Hezbollah

It should come as no surprise that news reporting is still indicating that the war that was fought in August of 2006 between Hezbollah and Israel was a success for Hezbollah. The news reporting continues to focus on the fact that the two Israeli soldiers were not rescued and the missile attacks were not stopped. This issue has been brought up again because an incident occurred last week on the Lebanese border involving Hezbollah and Israeli forces.

Once again I will point out that many well trained combat units have broken and fled the field in disorder after suffering losses of far less percentage of the force engaged than Hezbollah lost in August of 2006. The figures of losses vary widely, but even in the most conservative (Least number of losses) Hezbollah lost enough of a percentage to get hurt. Once the fighting ended, the missile attacks did stop. They have not resumed. In fact, it has been extraordinarily quiet on the Israeli-Hezbollah front for the past 18 months. It makes sense that Hezbollah is tentatively beginning active operations again.

Combat units that have been mauled in combat generally take some months to be re-built. This is with plenty of resources available. Rebuilding moral takes longer. This is referring to well-trained units and well-trained replacements. Hezbollah is far from being well trained. It can be expected for irregular units to take longer to rebuild than well-trained ones. 18 months is not an unrealistic amount of time. Israel has not had anything like this type of negative impact. Israel had to deal with the negative political impact. Its military was not hurt in any measurable way. And they lost the battle?

In general, I would not mind losing battles like that one. I certainly would not like to win any battles that maul our forces that much either. I know that our soldiers agree.