We’ve hinted at this a cou­ple of times since the fight between Israel and Hezbollah began. But the ter­ror group, “with the sophis­ti­ca­tion of a national army… and the lethal invis­i­bil­ity of a guer­rilla army” is a new breed of mil­i­tary ani­mal. “A hybrid,” Thom Shanker writes. “Old labels, and old plan­ning, do not apply.”

Hezbollah still pos­sesses the most dan­ger­ous aspects of a shad­owy ter­ror net­work. It abides by no laws of war as it attacks civil­ians indis­crim­i­nately. Attacks on its posi­tions carry a high risk of killing inno­cents. At the same time, it has attained mil­i­tary capa­bil­i­ties and other sig­nif­i­cant attrib­utes of a nation-state. It holds ter­ri­tory and seats in the Lebanese gov­ern­ment. It fields high-tech weapons and pos­sesses the fire­power to threaten the entire pop­u­la­tion of a regional super­power, or at least those in the north­ern half of Israel.…
“We are in a world today where we have a non-state actor using all the tools of weaponry,” from drone air­craft to rock­ets to com­puter hack­ing, said P.W. Singer, a senior fel­low at the Brookings Institution who spe­cial­izes in the impact of new tech­nolo­gies on national security. 

But John Robb, who’s been exam­in­ing this kind of “open source war­fare” for years, says that “the cen­tral secret to Hezbollah’s suc­cess” isn’t in its weaponry. It’s in the ter­ror­ists’ abil­ity to have its “guer­ril­las to make deci­sions autonomously… at the small group level.”

In every area — from fir­ing rock­ets to defend­ing pre­pared posi­tions… — we have exam­ples of Hezbollah teams decid­ing, adapt­ing, inno­vat­ing, and col­lab­o­rat­ing with­out ref­er­ence to any cen­tral author­ity. The result of this decen­tral­iza­tion is that Hezbollah’s aggre­gate deci­sion cycles are faster and qual­i­ta­tively bet­ter than those of their Israeli coun­ter­parts… the con­tin­ued suc­cess of its efforts has put the Israelis on the horns of a dilemma: either request a cease­fire or push for a full inva­sion of south­ern Lebanon (each fraught with dis­as­trous consequences). 

And not just for Israel. “Other ter­ror­ists are learn­ing from Hezbollahs suc­cesses,” Shanker notes. Iraqi insur­gents are show­ing a sim­i­lar blend of oper­a­tional flex­i­bil­ity and mod­ern tech­nol­ogy. To beat these groups, the U.S. is going to have to learn that it “takes a net­work to fight a network.”

American intel­li­gence agen­cies and the mil­i­tary proved it can fight this kind of war, as it did in Afghanistan to rout Al Qaeda, when intel­li­gence offi­cers and small groups of Army Special Forces worked with local fight­ers to call in dev­as­tat­ing air strikes and drive the Taliban from power.
Within the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and across the mil­i­tary, a clearer view is emerg­ing out of the chaos in south­ern Lebanon. It is that nation-states know they can­not directly take on super­pow­ers either regional or global with­out get­ting their clocks cleaned, and so they use prox­ies they train and sup­port to take the fight to those super­pow­ers. The fight against groups like Hezbollah requires a strat­egy for deal­ing with their spon­sors. These net­works, Hezbollah included, dont float around in the ether like free elec­trons bump­ing into each other. They alight. They attach them­selves to ter­ri­tory. In Afghanistan it was with the full sup­port of the Taliban. In Pakistan, its an ungoverned space. In Lebanon, its a state within a state. Cut off state sup­port, or elim­i­nate the abil­ity of the net­works to sur­vive in ungoverned areas, and they col­lapse on them­selves.
No solu­tion has been writ­ten. But it would include mil­i­tary force along with diplo­macy, eco­nomic assis­tance, intel­li­gence and infor­ma­tion cam­paigns.
“Most crit­i­cally, we have to get bet­ter at its such a clich win­ning hearts and minds,” said a mil­i­tary offi­cer work­ing on coun­terin­sur­gency issues. “That is influ­enc­ing neu­tral pop­u­la­tions toward sup­port­ing us and not sup­port­ing our ter­ror­ist and insur­gent enemies.”

And so the zillion-dollar ques­tion becomes: Do big air cam­paigns and large-scale inva­sions really influ­ence those opin­ions in a pos­i­tive way? Or do they just play into the ter­ror­ists’ hands?
UPDATE 07/31/06 4:07 PM: Anthony Cordesman’s answer: The U.S. — and Israel’s — cur­rent course is “stu­pid, incom­pe­tent, and obso­lete.” Youch.