Stan187

June 11, 2007

The “Revolution in Military Affairs” Shocks but Does Not Awe Israeli Commission

Haninah Levine, an Israeli citizen and CDI science fellow, writes in his summary of the Winograd Commission Interim Report that the failures the Israel Defense Forces encountered “stemmed, according to the commission, from ‘excessive faith in the power of the Air Force and incorrect appraisal of the power and preparedness of the enemy, amounting to an unwillingness to examine the details.’” More precisely, the failure can be attributed to a new twist in the decades-old agenda of the advocates of air power. Levine’s analysis connects what some in this country call the “revolution in military affairs” to a “new doctrine [in Israel] which emerged as stating [according to the commission] that ‘success can be achieved by means of ‘effects’ and indirect ‘levers,’ in place of classic concepts of success….’” Later, Levine writes, “Faith in advanced air and artillery system as magical ‘game changing’ systems absolved the [Israeli] General Staff from the need to consider what capabilities … the enemy possessed, and led the IDF into a strategic trap….”



It is a trap, one might add, that America now finds itself enmeshed in Iraq and Afghanistan in large part for the same reasons.



Levine’s summary of the interim commission report also goes a step further: the inappropriate reliance by Israeli’s Chief of Staff Gen. Dan Halutz and others on their new doctrine was complemented – rather exacerbated – by a low state of readiness in the backbone of the Israel Defense Force, the reserve ground forces. Levine writes, “the annual training given to reserve combat units was slashed dramatically [before the war].” Moreover, he writes, “the military’s emergency supply depots witnessed a steady decline in equipment levels, such that by the outbreak of the war in July 2006 supplies of both ammunition and medical equipment were dangerously low. ‘Even more worrisome,’ according to the commission, ‘is the lack of awareness within both military and civilian echelons regarding the factual state of matters.’”



The commission stated specifically, “the quality of equipment in the depots sent a message about values to the reserve soldiers. And in fact, missing, obsolete or broken equipment told the reservist that there was no one making sure that he would be equipped in a manner … that would allow him to operate in an optimal way….”

Given the shortages in many categories of U.S. equipment before and during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq (such as tactical radios, small arms ammunition, first aid kits, machinegun repair parts, M4 carbines and much else – to say nothing of body armor) and the backlogs of unrepaired equipment lining up at American military depots, the Israeli commission’s findings have a particularly unpleasant ring all too close to home.



Levine sums up the witches brew of high tech fantasies and basic unpreparedness: “as the conflict unfolded, Halutz’s optimistic assessment of the military’s state of readiness merged with his false confidence in the abilities of its advanced weapon systems … to create a state in which the chief of staff’s concept of what his forces were capable of achieving was completely divorced both from reality and from what the information available to him suggested.” One could, of course, substitute the name Donald Rumsfeld for Halutz in this conclusion.



Because the Winograd Commission failed to address them, two major issues are not discussed. There is a potential, perhaps even direct, connection between Halutz’s preoccupation with Israel’s version of the “revolution in military affairs” and the low preparedness of the Israeli ground forces: to pay for the high cost of high tech wizardry, it seems very possible that military readiness was selected as the “bill payer.” Secondly, the Winograd Commission’s interim report apparently did not address one of the most controversial elements of the campaign in Lebanon: the apparent “collective punishment” of civilian targets in Lebanon by Israeli artillery and air systems.



In the United States, the “revolution in military affairs” is being recognized as an abject failure only dimly and only in some corners; the Winograd Commission would seem to indicate that in Israel the matter is being faced a little more directly. On the other hand, in both countries it is not clear when, even if, the body politic will confront the issue of the civilian deaths resulting from domestic military forces and the very likely huge and long lasting ramifications that “collateral damage” (an atrocious euphemism) will incur, and already has.



The entirety of Levine’s summary of the Winograd Commission Interim Report follows; it also addresses other issues; it is worth reading.



“Behind the Headlines on the Winograd Commission’s Interim Report,” by Haninah Levine, was first published by Center for Defense Information on May 29, 2007.



In late April, the Winograd Commission, appointed by the Israeli government last September to examine the events of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, published its interim report. Media coverage of the interim report, which is not yet available in English, has focused mostly on the commission’s harsh evaluation of the nation’s civilian leaders, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz.



