Saturday, January 3, 2009

Were lessons learned?

As ground incursions are now underway in the Israel-Hamas fight (Operation Cast Lead), this might be as good a time as any for a comparison of how things go vs. how things went in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War in Lebanon.

Fighting in a place like Gaza is a different sort of battle, more of an urban campaign than the long-sightline fighting on the ground between the villages of South Lebanon, but none the less if Israel has not mastered the problems that appeared at that time, going into Gaza will be tough sledding.

Cautionary note to casual readers: The Strategic Survey of the 2006 campaign is a lengthy and detailed read.

1 comment:

Karl Reisman said...

Im thinking at least from the new reports since Sat AM here, that the Israelis only lost one OD and 31 injured, while the Palestinian Death toll is up around 500 Now. The terrain is different, also smaller than South Lebanon, and while Hamas has been working on building Gaza up into the ultimate Urban trap, it' wasn't all that successful what with Israel keeping the whole area under constant surveillance since they pulled out in 2005. Also the Israelis are doing two things differently, Theya re using YouTUBE to spread the IDF line without western media filters o get their side out fairly competently ( if only the GOP could learn from them), and the second rather than doing the "big Mouth Small stick" approach as they did in South Lebanon, the Israelis are using everything in their arsenal to keep civilian casualties down.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090104/D95GCUD00.html

Another difference is that the protestors in the west arent' anti-war, they are just FOR Hamas,as Glen Reynolds has stated. VDH has an even better take on it.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmI4MWRiODAxNzhkN2QwOTk4NGIyYzFmNzdlOTk4MjI=

Go Israel! Go!