Military Capabilities for Hybrid War: Insights from the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon and Gaza

Abstract : What kind of Army does the United States require to protect its interests in the future? Will the future challenges facing the United States be, as some argue, centered on "irregular warfare" (IW), similar to Iraq and Afghanistan?1 Will they be conflicts against state actors, like North Korea or Iran? Or might they be "hybrid wars," defined by defense analyst Frank Hoffman as a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war"?2 This paper examines the experience of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the recent conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza to argue for balanced Army forces, capable of joint combined arms fire and maneuver, to provide the range of capabilities needed to prevail in future conflicts. Furthermore, as recent U.S. operations have shown, Army forces are particularly important against irregular adversaries where there is often a requirement for "boots on the ground" for a protracted period of time to reach desired strategic end states. Hybrid opponents only increase the challenges the joint force-especially ground forces-might face. The U.S. military, particularly its ground forces, has made significant adaptations to its high-end warfighting skills in response to the IW environments in Afghanistan and Iraq.3 This adaptation is evident in the implementation of a new counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine that has markedly increased U.S. effectiveness in both of these wars. Nevertheless, the opponents the United States and its partners have faced in Afghanistan and Iraq have limited military capabilities, especially in the realms of training, organization, equipment, and command and control (C2). Therefore, to better understand the breadth of IW challenges that should affect U.S. decisions about future military capabilities, one must look elsewhere.