Purely from a weapon effectiveness standpoint, has there ever been a more effective urban warfare weapon than suicide bombers?
Other than retreating behind a defensive wall like Israel is doing, is there really any effective defense against them?
I’d say a tactical nuclear bomb would suffice… but that’s stretching the terms of “urban warfare” a little.
Actually, I think a little remotely controlled vehicle strapped with high explosives would be more effective than suicide bombers.
Though if you’re just talking doing terrorism, drivng around throwing hand grenades out of cars into crowded streets would work, too. As a finale, you could pack the car with dynamite and crash it into a gov’t building.
I still don’t understand why they don’t just bomb the lines at checkpoints though.
Tactically, maybe.
Strategically, no.
I don’t see suicide bombers as being engaged in warfare- at least not war in a common, traditional sense.
Maybe the actions of sapper units can be likened to suicide bombings if we really want to stretch it.
The final answer is that suicide runs have always had a limited usefulness in war. Having a skilled reusable brain/trigger puller is far more useful than even the “smartest” bomb. It takes at least 10-16 years to “build” a brand new suicide bomber, just to throw away?
During WW2 kamikazees may have struck fear into sailors but the top brass must have known it was the beginning of the end in th Pacific theatre.
Silly how warfare goes and changes over time, eh? 
Here enters the question of context. If one does not have the military-industrial complex and scientific knowledge required to produce smart bombs and GPS-guided artillery, one may have to resort to tactics that those kinds of weapons don’t work against (hence my threads earlier this year on the American invincible soldier increasingly being a liability instead of an asset).
Given a few hundred thousand willing people and a few cars full of dynamite, one may find it more fruitful to use suicide bombers than begin building weapons research facilities which would most likely be bombed to pieces in a few days.
I Agree, suicide bombers are the last refuge of a desperate warrior. When the tanks come, and all you have are stones, small arms, and your nerve, that can make you pretty damn desperate. That said, there is little more tactically efficient (if your aim is to strike terror in the hearts and minds of the populace) than to utilize a high order explosive in a large crowd, with some type of irritant canister thrown in to add chaos to injury. It’s unsettling enough to have the explosion take place, it’s completely another to have everyone in a one block radius coughing, and puking and crying because they have no other choice.
Matter of fact, the irritant canister and some unnaturally colored smoke (i.e. red or green or yellow) would probably do the trick, without actually blowing anyone to bits.
I disagree. I don’t think suicide bombers are necessarily the last refuge of a desperate warrior. They are a weapon of a warrior who has to constantly remain hidden, who doesn’t have the capability of stockpiling arms or mobilizing a conventional army. They are a weapon of terror, and thus, a psychological weapon. In the cases we’re discussing, they are not a weapon of last resort (though they probably will be at one point).
Fortunately, it takes brains to build a bomb, and guys who are smart enough to do that are much too smart to blow themselves up. If you have some people who make the weapon, and other people to use it, that means you have a network, and you can always break a network before it acts - so long as you act smarter. So the solution to suicide bombers is good intelligence and constant vigilence.
Seems to me the people you’re describing are the very definition of desperation. I wish to be an army, yet I have no arms, and no way to keep them. I have no system for recruting and outfitting soldiers and support personnel, and those soldiers WITH those things, who i count as my enemy, are hunting me down with every breath. Frankly, I could not think of anything more desperate. Suicide bombs are indeed the “I’ve-got-nothing-left-to-lose” option for those looking to strike their ‘enemies’ and haven’t the aforementioned trappings of a conventional army.
It isn’t desperation. It is necessity. They don’t do it because “they’ve got nothing left to lose” - they do it because they are trying to gain ground. They are simply forced to fight an unconventional war. It may seem desperate by conventional war standards, where the goal is to have more of your guys alive than the enemy, but it is not a conventional war. They want to win it through terror, through psychological warfare. I see no difference between a suicide bomber and a soldier on a mission. The soldier knows fully well that he may die. The suicide bomber accepts that he will die, but inflict more damage on the enemy.
Japanese kamikaze, that was desperation. Battle of the Bulge, that was desperation.
They do.
I think you’re splitting hairs. When you’re forced to fight in an unconventional way, when the enemy forces you to fight on HIS ground, that in and of itself creates desperation. You can’t match your opponent man for man, bullet for bullet, you’ve got to do it any way you can, and if that means strapping a willing sucker with a couple hundred pounds of TNT, then, that’s what needs to be done to win. The difference between a soldier on a mission and a suicide bomber is several-fold.
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The suicide bomber will DEFINATELY die, the soldier may make it out alive.
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The suicide bomber never goes directly for military targets, he heads for civilians.
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Soliders are individuals proud of their nations and armies, and willing to fight for their freedom, and to protect their way of life. Suicide bombers are cowardly psychopaths, driven insane by their own zeal and rhetoric spewed by their leaders, in an actual belief that they might come to win some supernatural reward if they kill innocent people who believe differently than they do.
Really?
