This author believes Israel will have to go deep into Lebanon to fight the Iran-created proxy army that has built up a huge rocket and missile arsenal to bombard Israeli civilians. That will be an opportunity for Hezbollah:
Despite these challenges, our task force found an IDF fully committed to compliance with the LOAC, knowing full well Hezbollah seeks to exploit this very same commitment. We worry, however, that the nature of a major combined arms operation will contribute to the operational and legal misperceptions that are so adeptly exploited by enemies like Hezbollah, resulting in false condemnation of Israel from the international public, media and many states.
How this story plays out for Israel will have reverberating effects for other professional militaries, including our own. Unless the challenges of such operations become more widely understood, with more credible assessments of legality, morality and legitimacy, others will be incentivized to replicate Hezbollah’s perverse tactics.
Yes, the limits of Iron Dome will require Israel to go deep into Lebanon to own the launch sites rather than hope they can improve on their failed 2006 air campaign to knock out a far smaller number of rockets. And the willingness of much of the world to believe that lawful Israeli military operations are war crimes make going in on the ground potentially a propaganda disaster.
The way to solve that problem isn't to fight so gingerly that the world will recognize the legality of the operations--they won't know matter what. But to try to make sure the next war is the last war against Hezbollah by going in deep past the missile-launching zone with massive ground power with the intention of inflicting a lasting defeat on Hezbollah by tearing up their combat forces and rear echelon forces and support infrastructure.
The authors say that Hezbollah is combat experienced from their long and bloody role fighting for Assad in the multi-war that developed in Syria. But the casualties bled Hezbollah. And the combat experience was on the offense against other light infantry.
If the Israelis hit Hezbollah with a mechanized and airborne ground attack supported by fires from the ground and air and with cyber and psychological warfare enhancing the attack, Hezbollah will find their experience counter-productive for the duration of the Israeli invasion. Going slow will only allow more of the Hezbollah combat veterans to adapt to the new style of fighting and then make their combat experience pay off.
With some luck and work, the Lebanese government and the thus-far ineffective UN force in southern Lebanon will be able to regain control of that territory from the non-state Iranian proxy force.
Seriously, if there is no way you can win a series of wars with an enemy because your side simply won't be judged to be fighting lawfully no matter how much you hamstring your combat operations, don't fight a series of wars that are constantly portrayed as unlawful--fight one major war lawfully to achieve a substantial victory and end the series of propaganda defeats at just one.
As an aside, yes Hezbollah has not launched a new war for overs a dozen years. But is that really a result of the losses in the 2006 war? It may simply be that with the heavy Hezbollah commitment and losses in the Syrian multi-war on behalf of Iran and Assad that Hezbollah simply wasn't able to fight a two-front war. Now that the Syria war is apparently winding down with the looming defeat of the last rebels in Idlib province, Hezbollah may be dusting themselves off and looking south again.
