ABSTRACT
One must be careful about generalizing too much from the lessons of the Arab-Israeli conflicts. Israel has succeeded in large part because it sought excellence in every relevant aspect of military performance and did not concentrate on only a few selected areas. The Arabs often failed because they could not match Israel’s overall excellence and not because they lacked broad competence or experienced failures in a few critical areas. The major nations in the Arab-Israeli conflicts have also been able to fight from very short lines of communication. All of the commanders in the Arab-Israeli conflicts have faced special imperatives in space and time and in deploying very high concentrations of land and air power into very small fronts. There are, in fact, many US war games that do not allow concentrations of armor which were typical of the 1973 and 1982 conflict.
