by Dr. Hanan Shai
[Mistakes] in the IDF’s deployment during Operation Peace for Galilee, and later in its protracted security activity, culminated in the May 2000 hurried withdrawal that continues to this day to negatively affect Israel’s national security.
Aerial view of stadium used as ammunition
supply site by PLO after Israeli airstrikes,
Beirut, Lebanon, 1982,
photo via Wikipedia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,596, June 4, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The conquest of
southern Lebanon in Operation Peace for Galilee, and Israel’s long
sojourn in the area, had political and military justification. But
defects in the IDF’s deployment during the operation, and later in its
protracted security activity, culminated in the May 2000 hurried
withdrawal that continues to this day to negatively affect Israel’s
national security.
Israel’s 1982 Operation Peace for Galilee had two
political objectives. The first, which was realistic and achievable, was
to restore normalcy to Israel’s northern towns and villages after
sustained rocket attacks had disrupted life there for many years. The
second, which was unrealistic, was to expel the Syrian and Palestinian
armed forces from Lebanon and secure a peace treaty with a second Arab
country—a goal that required complete Christian control over Lebanon.
In line with these objectives, the IDF was ordered
to conquer southern Lebanon up to the Beirut-Damascus Highway (about 40
kilometers from the border) to rid the area of terrorists and weaponry
and cut Syria off from Lebanon.
With the aim of reaching the highway before it was
captured by a nearby Syrian division, a brilliant, wily idea was
proposed: that an Israeli tank division make use of Mount Jabal Barouk,
which was considered impassable by armor and hence not well protected,
to rapidly penetrate deep into Lebanon. Its mission was to reach the
Beirut-Damascus Highway 48 hours from the beginning of the operation,
cut Syria off from Lebanon, and surprise and defeat the terrorists in
the south of the country by gaining access to the rear of their
defensive deployment.
Despite the cleverness of the idea and the fact
that the operation had been conceived and planned years in advance, the
IDF’s performance in conquering south Lebanon was rather poor. Its
forces reached the highway three weeks late, and even that required slow
advances that went on for more than two weeks after the ceasefire came
into effect. An inquiry conducted later by the IDF (the Wald Report)
found that the many failures in the IDF’s performance repeated failures
that had emerged nine years earlier in the Yom Kippur War, and which had
not been remedied despite the army’s promise to do so.
Moreover, as in a movie that is rewound, in
preparing for its stay in southern Lebanon at the end of Operation Peace
for Galilee, the IDF repeated the same mistakes it made in its
deployment along the Suez Canal in the year preceding the Yom Kippur
War.
Like post-June 1967 Sinai, southern Lebanon after
Operation Peace for Galilee was an ideal territory for a frontal
“protective holding effort”—that is, a secondary effort to create a
defensive alignment that would identify an attacking force and warn of
its movements as early as possible, thus enabling an advance deployment
to stop the attackers when they reached the area. In south Lebanon this
involved the early identification of terrorists making their way to the
Israeli border and the conveying of a warning of their progress to the
“protection effort” forces at the border so as to allow them to
intercept the terrorists while they were still on the Lebanese side of
the border security fence.
To fulfill its task of “identifying without being
identified,” a protection effort should be uncomplicated, mobile, and
without a signature. In the Lebanese case, it should have been based (as
it is within the Palestinian Authority) on units of mista’arvim
(Israeli soldiers disguised as Arabs) that were tailored to the sector.
However, as occurred along the Bar-Lev Line in Sinai, the Lebanon
frontal holding effort comprised a broad and prominent military
signature of strongholds and frontal logistical facilities, along with a
regular routine of operational and administrative traffic between the
positions within Lebanon and between Lebanon and Israel that was highly
vulnerable to guerrilla attacks.
The IDF’s visible signature grew ever more
prominent the more the IDF, in response to the rise in casualties,
thickened its protection rather than train its forces as mista’arvim
in counterinsurgency warfare and reducing them to the minimum needed to
gather intelligence on terrorists making their way to Israel.
In a decisive war aimed at achieving rapid
victory, it is impossible to avoid sacrificing the lives of soldiers—as
few as possible—to save many more lives, both soldiers and civilians.
However, in a war of attrition that takes the form of an ongoing,
erosive process that does not lead to victory, the winner is not
necessarily the side that inflicts more casualties on its enemy but the
one that limits its own casualties as much as possible. The IDF ignored
this rule in Lebanon just as it ignored it after the Six Day War in its
flawed deployment in Sinai. That deployment led to the protracted,
difficult, fruitless, and thus unnecessary War of Attrition (1969-70),
as Defense Minister Moshe Dayan characterized it.
