“In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles,”

David ben Gurion, prominent Zionist leader, founder of the Israeli occupation regime, and first serving Prime Minister

In May 2021, in retaliation to the aggression against Gaza, the Palestinian resistance launched operation "Seif Al-Quds", the air defenses of the occupation army intercepted 90% of the rockets fired by the Palestinian resistance nevertheless 11 settlers were killed in the retaliatory operation. Despite the disproportionate number of intercepted rockets, the retaliatory operation was celebrated as a victory by the resistance such that it proved effective in fulfilling the strategic goals set. 

This matter reflects a fundamental discrepancy between planning and operation in the Israeli military establishment: the conclusions and assessments drawn from studies and military drills are nullified when met with the harsh reality of the field once the first shots are fired. In military studies, this is what is dubbed an absolute "strategic disaster". 

Perhaps the most prominent example of this strategic failure was the July 2006 war between “Israel” and Hezbollah, the repercussions of which still unfold as these lines are being written. 

Furthermore, the significance of the July War's outcomes wasn't strictly confined to the borders of the Levant region but rather extended to different army institutions and military academies around the world. 

Shimon Naveh, head of the Middle East Brigade in the Israeli Political-Security Division and former head of the Institute for Military Theory, makes a notable observation in interpreting the abject Israeli failure against the Lebanese resistance within the context of the Israeli conflict with Palestinians. 

“The point is that the IDF fell in love with what it was doing with the Palestinians. In fact, it became addictive. When you fight a war against a rival who’s by all means inferior to you, you may lose a guy here or there, but you’re in total control. It’s nice," Shimon Naveh said during an interview with the Combat Studies Institute back in 2007. 

Naveh's approach reflects a grave problem in the collective consciousness of the occupation army, and it could serve as a good starting point for understanding the corrective track that the occupation army has taken in attending to their shortcomings after the July War. Back then, the Israeli authorities had found themselves "out of control" over the span of 33 days, for the first time. 

So What is the corrective track which 'Israel' adopted to develop the capacities of its armed forces?

After the failure of the war on Lebanon, and the consequent recommendations from the government investigation committee headed by Eliyahu Winograd to address the defects in the command and coordination system, the Israeli authorities worked to develop their capacities to try to address the problems that emerged in July 2006 through a new strategy, which relied on 3 basic elements:  increasing the frequency of military drills, strengthening the home front, and technological integration.

Israeli military drills 2007- 2023

It is difficult to quantify the number of military drills that the occupation has conducted during the past 17 years, especially since some have remained secret, but it can be estimated that they roughly amount to hundreds, the most prominent of which was the “Turning Point” drills.

The Israeli drills and training varied, according to the intended objectives which the occupation tried to achieve.

The occupation conducted drills aimed at training their forces to operate in lands topographically similar to that of southern Lebanon: focusing on areas in northern occupied Palestine, and then later training in territories in Cyprus similar in nature to Lebanese lands.

They have also carried out drills that included cooperation between different branches of the armed forces: close coordination between the air force, infantry, and artillery, reconnaissance through a joint field operations room, through which the occupation wanted to attend to the need for complex procedures of coordination at high levels between the commanders of basic branches.

Notably, the occupation had also conducted joint drills with the US Army, most of which focused on airstrike simulations, overriding air defense, and the use of smart bombs in war.

In recent weeks, the occupation announced more than 5 military drills and exercises, some of which were conducted jointly with partners, such as the “African Lion” drills and exercises with the US Air Force, and other independent and task-specific drills such as the drills in the Golan a few days ago, the “crushing strike”  and "The Blue Sun", which simulate wars on multiple fronts, and a war with Lebanon or Syria respectively.

Hezbollah, in parallel

On the opposite side of the front with the occupation, Hezbollah develops military experience on several levels. At a time when military training did not stop and increased in quantity and enhanced in quality, according to Israeli sources, the combat experience gained by the younger Hezbollah fighters in Syria represents a real "military treasure" for the party.

The occupation leaders watched with great concern the military formations of Hezbollah as it engaged in new combat experiences and developed special combat schools, while its fighters who did not witness the protracted war with the occupation before liberation accumulated field combat experience that could not be obtained in any training program, thus bypassing the "new generation crisis" which the occupation army was betting on. 

Based on the statements of occupation army leaders indicates that the concern is very great in regard to Hezbollah's capacities. There is a pressing fear that a Hezbollah fighter in his 20s would be more experienced than an Israeli fighter in his 20s such that the latter hasn't fought any wars or been involved in any military operations by land. 

Fortifying the home front

The Israelis were greatly interested in trying to build and strengthen their home front after the July War proved Hezbollah was in benefiting from internal Israeli pressure to impose their terms at the negotiating table.

Fortification of the home front was a prospect that was first introduced after 2006: highlighting it as being among the main issues that must be worked on to address the IOF's failure in 2006. 

The occupation had always assumed that their settler society was effectively buffered from any external wars. In 2006, the occupation recognized that getting involved in external wars that settlers at home could be targets and that an open front externally will automatically open a front inside( through the internal pressure that the targeting of civilians could cause). 

