Bulge

Bulge (pronounced buhlj)

(1) A rounded projection, bend or protruding part; protuberance; hump; to swell or bend outward; to be protuberant.

(2) Any sudden increase, as of numbers, often used in economics or demography.

(3) In the maritime sciences, a rising in small waves on the surface of a body of water, caused by the action of a fish or fishes in pursuit of food underwater.

(4) As bulging, to describe a box or similar container, the shape of which is distorted by being filled beyond its nominal capacity.

(5) In colloquial use, the outline of male genitals visible through clothing, a form especially popular in the states & micro-states of Melanesia and used also (by analogy with the bulge caused by a wallet) as a descriptor of wealth.

1200-1250: From the Middle English bulge (leather bag; hump), from the Old Northern French boulge & bouge (leather bag), from the Late Latin bulga (leather sack), from the Gaulish bulga & bulgos, from the Proto-Celtic bolgos (sack, bag, stomach).  It was cognate with the various English forms bilge, belly, bellows & budget, the French bouge, the Irish bolg (bag) and the German Balg; a doublet of budge.  Ultimate source was the primitive Indo-European bhelgh (to swell), an extended form of the root bhel (to blow, swell).  The sense of "a swelling, a rounded protuberance" is first recorded in the 1620s and it’s likely the later bilge is a nautical variant.  The later, more familiar military meaning "bulging part of a military front" was first noted in 1916, the Admiralty variation to refer to the shape a warship’s hull assumed after the addition of anti-torpedo armor appearing in the records of naval architects a year later.  The famous phrase "battle of the bulge" has been re-purposed by the weight-loss industry.  Synonyms and related words include wart, lump, nodule, protrude, swell, sag, bloat, projection, bump, swelling, promontory, growth, excrescence, dilation, bunch, protrusion, salient, hump, sac & blob.  Bulge, bulger & bulginess are nouns, bulging & bulgy are adjectives, bulged is a verb and bulgingly is an adverb; the noun plural is bulges.

Increasing bulginess: Lindsay Lohan's baby bump.  English phrases emerge organically and women seem much to prefer "baby bump" to "baby bulge", a Google search for the former returning 33,300,000 hits against a mere 35,000 for the latter.  "Baby bulge" does however have (usually unwanted) role in the process, the "postpartum baby bulge" a description of an abdomen which stubbornly resists post-delivery inducements to return to it's pre-pregnancy shape.

The hood (bonnet) bulge

1957 Jaguar XKSS (left), 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (W196S) Uhlenhaut coupé) (centre) and Mercedes-Benz 300 SL (W198, 1954-1963, right).

A hood (bonnet) bulge differs from a hood scoop in that the former exists purely for the purpose of providing clearance for some piece of machinery beneath.  What needs to be accommodated typically will be an inconveniently tall part of the engine, a supercharger or some other component in the induction system.  Jaguar added a bulge to the D-Type (1954-1957) because after lowering the profile of the hood in the quest for aerodynamic efficiency, the XK-six wouldn't quite fit, even with the addition of a dry sump which gained a few inches.  The bulge was carried over to the XKSS, the road-going version of the D-Type.  On the Jaguars, the bulge was centrally placed but Mercedes-Benz, adopting the same expedient for the 300 SLRs needed theirs to exist on only one side where it also acted as an air-intake for the mechanical fuel-injection, an example of a bulge doing also some scooping.  Asymmetry is common on racing cars where function rules but the factory apparently couldn't in those days bring themselves to do it on road cars.  Although the 300 SLs (both the gullwings and the roadsters) needed only the bulge on the right-hard side (the tall, dry-sumped engine canted 50^o to the left) to accommodate the fuel-injection's ram-tubes, a matching bulge was included, thus ensuring the symmetry prized by the Germans.

MG MGC-GT (1967-1969, left), Iso-Grifo Can-Am (1968-1972, centre) and Ford Falcon BA XR8 (2002-2004, right).

Mercedes-Benz may have been disturbed by asymmetry but it didn't worry the pragmatists at MG who, having shoe-horned into the MGB (1962-1980) a big iron lump of a straight-six which necessitated using a torsion bar arrangement for the front suspension, found even their first attempt at a bulge still wasn't enough.  A dry sump would have solved the problem but that would have been expensive so a "blister" was added at the offending point on the bulge; a bulging bulge as it were.  Apparently a matching blister on the right was never considered and the MGC has one of the industry's more admired bonnets although that feeling didn't extend to the rest of the car, the model not even a modest success in the market and it lasted but two seasons.  The later V8 version (1973-1976) was both a better car and one that needed no bulge at all but it fell victim to the first oil shock.  There are those who claim the rectilinear protrusion on the hood of the big-block Iso Grifos can't be called a bulge at all and many etymologists might agree but such pedantry should be agreed with and ignored.  Nicknamed the "penthouse", the neo-brutalist construction is one of the industry's great bulges and it's entirely functional, affording clearance to the induction system and providing airflow, in & out.  Not functional at all was the bulge Ford in Australia added to the XR8 Falcons when the BA model was released in 2002.  Cheerfully admitting it was unnecessary and there just for looks, the factory later took advantage of its presence to advertise things like the V8's power output, a juvenile pleasure much appreciated by the target market.

