational blunders that led to its disasterous performance in the Second Lebanon War in summer, 2006. Avi Kober, in an excellent, prize winning, must-read paper in The Journal of Strategic Studies, pieces together causes of Israeli under-performance, and discovers that one significant problem was the fixation of the IDF officer corps with pretentious post-modern philosophy. Kober disdainfully notes that, under the influence of the colourful IDF Brigadier General (Ret.) Shimon Naveh, “IDF officers in military academies and colleges started learning the writings of great architects instead of the writings of the masters of war.” My favourite quote, however, regards the equally confusing language of EBO:
Yoram Yair, who investigated the 91st Division’s functioning during the Second Lebanon War, found out that using terms like ‘swarmed, multi-dimensional, simultaneous attack’ in orders issued by the division’s commander came at the expense of a simple and straightforward definition of objectives and missions.
Wes said,
March 4, 2009 at 9:53 pm
excellent article. i think you were the one who accused me of trying to call you out on Dissensus (my sn is Agent Nucleus), as in a personal attack, which may or may not have been the case. But for the record i take none of that seriously, and i’ve never intended or taken anything said on an internet message board personally, only in stride.
I’m not sure if Deleuze would have approved of Isreal’s handling of Lebanon, neither in the recent war nor its totally botched aftermath. They allowed a terrorist organization to reassert its influence, which will eventually spread. The ‘nomadic war machine’ (the Deleuzian model) is a post-anarchist strategy designed to dismantle the military industrial complex, isn’t it? If they want to employ those strategies, in a watered-down form (re-appropriated from its leftist context), it is bound to fail, which is probably a good thing.
This paper on the IDF is pretty interesting, I might have to read the rest of it later. If the IDF has a centralized logistics division, it isn’t properly Deleuzian, at least i wouldn’t htink. Deleuze to me was a cybernetics/systems thinker, kind of like (not to make any unwarranted comparisons) Albert Einstein, Marshall McLuhan, Rene Descartes, Henri Bergson, or Blaise Pascal (all “INTP”s), ie he thought in terms of networks distributed along a plane, and connected non-locally. hence the nomad is associated with oceans, seas, steppes, plains, etc.