The 170-page document offers far more than just a report card on these politicians’ performance, however. It examines the behavior of the military, the government, the National Security Council, and even the media and the electorate over a six-year period which begins with Israel’s May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon and ends on July 17, 2006, nearly a week into the war. It is both uncompromisingly honest and scrupulously fair, offering a 15-page discussion of “The Principles of Responsibility” and weighing at every turn the balance between individual, collective and institutional responsibility and plain bad luck. (The breadth of the commission’s findings reflects its composition, which includes Israel’s leading experts on public administration and human and civil rights law alongside two reserve generals).



Of particular interest to readers in the United States defense community will be the commission’s views on the shortcomings of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and its General Staff. The crisis which developed into the Second Lebanon War was a crisis foreseen: the IDF recognized Hezbollah’s recurring efforts to abduct Israeli soldiers, and realized that a major conflagration along the Lebanese border was a perennial possibility. The IDF’s failures in the crisis, both in the advice it gave the civilian leadership and in its performance in the field, therefore deserve to be examined, as the commission considered them, as symptoms of chronic problems in the Israeli military establishment.



This analysis will examine three lessons which can be drawn from the Winograd Commission’s assessment of the IDF’s performance during the period covered by the interim report. A common thread between the three lessons is that the Israeli leadership engaged in wishful thinking, not only avoiding making difficult choices but, in the words of the commission, “avoid[ing] even preparing for [them]” (119).



Many of the problems identified by the commission are not unique to the IDF. Some of them are strikingly similar to criticisms which have been leveled against U.S. military planners over the last five years. In general, these problems may be endemic to contemporary Western military cultures. While the report provides the empirical evidence needed to establish these claims with regard to the IDF, the author believes that the readers’ experiences will confirm their relevance to other militaries. The author also believes that the interim and final reports will offer a wealth of other insights when they become available in translation.



Lesson One: Western militaries are in active denial concerning the limitations of precision weapons

Between Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 and the morning of July 12, 2006, when a cross-border attack by Hezbollah militants left three Israeli soldiers dead and two kidnapped, Israel’s policy towards the terrorist organization was, in its own words, one of “containment.” In practice, “containment” meant extreme restraint in response to acts of provocation. This restraint was justified by a simple calculus: in the IDF’s official estimation, Israel’s precision air and artillery forces could not suppress Hezbollah’s offensive rocket forces, which meant that any military action against Hezbollah was likely to provoke sustained rocket fire into Israel’s interior which could be suppressed in turn only with a costly invasion of the Hezbollah heartland.



The General Staff’s estimation regarding the survivability of Hezbollah’s deterrent forces did not mean that the IDF did not possess operational plans for a possible air and artillery campaign against the organization. It did mean, however, that most of these plans included a very important concession to prudence: while an initial bombardment campaign was in progress, the IDF was to mobilize reserve forces and train them for a potential ground offensive (see Lesson Two).



When Israel’s civilian leaders demanded a military response to Hezbollah’s July 2006 attack, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz failed to warn them of the General Staff’s long-standing estimations. At the outbreak of the war, the General Staff did not activate any comprehensive pre-existing operational plan, for reasons that will be discussed below. Left to improvise, Halutz encouraged the civilian leaders to believe that Israel could launch a precision air and artillery offensive without getting dragged into a broad ground offensive. Even worse, he failed to insist that mobilization and training of reserve units as a hedge against escalation was an absolutely necessary concomitant of any bombardment campaign. These failures stemmed, according to the commission, from “excessive faith in the power of the Air Force and incorrect appraisal of the power and preparedness of the enemy, amounting to an unwillingness to examine the details” (143).



The last clause in the previous sentence is crucial: the failure of Halutz and the General Staff to appraise the enemy’s abilities correctly at the outbreak of the war stemmed not from incorrect intelligence or analysis, but from a willed denial of the limitations of the IDF’s precision weapons.



