troung

The Times August 02, 2006

Military Briefing


Might in the air will not defeat guerillas in this bitter conflict
By Charles Heyman

Video: Times Online TV



AFTER Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon under pressure from Hezbollah in 2000, there was a rethink at the Israeli Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv. It resulted in a counter-guerrilla doctrine called “the vulture and the snake”.
The air force became the offensive counter-guerrilla force (the vultures) that would destroy the guerrillas (the snakes), wherever they might be. Ground forces were to defend Israel’s territorial integrity and, if necessary, make incursions into enemy territory to destroy pockets of guerrillas that the air force might be struggling to neutralise. The ground forces would be “in and out” very quickly and there would be no attempt at occupation.



That is what has been happening in Lebanon for the past three weeks. Since the formation of an air force counter-guerrilla task force, the Israeli air force has been the lead service and the army has played a secondary role.

This doctrine appears to have failed. The Hezbollah guerrilla force is still intact. What the planners forgot is that Hezbollah would use hospitals, schools, apartment blocks and other civilian infrastructure as cover for its activities. Hezbollah knows that it would be suicide to fire rockets from open areas; it would be unlikely to last five minutes if it did. Using the civilian population as cover is an integral aspect of asymmetrical warfare, and it follows that innocent civilians will die in large numbers in air attacks. The attacker, in this case Israel, subsequently loses the all-important international public relations battle.

What we are now seeing is a move towards the more traditional Israeli policy of using the army to take ground inside Lebanon and to flush out Hezbollah’s guerrillas. On paper Israel has total superiority.

It has one of the world’s most efficient military — well trained, motivated and equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry. It has hundreds of aircraft and the most modern artillery systems, and thousands of armoured vehicles and missiles. Hezbollah’s arsenal consists mostly of rifles, machineguns, grenades, mortars and mines plus improvised explosive devices.

Its fighters’ real advantage is their knowledge of the terrain, long experience of operations against the Israeli Defence Forces, local leadership and a burning sense of grievance. Hezbollah fighters rarely stand and fight. If they do, they are usually destroyed. Their main tactic is attrition, causing whatever casualties they can, usually through ambushes or mines, and then melting away.

Artillery and air attacks are seldom successful against such tactics. Indeed, the great military question of our time is how do you defeat an asymmetric warfare grouping such as Hezbollah? The reality is that you are unlikely to defeat it on the battlefield, simply because its fighters will refuse to fight on the battlefield of your choosing. If they did, they would be destroyed by a military machine such as Israel’s.

Your counter-guerrilla doctrine has to be much smarter. For a start, think of a 20-year time frame — because there are no quick fixes. Be prepared to spend an ocean of money. Identify the political grievance at the heart of the problem and prepare a comprehensive policy embracing political, economic, social, media and military means that will address that grievance over a generation.

No matter what happens, proportionate, and where possible minimum, force is absolutely necessary. In this type of campaign, large body counts are never a sign of success; they are nearly always a sign of failure.

In the short term the Israeli Defence Forces will win its campaign in southern Lebanon. It will chip away at Hezbollah’s infrastructure until something that passes for control is imposed. There will be incessant patrolling by Israeli troops on the ground and drones in the sky, supported by good Israeli intelligence.

After about a month, southern Lebanon is unlikely to be an area where Hezbollah can operate at will and, apart from the occasional ambush, the IDF will have the upper hand.

But the long-term winners will almost certainly be Hezbollah. The Israelis will withdraw from southern Lebanon at some stage, because they cannot afford to keep large numbers of reservists on a war footing indefinitely. Hezbollah will move back, and any UN force that tries to disarm it will become part of the problem. Hezbollah will resist and, after extensive casualties, the UN will likely be forced to withdraw.

Hezbollah will also survive in the long term because the traumatised children fleeing today’s onslaught will become the fighters of tomorrow.


