IDF reveals Hezbollah's deployment

[Gershon]

Hezbollah's getting ready for the next war in Southern Lebanon
(http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3916665,00.html)
The scuds from Syria are there. The command centers are in place. Over 20,000 men are ready to be deployed. The question is when.

[curlyg]

Neither BBC or CNN has reported this. Incredible...

[Mil]

BBC will report it - tomorrow or in a few days. If IDF would have wanted this to be shown by BBC they would have done son but in the meanwhile they just opened this up to the Israeli press. This was probably done to make Hizbullah aware that the "eye" is watching and watching very carefully.

[Mediocrates]

In other Hezbollah news:

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/israel/articles/20100710.aspx

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/hezbollah-takes-southern-lebanon-hostage/

http://weeklystandard.com/blogs/western-press-and-hezbollah

http://judeopundit.blogspot.com/2010/07/al-manar-tv-hezbollah-ayatollah.html

[Gershon]

Hezbollah says has list of targets in Israe (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3918195,00.html)l

Some 40k rockets able to hit population centers in and around Tel Aviv. U.N. Resolution and UNIFIL doing little or nothing.

[curlyg]

If rockets fall on Tel-Aviv, I don't envy Lebanon. Israel will turn that entire country to rubble before it allows its economic heart to come under sustained attack.

[bararallu]

If rockets fall on Tel-Aviv, I don't envy Lebanon. Israel will turn that entire country to rubble before it allows its economic heart to come under sustained attack.

Unfortunately, it is Syria that needs to be turned into Rubble... anything else is working on derivatives not causes.

[Mediocrates]

If rockets fall on Tel-Aviv, I don't envy Lebanon. Israel will turn that entire country to rubble before it allows its economic heart to come under sustained attack.


Nope. Israel sends 5 planes over there and there will be an international condemnation that will make Cast Lead look tame.

[curlyg]

International condemnations are a powerful deterrent but they are only effective within a certain limit. Once the enemy crosses a certain threshold, Israel can't and won't hold back. Sustained rocket attacks on Tel-Aviv would essentially paralyze Israel's economy for the duration of the attack - be it days, or weeks, or even months. It's a very serious red line - I'd say it's even worse than a successful invasion of the Galilee. Once that threshold is crossed international condemnation won't be an effective restraint.

[Mil]

If Hizbullah decides on a war, as they did last time, the consequences for Lebanon will be quite dramatic.

[Mediocrates]

Doesn't matter. 10,000 Israelis die and if the IAF drops ten bombs the pressure from Obama will put an end to it. Jewish life is less than cheap to our enlightened betters.

[curlyg]

It won't work that way. Pressure/condemnations have their limits.

The purpose of conforming with international demands is to avoid isolation, which in turn is a factor in ensuring Israel's security (defense sales/agreements) and prosperity (avoiding boycotts/sanctions/etc). The point is that the ultimate consideration is the wellbeing of Israel, and at times that requires compliance with international demands. But when attacks are carried out against the country, either of an existential nature, or of such a nature that they significantly harm the country's security/prosperity, international condemnation is not an effective restraint. Like all things in politics, it will boil down to a cost-benefit question. It is difficult to imagine something more costly than bringing the Israeli economy to its knees for a number of weeks by bringing life to a standstill in Israel's economic heartland. Nothing the world does short of very severe sanctions will be enough to pressure Israel to stop, as I see it.

[Mediocrates]

Israel has NEVER been permitted to end military actions on their own terms. Not ever. It has never happened in any conflict. One course of action would be a balance of terror approach. But the problem with that is that Hezbollah has numerical superiority. I suppose Israel could rip a page out of the 19th century and strike back at any attack anywhere in Israel with an attack on the capitals of Lebanon and Syria. On the whole there are not that many elegant solutions that capture both the necessity of recognizing that ANY response will be condemned, with the military need to focus on real targets coupled with the tactical demands of a very rapid battle cycle.

