The weak have one weapon the strong often lack - opinion

SEPTEMBER 22, 2026 14:00How can the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon continue fighting enemies with vastly greater military power?The answer is not that these movements are secretly stronger than the armies confronting them; it is that military strength and strategic endurance are not the same thing.The weaker side often has several advantages.First, there is a large pool of young people with too few opportunities.Where economies cannot provide jobs, dignity, or a plausible future, an armed movement can provide money, status, comradeship, protection, and purpose.This does not mean that poor young men inevitably become fighters – the majority do not. But it gives an organization a large potential recruiting pool.Protesters, mainly Houthi supporters, hold firearms next to a poster of assassinated Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, at the rally to show solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Sanaa, Yemen, August 2, 2024. (credit: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah/File Photo)Second, there is ideology.Religion is often the vehicle, but it need not be. Nationalism, Marxism, ethnic identity, or revolutionary ideology can perform the same function.Ideology transforms a military struggle into a moral one. The fighter is no longer simply fighting an enemy; he is defending his people, his faith, or his historical mission.Third, there is institutional weakness.When the state cannot reliably provide security, justice, electricity, water, employment, or education, an armed movement becomes a parallel society. The organization supplies services, distributes money, settles disputes, and creates a sense of belonging.Fourth, there is outside sponsorship.A local movement that could otherwise be contained can become a formidable strategic problem when an external power supplies money, weapons, training, intelligence, and technology.Iran’s support for regional armed groups is a particularly important example of how a relatively poor movement can acquire capabilities far beyond what its local economy could produce.And then comes the fifth advantage: time.This is where the arithmetic becomes particularly cruel.A powerful democratic country generally wants wars to be short. Its citizens will tolerate casualties for a compelling objective, but tolerance for an open-ended war tends to decline as the years pass.Soldiers have families. Reservists have jobs. Businesses suffer. Governments face elections. The public begins asking the most dangerous question a government can hear during wartime: When does this end?The weaker side often faces a very different calculation.It may not need to win; it may only need to survive.If it can survive long enough, the stronger enemy may eventually begin fighting its own domestic clock.This creates a great strategic asymmetry: the stronger side has something to lose every day; the weaker side often turns survival itself into victory.The longer the war continues, the more the stronger side’s military superiority is offset by political exhaustion.This dynamic has appeared repeatedly in modern warfare. Vietnam demonstrated the enormous difficulty of translating overwhelming American military power into a political settlement.Afghanistan demonstrated the difficulty of defeating an insurgency whose organizational and social foundations survived successive military campaigns.And Gaza has again demonstrated how military superiority does not automatically determine the political end-state.The lesson is not that democracies are weak. It is almost the opposite.The most important strategic lessonDemocratic societies possess enormous military and economic resources. But those societies also place constraints on the use of those resources. They debate, protest, hold elections, count casualties, and eventually demand results.Their enemies understand this and use strategic patience as a weapon.But there is another recurring advantage enjoyed by the weaker side: the hubris of the stronger side.Military superiority creates a dangerous psychological trap. Leaders with enormous capabilities can begin to believe that they possess enormous understanding.More often than not, they do not.Before major conflicts, powerful states repeatedly underestimated the adversary’s willingness to fight, its ability to absorb punishment, and the depth of its social support.Israel’s October 7, 2023 experience – the Hamas-led massacre and subsequent war – provides a contemporary warning.Whatever the eventual findings about individual decisions and intelligence failures, the central lesson is unmistakable: a technologically sophisticated intelligence system does not necessarily guarantee correct understanding of the enemy.And this is where hubris becomes particularly dangerous.When an enemy appears weak, intelligence can seem like an unnecessary expense. Why devote enormous resources to understanding a movement that appears incapable of defeating you?Because the enemy does not have to defeat you.It only has to surprise you, then survive and wait.The combination of demographic pressure, ideology, institutional weakness, external sponsorship, strategic patience, and the stronger side’s own political constraints creates a remarkably powerful formula.It explains why the history of modern warfare is filled with apparently irrational confrontations in which the weaker side refuses to surrender despite overwhelming odds.The weaker side understands something the stronger side sometimes forgets: You do not have to win the war today. You only have to make sure the other side eventually wants it to end more than you do.That may be the most important strategic lesson of all.The writer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Neaman Institute and an Emeritus Professor at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where he has served in various leadership positions. He also serves as a member of the Board and as a strategic consultant to some companies and organizations.Follow us on Google