Warfare: Conventional, asymmetric, dare we whisper nuclear -- let's call the whole thing off.

A tiny smidgen of at least lukewarm if not good news emerged as the cross-border rocket war continued between Israel and Hezbollah.  Giora Eiland, a retired major general in Israel’s defense forces was quoted in the New York Times today explaining why Hezbollah’s rocket assault on Israel was not aimed directly at population centers such as Haifa, Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, all of which at least some of Hezbollah’s rockets are capable of striking.  Speaking of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Eiland said, “He’s trying to maneuver between two conflicting needs: staying out of a total war and responding to the very successful attacks in Lebanon.  He understands very well that full destruction of the Lebanese capital isn’t something he’ll be able to explain to the Lebanese people.”

Hezbollah came into being during the war to expel Israel’s army from Lebanon in the early 80’s when Israel bombed huge sections of Beirut.  Hezbollah blossomed during the civil war in Lebanon that followed, during which the parts of Beirut that weren’t damaged by Israel were flatted by artillery fired across the “Green Line” that separated West Beirut, where Palestinian factions ruled, from largely Christian East Beirut.  The civil war lasted from 1975 to 1990 and caused more than 150,000 casualties, drove a million Lebanese into exile, and destroyed Beirut, which until the civil war was known as “The Paris of the Middle East” and served as a center of banking for the entire region.

What the Israeli general seemed to be saying to the Times was that not even Hezbollah wants a war that would cause a second destruction of the Lebanese capital.  Hezbollah has the largest military in Lebanon, far bigger than the Lebanese army, with tens of thousands of heavily armed fighters and an arsenal of ballistic missiles and rockets said to rival Israel’s own.  But neither Hezbollah nor the Lebanese military has an anti-missile defense equivalent to Israel’s Iron Dome that has protected its population centers from recent missile and drone attacks by Hamas and Iran. 

The ground has shifted since the civil war of the 70’s and 80’s.  Lebanon has bounced back as a nation.  Beirut has returned as a center of commerce in the Middle East and even a tourist destination, at least until the latest fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, during which many airlines have canceled their flights into and out of Beirut’s airport.  Hezbollah isn’t just a Palestinian militia; it is a significant political force in Lebanon with positions of power in the Lebanese government and a constituency of supporters and voters it represents in the Lebanese parliament. 

When Israel attacked Hezbollah last week with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, there were headlines asking if this sort of asymmetrical warfare was the future of international conflicts.  Today the Times published an excellent op-ed positing in its headline the theory that Israel’s “pager attacks have changed the world.”  The story points out the vulnerability of every country’s security to its “international supply chain” of computer-centric devices that run not only families’ entertainment devices, but the economies of the nations they live in.  The Washington Post reported last December that Chinese military hackers had broken into the computer systems of a major port on the West Coast, the Texas power grid (which is separate from the grid of the rest of the country), a water supply system in Hawaii, and an oil and gas pipeline. 

The Times op ed, written by Bruce Schneier, a “security technologist” at Harvard University, pointed out that the Israeli pager attack brought “into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like — in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding gray zone in between.” 

That’s the nut of it.  Even Israel’s air and missile assaults on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hezbollah’s retaliatory missile attacks yesterday exist in modern warfare’s new “gray zone.”  Israel isn’t bombarding Beirut in the way that Putin has rocketed and shelled population centers in Ukraine, leveling small towns and nearly completely destroying cities such as Mariupol and Kherson, hitting civilian targets that have included hospitals, schools, power stations and even cultural landmarks like theaters and cathedrals.  The strike Israel carried out on Friday in the Beirut suburb of Dahiya killed multiple Hezbollah commanders, including the man who masterminded the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.  The airstrike took out the high-rise apartment building housing the ten Hezbollah leaders and killed 14 civilians and wounded dozens, according to the Associated Press.  The dead and wounded included women and children, according to other reports.

