HOW
HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL PART 2: Winning the ground
war By Alastair Crooke
and Mark Perry
(For Part 1 in this
three-part series, Winning the intelligence war,
click here.)
Israel's decision to launch a ground war
to accomplish what its air force had failed to do
was made hesitantly and haphazardly. While Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) units had been making forays
into southern Lebanon during the second week of
the conflict, the Israeli military leadership
remained undecided over when and
where - even whether
- to deploy their ground units.
In part,
the army's indecisiveness over when, where and
whether
to deploy its
major ground units was a function of the air
force's claims to victory. The Israeli Air Force
(IAF) kept claiming that it would succeed from the
air - in just one more day, and then another. This
indecision was mirrored by the Western media's
uncertainty about when a ground campaign would
take place - or whether in fact it had already
occurred.
Senior Israeli
officers continued to tell their press contacts that
the timing of a ground offensive was a tightly kept
secret when, in fact, they didn't know themselves.
The hesitation was also the result of the
experience of small IDF units that had already
penetrated beyond the border. Special IDF units
operating in southern Lebanon were reporting to
their commanders as early as July 18 that
Hezbollah units were fighting tenaciously to hold
their positions on the first ridgeline overlooking
Israel.
At this point, Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert made a political decision: he would deploy
the full might of the IDF to defeat Hezbollah at
the same time that his top aides signaled Israel's
willingness to accept a ceasefire and the
deployment of an international force. Olmert
determined that Israel should not tip its hand -
it would accept the deployment of a United Nations
force, but only as a last resort.
First,
he decided, Israel would say that it would accept
a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) force.
In keeping with this strategy, Israeli reserve
forces were called to the front on July 21. The
surprise call-up (the IDF was to defeat Hezbollah
first from the air, and then - if that failed -
use its regular forces, with no reserve forces to
be called) made the initial deployment of the
reserves hurried and uncoordinated. (It is, to
repeat, likely that Israel did not believe it
would have to call on its reserves during the
conflict, or it would have called them much
earlier.)
Moreover, the decision to call
the reserves took key senior reserve officers,
usually the first to be notified of a pending
call-up, by surprise. The reserve call-up was
handled chaotically - with the reserve "tail" of
logistical support lagging some 24-48 hours behind
the deployment of reserve forces.
The July
21 call-up was a clear sign to military
strategists in the Pentagon that Israel's war was
not going well. It also helps to explain why
Israeli reserve troops arrived at the front
without the necessary equipment, without a
coherent battle plan, and without the munitions
necessary to carry on the fight. (Throughout the
conflict, Israel struggled to provide adequate
support to its reserve forces: food, ammunition
and even water supplies reached units a full 24-48
hours behind a unit's appearance at its assigned
northern deployment zones.)
The effect of
this was immediately perceived by military
observers. "Israeli troops looked unprepared,
sloppy and demoralized," one former senior US
commander noted. "This wasn't the vaunted IDF that
we saw in previous wars."
In keeping with
Olmert's political ploy, the IDF's goal of the
total destruction of Hezbollah was also being
markedly scaled back. "There is one line between
our military objectives and our political
objectives," Brigadier-General Ido Nehushtan, a
member of Israel's general staff, said on the day
after the reserve call-up. "The goal is not
necessarily to eliminate every Hezbollah rocket.
What we must do is disrupt the military logic of
Hezbollah. I would say that this is still not a
matter of days away."
This was a decidedly
strange way of presenting a military strategy - to
conduct a war to "disrupt the military logic" of
an enemy. Nehushtan's statement had a chilling
effect on IDF ground commanders, who wondered
exactly what the war's goals were. But other IDF
commanders were upbeat - while the IAF had failed
to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli
cities, fewer rockets were fired at Israel from
July 19-21 than at any other time (a very small
number on July 19, perhaps as few as 40 on July 20
and 50 on July 22).
