Part Two: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

I'm not going to call the cops. Like your back bumper is a little cracked, but like, if you don't want to report this to insurance, I don't give a fuck.

were making a mistake here, but I don't know. I see somebody cry like I'm not gonna One of my favorite things is whenever you see someone get upset because they've hit you, and you get to be like, hey, I'm not calling calling anybody over this. Oh it's such a good feeling.

are Muslim, Right. The British had occupied Egypt in eighteen eighty two and had fought a very bloody war there against an enemy who was seen in the West not dissimilarly from how Isis was depicted in the twenty first century. So there's a lot of anger towards the West. In nineteen oh eight, just before Lawrence began his explorations, the Young Turks had taken the reins of the Ottoman government.

They'd turned the Caliph into a figurehead and ignited a period of conflict over who would rule the dying empire. The Young Turks were comparatively secular, they were Western aligned, and this amped up the internal imperialism in the Ottoman Empire substantially, because that is not how most of the people in these like Arab and Kurdish and other regions

of the Empire really are. The Young Turks created the Committee of Union and Progress to try and spread some of their sexy new ideas among the people they ruled. And the most significant idea they wanted to push was called pan Turanism. And this is key to understanding Tayaprassip Erdowin and the current Turkish government. It's genocide against the Kurds in Syria and against in southern Turkey. This is a very pan Turanism is a very important imperialist concept.

that most of those areas are not Turkish. Yeah, Iran not Turkish, Northwest China very much not Turkish. You know, Central Asia not really Turkish, the Balkans not Turkish. Turkish influence in some of those places, of course, you know, go to Sarajevo, you'll see that, but not Turks. Now, this very much a historical belief is justified by the claim that all the real indigenous peoples of those regions speak Turkish, or at least in their natural state spoke Turkish,

and thus should belong to the same state. Quote. Hungarian Pan turanianist activists even go further. They have proposed that the entire Eurasian land mass between Hungary and Norway and Europe to Japan and Korea was once an empire known as Turania. Apart from non scholastic websites, no linguist and no linguistic anthropological and archaeological evidence for such an empire exists.

Pan Tirranean racialists and historians would beg to differ. They are impervious to logical explanations even in the face of heart evidence. I love this shit. Everything was Turks. Yeah, in the un shit past, it was all Turks all the way down. I just love that shit. What a batshit Like, No, everything wasn't Turkish. I'm sorry it wasn't.

That's like everything was fucking It's like the Germans being like, are you know, like the root of our the Aryan race is these guys living in Nepal, you know, uh and and and also the same as like our dreams of you know, rebreeding this like Aryan perfect race. I mean, they are Aryans in Nepal, but that's not what Aryan means,

you know. So this belief forms the core of a lot of current fascist theory in Turkey and underpins, for example, the genocidal acts of the Turkish state towards Kurdish rebels in the south and across the border in Rajava. Now all this a lot less settled in Lawrence's day it's just kind of gearing up. But he is watching the early stages of this thing that's going to end in genocide, and he recognizes this has a bad end, right, anything

anything like this is going to not end well. And as the Young Turks, one of the ways in which they push these pan Tyrannian ideas is by disseminating anti Arab propaganda. They are arguing at this point in time that like, instead of you know, Arabs existing in all these regions, like all of them, all of these different peoples are descendants of like Genghis Khan, who is the progenitor of the nation. This kisses people off, and there are counter revolutions starting in nineteen oh nine, the year

before Lorenz goes on his first dig. Now that revolution had been sparked by army officers and angry students at a religious school, but the crackdown afterwards bred hatred among locals of Armenian Christians who they saw as supporting the hated Young Turk government. Thirty thousand of these Christians were butchered and massacres that would prove an ugly prelude to the looming genocide. Lawrence arrived in the wake of all this chaos, and while he was living in Ottoman territory