Major Charles Heyman is the former editor of Jane’s World Armies and editor of The Armed Forces of the United Kingdom.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...295625,00.html

__________________
To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

troung

Israel making same mistake as US in Iraq, say strategists

By Stephen Fidler and Roula Khalaf in London
Published: August 3 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 3 2006 03:00

It may be, say military experts, the future of warfare: a powerful army frustrated by a much weaker enemy.
As Israeli ground troops flood into southern Lebanon in a bid to create a buffer zone to protect its territory from rocket attacks, some military analysts believe Israel has made the same mistakes as the US in Iraq. They say its focus on high-technology warfare and tactical advantage has led it to underestimate the strategic importance of public opinion.
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"Local, regional and global perceptions of the conflict will be as important in sustaining a war, and in terminating a conflict on favourable and lasting terms, as the numbers of enemies captured or killed," Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote.
"Israel has failed to understand this in Lebanon as the US to some extent failed to understand it in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq."
Even some pro-Israel commentators in Washington say the conflict has not gone in Israel's favour, particularly since the death of more than 50 Lebanese in Qana on Sunday, and despite claims from Israeli leaders that the group had been severely diminished.
"Rising civilian casualties in Lebanon have not been accompanied by a quantifiable degradation of Hizbollah's military capabilities," argued David Schenker of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Indeed, yesterday Hizbollah fired more rockets into Israel - about 190, according to news agency reports - than on any day since the fighting began on July 12.
Critically though, Israeli public opinion has stuck behind its military - belying the May 2000 description by Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's leader, of Israeli society as like a cobweb in the face of conflict.
There is little doubt that Hizbollah constitutes a problematic adversary. In contrast with the conventional Arab forces Israel easily defeated in the 1960s and 1970s, the Shia militia has become a clever exponent of "asymmetric warfare". Its decentralised command structure means its fighters can use their own initiative without having to consult their leaders in Beirut.
Doron Amir, a former Israeli military intelligence officer now with the Infinity Group, an investment house, says Hizbollah is a hybrid organisation. "Hizbollah is between a guerrilla force and a normal army. It's on the border between the two. It would be a lot easier if we were fighting a country or an organised army."
Nizar Hamza, a professor of international relations at the American University of Kuwait and an expert on Hizbollah, says Hizbollah moves in groups of between three and 10 people, who conduct hit and retreat operations. "Three groups might act like a triangle. If one group is hit and retreats, it doesn't mean you lose the triangle, another could still go in and attack," he says.
Mr Amir says Hizbollah has built its infrastructure amid the civilian population and its fighters attack Israel from civilian areas, leaving Israel with a dilemma about how to respond.
"Nasrallah is an expert in psychological warfare," he says. Publicity is an essential element of his approach, making sure video footage of Hizbollah successes are quickly published and eschewing confrontations of no propaganda value.
Hizbollah appears to have carefully prepared for such a conflict since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. The group has imported thousands of missiles, many from Iran and often transported through Syria. Iran has provided revolutionary guards to help train fighters. Western estimates suggest about 40 such trainers have been in the south, with another 40 moving in and out. Some Israelis put the number in the hundreds.
The group has created a network of tunnels in the south. An unconfirmed report in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a London-based Saudi-financed Arabic daily, said this week that North Korean experts had helped with the tunnelling.
There are wide differences in estimates of how many fighters it has. Western estimates suggest 2,000 frontline fighters with 8,000 in support. Some Iranians claim there may be 20,000. Mr Hamza says possibly 30,000.
A central difficulty for Israel is that its and Hizbollah's military goals are asymmetric too. Hizbollah can claim victory, even if severely battered, if it can still launch a few rockets into Israel or seize an Israeli soldier.
Longer term, the balance between the two sides may be settled only in the minds of Lebanese people: whether they withdraw support from Hizbollah for provoking Israeli attacks or whether they back it for standing up to their powerful neighbour.

Bluesman

Dude, nobody reads your posts. Were you aware of that?

__________________
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell

Confed999

I do.

__________________
No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

Parihaka

Me too. Maybe it'd help troung if you kept em to one thread, like a daily roundup?

__________________
In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Lahori paa jee

Me too.

__________________
Nisaar main teri galiyon pe aaye watan, ke jahan
Chali hai rasm keh koi na sar utha keh chaley

troung

I tried to put op-eds on the military situation together, reports of the battles for the border towns together and reports about the expansion of the operation together and a side one for human interestish/foot in mouth stories that aren't covered by the 24s.

Lahori and Confedl;

Thanks.

Parihaka

Fair enough, I'm fine with it. Blues'll just have to start his own threads

troung

Who won? Amotz Asa-El, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 3, 2006

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...cle%2FShowFull

Middle Israel: Who won?

Amotz Asa-El, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 3, 2006

At this writing it is still unclear whether Israel's offensive in Lebanon has been merely slowed down momentarily, or altogether stopped in its tracks. And yet several conclusions can already be drawn.