The Israelis tried to fortify the homefront by strengthening the shelters and alarm system, responding to the settlers' requests to go to the shelters, and developing response systems for fires and explosions that would occur, to overcome this difficult complex.

The winds of the Israeli interior reflect the military command ships

Two factors restrict the effectiveness of Israeli shelters: the expenditure of settlers' nerves such that they feel they're on the front lines whenever a shell penetrates the airspace of occupied Palestine, and also giving the military authorities the false impression that they have time. Time has always been against the occupation's advantage as has been proven during the confrontations with the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. Time has always played a decisive role in pressing the occupation forces to end the operation. 

Furthermore, new factors have been introduced into the artillery rules of combat: increased precision and a large arsenal. in addition to what the Hezbollah leadership has confirmed more than once, that whoever starts the next war will not be the one who will end it.

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In fact, up until now, the occupation has been depending to a large extent on the fact that the cessation of hostilities will mean the end of the battles to a large extent, as well as the end of the bombing, whether with Lebanon in 2006 or after that with Gaza in the attacks that followed.

However, not having the power to declare a cease-fire effectively themselves means that the occupation cannot put pressure on its internal front until its "last breath" and then announce the cessation of operations, as usual.

In the event that a ceasefire was unilaterally announced and the resistance did not reciprocate it and continued to rain missiles on the occupation's settlements, this would open the doors of possibilities for the destruction of targetted settlements which would quickly snowball with the scared settlers into the collapse of the Zionist entity at large.

In addition to all this, the recent internal crisis, which divided Israeli society vertically and horizontally, made talking about a cohesive home front in wars closer to wishful thinking. 

Strengthening Israeli military capabilities

It is noteworthy that the occupation has invested more in its defensive capabilities than it has in its offensive capabilities over the past two decades: the most prominent products produced by Israeli arms companies are the multi-layered air defense systems that exist today, and the most used today is the Iron Dome missile system.

In the July 2006 war, the Iron Dome was not included in the battle and its equations, and the resistance's missiles were moving freely in the sky of occupied Palestine, and only the distance that they needed to travel separated them from their target.

With the development of this system and its inclusion in the equation, in an Israeli effort to protect the occupied territories from the effects of wars and neutralize the resistance’s missiles, they were able to reduce the risk of casualties to some extent, but it did not prevent it completely, with the confrontations with the Palestinian resistance factions. Moreover, Hezbollah possesses an arsenal of missiles that the occupation army says may be the largest in terms of its fire capabilities than that of most European armies.

Furthermore, the iron dome will not be the basis for the war against Hezbollah, as it is intended to deal with relatively small missiles and rockets, while what threatens "Israel" today are long-range and medium-range missiles. In an attempt to confront them, larger systems such as the Barak, the Arrow, and David's Sling are needed. Systems that Israel does not have huge amounts of supplies for, in addition to their huge cost.

The Israelis also strengthened their naval capabilities by deploying the Iron Dome in the sea and conducting experiments on its anti-missile defense recently.

Israeli experts have also tried to develop reactive shields for the Merkava to protect them from the Kornet missiles, but up until now all the armored vehicles and tanks of the occupation remain incapable of confronting Hezbollah's anti-armor special forces, whose tactics and combat experience have developed tremendously in the war against terrorists in Syria.

Hezbollah and the qualitative armament battle

Hezbollah has accumulated significant military capabilities since 2006, both in quantity and quality, from precision missiles to short-range and long-range missile systems, and heavy and light artillery, which compensated for the lack of air coverage by its fighters in the field.

Hezbollah has also developed its naval military arsenal tremendously, after the success of targeting the "Sa'ar 5" battleship in 2006, and it was also able, even according to Israeli reports, to build air defense capabilities that greatly threatened the freedom of movement of the Israeli Air Force in any future war, which means robbing the occupation of their major point of superiority, on which they have always relied in all the wars.

In the July war, Hezbollah identified its gaps and shortcomings to cater to military development accordingly. After it had developed from a movement consisting of a few hundred fighters in 1982 to a few thousand after the liberation in 2000, and now nearly 100,000 fighters, according to the statement of its secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, with the end of the second decade after liberation.

The resistance catered to the shortcomings which it had discovered during the war and developed its capabilities in a thoughtful and accurate manner, which constituted a real crisis for the occupation army and made it obsessively pursue everything related to the arming of the resistance, its supplies, factories, and laboratories.

The resistance has preserved the deterrence equation imposed and maintained its presence and work on Lebanese territory with the occupation no longer daring to target the cadres of the resistance in Syria.

From swift decisive victory to "Dahiya Doctrine" 

In his statement to a journalist who asked him what the pilots feel when they bomb hostile targets, Dan Halutz refers to a fundamental issue that marked his failed term as chief of the General Staff of the Israeli occupation army, which is his "separation from the ground".

The occupation leadership aspired, through the July War, to stage a combat "show" that would culminate in the myth of the air superiority of the Western camp, which Western military "end of history" schools considered to have begun in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon with the air battle over the Bekaa Valley against the Syrian Air Force, it was further affirmed with the second Gulf War in 1990 against Iraqi forces, then in Kosovo 1999, reaching its climax with the Afghanistan war in 2002, and the air campaign against Iraq in 2003.

