AIR WAR OVER LEBANON
Andrew Brookes
8 August 2006
At the end of June, Palestinian Hamas members tunnelled into Israel, killing two soldiers and abducting Cpl Gilad Shalit. The focus then switched to Lebanon where Hizbullah, the Iranian-inspired ‘Party of God’, crossed the border on 12 July and abducted two Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. When the Israelis went in hot pursuit, Hizbullah destroyed one of their tanks with a mine – and fired on the tank’s would-be rescuers – killing eight Israeli soldiers. Hizbullah’s leader Hassan Nasrullah went on television to say that if Israel chose confrontation, ‘We are ready’.
Experience during its 18-year occupation of Lebanon convinced Israel that it should never again be dragged into another such occupation . The Israeli Ministry of Defence fashioned a new counter-guerrilla doctrine termed ‘the vulture and the snake’. The air force became the offensive force (the vultures) that would destroy any guerrillas (the snakes), wherever they might be. Multi-role jets would destroy guerrilla strongholds, helicopters would pick off enemy combatants while unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would select and track targets. Ground forces would defend Israel’s territorial integrity but would only make quick ‘in and out’ incursions to destroy pockets of guerrillas that might escape air power.
At the cutting edge of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) are 25 F-15I Ra’am (Thunder) and around 20 F-16I Block 50 Sufa (Storm).As further F-16Is are only being delivered at a rate of two per month, the bulk of the IAF ground-attack effort into Lebanon falls on 126 older multi-role F-16Cs and Ds. Israel’s first move was to blockade Lebanon. The IAF cratered the runways of Beirut’s international airport and began to pound Hizbullah’s headquarters, killing its leadership, destroying its arsenal of Syrian and Iranian weaponry, and knocking out roads and bridges to prevent Hizbullah’s friends from sending in new supplies.
But while Operation Change of Direction (also referred to as Just Desserts and Appropriate Retribution) was being launched, the ‘snake’ bit back on 13 July by launching a rocket at Israel’s third-largest city, Haifa. The head of Israeli Military Intelligence reported in 2004 that Hizbullah had 13,000 rockets, mostly inaccurate Katyushas with ranges of 11–25km. More worrying was the assessment that Hizbullah may also have about 500 Fajr-3 &5 missiles with ranges of up to 75km, and possibly a few dozen Zelzal-2 missiles with a 115km range.
The next day Hizbullah hit the corvette INS Hanit with an Iranian-supplied C-802 cruise missile off Lebanon, killing four sailors and severely damaging the ship’s flight deck and steering systems. Hanit, part of the naval blockade of Lebanon, was well equipped to defend itself but its self-defence suites were not fully activated at the time. As Hizbullah was believed to have received targeting information from the Lebanese Navy’s radar station in Beirut, Israel destroyed all the radar stations along the Lebanese shore immediately after the attack.
On 16 July, IAF commander Maj.-Gen. Eliezer Shkedy said that his fast jets had made over 1,000 flights and his attack helicopters over 350. Chief of Staff Lt-Gen. Dan Halutz, a former IAF commander, said that 100 F-15s and F-16s had been employed against Hizbullah. Given the lack of aerial opposition, most of the sorties were strike missions.
By 18 July Hizbullah had fired over 700 rockets into Israel, a massive escalation from the previous random harassing fire against border settlements and military posts. The IAF was now flying 200 missions a day against militia strongholds as well as major roads and bridges throughout Lebanon. Tel Aviv had to request up to $210 million in JP-8 military aviation jet fuel from the US. However, although air strikes on southern Lebanon, Beirut and the Bekaa Valley took out five long-range and ten short-range Hizbullah rocket launchers, they failed to reduce rocket attacks on Acre and settlements across Galilee. Israel continued to emphasise that ’we are talking about an air war, with limited use of special operations troops. We want to keep our signature on the ground very low.’
Rockets caused heavy damage to a major IAF base at Meron, the regional air operations centre, 20km inside Israel, that was directing the campaign in Lebanon. The attacks also affected IAF use of its AH-64 Apache and AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters, whose landing grounds were within rocket range. The IAF had to transfer its helicopter maintenance and logistics centre from northern Israel to a base in the Negev.