The Winograd Commission traces studiously the origins of the General Staff’s error of judgment. The commission outlines the changes which took place in Israeli military doctrine over the preceding decade in response both to strategic developments – particularly the chronic low-intensity conflict in the Palestinian territories and Israel’s emerging deterrence relationship with Iran – and to technological developments – the so-called “revolution in military affairs,” whose keystone is the advent of precision air-to-surface and surface-to-surface weapon systems. The commission summarizes the new doctrine which emerged as stating that “success can be achieved by means of ‘effects’ and indirect ‘levers,’ in place of classic concepts of success, which were occupation/control of territory and elimination of forces” (49). In the IDF’s own words, the new doctrine meant an emphasis on “posing dilemmas” before the adversary, particularly by means of “bombardment… by precision fire, combining maneuvering forces based in land, sea and air… against all dimensions of the adversary’s system…” (“IDF Concept of Operations,” 2006: 69, quoted in Winograd Commission interim report, 49).



It would be an easy mistake to dismiss this new military doctrine as entirely misguided; in many ways, it may be well-suited to the complexities of Israel’s showdowns with both Iran and the Palestinians. Unfortunately, it was fundamentally ill-suited to a confrontation with Hezbollah, which had, in the words of the commission, “in effect prepared itself precisely for such a scenario, by minimizing in advance [through concealment, distribution and hardening] some of the damage which … the IDF’s precision fire system was supposed to inflict on it” (49). In this regard, it is worth emphasizing that Hezbollah was in some ways more conventional an armed adversary than Israel was prepared to confront.



As was noted previously, the IDF General Staff was largely aware of the fact that Hezbollah had minimized its vulnerability to precision bombardment, and tried to take this fact into account in its operational plans. In general, the plans called for the intensity of a bombardment to be carefully calibrated over a period of time in order to give decision-makers time to decide whether to cross the threshold beyond which Hezbollah retaliation would almost certainly necessitate a broad ground offensive. At the same time, the IDF was supposed to take advantage of the period of escalation to prepare for the possibility of a ground offensive, including by mobilizing and training reserve units. (Whether this calibrated bombardment would have amounted to anything other than a show of force, and whether such careful escalation-management would have worked in practice, are questions beyond the scope of the interim report and of this article.)



When the crisis broke out in July 2006, a combination of bad luck and bad planning (of which more under “Lesson Two”) created a situation in which none of these operational plans was both formally approved and up to date. As a result, the General Staff and the civilian leadership were left with too much room to improvise. It was in this improvisation that the General Staff’s wishful thinking overtook its analysis.



In the early days of the air and artillery campaign, Halutz raised the idea of mobilizing reserve units, but repeatedly allowed that unattractive option to be shelved. The commission found in the military and civilian leadership’s actions in that period “a concealed decision, which was not explicitly debated, to avoid a broad ground offensive and to avoid even preparing for one” (119, emphasis in original).



In its “Conclusions,” the commission blames the decision to launch immediately a massive, uncalibrated bombardment campaign without undertaking the necessary precautions on, among other factors, “an unfounded expectation – in both the civilian and military echelons – that despite the majority of plans, and the doubts of experienced persons, it would in fact be possible to [strike] a hard blow to Hezbollah by means of an aerial bombardment… [while] avoiding a broad ground campaign” (119-120, emphasis in original).



In its personal findings concerning Halutz, the commission is more explicit: “Even though the Chief of Staff was aware of the military’s plans and of their foundational assumptions, as well as of the fact that no effective military response existed from the air to the short-range rocket fire… he believed – contrary to the foundational assumptions of all the military plans – that if the military would be given enough time, it would be able to hurt Hezbollah in a significant way from the air, and to provide military and political successes without the ‘complications’ of issues like control of territory, friction and heavy losses” (142).



The lesson of the Second Lebanon War is not necessarily that the IDF’s reigning strategic doctrine, which emphasizes the importance of employing indirect “levers” rather than of occupying ground and destroying massed forces, is fundamentally flawed.



The first lesson of the Second Lebanon War is, rather, that wishful thinking concerning the capabilities of precision weapon systems overpowered the General Staff’s analytical abilities, leading them to apply this doctrine in an arena where previous plans largely recognized that it could not succeed. The General Staff believed that they were creating “dilemmas” for the enemy, against all evidence. Faith in advanced air and artillery systems as magical “game-changing” systems absolved the General Staff from the need to consider what capabilities (such as distributed and hardened facilities) the enemy possessed, and led the IDF into a strategic trap it had recognized in advance.