in nineteen eleven, Italy invaded and conquered Libya. All of this provoked a surge in Arab nationalism, which we should rightly see as not disconnected from the swells of nationalism across the Austro Hungarian Empire and elsewhere in Europe. There's a direct line between this Arab revolt that's going to brew and like Serbian nationalism, right these are all part

of like a broader cultural movement around the world. Now, there are two different but not entirely contradictory explanations for what motivated Lawrence ultimately to support an Arab uprising against the Ottomans. The most sympathetic reason and the one that paints him in the best light, is related to his

relationship with Dome, Lawrence's friend later in life. I. M. Forster argues that Lawrence was intimate and passionately devoted to Doome, although they never consummated the relationship, and given lawrence dide of virgin he likely had no idea to do so. Satine Who's Satin, whose biography of young Lawrence gives the best texture on the Man's Life describes the relationship as

something intense but fundamentally unknowable to people reading today. However, he cites with clear textual evidence that, however we define this relationship, it inspired Lawrence's actions during World War One. In nineteen nineteen, Lawrence admitted in a letter to a friend that he had joined the Arab revolt because I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present. And

that is both profoundly orientalist and also so romantic. I know, I'm going to free your people because like I like you, Like that's such a not even romantic. That's so because like I don't think this was a romantic relationship. That's so sweet.

into this somehow. I don't have a relationship that when Tolkien talks about like Tlkien talks about it, and it's like, yeah, it's the relationship between brothers in arms and war, right, Yeah, And it's the kind of relationship that now that like heterosexuality and homosexuality are much more like defined doesn't translate to anything, Like the modern world has no way of understanding this relationship you're describing.

Dome's death. Quote, I love you, I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars.

my back pocket, if we ever have a big fight with Great Britain, I can incite a jihad against the British Empire in India and that'll solve all my British people problems.

rest of modern day Saudi Arabia. This is a railway that goes from like, you know, the the Ottoman heartland and the Arab world all the way down through what is modern day Saudi Arabia to like Omen and Yemen. I think, right, like that's the Hjas is this massive desert peninsula, right and this is you know, the Ottomans. Once that Great Britain had gotten the sus Canal going.

The Ottomans had become dependent on Great Britain to move goods to a lot of parts of the world, and this railway was not only supposed to connect a lot of these backwaters of the Empire, these tiny, little off the map places that were really completely separate from the rest of the world. It was also supposed to be this like economic lifeline to the Empire that reduced their

dependence on Great Britain. The railway was so crucial not just to the Ottomans, but in a lot of eyes to the to Islam right that it had been funded by do nations from Muslims all over the world, including a huge number of Indian Muslims. And the fact that so many Indian Muslims had donated to fund the Jjas Railway was seen by a lot of like British observers as evidence that like, oh, we really do need to be worried that the caliph could spark a rebellion right now.

This ties back to Lawrence because during the years he was digging, a realization had spread among the brass back home in England that we might, you know's it's becoming increasingly likely that we're going to have to scrap with the Germans, and if that's the case, we probably have

to have a plan to deal with the Turks. Now, Lord Kitchener, who is like the king shit of the British military, you know, in the period leading up to in the early stages of World War One, is the guy, the man in power in the British military establishment who is first like, hey, I am backing, Like I am officially backing that we want to incite an air We're looking into the possibility of inciting an Arab rebellion in Syria, right, and support it enough to create a friendly state that

will fracture Ottoman power. Right Kitchener is like, he's not the guy who originates the idea, but he's the first guy in power who's like, I think we should explore this as a potential official like policy move, Like.

So he sends operatives to Palestine to gather information on Ottoman military facilities there. Now, since the Ottomans weren't just about to okay, like spy of bes, oh, you want to send some spies the Holy that absolutely, it was suggested that they send some local boys, some local like English boys who were already in the Ottoman Empire playing at archaeology, right, And that is how Te Lawrence and his friend Ced L. Wooley find themselves called upon to

act as spies for the mother country. Lawrence was described by his mentor to the Shell organization created to execute this expedition as someone who quote gets on very well with the natives. He has I think more the instincts of an explorer, but is very shy. Right, that's like the the what gets him this job. As like, you know,

he's kind of doing some James Bond shit. You know six am I five doesn't exist then, but like that, that's very much what he's doing here, right, He's being brought in by the state to help provide cover to an espionage operation.

