The 2006 Lebanon Campaign

The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy by Dr. Stephen D. Biddle and Mr. Jeffrey A. Friedman, US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

Many now see future warfare as a matter of nonstate actors employing irregular methods against Western states. This expectation has given rise to a range of sweeping proposals for transforming the US military to meet such threats. In this context, Hezbollah’s 2006 campaign in southern Lebanon has been receiving increasing attention as a prominent recent example of a nonstate actor fighting a Westernized state. In particular, critics of irregular-warfare transformation often cite the 2006 case as evidence that non-state actors can nevertheless wage conventional warfare in state-like ways. This monograph assesses this claim via a detailed analysis of Hezbollah’s military behavior, coupled with deductive inference from observable Hezbollah behavior in the field to findings for their larger strategic intent for the campaign.

The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy

(H/T Mark Vinson)