Militarily, the IDF has disappointed in its operation's lack of swiftness and imagination. Massive aerial bombardments on mountainous guerrilla enclaves, followed by ground forces frontally approaching villages just beyond the border fence, could hardly have been more banal. Had we been a superpower we may have been in a position to adopt such a quantitative, time-consuming attitude, but the fact is that Israel never gets enough time in its wars, and can therefore lose no time in rushing to the enemy's heart.

Considering south Lebanon's compactness, its proximity to Israel and the high motivation of our troops - many of whom are themselves residents of the North - it takes no military genius to believe that the situation demanded airborne commando raids in the enemy's rear, and Hizbullah's leaders to be targeted not with megatons of dynamite unleashed from warplanes far above them, but with 5.56-mm. bullets shot from their bunker's doorstep.

Instead we saw an over-reliance on air power that brought to mind military thinker Giulio Douhet, who is widely recognized as the prophet of the warplane's supremacy in the battlefield and of strategic bombing's decisiveness in winning wars. While pioneering, this Italian general's insights were conceived in the wake of World War I, and were already considered anachronistic before the end of World War II, which demonstrated that wars are won on the ground.

Judging by what we have seen so far, either the General Staff failed to recognize this simple fact or, worse, it just did not anticipate and prepare for an order to swiftly defeat Hizbullah.

HOPEFULLY, this war's aftermath will still be shaped by, and remembered for, a very inventive last act - but if it isn't, one of its conclusions may well have to be that Ariel Sharon's experimental appointment of a pilot as chief of staff has been a failure.

Equally disappointing, if less important, was the IDF Spokesman's performance. Brig.-Gen. Miri Regev's failure to silence all uniformed babblers - and at the same time assign one authoritative and eloquent general who would brief the public daily - has been unprofessional and damaging. No less perplexing was the initial failure to embed reporters and deliver footage from the battlefield, not to mention Regev's failure to effectively and personally address the big foreign networks, especially after Kana.

And yet all these drawbacks do not change the fact that Hizbullah has been dealt a strategic blow for which it did not prepare, and from which it is not likely to recover with its prewar clout intact.

FIRST OF all, while Hizbullah's troops were motivated and brave, at the end of the day they were defeated decisively in each encounter with IDF infantry. Even more importantly, Hizbullah lost its hard-won grip on the Israeli-Lebanese border, and will therefore find it more difficult in the aftermath of this war to disrupt its protection the way it could before.

Secondly, Hizbullah's main doomsday weapon - the ground-to-ground rocket and missile - has been exposed and severely damaged. Considering that Hizbullah's possession of this weapon, and its willingness to use it, were no secret, what remained to be seen was the impact of its unleashing; and that impact proved anti-climactic.

With nearly 2,000 rockets fired as of Tuesday, their potential damage seems no more challenging than the suicide-bomb attack, the last new weapon with which Israel was massively challenged. An attack that for nearly three weeks targeted a million civilians but managed to kill or seriously wound fewer than 100 is not what Hizbullah sought. Moreover, the Home Front Command has now been provided with vast hands-on experience in dealing with this threat, and can be counted on to use that experience in perfecting its ability to shield civilians from rocket attack.

MOST OMINOUSLY, Hizbullah has caused Israel to formally target civilian locations that shield terrorists. In this it has done a disservice to Israel's enemies, who will in the future find it more difficult to abuse the Jewish concern for human life.

Equally damaging from its viewpoint has been Hizbullah's contribution to the restoration of the Israeli consensus. The patriotism and unity with which Israel is taking this skirmish are for us priceless, and have already refuted Hassan Nasrallah's memorable boasts that Israel's social fabric is as weak as a spider web.

Having said all this, the worst blows to Hizbullah's position were beyond the battlefield and, in fact, beyond this region.

AROUND THE globe Hizbullah is now recognized as part of the fundamentalist threat to mankind's freedom and well-being; not because Israel has said anything about this with particular eloquence - it hasn't - but because the whole world watched the entire leadership of the industrialized powers, along with the major Arab countries, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, treat it with contempt.

True, this trend has yet to mature. As the Kana tragedy has demonstrated, fingering Israel in such moments still comes reflexively to too many people, most of whom didn't even bother to mention Hizbullah's unabashed targeting of a million civilians for the previous three weeks; if, as Hosni Mubarak demanded Monday, the Kana attack warrants an international inquiry, why wouldn't the attacks on Haifa, Tiberias and Nazareth?

