Hamas’s attack on Israel last October was a case of low tech, or no-tech, beating high tech. Israel had built an electronic fence-fortress around itself, and thought it was safe. Hamas came in electronically naked, and crawled across. No alarms, no sirens, no alerts, not even a beep. That was the nastiest surprise that Israel got since Anwar Sadat cried wolf and war several times in 1973, and finally invaded on October 6.
Low tech beating high tech is nothing new in war. Mythology and history give several instances. Lord Ram’s monkey troops from the wilds of Kishkindha beat the well-heeled and well-wheeled (on chariots) Lankans in the Ramayan. Henry V’s 6,000-odd English longbowmen beat 14,000 Frenchmen who were carrying the more advanced crossbows at Agincourt in 1415. Gen. J.N. Chaudhury’s World War-vintage Shermans and Centurions made a graveyard of Ayub Khan’s US-supplied and air-conditioned Pattons in a tank battle of 1965 known variously as Longewala and Assal Uttar.
Illustration: Deni Lal
In war, it’s neither technology nor the size of your force that finally matters; it’s tactical ingenuity. The Israelis have since re-learnt this lesson. Look at what they—we believe it was their fabled Mossad—did last week. In this age of internet and artificial intelligence, they used a fax-age technology to unnerve the Hezbollah who have been needling them from the sides while they were waging their war against Hamas. The radio-pager was perhaps the second last popular tech gadget of the 20th century, the last being the non-smart phone which is said to be on its last rings these days. The pager’s reign in our hands or lives was brief—about a decade or less. It slipped out before it could catch popular fancy, much like the airship of the inter-war era, the electric typewriter of the 1970s, its smarter electronic kid-brother of the 1980s, or the fax of the 1990s. Since then, a whole generation has been born, schooled, and jobbed without any of them hearing a beep or seeing a blip from a pager.
But then, the pager blasters of last week aren’t going into the annals of military history with the honour that the longbowmen of Agincourt or the tank warriors of Assal Uttar had earned. Those were heroic battles, waged by regimented troops, operating under known commanders, against other regimented troops, both following certain written or unwritten codes of conduct, and guided by norms of honour in the battlefield.
Not the pager-blasters. They wreaked havoc not in the enemy’s battlefields, but in the enemy’s backyards. They killed and maimed boys, bibis and begums in busy bazaars. Killing kids in plazas and slaughtering shoppers in stores isn’t war; it’s terror, the very crime that Israel is accusing its enemies of perpetuating.
One may ask—can’t a state being subjected to constant terror resort to terror? India should say no. We have been terrorised since the 1980s, with booby traps in the valley, transistor-bombs in buses, timer-bombs in markets, remote-bombs in plazas, cooker-bombs in local trains, Kalashnikov-killers in metro cities, and suicide-bombers in military stations. Yet, the ethos of honour that runs in the veins of our republic have prevented us from picking up the tools of the devil; we wage wars with weapons of honour.
Proof? When badmashes from the bad lands around Balakot blasted into Uri and Pathankot, India sent uniformed pilots wearing their squadron colours—not to bomb the bazaars of Balakot, but to blast the terror school there.
prasannan@theweek.in