Lesson Two: There are real consequences to overstretching a military

In the previous section the IDF’s failure to mobilize and train reserve units early in the war was singled out as a sign that the leadership wished “to avoid even preparing for [a ground offensive.]” The commission had good reason to place such an emphasis on the preparation of the reserve forces: at the outbreak of the war, the IDF found the fighting forces at its disposal along the northern border undermanned, undertrained, underequipped and underdisciplined. The condition of the IDF forces along the northern front is profoundly related to the stresses placed on both the IDF and Israeli society by six years of continuous fighting on the Palestinian front, which leads to the second vital lesson of the Winograd Commission’s interim report: the consequences of overstretching a military are real, and immediately apparent in combat.



The situation in which the IDF found itself along Israel’s northern border before the Second Lebanon War, as described in the interim report, was a recipe for disaster. The ongoing conflict in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which in the first few years of the present decade led to the deaths of over 1,000 Israeli civilians and military personnel, drew military resources of every kind away from the Israel-Lebanon border. Most significantly, it was a drain on the IDF’s supply of well-trained regular units. Over the course of the decade, the Lebanese front was gradually handed over to a reduced number of reserve units.



At the same time, the annual training given to reserve combat units was slashed dramatically. The commission blames a number of factors for the cut in training. Some, such as strains on the military budget and the need for reserve troops to participate in combat operations alongside regular units in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are direct results of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Others, such as cuts in the overall defense budget and growing societal pressure to reduce the burden that annual reserve duty placed on Israeli society’s most productive members, are related indirectly to the effect of war fatigue on Israeli society.



In response to all these pressures, the IDF came to rely less and less on annual peacetime training of reserves, and instead developed a plan, mentioned in the previous section, for reserve forces to undergo emergency training during the crucial period of escalation towards a high-intensity war.



While these changes were taking place on the personnel preparedness front, more disturbing, and unplanned, changes were taking place on the logistical front. The commission found that between 2000 and 2006, the military’s emergency supply depots witnessed a steady decline in equipment levels, such that by the outbreak of the war in July 2006 supplies of both ammunition and medical equipment were dangerously low. “Even more worrisome,” according to the commission, “is the lack of awareness within both the military and civilian echelons regarding the factual state of matters” (52).



Given these conditions, the IDF was at a dangerous disadvantage along the northern border in the years leading up to the 2006 war. The combination of reduced manpower and political pressure to avoid confrontation with Hezbollah, which had dug its forces in all along the border, led the IDF to minimize over time its presence along the sensitive border: patrols were reduced, isolated posts were shut down and alarms from the electronic fence routinely went uninvestigated. In the words of the commission, “the success of the [border security] plan relied on discipline, training and oversight. We doubt very much, in light of the testimonies and documents that were presented to us, that these were present” (47). Instead, “security operations … were influenced and characterized by… a nibbling away at the abilities of the IDF, especially as a result of manpower cuts… because of preference for the Palestinian arena, [and by] loss of discipline, training and oversight” (48).



On the morning of July 12, 2006, when Hezbollah launched the attack that precipitated the Second Lebanon War, all of these weaknesses came into play. The northern front had been on alert for a week and a half for a possible kidnapping attempt, and the commander of the overnight patrol in one sector warned his counterpart on the morning patrol of an unusual number of disturbances along that sector’s fence – “It was a very scary night, and according to what happened overnight I think that at least 20 Hezbalonim went past” (66). The post overlooking the stretch of the fence where the disturbances had taken place had been shuttered as a result of budget cuts. In spite of these worrisome indications, the commander of the morning patrol set out shorthanded and without completing a pre-patrol briefing. When the patrol reached the stretch of the fence where the disturbances had been noted, a Hezbollah force ambushed its two Humvees, killing three soldiers, wounding two and kidnapping the remaining two, including the patrol commander.