Battle of the Bulge, Dec 1944-Jan 1945

The Ardennes Offensive, (Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) was the German code-name) popularly known in the West as the Battle of the Bulge, was the last major German strategic offensive of World War II and ironically, Watch on the Rhine was the title of a play by Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) which debuted on Broadway in 1941, the theme being the need for an international alliance to oppose the Nazis.  After many delays, it began on 16 December 1944 and lasted officially until 25 January but had been repulsed by Allied forces weeks earlier.  It wasn't the first use of "bulge" in a battlefield context, the phrase documented in June 1940 in discussions about the German offensive in France and many generals over the centuries would have seen bulges represented on their situation maps.  One especially well-known One of the best known was Unternehmen Zitadelle (Operation Citadel), the German operation conducted in July 1943 against Soviet forces in the Kursk salient although, unlike the Ardennes Offensive, the Battle of Kursk was staged along a very long front and is best understood as a series of shifting bulges and the theatre evolved rapidly into a huge, dusty, swirling mass of tanks, artillery assaults and air attacks.  It remains history's largest tank battle.  

The bulge, December 1944.

Because of the disparity in military and economic strength between the German and Allied forces, in retrospect, the Ardennes Offensive appears nonsensical but, at the time, it made strategic and political sense.  Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) knew, confronted as he was by attacks from the west, east and south, continuing to fight a defensive war could only delay the inevitable defeat.  An offensive in the east was impossible because of the strength of the Red Army and even a major battlefield victor in the south would have no strategic significance so it was only in the west that opportunities existed.

For many reasons, by late 1944 the Allied advance in the west had stalled after remarkable progress since the D-Day landings 6 June 1944) and defensive lines had been formed, the most lightly defended being those in the Ardennes Forest, the very region which had been the conduit for the German’s stunningly successful blitzkrieg campaign in 1940.  Despite that history, 1944’s rapid advance through collapsing German lines had convinced Allied intelligence their enemy was no longer capable of major offensive operations.  It was this compliancy which made the German attack possible and in military colleges this problem, created by what in the psychology literature is called "Bayesian perception" (from the probability theories developed by English statistician Thomas Bayes (circa 1700-1761)), is often more helpfully described as "top-down processing" which tends to overwhelm the inherently more accurate "bottom-up processing".  The idea is that a "Bayesian brain" will use prior knowledge and assumptions which will influence perceptions meaning we see what we expect to see and fail to observe what is not expected and the more intensely something is focused upon, the more acute becomes the tendency.  Thus, because the phrase "Paris in the spring" is so well known, a single glance will confirm the brain's perception and the duplicate "the" will remain unseen.

In the last great example of the professionalism and tactical improvisation which was a hallmark of their operations during the war, the Wehrmacht (the German military) secretly assembled a large armored force, essentially under the eyes of the Allies and staged a surprise attack through the Ardennes, aided immeasurably by the cover of heavy, low clouds which precluded both Allied reconnaissance and deployment of their overwhelming strength in air-power.  Hitler’s audacious strategic objective, which, given the forces available, none of his generals though possible, was to advance to the Belgium port of Antwerp, splitting the Allied lines in a pincer movement, destroying their four armies.  This he hoped would force the Western Allies out of the war, permitting the Germans to focus their entire strength against the Soviet Union in the east.

Initially successful, the Wehrmacht’s advance punched several holes in the line, the shape of which, when marked on a map, lent the campaign the name Battle of the Bulge.  Within days however, the weather cleared and the Allies were able to unleash almost unopposed their overwhelming superiority in air power.  This, combined with their vast military and logistical resources, doomed the Ardennes Offensive, inflicting losses from which the Wehrmacht never recovered.  From mid-January on, German forces never regained the initiative, retreating on all fronts until the inevitable defeat in May.

The IDF, Hamas and the Hezbollah, October 2023

Mr Netanyahu.  His friends, (both of them) call him "Bibi".

