Center for a New American Security

Greg Jaffe has an A1 article in today's Washington Post all about the 2006 war between Israel and Hizballah and the way in which the war is used in contemporary U.S. defense policy debates. Jaffe starts with a simple question: Why, despite fighting in two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that both offer all kinds of lessons of their own, is the U.S. military spending so much of its time and money studying the 2006 war?

...the Defense Department has dispatched as many as a dozen teams to interview Israeli officers who fought against Hezbollah. The Army and Marine Corps have sponsored a series of multimillion-dollar war games to test how U.S. forces might fare against a similar foe. "I've organized five major games in the last two years, and all of them have focused on Hezbollah," said Frank Hoffman, a research fellow at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico.

Steve Biddle, per usual, has the answer to the question Jaffe is asking:

"The Lebanon war has become a bellwether," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has advised Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command. "If you are opposed to transforming the military to fight low-intensity wars, it is your bloody sheet. It's discussed in almost coded communication to indicate which side of the argument you are on."

Here's the problem with that, though. As Jaffe notes toward the end of the article, the 2006 war is a kind of Rorschach test that does not so much point toward obvious conclusions but rather highlights pre-existing biases on the part of those researchers looking to draw conclusions. Personally, I believe you can take any number of important lessons from the war and can use the war writ large to argue all sides of the ongoing defense debates. If you just look at the war within the 34 days of open fighting, for example, it is clear the Israelis allowed their conventional war-fighting skills to atrophy as they engaged in low-intensity operations in the Palestinian territories between 2000 and 2006. But if you look at the war from the other side of the border -- which few studies have done -- you see the way that, over a span of time beyond the 34 days of open fighting, Hizballah employed non-kinetic lines of operation (to include information operations and the provision of essential services to their population), to virtually ensure that no matter how the Israelis performed operationally, they would have a tough time winning strategically. Or, to put it another way,

"Even if the Israelis had done better operationally, I don't think they would have been victorious in the long run," said Andrew Exum, a former Army officer who has studied the battle from southern Lebanon. "For the Israelis, the war lasted for 34 days. We tend to forget that for Hezbollah, it is infinite."

So there are lessons to be found in the 2006 war for Cold Warriors and COINdinistas alike. What we should do, instead, is study the wars we are actually fighting. That will cost guys like me several thousand dollars in consulting fees each year for those war games Frank Hoffman mentions, but it makes a lot more sense to study the wars in which Americans are actually fighting and dying than it does to study a war whose lessons are only vaguely applicable to the future of American war.

(Unless, of course, these drug wars in Mexico lead to the rise of some Hassan Nasrallah figure who starts lobbing Katyushas over the border into El Paso. Then it's game on.)

Israeli officers, realizing this hasn't been the best few weeks for their institution, are pushing back on stories of abuse and indiscipline in Operation Cast Lead. In the same way, Jeff White -- a longtime (and highly respected) DIA analyst who now writes for the Washington Institute -- has written a largely apologetic* consideration of Israeli operational behavior in Gaza. We've debated IDF performance in Gaza, and some of the threads were so intense that I almost re-instituted the (in)famous "No Israel and Palestine" rule for the blog. But I might as well instead link to two pieces offering interpretations of events contrary to those printed in Ha'aretz.

*I use "apologetic" in the Greek sense of the word.

Brother Mitch passed along this story, which I have seen ... no, nowhere else, actually. David Martin is a respected reporter, though, so it's not like this is some random rumor on teh internets.

A government minister in Sudan is accusing the United States Air Force of killing dozens of people in that north African country this past January – but the semi-official American version of the story is very different.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin has been told that Israeli aircraft carried out the attack. Israeli intelligence is said to have discovered that weapons were being trucked through Sudan, heading north toward Egypt, whereupon they would cross the Sinai Desert and be smuggled into Hamas-held territory in Gaza.

There was a great deal of response and debate on my short piece in the New York Times on whether the IDF might be more effective if it used tactics that "place a higher emphasis on the prevention of civilian casualties at the expense of lethality and force protection."

Between Clancy Chassay's video reports from Gaza for the Guardian, the reports of "interesting" t-shirts popular with IDF units, and the continuing stream of less-than-flattering testimonies from soldiers who fought in Gaza, this has turned out to be a horrible week for the IDF and Israel more generally. (More on the IDF and teh internets here.) But does the IDF have an image problem? Is this just bad information operations and public affairs work? Or is it something else?