The stress on the military, and in particular the dangerous shortage of equipment, came into play in the course of the war, as well. Reservists were called up, only to find problems with the equipment they were given. In the words of the commission, “the quality of the equipment in the depots sent a message about values to the reserve soldiers. And in fact, missing, obsolete or broken equipment told the reservist that there was no one making sure that he would be equipped in a manner… that would allow him to operate in an optimal way… when he was called to the flag” (52). The practical consequences of this “message” will presumably be dealt with in the final report.



The overstretched state of the military was apparent not only on the level of guns and grunts, but also at the General Staff level, in the General Staff’s ability to plan for the long-foreseen possibility of a conflagration along the Lebanese border. As was mentioned, the commission found that no adequate operational plan was in place for a war with Hezbollah: the operational plan formally in place in July 2006 had been prepared and authorized in 2002, and did not take into account the political and strategic changes which had taken place in the interim, including the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon in 2005. While revised plans were prepared in the wake of the Syrian withdrawal, these plans were never fully integrated or formally approved.



The commission rightly blames the IDF General Staff for failing to have its operational plans up to date, but relates the failure at least in part to the burden which over half a decade’s fighting in the Palestinian territories, and the 2005 “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, had imposed on the military and the General Staff.



The failures of the General Staff are also attributed by the commission in part to the confusion wrought by an ongoing, nearly decade-long succession of doctrinal and organizational changes. The commission warns that “frequent organizational changes in the IDF created a state of perpetual motion and perhaps even confusion, which compromised the ability of the military to deal with the conflict in an optimal way” (64). These words should be chilling to any veteran observer of the U.S. military, in which “transformation” has been elevated to a virtue in its own right.



Lesson Three: Rhetorical praise for the troops must not interfere with honest assessment of their abilities

We have already seen that by July 2006 the IDF had been overstretched for some time, and that the thin point on its operational surface was the Lebanese border. Half a decade of fighting in the Palestinian territories – which intensified in the final days of June – had left the Northern Command reliant on an insufficient number of under-trained reserve units. The most recently approved operational plan for a conflict on the northern border had last been updated four years earlier, under different regional circumstances, and the updated plan was not scheduled to be approved until after a major exercise in October. Finally, the military’s emergency supply depots were dangerously under-stocked.



In the months between Ehud Olmert’s assumption of the prime minister’s duties in January 2006 and the kidnapping of July 12, 2006, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz was asked on several occasions to provide his assessment of the IDF’s readiness for a crisis along the northern border. In a March 5 meeting, Olmert asked about the state of operational plans for a military response to a successful Hezbollah kidnapping; Halutz answered, “They exist.… They exist and they’re approved by everyone.” The day before the kidnapping took place, Halutz told Olmert in a meeting devoted to budget issues that “You can count on us… the routine operations… will be carried out under any conditions… with a minimum of mistakes and a maximum of results” (61).



Both of these statements of Halutz’s were false. The latter one is particularly ironic, as the very next day a tragic failure of routine operations would take place.



Both falsehoods can perhaps be understood, if not justified, in their contexts, as routine bureaucratic self-evaluations. Unfortunately, Halutz’s expressions of confidence were accepted by Olmert not as bureaucratic formalities, but as operational assessments. When the crisis began, and the civilian leadership sought a response, the military’s low state of readiness for a third-front conflict was not a factor that entered into its deliberations.



For this, the commission blames Halutz: having allowed a gap to develop between the military’s true capabilities and the civilian leadership’s estimation of those capabilities, he then failed to warn the leadership of that gap when war broke out. On the contrary, as the conflict unfolded, Halutz’s optimistic assessment of the military’s state of preparedness merged with his false confidence in the abilities of its advanced weapon systems, discussed above, to create a state in which the chief of staff’s concept of what his forces were capable of achieving was completely divorced both from reality and from what the information available to him suggested. In the words of the commission, “faith in the power of the IDF is an admirable quality in a Chief of Staff. In the case of Chief of Staff Halutz, however, it appears that it reflected excessive faith in the ability of the Air Force…. And indeed, the Chief of Staff consistently expressed an attitude of enormous confidence in the ability of the IDF to withstand all challenges…, and to achieve the full objectives set by the civilian leadership” (143).



