Advancing to the Litani and Restoring Deterrence

A special assessment of what lays ahead in the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah

Israeli air strike in Lebanon. Image: Reuters

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, told soldiers to prepare for a possible incursion into Lebanon, where they would “go in, destroy the enemy there and decisively destroy” Hezbollah’s infrastructure. Washington Post, 25 September 2024

Israel might again conduct a ground operation into southern Lebanon.

As a possible prelude to such an operation, the Israelis this week conducted an air strike that appears to have decapitated the Hezbollah Radwan force leadership, a special force designed to infiltrate into northern Israel. Israel also targeted and destroyed many of Hezbollah’s missiles in their storage locations (particularly in fake houses) in southern Lebanon. Around 1600 strikes were conducted by the IDF, which is a very significant level of effort for their Air Force.

There were many casualties on the ground, and the balance of civilians and Hezbollah in the casualty numbers remains unknown. While these strikes have been destructive, Hezbollah is estimated to possess somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand missiles of varying range and precision. Therefore, just how much of an impact these strikes will have on Hezbollah’s capacity to attack Israel remains to be seen.

In the past day, Hezbollah also launched a ballistic missile at Tel Aviv. The alleged target was the headquarters of Mossad. The missile was intercepted by the IDF, but was an indication of Hezbollah capacity, and the potential for further escalation in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

The trajectory of this conflict appears to be trending towards a more intense and more violent confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah.

However, the big question is whether the recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon are designed to deter Hezbollah from any escalation or are shaping operations for a larger scale Israeli ground operation in southern Lebanon.

Restoring Deterrence

The Israelis appear to have two options available to them in the near term. The first option is to continue the current tempo of strikes in Lebanon, which is about restoring deterrence against Hezbollah. The second option is that these strikes are actually the preliminary phase of a larger mission against Hezbollah south of the Litani River. Both are examined below.

Restoring Deterrence. One of the themes that I discussed in the wake of my visit to Israel in December 2023 was ‘restoring deterrence’. (You can read my report on this topic here). In nearly every discussion with security officials, the failure of deterrence on 7 October was a central issue. The important follow-on issue then was how to restore deterrence, particularly against Hamas and Hezbollah.

In the case of Hamas, restoring Hamas has involved its destruction at the hands of the IDF. This has also been accompanied by massive destruction and death in Gaza, which might influence the support of Hamas in future. But by the same token this might also provide a new generation of recruits for Hamas.

Hezbollah is a different organisation. It is larger and possesses very capable fighting units and a massive arsenal of short, medium and long-range rockets which could be used against Israel. Hezbollah has been firing barrages of rockets into northern Israel since October 2023, necessitating the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from that part of the country. The government of Israel is keen to restore deterrence in its fight against Hezbollah and have its citizens return to its homes in northern Israel. The latest strikes will be part of that effort.

The pager attacks last week, as well as those against other communications devices, are also part of this restoring deterrence effort. These attacks will have been designed to kill or injure Hezbollah members. More importantly it will have been designed to impact their confidence in communication systems and corrode the ability of Hezbollah’s leadership to command-and-control elements the various components of Hezbollah.

Preparing for a Ground Operation. If restoring deterrence cannot be achieved through these strikes, a ground operation might then be undertaken by the Israelis.

Such an operation is something that the IDF has been thinking about and preparing for over the past decade, so we might expect a different concept of operations compared to their previous large-scale operation in southern Lebanon in 2006. This will be different in concept and execution from the operations conducted in Gaza since last year.

Southern Lebanon has a different density of urban settlements, which means that any ground combat will be a mix of urban (in the many small towns that dot the region) and in the hills and vegetated areas south of the Litani River. This may make target discrimination a little easier for the Israelis.

While the physical environment of southern Lebanon is quite different to Gaza, so to is the enemy that the Israeli’s will face. Hezbollah has well trained ground forces who are able to conduct what we might recognize as combined arms operations. Their troops have experience from Syria, which they will import back into Hezbollah units, and will be fighting on home ground. Hezbollah also possesses more effective anti-tank and anti-air weapons, and probably have a better anti-drone capability than Hamas did in Gaza. All of these factors will complicate operations for the Israelis.

Fighting in Southern Lebanon is Tough

The Israelis have experience in southern Lebanon. They have been there before, and they know the ground and have a good appreciation of the capabilities of Hezbollah. As Bret Stephen’s writes in a recent article:

2006 Hezbollah launched a guerrilla raid into Israel. It led to a 34-day war that devastated Lebanon, traumatized Israel, and concluded with a U.N. resolution that was supposed to disarm the terrorist militia and keep its forces far from the border.

