NPW and Elusive Victory give a Israeli/Iraqi CEV of 3.43.

There seems little reason to suppose the IDF is less profesional than the US Army, and plenty of reasons, considering things like doctrine, officer selection and length of training, to suppose the opposite.

1) Battle field preperation. Iraq was subject to artillery and aircraft attacks for a significant length of time prior to the commencment of the ground campaign. Specifically targeted were long range, logistics, and C&C facilities.

2) The US had time to plan the battle and was able to hit the Iraqiis in places they weren't expecting.

3) The US was able to apply overwhelming force at the initial breaches against 2nd line units.

4) When the US faced 1st line units their C&C was already trashed, their flanks and in some cases rear were compromised, the coallition had complete control of the air, and a number of aditional things were going on that had to have adverse effects on their moral.

5) Their equipment was inferior to that of the US and most other coallition forces to a much greater extent than it was vs Israel.

quote:

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Originally posted by LWD:
It's been a while since I read Dupuy's books and so I forget exactly what CEV is a measure of but based on the assumption it's a relative measure of combat power I would suggest the following.[B]

There are a few ways of deriving it. In NPW it is a composite of ability to accomplish missiona, take or hold ground, and inflict casualties. Comparative casualty rates, or rates of advance been used at times, when a data was more limited or questionable.

[B]
1) Battle field preperation. Iraq was subject to artillery and aircraft attacks for a significant length of time prior to the commencment of the ground campaign. Specifically targeted were long range, logistics, and C&C facilities.

2) The US had time to plan the battle and was able to hit the Iraqiis in places they weren't expecting.

3) The US was able to apply overwhelming force at the initial breaches against 2nd line units.

4) When the US faced 1st line units their C&C was already trashed, their flanks and in some cases rear were compromised, the coallition had complete control of the air, and a number of aditional things were going on that had to have adverse effects on their moral.

5) Their equipment was inferior to that of the US and most other coallition forces to a much greater extent than it was vs Israel.[B]

Ah yes. Good points.

[B]I'm also not sure if the US doctrine and training should be considered inferior to that of Isreal at those respective points in time.

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Well, it is opinion. I don't know of any good data to make a proper comparsion.

However, supporting that opinion:
Tthe Israelis do use a much more decentralized "Auftragstaktik" style of command and control, and I tend to be at one with Martin van Crevald in holding this to be superior to the more centralized US method, which seems to rely more on lots of planning, and tends to be less friction resistant.

As far as training, I know it is more complicated than this, but a US Infantryman will go through 14 weeks training, between the start of Basic and the completion of his Advanced Infantry training. (I know, they use some more confusing term for that now, not AIT.) By comparison, an Israeli will spend I beleive 18 weeks training before he even goes to his service arm training.

quote:

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Originally posted by LWD:
If you are in for 2 years and have a small very uniform military then longer "Basic" training may be best. If you have a large less uniform or longer serving military you might be better off with a shorter "Basic" and more training in the unit. I'm not saying that the US system is better just that I'd be very reluctant to say that in general one is better than the other without a lot of thought and research and well defined definition of "Better".

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That is an interesting point. I have given some thought it, but I admit to having been biased towards looking at basic/arm/school type training for the simple reason that it is vaguely measurable. You can say, well every member of this unit spent x weeks at school y, where they were expected to achieve standards a,b and c...

That really isn't a good answer of course. Kind of like all the people writing models who spend alll their time worrying about weapon effcets, because they can't easily measure human factors.

But I don't really know how to try to measure in-unit training. Especially since the routines vary so much. How much time do the Israelis and Americans respectively spend on things like paarde inspections, sports PT and lawn care, vs actually going out and firing wepaons, doing tactical excercises, etc?

While I strongly suspect that equation favours the Isrealis, I have no hard data to support it. Even worse, since it likely varies markedly from unit to unit, what one person reports as the routine experience may or may not be representative of the military culture.