The result was wild telephoning all over the frontier. The Turks were wandering over their hills. About forty Arabs were arrested and brought in his hostages for our reappearance. And meanwhile we were sitting quietly wondering where in the world our tents had got to. Now. To anyone else, this would just be kind of like a funny moment, But Lawrence, being very perceptive, takes something crucial from the experience. He writes, quote, it shows how easily it is in an absolutely deserted

country to defy a government. And this is going to lead him to one of the most important realizations of the last one hundred and fifty years. After the expedition, Lawrence and Woolly went back to their dig. Woolly left around June, but as was usual, Lawrence stayed. He got regular pushes to go back home, but in the last

eighteen months had spent just three weeks in England. Daoum and another local friend of his, Hamoodi, had by this point heard stories from Lawrence about and they'd repeatedly asked, hey, can we would like to see You've spent so much time in our home, we would like to see England, right, And eventually, in nineteen thirteen, in the last summer before the world went mad, Lawrence obliged them. Now they stayed about ten days. He brings these two Arab friends of his,

and they stayed for ten days in Oxford. They are mostly treated as like curiosities. They give like speeches and stuff in public where people get to question them about like their lives and their home. And for the most part, you know, I think it's kind of interesting that this happened, but it's not super relevant to like our question, you know,

where do we put this guy morally? There is one anecdote here that I think is worth reciting to you, and so I'm going to quote again from Anthony Satin's book The Young te Lawrence, where he writes about a story that Hamoodi told of this visit after Lawrence's death. Quote, many wish to photograph us Hamoodi and Dome as we sat with him, Lawrence in our customary clothes, And after they took a picture, they would come and speak to him, and always he said no, no.

angrier Hamoudi became. Then Lawrence said, yes, you might have been rich, richer than any in Jurabulus. And I what should I have been? I should have been the showman of two monkeys. And suddenly Hamoudi admitted all my anger died down within me.

this is where the nineteen sixty two film starts. I think it's valuable that we have we've gone a little bit back there by the time the fighting started. Kitchener's interest in sparking an aerbravolt only deepened, and he'd had several clandestine conversations with Prince Houssein ibn Ali, the Arab nobleman charged with protecting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Kitchener and his advisors believe that Prince Hussain could be used to sever much of the Arab world from the

Ottomans and prevent them from functioning as an ally to Germany. Now, Prince Husain was not the only potential game in town for the Brits. Kitchener and his allies supported him as the new Khaliph, while others backed a young chieftain from Riad named Abdullah Aziz Aziz ibn Saud. Now did you think about that last name, Saud for ahent as to what his family's doing today? Yeah, well, yeah, they're doing quite well. Some of the evilest people on planet Earth.

And Abdulla Ziz ibn Saud sucks ass too. Now so does Prince Houssein. Both of these guys are huge dix and a big part of why this Arab revolt doesn't end in a better place for the Arab world. Know, I would say overwhelmingly the blame is on the Ottomans and the European powers. But a lot of it comes down to the fact that the local leaders, you know, the Arab leaders of this revolt are also assholes, right, and that plays a role in the structures that get

set up, you know, at the end of this. All right, Yeah, Now, Saud is Wahabi, right, which isn't a Puritan strain of Islam that is also strongly anti idolatry. And Prince Hussein is a guy. He is a real asshole about it. He is super anti woman. He is a very strict He's also a Puritan, right, He's the guy who like

bans drinking in Mecca, you know. But he is also he's not a Wahabbist because the Wahabbies they're anti idolatry, and Prince Hussein kind of wants to be worshiped almost as much as Allah, right, like, and so he doesn't like the anti idolatry stuff about Wahabism.

comes from. People aren't doing as much of that. After the whole war decides like what if we take all these young men who were, you know, around to go on pilgrimages to Mecca and the like, and instead we feed them to each other's machine guns, you know, and honestly a great this is a great time to be a machine gun, bad time to be a young man. So traffic to Mecca collapses and the economy follows with it. And I'm going to quote from James Barr's book here.

