Israel Matzav

The soldiers of the next war with Hezbullah: You and me

Wars against guerrilla organizations with state-like capabilities cannot be decided on the ground, but rather in the minds of people. Israel has been intensively preparing for such a war.

In 2006, the IDF attempted to carry out a well-known ground maneuver that failed because Israel did not face a clearly defined enemy and its military was not geared toward looking for guerilla fighters in Lebanon’s mountainous terrain. Since then, several chief commanders of the Northern Territorial Command have promised, in their very own words, that Israel will not spare Lebanon’s infrastructures and will wreak as much destruction in as little time as possible to force Nasrallah to stop firing rockets and missiles well before he runs out of them.

And there’s something else. According to quite a few assessments, when the next war breaks out, Nasrallah will attempt to do what no Arab leader has attempted to do in the last 40 years.

He will try to carry out a strategic seizure of areas within Israel proper. In a swift and startling commando operation, he will attempt to invade it and perhaps take over the Karmia kibbutz or the town of Shlomi or any other Israeli town close enough to the Blue Line. Israel might be caught off guard.

The IDF looks with concern at the ground capabilities Hezbollah has been demonstrating in Syria, noting that it has learned to operate large ground frameworks such as battalions, brigades and even larger ones. It can carry out an orderly ground campaign, putting up military-like resistance. In light of this, the IDF is bracing for the possibility that Hezbollah — if only to go down in history as having done this — will attempt to mount such a “mindset-changing” move, hitting Israel in its underbelly, thereby breaking the paradigm that “no foothold inside Israel’s territory will be allowed.”

Incidentally, this will take place if and when Israel strikes Iran. I have written extensively on this subject, although nothing is definitive. It depends on many variables as well as the personalities of the decision-makers on all sides. Israel views Hezbollah as a forward outpost of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a kind of an Iranian bridgehead that will rain hellish fire on it come D-Day.

In Israel, it is amply clear that the soldiers of the next war will be its citizens and not its military personnel. This is the reason why the Home Front Command has been beefed up recently, seeing a bitter fight over the division of purviews between Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and Home Front Minister Gilad Erdan.

The world has changed, and with it the nature of war. Israel, for a change, is trying to prepare for the next war and not for the previous one.

Labels: Galilee farmers, Hezbullah, IDF, IDF Home Front Command, Second Lebanon War

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:35 PM