"Anarmy that fights the weak becomes weak."

Martin Van Creveld.

The report of the Winograd Commission[1] on the war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 is particularly enlightening on the vulnerabilitiess psychological vulnerabilities that can affect an army that has lost the habit of fighting an adversary to its measure, within a nation that itself believes itself to be protected from any major threat.

1] Published in an interim version in April 2007 and in its final version on January 30, 2008.

Security rather than victory

The Israeli failure of 2006 is first of all the result of the illusion of having found the "great unified doctrine" applicable to all forms of warfare and all threats. This illusion itself stems from the combination of the strategies adopted to deal with the internal threat (Palestinian movements) and the distant threat (nuclear Iran), both based on the triptych of intelligence-shield (security barrier or missile defence)-precise remote strikes.

This defensive vision also had the advantage of adhering to the dominant ideas of the Israeli elite in the 2000s, which were very guilty of the use of violence and even risk-taking. Political correctness' thus imposed itself. As an Israeli general pointed out before the Winograd Commission: "When you are strong and there are other means to fulfill the mission, it makes no sense to risk the lives of the soldiers" [1], which, in the face ofPalestinian movements, translates into a very sanitized war.1], which, in the face of Palestinian movements, translates into a very sanitized war made of multiple operations with very small results but without risks ("better 1-0 than 3-1" according to a slogan of the time) and where the enemy is destroyed at a distance, as in a video game.

From 2004, the system became so well established that some commentators like General (rtd) Naveh considered it comfortable:

"There were some losses from time to time, but the generals were always in control of the operations. They could claim to be fighting a war, but they did not run many risks and especially not the risk of being defeated....[2]».

This vision of warfare, dressed in the semantics of the American concept of "effects-based operations (EBO)", has thus emerged as a paradigm and has replaced the classic offensive strategy of warfare carried as early as possible into enemy territory. It is true that the proximate threat, i.e. that of neighbouring Arab countries, was no longer considered probable for a long time.

The painful rediscovery of combat

So when operations began against Hezbollah after the raid of 12 July 2006, the Israelis did not have the impression that they were engaging in a war but in air reprisal actions, hardly different, if not in scale, from what was happening in the Gaza Strip at the time. The word "war" is used neither by the government, nor even by the Joint Chiefs of Staff [3].

3] The very rapid destruction of Hezbollah's long-range launchers even reinforces Israeli decision-makers in the idea that the chosen strategy is the right one. Very quickly, however, it turns out that, despite the strikes and electronic jamming, Hezbollah is far from being paralyzed, as is shown by the 100 to 200 rockets that fall every day against northern Israel. Things are therefore not going as planned, and the Israeli military is in the paradoxical situation of running less risk than the civilians it is supposed to protect. This unforeseen situation generates "organizational stress", and like any stress, it can cause flight, stimulation or inhibition.

Given the disproportionate nature of the forces, the first choice is that of aggressiveness and escalation to extremes. Since the Israeli strike force is not threatened by an anti-aircraft or counter-battery defence system, it is not subject to a dialectical logic and can therefore continue to apply its own according to a linear logic. This is therefore pursued by simply increasing the "doses" and by striving to be ever faster and more precise. This debauchery of fire, which alone will end up costing 1% of the GDP and representing twice as many projectiles launched as during the Yom Kippur War, nevertheless only manages daily to kill a dozen enemy militiamen and to destroy a hundred rockets (out of a total of 12,000). The general staff and the government persist, however, until they finally turn public opinion upside down, outraged by the civilian casualties (1,180 Lebanese civilians killed) and the billions of dollars of destruction inflicted on Lebanon. International bodies then put pressure to impose a ceasefire. The Israelis thus persisted in reducing their own room for manoeuvre.

In addition to the disproportion of forces, this persistence is the result of several logical traps. The first is that the person who is responsible, for the first time on a large scale, for the implementation of the new doctrine is also largely its creator: General Halutz, the first Air Force airman. A change of strategy would have required a personal challenge, a rare occurrence in history. The second is the lack of communication between the AAC and the Olmert government, the least militarily experienced in the history of Israel, each taking the silence of the other as approval, which obviously makes it difficult to make any strategic inflections. In any case, as the poor performance of the army will show, there was, once the campaign was launched, hardly any other option.

During the first days of the campaign, the land forces, to whom no one said they were at war, were initially employed as in the Palestinian territories, in surveillance or in tiny operations to take observation points along the border. Each death was reported immediately to the ACSS (probably a unique case in the history of warfare) and an attack was even halted at the first casualty.

It was only thirteen days after the fighting began that the Israeli command decided to send its brigades into southern Lebanon to remove the threat of rockets a few kilometres away. This engagement acts as an eye-opener. The soldiers involved find themselves facing an adversary who is well equipped, sometimes better than them, well trained and, far from the "post-heroic" model [4], ready to sacrifice himself. It is a shock:

"A column of tanks was hit by two Cornets missiles, two tanks exploded and everyone lost their heads! An 81 mm salvo hit a group of infantrymen and everyone went crazy![...] Most of the Israeli troops had lost contact with reality. They were corrupted [by the Intifada]" [5].

