Ron Tira on the 33-day war

Strategic Assessment, published by the institute formerly known as the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, has a new issue, wholly available online, that is almost completely devoted to analyses of the 33-day war between Israel and Hizbullah.
The best article there, imho, is this one by Ron Tira, who is described in my paper copy of SA as “Formerly the head of a unit in Israel Air Force intelligence (‘Lahak’).” That tag-line also says that an abridged version of the article was published by HaArtez on September 15. I guess I missed it there.
Tira’s general analysis of the strategic shape of, and developments during, the war is largely similar to the one I described in my recent article on the war in Boston Review. But he goes into quite a lot more detail regarding the doctrinal and operational flaws of Israel’s performance.
He is absolutely crushing in the criticism he expresses of the ground force operations during the war. In a section subtitled The Absence of a Coherent Operational Concept for the Ground Forces he writes,

Too little, too late: Israel introduced ground forces into Lebanon in the fighting belatedly, indecisively, and above all, without a clearly defined operational concept.
… The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu claims that a military leader’s objective is to dictate to his enemy the nature of a war in which he has a relative advantage, and he should not be drawn into a type of war in which the enemy has a relative advantage. If this is not possible, said Sun Tzu, fighting should be avoided. For Clausewitz, in war one should attack the enemy’s plans. Israel played into Hizbollah’s hands, and conducted the campaign in accordance with Hizbollah’s plans and strengths and, as such, from the outset there was almost no chance of victory.

But it is notable– since he’s an air force person– that Tira is not an advocate of the view that airpower alone could have been expected to win the war (as Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz had apparently originally hoped.) Tira writes: “The idea of an operation based solely on [stand-off] firepower and without land maneuvers is still unproven and unfounded, and to date has scored just one success – in Kosovo. However, circumstances indicated that the second Lebanon War was very different from events in Kosovo… ”
He is also critical of the reliance that Halutz apparently placed on the “Shock and Awe” aspects of the early days of the war. Indeed, he’s pretty critical of the “Shock and Awe” approach as a whole– or rather, of “Effects-based operations” (EBO), which is the technical term in US military jargon for Shock and Awe…
This is how Tira defines the “direct” results of the way Israel fought the 33-day war:

The direct upshot of the deterioration in the IDF force buildup and in the operational design, and the consequent adoption of particular campaign themes, was the failure to destroy, repress, or even to substantially impinge on enemy activity according to the primary parameters of Hizbollah’s operational design. Indeed, towards the end of the war, Hizbollah fired more than 200 rockets per day into Israel, while at the start of the war around 100 rockets were launched per day (even if the mixture shifted during the war toward short range surface-to-surface rockets). Hizbollah’s fighting forces continued operating while inflicting damage on the IDF, and even in most of the ground battles that they lost, they did not collapse or retreat. Hizbollah’s command and control echelon continued to function throughout the war. Its fighting spirit for the most part stayed strong, and currently there are no signs that its political will has been irreversibly impaired. While Hizbollah preferred to arrive at a ceasefire, this was based on a justifiable wish to “lock in its profits” (i.e., to stop the fighting at a stage where its force was maximizing its achievements and was perceived as the victor) and not because it was in distress or on the verge of collapse. In Hizbollah’s eyes, and in the view of some Arab onlookers, Hizbollah won the battle.
Moreover, the fact that several hundred Hizbollah fighters faced up to four Israeli divisions and the Israel Air Force, and ended the war standing up after inflicting significant damage on IDF forces, may also generate indirect results that are at best problematic. Some of the parties that followed the progress of the war may conclude, correctly or otherwise, that the IDF of today is not the IDF of the past, and that the Israeli (and, in generally, the Western) soldier is weaker and finds it difficult to deal with the difficulties of battle. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this perception, if it takes hold.
… the manner in which the second Lebanon War was conducted and the way in which it is viewed may affect the perception of Israel’s military superiority and, as such, may impact on many aspects of the reality in which Israel has existed since 1967. It is very difficult to foresee future political intent and to assess the probability of war; however it seems that in the wake of the second Lebanon War, at least some of the relevant parties may believe they can do battle with Israel and emerge from the fighting with the upper hand.

In other words, he’s expressing the fear that the credibility of Israel’s broader strategic deterrence may well have been significantly dented. H’mm, so maybe Israelis might consider that negotiations would be a better way to resolve their outstanding differences with their neighbors, rather than continuing along the path of refusing negotiations while sheltering behind the projection of the threat of using a huge amount of military power against anyone with outstanding claims against them?
Tira, unfortunately, doesn’t draw that conclusion. Maybe he’ll come to it over time?
In that section, though, he does also note that by being able to credibly “project” a very fearsome military deterrent against its neighbors since 1967, Israel has until now been able to get by very well without having to maintain an actual war-time type of economy:

The perception of Israel’s military superiority was responsible for generating the requisite conditions for the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the peace process with the Palestinians, and thirty-three years of quiet on the Golan Heights. It allowed Israel to sustain a peacetime economy and a society of plenty and wellbeing, despite the absence of peace. And due to the perception of its military superiority, Israel became an American strategic asset that justified the investment of an aggregate amount of about $100 billion and the provision of dozens of billions of more dollars in guarantees, the best arms available, and a political umbrella.

He notes that there might be a real threat now that the Americans might reconsider Israel’s “strategic worth” to them, after the military debacles of the summer. (Don’t worry, Ron. Israel’s bought-and-paid-for friends in the US Congress won’t be judging Israel’s military capabilities on anything as crass as their intrinsic merits any time soon… I certainly don’t see any signs that the flood of taxpayer $$ going your way is going to stanched anytime soon.)
Here’s another intriguing quote from Tira:

Hizbollah designed a war in which presumably Israel could only choose which soft underbelly to expose: the one whereby it avoids a ground operation and exposes its home front vulnerability, or the one whereby it enters Lebanon and sustains the loss of soldiers in ongoing ground-based attrition with a guerilla organization. Hizbollah’s brilliant trap apparently left Israel with two undesirable options…

And finally, this:

To a large degree, the second Lebanon War was our Vietnam. Like the US in Vietnam, we tried to overcome guerillas with firepower but without massive maneuvering, force was put into use in rolling gradualism, the enemy leaned on a strategic rear in a neighboring country that was not attacked, and we did not engage in battle wholeheartedly and with a full commitment to victory. The bad news from the second Lebanon War is that we failed. The good news is that our regular and reserve forces are solid and committed; the problem is that they were assembled and deployed incorrectly. There is also good news in the fact that we received a wake-up call, and a second chance to learn and improve.

Those “good news” items there do seem like rather thin gruel for Israelis. Let’s hope the “learning and improving” they embark on now will include a more realistic assessment of their need for a changed balance between, on the one hand, war preparations and the projection of a massive military threat, and on the other, diplomacy and a real, good-faith commitment to negotiating all the outstanding issues with the neighbors on a basis of reciprocity and mutual respect.
So far, the international community has done pitifully little to make Israelis face up to this as a real and very necessary choice. But surely, if the Lebanon war “teaches” Israelis anything it should be that reliance only on military force can never resolve your problems and assure your security in a satisfactory way. Building relationships of reciprocal respect and mutual interest is (still) the best way to do that…. Anywhere in the world.