Page 243 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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IDF Combat Intelligence in an Asymmetric War
The Second Lebanon War against hezbollah,
july-August 2006

DANI AShEr - ISrAEL

Much has been written about Israel’s strategic errors in the 2006 conflict with Hezbollah:
from the long discredited notion that war can be won with air power alone to the fatal inde-
cisiveness of political and military leaders whose plans went away.
The aim of this article is to examine the way Israeli field intelligence (combat intelli-
gence) operated against Hezbollah before and during the “Second Lebanon War.” Basing
1
my argument on published documents, media analyses, and interviews with combatants, I
will attempt to describe and outline the field intelligence layout’s ability to serve other ele-
ments on the asymmetrical battlefield in South Lebanon.

impLications of the changes on the battLefieLd
Before dealing with the Second Lebanon War, let us recall that military terminology has
changed in the last decades. These changes, observable throughout the world and especially
in the Middle East, are the result of the shift from all-out wars of massive firepower to lim-
ited local (mainly asymmetrical) wars waged between large standing armies and terrorist or
guerilla organizations. The Second Lebanon War is an example of the latter.
The break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s generated an unprecedented geo-
political, geostrategic revolution. The superpower balance was overturned, freeing ethnic,
religious, social-cultural, and economic tensions across the globe. Conflicts and national
awakenings took the form of rural and urban terrorism and guerilla warfare whose suppres-
sion replaced traditional confrontations that employ massive firepower and huge military
formations.
These changes witnessed the introduction of new weapons layouts and a new type of bat-
tlefield that radically altered the face of war. An enemy of inferior combat strength excelled
in adaptability, mobility, the integration of relatively simple weapons into state-of-the-art
systems (while transferring the fighting to regions where size is of no advantage), in short,
he was skilled at shaping the fighting to his limited strength – he developed qualities at the
cornerstone of “asymmetrical warfare” where the larger force often finds itself at a distinct
disadvantage. These changes hamper the large regular armies’ ability to carry out operations
against terrorists and guerilla forces in low intensity conflicts.
2
In a low intensity conflict the inferior side tries to counteract the asymmetry by using

1 This article deals with the problems that regular army combat intelligence faces in an asymmetric war
against irregulars in mountainous or built-up areas.
2 From Low Intensity Warfare (IDF) [Hebrew] –2001. This work is based on the writings of the late Shmuel
(Samu) Nir, a colonel in the IDF who developed the scientific study of low intensity warfare.