(Suicide Bomber Attacks U.S. Military Convoy, Sgt 1st Class Brian Sutton, a military spokesman: “We have had six suicide bombs in the last week against our units”, lots more available at a friendly search engine near you.)
All soldiers? Including, say, an Iraqi soldier during the second Gulf War? A German fighting for Wehrmacht? A Russian soldier in Tsjetsjenia?
All suicide bombers? This one isn’t quite as easily refutable, but imagine your country was invaded by a vastly superior military force, and enough of your loved ones were killed that you felt you hadn’t much left to lose. Do you find it quite inconceivable that you’d be willing to sacrifice your life to hurt the enemy? I don’t (except I’m in no way sure I’d have the courage).
Note: I’m not saying that all suicide bombers are noble freedom fighters. I’m saying that I’m (to put it mildly) far from convinced that none of them are.
If anyone knows of a better way to fight a vastly superior conventional military force… please do post it. To label them as desperate is silly.
(RPGs are pretty good too… and you live to “insurgent” another day maybe.)
Why does everyone always equate suicide bombers with car bombs or Kamakazis? Any teenager could walk into any shopping mall in America on the day after Thanksgiving with a bookbag filled with 15 or 20 pounds of fertilizer and 4 or five pounds of nails and detonate it in the name of Allah. It would be too easy and don’t tell me there are no more young zealots to go around, I have friends that elisted and were ready to scrifice their lives for Iraqi Freedom. All Hail Halibutrton!!!
First, what does the suicide bomber hope to accomplish?
OK, you massacred a bunch of civilians, or you blew up a checkpoint and killed a couple soldiers. What exactly does that accomplish?
In the Palestine-Israeli conflict, the suicide bombers attack Israeli civilians. What do they hope to accomplish? They send a message that Palestinian areas are ungovernable, that as long as the war continues Israel will suffer. And of course, the handlers who make the bombs and recruit the bombers have a more cynical goal. They want the war to escalate, they want to provoke counter-reactions, they want to goad the Israeli army into attacking civilians, they want the army to set up more checkpoints, they want life for Palestinians to become even more difficult…because the worst thing that could happen would be peace, since that would mean Israel would continue to exist. So they hope to prolong the war, to make it bloodier, more personal, they want to radicalize their side.
But what do the suicide bombers in Iraq hope to accomplish? First, attacking American military targets. They hope that if they rack up enough American casualities that the American public will get sick of the occupation and go home. And why to they attack Iraqi civilians? Becuase they also want to make Iraq ungovernable. A transition to a quasi-democratic American client state is their worst nightmare. So they aim to make things as bad as possible for the average Iraqi. Why do you think they kidnap and murder aid workers? Anyone working to make life in Iraq better is an enemy, because if things in Iraq get better then there will be no civil war, there will be no chance for the Baathists or Islamicists to seize power.
However, I don’t think attacking civilian Iraqi targets is going to work nearly as well as attacking civilian Israeli targets. The Palestinian terrorists rely on the support of the Palestinian people. How will bombing civilian targets win them support from the Iraqis?
As Alessan points out, the bomb-makers/recruiters and the martyrs are two different sets of people. It isn’t a matter of someone deciding to become a suicide bomber, building a bomb in their kitchen, finding a target and going out to blow themselves up. There is an organization here. And the more Iraqi civilians they attack, the more they expose their network to betrayal. It is one thing to keep quiet about a bomber who attacks foreigners, it is another to keep quiet about a bomber who targets your own ethnic group.
There is no such thing as an invincible weapon. Every soldier has to sleep, they have to eat, they have to take a dump. The best-equipped soldier can be killed by a guy who sneaks up behind him with a stone knife.
Lemur866 - This may possibly be the very best one-paragraph summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I have ever seen!
To the OP - Israel is not only “Retreating behind a wall”. It is doing other things as well. Infiltration of the terrorist networks (as Alessan pointed out - they can’t go it alone); removal of known terrorist leaders and engineers (bomb builders); and, as time goes be, an almost philosophical approach to the result of suicide bombing, sort of treating them like traffic accidents.
It is this last bit, our ability to stand up to terrorism as a society and go on with our lives despite their sporadic successes, which I think may be the most important part of the fight against terrorism. They are beatable by the simple act of remembering that in a war, you have to take some blows. If you remember that, and have the strength, as a society, to regroup after each blow and deal the terrorists an even harder blow in return - this society, by the very act of not succumbing to panic, will win the war.
Dani
Lots(almost all) insurgencies in the past did not employ suicide bombing. Here’s a better way: train people to properly plant bombs and then leave. You can still bomb the same things if you want. Instead they feel they need to use a human being because they can’t put together a Timex or radio-signal trigger. That doesn’t sound a little desperate to you?
OTOH, I’ve heard of one theory that says suicide bombers are a good way to control your own people. The less controllable people get steered towards martyrdom.
Hijacking big, big vehicles such as trucks, tanks and jet planes, and ramming them all over the place might be a better tactic. Bombs inside the vehicle are optional.