Discussion on Israeli Strategy

[FastEddy]

 

Guh.  The drawn out reply-from-hell.   

You've answered and said it all, I've got nothing to add, excellent post.

Cheers.

 

[zipperhead_cop]

EDIT: Hey Zip, look at the posting timings, two great minds think alike, eh 

Maybe we could do something like a "Wonder Twins Power--Activate!" through the power of our minds right through the planet  ;D

You've answered and said it all, I've got nothing to add, excellent post.

Thanks, Ed.  However, I don't think I'll get the last word on this one...

 

[tomahawk6]

Following the Qana building collapse in Lebanon the IDF has suspended air operations for 48 hours. Some observers feel that this development could be a critical point in the 3 week old conflict. Hizbollah might respond with a suspension of rocket attacks which might lead to a ceasefire. If Hizbollah continues operations against Israel this might undermine their position and take pressure off of the Israelis/US.

The article below discusses the possibility of a 2 division thrust up to the Litani river. Over 30,000 reservists have been called up which is an expensive proposition for Israel. Financial considerations may drive Israeli strategy. Whatever happens needs to happen quickly.
_______________________________________________________________
Stratfor article.

Special Report: Shift in Israeli Operations

At this moment there appears to be a major shift taking place in the war. Though the scope of the operation is unclear, it appears the Israelis have shifted to a new phase of the war, focusing on broader and more intense ground operations. It could be that this is the opening phase of a broader raid-in-force against Hezbollah that might go beyond southern Lebanon. We do not know this for certain, but it does warrant alerting our readers to the possibility. Various bits of evidence point in this direction.

For example, early Sunday Israeli time, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman was quoted as saying, "We have drawn our conclusions from battles in other areas, we have learned our lesson and are about to embark on another mission. There is no intention whatsoever to occupy this region or any other -- only to arrive, to act, and when we're done, to get out."

There are reports of new areas involved in fighting and new Israeli units being engaged. For example, Israeli forces are now fighting in the area of Qana. This is a few miles southeast of Tyre and deep into southern Lebanon. We have heard that the Qana action consists of engineers, armor and infantry, indicating a more traditional combined arms effort. The engineers would be clearing mines, bulldozing fortifications and clearing roads damaged by Israeli airstrikes. Infantry would be clearing the area of anti-tank teams and opening the way for broader armored thrusts to destroy rear infrastructure and isolate forward Hezbollah positions. There are additional reports of engagements near and to the west of the Israeli panhandle in the Dan-Dafna-Metulla region, along with heavy artillery fire in this region. This would be the jump-off point for an attack both westward along the Litani and northward into the Bekaa Valley. There were extensive reports of a major armored buildup in this area over the past 48 hours. This would also explain the decision to disengage temporarily at Bent Jbail in preparation for the new phase of operations.

Interestingly, the report about Qana that we have says the attacking force is from the Nahal Division. According to Israeli media, the Galilee Division, which normally has full responsibility for the entire Lebanese border, has been given responsibility for the western half of the border, while Nahal Division has been made responsible for the eastern half. If all of this is true and the Qana fighting is being carried out by Nahal, then the action at Qana represents a drive westward from the northern panhandle rather than a northern drive from Galilee division. This is of great importance because it indicates that the armor massed in the panhandle is moving in a broad encirclement as per traditional IDF doctrine. Nahal has been moving rapidly during daylight hours. Ground operations involving the Golani Brigade were also reported in Taibe last night. If Nahal moved west, it would have passed through Taibe. If the division were planning on a move north to the Bekaa Valley, it will need Taibe. The town is in a critical location.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has canceled her visit to Lebanon. She is, however, going to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday night and return to the United States on Monday. If nothing important were happening, Rice would stick to her schedule. If the United States objected to what is happening, Israel would postpone until she left or she would be on the plane right now. Therefore, a logical conclusion is that whatever is happening makes her trip to Lebanon pointless or harmful but that she wants to signal that there is no strain in relations with Israel. If there is a major attack coming, Washington has signed off on it.

