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Europe under extreme duress

R

Random8145

Registered User
Contributor
Spekkio said:
I don't know why you are bolding Hezbollah. I used the word Hamas in my prior post because the primary conflict is between them and Israel, with Hezbollah supporting Hamas and the U.S. supporting Israel. That was the basis of using Hamas in my example of attacking American military and political leadership. There is a separate, protracted conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, but the two need to be analyzed separately.

I disagree with your assertion here that Israel's actions have consolidated their front against Lebanon. Implicit in this contention is that the Hezbollah leadership represents their theater-strategic center of gravity, which a C2 structure rarely does. The only way this helps Israel achieve its aims is if the change in leadership will result in a favorable shift in Lebanon's national policy - extremely unlikely in this case given Hezbollah's popular support (the political party, not the individuals). The other case where this helps is if Israel thinks it can defeat Hamas in the time it will take Hezbollah's leadership to reorganize - I also think that's completely unrealistic.

I think that the operation will have the opposite effect - it's going to strengthen Hezbollah's morale to fight against Israel and ramp up their aggressiveness in attacking them, creating an increasing distraction against their fight against Hamas. In other words, it's going to widen the two-front conflict rather than consolidate it. Meanwhile, popular support for Israel in the U.S. continues to decrease, making support cost increasing political capital - a fact the Biden administration is acutely aware of.
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Hezbollah is the one who escalated against Israel by massively increasing their rocket attacks after Hamas attacked. They have forced a massive evacuation in parts of Northern Israel. Israel responded by killing a bunch of their leaders. I do not for the life of me understand this view that such an attack will strengthen Hezbollah's resolve to fight Israel and increase their aggressiveness---they already have a tremendous resolve to fight and already significantly increased their aggressiveness. They are Iran's largest proxy and the world's largest non-state military force. After a certain point, the enemy hates you so much that you can't worry about them "increasing their resolve" when you counter attack because of their already having increased their aggressiveness towards you and already maniacally hating you. Hezbollah wants the destruction of Israel. They are not some Muslim state that maybe doesn't like Israel too much but that otherwise isn't hellbent on Israel's destruction either.
Spekkio said:
There may have been some alternative intel that motivated the cell-phone strike, but if that's the case I go back to my statement that Israel has a gross IO failure following the operation.

The only way for Israel to capitalize on the short-term gains to Hezbollah's degraded leadership is to take military action in southern Lebanon to defeat them before they can reorganize. Besides the fact that Israel lacks the military capability to do this without U.S. support that we aren't willing to give at this time, that option would significantly degrade Israel's legitimacy among other nations.
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What makes you think it will be short-term before Hezbollah can reorganize. It takes time to replace military leadership with capable leaders if you kill enough of the chain of command.
Spekkio said:
Biden did condemn Nasrallah, but he has also been steadfast about an internationally approved ceasefire plan that has been unpalatable to Netanyahu. Our primary policy goal is deescalation.

We assassinated Soleimani under a different administration with different policy goals. It also turned a lot of heads at the time. I already said a couple posts ago that Netanyahu's gambit would payoff with a Trump re-election.

None of this is an endoresement of Hezbollah or Hamas being the "good guys" like the idiots protesting on college campuses. They are, unequivocally, at odds with U.S. national security and present a threat to our families. But just like we can't off Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, Putin, or whoever, Israel can't off Hezbollah's leadership and "win." Closer to home, we can't execute a bunch of prominent cartel leaders in South America and celebrate a win against illegal immigration, fentanyl, and cocaine. It's not that simple, even if it was fucking cool that Israel wiped out senior leaders in a matter of a couple of days. In this context, we have to divorce ourselves from the emotional "hell yeah, they killed bad guys" from how to best achieve political objectives and end-states.
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Actually, I'd say if Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, or Putin were having their countries directly attack America indiscriminately and were acting as a terrorism force, we would be fully justified in killing all of them. Just because one is a head of state doesn't put them into some protected class if they are engaging in out-and-out terrorism and warfare. But those countries, while our opponents and enemies, are not engaging in such.
 
Spekkio

Spekkio

He bowls overhand.
There's a lot of emotion in your post. If leaders make decisions based on a childish 'but mom, he hit me first!' train of thought, they're usually going to make mistakes.

We have a very recent example of conducting a regime change in Iraq due to Saddam's unwillingness to comply with UN resolutions wrt WMD inspections.

