“Terrorists are cowards,” one Army sergeant told me in Iraq last year. “And they can’t shoot worth @$%#!,” he added.
Through all the troubles in Iraq, the U.S. military has taken some comfort in its absolute tactical superiority to insurgent forces. In a stand-up fight, U.S. troops always win.
But what if that changed?
Indications are that Hezbollah has achieved the unthinkable. It has combined the elusiveness and agility of a terrorist group with the fighting prowess of a modern army, according to The New York Times:
Hezbollah is a militia trained like an army and equipped like a state, and its fighters are nothing like Hamas or the Palestinians, said a soldier who just returned from Lebanon. They are trained and highly qualified, he said, equipped with flak jackets, night-vision goggles, good communications and sometimes Israeli uniforms and ammunition. All of us were kind of surprised.
This is bad. Real bad.
On the other hand, as fellow blogger and Iraq vet Geoff Edwards has pointed out: the bolder and more tactically proficient a group like Hezbollah gets, the more it looks and acts like an army and the easier it is to find, fix and destroy using precisely those weapons that, against an insurgent force, are nearly useless.
–David Axe
UPDATE, 4:37 EST: Now Reuters is reporting that Israel has shot down a Hezbollah drone:
Israeli aircraft shot down a suspected Hizbollah drone as it flew over Israeli territory on Aug. 7, the Israeli army said. “I can confirm that the air force destroyed a Hizbollah drone,” an army spokesman said, but would not provide any other details, including where the drone was flying. Israels Channel One television reported that the drone was believed to be armed, but the army had no comment.
Is this another bit of ignorant reporting like the “drone hits ship” situation a couple weeks back? Or is this the latest example of Hezbollah’s remarkable military sophistication?
If it’s true, I wonder … was this drone on a surveillance mission, or doing something more nefarious?
Except that so far the IAF and IDF have had significant problems in targeting and destroying hezbollah fighting ability. In fact, hezbollah has managed to double its average rocket barrage per day for the last week, and is suffering very few casulties against a supposedly supperior foe.
Solid training with good opsec, well entrenched and hidden positions, with heavily ATGM equipped light infantry. Thats what causing the IDF trouble.
1. Any other country would act the same way if terrorists crossed over an internationally recognized border and killed people unprovoked.
2. On the whole, Israel has consistently made efforts to retract from conflict for the sake of normalcy and peace; from Sinai, from Yamit, from Lebanon, from Gaza, and eventually from the West Bank. (Charles Krauthammer wrote about this in a recent column in the Washington Post)
3. Israelis do not parade in the streets when others die.
4. Jewish public/governmental figures do not advocate the destruction of any other countries or ethnic groups, yet other ethnic groups decry the destruction of Israel on a daily basis.
5. Before you call Israel an apartheid state, or a state pursuing ethnic cleansing, or any other ridiculous claim like that, remember your history, and how the Armenian, Kurdish, and Tajik populations of the Middle East were (are) treated by Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Remember how Sunni/Shiite/Alawite/Wahabi ruling elites have treated their populations and each other (like the incident at Hama). Israel has screwed up in the past, but that does not mean the rest of the region is golden in comparison.
http://www.newzionist.com/2006/08/on-israeli-pr/
Good Morning Folks,
All good posts here but I find something missing. No body has mentioned the infulence that the insurgency in Iraq has had on developing the military sophication of not only Hezabollah but Hamas and The Teliban in Afghanistan.
The legecy of al-Zarqawi and his seeming genus in organization and military tactics along with his master of the asymerticaly battlefield seems to be spreading.
Hind sight is that before 2003 al Zarqawi was a nobody looking for some role in bin-Ladens al-Qaeda organization, but all that changed with the Americans invasion of Iraq and its blotched occupation. Opportunity knocked and al-Zarqawi answered, the rest as they say is history.
Who say’s that Bush hasn’t accomplished anything in Iraq.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
I think Hezbollah is one of the first militarily active “late phase 4GW” forces. It seems obvious that in the later phases of 4GW (or early phases of 5GW) we would see forces that have the resources and training of a state sponsored military using the proven tactics of 4GW or successful guerrilla forces.
Expect to see Iran use a modified version (they’d start out by relying on their air defense network and their long range missle capabilities) of this kind of strategy if attacked by the U.S or other major powers.
It is doubtful that Hezbollah will be definitively defeated by the IDF. Seeing as they are entrenched within a population, and the IDF is operating with a necessarily short amount of time. It is comparative to the Iraqi insurgency in that way and that way only, and the one did not influence the other. Oh, and Bush hasn’t accomplished anything in Iraq. In less you count stagnation as an accomplishment. Israel has made attempts to back off of captured territory for peace, but never willingly, only after great international pressure. Whats with that comment about the Hezbollah welfare system? I would say if there is such a thing in Lebanon, it would be provided by the government. Although Israel isn’t entirely in the right for this police action, they should still be able to counter terrorism how ever possible. For Israel’s present situation in the world, surrounded by hostiles, an inability to react would mean destruction.
i saw on tv a “freedom figther/terrorist” {depending on which tv station you are watching}.in afganistan and than a week later an other one in iraq saying this same words.