It's hard to look at a bombing attack like this one, or the pager hack on Hezbollah that also killed more than a dozen civilians, including women and children, and think of them as limited in scope, but they are.  Another way to go after the Hezbollah leaders killed on Friday would have been to flatten the entire neighborhood where they were thought to reside.  Rather than attacking Hezbollah militants using exploding pagers, Israel could have identified them using intelligence operatives and hit them with air-to-ground missiles or Kamikaze drones, both of which Israel has used in the past to take out Hezbollah commanders.  No matter the manner of attack – pager, drone, or missile – the nature of warfare against a non-uniformed enemy that lives and operates militarily among the civilian populace means that civilians are likely to be killed when engaging the enemy with the aim of killing him or her.

The idea of launching attacks on a civilian power grid, energy infrastructure, hospitals, or communications and transportation systems is not a new one.  Russia has been doing that almost daily in Ukraine since 2022.  The new idea is that such attacks may one day amount to the totality of the manner of warfare launched by one nation against another.  It is known that China and Russia have both begun developing space-based weapons systems that could be used to attack communications satellites that quite literally run the information economies of the Western world. 

There have been multiple reports in the media since the emergence of Artificial Intelligence that the U.S. is going to have to protect its chip development and manufacturing in order to defend against hostile foreign nations achieving the same gains we have accomplished and are in the process of advancing further.  Practically every level of computer-based manufacturing and product development has national security implications for this country and every other Western nation.

It is unclear what all of this reflects.  For now, it appears that nations are wary about escalating the nature of weaponry used in warfare.  It is suspected that Vladimir Putin has refrained from using battlefield nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine because he knows that use of nukes might cause the West to launch massive retaliatory attacks on Russia that would involve attacking Moscow and the Kremlin itself, something Putin apparently has no interest in setting off.  Now it is thought that even Hezbollah is pulling its punches in the way it retaliates against attacks by Israel for fear that a wider war would not only deal a deadly blow to Hezbollah, but blow up the country in which they operate, in the current case, Lebanon.

The U.S. has held back some of its most deadly weapons from Ukraine for fear of “poking the bear,” as it is said of provoking Russia, causing a more violent conflict in Ukraine or the possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia.

The warfare now being waged around the world is not less deadly.  Civilians are being killed in Gaza, Lebanon, Israel, Ukraine, and in multiple countries in Africa that face insurgencies and political unrest.  The uncomfortable fact about war is that soldiers are not the only ones who die.  You need look no further than the destruction during World War II in London, Dresden, Berlin, and Tokyo for evidence of that, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  In this country, civilians who lived downwind of nuclear weapons test sites in Nevada and New Mexico are still dying from cancers caused by fallout, and the same is true in some island nations close to where nuclear weapons were tested in the Pacific. 

Looked at just in terms of dead bodies, there are no winners in wars.  The 58,000 American soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam “for a mistake,” in the memorable words of John Kerry, did not want to be there, had no bone to pick with the Vietnamese people, and left behind mothers and fathers and loved ones in this country who still mourn them.  The same is true of the soldiers who were killed more recently in wars now seen as mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

There have been some who have charged that Israel’s use of exploding pagers against Hezbollah was a war crime.  By that definition, any death of any civilian during a military conflict is a war crime, no matter the weapon.  A Russian missile that strikes a hospital in Mariupol in Ukraine is a war crime; a missile fired by a Houthi militant on a civilian ship that kills a merchant seaman is a war crime; an American bomb dropped on a mud village occupied by the Taliban is a war crime; the entirety of the B-52 strikes on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were war crimes.

Wars are terrible things, all of them, because people are killed, both soldier and civilian.  Writing about war is painful.  My father told me the only time he ever saw his father, General Truscott, break down and weep was when he spoke of the bodies of American soldiers who had been killed following his orders during the war.  

The nature of war demands that you kill your own in order to kill theirs.  Can’t we call the whole thing off?