This will be quick and focused. There is a lot else to say, but it’s more important to get these points out than to take long enough for more comprehensive coverage.
Hezbollah’s atrocious Falaq-1 rocket attack on a recreation area in the Golan Heights, where at least 12 young people ages 10-20 were killed – some blown to bits – and dozens injured, was meant to be escalatory. The simultaneous drone attempt on oil and gas infrastructure offshore is added evidence of that.
That is not to say that Israel has to escalate on any schedule of Hezbollah’s. (Israel has already mounted counterattacks by air as of this writing.) It’s to establish what Hezbollah is doing with this fresh move, and hence what the frame of mind of Hezbollah’s planners is. Iran was undoubtedly in the decision-making process; this is on Iran too.
There is no justification for anyone to try to downgrade or whitewash the vile nature of the attack, or suggest that Israel is under any obligation to pull any punches except the ones Israel may find strategically convenient.
To the pings.
Ping One: Reprisal
This is the highest-priority point. Pundits are largely speaking of Israel’s next step as a “retaliation “ for the 27 July attack. The pundits are wrong.
A distinction I’ve often been at pains to make is that between retaliation and reprisal. Reprisal is without question the response Israel needs to make in this case. “Reprisal” literally means “re-taking,” and in the language of war it means re-seizing the initiative and making responses for the aggrieved party’s own purposes.
Retaliation lags the problem and leaves the enemy in the driver’s seat.
Reprisal leads the problem and puts the attacked nation in the driver’s seat.
Reprisal is consonant, at the operational or strategic level, with what rules of engagement are intended for at the tactical level. ROE are meant to preserve for one’s own force the discretion and choice in responding that keep own forces in the driver’s seat, and keep them on-mission for the purposes of the nation. (The inherent right and obligation of self-defense is part of keeping own forces on-mission.)
That’s what reprisal does at the higher level of military execution. That’s what Israel needs to use as its principle for response.
There is in any case no such thing as a “proportionate” response to having children at a recreational park blasted into bloody pieces. That line of thinking need not even get started.
In my view, the priority for an Israel in the driver’s seat would be systematically destroying Hezbollah’s weapons arsenal, the infrastructure that keeps it coming, and the command/control apparatus that wields it. The effort to destroy all those things would be called a campaign of interdiction. That’s how I’ll refer to it.
Serious damage to Hezbollah’s attack mechanisms has the strong potential to deter Hezbollah, possibly even to the extent of preventing an enlarged effort at attack in the near future.
If Israel had no resource limits – in particular, the higher-weight air-delivered bombs suitable for destroying weapons caches and manufacturing sites in tunnels or hardened bunkers – the choices about this priority would be simplified. The choices would be mainly about when it’s convenient to do it, and how to minimize the risk to Israeli forces while limiting, where possible, the collateral damage in Lebanon. In Lebanon, there will be a legitimate, recognized government to settle with at the end of the period of belligerence. Aside from serving the moral expectations of the Israeli people, good-faith efforts to minimize collateral damage are a wise approach for a better peace.
That said, Hezbollah is dug in, and the hope of avoiding disastrous damage to Israel in a protracted war with Hezbollah lies in destroying Hezbollah’s arsenal before Hezbollah can use it.
Israel can’t afford to lag the OODA loop at this point, still thinking, like the pundits, in outdated grass-mowing terms like retaliation. Israel had better be thinking about how to shape the battle space for war. That’s the only possible way to deter war, and it’s the merest obligation to the Israeli people in advance of it.
Ping Two: The resource problem
Israel’s forces do have a resource problem, as far as we know. As discussed many times before, the Biden administration has a hold on a plus-up delivery of the main bombs the IDF needs for an effective interdiction campaign against Hezbollah. These are the 2,000-lb bombs that were released for delivery back in March, under the terms of a years-old military sales contract, but were then put on hold in May 2024.
To accompany the bombs, which start out dumb, the IDF needs JDAM precision-guidance kits to mate them with, to ensure their most effective and efficient use. Being effective with fewer bombs is the very heart of minimizing collateral damage, and that’s what JDAM-enhanced bombs make possible.
Readers will recall, per previous discussion, that Israel probably has only weeks’-worth of these bombs left at this point. It’s impossible to be certain given our lack of knowledge in the general public, but we can hazard a crude estimate after the campaign in Gaza to this point. The January 2024 estimate that Israel would have some 16 weeks’ worth of 2,000-lb bombs to launch an interdiction effort in Lebanon is probably down to between 12 and 14 weeks. This is based on my perception that Israel has been very sparing with the air-delivered punch in Gaza, and has performed minimal attacks so far in Lebanon.
My judgment is that this inventory is not enough for a hard, sustained, deterrence-level thump of Hezbollah. For one thing, the bombs will be used up faster in Lebanon. I do note that Israel has other sizes of air-delivered bombs (500-lb, 1,000-lb, and some 5,000-lb, as well as the 300-lb Small Diameter Bombs). The 1,000-lb bombs in particular can be used in conjunction with 2,000-pounders for some targets.