Jeffrey Goldberg, who I do not know but who links to this blog on occasion, had this to say:

The Times reported that the Israeli government believes it must spend more money on "hasbara," a Hebrew word that falls somewhere between propaganda and information. It is true that the world media, generally speaking, doesn't like Israel very much, and stacks the deck against it, but good hasbara starts with not allowing soldiers to vandalize Palestinian homes and shoot Palestinian women.

Now why do I mention this? Because I'm sticking to my guns -- how you behave tactically has strategic effects on the modern battlefield. My central thesis, I believe, is correct -- whether you're talking about the U.S. military, the IDF, or any other Western military:

In modern conflict against violent nonstate actors like Hamas, Hezbollah or guerrilla groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be in the best interests of the dominant military actor to adhere to rules of engagement that go beyond the laws of land warfare and international conventions. As the United States military has discovered in both Iraq and Afghanistan, civilian casualties have a direct effect on the effectiveness of operations in the strategic sense.

I was exchanging emails with Michael Totten about his blog post on Commentary, and he correctly noted that I did not have much space in the Times piece to talk about how Iraq differs from the Palestinian Territories or how American priorities in Iraq differ from Israeli priorities. But leaving Israel aside, can we agree that -- in the age of television and the new media -- decisions made by corporals and sergeants have strategic effect? Is this really controversial?

The most significant thing about this story -- and this technology -- is the way in which ordinary Israelis can now carry out DOS attacks on a declared enemy of the state. If cyber-warfare is really warfare and one of the requirements of statehood is a monopoly on "violence", what are the implications of this? The idea that the government of Israel would take action against an Israeli attacking a site maintained by Hizballah is laughable, but in general, should a state be allowing its citizens to do such things?

Last week, while trying out breaking-in tools developed by Chinese hackers, an Israeli Network security company, Applicure, brought down the Hezbollah Web site (hizbollah.tv), using no more than 10 bots, which are computers controlled by hackers.

Reports of hackers taking out Web sites by bombarding them with massive amounts of information commonly appear in the news media. But often it's hard to estimate both the magnitude of the phenomenon and the ease with which even laymen can use existing web tools.

Those attacks geared at bringing down Web sites are know as either denial of service attacks (DOS) or distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS), and make use of Botnet networks - large networks of unsuspecting computer users hijacked by hackers with viruses and Trojan horses. According to Chinese CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team), the threat on China's internal network has multiplied by 20 in 2007.

One of the most surprising things about the software used in order to take down the Lebanese militant organization's site is its interface, which is light years away from the common image of hackers dealing with complex code. The interface is very accessible and is clearly meant for everyday users, as opposed to veteran programmers.

The software enables a choice of attack possibilities, attack speed, and the number of computers the attackers wish to use in order to bring down the Web site's servers.

Applicure's South Korean partners say the price of using the software of the kind that brought down the Hezbollah site starts at about $260 a year, when using a small number of bots. Having 1,000 bots at your disposal can bring the price up to $100 a month.

Although this blog steers clear of all things Israeli and Palestinian, the New York Times asked me -- in light of the civilian deaths in Gaza -- to consider proper rules of engagement for conflicts in which civilians are caught up in urban combat.

The recent Israeli campaign to end rocket fire originating from Gaza left 1,300 Palestinians dead and many wondering about the morality of such seemingly “disproportionate” operations. Questions of morality in warfare, though, are notoriously difficult to referee and inspire more emotion than sober thought.

A related question to ask — and one more accessible to traditional tools of measurement — would be one concerning effectiveness. In pursuing military options that carry with them such a high human cost, did the Israel Defense Force achieve operational successes at the expense of Israel’s long-term strategic interests?

In modern conflict against violent nonstate actors like Hamas, Hezbollah or guerrilla groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be in the best interests of the dominant military actor to adhere to rules of engagement that go beyond the laws of land warfare and international conventions. As the United States military has discovered in both Iraq and Afghanistan, civilian casualties have a direct effect on the effectiveness of operations in the strategic sense.

Traditionally, Israel — much like the United States — has subscribed to a Jominian concept of warfare that privileges the destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces above other considerations. In the Clausewitzian model, though, the supreme question of war has to do with whether or not military force served its purpose in advancing national political aims.

The time may arrive when Israel decides that highly kinetic, enemy-centric military operations do not necessarily serve Israel’s longer-term strategic aims. Instead, Israel may want to adopt lessons learned from the United States experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and place a higher emphasis on the prevention of civilian casualties at the expense of lethality and force protection.

I wrote this before I had a chance to read some of the disturbing testimonies of Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza.

