The Military Match-Up

‘Noz pointed to this piece by Lara Deeb, Hezbollah: a primer that gives another view on the organization and the history behind it.

As a former analyst I’m interested in the military segment of Hezbollah. Steve’s Artillery and Bunkers, Billmon’s Punching Above Its Weight, and Badtux’s Third Generation Thinking are all worth reading for their insights.

I’ve looked at the reporting and have formed an opinion that is complimentary to what these people see. This is a light infantry force that seems to operate independently at the platoon and squad level. They probably don’t have a command & control structure to destroy. It would appear that people are assigned to defend a specific zone and have their own supply caches to draw from, rather than a centralized system, meaning there are no supply lines or depots to destroy.

Given that they are a defensive force, the bombing only increases their ability to defend. They pop in and out of prepared hard sites and use tunnels to move around. They fire and move, which significantly reduces the ability of artillery or bombing to defeat them [see Steve’s piece].

They all appear to have uniforms, body armor, helmets, assault rifles, grenades, and RPGs. They seem to have access to mortars and anti-tank missiles, but not in the quantity of the personal weapons.

The rockets are not being used for their general battlefield mission; they seem to serve a psychological operations purpose. They aren’t intended to destroy anything, but to scare the hell out of the Israelis as payback for the aerial campaign. If there is a large scale Israeli invasion, the Katyushas can be used as an effective anti-personnel weapon, but they are currently being used like the German “V” weapons. The “V” stands for Vergeltungswaffe – “reprisal weapon”.

The only saving grace for the IDF is that Syria hasn’t given Hezbollah the 9К38 Игла “needle” [NATO: SA-18 Grouse], the Russian equivalent of the FIM-92 Stinger anti-aircraft missile.

They are probably not hiding among the population, because they assume that Israel has spies in the general population. Israel does have spies. The total failure of Israeli intelligence and the failure of the IAF to seriously degrade the militia tend to confirm that they are not among the general population.

Laura Rozen came across this piece in Ha’aretz in which the Israeli Air Force explains how the presence of Hezbollah in Qana was “a unknown known or known unknown” or some other excuse in Rumsfelder that boils down to “conventional wisdom says that terrorists always use women and children as human shields,” so it’s totally unfair of Hezbollah not to do this. Bottom line: I don’t know if Hezbollah was in Qana, and neither does the IDF.

The only way to combat this force is on the ground. You have face them and dig them out one unit at a time. It is a hard, dangerous mission; just ask one of the few tunnel rats who survived the unpleasantness in Southeast Asia.