(patience america our revenge will be brutal).
if you want war prepare for war.……
First, J. Brenner has an interesting point. Since the IDF has started to scale up ground force incursions into Lebanon, have they lost armor to ATGMs? Since the body count for Israeli soldiers has been relatively low until recently, I wonder whether Hezbollah has some AT-4 Spigots or AT-5 Spandrels squirreled away somewhere.
As for Mr. Skinner’s post, I think reporting on Zarqawi’s exploits in Iraq were overblown. Was he part of the insurgency? Yes. Where his attacks high profile? Relatively so. But my impression is that his planning and operations were only an incremental improvement on stuff typical of al Qaeda. Also, as the ethnic violence in Iraq blooms, his unfortunate victims are proving to be merely a down payment on a much large conflict.
As for this latest bit of drone speculation, I am skeptical. Without details, for all we know this drone could have been a remote control prop plane kit. I don’t see where a drone fits into Hezbollah’s tactics or C4ISR scheme. With IAF planes dominating the sky, you’d think it would be easier to recon on foot and in civilian clothing. I am interested to see if this turns out to be another cruise missile.
The media is exaggerating Hezbollah’s battlefield prowess, and has been consistently doing so, since the beginning of this fight. It goes without saying that Hezbollah is going to be better trained and equipped than the palestinians, they are, after all, a proxy force for Iran, trained by probably the best Iran has to offer and armed by Iran/Syria.
That said, Hezbollah has NOT managed to defeat or even seriously stall the Israelis anywhere. If Hezbollah was such a powerful force, with all the myriad advantages this site was proclaiming, then how can it be that Hezbollah can’t even put up the level of resistance that the oft-denigrated Poles put up against the Nazis. Even the Poles had solid military units that the Nazis could not take down in a straight fight, and the Nazis were forced to encircle and bypass them.
Even if Hezbollah was able to beat back multiple serious Israeli attempts to take an area, that doesn’t mean Hezbollah is winning. In war, the losers, even when they lose overwhelmingly, can at least count SOME successes within the broader war. Can Hezbollah do that? NO.
How do I know for sure that Hezbollah isn’t having military victories? Because if Hezbollah did have one, the international media would ocne again make a mountain out of a molehill, and merrily propagandize for Hezbollah, as the media has knowingly been doing in the context of civilian casualties thus far.
“For Israel’s present situation in the world, surrounded by hostiles, an inability to react would mean destruction.“
React is the wrong word. I’d use “secure victory”, because in this instance, anything less is a defeat, especially since it appears that Israel has staked its existence on this campaign.
Pretty soon, a cease-fire will look like a time-out for Israel rather than the other way around.
Anyone who has been exposed to Isreali military prowess via either defense exercise, or witness. (i.e. Operation Peace in Galilli in the 80’s, which may have triggered our involvement in the fiasco in Berirut a couple of years later.) Knows the standard Israeli stategy, Identify, Isolate them from their resupply, fix them with air and artillery, and force them to stand and fight. Israeli reconaisance is as usual state of the art. They shut down the highways the first day of the war, (especially those to Syria and their supplies), make sure they kept the pressure on to fix them, then hit them as they please with either infantry.
The Lebanese government seems to have ceeded power to the various opposition groups against Israel for better than 20 years and now people are surprised at the Isreali response? Note, that the Israeli’s are responding with artillery and precision weapons not the damned unguided 122mm rockets of hezbollah. If Hezbollah decided to stand and fight then so much the better for the Israeli cause, in a stand up fight very few can stand with them. I ernestly believe if the Labanese would just govern their country most of this could be avoided. The irony of this is that Hezbollah is the duly elected ruling power in gaza, why go to war now for this?
A weak government, such as the one in Lebanon, would be all but unable to prevent “various opposition groups” from gaining power. The Israeli “precision weapons” have killed far more civilians than the “damned unguided rockets of Hezbollah.” And Hamas is the power in Gaza, not Hezbollah. The media is exaggerating Hezbollah’s prowess, but that is how it has always been with such organizations, and they will be exceedingly difficult to irradicate in any case.
the lingering shadow of shaking in my face, in order to play this game I spend money to buy the flyff penya, the BB again left me at the same time, same situation when I hard to get it, my angry can not use the words describe
I to the present personal danger of me. I spend not only the flyff money but also my feeling.
Other players can, I think I can too, many players said that BB can let us get more flyff gold, if you do not have enough flyff gold in the game, and then you can not do many things, in the reality world also like this. But I more like through my effort to get the success, that success can let me memorable forever.
I can spend many money to buy flyff penya, I can do not have lunch and sleep. Play the game can look the people diathesis, but I only know that we will not attack unless we are attacked; if we are attacked, we will certainly counterattack. This is my principles.