It is understandable that politicians in any country would go out of their way to avoid speaking ill of “the men and women in uniform.” It is an unfortunate fact that the same politicians who are bound by this constraint in public must, in private, make decisions informed by the awareness of shortcomings in the numbers and preparedness – or even in the skills, discipline and morale – of the human beings who make up the armed forces. The confidence and respect which must be shown by politicians in public must not interfere with the honesty of the private assessments.



In this regard, the performance of the Winograd Commission itself is telling – without disrespect for the men who fought the Second Lebanon War, the commission has begun to examine in painful detail the impact which the military’s overstretched condition had in the conduct of the war. This, then, is the fourth lesson of the Winograd Commission’s interim report: without absolute honesty, there is no point in engaging in oversight and review.

All translations from the Hebrew are by the author.

Haninah Levine is a science fellow at the World Security Institute’s Center for Defense Information.

__________________
In Iran people belive pepsi stands for pay each penny save israel. -urmomma158
The Russian Navy is still a threat, but only to those unlucky enough to be Russian sailors.-highsea

Ray

Stan,

Thanks for this Report.

Any links?

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

Stan187

Here is where I found some good stuff, including this report itself:

Straus Military Reform Project

zraver

Why does this guy start out talking about RMA and then switch to the real reason- Israel wasn't prepared. Israel could ahve gone to war with the British Square and still would have gotten stomped becuase of a lack or preparedness over any doctrinal issues.

Bluesman

I really think the reason is much more fundamental, and is intimately related to why we're having our so-called 'difficulties' in Iraq: an immature public and political class that do not REALLY understand what their military is for, what it can and cannot do, and what it should and should not be used for.

The IDF wasn't 'stomped' in Lebanon - it was MUZZLED, and NOT by Hez. The US forces in Iraq are not being BEATEN by the moodje - they're being kept from sweeping all before them by timid men that simply do not understand this simple truth: the reason war should be taken seriously and one must be completely committed to victory BEFORE going into one is because timidity KILLS YOUR FORCE. Half-measures LEAD TO YOUR OWN DEFEAT.

Lord North, advising Parliament and King George III as the American Revolution was just getting rolling, told his sovereign clearly: go all the way, or don't go at all. Crush it completely, decisively, and finally, or you'll eventually lose, at far greater cost than if you try to win it on the cheap.

They didn't listen. And they lost a colony that would eventually be the greatest Power in the history of the world, one that would have made the fortunes made in India look paltry.

All to save a few shillings.

And so it goes, every single time war is approached as some kind of balance sheet, like a production run or a contract for services rendered. Business principles don't apply.

There is NO HUMAN ACTIVITY that compares to war, and it has its own rules, and they are universal. The very first principle - an iron rule that is broken only at enormous cost, possibly even costing ALL - is this: win your wars. Because losing them while prosecuting them on the cheap is far, far more expensive than a massive expenditure with a will to see it through to a successful conclusion.

We're only going to get so many more chances to avoid paying the ultimate cost for violating this rule. Israel has even less ability to absorb the cost of learning this hardest of lessons.

Win your wars.

__________________
"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

zraver

Bluesman, while I agree with you as far as Iraq goes. The Lebanon war was an Israeli defeat. The IDF failed to reach the Litani river by ground making repeated mistakes like 1- driving tanks up the center of exposed narrow valleys without any type of over watch. 2- Trying to blitzx through a fortifed belt leaving enemy bastions astride the penetration. 3- Not realizing soon enough that Hezzbollah units not only could not retreat, but would not.

Not having any strategic depth Hezzbollah chose instead to fight on the fontier betting correclty that they could kill enough IDF personel to claim victory.

Israel was defeated, beaten like a bad dog, and by Arabs. Other than Egypt in the first part of 73 or the Western modelled Jordanians no Arab had ever stood up to the IDF. Hezzbollah not only stood up to the IDF, but traded losses nearly 1-1, fought harder, and made sucessfull use of a war plan that all but negated the IDF's air and armor advantage.

Bluesman

Unless you can show that the IDF could NOT have won in a gloves-off all-or-nothing fight, I maintain that the firepower advantage of the IDF would've absolutely gutted Hez, but for the Israeli's self-restraint of their armed forces. This restraint was not justified in any way, mind you, as ANY force employed by Israel would've been condemned, and NO restraint of the Israeli's power by themselves was even going to be acknowledged by a hostile world.

