The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy - Softcover

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The future of non-state military actors is a central issue for U.S. strategy and defense planning. It is widely believed that such combatants will be increasingly common opponents for the U.S. military, and many now advocate sweeping change in U.S. military posture to prepare for this the debate over the associated agenda for “low-tech” or irregular warfare transformation is quickly becoming one of the central issues for U.S. defense policy and strategy. As a prominent recent example of a non-state actor fighting a Westernized state, Hezbollah’s 2006 campaign thus offers a window into a kind of warfare that is increasingly central to the defense debate in the United States. And the case’s implications for U.S. policy have already become highly controversial. Some see Hezbollah as an essentially terrorist organization using an information age version of the asymmetric military methods seen as typical of non-state actors historically. This view of Hezbollah as an information age guerrilla force strengthens the case for a major redesign of the U.S. military to reposition it for irregular warfare. Its advocates differ in the particulars, but most would expand the Army and Marine Corps; reequip this larger ground force with lighter weapons and vehicles; restructure it to deemphasize traditional armor and artillery in favor of light infantry, civil affairs, military police, military advisor, and special forces capability; and reengineer training, doctrine, Service culture, recruitment, and promotion systems to stress low-intensity irregular warfare skills and methods rather than conventional combat. And major changes in the interagency process would be needed to replace a balkanized, slow-moving decision-making system with one agile and integrated enough to compete effectively with politically nimble, media savvy opponents in portraying the results of such warfare persuasively to public audiences overseas. If so, the needed changes in the defense program would be extremely expensive. Many would pay for this by scaling back or abandoning hi-tech air and naval modernization programs; reducing the size of the Air Force and oceangoing Navy; and cutting back the ground forces’ training and preparation for conventional war fighting. The result would be a very different American military and defense establishment—from its size to its structure, equipment, people, and doctrine. Others, however, see Hezbollah’s 2006 campaign as a major departure from the asymmetric methods of traditional terrorists or guerrillas and as a shift toward the conventional military methods normally associated with state actors. What is new in this account is how much the 2006 campaign differed from terrorist or guerrilla warfare information age or not—and how conventional and state-like the fighting was. This view of Hezbollah as a conventional army weakens the case for irregular warfare transformation. Instead it implies that a conventionally structured military is actually better suited for a future of non-state opponents than low-tech transformation advocates claim. Where capabilities for low intensity combat can be improved without undermining conventional performance this would always be wise, but many in this camp see sharp tradeoffs between the forces and training needed for irregular as opposed to conventional combat; if so, then radical transformation would be ill advised and traditional force structures, doctrines, and training are a better course for the future.

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