U.S. learns from Israel-Hezbollah war
U.S. learns from Israel-Hezbollah war
USA Today, 14 February 2008
Quote:
WASHINGTON — Senior Pentagon officials are using a classified Army study on the 2006 war between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah to retool the U.S. military's combat strategy for future wars.
Incidentally, if anyone has access to the unclassified version mentioned in the news report (or a non-NOFORNed other version), could they PM me?
How are we evaluating this?
The IDF failed in their recent fiasco into Lebanon, so all the chest thumping about how the IDF can defeat Hezbollah in combat is somewhat comical. I guess the caveat was if the IDF had a better plan they would have won, because they can fight better.
By most accounts the IDF's active duty forces did superbly, but several of their reservists didn't fare so well in tough urban combat. That is probably true for most nations, you have the A-Team and then a distant C-Team that normally requires a fair amount of time to knock the dust off of it after they mobilize to be combat ready.
The fact remains that irregulars achieved their goal, and just as in Vietnam it doesn't necessarily matter who actually wins the individual battles. This conventional mindset still blinds our military to the reality that in irregular warfare the fight is to shape the perceptions of the population (and other target audiences), not destroy the opposing military forces, because they know they can't.
We need to evaluate how the Hezbollah utilized tactical operations to defeat Israel in the last campaign, not how they used tactical operations to defeat the IDF, because they didn't, but then once again that wasn't the point.
We have this habit of saying we kicked their butt based on metrics that simply are not important, when we're actually getting our butt handed to us if you look at the metrics that count.
Network Embeddedness and the Laws of Armed Conflict
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Originally Posted by
Rank amateur
Depends upon who you mean by we and whether disguising soldiers as civilians counts as "working from within a civilian population."
I was wondering when the discussion would get around to this. Some of you might be interested, if not surprised, to know that legal research has been working on those sticky gray operational areas where recce, SF, and intelligence takes on shapes and forms that are difficult to distinguish, at least in appearance, from guerrilla/insurgent/terrorist tactics. Issues of network embeddedness and the legitimacy thresholds they imply (one man's terrorist, etc.), are being revisited and deliberated with a view to better understanding how the Laws of Armed Conflict, designed for the linear battlespaces of old, can be reconciled with non-linear conflict environments like those inhabited by Hizbullah, AQ, etc.
For starters, take a look at the New Battlefields, Old Laws (NBOL) project. It's a joint research initiative of the Institute for National Security and Counter-Terrorism (INSCT) at Syracuse University, and the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya in Israel. Workshops have included discussion of scenarios just like the one cited in the last post, except they happened a bit more recently. More interestingly, scenario writers were very young Israeli Masters students who'd been faced with those very situations during their 2006 summer break, spent fighting in Lebanon.
Apples, Pineapples and Potato Pancakes
Military deception is as old as warfare. Inadvertently placing civilians in danger due to combat exigencies is also an unhappy circumstance of long standing. So too is deliberate use of civilians as shields an ancient practice -- but they are three very different things.
Lawyers and wordsmiths may parse the three to their hearts content to get accord -- because that's what lawyers and wordsmiths do. Fortunately, most of us can safely ignore both.
I know of no western nation or armed force that allows, much less espouses the use of civilians as shields. If anyone here knows of one that does, I'd like to hear about it -- and I am NOT talking about aberrations where some Commander locally gets or got stupid.
Anyone who conflates the three very different things to make a political point simply isn't thinking well. :rolleyes:
Let's stick to apples then
And a war were Ken served.
But the AP found in researching declassified Army documents that U.S. commanders also issued standing orders to shoot civilians along the warfront to guard against North Korean soldiers disguised in the white clothes of Korean peasants.
Were the North Koreans moral or immoral: justified or unjustified?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Surferbeetle
if we can/should use some of their successful tactics in Iraq.
Which specific tactics are you thinking about?
Market Metrics & Associated Tactics
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Rank amateur
Which specific tactics are you thinking about?
R.A.,
This quote from the Krepinevich article I referenced above sticks in my head....and I believe we can substitute Hezbollah/Hizbollah for Iraqi.
"Then there are "market metrics." Insurgents have exploited both the unemployed and criminals in seeking support. They often pay Iraqis to plant IEDs and declare bounties for the killing of government officials. Such measures indicate that the insurgency is struggling to expand its ranks and must buy support. It would be helpful to keep track of the "market" in this aspect of the conflict. What are the insurgents offering to those who will plant an IED? What kind of bounty are they placing on the lives of their enemies, and how does that price change over time? The assumption behind these market metrics is that the higher the insurgents' price, the fewer people there are who are willing to support them. Such a reduction in support could indicate success on the part of the coalition and the Iraqi government in improving security, reducing unemployment, and strengthening the popular commitment to the new regime, all of which would leave fewer people vulnerable to persuasion or coercion by the insurgents."
Steve