If the Israelis had wanted to road-march to Damascus, in my professional opinion they would've been able to do it almost at the speed of re-supply. Losses were what they were because the Israeli political leadership temporized, dithered, an d bumbled their way through strategic decisions, choosing poor courses-of-action when they were able to choose at all.

In Lebanon 2006, Israel began to wage war like a true Western Power, seeing the phantoms of considerations that should ALWAYSALWAYSALWAYS be relegated BEHIND victory, once the decision to send their forces into battle.

WIN YOUR WARS. If you think world opinion is against you if you win, no matter whether you showed any care whatsoever to being 'humane', just wait until you know what they think about you when you LOSE, and again, it won't matter how careful you were.

VICTORY is important, and nothing else even comes close to second place. It really is the only consideration, once you've decided to fight. Which is why, for the second time of pointing this out, war is such a weighty, serious matter. If you're going to risk your young men and your country's interests, and kill the people of an enemy's country, MAKE IT WORTH IT.

WIN YOUR WARS. Or don't fight at all.

zraver

Bluesman, I am a big fan of total war as a means to end them quickly, but it didn't work for the IDF becuase the ground troops could not pull thier own weight.

1- Israel ran out of bombs and needed emergancy resupply from the US.

2- 22 tanks knocked out, dozens more damaged with no breakthrough achieved and the border area was never cleared.

3- unprecedented losses of infantry as a proportion to the force committed to battle

4- flat rate of exchange with Hezzbollah vis a vis causalties.

5- depsite complete command of the air, counter battery radars, UAV's etc was never able to stop Hezzbollah rocket attacks

6- Was never able to get inside Hezzbollah command cycle

7- 30,000 troops, hundreds of tanks and aircraft, attack helicopters, self propelled artillery, called up reserves, paratroops and yet they could not dislodge 3,000 light infantry fighters.

Short of going nuclear what more could Israel have done? Her soilders (not the politicians) did not have the will to win, and her tactical through operational commanders didn't have the skill the greatest military sins of arogence and the inability to learn on the fly and would not press the attack, She dropped bridges and cut roads only to find out air interdiction would not work. They went from fighting Hezzbollah to attacking Lebanese in an attempt to force lebanon to act and instead ended up as an international parahia.

Stan187

Stan187

zraver

Did Isreal achieve its objectives? NO

Did Israel lose its air of invincability Yes

Did Israel lose the support of the Sunni Arab states and upset dente Yes

Did israel signifigantly weaken Hezzbollah. No

Did Israel protect its citizens from rocket attack No

What they achieved in the last 3 days of the war with an international force inbound was a temper tantrum. It was like the battle of New Orleans the war was already all but over over.

Spinning the war as anthing other than a defeat is silly. At least in Iraq the US got rid of Saddam.

Now don't get me wrong, if the Frogs step aside and let round 2 start I expect to see a much different war, Hezzbollah is a one trick pony and Israel does learn from its mistakes. But round 1 was an Israeli defeat beucase Israel did not achieve its objectives.

Shek

Stan,

Sorry, but Lebanon 2006 was an Israeli loss. Force was used, but to what end? Zraver asks the right questions below.

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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Officer of Engineers

Stan,

You're looking at this from a tactical perspective. While alot of things wrong, each thing was not a show stopper. What Zraver and the Major have pointed out was that the OPOBJs were not achievable with the force and attitude at hand.

__________________
Chimo

astralis

bluesman,

IIRC israel was given a much freer hand to work with this time around than in her other wars. US, UK, hell, even the arab states gave israel a pass on that one.

i had the honor of discussing this very war with (ret) col. gary anderson, when i stopped by his SAIC office. i later stopped by his GWU offices to further chat with him.

he was actually an on-the-ground observer in lebanon at the time, and he believed that hezbollah would have kept on effectively stale-mating (in effect, defeating) israel unless israel pulled off an invasion from the north of lebanon (along with continuing pushing north from the south), in what amounts to a large pincer movement.

in that case, what was missing from the israeli side was not so much lack of will, but simply an incorrect estimation of the enemy and thus incorrect tactics/strategy.

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations