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

Hezbollah's conduct of its 2006 campaign in southern Lebanon has become an increasingly important case for the U.S. defense debate. Some see the future of warfare as one of nonstate opponents employing irregular methods, and advocate a sweeping transformation of the U.S. military to meet such threats. Others point to the 2006 campaign as an example of a nonstate actor nevertheless waging a state like conventional war, and argue that a more traditional U.S. military posture is needed to deal with such enemies in the future. This monograph, by Dr. Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations and Mr. Jeffrey Friedman, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, seeks to inform this debate by examining in detail Hezbollah's conduct of the 2006 campaign. The authors use evidence collected from a series of 36 primary source interviews with Israeli participants in the fighting who were in a position to observe Hezbollah's actual behavior in the fiend in 2006, coupled with deductive inference from observable Hezbollah behavior in the field to findings for their target strategic intent for the campaign.