US Studies Hezbollah to Prepare Troops

Hezbollah's military performance against Israel in the summer 2006 war is being studied by US defense chiefs in a bid to prepare their armed forces for potential conflicts in the future. Israel launched a full-scale military offensive in an attempt to destroy the Lebanese group in 2006, but their war plans were frustrated when they met fierce resistance from well armed and well trained Hezbollah fighters.

According to an article in The Washington Post published on Monday, US military chiefs were stunned by the effectiveness of Hezbollah fighters against a better equipped Israeli army, and concluded that the group's tactics had shifted from the low intensity conflict that had driven the Israeli military from Lebanon in 2000 to an approach that more resembled conventional warfare.

With the US military engaged in counter insurgency battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, concerns have been raised that it is no longer prepared to effectively fight enemies using conventional tactics.

To counter this, the newspaper reported, the US has sent more than a dozen teams to Israel to interview military officers who fought against Hezbollah in 2006 to glean as much information about their tactics as possible.

They have also organized several multimillion dollar war simulation exercises, in which the enemy was modeled on Hezbollah to prepare soldiers for different types of conflict.

"I've organized five major games in the last two years, and all of them have focused on Hezbollah," Frank Hoffman from the US military's Warfighting Laboratory told the newspaper.

The report also revealed that the US, which considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization, has developed hypothetical scenarios demonstrating how the latest military technology, Future Combat Systems (FCS), could be used to kill Hezbollah fighters at speed without losing many US soldiers in the process.

"Hezbollah relies on low visibility and prepared defenses," a briefing slide from a presentation aimed at senior US officials says. "FCS counters with sensors and robotics to maneuver out of contact."

One of the reasons that Hezbollah's stand and fight tactics may have been so successful in 2006 is that the Israeli military had spent the previous few years suppressing insurgent attacks against its occupation of Palestinian land and may have lost its edge in conventional warfare tactics.

Sections of the defense establishment in Washington are said to be fearful that a similar shift in emphasis within the US military in response to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan could have left it vulnerable to tactics of the type employed by Hezbollah in 2006.

But others say that threat posed by Hezbollah is being exaggerated by US military chiefs who want to shift the emphasis away from counter insurgency and back to traditional methods of warfare.

They argue the US would be better served by concentrated on defeating the waning insurgency in Iraq and its rising counterpart in Afghanistan. "The idea that you can do it all is just wrong," Stephen Biddle, a former adviser to the head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the newspaper.