The IOF, 2006 And Now--Lessons Not Learned

Since the beginning of the war in Palestine I’ve stated several times that the Israeli military is not truly professional, being more akin to a Middle Eastern tribal militia. I’ve cited Alastair Crooke’s views in that regard, and other commentators have also weighed in, usually emphasizing the inexperience of the officer corps and the reliance on relatively poorly trained and motivated reservers.

Today I came across a US Army analysis of the Israeli military’s defeat in its 2006 war against Hezbollah. It’s a revealing document because it suggests that the same deficiencies that existed in 2006 remain today and are on display in Gaza. That being the case, another conclusion is that the only way Israel can successfully wage war against Hezbollah—which they continually threaten to do—is to have the US do it for them. That would likely prove disastrous, as the situation across the Middle East deteriorates. MoA explains:

Biden Needs To Come To Israel's - And His Own - Rescue

Changing a society's mind requires a slow and long response. In the north Hezbullah is slowly escalating its tit-for tat war with the Israeli army. Some 100,000 Israeli civilians have fled from the border zone. The Ansar Islam movement in Yemen has blocked maritime traffic to Israel's Eilat port. The U.S. attempt to counter that has failed:

…

Local resistances in Iraq and Syria are attacking U.S. troops deployed in those countries. As long as its troops are there the U.S. can to nothing to prevent that.

There are also threats to Israel's Mediterranean coast line. Hezbollah has the ability to close down Haifa and and other Israeli ports. Missiles, cruise missiles and drones from Gaza, from Lebanon, Yemen and from resistance fighters in Iraq and Syria continue to target Israel day by day.

With more than 350,000 Israeli troops mobilized and Palestinian workers from the West Bank banned, Israel's economy is, for lack of workers, in deep trouble.

Its military forays into Palestinian cities in Gaza have so far achieved little results but incurred significant losses. All the army can do is to destroy those cities block by block. But Hamas continues to fight back, even in rubble.

The current plan is to make Palestinian life in Gaza so miserable that leaving it will be for them the only alternative to certain death. But leaving whereto when no one wants to take them?

That is a question Israel and its U.S. backers fail to answer.

With the war going into a prolonged, unsustainable phase the Israeli government needs to do something else, or fail.

It plans to open a new front in Lebanon against Hezbollah. But a repeat of the 2006 war, which Israel lost, can not be risked. To fight Hezbollah on the ground Israel needs active U.S. backing, not only by U.S. delivery of weapons, but by U.S. forces on the ground.

Among the continuing deficiencies that I see on display is the reliance on air power, the poor performance in basic ground maneuver, and the demoralization of the ground forces based on decades of use in bullying civilian populations.

I’ve assembled a selection of excerpts from the US Army analysis, drawn fron the conclusion (which begins on p. 61):

We Were Caught Unprepared: The 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli War

U.S. Army Combined Arms Center

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

By the time the UN cease-fire went into effect on 14 August, Hezbollah had launched 3,790 rockets in Israeli territory. A total of 901 of these rockets hit Israeli towns and cities, killing 42 civilians and wounding 4,262. An additional 2,773 Israeli civilians were treated for “shock and anxiety.” The war was a wakeup call for Israel. The Effects-Based Operations (EBO) and Systemic Operational Design (SOD)-inspired doctrine that vigorously embraced air power at the expense of a classic ground maneuver campaign was certainly a major factor in the IDF’s disappointing performance. As IAF campaign planner Ron Tira noted:

Israel failed on the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Israel did not succeed in generating decapitation, paralysis, blindness, or any other effect that substantially harms the will or functioning of the organization’s command and control echelon. Nor did it succeed in suppressing the operational effectiveness of Hizbollah’s combat groups and light surface-to-surface rocket formations. At the end of the day, Israel did not upset the equilibrium of Hizbollah’s system and did not create a sense of helplessness and distress, nor did it push the organization towards cognitive-strategic collapse and a drive to end the war immediately on Israel’s terms.

In other words, the failure was comprehensive.

As enemy rockets rained down on northern Israel, the IDF attempted to orchestrate the strategic cognitive collapse of Hezbollah through the use of air power and precision firepower-based operations. When this failed, the IDF sought to produce the same effects by using its ground forces to conduct limited raids and probes into southern Lebanon. These restrained initiatives designed to create a cognitive perception of defeat also failed to produce the effects necessary to incapacitate Hezbollah. ...

EBO’s aim is to paralyze the enemy’s operational ability, in contrast to destroying its military force. This is achieved by striking the headquarters, lines of communication, and other critical junctions in the military structure. EBO [was] employed in their most distinct form in the Shock and Awe campaign that opened the 2003 Iraq War. However, the Americans used EBO to prepare the way for their ground maneuvers, and not as an alternative to them.”

...

Another crucial factor in the IDF’s reverses in southern Lebanon was the dismal performance of its ground forces. Years of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations had seriously diminished its conventional warfighting capabilities. The IDF was completely dismayed to find that its land forces could not conduct a successful ground campaign in southern Lebanon. Although Naveh was heavily criticized, his observations are astute and timely. “The point is, the IDF fell in love with what it was doing with the Palestinians,” he stated. “In fact it became addictive. You know when you fight a war against a rival who’s by all means inferior to you, you may lose a guy here or there, but you’re in total control. It’s nice, you can pretend that you fight the war and yet it’s not really a dangerous war. ...