Equally frustrating and unreconstructed was the French foreign minister's insistence this week that "Iran is a stabilizing factor in the Middle East" - a statement that makes sense if you also think that robbers stabilize the banking system and contraception makes more Catholics.

And yet even France and Egypt did nothing to stop Israel's assault on Hizbullah, and in fact still openly share Jerusalem's view that Lebanon's Islamist militia should be disarmed and pushed northward.

The extent to which this actually transpires remains to be seen, but the fact is that Nasrallah has overplayed his hand, emerging from this bout facing a world that has lost much of its prewar patience for his bravado and provocations. Lebanon's non-Shi'ite majority know he is out to hand Beirut to Teheran, they know he does not share their quest for liberty, and they know it is he who has inflicted all this damage on their land. Now they also know that if they won't challenge him, someone else will, even if it comes at their expense.

troung

Aug. 6, 2006 2:40 | Updated Aug. 6, 2006 10:29
Analysis: Victory from the jaws of defeat?
By ANSHEL PFEFFER

For many Israelis, this was a weekend of stocktaking. The first wave of reservists arrived home for short leaves and supplied their families and friends with better reports than any newspaper can give. The impression was mixed.

"I'm still shocked by the amount of screw-ups I've seen at every possible level," was the verdict of one veteran company commander.

But there were more positive assessments.

"It all depends on the initiative," said a young doctor who spent the last three weeks attached to a paratrooper battalion. "When our guys are waiting around, Hizbullah manages to surprise us, but when we take the initiative, we beat them every time. And thank God, the penny's dropped and we're doing that more and more."

Despite the continuing rain of rockets on Israeli towns and their deeper reach into the center of the country and the disturbing revelations of more military mistakes and miscalculations, there is also a new feeling of confidence.

Three sources can be identified for this resurgent optimism. The reports of commando operations deep in Hizbullah territory leave Israelis wondering about their tactical value, but they've fired the imagination and reminded people that the IDF isn't just the bumbling out-of-date behemoth that it had begun to resemble.

On the other end of the operational spectrum, the overdue entrance to the fray of thousands of reservists might have given much cause for concern to every family across the nation but it also inspired faith. They might have added 15 kilos and lost a bit of hair since their days in regular service but these are the grown-ups; "our boys" now have their older brothers with them.

The third high-point is the continued unflagging support of the US (and of the remarkable Tony Blair, though regrettably not of Britain), even after the Kafr Kana disaster. President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have outdone themselves, withstanding increasingly hostile pressure from the rest of the world and some rather inept diplomacy from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. They have kept their sights firmly on the main objective, dealing Iran's proxy a resounding defeat. And they're not about to allow French politicians and Israeli shortcomings to stand in their way. Now it seems the third point of light is growing even brighter.

For those who turned on the news immediately after Shabbat and learned the details of the joint US-French draft resolution for the UN Security Council, it seemed almost too good to be true. How on earth did Jacques Chirac agree to a resolution that didn't even call for an immediate cease-fire or an immediate Israeli pullback from southern Lebanon, that allowed Israel to retaliate if attacked in the future, and called for the disarmament of Hizbullah and the unconditional release of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev? In other words, the proposal includes almost all the goals that Israel set out to achieve in this war.

So is US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton a magician or is there a hidden catch somewhere?

Well, of course, it's only a draft. France could still backtrack and there might still be objections from two other permanent members, Russia and China. Hizbullah has already announced it will never accept this resolution, and it remains to be seen whether this will cut any ice with any member of the Security Council. The current draft is far from being the last word on the subject and nothing concrete has yet been said about any long-term security solution, whether via the Lebanese army or employing some yet to be defined multinational force. But for once, time seems to be on Israel's side at the UN.

If the resolution is approved sometime this week, the IDF will have had enough time to establish itself on a line roughly 10 kilometers to the north of the border. This will ensure that until a long-range solution is found (and hopefully long afterward), Hizbullah will not return to our border and the IDF will be in a much better position to retaliate for further rocket attacks. Of course, there will still be Hizbullah fighters operating within the new "security area," but eradicating them will now come under defensive measures.

On the other hand, if the resolution is rejected, it will only lead to further diplomatic wrangling since the US will probably veto any radically different text, and that will probably last at least a few more weeks. Now that the IDF is, hopefully, gaining the upper hand on the ground, the additional time will allow it to cause much more irreparable damage to Hizbullah's infrastructure.