Meccans were reduced to selling their furniture and the ornately carved wooden doors and fretwork windows of their houses for firewood to feed themselves. These screens shielded their women folk indoors from prying eyes. It was a deeply humiliating resort to have to take.

post office. This guy is the anti wokest of the anti wokes. He describes lady post office workers as an evil that will greatly injure us if it increases. Like alost debate, why did this terrible war happen? Why are we slaughtering each other? It's lady post office workers. He's so out of his mind the words male man, mail man, Oh god, damn it. Yeah, Prince Husain real piece of shit in this story.

military establishment. It's very similar to how like during the Syrian Civil War, you had like the US kind of military intelligence back the Kurds, and you had like the CIA back these kind of alliances of like rebel groups.

Well you have within you know, the military and the intelligence arms of kind of the British state are backing to Dit like Saud or Hussein, right, And there's a lot of argument over like who is better, and this is It's also worth noting that when we're parsing out the morality of this, what what Great Britain is doing here playing with these people's lives is evil. What Prince Hussein is doing here try to get absolute power, make himself into a khaliph is evil.

summaries from hundreds of sources across the region. Right other people are bringing in data, he is like turning it into briefings and sending it out right. And he becomes as a result of this duty. He's a guy who studies constantly. He's fascinated in the culture of the region, and he becomes acquainted with the history of the Bedouins. These are the nomadic peoples in the Hisjahs in this in the Arab Peninsula, and they are primarily the way

everyone sees them, raiders and bandits, right. They fight a lot within each other. They are a clannish tribal people, and they make a lot of their living from like banditry, you.

So the fact that Lawrence is starting to understand these people and study them was going to prove crucial to what comes next. But at the time, he's really frustrated that he's like forced to just sit on his ass and do nothing. In May of nineteen fifteen, less than one year into the war, his brother Frank had been killed in France. Four months later, his youngest son Will was shot down and perished.

carefully lest one of the weaker ones be offended. But he also complained to her, we do nothing here except sit and think out harassing schemes of Arabian policy. My hair is getting very thin and gray. I'm going to be in Cairo till I die. You know, he's an emotional guy. He's going through a lot here. This is a complex time to him, and his grief is compounded by fury at the failed Allied invasion of Gallipoli, masterminded

by friend of the Pod Winston Churchill. This was a vast invasion by sea of the Ottoman coast that ended in just just the worst fuck up ever. Right, one of the great disasters in military history, you know, pick, yeah, just a calamitous fuck up. Now, Lawrence writes a report on precisely why the campaign, which he termed a disgrace failed. It was buried this report of his to protect the

people who'd planned it. Right, we can't have Winston Churchill getting criticized, heres h. And it's a very good James Schneider writes in his book Guerrilla Leader. He discovered then the reality in modern war that the civilian population will always suffer when a European power pursues its national interest without regard to the culture and political aspirations of the

native populace. Right. And so this is kind of like he makes a he makes a decision here that to be different, that like, we have to be different, because like if we're not, if we make these decisions but purely on what we know and think of war without any kind of like uh uh, you know, without any sort of openness to the realities on the ground, we wind up walking into disasters. Right. He is trying to preach against Vietnam syndrome, right where you just like stumbling, well,

we're America, we know how to fight a war. This is how you do it. I don't need to know shit about this country, right, I'll just fight this the way I fight every war. Ops turns out it's a different part of the world that doesn't work here, you know.