We are approaching nightfall in Israel. If this is indeed a major shift operationally -- and we simply cannot be certain at this point, in spite of pieces seeming to fall into place -- then we would expend rapid movements of Israeli forces through the night, and we should get a sense by morning, Israel time, of just how deep they expect to go. At this point, having made the decision to shift to larger-scale, more traditional operations, Israel will want to proceed as rapidly as possible for operational and diplomatic reasons. If the Israelis are going, they will be going rapidly.

It should also be noted that Israel attacked key roads and bridges along the Syrian-Lebanese border. This indicates that Israel is not intending to use those roads to attack Syria (otherwise they would have wanted them intact) but does want to protect its flank from any Syrian countermove. It is the least intrusive action Israel can take. They neither want to attack nor be attacked by Syria.

At this point, if this should take place, we will get a better sense of Hezbollah's broader capabilities. Its forward troops seemed to be extremely competent. Whether troops in other areas are equally capable remains to be seen. Also remaining to be seen is the effect of the Israeli air campaign on the militants' numbers, morale and coordination. If they are an effective fighting force, we would expect effective attacks against armored columns using anti-tank weapons and mines, and a slow evolution. If they are severely weakened, as some reports we are receiving from Lebanon say they are, the attack will be broader.

Remember that in our view Hezbollah does not expect to defeat Israel's main force, but wants to draw it into Lebanon to impose an Iraqi/Afghan style insurgency. Therefore, an apparent collapse of Hezbollah (as with the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's forces) does not necessarily mean defeat but rather can mean a shift to insurgency rather than conventional resistance. As the IDF statement makes clear, Israel does not intend to occupy and expose itself to such actions. It should also be remembered that both within and outside of Lebanon, Hezbollah has historically used terror techniques to impose penalties on enemies and shape the political environment. Hezbollah pioneered suicide bombing in Lebanon during the 1980s.

In conclusion, we do not have definitive intelligence that Israel has shifted to a radical new course. This could simply be another phase in a piecemeal operation. However, given Israeli practice in the past and political disputes within the Israeli government, we regard it as reasonable to alert our readers to the possibility of the beginning phases of a major, more traditional Israeli ground offensive designed to destroy Hezbollah in detail. We will know more clearly over the next 12 hours.

 

[a_majoor]

We will be facing the same intelligence problems as the IDF:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/28/AR2006072801573_pf.html

Spy Lessons From Israel

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, July 30, 2006; B07

Israel has been forced to improvise furiously on the battlefield after discovering how much it did not know about the fighters and the strategic arsenal that Hezbollah had amassed in southern Lebanon. Americans should watch closely what will happen in Israel once the smoke of this battle clears.

What will happen will be a thorough and bureaucratically impartial inquiry into the causes of this intelligence failure -- an inquiry of the kind that the United States seems unable to produce even in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, or the calamitous failure of U.S. occupation troops and spies to secure Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion.

The prediction about Israel is not based on insider information. It is based on history and on culture. Searing investigations that fixed responsibility at the top and brought dismissals and resignations of politicians, generals and intelligence officials followed the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria in 1973 and the debacle of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Israelis take intelligence deadly seriously. For them, it is a tool of survival. They cannot afford to be as forgiving, or as ambivalent, as Americans tend to be about espionage, a trade that in its very essence runs counter to American ideals of a fair and open society based on the rule of law.

While Americans debate whether CIA renditions and National Security Agency eavesdropping violate the law -- a vital and necessary question to be asked in this country -- Israelis demand to know why their spies have been ineffective and then relentlessly examine how to fix the problems. The U.S. system of checks and balances has created a misleading veneer of intelligence oversight by Congress and by the occasional, politically balanced blue-ribbon commission. That veneer serves to obscure rather than fix responsibility for ineffectiveness.

The intelligence failures by the Israelis in Lebanon and by the Americans in Iraq are separate but related. They stem from the incomplete transformation of espionage establishments originally shaped by the demands of large-unit conventional warfare. The loose-jointed networks of terrorist groups and insurgents who hide and fight and then hide again among civilian populations are much harder to find and destroy than were Soviet or Egyptian bombers parked on airstrips.