Or as an earlier report from the RAND Corporation described it:

A Hezbollah raid along the Lebanon-Israel border on July 12, 2006, resulted in the capture of two IDF soldiers and others killed and wounded. The response from Jerusalem was both quick and violent, surprising Hezbollah’s leadership and triggering a monthlong conflict…The event left the IDF a chastened force and Israel an introspective nation.

The operation, which lasted a little over a month, was largely seen as a failure. Despite its overwhelming military and economic advantages, Israel did not defeat Hezbollah in the war. Israel also did not achieve its publicly stated goals at the outset of the war, especially those related to returning the soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah, or the disarming of Hezbollah in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1559.

But how might the lessons of the 2006 war in Lebanon inform any Israeli operation in southern Lebanon in the near future?

A wide variety of reports were produced by Israeli and Western military organisations and think tanks in the wake of the 2006 operation. The IDF was particularly rigorous in reviewing the lessons of the 2006 war. And an independent commission, the Winograd Commision, was formed to investigate the war.  As Amir Rapaport has written:

The process of drawing lessons from the war was the most comprehensive and thorough in Israel’s history. A series of investigative committees, headed by reserve officers and senior academics, were established a few weeks after the war. Their work formed the basis for an official document that presents the lessons of the war and main recommendations for changes in the IDF.

In reviewing all these reports, some common themes emerge. It is important to understand these before any new war because the same kinds of challenges are likely to emerge in any new Israeli operation in southern Lebanon.

Theme 1: Tactical competence does not make up for failures in strategy. Israeli failures in strategy were a key finding of the Winograd Commission, which Israel established to investigate the conduct of the 2006 war. The final report of the Winograd Commission noted that:

We found serious failings and flaws in the lack of strategic thinking and planning, in both the political and the military echelons.

In a report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Tony Cordesman wrote that “it is far from clear that Israel’s leaders ever had a real strategic consensus on any aspect of the war, that they agreed on…goals at the time Israel began fighting or that they had pursued goals consistently or with proposer coordination.”

Civilian and military leaders appear to have possessed different views on the aims of the operation into Lebanon. There were differences between senior military and political leaders over what military operations could accomplish, and these differences were not resolved. This ensured that an integrated war strategy, which included military as well as other non-military actions, was neither developed nor integrated.

In 2007, a preliminary report by the Winograd Commission was released. It criticized the Israeli Prime Minister for having “no organized plan” for the invasion of southern Lebanon, and for not seeking sufficient military advice on the operation.

Without an explicit and agreed strategy to drive and shape military efforts, tactical operations are largely directionless. Tactical activities might achieve local objectives, but the purpose for their conduct is missing. This lack of a strategy, and a way to link tactical actions through campaigns and military strategy to political outcomes, was a major lesson from the war in 2006. 

Theme 2: Air Power matters but is not in itself a war winning solution. Air power received a lot of negative critique in the wake of the 2006 war, and eventually led to the Israeli chief of defence, a key air power advocate, resigning. The Israeli leadership’s faith in airpower before the war, a means to lower risk and conduct a low-casualty response to the challenges of Hezbollah, was found to be misplaced. The application of air power was not able to provide a full solution to the challenges of Hezbollah asymmetric operations and their hiding among the people.

The use of air power did not fail in 2006, but it should never have been viewed as the comprehensive solution that it was by senior Israeli leaders. As Sarah Kreps wrote in her critique of Israeli air force during the 2006 war, a key lesson is perhaps not airpower is a categorical failure, but that it does not promise the antiseptic elixir that some leaders are seeking.

Interestingly, in the lead up to the 2006 war, the Israeli Air Force declared that it would no longer provide fixed wing close air support for Israeli ground forces due to priority strategic missions. Consequently, ground forces involved in the incursion into Lebanon were not given the full level of support that might have otherwise been available.

Theme 3: Realistic, rigorous and assessed training is a key foundation for operational success. IDF investigations after the war, which used multiple incidents during the war as case studies, found that the basic training for units in the IDF was unacceptable, and that this had contributed to the challenges experienced during the 2006 Lebanon war.

For example, simple coordination between neighboring units and formations was lacking. Another example was that army units before the war lacked standards for collective training, and therefore their operational effectiveness could not be assessed – until they entered combat. Collective training activities before the war were frequently cancelled at short notice (one report noted 25% of battalion training operations were cancelled at short notice in the period 2001-2005).