so they had the ability. Eventually, we'll get enough guys there that will crack down on this little rebellion. Now, much of the internal debate in this period among the British revolved around whether or not we should send our own troops in to stop the Ottomans from like crushing this rebellion, specifically from capturing a place called Rabigue, which contained valuable wells that would allow resupply for an attack

on Mecca. The problem was twofold number one. If the British sent in Christian soldiers, white guys, right, that would infuriate soldiers because like Christians are not supposed to be in the Holy Land, you know, and that would dry up support for the rebellion if it's seen as like, oh, this is really just a British thing, Oh, the British are in this, you know, Like maybe people aren't going to be willing to die if they're like, oh, so we're just we're just fighting to become slaves of the

British Empire. Well I don't like that any better, right, But at the same token, the British have this option. We have all these Muslim soldiers right from Indie, India. We could send in with modern guns and that they would probably make a difference. But if we send in Muslim soldiers, no one's going to believe that Prince Hussein is backed by us. And that's also necessary because otherwise why would you take him seriously if he doesn't have

the backing of a great power. Right, So it's just like catch twenty two situation, you know of, like we can't send in white guys, but nobody takes it as seriously unless they see some white guys. And Lawrence is on the side of arguing that we absolutely cannot send in British soldiers, right, and he argues interestingly, he takes the stance that not only should we not send in British soldiers, they're not needed. The Bedouins can on their own defeat the Ottomans in Hajas, so long as we

arm them properly. Right. His attitude is, we don't need to send in troops. They can handle this. They just need guns.

Like that's just how the French be. He argued in letters meant to be read by other British officers that supporting Prince Husain as the new caliph also would effectively neuter Islam as a threat to the empire. Right, so there's a very imperialist slight to this too. Although the question is does he believe that, like, ah, we can neuter Islam as a threat to our ambitions in India or does he know that saying that will get people to back his play back home.

it's not necessary. It could be instead of Orientalism, just him trying to manipulate his bosses, right, who he knows are oriental who he knows are orientalists?

send troops. So Lawrence gets to go. This is his first time kind of going to the Jjaws, and over the course of ten days he meets in befriends the prince's son, Faisal Faisal Hussein, and Faisal is the guy, He's the guy that you see in the movie, and he's the guy that, like Lawrence, is actually going to back as the leader of this future Arab state that

he wants to incite to rebellion and independence. Faisal and him get along so well that Faisal kind of insists that Lawrence become his appointed liaison to the British army, and Lawrence, for his part, becomes convinced that Faisal is the future of the revolt, writing back that Faisal has quote leadership, not intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but the flame of enthusiasm that would set the desert on fire.

Thus the title of the Thus the title of Barr's book. Now, the primary opponents of arming the rebellion countered Lawrence by arguing that the Bedouin were, in one officer's words, untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle. And this is a complicated There's a lot of like back and forth where like they'll be promised arms, Lawrence will kind of say like, oh, I just got back from my boss. His guns are coming in, so we need to carry out this attack. But like the guns are coming, and

like the guns are not coming. Lawrence is lying to them. He's pretending that this has been done, and he's doing it because he wants to. He's trying to motivate them to carry out attacks that he thinks that they can succeed at, and they in fact do succeed at. Right, But he is also lying to them, and also the Britis.

It's paternalism, right, It's the same thing, yeah, exactly. And also separately, the British are just say agreeing to send arms, and then there will be some like behind the scenes fight and they'll be like, oh, actually we can't do that, right, Although you know a lot of arms do wind up

getting to these rebels, right. So Lawrence knows that, you know, in order to kind of secure support for Faisal to get these arms, he has to make a case very clearly to his very hesitant superiors that the Bedouins can win this war. Right. Lawrence arrived shortly after the situation in the southern Hejas had devolved into a stalemate, one

that favored the Turks. Faisal's men had worn out a lot of their initial strength, failing to chew through the defenses of Medina, but the Turks had made unexpected retreats after rumors of an era of attack, which had allowed Faisals men to capture the port of Rabigue in the first place. This was confusing because they'd moved vastly superior

forces into the region. It was in analyzing their decisions here like why all of this happened, that Lawrence would make his first key realization, and here is how Schneider

describes it. Why did the Turks waiver? It occurred to Lawrence that perhaps the virtue of irregulars lay in depth, not in face, and that it had been the threat of the attack by them on the Turkish northern flank which had made the enemy hesitate so long the actual Turkish flank ran from their front line at Rebeg their face, in Lawrence's words, to Medina, a distance of some fifty miles.