July 22 also marks the
first time that the United States responded
militarily to the conflict. Late on the day of the
21st, the White House received a request from
Olmert and the IDF for the provision of large
amounts of precision-guided munitions - another
telltale sign that the IAF had failed in its
mission to degrade Hezbollah military assets
significantly during the opening rounds of the
war.
The request was quickly approved and
the munitions were shipped to Israel beginning on
the morning of July 22. Senior Pentagon officials
were dismayed by the shipment, as it meant that
Israel had expended most of its munitions in the
war's first 10 days - an enormous targeting
expenditure that suggested Israel had abandoned
tactical bombing of Hezbollah assets and was
poised for an onslaught on what remained of
Lebanon's infrastructure, a strategy that had not
worked during World War II, when the United States
and Britain destroyed Germany's 66 major
population centers without any discernable impact
either on German morale or military capabilities.
But there was little grumbling in the
Pentagon, though one former serving officer
observed that the deployment of US munitions to
Israel was reminiscent of a similar request made
by Israel in 1973 - at the height of the Yom
Kippur War. "This can only mean one thing," this
officer said at the time. "They're on the ropes."
In spite of its deep misgivings about the
Israeli response (and the misgivings, though
unreported, were deep and significant - and
extended even into the upper echelons of the US
Air Force), senior US military officers kept their
views out of public view. And for good reason:
criticism of Israel for requesting a shipment of
arms during the 1973 war led to the resignation of
then Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman General
George Brown. Brown was enraged that US weapons
and munitions were being sent to Israel at the
same time that American commanders in Vietnam were
protesting a lack of supplies in their war in
Southeast Asia.
The current JCS chairman,
Peter Pace, who remained notably silent during the
Israeli-Hezbollah war, understood history,
saluted, and remained silent. But the JCS and
senior military commanders were not the only US
officials who were worried about Israel's
performance. While the new US munitions were
winging their way to Israel (via Prestwick,
Scotland), intelligence officials were conducting
initial assessments of the war's opening days,
including one noting that in spite of the
sustained Israeli air offensive, Al-Manar was
still broadcasting in Beirut, though the IAF had
destroyed the broadcast bands of Lebanon's other
major networks. (This would remain true throughout
the war - Al-Manar never went off the air.) How
effective could the Israeli air campaign have been
if they couldn't even knock out a television
station's transmissions?
The call-up of
Israel's reserves was meant to buttress forces
already fighting in southern Lebanon, and to add
weight to the ground assault. On July 22,
Hezbollah units of the Nasr Brigade fought the IDF
street-to-street in Maroun al-Ras. While the IDF
claimed at the end of the day that it had taken
the town, it had not. The fighting had been
bloody, but Hezbollah fighters had not been
dislodged. Many of the Nasr Brigade's soldiers had
spent countless days waiting for the Israeli
assault and, because of Hezbollah's ability to
intercept IDF military communications, Israeli
soldiers bumped up against units that were well
entrenched.
IDF detachments continually
failed to flank the defenders, meeting
counterpunches toward the west of the city.
Special three-man hunter-killer teams from the
Nasr Brigade destroyed several Israeli armored
vehicles during the fight with light man-made
anti-tank missiles. "We knew they were going to do
this," Ilay Talmor, an exhausted Israeli second
lieutenant, said at the time. "This is territory
they say is theirs. We would do the same thing if
someone came into our country."
While the
IDF continued to insist that its incursions would
be "limited in scope", despite the recall of
thousands of reserve troops, IDF battalions began
to form south of the border. "We are not preparing
for an invasion of Lebanon," said Avi Pazner, a
senior Israeli government spokesman. The IDF then
called Maroun al-Ras its "first foothold" in
southern Lebanon. "A combination of air force,
artillery and ground-force pressure will push
Hezbollah out without arriving at the point where
we have to invade and occupy," Pazner said.
The difference between "pushing" out a
force and invading and occupying a town was
thereby set, another clear signal to US military
experts that the IDF could enter a town but could
not occupy it. One US officer schooled in US
military history compared the IDF's foray into
southern Lebanon to Robert E Lee's bloody attack
on Union positions at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
during the American Civil War. "Oh I can get
there, all right," Lee's lieutenant said during
that war, "it's staying there that's the problem."
