Much Soul-Searching Ahead for Israeli Army

JERUSALEM —  Israel’s much-vaunted military, which emerged bruised and bloodied from its 34-day conflict with the guerrillas of Hezbollah, is in the midst of an intensive reappraisal of the battlefield tactics, intelligence capability and weaponry it brought to bear in Lebanon.

Yet a war whose outcome veered closer to a loss than almost any in Israel’s history is unlikely to result in fundamental changes in Israeli military doctrine, analysts and military officials say.

That is in part because Israel regards Hezbollah, a disciplined and highly motivated Islamist militia equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, as unique among its many enemies in the region, and strongly believes that its army remains capable of inflicting decisive defeat on any conventional force it might confront.

Most Israeli military strategists also firmly believe they could have won the conflict with Hezbollah had they not been hobbled by the missteps of a domestic political leadership untested by battle -- a view that is likely to be aired repeatedly during what may be months of public inquiries into how the conflict was conducted.

At the same time, however, Israel is weighing the long-term implications of the militia’s ability to inflict pain not only on Israel’s military, but civilians. Israel’s conclusions could have far-reaching effect on its dealings with the Palestinians, in particular with militant groups such as Hamas, the political ruling power in the Palestinian territories.

“This war will definitely change Israeli thinking on a military level, but not necessarily in ways that might be expected,” said Eran Lerman, an Israeli analyst and former senior military intelligence official. “In terms of tactics, yes. In terms of strategy, probably not.”

For decades, Israel’s deterrent capability, the notion that any attack would be met with overwhelming force, has remained a cornerstone of the country’s strategic thinking.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, once remarked that Israel could win 50 wars against its Arab enemies but had only to lose one in order to be destroyed. In a country that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, such a worldview has always resonated powerfully.

This conflict, more than any other in recent years, laid bare Israel’s fears for its existence, which are never far below the surface.

Although the level of casualties and property damage in Israel paled in comparison with that inflicted across Lebanon, most Israelis were astounded that their army was unable to quell Hezbollah’s monthlong rain of Katyusha rocket fire. It was the most sustained external assault on the country’s cities since the war that broke out upon Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948.

“Even at the very height of the intifada, Israel did not believe it would be destroyed by Palestinian suicide bombings,” ex-Defense Minister Moshe Arens said. “People did not think that we would be defeated by Katyushas this time, either, but rather by what might come after.”

Hezbollah’s ability to hold its own against the Israeli army, even for a limited time, has raised the specter of other enemies being emboldened to strike, perhaps together. But Syria, one of Hezbollah’s chief backers, stayed on the sidelines of this conflict -- fully aware, analysts said, that the Israeli military was capable of destroying not only its army, but its infrastructure and institutions of statehood.

Many Israeli analysts and commanders say the military’s overall performance was far from the stinging defeat that Hezbollah claims to have inflicted. But they generally acknowledge that Israel’s poor planning, carelessness and hubris played a part in high-profile failures at crucial moments, from the earliest days of fighting to the final hours.

A prime example of that came two days after the conflict erupted, when an Israeli missile ship enforcing a blockade of the Lebanese coast was hit by an Iranian-made C-802 radar-guided missile. Israeli intelligence had apparently been unaware that Hezbollah possessed such weapons -- and as a result, the Israeli Saar-class vessel had failed to activate a sophisticated antimissile defense system.

Even after the cease-fire took hold Aug. 14, smaller-scale blunders continued to have deadly consequences for Israeli troops. Last week, an Israeli soldier was killed when his tank strayed into an Israeli-laid minefield dating to the previous Lebanon conflict, despite the fact that it was clearly marked on maps.

During the recent fighting, Israel relied heavily on its massive Merkava battle tanks, which were designed to provide the best possible protection for the crews inside. But Hezbollah’s advanced antitank weapons, thought by Israeli intelligence to have been the Russian-made Kornet-E and Metis-M missiles, readily penetrated the tanks’ armor. Four Merkavas were destroyed and dozens damaged.

Hezbollah antitank missiles were also used, repeatedly and to lethal effect, against small squads of Israelis who took temporary shelter in buildings, and whose presence was almost immediately pinpointed by the guerrillas’ surveillance. In all, antitank weapons, some of which could be fired from more than a mile away, are believed to have accounted for nearly a quarter of Israel’s 120 combat fatalities.

Israel says more than 500 Hezbollah fighters were killed in the conflict. The militia contends that no more than several dozen of its members were lost.

Much has been made of Israel’s overreliance on airstrikes to destroy Hezbollah’s rocket-firing ability. The army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, a former air force commander, was a chief proponent of the fierce air assault that preceded Israel’s last-minute, large-scale ground push into southern Lebanon.

Halutz, whose job is now in jeopardy, has acknowledged “shortcomings” in the way the offensive was carried out.

“There is recognition now, pretty much across the board, that ‘standoff’ weapons cannot address certain kinds of threats, such as well-hidden rocket caches,” said Reuven Pedatzur, a Tel Aviv University analyst.

Despite the Israeli public perception of the war as an intelligence failure, some analysts said Israel in fact had assembled a trove of information about Hezbollah’s missile arsenal and command structure.

The problem, said one Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity, was that some information was considered so sensitive it was not always shared among intelligence branches, and not enough of it filtered down to the field commanders.

The intelligence problem compounded difficulties that would have been formidable for any conventional army facing a far more agile guerrilla force on its home turf, Israeli commanders said. “We found ourselves fighting a battle that Hezbollah was running, not us,” paratrooper reserve Col. Amnon Nachmias said.

Despite striking parallels, some analysts reject too close a comparison between Israel’s battle with Hezbollah and U.S. encounters with insurgents in Iraq.

“While there may be some particular aspects that are similar -- for example, the use of explosive devices against armored units -- the situations are very different overall,” said Uri Bar-Joseph, a University of Haifa analyst specializing in nonconventional military doctrine. “Hezbollah is a very unusual organization -- it possesses weapons superior to those of many states, and for a long period had been acting almost as a state.”

Israel’s under-training and under-equipping of its reserve forces is generally viewed as a major lapse on the part of military planners. With reservists returning from the battle mounting a campaign of highly vocal protests, some analysts believe Israel may revert to maintaining a reserve that is smaller but whose abilities more closely track the regular army’s.

That would be expensive. Pedatzur of Tel Aviv University predicted that Israel would begin allocating even more of its national budget to military spending, which is already about a tenth of the gross domestic product, a much higher share than in most Western democracies.

Some analysts said the conflict with Hezbollah showed that too many of Israel’s younger field commanders had experience only in fighting Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who lack Hezbollah’s discipline, organizational strength and formidable arsenal.

“When you fight a weak enemy, you become a weak army,” said Lerman, the former senior military intelligence official.

He and others predicted that one spillover effect of Israel’s war with Hezbollah could be a crackdown on armed groups in the Palestinian territories, because of the perception that Hezbollah was allowed to operate undisturbed as it made careful preparations for battle with Israel.

Meanwhile, there is a widespread expectation in the military establishment of a return engagement with Hezbollah.

“There is no doubt that the possibility of another war has been increased because of the perception of how this one went,” said Arens, the former defense minister. “But I think we have the capability to win, if mistakes are not repeated.”