We could have decided to conduct missile strikes against Saddam and his military leadership (we could have done this as early as the first Gulf War), but we did not do this and instead conducted a ground invasion to defeat their military forces and topple the government entirely. The reason being from a theoretical standpoint is that political and military leadership have lines of succession and we have to rely on wishful thinking that killing someone's boss is going to make the next guy say 'oh crap, I better not do that' vice emboldening their resolve for revenge. Furthermore, assassinating political leaders generally degrades one's legitimacy.

So the real question is whether Israel has the capability to conduct an invasion and regime change in Southern Lebanon? Do they have the international support to do this? And if they do, should they undertake this task before getting to a more stable point in its conflict against Hamas?

Israel's mistake isn't about whether or not they are justified in believing that they have the moral high ground to assassinate people. To argue that Israel's strategy is sound is making a huge indictment to our own doctrine for conducting war.
 
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Flash

Flash

SEVAL/ECMO
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Super Moderator
Contributor
Hair Warrior said:
It’s not lost on me that China test launched an ICBM in the past week - the first such test in decades. That isn’t a coincidence.
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Correlation ≠ Causation.

Why do I say that? There is a lot of work that goes into testing an ICBM, especially if it is an operational one. We pull operational Minuteman III's out of their silos, replace the nuke warheads with dummy ones, ship them down to Vandenburg, check them out to make sure everything is good to go and then stuff them in a silo there to test. It is not a short process for us and likely isn't for anyone else.
 
R

Random8145

Registered User
Contributor
Spekkio said:
There's a lot of emotion in your post. If leaders make decisions based on a childish 'but mom, he hit me first!' train of thought, they're usually going to make mistakes.

We have a very recent example of conducting a regime change in Iraq due to Saddam's unwillingness to comply with UN resolutions wrt WMD inspections.

We could have decided to conduct missile strikes against Saddam and his military leadership (we could have done this as early as the first Gulf War), but we did not do this and instead conducted a ground invasion to defeat their military forces and topple the government entirely. The reason being from a theoretical standpoint is that political and military leadership have lines of succession and we have to rely on wishful thinking that killing someone's boss is going to make the next guy say 'oh crap, I better not do that' vice emboldening their resolve for revenge. Furthermore, assassinating political leaders generally degrades one's legitimacy.
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Hezbollah's leaders are not political leaders in the normal sense, they are terrorists. And if killing such "degrades one's legitimacy," not really sure what to say there. So apparently one is to just let them continue to attack and not do anything destructive to them lest it make them even more violent ?:confused: I think you're looking at it backwards. How about it be viewed that leaders engaging in such types of attacks degrades their legitimacy? And that such types of attacks will only embolden the country being attacked to fight back? I disagree that Israel's decision-making is childish at all on this. Hezbollah has been repeatedly attacking them for months. It isn't like they launched some rockets and Israel then retaliated by taking out their leadership. Also, if it doesn't make the next leadership think twice, so what? Then kill them too if they start up with the same nonsense.
Spekkio said:
So the real question is whether Israel has the capability to conduct an invasion and regime change in Southern Lebanon? Do they have the international support to do this? And if they do, should they undertake this task before getting to a more stable point in its conflict against Hamas?

Israel's mistake isn't about whether or not they are justified in believing that they have the moral high ground to assassinate people. To argue that Israel's strategy is sound is making a huge indictment to our own doctrine for conducting war.
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How is it an indictment of our own method of conducting war?
 
Hair Warrior

Hair Warrior

Well-Known Member
Contributor
ChuckMK23 said:
US is hedging (JSF is notably absent)

www.defense.gov

DOD Enhances Middle East Defense Posture

The Defense Department has taken steps to further enhance the defense posture of U.S. forces throughout the Middle East region to deter aggression and mitigate the risk of a broader regional conflict.
www.defense.gov
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According to the press release, CVN-72 is being tasked to remain in the area, and according to the wikipedia page for CSG-3, CVW-9 includes VMFA-314, which flies the F-35C. But who knows if any of that is current and/or accurate.
 
Brett327

Brett327

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Hair Warrior said:
According to the press release, CVN-72 is being tasked to remain in the area, and according to the wikipedia page for CSG-3, CVW-9 includes VMFA-314, which flies the F-35C. But who knows if any of that is current and/or accurate.
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It is. They also have the first deployed NJG squadron in that CVW. This is public info.
 
Flash

Flash

SEVAL/ECMO
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
tumblr_n31vhxYjs41sp5x9to2_r1_400.gif


Iran launched another missile attack against Israel.
 
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