No two wars are alike, even those fought between the same two combatants on the same terrain. But many of the challenges remain the same.
Israel’s most senior military commander has told troops that airstrikes will continue inside Lebanon as the Israeli military prepares for a possible ground operation. If its forces do cross the northern border they are likely to face obstacles they have seen before.
When Israeli tanks rolled into southern Lebanon in 2006 (not for the first time) they found an opponent who had changed dramatically since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon six years earlier.
Even in that short time, Hezbollah had organised and developed its capabilities. In the scrubby border zone overlooked by steep rocky ridges, combat tunnels had been prepared. New tactics and weapons had been adapted that would harry the Israeli forces as they entered.
Tanks in particular were vulnerable to anti-tank missiles, while fighters from Hezbollah and its allied group the Amal Movement fired mortars on the units of advancing Israeli infantry as they picked they way through groves and tobacco plots.
For those (including this writer) who witnessed the fighting close up, it was instructive.
In that war – as in this one – Israeli jets and drones controlled the air, pounding infrastructure and Hezbollah positions unopposed. Israeli gunboats, often sitting over the horizon, shelled the coast, threatening the main coastal highway daily. But approaching the border, it was a very different picture.
Then, as now, Hezbollah had well-prepared positions. Rockets would erupt from a hidden position on nearby hillsides, drawing Israeli counter-strikes, both from jets and artillery on the border, that it seemed impossible to survive. But often, after a pause of a few hours, the rockets would fire again from the same place, initiating a repeat of the cycle.
In his comments to soldiers, the Israeli chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, appeared to nod to the reality that any ground incursion, if it is ordered, would be difficult and opposed.
“We are preparing the process of a manoeuvre, which means your military boots, your manoeuvring boots, will enter enemy territory, enter villages that Hezbollah has prepared as large military outposts, with underground infrastructure, staging points, and launchpads into our territory and carry out attacks on Israeli civilians,” he told Israel Defense Forces troops on Wednesday.
“[In] your entry into those areas with force, your encounter with Hezbollah operatives, [you] will show them what it means to face a professional, highly skilled, and battle-experienced force. You are coming in much stronger and far more experienced than they are. You will go in, destroy the enemy there, and decisively destroy their infrastructure.”
The reality is that any ground campaign will be a far more complex undertaking than the intelligence-led attacks Israel has been pursuing in its exploding-pager gambit and the subsequent airstrikes.
The failures of the 2006 war – outlined in the subsequent Winograd commission – had its own fathers, including in a troika of inexperienced Israeli wartime leaders, including the then chief of staff, Dan Halutz, a former fighter pilot who struggled to coordinate ground movements, as well as the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and defence minister, Amir Peretz.
As the Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel wrote in 2016, a decade after the war: “IDF divisions were moved around aimlessly, with the government and army incapable of defining a manoeuvre that would gain the upper hand.”
And while the IDF has improved its armour to better defend against mobile anti-tank weapons and prepare for fighting in Lebanon, it remains unclear whether an Israel ground incursion can avoid the same pitfalls. Or whether, indeed, its goals any more realistic.
Hezbollah is much better armed than it was in 2006, its militants more combat-experienced after years fighting in Syria, but Israel seems to be falling into the same conceptual trap of misunderstanding the nature of the Islamist group.
While the pager operation and Israeli strikes have been successful in removing a layer of leadership and command and control, the essence of Hezbollah as a Lebanese force – as opposed to its function as a strategic proxy for Iran – ultimately remains intact.
At its heart it remains a locally embedded force dispersed through cities, villages and the countryside with a single and well-understood task: to oppose Israeli troops.
And while Hezbollah has experienced a moment of “shock and awe” in the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, and airstrikes, Israel has its own disadvantages – not least an increasing overstretch not only in its military capacity, but in a growing exhaustion in Israeli society after a year of war.
Many of the same units that have been fighting in Gaza have been moved north. A deepening crisis on the West Bank is also draining as the conflict in Gaza continues.
The IDF has long boasted of fighting on multiple fronts, but the long, grim operation against Hamas remains uncompleted and with no obvious plan for a day after. That campaign has also demonstrated the shortfalls in Israeli military thinking – not least the notion that manoeuvre warfare can defeat non-state actors that sometimes behave like conventional forces but can also default to unconventional warfare.
If history has anything to teach us – and following Israel’s past invasions of Lebanon in 1978 (then targeting PLO bases in Operation Litani), in 1985 (leading to an occupation that lasted until 2000), and 2006 – any ground incursion is more likely than not to fall short of its objectives.