The appalling widespread collateral damage from Israeli air raids -- including the killing of four U.N. observers -- is one sign of the faulty "battlefield" intelligence. So is the Israeli shock at one of its warships being hit by an Iranian-supplied C802 radar-guided anti-ship missile that the Israelis did not suspect Hezbollah had.

The surprising extent and depth of the fortifications and of the long-range rocket force assembled by the Lebanese Shiite group just across Israel's northern frontier have forced Israel to alter the scope and thrust of its original attack scenario. "What we found showed that the Lebanese government and army would never be able to handle this problem by themselves, as we hoped," one Israeli official told me.

So Israel has committed ground troops, vowed to establish a one-mile-deep security strip inside Lebanon and endorsed an international military stabilization force to be created under a U.N. mandate. None of this was in the original attack plan to retaliate against Hezbollah's killing and kidnapping of Israeli troops inside Israel.

American intelligence has done no better at predicting the course or strength of Iraq's insurgency and the sectarian warfare that the insurgents have deliberately fanned between Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis. Months of Bush administration happy talk about a government of national unity based on Sunni inclusion led not to a reduction of violence that was predicted but to a sharp spike in Iraqi deaths and destruction instead.

The Vietnamese adopted a strategy to "talk and fight" to wear down American resolve. Iraq's Sunni extremists seem to have decided to "vote and fight." The distrustful Shiite majority is striking back, even as both groups participate in the "unity" government and the parliament. American forces, given only spotty information by the CIA-run Iraqi intelligence service, remain largely clueless about identifying and separating good guys and bad guys on the ground, as Iraqi officials suggested in a meeting here last week with National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Reforming intelligence operations to meet the new challenges of the "long war" on terrorism is a vast and difficult task that Negroponte has only recently begun. He and his congressional overseers must be ready to be brutally honest about intelligence failure and honestly brutal in correcting it. Israel's history, and its future, speak to how that can be done.

jimhoagland@washpost.com

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

 

[tomahawk6]

Unless you have eyes on the ground there is a limit to what technical intelligence can provide. Hizbollah unlike AQ relies on family connections which makes it very hard to penetrate the organization. Unless you are related to someone in the organization you cant get in.

 

[a_majoor]

Another view....

 

[Scoobie Newbie]

 

[Colin Parkinson]

The Israelis have already admitted that it very difficult to penetrate Hezbollah as opposed to the various Palestinian factions, likely hampered by Hezbollah’s close cooperation with Iran and I am sure that they get the support of Iran’s Secret Police trained to watch for spies, plus far less personal contacts between the Israelis and the Lebanese Shia to exploit for resources. Likely their strongest contacts are with the Christians and Druze.

 

[enfield]

I agree a_majoor; this is a good example not just of the problems and failures of national intelligence, but of battlefield information gathering and the problems with working with info-centric forces and plans. Thinking of the current CF doctrine, and plans for future doctrine and capabilitie that centre on information dominance of the battle space I see the Hezbollah campaign as another (Iraq is a broader example) nail in the coffin of concept victory through information dominance.

Over the course of years Israel had the full range of technology, platforms, and equipment to gather military intelligence and reconnaisance. Israel also had the full resources to analyze and interpret what it was seeing - translators, experts, first hand experience, etc. I believe its fair to say that Israel knew as much as could be reasonably known about Lebanon and Hezbollah, and probably more than the average Western army could expect to know about its enemy. And still Israel has had problems with finding the enemy, neutralizing his offensive capabilities, and destroying their command and control functions.

Hopefully the proponents of information-centric warfare are watching. Information is key, but UAV's, Coyotes, satellites and SIGINT will not replace tanks and infantry advancing to contact.

 

[GAP]

Have you noticed over at least the last decade the drawback in humit intelligence on the part of a lot of countries, especially the US? They keep relying on technology, but that only goes so far.

An awful lot of the stuff going on today is the result of poor intelligence. The west is being manipulated by lack of information on the ground and the other side seems to have a whole wack of info they shouldn't have. It may be time to reassess these "new" immigrants and their infrastructure, or it may be already too late.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Even the ‘best’ of the high-tech intelligence gathering systems needs a lot of highly skilled human attention.

