"Terrorists are cowards," one Army sergeant told me in Iraq last year. "And they can't shoot worth @$%#!," he added.
Through all the troubles in Iraq, the U.S. military has taken some comfort in its absolute tactical superiority to insurgent forces. In a stand-up fight, U.S. troops always win.
But what if that changed?
Indications are that Hezbollah has achieved the unthinkable. It has combined the elusiveness and agility of a terrorist group with the fighting prowess of a modern army, according to The New York Times:
Hezbollah is a militia trained like an army and equipped like a state, and its fighters are nothing like Hamas or the Palestinians, said a soldier who just returned from Lebanon. They are trained and highly qualified, he said, equipped with flak jackets, night-vision goggles, good communications and sometimes Israeli uniforms and ammunition. All of us were kind of surprised.
This is bad. Real bad.
On the other hand, as fellow blogger and Iraq vet Geoff Edwards has pointed out: the bolder and more tactically proficient a group like Hezbollah gets, the more it looks and acts like an army and the easier it is to find, fix and destroy using precisely those weapons that, against an insurgent force, are nearly useless.
--David Axe
UPDATE, 4:37 EST: Now Reuters is reporting that Israel has shot down a Hezbollah drone:
Israeli aircraft shot down a suspected Hizbollah drone as it flew over Israeli territory on Aug. 7, the Israeli army said. "I can confirm that the air force destroyed a Hizbollah drone," an army spokesman said, but would not provide any other details, including where the drone was flying. Israels Channel One television reported that the drone was believed to be armed, but the army had no comment.
Is this another bit of ignorant reporting like the "drone hits ship" situation a couple weeks back? Or is this the latest example of Hezbollah's remarkable military sophistication?
If it's true, I wonder ... was this drone on a surveillance mission, or doing something more nefarious?
