Ultimately, Hezbollah’s media capability amplified the psychological impact of its guerrilla tactics to offset the IDF’s conventional military superiority. Throughout the fifteen year occupation of southern Lebanon, the casualty rate was consistently in Israel’s favor: Hezbollah suffered 1,248 fatalities and 1,000 wounded, while the IDF lost 256 soldiers and 840 wounded—a much lower casualty count than in Israel’s previous wars. Yet the conflict in Lebanon was perceived as a “war of choice” for Israel, and by the late 1990s pressure from Israeli protest movements called the underlying assumptions of the security zone’s strategic value into question. Amidst increased calls for withdrawal, newly-elected Prime Minister Ehud Barak finally pulled the plug on the operation. (In a sad coda to the conflict that would presage the fate of the Iraqi Security Forces after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, the SLA crumbled after the IDF’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Some fighters surrendered to Lebanon’s government, others fled to Israel.)

Although Israel’s invasion of Lebanon achieved its immediate goal of eliminating the PLO threat to its northern border, the second order effects of the operation inadvertently gave rise to an exponentially greater threat. Since 2000, Hezbollah has become entrenched in Lebanon’s political system, effectively possessing a veto over the nation’s government formation process. More ominously, Hezbollah currently has over 130,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel, and is being supplied with precision guidance kits that make this capability a truly existential threat to Israel.

To be sure, the U.S. military has learned many hard-earned lessons about counterinsurgency over the past two decades, including: the tactical threat posed by IEDs; the central strategic importance of the local population; the problem of foreign support to non-state actors; the benefits and risks of relying on proxy forces; and how information operations can produce strategic effects. Yet many tactical and operational errors—and countless human tragedies—could have been avoided had the U.S. military attempted to learn from the IDF’s experiences in South Lebanon before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began.

Benjamin Runkle is a Senior Policy Fellow with Artis International and an Adjunct Lecturer with The Johns Hopkins University’s Global Security Studies program. He is most recently the author of Generals in the Making: How Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Their Peers Became the Commanders Who Won World War II (Stackpole Books, 2019).

Image: Flickr.