There are all manner of wonderful algorithms to tell all the SIGINT stations what words or beeps or signal patterns to watch for – but they all have to be reported to someone who then has to ‘read’ them within some kind of sensible context.  There was, almost certainly still is, a severe shortage of linguist/analysts in most languages – especially Arabic and Asian languages.  I would not be surprised if, in the wake of 9/11, hiring Arab speakers for highly classified jobs got a whole lot harder.

I also suspect that the dunderheads in charge of our Foreign Affairs Department, like their colleagues in Washington, London, Canberra and so on, have gotten all prissy about good intelligence gathering practices like bribery and corruption, sifting through nice peoples’ garbage and exploiting peoples’ weaknesses (like alcoholism or a spouse’s prescription drug problem) and, especially, their sexual proclivities.

My other problem (which I have raised before) is the trend towards collectivization in the intelligence process.  It appears to me that there is  much more fusion at many higher and higher (new) levels so that too little intelligence ever gets ‘out’ (especially in a timely manner) to the people who need it.  Collective farms didn’t work; neither, I think does collective intelligence processing.  (That being said, I appreciate the risks and costs (not just monetary, either) of ‘competitive’ intelligence services; I just think they are worth the risks/costs.)

 

[probum non poenitet]

...good intelligence gathering practices like bribery and corruption, sifting through nice peoples’ garbage and exploiting peoples’ weaknesses (like alcoholism or a spouse’s prescription drug problem) and, especially, their sexual proclivities.

I personally approve of these methods ... without them, I'd still be a private and posted to Alert.

 

[a_majoor]

I personally approve of these methods ... without them, I'd still be a private and posted to Alert.

Um, Edward wasn't talking about your personal exploits.......

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Have you noticed over at least the last decade the drawback in humit intelligence on the part of a lot of countries, especially the US? They keep relying on technology, but that only goes so far.

An awful lot of the stuff going on today is the result of poor intelligence. The west is being manipulated by lack of information on the ground and the other side seems to have a whole wack of info they shouldn't have. It may be time to reassess these "new" immigrants and their infrastructure, or it may be already too late.

Mind you Israel has the advantage of a smallish regional conflict area and a fairly good idea who they will be fighting. The US depends on expeditionary forces that could be engaged anywhere on the globe, so they will never have the humint resources for each circumstances, however they still depend to much on hi-tech toys and as mentioned here are worried about getting dirty at the ground level.

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Did anyone think that going into Lebanon was going to be easy?  Is it possible the IDF is just trying to proceed at a reasonable pace, and make sure they aren't rolling past any points that will bite them when they advance and it is their rear ech that will have to deal with Hezbollah.  It must be a real pain trying to determine what tunnels exist, remote hidden bombs to defuse, mines etc.  The IDF engineers have their work cut out for them (just as an aside hijack question, do engineers have ground penetrating radar to look for tunnels?)
Even if this war isn't going quite the way it may have been scripted, IMO once the IDF gets a better feel for the rhythm of the battle, they will adjust their tactics and smash on.

 

[tomahawk6]

Israel has to acheive a clear victory in Lebanon or else face further attacks in the future. Updated map from Stratfor of Israeli operations in Lebanon.
http://web.stratfor.com/images/middleeast/map/Israel-Leb_BASE-08-01.jpg

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Here is a link to Google earth placemarks of major incidents, clearly the IDF had a fairly good idea of targets.

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/520017/an/0/page/1

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Google earth never ceases to amaze me. 

 

[tomahawk6]

News reports and commentary indicate that the war against Hizbollah has not gone smoothly. Reliance on an air campaign may have cost the IDF 2 weeks that ground operations could have been initated.PM Olmert is seen as less than decisive and the Northern Command gets low marks for poor planning for the ground operation. The news story below indicate deficiencies with reserve unit equipment and planning/execution of the war plan. The terrain and Hizbollah tactics seem to have caught the IDF without a doctrine to rapidly defeat the guerrillas.

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/747356.html

 

[Scoobie Newbie]

All lesssons learned (hopefully not too late).