Infantry mobility before 2006 was not sufficient for them to keep up with the IDF tank corps, and infantry-tank coordination was lacking. The collection and distribution of tactical intelligence when the war began was a lower priority than strategic intelligence capabilities. Finally, the training of reserve units was a low priority compared to regular units, and reservists (around 30,000 of whom were mobilised for the war) entered the war with insufficient training and preparation.

Theme 4: Tested and relevant doctrine is vital. A primary lesson in IDF reports on the war was the need to reformulate the Operational Art. Many of those interviewed in the wake of the war saw the doctrine on Israel’s Operational Art, which was introduced just three months before the war, as a significant contributor to failure in Lebanon. With titles such as The General Staff’s Operational Art for the IDF, Systemic Design and Effects-Based Operations, the Winograd Commission identified that this new doctrine had been officially approved in the IDF without undergoing suitable testing and wider education within the organization beforehand.

To make matter worse, conformism ensured that even when senior leaders thought the new doctrine was bad, few dared speak up. As one report found:

A sensitive issue regarding the conduct of the General Staff in the period preceding and during the Second Lebanon War is that of conformism – the “swimming with the current” – of most of the generals. The changes instituted by Haloutz were accepted by the members of the staff almost without opposition.

The doctrinal aspects of this took some time to remedy. As Gabi Sidoni writes:

Since the Second Lebanon War, several attempts were made to formulate a current operational concept for the IDF, but these did not evolve into a working document. Only in August 2015, a little over nine years after the war, was a new conceptual document issued – The IDF Strategy.

Theme 5: Leader development must be improved. In the wake of the war, Israel recognized that many of the difficulties it faced during the 2006 Lebanon War were failures of leadership. As a RAND examination noted:

The actions and judgments of the prime minister, defense minister, and many commanders at echelons from IDF chief of staff to those below brigade demonstrated, in one way or another, that more attention to educating leaders and their staffs is necessary. There were tactical failures: It was reported that tactical-level commanders in too many cases never left their command posts to cross into southern Lebanon and gauge conditions at the front. There were operational-level shortfalls: Fears of soldier casualties first stopped attacks and later slowed them to the pace of bulldozers constructing new roads. There were strategic misjudgments: Expectations regarding what could realistically be expected of air power were naïve.

Another fundamental failure of leadership was that the vast majority of forces committed on the ground had only been training in the kinds of security missions conducted during intifada operations. This focus on a single type of operation denies a force the capacity to adapt quickly in wars and increases the risk to the force when it is employed on alternative missions.

These failures of leadership are often systemic and require changes across the entirety of a military institution’s education and training efforts.  Whether they have been fully addressed remains to be seen.

A Fork in the Road

There are many other lessons from 2006. The Israelis were rigorous in studying the lessons of the war. Some elements of the Winograd Commission, the principal investigation of the war which released its final report in 2008, remain classified. But the IDF has changed many of aspects of its organisation, training and leadership which led to the lessons described above and the failures of the 2006 Lebanon war.  Layered on top of these lessons and changes are more recent learning about new technologies and their application on the modern battlefield from Ukraine and Gaza.

However, whether that means the IDF would be more successful in any near future incursion into Lebanon remains to be seen. These lessons are not predictors of future performance. They do indicate the kinds of challenges the IDF may face during an invasion of southern Lebanon.

Importantly, Hezbollah has also been watching and learning since 2006. As the old saying goes, “the enemy always gets a vote.” IDF effectiveness and military success in Lebanon will be influenced by the changes in Hezbollah organisation, training, tactics, and equipment over the past 18 years.

Whether Israel chooses to continue its strikes to restore deterrence, or pursues a large-scale invasion of southern Lebanon, it is unlikely there will be a significant reduction in the tempo of the conflict in the near term. Both Hezbollah and Israel have indicated that they possess the will and the capacity to continue their current operations for some time to come.

The coming days will provide further insights into whether the reality of a larger and more destructive war sees the conflict continue in its current form or shifts to a different phase of large-scale ground and air combat within southern Lebanon.

The 2008 Winograd Commission final report found that the decision to react immediately to the 2006 kidnapping of Israeli soldiers reduced Israel’s strategic options to either a standoff war or a full-scale invasion. History doesn’t repeat, but it appears to be rhyming.

(Images: Hezbollah DR3 missile - Alma Research and Education Centre; Merkava tanks in Lebanon on 2006 - Jerusalem Post)