Who knows, the intelligence services might even finally obtain the one vital piece of information that will, together with a missile, wipe out the elusive Hizbullah command post. Military Intelligence and Mossad officers are convinced that it's only a matter of time.

If either of these optimistic scenarios works out, you can trust Israel's politicians and generals to be on hand to say "we won." At that point, someone should be around to remind them that it was Israel's friends in Washington who almost had to force Israel to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. If we reach that point.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...cle%2FShowFull

TillerNOS

How about you just link to the story and give us the first paragraph?

Sea Toby

The entire Muslim world has been calling for a cease fire since the beginning of this conflict. Now that they don't agree to a United Nations resolution acceptable for the United States and the United Kingdom to sign on, they are refusing to cooperate with the United Nations resolution.

Frankly, most Americans could care less whether Israel survives or not! But through decades of being targeted by Muslim terrorists, while at the same time Muslim terrorists won't allow our troops to leave Iraq or Afghanistan, I wonder why radical Muslims are now surprised by the United States government's and people's non support of them. While radical Muslims may gain favor within the Muslim world, they have done everything they possibly can do not to gain favor from the western Christian world.

At the beginning of this conflict I suggest Israel use SEIGE tactics. Well, the UN and other appeasers couldn't wait to rush in food and supplies. Now that Lebanon and Hezbollah refuse the UN resolutions, isn't it about time we allowed Israel to succeed in its seige tactics, and STOP providing humanitarian aid to a government and people who refuse to adopt and accept UN resolutions?

Why give aid when they hate you anyway?

__________________
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troung

So starve the people of Lebanon?

troung

First hints of Israeli dissent

By Bethany Bell
BBC News, Jerusalem



Over the past few weeks, support among Israelis for the military campaign against Hezbollah has remained high, but for the first time this may be changing.


One peace campaigner said the war had spiralled out of control


A recent poll published in the mass circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper suggests that 75% of Israelis think the decision to go to war was right.
Despite the rising number of casualties and the disruption to life in northern Israel, where scores of Hezbollah rockets land every day, many people here say the fight must go on.
Many Israelis feel they have no choice but to strike hard at Hezbollah. They believe that at stake is the very survival of the state of Israel.
But there are signs that cracks are beginning to appear in the consensus.
The Yedioth Aronoth poll says 64% of Israelis (71% of Jewish respondents) support sending troops deeper into Lebanon, up to the Litani River.
But another poll in the more leftwing Haaretz newspaper suggests that only 39% of Israelis are in favour of an expanded ground offensive.
The Haaretz poll, of 570 Israelis, also suggests that support for the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is slipping.

Protests

The paper says the rising number of Israeli casualties and the continued Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel may be to blame for the drop in popularity.
Up to now, protests against the war have been mainly confined to the radical left and Israeli Arab groups.
The campaign group Peace Now, which was at the forefront of opposition to the previous war in Lebanon, did not condemn the current military offensive.
But more than four weeks into the conflict, that changed. The group held its first demonstration against the war, along with politicians from the opposition Meretz party.
The protest, in Tel Aviv, was a small one. Some of the demonstrators wore blue and white, the colours of the Israeli flag, to show their loyalty to the state. But their message was clear.
"The war has spiralled out of control and the government is ignoring the political options available," said Yariv Oppenheimer, general director of Peace Now.
Writing in The Jerusalem Post, the Meretz Knesset member Ran Cohen called the move to expand the ground offensive "a wretched decision".
"The government has fallen into the trap that [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah has laid for it... We are ploughing back into the Lebanese quagmire," he said.

'Cabinet splits'

Public sentiment has mostly called for more aggressive action, not less - one likely factor in the government's decision to escalate military operations.
But some doubts have been growing as to whether Hezbollah can be destroyed and there are reports of splits in the Israeli cabinet about how to manage the crisis.
The Haaretz newspaper suggests that despite the fact that a majority of ministers voted for an expanded ground offensive, some would prefer a political rather than a military solution.
One article suggests that Mr Olmert is not pleased with the army's performance and is convinced that the war must be stopped.
Other papers report on a growing frustration in the army that the broader campaign has been put on hold.
A majority of Israelis still support the military offensive but a sense of weariness has set in. "People were more enthusiastic about this conflict at the beginning," one man from Tel Aviv told me. "But now everyone just wants things to quieten down. We want things to return to normal."

BBC News Online

Bluesman

To answer the question posed by the Original Post of thsi thread, 'Can Israel Win?'

They COULD have, but they did not.

What a sad day for Humanity.