This time the stress does not stimulate aggressiveness and obstinacy, as it does for the strike force, but above all paralysis. In scenes reminiscent of August 1914 or "The strange defeat" by Marc Bloch, several generals are clearly unable to make decisions and are quickly "sacked" (including the commander of the prestigious 7th armoured brigade).

The impossible adaptation

Unlike the strike force, the ground shock force faces real opposition. It is therefore subject to a dialectical logic which, from the moment the usual methods are countered, leaves no other choice than adaptation or defeat. Thus, in October 1973, after an initial shock when the Israelis saw their instrument of blitzkrieg break down on the Egyptian anti-aircraft and anti-tank barrage, there was a phase of reorganisation which allowed the breakthrough of the Egyptian front and the crossing of the Suez Canal.

These rapid internal adjustments were possible thanks to the surplus of intellectual resources available to the IDF. Faced with the many very concrete problems that arose in 1973, a multitude of ideas were found, drawn either from the civilian experience of the reservists mobilised or from the memory of military personnel who had lived or experienced something other than the methods in use. In South Lebanon in 2006, there was no such thing and the Israelis were unable to switch to "adaptive mode". On the contrary, the many behaviours inherited from the Intifada and unsuited to the new context (moving at night in the open, regrouping in the open, etc.) were not adapted to the new context. inside buildings, scattering of tanks) continued despite the evidence until the end of the war.

This rigidity is the result of years of internal security operations that made the initiative at the lower echelons lose the habit of initiative. More importantly, the fund of expertise in high-intensity combat was lost due to a lack of time, interest and training resources allocated to this form of warfare. As a result, some reserve units have been engaged against Hezbollah without combat training for six years. The Israelis are also heavily penalised by "rationalised" logistics organised around bases supplying all the units in their area of responsibility. This structure, which was sufficient to support small actions during the Intifada, fell into total confusion when it was changed to the simultaneous support of several brigades engaged in combat and intermingled with the enemy. Much of the officers' energy was thus consumed by pure supply problems. As a result, few new ideas emerged from the front and even fewer were able to circulate within a very modern but organized command network for the benefit of the enemy.This network, like an overloaded computer, became very slow at the slightest change in intensity.

It was finally only three days before the ceasefire, on the night of 10-11 August, that the decision was made to launch a major ground offensive towards the Litani River. But as the ground units had hardly changed since the fighting began, this great offensive was a new source of humiliation. Despite the breakthrough of the front and significant losses (a third of the total war), no decisive results were achieved.

The return to warlike reality

This war was the first conventional war, if not lost, at least missed by a Western army since the Indochina War. This failure is due to the oblivion of the fundamentals of strategy but also to psychological problems: obsession with protection, oblivion of violence, semantic confusion, pride, blindness, cognitive paralysis for some, hyperactivity for others. The Israelis have unlearned the fight for security and no longer wanted to pay the price of blood, which necessarily placed them in a position of inferiority in the face of warriors who, for their part, accepted sacrifice.

These problems have their origins within the military institution itself (false beliefs, overestimation of the effectiveness of certain materials) but also in society. Moreover, the first reactions following the war in Israel were mainly violent towards the country's intellectual and political elite, as this statement from the newspaper Haaretz shows:

"The charge of insanity will be leveled against the entire category of Israeli opinion-makers and social leaders who lived in a bubble and who led Israel to live in a bubble as well. The army will have to put its house in order and rebuild it, but the real anger will be directed against the elites who failed."[6].

Since then, a number of illusions have disappeared in Israel, where we are witnessing a return to the "remilitarization of the army" and the old values of imagination and offensive daring. The forces have been rebalanced and the training structure reconstituted.

But this Israeli example obviously challenges all Western armies and, while we must of course be wary of any hasty transposition, it must be noted that the problems described above have not been solved.While we must, of course, be wary of any hasty transposition, it has to be said that the problems described above reflect some of the difficulties encountered by European contingents under Blue Helmets in Bosnia and, above all, those of the Coalition members in Iraq paralysed by the sudden change in intensity of the Mahdist uprising in 2004.

It is therefore perhaps not useless, before being surprised in our turn, to indulge in some real introspection and to ask ourselves a few questions:

• by multiplying "enemy-less" missions over the last twenty years, haven't we pushed our new professional army into a "path" from which it will be difficult to get off?
• By being monopolized by successive reorganizations, have we not prepared ourselves intellectually for brutal changes in the form of warfare?
• by constantly seeking long-term savings, have we retained the surplus resources needed for rapid adaptation?
• are we psychologically prepared for a return to violence on a large scale?
• what remains of our capital of high-intensity combat skills?

The evolution of the mission in Afghanistan with the engagement of an additional battalion in a difficult mission may be a first test.

1] Major-General (rtd) Yoram Yair, quoted in Avi Kober, "The IDF in the second Lebanon war: why the poor performance", in The journal of strategic studies, February 2008.

2] General (rtd) Shimon Naveh, interview by Combat studies insitute, Fort Leavenworth.

3] Moreover, it was not until March 2007 that these events were officially baptized "Second Lebanon War".

4] The expression was coined by Edward Luttwak.

5 ] Shimon Naveh, op. cit.

6 ] Ari Shavit, "A spirit of absolute folly", in Haaretz, 16 August 2006.