In the conventional arena, the IDF ground forces performed unsatisfactorily. The fight at Wadi al-Saluki, for example, revealed the failure of tank commanders and crewmen to use their smokescreen systems, the lack of indirect-fire skills, and the total absence of combined arms proficiency. The IDF lost many of these perishable combat skills during its long years of COIN operations against the Palestinians.

Compared to the IOF …

Hezbollah proved to be a highly dedicated and professional fighting force, armed with some of the most advanced weapon systems in the world. There can be no doubt that the IDF greatly underestimated its opponent. From 2000 to 2006, Hezbollah successfully embraced a new doctrine, transforming itself from a predominantly guerrilla force into a formidable quasi-conventional fighting force. Hezbollah correctly ascertained the manner in which the IDF would fight the war and prepared its resources and command and control systems to effectively withstand an EBO campaign.

In the tactical arena, Hezbollah proved a worthy adversary for IDF ground forces. Its use of swarming ATGMs and RPGs against Israeli tanks was both shrewd and inventive. Of the 114 IDF personnel killed during the war, 30 were tank crewmen. Out of the 400 tanks involved in the fighting in southern Lebanon, 48 were hit, 40 were damaged, and 20 penetrated. It is believed that five Merkavas were completely destroyed. Clearly, Hezbollah has mastered the art of light infantry/ATGM tactics against heavy mechanized forces. Hezbollah also deserves high marks for its innovative use of sophisticated ambushes and the clever use of both direct and indirect fires.

Seventeen years later, Hezbollah is a vastly more effective fighting force. More experienced and much better equipped. Yet the IOF appears to exhibit the same deficiences that it demonstrated in 2006 and again in 2014 in Gaza. The only difference appears to be an increase in brutality.

What follows next are excerpts from a well known military blog. The author is clearly pro-Israel, although I haven’t included those sections. He is nevertheless totally bummed by Israeli’s disastrous and indefensible performance in Gaza. He doesn’t quite spell this out, but by combining the two analyses we can see that decades of brutalizing the Arab population has had a demoralizing effect on Israeli society generally, which is manifest in its military ops:

REVERSING AMERICA’S RUINOUS SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL’S ASSAULT ON GAZA

Since the brutal attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, I have been filled with a familiar sense of dread as the Israeli government has squandered the sympathy and support of so many around the globe. Tragically, this is where comparisons with 9/11 hold the most explanatory power. What took America about two-and-a-half years from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel accomplished in weeks. ...

Israel’s military operation in Gaza is both strategically and morally unrecoverable. The legacy of this maximalist assault will haunt Israel for years. Its costs have cascaded around the world and acutely affect Israel’s closest partner, the United States. U.S. policy ought to reflect these realities, first by threatening to withhold further material and political support to Israel unless it announces an immediate ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to flow, complies with the laws of war should combat resume, and commits to a positive political program on Palestinian governance of Gaza.

An Unrecoverable Disaster

For military action to succeed, it must serve an achievable policy aim. ...

That Israel’s policy is so maximalist and therefore likely unachievable is bad enough, ... In fact, this war may even leave Hamas more powerful. Nor has Israel been successful in getting back most of the hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7. In fact, the character of Israeli military operations has only put their lives at greater risk ... This does not speak to a coherent military strategy. It speaks to the absence of one. What we are seeing is nothing more than a large-scale punitive operation — or, in other words, an exercise in collective punishment.

In a 1864 letter to representatives of the city of Atlanta, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman famously observed: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” ...

[Quoting +972 magazine's report:]

[T]he Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. ...

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. ...

Israel has not only considered and accepted this high rate of non-combatant deaths privately. It has also defended it publicly.

... The only results of the operation even worth speaking of today are its immense destruction and grotesque disregard for the survival of non-combatants, to include women, children, the elderly, and the infirm. The long-term political, strategic, and moral costs of killing large numbers of civilians far outweigh the time-limited tactical benefits of continuing to wipe out Hamas terrorists.

That’s a very good phrase—the moral costs of killing large numbers of civilians include the literal demoralization of Israeli society. But this was brought on by the decades of systematic brutalization directed at non-Jews in Israel.

... Well-meaning American analysts continue to make arguments about how Israel can wage a more effective military campaign, but it is simply too late.

It would be difficult to overstate to the extent that Israel has cocked this up. ...

Many people know the line from Sherman’s letter that I quoted above. Fewer know the words that follow: “those who brought war into our Country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” ...

This is where the author really falls down. Throughout the article he more or less pretends that the Hamas raid into Israel had no causes. No mention of decades of brutalization of the Arab population. The Zionist politicians who brought their ideology to Palestine are the ones who brought this war on themselves. That’s not an apologia for Hamas. It’s simple reality.

The damage to American interests has already been profound, even setting aside the reputational costs of running interference for war crimes in one place while opposing them elsewhere. Vital shipping lanes and U.S. military outposts are under assault from Iranian-backed militants.

... Despite the insistence of Israel’s leaders and most devoted advocates, Israel is not adhering to the laws of war: a choice, not a necessity. And finally, the United States ought not to be supporting this operation any further, at least not in anything like its current form. ...

Washington ... ought not continue to sustain one of the greatest human disasters of the 21st century. This calamity is not in America’s interests, nor does it even serve the interests of the Israeli people.

What is wrong with Israelis?

Max Blumenthal takes a searing look at the societal sickness that exploded into the open after October 7, as Israelis of all walks of life took to social media to mock the suffering and torture of Palestinians, and proudly broadcasted grotesque war crimes to the world.