After-battle reports of Hezbollah
commanders now confirm that IDF troops never fully
secured the border area and Maroun al-Ras was
never fully taken. Nor did Hezbollah ever feel the
need to call up its reserves, as Israel had done.
"The entire war was fought by one Hezbollah
brigade of 3,000 troops, and no more," one
military expert in the region said. "The Nasr
Brigade fought the entire war. Hezbollah never
felt the need to reinforce it."
Reports
from Lebanon underscore this point. Much to their
surprise, Hezbollah commanders found that Israeli
troops were poorly organized and disciplined. The
only Israeli unit that performed up to standards
was the Golani Brigade, according to Lebanese
observers. The IDF was "a motley assortment", one
official with a deep knowledge of US slang
reported. "But that's what happens when you have
spent four decades firing rubber bullets at women
and children in the West Bank and Gaza."
IDF commanders were also disturbed by the
performance of their troops, noting a signal lack
of discipline even among its best-trained regular
soldiers. The reserves were worse, and IDF
commanders hesitated to put them into battle.
On July 25, Olmert's strategy of backing
down from a claimed goal to destroy Hezbollah was
in full force. The Israeli Defense Minister Amir
Peretz was the bearer of these tidings, saying
that Israel's current goal was to create a
"security zone" in southern Lebanon. His words
were accompanied by a threat: "If there is not a
multinational force that will get in to control
the fences, we will continue to control with our
fire towards anyone that gets close to the defined
security zone, and they will know that they can be
hurt."
Gone quite suddenly was a claim
that Israel would destroy Hezbollah; gone too was
a claim that only NATO would be acceptable as a
peacekeeping unit on the border. On July 25,
Israel also reported that Abu Jaafar, a commander
of Hezbollah's "central sector" on the Lebanese
border, was killed "in an exchange of fire" with
Israeli troops near the border village of Maroun
al-Ras - which had not yet been taken. The report
was not true. Abu Jaafar made public comments
after the end of the war.
Later on July
25, during US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's visit to Jerusalem, the Israeli military
fought its way into Bint Jbeil, calling it
"Hezbollah's terror capital". The fight for Bint
Jbeil went on for nine days. But it remained in
Hezbollah hands until the end of the conflict. By
then, the town had been destroyed, as Hezbollah
fighters were able to survive repeated air and
artillery shellings, retreating into their bunkers
during the worst of the air and artillery
campaign, and only emerging when IDF troops in
follow-on operations tried to claim the city.
The Hezbollah tactics were reminiscent of
those followed by the North Vietnamese Army during
the opening days of the Vietnam conflict - when
NVA commanders told their troops that they needed
to "ride out the bombs" and then fight the
Americans in small unit actions. "You must grab
them by their belt buckles," a Vietnamese
commander said in describing these tactics.
On July 24, as yet another sign of its
looming failure in Lebanon, Israel deployed the
first of thousands of cluster munitions against
what it called "Hezbollah emplacements" in
southern Lebanon. Cluster munitions are an
effective, if vicious, combat tool and those
nations that use them, including every single
member of NATO (as well as Russia and China), have
consistently refused to enter an international
agreement banning their use.
The most
responsible nation-states that use them, however,
"double fuse" their munitions to cut down on the
failure rate of the "bomblets" after they have
been deployed. During the administration of US
president Bill Clinton, defense secretary William
Cohen agreed to the double-fusing of US cluster
munitions and a phase-out of the "high dud rate"
munitions in the US stockpile, which was intended
to cut the failure rate of these munitions from
14% (some estimates are higher) to less than 3%
(though some estimates are lower).
While
investigations into Israel's use of these
munitions is not yet complete, it now appears that
the IDF deployed single-fused munitions. Recent
reports in the Israeli press indicate that
artillery officers carpeted dozens of Lebanese
villages with the bomblets - as close to the
definition of the "indiscriminate" use of
firepower as one can get.
