HOW HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL
PART 2: Winning the ground war
By Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
(For Part 1 in this three-part series, Winning the intelligence war, click .)
Israel’s decision to launch a ground war to accomplish what its air force had failed to do was made hesitantly and haphazardly. While Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) units had been making forays into southern Lebanon during the second week of the conflict, the Israeli military leadership remained undecided over when and
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where – even whether – to deploy their ground units.
In part, the army’s indecisiveness over when, where and whether
to deploy its major ground units was a function of the air force’s claims to victory. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) kept claiming that it would succeed from the air – in just one more day, and then another. This indecision was mirrored by the Western media’s uncertainty about when a ground campaign would take place – or whether in fact it had already occurred.
Senior Israeli officers continued to tell their press contacts that the timing of a ground offensive was a tightly kept secret when, in fact, they didn’t know themselves. The hesitation was also the result of the experience of small IDF units that had already penetrated b…
