Take a look at pages 18-19
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/mh/dti0906/
Take a look at pages 18-19
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/mh/dti0906/
Seems to be a reverification, though from a pro-Israeli source, of Israeli Armor performance in Lebanon.
As an aside, that NXT-book format is horrible. Who thought that would be a good idea?
WINEP, 21 Aug 07: Hizballah's 'Big Surprise' and the Litani Line
....At the moment, the group seems to think that despite Israel's heavy reliance on airpower in the last war -- with ground forces deployed in only a limited fashion -- the next war would begin with a much larger Israeli ground assault. Any attempt to defend the area south of the Litani would therefore be suicidal. Moreover, the deployment of 12,000 UN peacekeepers and several thousand Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) personnel has made the construction of static defensive lines in southern Lebanon much more difficult than it was before summer 2006. Accordingly, even as Hizballah continues to train village units south of the Litani in the hope that they could slow an Israeli ground invasion, the group has constructed its main defensive positions to the north, where the terrain favors the defender and where Hizballah could deny Israeli armor columns easy access to the Bekaa Valley....
One notable thing that I take from this (if true) is that Hizbullah AT units matched ATGM attributes to Merkava subtypes, and systematically targeted to probe for AFV design weaknesses.
If true, its shows a strikingly high degree of training and fire discipline, when the tendency for most irregular (and many regular) forces would be to fire at the nearest or most threatening vehicle.
Iran doesn't have much capacity to smuggle substantial ATGM capacity to Hamas in Gaza, and almost no capacity to get anything into the West Bank. The most you find is a few RPGs (usually with regular, non-tandem warheads) and IEDs/mines, and in Gaza only. Given how casualty-averse the IDF is, however, that's a substantial deterrent.
Regarding Iraq, its almost inevitable that Iran will, in the long term, be providing some security assistance to Iraq--indeed, Ahmadinejad has made the offer. Indeed, some (now senior) Supreme Council military cadres held IRGC commissions during their exile in Iran in the 1980s.
I'm just speculating that Iran could get more aggressive once they have a nuclear bomb, or if we get aggressive with them, but your points are well taken.
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