The IAF offset its helicopter difficulties by expanding the use of UAVs for reconnaissance and attack missions. At least two UAVs provided 24-hour coverage over Lebanon, with the Israel Aircraft Industries’ Searcher 2 and the Elbit Systems Hermes 450 (chosen for the British Watchkeeper programme) transmitting real-time targeting data directly into F-15 and F-16 cockpits. On one occasion, this enabled the IAF to report that it had destroyed a truck in Beirut carrying an Iranian-made Zelzal long-range missile. On 31 July a Harpy UAV, which is designed to detect and destroy enemy defence radars with its high-explosive warhead, destroyed a Hizbullah checkpoint and a truck suspected of supplying Syrian weapons.
Two weeks into its military assault against Hizbullah, Israel declared that it would occupy a strip inside southern Lebanon with ground troops. Meanwhile, four unarmed UN observers were killed when an Israeli air strike hit their observation post near the Israeli border. On 28 July, Hizbullah fired its first medium-range Iranian-made Fajr-5 rocket, which landed near Afula, 50km south of the Lebanese border. The same day it was claimed that Israeli F-16s killed a Hizbullah commander said to be involved in smuggling ’strategic arms to Hizbullah, including long-range missiles’.
On 1 August the Israeli cabinet unanimously extended its military campaign into Lebanon. The following day Hizbullah fired an unprecedented number of rockets against northern Israeli towns in an apparent reply to the seizure of five of its fighters. As Hizbullah rockets struck further into Israel, CH-53 Sea Stallion-borne commandos launched Israel’s deepest raid into Lebanon. IAF warplanes resumed their attacks against Beirut’s battered southern suburbs after a six-day halt, killing five people. More than 70 targets were hit throughout the country, with heavy air strikes in the eastern Bekaa valley. On 3 August Hizbullah fired more than 230 Katyusha rockets at Israel, including about 130 in a single hour.
Assessment
For the past four weeks, the IAF has enjoyed air supremacy and conducted free flights almost at will. The mightiest air force in the Middle East has mounted over 5,000 offensive missions, predominantly with F-16s but with more than 700 flown by attack helicopters. But Hizbullah is doing more than simply surviving. It has fired around 3,000 rockets and missiles to date, with the deadliest barrage on 6 August killing 12 Israeli Army reservists.That still leaves the militant organisation with around 10,000 rockets, many of the long-range variety. In being able to force 12% of the Israeli population to live in shelters and paralyse the northern part of the country, Hizbullah is proving adept at asymmetric warfare.
For all the kerosene expended, air power is not the answer to the problem. ‘You have to go from one Hizbullah [weapons] bunker to another’, said one senior officer. ‘Some of these bunkers are seven meters deep and can’t be destroyed by aircraft, even if you could find them.’ The IAF learned that lesson on 19 July when it dropped 23 tonnes of munitions on a Hizbullah headquarters in Beirut and still failed to penetrate the thick walls of the underground command headquarters. This resulted in the hasty dispatch of GBU-28 ‘bunker-buster’ bombs from the US via Prestwick in the UK.
The military hierarchy led by Lt-Gen. Halutz was convinced that communications and air power, rather than troops, would rapidly win Israel’s wars. But as Halutz now recognises, ‘an air force cannot stick a flag on the hilltop’. The IAF that once destroyed whole air forces in a few days has so far been unable to stop Hizbullah rocket strikes. Despite starting the conflict with a pre-set ‘bank’ of targets, on every night Israeli combat aircraft have tried to destroy Hizbullah’s TV station without success. Moreover, having the latest sensor-to-shooter technology did not prevent F-16s from killing 16 children at Qana on 30 July, or 33 farm workers packing fruit in a warehouse on 4 August. The conflict has also taken its toll on Israeli air and ground crews. On 19 July an F-16I crashed during take-off from Ramon in the Negev. The IAF has also lost three Apaches, two of which collided while returning from a strike in south Lebanon. An AH-64D Apache Longbow was lost on 24 July when its main rotor separated during a fire suppression mission. It may have been struck by friendly artillery fire.
Many hundreds of Lebanese have now been killed by Israeli air strikes and at least 400,000 have been forced to flee their homes. Around 100 Israeli civilians and soldiers have died. However, Tel Aviv has claimed that the IAF bombing campaign has severely weakened Hizbullah, but there is little evidence for that. The militant organisation continues to fire rockets into Israel and its support will have increased in response to the air attacks. Once again, the idea that air power can be a substitute for military skill on the ground or patient resolution of disputes is proving beguiling but illusory.
