Hugin and Munin (Thought and Memory) Discuss the changing ways of war, before reporting to their master Odin.)

Stirling called what has happened in Lebanon the end of the Israeli empire, and I noted that it'll be very carefully studied by other militaries in the world.

If it turns out to be both copyable and scaleable, it is indeed a revolution in military affairs. A military with complete air supremacy, artillery and an armored corp, was unable to just bypass light infantry. In blitzkrieg warfare they would have created pockets and then crushed the out of supply pockets. In Lebanon, cutting off light infantry doesn't put it out of supply - but extending yourself in a pocket creation maneuver creates interdictable supply lines that the infantry you just left behind can cut. And your tanks definitely cannot survive without their fuel.

The key part about the decapitation military is that it faces the full might of the state, destroys it in pitched battle, then simply takes over. You strike for Paris, defeating any armies along the way, then when you capture Paris, the French admit they've lost and give up. You strike for Baghdad, isolating troops along the way, the army collapses and the Iraqis (for about 6 months, anyway) admit they've lost.

More After the Break

So what do you have to do to defeat Hezbollah? There's no capital to strike for, although they do have a heartland. Killing Nasrallah won't make them give up. What about defeating their troops? Well, problem is, they won't give up. Let's imagine that Israel threw their entire army into Lebanon and after some fighting Hezbollah started losing decisively. what would they do? Well the word would go out. "Throw down your weapons, put on civilian clothes and disperse." And they would do so. And on the next day, the guerilla war would start, supplied by carefully hidden caches and by weapon smuggling. If an individual leader, whether Nasrallah or anyone else was captured or killed, they would be replaced.

So first you have defense in depth designed to force attrition warfare; to blunt the effect of air supremacy and to make armored blitzkrieg warfare largely ineffective. (No, you didn't just isolate us, you just made your supply lines more vulnerable. Thanks!) There can be no fast decapitation strike, you will have to defeat the army in detail, one unit at a time. So you will take relatively significant losses, even if you have definite superiority.

Second, you can't decapitate us, because we have plans that will allow us to continue fighting even if the "government" is defeated. We will just disperse and keep fighting a guerilla war till you decide you aren't willing to live with this.

The third feature is a strategic deterrent. Hezbollah's strategic deterrent is missiles. They aren't all that effective but what they do is they say "you can't bomb us with complete impunity". As long as this war goes on, your civilians will bear a cost for it. It's a mobile deterrent that has, so far, proved impossible to take out. Unlike relying on your air force as a deterrent it can't be shot down and you can't just destroy the airfields and ground it. It's not as powerful as an air force, but it can't easily be taken out. So again - attrition - we may take more losses than you, but you will take losses.

Now, Americans may think, being a Continental power with an ocean between them and their enemies, that this doesn't apply to them. But Iran, for example, has a strategic deterrent even without American troops in Iraq - it can use missiles to close the strait of Hormuz and inflict massive economic penalties on everyone who imports oil. All you need for a strategic deterrent is the ability to hit your enemy where it hurts, with a weapon system which can't easily be destroyed by their strategic forces.

Let's look at the cost. I've seen a number of estimates of Hezbollah's fighting size - but lets call it 5,000 frontline troops, which seems to be the consensus figure. Assume a fairly good tooth to tail ration 1:4 and assume that there are another 16,000 people supporting those troops. So 20,000 people out of a population of 1 million. That's 2% of their population in the military. Even with a worse tooth to tail ratio it wouldn't go higher than 3% max.

That's a number most societies can easily sustain, especially when you consider these are cheap troops. They're very highly trained, they have a lot of static resources, but the basic weapons and so on aren't expensive compared to tanks, jets and so on. Even the better equipment a richer state would use (better mobile air defense, for example) wouldn't be all that expensive.

So, Hezbollah had a population of 1 million (that's the Shia). Iran has 70 million. Under this model you could assume an army of 280,000 front line troops, with about a million to a million and a half support for a military of 2 million, tops.

You going to try for a decapitation strike against that? I don't think so.

Now this doesn't alter everything. One thing to note is that the ideological and morale requirement is pretty stiff. Saddam couldn't have used this model to save his ass in most of Iraq, because the population wasn't hard behind him. However, in the key Sunni areas, such a network might have been effective. I do say might, because my sense is that the Sunnis were willing to deal rather than fight - to abandon Saddam, figuring they could work with the US. The way the army stood down indicates that they lacked something Hezbollah has - very high morale and a willingness to take casualties.

This model requires very high morale troops who are well trained and can improvise tactically at the unit and individual engagement level. It requires a population willing to support a guerilla campaign, for full effectiveness. (The knowledge in the back of the heads of Israeli planners that even if they manage to win some battles all it will do is turn into a guerilla campaign has a major chilling effect.) It requires not just high morale, but bloody-mindedness - Hezbollah is losing more men than Israel. They're ok with that. While this model tries to make the mechanized army's losses intolerable (5 men lost to take out a main battle tank? Deal!) It doesn't expect even losses in terms of men.

But if you know the other side is more powerful, this model allows you to make them pay retail to defeat you. They can't bypass your forces, they can't defeat you in a war of grand maneuver, they have to defeat your army in detail, unit by unit, and they will take significant casualties.

If it works, it makes you damn near immune to the "fast easy colonial war".

And this is also why the US has been obsessively working on bunker busters and such. As Seymour Hersch reports (Taylor Marsh has a video) the US and Israel, while they may have been surprised by the extent of the fortification of Lebanon, knew it existed. They wanted to try out their fancy new bombs and tactics as a dry run for Israel:

“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

Which also puts a new light on rushing the best precision bombs to Israel. The US needed to see if they would work. (Answer: in a strategic sense, no.)

So, the new model for defense, and the new model for air war faced off - and the new model for defense won.

This won't be the last test of this model. Around the world military analysts will be working feverishly both to figure out how to adopt and refine it - and to defeat it. But you can be sure that after the fighting dies down, one of the first things that will happen is that lot of Hezbollah troops will be heading to Iran (and Syria, if Syria is smart) to teach what they learned to their patrons.

And the world will become a place with a little more autonomy - as long as you can actually produce high morale troops and swing the population hard behind you.

And I find it hard, in a larger sense, to see that as a bad thing. If this model really does require highly motivated troops backed by popular support (and there will be many who try and just create high morale troops, something which I think will fail to stop decapitation strikes, since Praetorians are never as loyal as the Emperor would like to believe) then it will lead to governments who want to be secure from external actors actually having to gain their population's true support.

And while the popular support can be for regimes that are unsavory, that minimum requirement is still better than small elites or despotisms. So, while America and the West may look on this model as reducing their freedom of action, I would suggest that it is probably, on the whole, a good thing. And less military adventurism, a lack of perception that there are "easy" wars is also something we should all welcome because they've usually only been "easy" for one side - the other side, as Madeline Albright's acceptable half a million dead Iraqi children would attest, if they weren't, ummmm, dead, is too high a price to pay.