What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.

Ha'aretz and other Israeli newspapers promise to run more of these stories in the days to come.

[A] reserve officer who looked at the transcript Wednesday said: "This is not the IDF we knew."

Okay, I may live to regret this, but take it away, comments section. Please, though, avoid anything that could reasonably be interpreted as anti-Jewish or anti-Arab.* I would very much like to keep this discussion about the issues I discuss in the Times piece -- with a similar level of sobriety -- without descending into hate speech. Thanks.

*Regarding some of the comments thus far, I'm not trying to get into an argument over semantics here. "Anti-semitic", "judeophobic", whatever... You guys and girls are all adults and know what I'm talking about. Let's just keep the conversation lively without descending into ugliness.

Long-time readers of this blog will have noticed a bit of pessimism in my recent posts on Hizballah. Cynicism about Lebanese politics is nothing new for this blog, but even some of my most enthusiastic readers wondered if I had not already caught a case of "think tank-itis."

The truth is, I have been pretty pessimistic about the near-term prospects for peace in southern Lebanon for some time now, and much of this pessimism was informed by my recent time spent in Lebanon -- rather than the past two months in the 202 area code. To a degree, I have always taken some of Hizballah's public rhetoric with a grain of salt, conscious that what was meant for external consumption may or may not accurately reflect the internal logic and decision-making process of the organization.

So when I would hear about building a "society of resistance" I didn't think too much about it at first. Traveling through southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut this past summer and fall, though, I grew worried that Hizballah might actually succeed in building a society around the act of "resistance" -- and began to think about what that might mean for Lebanon and the sub-region.

On 6 November, I went to the ardi festival in Beirut's southern suburbs, where merchants and artisans hawked some amazing food and spices from rural Lebanon in addition to kitsch featuring Hassan Nasrallah and Michel Aoun. It was just delightful, really. But on the walls of the big structure in which the festival was held were two huge banners -- one in Arabic and one in English -- that featured a picture of Imad Mughniyeh against a backdrop of Hizballah militants lined up in their ranks: "Imad Mughniyeh left you thousands of fighters who are ready for martyrdom."

These kinds of posters and banners are up all over southern Lebanon and in the southern suburbs, and maybe it should not have affected me, but in my last months in Beirut, it did. And as I sat there enjoying fresh bread and thyme, I had a nagging worry in the pit of my stomach.

As I wrote in the World Politics Review a few weeks ago, the danger of trying to create a society of resistance is that you might succeed. And once you do, it gets awfully tough to talk your constituents down from the rhetorical ledge you've constructed. So I worry that at this point it would be a lot more difficult for Hizballah's leadership to lead their constituents toward disarmament because they have constructed this external enemy that gives the organization its meaning. (The Israelis play a role in this as well, of course, but Israeli threat perception and strategic culture are subjects for, oh, about 500 other posts.)

Then there is the whole problem of Hizballah's rhetoric. Trying to convince one's self that armed resistance isn't actually the organization's rasion d'être takes a Golden Gate Bridge-sized suspension of disbelief. Hizballah is, in the words of Hassan Nasrallah, "a resistance movement, pure and simple." Hussein al-Mousawi said that "The Resistance is Hizballah and Hizballah is the Resistance." Naim Qassem, in his book, goes to great lengths to stress that Hizballah's armed resistance mission is the most important thing the organization does.

When Mona Harb and Reinoud Leenders wrote their excellent article criticizing existing Hizballah scholarship a few years ago, most people focused on the rather unkind words they had for the shoddy "scholarship" on Hizballah's military activities -- much of which was written while relying heavily, if not exclusively, on dodgy Israeli "intelligence" "sources" and with little to no time spent researching in Lebanon. But Harb and Leenders had another complaint: most of the good scholarship on Hizballah went almost out of its way to ignore the organization's military behavior. (Which, admittedly and as I know all too well, is the most difficult part to research.) But if the organization itself continuously stresses that armed resistance is the most important thing about the organization, what the hell are we doing treating Hizballah like the Hamilton Co. (Tennessee) School Board? (Which, actually, is probably more heavily-armed than Hizballah.) I know Nick Noe and others want us to believe that we need only address certain "bleeding wounds" for Hizballah to disarm, but c'mon, Nick: you edited an entire book of Nasrallah's speeches. What in that book of speeches should lead you or anyone else to believe that Hassan Nasrallah and the rest of the organization is not committed to continued and unyielding armed struggle against the Israelis?