Already, comparisons with 1944 are being made with the apparent failure of the much vaunted Israeli intelligence machine, either to detect or act upon indications of the activities which would have been a prelude to the audacious attacks launched on 7 October 2023 by the Hamas into Israeli territory.  Although low-tech by comparison with a conventional military operation, the scale of what the Hamas managed to stage would still have demanded movements of materiel and personnel, an exercise in logistics which should have been noticed.  In an echo of the Yom Kippur War (6-25 October 1973), presumably, some activity would have been noticed but clearly it wasn't interpreted as an imminent threat so the inevitable review will have to focus on both the gathering and analysis of intelligence and one thing which will be considered is whether, as in the winter of 1944, assumptions were allowed to prevail over facts on the ground.  Any inquiry can be expected to be rigorous but only within the terms of reference the government will provide and those parameters are unlikely to allow any consideration of the consequences of the recent actions of Benjamin Netanyahu (b 1949; Israeli prime minister 1996-1999, 2009-2021 and since 2022).  Mr Netanyahu has for some time been attempting to make structural changes to Israel's courts, allegedly because he wishes to avoid any judicial scrutiny of the corruption charges which he faces.  The proposed changes to the courts are would actually align the way things are done in Israel with those used in many Western, democratic nations but it's the political context which has made them controversial and part of the widespread and long-lasting public protest has included large numbers of military reservists (on which the security of the Jewish state depends) refusing to serve while the government continues the legal manoeuvres which would have the effect of shielding the prime minister from prosecution.  Mr Netanyahu is one of the great survivors of modern politics and his longevity in office has been a remarkable achievement in one of the world's more difficult neighborhoods but it's unpredictable whether he can turn the shock of the Hamas incursion to his advantage and that is likely to depend upon managing any perception his being distracted by his own legal difficulties made Israel unusually vulnerable.

Securing any advantage will of course depend on Israel gaining what can be presented as a victory, something which in recent conflicts, north & south, has been as elusive on the battlefield as on social media.  Nor is the Hamas attack the only thing which will absorb the resources of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).  In the north, there is the even more formidable Hezbollah and few in the intelligence community have cast doubt on reports the Shi'ite militia (which out-guns the armed forces of Lebanon and has more political influence) have some hundred-thousand short & medium range rockets available for deployment south of the Litani River (the Qasimiyeh or River Leontes).  Within hours of the Sunni Hamas launching their operation, the Hezbollah targeted Israeli military positions in the disputed Shebaa Farms, announcing it was acting "in solidarity" with the Palestinian people and in response, the IDF responded with artillery barrages.  No casualties were reported and at this stage the attack in the north seems to be thought a supportive gesture rather than anything strategic and the consensus is the Hezbollah will act at scale only if the situation in Gaza evolved to offer a particularly attractive opportunity and even then it would require approval from Tehran; in an unsubtle waring directed at the Ayatollahs, the Pentagon announced the movement of an aircraft carrier into the region.  The Hamas have seemingly timed their high-risk attack with some thought.  With the war in Ukraine demanding much military, political and financial support from the West (something already beginning to fray as Moscow predicted it would in any battle of attrition), the US government in political & fiscal paralysis and Israeli support for its own government at a historic low, the Hamas will have sniffed blood.  Nor will they be unaware the most long-lasting legacy of the Yom Kippur War fifty years earlier was the Arab oil embargo and the spike in the price which ended the long post-war prosperity in the West and triggered the political and economic upheavals which would last a decade.  The structure of the world economy and the imperatives of governments are not in 2023 quite what they were in 1973 but these things will be on the minds of many in many places.

In the short term, within the Israeli intelligence establishment, there will be an admission the military specialists will have to share more of the space with the political analysts.  With a death toll on both sides already in the thousands, the focus is of course on bullets and bombs but what Hamas has also done is stake their claim for support (1) in the region, (2) among the Arab & Palestinian diaspora and (3) from those governments willing to fund proxies for their campaigns against the West.  In this sense, the Hamas is advertising themselves as a muscular resistance to Israeli (ie Western) oppression and occupation, contrasting themselves with Fatah, the faction controlling the Palestinian Authority which exercises nominal authority over what is left of the Left Bank territories.  The Hamas regard Fatah as as least accommodative while some use the slur "collaborators".  Thus positioning the contrast as something like the Marquis vs Vichy, October's assault has a political aspect and in that they identified their target market rather as the Republican Party's "House Freedom Caucus" focused on those dissatisfied with the direction of their own leadership.

What Hamas are practicing is politics with a high civilian death toll, the rationale for that being every Palestinian who is killed will have died a martyr's death with all that implies, theologically and socially.  As a tactic, what Hamas are doing is a kind of political intervention into what they see as the increasingly disturbing trend of Arab nations moving towards normalization of relations with the state of Israel without any settlement of the "Palestinian problem".  If the IDF can be induced to respond with such severity that the civilian death toll in Gaza rises to the point where the pressure from the so called "Arab street" is of such intensity that Arab states are forced to retreat from their recent rapprochements, for Hamas, that would be progress.  There was a time when the strategists in Gaza might have imagined the regional reaction would be something more tangible on the ground but as they've noticed, winds of change can blow in both directions and now it's only in Tehran there's much support for their long-standing position that the only final solution for the Palestinians is the destruction of the state of Israel.