But if we moved towards the Jjaz railway behind Medina, we might stretch our threat and accordingly their flank as far potentially as Damascus, eight hundred miles away to the north. Such a move would force the Turks to the defensive, and we might regain the initiative. Do you see what he's saying here, Because this is the core of his understanding of how to do an insurgent the struggle.

to worry about. But because we have all of these tiny little units of guys on camel who are capable of traveling for weeks at a time and then carrying out insurgent attacks, actual area they have to defend is eight hundred miles deep, and so they can't attack and care and regain the initiative the way they otherwise would be able to because they have to have forces split off and be aware of all of these potential everywhere is vulnerable, right and by doing that, we don't actually

even have to carry out all that many attacks. Just the reality of our threat opens possibilities to us.

These are you know, nomads are not a high population group in the desert, so you don't want to use them the way British officers instinctively wanted to use them, by like sending them to run at guns until they were all gone. That is kind of what a lot of Lawrence's superior sye is like, Well, this is how you fight a war, right, we just throw them at guns and like, oh, they're not good at being thrown

at guns. There's there's this whole thing. The British like really have this distaste for these these better win troops because like they're scared of artillery. They don't like to get blown up. It must like their religion tells them they won't go become whole in heaven if they get blown up, So like fools, they're scared of field guns. This cowardly Arab terror at being exploded. Which is funny because is it all.

take with more conventional attacks. Okay, yeah, Now, Lawrence advised his allies to move troops away from prepared defenses and towards operating a terrain that would let them strike at the railway with one redeployment, Faisal's men went from threatening a single city to two hundred miles of this railway. Lawrence began to take part in raids on isolated Turkish units, defending chunks of railway or on patrol. Over the course of three months, he got a feel for his Bedouin troops.

Being largely composed of family units from a culture with a low population, they had little stomach for casualties. At one key battle in January nineteen seventeen, the Arab forces overran Ottoman defenders in a town called Wash, alongside British infantry and naval support. The Brits lost one man, the Arab tribesmen lost twenty. Now, the British officers in charge of this operation had all fought in France, and they were like, fucking twenty one dudes to take a town,

this is great, right, Yeah. Lawrence had to caution them that like, no, no, no, the Bedouin don't feel like this is a great victory quote. Instead, he feared their deaths might easily upset Arab morale. Our rebels were not materials like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting in our leadership. In his book, yeah I do love that like soldiers, you know, they're just materials. They're trash basically, right. He's like, no, no, these guys are our buddies and they don't like to

see their family die. Right, You're going to war with your uncle. It's not just a casualty, right, Like that's your uncle got killed. In his book, James Barr notes that Lawrence later added this explanation, we were not in command, Nash, but by invitation, and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that death was a personal sorrow to many in the army.

But but there are more conventional attacks. But where they're taking and like large chunks of land and like entire influential cities and ports. And you're seeing, like two guys died in this battle, right, two of our giants, right, Like that is the thing where Lawrence is active, because they are thinking smart.

this in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In mass they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline, nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit, the better its performance. A thousand were a mob ineffective against a company of trained Turks, but three or four Arabs in their hills would stop a dozen Turks. Napoleon remarked this of the Mamluks, we were yet too breathless to turn our hasty practice

into principle. Our tactics. We're imperial snatchings, we're empirical snatchings of the first means to escape difficulty. We were learning like our men. This recognition that again, you know, just thinking about modern times is like, well, if you get a thousand these people together, it's just chaos, right, Like everyone's fighting with each other. People don't really get along very well. They certainly don't trust each other in battle.

