Israel's Failure to 'properly assess Hezbollah led to little incentive to fight & more difficulty to defeat its defenses"

"Israel's disappointing performance in its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 did not reflect a "failure of air power," but rather a failure of Israel's political and military leaders to properly assess the enemy, set achievable goals, apply an effective strategy and adequately manage public expectations, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today....

"What ultimately failed in the planning and conduct of the campaign against Hezbollah was not Israeli air power or any other instrument of warfare," said Benjamin Lambeth, author of the study and a senior defense analyst at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "It was a consequential blend of ill-advised civilian and military leadership decisions about the nature of the adversary, the campaign's initial goals and the desire to avoid a military occupation in southern Lebanon."

When the conflict ended following a mutually agreed cease-fire, those unrealistic goals remained unmet, and the Israeli Defense Forces proved unable at any time to stem the daily barrage of rockets that Hezbollah fired into civilian population centers in northern Israel, according to the study. Well before the crisis erupted, the commander of the Israeli Air Force had warned government leaders that preventing the launching of well-hidden rockets was beyond the capacity of Israel's air assets alone.

Lambeth finds that although the Israeli Defense Forces had a fully developed contingency plan for a joint air-ground counteroffensive that might have offered real promise in response to Hezbollah's provocation, Israel's leaders were unwilling to countenance the high friendly casualty rate that such action would almost surely have generated. As such, leaders chose to avoid a repeat of the sort of massive ground invasion that Israel launched into Lebanon in 1982.

Moreover, the Israeli Defense Forces had conducted virtually no periodic large-scale training of its ground troops for major combat in recent years, leaving Israel's ground commanders with little incentive to fight a robust Hezbollah. When the Israel government finally committed ground troops to action in large numbers during the last three days of the conflict, the performance of those troops was poorly coordinated with supporting air operations. Furthermore, Hezbollah's well-dug-in defenses proved more difficult to defeat than expected.

"For the most part, in those mission areas in which it naturally excelled, the Israeli Air Force performed to its usual high standards of competence throughout the engagement," Lambeth said. "The government's greatest misstep was taking an overly unreflective view of what military power of any kind, unaided by a coherent and effective strategy, could accomplish when the declared goals were so ambitious and the Israeli Defense Forces' ground troops were so unready. That misstep had nothing to do with the strengths or limitations of air power."