The 5,000-lb bombs should be reserved, to the extent possible, for absolutely essential contingencies (including a need to conduct strikes on hardened targets in Iran at some point). With the U.S. administration currently in office, obtaining more of them would be harder than springing loose the 2,000-lb bombs.
A note on using the bombs. It is not correct to say that the type and extent of tunnel infrastructure in Lebanon makes the 2,000-pounders inapplicable. What it means is that it will take on average more bombs per objective, used in concert, to achieve targeting goals. Precision guidance is especially important, because the thump has to be delivered as precisely as possible to increase its impact and punch through to underground infrastructure.
It’s a tough problem, and while I’m fully confident IDF planners know what to do about it, I’m not confident they have all the resources they need.
I wouldn’t discount the possibility of Israel finding a way to get basic bombs by different means. Israel has to do what’s necessary.
Congress could generate momentum for a policy theme by quickly voting on a new package of interdiction-quality munitions, while voting to go ahead with immediate delivery of the items delayed by the Biden administration. “Biden” (“Harris”; pick your imagined Entity-in-Charge of choice) would presumably refuse to sign on the dotted lines, but the issue cold still be forced to that point.
In an earlier article I outlined non-bombing options for changing the battle conditions in Lebanon. Those are things the U.S . could do, but few if any would imagine the current administration undertaking them.
Ping Three: The real problem of leadership in Washington
It helps to not be confused about this. We needn’t take up all the competing theories out there and discuss them; to keep this treatment tight, I will just state my assessment.
Joe Biden was never making the decisions for his administration, and there will be no situation in which Kamala Harris is actually making decisions either.
That emphatically does not mean no one is making decisions. It means someone is making decisions, but you don’t know who it is. (Many of you are certain that you do know, and you may be right.)
If you do understand that decisions are being made, coherently and with intent by the same entity or individuals from one decision to the next, you know what you need to, to keep things straight. All you have to do is remember that. It’s reasonably accurate to call it a shadow presidency.
What we’re seeing from the Oval Office is not incompetence or a leadership void. It’s a consistent pattern of decisions that oppose Israel’s policies and interests, made unaccountably by anonymous actors, while claiming to support Israel in the generic. Joe Biden’s prior reputation vis-à-vis Israel has no bearing on the quality or trend of the decisions, though his prior reputation has been used in media rhetoric to obfuscate the trend. VP Harris’s reputation on Israeli matters is probably a better guide to what decisions will look like between now and January, but her individual posture isn’t material either.
This is the context in which to understand the signal the U.S. government sent this week, via Harris’s summary of her meeting with PM Netanyahu. The chief points she made are that the U.S. government’s priority is a ceasefire, regardless of any other impact from that (e.g., that a ceasefire is the main thing that would keep Hamas alive), and that the U.S. administration has no intention of delivering the delayed interdiction weapons that Israel needs to face a war with Hezbollah.
That signal is devastating. And at this point, there’s a finality to it that there wasn’t before, when the U.S. leadership situation at least had the semblance of normality. It’s clear the U.S. administration has now moved overtly beyond “normal.” And the very first thing it did beyond normal was make a declaration of U.S. priorities against Israel’s interests.
Here’s something foreign leaders are much less confused about than Americans are. The foreign leaders know that Harris isn’t her own woman here. She won’t be making future decisions about this. Appealing to her isn’t an effective option.
I’m confident any nation with a functioning intelligence service knows where the U.S. government’s Appeals Window is today – but not every nation is welcome to approach it. I perceive the EU’s usual suspects to have the entrée, along with a motley collection of others, from Lebanon and Qatar to Australia under the current Labor government, the Iran-compromised Iraqi government, and the governments of Mexico, Canada, and Brazil.
That isn’t a comprehensive list. The point isn’t so much the list as the surreally unstable situation created by having an unaccountable shadow government making major decisions for the United States. The decisions have actually been consistent and predictable, but they’ve been weak, usually counter to America’s interests on the big issues, and basically an invitation to exploit the leadership vacuum left by U.S. silence.
That won’t change between now and January, because there’s no way for it to. Anxiously trying to make the U.S. administration’s formal emissions fit the policy management profile of previous administrations is a fool’s errand. They don’t fit, and they will not be a source of credible leadership, admonition, or deterrence in the coming days. But they will assuredly be consistent with what they have been: i.e., disadvantageous for Israel, and focused on ceasefire(s), “internationalizing” the Israeli security problem, and pushing for “recognition of a Palestinian state.”
End note
Israel will no doubt conduct some robust bombing, as it has already started doing.
Only Israel can decide when or if it’s time to commit irrevocably to a war with Hezbollah seeking a decisive, “better peace” end-state. One of the most important factors in that decision is that the commitment will occupy Israeli resources to an extent that will make it harder to be ready for a move against Iran, if such a move becomes necessary. Naturally, I perceive the likelihood that Iran will try to exploit a war crescendo around Israel to make big moves.
It may actually be to Israel’s advantage to deter Hezbollah for the time being, achieving what it can until the U.S. election indicates what will be coming next. It would be most gratifying if it were useful to reiterate what the U.S. could do to adjust the situation more in Israel’s favor, and thwart the terrorists. But it isn’t.
{Reposted from the author’s site}
