The New Generation of War

Defense expert Chet Richards on Lebanon, Iraq, and the future of the American military

Jesse Walker | July 20, 2006

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If the bombardments don't produce whatever result it is that they want, which I assume would be a commitment by the Lebanese to keep Hezbollah out of the area where they could launch attacks against Israel, then you might see a deep stab into Lebanon followed quickly by a withdrawal. Basically a punitive raid. In the end it would accomplish nothing. At that point, if you're Lebanese, how do you stay neutral? The thing about invasion is, it turns dissent into treason.

Reason: If you were an Israeli, what would you want to see the government in Jerusalem doing right now?

CR: If their goal is to ensure rockets aren't directed at them, the only conceivable way they can do that is, eventually, to work some kind of deal with the government of Lebanon. And I don't see that you can do that if you've invaded Lebanon. I think there's going to have to be some behind-the-scenes negotiating between Israel and Lebanon and eventually Syria, which probably means the United States is going to have to throw some serious carrots in the way of both Lebanon and Syria.

Reason: If you were Lebanese, what would you want to see the government in Beirut doing right now?

CR: Right now there's got to be war fever. If you're living in the south, you're definitely going to be under a lot of pressure to support the Hezbollah resistance.

If you're living in the north, which means you're probably a member of one of the Christian or Druze sects, then maybe you figure, "What the heck. We're not involved with these guys. Maybe Hezbollah had it coming." Hezbollah is a political adversary in Parliament, and they've been a military adversary on more than one occasion.

Reason: Some of the places Israel has bombed have traditionally been anti-Hezbollah, which I would think would push some of those people into the other camp.

CR: It would. All I can figure is that for some reason Israel had some targetting information that there was stuff there that they wanted to hit. It might be traditionally anti-Hezbollah as a neighborhood, but there were specific targets in there that they wanted to go after. Otherwise it makes no sense at all.

If I'm a Hezbollah leader, it's a really good idea to have a safe house that's away from known Hezbollah locations. If Israel has been able to find and target those—and I assume they have their usual good human operations going on—then they would strike at them. But it seems to me there's a limit to how long they can keep doing that if they want to have any chance whatsoever of eventually getting the Lebanese government to control Hezbollah.

And of course, Hezbollah is part of the government.

Reason: You had a line in Neither Shall the Sword that reversed Clausewitz's most famous quote. You said that for groups like Hezbollah and Sinn Fein, politics is the continuation of war by other means.

CR: Martin van Creveld is the first guy I heard that from. Clausewitz thought in terms of war in early 19th century Europe. If you look at the map of Europe at that time, it looks like a calico quilt. There's little pieces of statelets all over the place, typically non-contiguous. If you were a princeling, one of the things you might want to do is consolidate your holdings a bit. War was another tool they could use for that.

For organizations like Hezbollah, war is sort of their raison d'etre. It's how they rose to the top: They opposed Israel, they claimed to have driven the Israelis out of south Lebanon. At times, when there's no war, they'll enter the Lebanese government and attempt to use the political process to advance their cause. But their natural state is armed conflict. They refuse to disarm, obviously. War is good for them.

Reason: The other Fourth Generation war on everyone's minds is the occupation of Iraq.

CR: It's not clear that what we have there is a Fourth Generation type conflict. Bill Lind [co-author of the paper that coined the phrase "Fourth Generation warfare"] goes ballistic whenever he hears me say this. But if the main purpose of the fighting there is to push us out, that's just garden variety guerrilla warfare. If there are transnational jihadis coming in, that gives it more of a Fourth Generation flavor, but revolutions have always attracted soldiers of fortune and adventurers and malcontents from all over the world. We invaded, and then after a while some of the elements in there started to attack. It's a largely Christian army plunked down in the middle of the Muslim Middle East. What do you expect?