But if you separate them into these three and four man groups, then you can make them extremely effective, right, and then maybe occasionally take the risk of having them carry out larger actions.

a tent. To distract himself from dying, he spends all of the time kind of like hallucinating from dehydration and writing out the most influential military theory of the century. And he's consolidating here these years of military theory that he had studied back in school and applying it to

his experiences thus far in the Hajahs. And as he's trying to do this, his mind is drawn to an Austrian general, Maurice de Sachs, who back in the early seventeen hundred, had decided that the generals of his day spent too much time worried about tactical details. How do I move this unit in opposition to this unit right in order to get a flight? How do I get this unit of riflemen? How do I get cavalry around

their side to flank this one group of guys? Right, that's a tactical problem, right, And Desas is like, really the game is figuring out larger operational concerns what he cal calls the higher problems of War Now. Interestingly enough, Desacks had written his book, which is kind of the precursor to Lawrence's groundbreaking work, while he was dying for two weeks in a tent.

years earlier. Sons sue the most famous Yeah exactly, Yeah, soun Su has a quote about this, right, and he's the guy. You'll see him recommended often today in the reading of Instagram posts of guys who want to sell you one regulated testosterone.

to maneuver outside of where the railway takes them. Now, any fool with soldiers can tell you that if your enemy has a train, blow it up. But Lawrence is smarter than this. He's like, no, no, no, don't blow it up. That's the worst thing to do. If you destroy the train so it can't operate, your enemy has to adapt and find a different way of getting troops and supplies in theater. And when they adapt, that will

make them less vulnerable to you. If you just buck with the railway constantly damaging bits and pieces of it, they'll have to keep repairing it. They'll have to keep sending troops to these different areas to repair it. They're going to have their repair crews, they're going to be like spending resources to do this. And every resource that they scramble to defend and repair this railway is a source that's not out there actually pressing the attack or

defending other territory. Right, you want to keep them on the railway. You just want to fuck with it a little bit, you know. Yeah. World military Yeah.

In developing his own theory of a regular war, Lawrence identified three key elements for analysis, the algebraic, the biological, and the psychological. The algebraic element of things refers to the physical environment that has shaped warfare in the Hejahs. For Lawrence, this was the decisive moment. Using simple math, Lawrence calculate at the size of territory held by the Arabs in relation to the number of Ottoman troops in theater.

The Ottomans, with only sixteen thousand troops in Arabia and with a shortage of staunch Arab allies among the tribes, lacked enough soldiers to establish effective control over one hundred and forty thousand square miles of territory geogret geography. The vast desert gave the Arab revolt sanctuaries that the Ottomans could not seize and hold for any length of time. As noted by Lawrence, to make more war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife. I just love is writing.

this whole area. We're threatening this train, and that diverts Ottoman troops, the Great Power War, the British army that hasn't succeeded in taking the Holy Land, but threatens it also blocks troops away, and so he is looking at Lawrence is looking at these very local, small unit actions in the as part of this grander struggle, which is exactly, by the way, what the Vietnamese are going to do, right. They don't have this vast desert, but they have Lao

and Cambodia. They have these underground tunnels. This is their safe haven, right. And what the viet Cong are doing very much exists not just in concert with the greater struggle being waged by other Vietnamese elements like the NVA, this conventional army, but in the greater power struggle of the Cold War, all of these different conflicts that have an impact on who can and resources where and what can be sent ware right and how much things can be escalated.

separate conflict or conflicts with the occupier. This is how you would describe every great conflict of the last seventy five years, right like, this is what this is what everything is, right, this is there's a lot of Israel Palestine in here, right in this conflict between You've got Israel and the United States back and then you've got Iran supporting you know, his Bellah and hamas. You know these are This is the nature, the basic nature of

all modern conflict. Really yeah, In other words, I just find this stuff cool. One of the many things that sets Lawrence apart from his colleagues is that he also has an understanding of his limitations. He knows, for example, I'm a white guy. I cannot be the leader of a grand erab revolt. That is not my place. But he also knows how to fin leaders and craft propaganda

around them to turn them into heroes. And one of these heroes is a guy who's one of the coolest figures in this although he's also he's someone who does a lot of back dealing and wheeling and dealing, but Lawrence meets him in eighteen seven or in nineteen seventeen.