The Israeli
munitions may well have been purchased from aging
US stockpiles that were not double-fused, making
the United States complicit in this indiscriminate
targeting. Such a conclusion seems to fit with the
time-line of the resupply of munitions to Israel
on July 22. The IDF may well have been able to
offload these munitions and deploy them quickly
enough to have created the cluster-munitions
crisis in Lebanon that plagues that nation still -
and that started on July 24.
On July 26,
IDF officials conceded that the previous 24 hours
in their fight for Bint Jbail was "the hardest day
of fighting in southern Lebanon". After failing to
take the town from Hezbollah in the morning, IDF
commanders decided to send in their elite Golani
Brigade. In two hours in the afternoon, nine
Golani Brigade soldiers were killed and 22 were
wounded. Late in the afternoon, the IDF deployed
its elite Paratroopers Brigade to Maroun al-Ras,
where fighting with elements of the Nasr Brigade
was in its third day.
On July 27, in
response to the failure of its units to take these
cities, the Israeli government agreed to a call-up
of three more reserve divisions - a full 15,000
troops. By July 28, however, it was becoming clear
just how severe the failure of the IAF had been in
its attempts to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks. On
that day, Hezbollah deployed a new rocket, the
Khaibar-1, which hit Afula.
On July 28,
the severity of Israel's intelligence failures
finally reached the Israeli public. On that day,
Mossad officials leaked information that, by their
estimate, Hezbollah had not suffered a significant
degradation in its military capabilities, and that
the organization might be able to carry on the
conflict for several more months. The IDF
disagreed, stating that Hezbollah had been
severely damaged. The first cracks in the Israeli
intelligence community were beginning to show.
Experts in the US were also beginning to
question Israel's strategy and capability. The
conservative Brookings Institution published a
commentary by Philip H Gordon (who blamed
Hezbollah for the crisis) advising, "The issue is
not whether Hezbollah is responsible for this
crisis - it is - or whether Israel has the right
to defend itself - it does - but whether this
particular strategy [of a sustained air campaign]
will work. It will not. It will not render
Hezbollah powerless, because it is simply
impossible to eliminate thousands of small,
mobile, hidden and easily resupplied rockets via
an air campaign."
Gordan's commentary
reflected the views of an increasing number of
military officers, who were scrambling to dust off
their own air plans in the case of a White House
order targeting Iranian nuclear sites. "There is a
common misperception that the [US] Air Force was
thrilled by the Israeli war against Lebanon," one
Middle East expert with access to senior Pentagon
officials told us. "They were aghast. They well
know the limits of their own power and they know
how it can be abused.
"It seemed to them
[USAF officers] that Israel threw away the book in
Lebanon. This wasn't surgical, it wasn't precise,
and it certainly wasn't smart. You can't just coat
a country in iron and hope to win."
The
cold, harsh numbers of the war point up the
fallacy of the Israeli air and ground campaign.
Hezbollah had secreted upwards of 18,000 rockets
in its arsenals prior to the conflict. These sites
were hardened against Israeli air strikes and
easily survived the air campaign. Hezbollah
officials calculated that from the time of firing
until the IAF was able to identify and deploy
fighters to take out the mobile rockets was 90
seconds. Through years of diligent training,
Hezbollah rocket teams had learned to deploy, fire
and safely cover their mobile launchers in less
than 60 seconds, with the result that IAF planes
and helicopters (which Israel has in much fewer
numbers than it boasts) could not stop Hezbollah's
continued rocket fire at Israel ("Israel is about
three helicopters away from a total disaster," one
US military officer commented).
Hezbollah
fired about 4,000 rockets at Israel (a more
precise, though uncertain, figure calculates the
firing of 4,180 rockets), bringing its stockpiles
down to 14,000 rockets - enough to prosecute the
war for at least three more months.