This is what worries me. As anyone who knows me and my biography can attest, I am as big a fan of the Lebanese people as I am a critic of their political leaders. I especially adore southern Lebanon, the area which bears the brunt of any fighting between Israel and Hizballah. (In my mind, as I sit here in my Washington office on a gloomy gray day, I am instead swimming off the beach at Tyre -- as I was as late as last November.) I love Lebanon and its people. But when I listen to the rhetoric of Hizballah, I have no faith the people of southern Lebanon are going to enjoy an extended period of peace -- no matter who is in office in Jerusalem or what Israel does.

About a year ago, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, another graduate student researching Hizballah. He was listening to Hizballah battle anthems and songs on his computer. "Doesn't this stuff pump you up?" he asked me, smiling.

No. No, it doesn't. It depresses me. And that's what is behind my pessimism.

Update: Whenever I call someone out, I like to give them (unedited) space to respond. This is Nick Noe:

Quickly - I think some more of how I think on Hizbullah's discourse will be clearer next week when a long essay on Nasrallah is published in the national magazine. Lets see if that makes things clearer vis a vis the party's states goals, aspirations, interpretations. But even without such a line of argument, we need to end this idea once and for all that I am arguing for removing the bleeding wounds - and that with their removal, Hizbullah disarms. I am NOT. The paper I released argues that this would certainly not get the job done. Instead, it is my position that 1) you must view Hizbullah's discourse dialectically as an operation between reason/unreason, totalitarianism/radical democracy and peace/violence. When you do that and then add an analysis of the multitude of constraints which the Party faces in exercising violence towards its goals (which are themselves a dialectical operation as I stressed), you arrive, I believe, at the conclusion that a strategy of using reason, democracy and nonviolence to undermine all that is indeed unreasonable and violent about Hizbullah is the best strategy for serving US interests and, I believe personally, Lebanese interests. That strategy has THREE key parts: 1) Remove the bleeding wounds because these are the areas where conflict might reasonably be sparked in the short term (so remove the likely conflagration points; 2) Credibly arm the LAF to defend Lebanon against Israel and internal threats (and Syria too!). This means, as Aram and I BOTH argue a) the US, Israel and M14 accepts that a strong LAF is not to be used to forcibly disarm Hizbullah (although it can and should protect a credibly constructed state!) and b) the US accepts a recalibration of Israel's QME WITHOUT an a priori peace agreement; and 3) the US begins to help the Lebanese push the process of deconfessionalization and enfranchisement which the Lebanese have already mapped out for themselves (this rests on Bilal Saab's argument that the US should support certain processes rather than parties and figures in Lebanon).

There it is in a nutshell - so please do NOT consider me duped by Nasrallah or an "admirer" which suggests a positive value judgement. I agree with mona and reinoud's point on the military-jihadist core for Hizbullah because they both insist on viewing this DIALECTICALLY....But remember, as i said in the paper, even if you think that Hizbullah operates towards the most extremist, evil ends, they operate within a framework which can be deftly marshalled to deflate violence and build peace. The openings for this is what I am focused on. Sadly though, I have not seen much in the way of good ideas from those who understand this and who then criticize this approach. But let me know, because one should not give up on proposing peaceful options even when you think the actor in question is bent on evildoing - and especially when that other actor is far more complicated than that and faces other actors who hold such a perponderance of power!

Several things in today's Post caught my eye this morning:

1. We should all applaud Phillip Bennett for his excellent observation that in all the books written on America's war in Iraq, the main characters are invariably American and not Iraqi. War may be the way Americans have traditionally learned geography, but six years on in Iraq, the average American still knows little of the people with whom our fates have been intertwined for the past two decades. It's so very bizarre. (Although a similar phenomenon occurred in reporting from Vietnam, Bennett notes.) There has been a wealth of good books written on the Iraq War, but very few of them -- such as Anthony's Shadid's Night Draws Near -- really tell the stories of Iraqis themselves.

2. Walter Pincus surveys some of the Arab media -- though not so much the Arabic-language media (most of his sources were in English) -- and discovers the Arab World thinks the Israel Lobby was behind the downfall of Chas Freeman. Charles Lane of the Post's editorial staff thinks Obama needs to respond to this charge. I'm not going to get knee-deep into that tar pit, but touching it with a ten-foot pole, allow me to note that Aaron David Miller probably had the wisest words on L'Affair Freeman. Whether or not Freeman's downfall was due to the "Israel Lobby" in the end -- rather than, say, his statements on China or ties to Saudi Arabia -- is unclear. What is clear is that at a time when the Obama Administration is contemplating major diplomatic and military moves in the Middle East that directly affect Israel's interests -- engagement with Syria, negotiations with Iran, etc. -- some of Israel's biggest supporters in the United States elected to spend their energy on ... a position that really isn't all that important. Talk about taking one's eyes off the ball.