The defense establishment rejected criticism of
the IDF’s conduct in Lebanon with the claim that risking soldiers’ lives
was necessary to protect the Galilee’s civilian population. That claim
was in turn rejected by the Four Mothers—ordinary women who, through the
massive public pressure they generated, brought about the IDF’s May
2000 ignominious withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the opening of a
new, lackluster chapter in the history of Israel’s national security.
After the withdrawal, the attrition of IDF
soldiers in Lebanon—which, as noted, could have been reduced with a
proper professional deployment—was the main factor that influenced the
crafting of the combat doctrines of both Hezbollah (and later Hamas) and
the IDF.
Hezbollah exploited Lebanon’s mountainous
territory to block the movement of mobile ground forces along the few
existing traffic arteries with a stationary terror army operating within
a dense network of fortified, well-obstructed, and tunnel-based
defenses equipped with antitank weapons and rockets/missiles for
standoff fire at Israel. These defenses were built in areas densely
populated by civilians whom Hezbollah made use of as human shields.
Hezbollah’s (and later Hamas’s) stationary army
would pose a triple military-political threat to Israel: attrition of
the home front under rocket fire and attacks issuing from offensive
underground tunnels; the infliction of heavy casualties on the IDF’s
maneuvering ground forces, which would be compelled to operate in costly
frontal battles aimed at breaching the fortified routes and defenses
from which the fire on the home front was executed; and damage to
Israel’s international status and the legitimacy of its struggle if it
struck the human shields. Hezbollah thereby confronted Israel with three
cruel options: high attrition of its soldiers in order to stop the
attrition of its civilians; civilian attrition to avoid the attrition of
its soldiers; or the prevention of the attrition of both soldiers and
civilians by destroying rockets and tunnels from afar at the price of
widespread collateral damage and the attendant damage to its
international status.
Israeli society’s high sensitivity to casualties
led the IDF to replace its traditional doctrine of rapid victory, which
entailed defeating the enemy by destroying its combat capabilities, with
a new doctrine that seeks to force the enemy to surrender quickly via
the infliction of psychological shock and awe induced by technological
feats that are spectacular in their accuracy and lethality.
This doctrine seems to have been based on a
well-known idea of Michel Foucault’s: that power and knowledge are
inextricably intertwined. Thus the IDF’s superiority was translated into
massive data collection and the building of a rich “bank” of “quality
targets.” By gradually destroying those targets in their order of
importance, processes were meant to be generated that would lead to the
enemy’s surrender.
While it is doubtful that the political echelon
formally approved this doctrine, it was applied during the 2006 Second
Lebanon War. Yet despite the emptying of the Lebanese “target bank” of
its “Foucault treasures,” Israel’s northern towns and villages remained
under rocket fire for 34 days. Eight years later, in Operation
Protective Edge, the doctrine of emptying the “target bank” was applied
against Hamas—a much smaller and weaker terror army than Hezbollah. Yet
Hamas was able to subject the south of Israel and the outskirts of the
central region to rocket fire for 51 days.
Under the IDF’s traditional doctrine of victory,
each round of fighting ended with the enemy’s defeat and the creation of
improved initial operative conditions (which were not always exploited)
for the next round of fighting. Because a war of attrition does not
afford decisive military achievements, it is impossible to end it with
significant political and military arrangements, including better
initial conditions for the next round. Hence each round of attrition
warfare turns out to be (as might be expected) more difficult and
protracted than its predecessor. This may be why, in recent years,
Israel has been forced to accept the ongoing suffering of its civilians
along the Gaza border and the buying of quiet with Qatari money.
Although Israel is no longer threatened with
destruction through conquest by maneuvering state armies, the new
strategic threat it faces is not to be dismissed: the infliction of
extremely heavy damage by powerful and massive rocket/missile fire, some
of it extremely accurate and lethal, carried out by small, stationary
terror armies.
Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi seems to be the first
to try to extract Israel from the security trap into which it has fallen
by exploiting its technological advantage to readopt a combat doctrine
based on victory. This doctrine is aimed, according to Kochavi’s own
description, at concluding a war with a rapid, clear, and unequivocal
victory that will destroy the enemy’s combat capabilities with minimum
harm to both IDF soldiers and human shields.
While the technologies needed to implement this
doctrine are available or can be acquired relatively quickly, they will
necessitate huge budgets. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, it is doubtful
whether such budgets will be allocated anytime soon.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/1982-lebanon-repercussions/
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