In April, Aouda Abu Tai of the Howitat tribe, a passage from Schneider's book That I Loves gives you an idea of like what a fucking almost yeah a storybook character this you could hardly invent like a cooler sounding protagonist centuries earlier, the Howitat arrived from the Hajahs, and now their clans prided themselves on being true nomads in the Bedouin manner. Aouda was a tribal archetype, a heroic leader and warrior in the tradition of co chiefs, Geronimo,

crazy horse, sitting bull. His generosity made him poor, as his growing legend made him ever richer in reputation. He had taken twenty eight wives during his adult life. His body bore the scars of thirteen wounds. He had seen most of his relations slain in countless raids. Aouda had slain seven five Arabs with his own hand. How many turks Outa did not tally hit them, They simply did not count His retinue, compromise, the fiercest men of the

tribe fighting about sides Auta with relentless courage. I've killed seven personally in a hand to hand combat. It's killed seventy five of the men that I consider men for people who county, which is like, I mean, this guy is also a monster, but you know you can't like undeniably badass. Yeah, yeah. I think paragraphs like this help make it clear. Also why Lawrence finds the Bedouin way of war so much more intoxicating than say, the Western Front.

If you, if you're a drafty in the Western Front, your combat leader's prior life experience was like competing with other rich kids to molest underclassmen and eton, right, Whereas if in this war, if you wind up under Auta, it's this guy from like, yeah, from like a fucking story book, right, Yeah, you know, a swashbuckling figure. And Lawrence is a romantic, right, he is still enthralled with

medieval poems of knights and ladies. This is catnip to him, right, Like there was no chance him not being on these guys side once he starts to meet these people. Now, at the time they met Aouda had about five hundred fighters, half as many as he brought into the war. A desert pirate, he was frustrated trying to fight a conventional war. I woulda saw himself as an epic hero. Schneider notes, this guy, in addition to everything I've said, refers to himself exclusively in the third person.

transport machine guns, cars and high explosives. At the decisive point, we can deploy a highly mobile, lightly equipped, striking force of the smallest size and use it successively. It distributed points along the Turkish line to force them to strengthen their posts beyond the usual twenty men. This will be our shortcut to success. Right, This is this other recommendation. War battles always go to who has the numbers, who has the most men and guns. But that doesn't mean

who has the most men and guns in total. It means where it matters, right, Yeah, I mean it matters right exactly. You don't fight when you're gonna lose, exactly. Lawrence assured auDA and Faisal that allowing the Ottomans to keep Medina and the railway would work because it would keep their forces bottled up trying to defend these things

while the Arabs took everything else. Quote. His stupidity will be our ally, for he believes that his success depends on holding as many of the older provinces is possible. This pride in his imperial heritage will keep him in his present absurd position. All flanks and no front. Now, if you remember nothing else about the way empires think and function from these episodes, remember this, all flanks and

no front. They can't really help themselves. That's just the way they are anyway, This is fascinating.

we did? We simply don't know, like good strategy in terms of will they achieve ultimately their goals, that's unknown, right, Right, we can look at what the Taliban did and say they very successfully employed a version of this strategy and it worked for them, right, And we can look at we can look at to an extent Iran in Iraq, right, an Iranian influence in Iraq and the degree of political power that it's given them in the modern day state and like the damage that they did to the United

States as another example of like, well, yeah, this is the you know, they were fairly successful, not to the same extent that Taliban was, but fairly successful with a strategy like this, right when you also.

a situation like this, it's just home territory. Yeah, and the Ottomans haven't really I don't know enough about how the Ottomans were exerting power in that region.