The Israelis had already planned for the war on Lebanon, which was scheduled at a different time than July 2006, and the occupation government decided to exploit the successful capture of the resistance as a pretext to launch it at an early date, as a model war on how to crush the forces hostile to the Western camp, bringing back to Western military schools the presence of "Israel". The crown of the western camp and its spearhead.

The air force's "clean" strike strategy failed to resolve the battle with Hezbollah, allowing the occupation leaders to develop it under the name of the Israeli "Dahiya Doctrine" in combat, which was attributed to the Chief of Staff, Gadi Eisenkot, and stipulated that achieving victory in asymmetric combat is based on the widespread and intense use of force to shock the enemies of "Israel" with widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and pressure on the hostile society, which will be subjected to a major shock that will make it defeated sooner or later.

"What was not achieved by force... can be achieved with more force"

A popular saying among the Israeli soldiers. 

It seems that the resistance benefited from this example more than the Israelis.

Hezbollah was able to render this strategy devoid, without a round of combat, by accumulating huge missile capabilities, with effective and rapid firepower, that baffled the occupation and represented an effective deterrence to all Israeli intimidations over the years.

According to some statements by senior Israeli political and military figures, the thought of ​​hundreds of missiles raining down on Israeli settlements incites distress among Israeli leaders and makes the cost of this combat strategy very expensive for the entity.

After the failure of the "Dahiya Doctrine," the new Chief of Staff, Aviv Kochavi, came to talk about "crossing arms" and introducing high-tech "hi-tech" into the Israeli army's operations, presenting this equation as a magical solution to the new crisis of the occupation army with land wars.

Arm Wrestling to Restore Offensive Capacity

After the failure of the "Dahiya Doctrine," the new Chief of Staff, Aviv Kochavi, came to talk about "arm wrestling" and integrating "hi-tech" into the Israeli army's operations, presenting this tactic as a magical solution to the shortcomings of the infantry capacities.

In the past, the occupation army had depended on their soldiers' experience and morale to compensate for the disproportion in numbers compared to the Arab armies. Today the IOF resorts to technical superiority to compensate for its shortcomings in contending with the resistance fighters. 

Kochavi believed that providing the Israeli squadrons tasked with offensive operations with advanced means of communication that allow immediate sharing of reconnaissance information, transmitting the image directly from the ground to the operations rooms, and quickly summoning air and artillery coverage, will reflect superiority for the IOF over their asymmetric enemy.

The course of the Ukranian is a potential litmus test for studying this theory of hi-tech integration. Of course, the integration of hi-tech will be to the IOF's convenience and would constitute an advantage to Israeli soldiers during combat, but the important question for the IOF is whether hi-tech integration would enable them to penetrate the deterrence wall, and consequently knowing whether the hassle of hi-tech integration would be effective in the next war. 

Today, the Ukrainian forces amass a counterattack against the Russian forces, with massive reconnaissance and intelligence support, advanced and open armament, and combat tactics coordinated with the most important NATO operations rooms. Most notably, the Ukranian forces are adopting a strategy similar to what Kochavi wanted in the occupation army.

The Ukrainian soldier in the elite forces today has real-time supervision of reconnaissance information: enabling him to adequately direct and correct the targets of the artillery, and permanently deploy drones over the front lines, but despite that, he is unable to achieve a real breakthrough against the Russian trenches. When the Russians insisted on fighting and not withdrawing, the hi-tech equipment of Kiev and its allies suffered significant losses. 

In reality, the fighter who is hassled with hi-tech will become too reliant on this equipment, as he will increasingly grow dependent on them with time, which means that it would be difficult to go to war without them or to swiftly and effectively overcome any technical issue that might incapacitate his equipment. 

After an anonymous party in the Axis of Resistance succeeded in jamming the warning systems and monitoring devices of the Israeli air defense systems, during the recent aggression on Gaza. The most paranoid was the Israeli battalions tasked with offensive operations.

If we were to entertain picturesquely a hypothetical scenario in which a group of the Igoz unit crosses into Lebanese territory, and its communication tech is jammed that would render the soldiers both deaf and blind. Offense and tech-jamming are a recipe for disaster in the ranks of Israeli soldiers. 

Furthermore, Hezbollah has repeatedly hinted about a potential large-scale operation by the resistance against the occupied Galilee territories:  which means the occupation will find itself facing a new scenario that it did not imagine would be repeated after 1973 when the Syrian tanks reached the outskirts of Kinneret lake. 

Currently, "Israel" appears to be facing multiple challenges. Internally, there is an ongoing conflict that poses a risk of dividing the army. Simultaneously, a resilient resistance movement is gaining momentum, accumulating strength, experience, and determination in its confrontational approach. Additionally, Israel's offensive capabilities have not achieved significant success in large-scale military operations for over four decades. 

With the accumulation of its achievements and the validation of its key strategies, the resistance now stands a genuine chance to penetrate the illusory iron barrier that the occupation has fortified itself with over the past few decades.