One thing that the IDF learned last time, and in fact they should have remembered from 1973 is that large #'s of MANPADs are extremely effective against tanks and mobile armor. Tanks will have to play a smaller role than they did before which commits them to infantry and urban warfare. Both of which are very bloody. Our Maximum leader Obama has denied the IAF its request for Apache Longbox helos so that puts their existing inventory at a very high cost of loss. Israel already got slammed for using cluster munitions. I would recommend massive use of mortars where possible. A nice random high-fear weapon that in every way mirrors the level of force used by Hezbollah. An 88mm mortar has a 50% kill radius for unprotected vehicles of 100 meters. I would also recommend extensive use of smart tank round where possible. These are the kind that swap in antipersonnel ordnance to detonate over the heads of protected enemy troops. Then I would not be shocked to see extensive use of armed drones, albeit these can only carry a few Hellfire sized missiles, maybe more if they're scaled down in size. Hellfires are expensive. A Stalin-organ type rocket would be better.

[curlyg]

Medio I was under the impression that Israel is not only not scaling back its reliance on armour, but in fact plans to use it more extensively in the future in Lebanon. The focus since Lebanon II has been on combined arms, coordination between the branches of the military, etc. and Teffen 2012, which was the 5 year procurement program decided on in 2007 following Lebanon II, focused mainly on expanding and modernizing Israel's armoured forces by replacing older deathtraps like the M113 with the new Namer, buying additional Merkava Mk.4s, and deploying active protection systems to neutralize antitank missiles and RPGs.

That sort of procurement and training doesn't seem to be consistent with what you are predicting Israel will do in the event of a war. It seems to me that the main lesson taken from 2006 was not that MANPADs are effective against Israeli armour, but rather that Israeli armour wasn't used effectively. And this is consistent with the various reports I have read which suggested that Israeli tank crews were in many cases surprisingly poorly trained and unprepared for the kind of warfare they faced. Actually, probably the more important lesson which seems to have been learned is that air power is insufficient by itself and that future operations of this kind would have a large ground component. Based on what I have read, training in the ground forces has shifted from a focus on low-intensity warfare on company/platoon levels to high intensity warfare in larger formations.

I think what seems to be emerging is actually that Israel is thinking of a far more large scale war than in 2006. This seems to be consistent with the approach taken by the IDF in Cast Lead. It's a return to a more traditional kind of maneuver warfare with a strong focus on coordination and combined arms.

[Gershon]

Lebanon sends troops to its restive south (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/09/AR2010070904897.html)

Lebanon is sending 5,000 additional troops to try and rest the clashes between the UN and civilians in the south.

Lebanon sends troops to its restive south

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</td></tr></tbody></table> By Bill Varner
Saturday, July 10, 2010

UNITED NATIONS -- Lebanon (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/countries/lebanon.html?nav=el) is sending as many as 5,000 additional soldiers to the country's south after clashes between civilians and United Nations troops and Israel's (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/countries/israel.html?nav=el) warning that Hezbollah is preparing for a new war there.
"Some measures had to be taken to make sure no such incidents take place in the future," Nawaf Salam, Lebanon's U.N. ambassador, said in an interview Friday, referring to three attacks on French peacekeeping troops since June 29.
The commander of the United Nations' 12,000 soldiers and civilian police in southern Lebanon appealed for calm this week in an open letter to the region's population. France (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/countries/france.html?nav=el) called a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Friday to receive a report.
"We wanted to emphasize the seriousness of the situation," Gerard Araud, France's U.N. ambassador, told reporters after the meeting. "We cannot accept obstacles to freedom of movement" of U.N. troops.
A statement adopted after the briefing said the members of the Security Council "strongly deplore" the clashes with peacekeepers and urge the Lebanese army to send reinforcements to the border area with Israel.
The tensions came as Israel said the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah militia, considered a terrorist group by the United States, is preparing for fighting. Hezbollah fought a month-long war with Israel in 2006.
The Israeli daily Haaretz said that on Thursday, Israel's army showed journalists previously classified aerial photographs of a unit of 90 Hezbollah militiamen operating in a village where they were storing weapons close to hospitals and schools.

-- Bloomberg News