Moreover, and more significant,
Hezbollah's fighters proved to be dedicated and
disciplined. Using intelligence assets to pinpoint
Israeli infantry penetrations, they proved the
equal of Israel's best fighting units. In some
cases, Israeli units were defeated on the field of
battle, forced into sudden retreats or forced to
rely on air cover to save elements from being
overrun. Even toward the end of the war, on August
9, the IDF announced that 15 of its reserve
soldiers were killed and 40 wounded in fighting in
the villages of Marjayoun, Khiam and Kila - a
stunning casualty rate for a marginal piece of
real estate.
The robust Hezbollah defense
was also taking its toll on Israeli armor. When
Israel finally agreed to a ceasefire and began its
withdrawal from the border area, it left behind
upwards of 40 armored vehicles, nearly all of them
destroyed by expertly deployed AT-3 "Sagger"
anti-tank missiles - which is the NATO name for
the Russian-made vehicle- or man-deployed,
wire-guided, second-generation 9M14 Malyutka - or
"Little Baby".
With a range of 3
kilometers, the Sagger proved enormously
successful in taking on Israeli tanks, a fact that
must have given Israeli armor commanders fits, in
large part because the Sagger missile deployed by
Hezbollah is an older version (developed and
deployed in 1973) of a more modern version that is
more easily hidden and deployed and has a larger
warhead. If the IDF could not protect its armor
against the 1973 "second generation" version, IDF
commanders must now be wondering how it can
possibly protect itself against a version that is
more modern, more sophisticated, and more deadly.
Prior to the implementation of the
ceasefire, the Israeli political establishment
decided that it would "clear drop" Israeli
paratroopers in key areas along the Litani River.
The decision was apparently made to convince the
international community that the rules of
engagement for a UN force should extend from the
Litani south. Such a claim could not be made
unless Israel could credibly claim to have cleared
that part of Lebanon to the Litani.
A
significant number of Israeli forces were
airlifted into key areas just south of the Litani
to accomplish this goal. The decision might well
have led to a disaster. Most of the Israeli forces
airlifted to these sites were immediately
surrounded by Hezbollah units and may well have
been decisively mauled had a ceasefire not gone
into effect. The political decision angered
retired IDF officers, one of whom accused Olmert
of "spinning the military" - using the military
for public relations purposes.
Perhaps the
most telling sign of Israel's military failure
comes in counting the dead and wounded. Israel now
claims that it killed about 400-500 Hezbollah
fighters, while its own losses were significantly
less. But a more precise accounting shows that
Israeli and Hezbollah casualties were nearly even.
It is impossible for Shi'ites (and Hezbollah) not
to allow an honorable burial for its martyrs, so
in this case it is simply a matter of counting
funerals. Fewer than 180 funerals have been held
for Hezbollah fighters - nearly equal to the
number killed on the Israeli side. That number may
be revised upward: our most recent information
from Lebanon says the number of Shi'ite martyr
funerals in the south can now be precisely
tabulated at 184.
But by any accounting -
whether in rockets, armored vehicles or numbers of
dead and wounded - Hezbollah's fight against
Israel must be accorded a decisive military and
political victory. Even if it were otherwise (and
it is clearly not), the full impact of Hezbollah's
war with Israel over a period of 34 days in July
and August has caused a political earthquake in
the region.
Hezbollah's military defeat of
Israel was decisive, but its political defeat of
the United States - which unquestioningly sided
with Israel during the conflict and refused to
bring it to an end - was catastrophic and has had
a lasting impact on US prestige in the region.
Next: How Hezbollah won the
political war
Alastair Crooke and
Mark Perry are the co-directors of Conflicts
Forum, a London-based group dedicated
to providing an opening to political Islam. Crooke
is the former Middle East adviser to European
Union High Representative Javier Solana and served
as a staff member of the Mitchell Commission
investigating the causes of the second intifada.
Perry is a Washington, DC-based political
consultant, author of six books on US history, and
a former personal adviser to Yasser Arafat.
(Research for this article was provided by
Madeleine Perry.)
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uncertainty about when a ground campaign would
take place - or whether in fact it had already
occurred. 