3. Okay, this was in yesterday's Post, but there was an article on the most recent GAO report into cost overruns on the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS). The lead contractors on FCS are Boeing and SAIC. SAIC's executive vice president for government affairs, Arnold Punaro, is rumored to be the next Army Secretary. It is my understanding that Punaro is a great American, but frankly, I do not see how his potential nomination overcomes this conflict of interests. Which, combined with the fact that I am a southerner and the Obama Administration needs more of those, should be enough to ensure that I am the next Secretary of the Army. (It's mostly a ceremonial title, yes?)

I didn't say anything in response to Nick's response to my criticism. Hassan Nasrallah does all my heavy lifting.

The leader of Lebanon's Islamist Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, has said his group will never recognise Israel's right to exist.

He was responding to a US suggestion that both Hezbollah and the Palestinian faction Hamas should recognise Israel before expecting any US engagement.

"We reject the American conditions," he said. "As long as Hezbollah exists, it will never recognise Israel."

Israel and Hezbollah's armed wing fought a bloody conflict in 2006.

Mr Nasrallah made the statement rejecting the US conditions for talks said in a speech marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.

Personally, I think Hizballah is a lot more intimidated by Barack Hussein Obama than it ever was by the cartoon villain George W. Bush. It would be like if Iran voted in a moderate president and we still had to deal with the issue that the Iranian population still wants nuclear power and feels they have a right to it. It's all well and good when some cartoonish clown like Ahmadinejad or Bush is in charge. When a conciliatory moderate is in charge but your interests still aren't alligned, that's when you see the real differences -- and you can't blame all your disagreements on the other side.

I have two thoughts:

1. Maybe it's about time we start taking some Islamist groups seriously and at their word. When Hamas or Hizballah says there is no circumstance under which they would recognize Israel or accept a two-state solution, maybe we should, you know, believe them.
2. Maybe we shouldn't think about how we are going to pursue our own interests without first seeing whether or not we have partners willing to meet us halfway. Hizballah can put the most enlightened spokesperson in front of the organization -- Ibrahim Mousawi, Hussein Rahal, whoever -- but if it looks as if there is no middle ground on which we can meet, there is really nothing we can talk about.
   

What if the Obama Administration said, "Hey, Hizballah, if we guarantee Israel will not attack you, will you lay down your arms?" I'm guessing the response would be something along the lines of "a) let us check with Tehran first and b) well, we've been telling our Shia supporters that these crazy Sunnis in Lebanon are a threat as well, so that's really not an option. Plus, they think our hard-won seat at the table in Beirut would go away if we disarmed. So, no."

The bottom line is, we the United States made things easy on Islamist groups from 2001-2009. With hard-liners in Washington, they could always deflect blame onto the United States and our inflexible policies. Now, I suspect, they will have to adjust to the new realities in Washington -- or risk isolating many of the supporters they have gathered in recent years.

One more thought: this new Neko Case album is quite good.

Someone get Keith Dayton a medal!

A young Israeli woman who works as a stripper was found intoxicated in Ramallah Friday morning, and returned to Israel with the aid of the Palestinian security sources. She was handed over to the police.

Palestinians called the offices of the Civil Administration Friday morning and reported that an Israeli woman in her twenties was seen at the heart of town. "They said that she didn't quite understand what was going on," said Major Shadi Seif of the Ramallah District Coordination Office.

The IDF immediately alerted a police unit to the nearest checkpoint, and within 10 minutes the woman was brought to the place by the Palestinian officers.

As Mitch said, it must have been one hell of a party...

But in all seriousness, it will be interesting to see the way in which what passes for the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank references the way in which -- while 1,300 Palestinians were being killed in the last Gaza war -- the Palestinian security forces in the West Bank kept things as quiet as a field mouse. That's no easy feat, and I imagine the Palestinians will expect something in return. If I go on with this post I will further violate this blog's famous "Nothing on Israel-Palestine Rule." It took a story about a drunk Israeli stripper to get me to write this much. (Please, readers, try to casually work the phrase "drunk Israeli stripper" into one of your office conversations today.) And with respect to Keith Dayton, it should be noted here that he has somehow earned the respect of both the Israelis and the Palestinians -- not to mention the appreciation of his peers and superiors in the military here.