Each war is different and brings with it unique lessons.
And while the book is far from closed on the long-term implications of Israel’s military campaign to extinguish Iran’s so-called “Ring of Fire” strategy to encircle the Jewish state with its proxy forces — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and pro-Iran militias in Iraq — the events of the last month have written a few chapters that will likely be studied in war colleges for decades.
The conventional wisdom, and coincidentally the position of President Joe Biden 's administration , is that an all-out attack on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to put an end to the cross-border rocket attacks that displaced 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the north, would be a foolhardy effort. It would, in this view, prompt Hezbollah to unleash its vast arsenal of Iranian-supplied missiles on Israeli cities, resulting only in more death and destruction along with the risk of a wider war with Iran.
But those assumptions, as reasonable as they may have seemed, were completely upended by a methodical, some might say a diabolical, plan that rivaled the fabled Trojan Horse of Greek mythology in its ingenious use of subterfuge.
The Israeli scheme to manufacture booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, sell them to Hezbollah fighters under the guise that they were indestructible and spy-proof, and then use them to eavesdrop and track the terrorists was years in the making.
And then, on Sept. 17, Israel’s Mossad intelligence service triggered the tiny bombs hidden in the hand-held devices, killing or maiming as many as 3,000 Hezbollah members, including senior leaders.
Because the pagers required two buttons to be pushed at the same time to receive an encrypted message, many of the fighters suffered wounds to both hands, including the loss of fingers, when fateful messages arrived to simultaneously detonate the devices.
The surprise attack was just the opening salvo in a campaign of precisely targeted airstrikes, made possible by the very intelligence gathered from the compromised communications devices, that eliminated every major and minor player in the Hezbollah chain of command.
“I can't find any parallel in the innovation, intelligence, audacity, and simultaneous attack on a military higher command that had such an impactful result,” John Spencer, chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “The American military has never been able to do that — not with al-Qaida, the Taliban, nobody.
“By the end of the week, [Israel] had eliminated the complete organizational chart of Hezbollah, which is a very big military of around 200,000 people. Even when somebody was nominated as the new leader, that leader was eliminated.”
The assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was “a seismic event,” New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley said in a recent podcast . “Nasrallah was immensely influential, immensely powerful. And it’s hard to overstate how much of a blow his death was to Hezbollah. He was their talisman. He was their longtime leader, their strategist.”
Hezbollah was left leaderless and in disarray, as Israel next went after the missiles that might otherwise have been launched in retaliation.
The psychological impact was devastating, Spencer said. “To believe somebody is so much more superior than you that they've gotten inside of all your equipment, you can't trust any of your equipment.”
Iran was rattled too. Its Ring of Fire strategy relies on its proxy forces to form a first line of defense against Israel, while allowing it to conduct its malign actions in the region with a hands-off approach that allows it to claim, however implausibly, some degree of deniability.
Now, Hezbollah was expecting its sponsor to avenge its humiliation, risking a widening of the war.
In April, when Iran launched more than 150 missiles and 170 drones at Israel in retaliation for an Israel strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria, almost all were shot down by Israeli and U.S. missile defenses.
Iran seemed hesitant to try again but needed to respond or appear weak.
Its October attack proved no more successful than its first.
Suddenly, neither Hezbollah nor Iran seemed to be the threat it was once perceived to be.
“Iran's on their back heel,” former U.S. Central Commander and retired Marine Corps Gen. Frank McKenzie said in an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation. “Their strike against Israel … was not particularly successful. Their principal ally in the region, Hezbollah, has been decapitated, and its own offensive capability is greatly limited.
“Israel has the ability to operate, not with impunity, but with great force over Iran at a time or place of their choosing.”
Iran was suddenly feeling particularly vulnerable.
Hezbollah was a key part of its regional military alliance known as the “Axis of Resistance,” but it turned out to be a modern-day Maginot Line.
Iran has the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East, and it used its best, fastest, top-of-the-line missiles against Israel with little to show for it.
With no air force to speak of, Iran increasingly sees Israel as an existential threat in the same way Israel sees Iran as bent on the destruction of the Jewish state.
Arms control advocates worry that if Israel presses its current advantage too much, it could push Tehran to develop nuclear weapons.
“Iran already has the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear explosive device — that knowledge cannot be bombed away,” Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball warned. “Any setback in Iran’s nuclear capabilities would be temporary and would likely lead Iran to rebuild its program and further harden its facilities against future attacks.”
McKenzie, who, until 2022, was the top U.S. commander for the Middle East responsible for contingency plans to take out Iran’s infrastructure, said it's “not as easy as you might think for them to just declare, you know, we're going nuclear, or to go nuclear.”
“Even if they do develop the fissile material [for a bomb], which they could do within a matter of days or weeks, they still have a delivery problem,” McKenzie said. "They've got to create a missile and an entry system that will allow it to take the missile to Tel Aviv or whatever target they choose. That's a matter of many months."
That would be plenty of time for Israel and the United States to mount a preemptive strike, given that both countries have the same stated goal: that Iran must never possess an offensive nuclear capability.
“And that's the valley of death for Iran because you're in that period of time they will have declared nuclear and they will be vulnerable,” McKenzie said.
“The answer is no,” Biden said when asked if he would support an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites by Israel. “They have a right to respond, but they should respond proportionally.”
McKenzie said that while Israel could degrade Iran’s nuclear capacity, it could not take it out completely without U.S. help.
“We have special capabilities that allow us to get at it,” McKenzie said on CBS. “The Israelis do not have all of those capabilities. Because of its size, complexity, and scope and how it's expanded over the last 10 years, it's a very difficult target to take out.”
Former President Donald Trump is among the Republicans who favor a strike to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, saying at a rally in North Carolina this month that Biden was wrong to rule it out.
“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to hit? I mean, it’s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons,” Trump said. “When they asked him that question, the answer should have been, hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.”
It’s a rare instance in which Trump’s former national security adviser and inveterate critic agrees.
“Israel's response should not be proportionate,” John Bolton said on CNN. “I don't know what the word proportionate means here. When Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, should our response have been proportionate, to sink an equal number of battleships that Japan had sunk?
“Can you assure Israel that the next time Iran fires a ballistic missile from its territory, that under the nose cone of that missile, there's not going to be a nuclear weapon? Iran's nuclear program is the biggest threat. Israel is a small country. Six, eight, 10 nuclear weapons, there's not much of a country left.”
“You should never take a potential target off the menu,” McKenzie advised. “You want your adversary to have to plan to defend everything. I would argue, just from a purely military point of view, there are perhaps targets [that] are more productive to hit in an initial response.”
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Meanwhile, Israel’s defanging of Hezbollah would be called a textbook example of how to decapitate your enemy’s leadership, if there were such a manual.
“Israel has waged the most impressive high-value target campaign in history,” Spencer said. “Writing the book on targeted warfare.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com .
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