Wampum

Via Juan Cole, a CSIS operational paper (as opposed to a war and society paper, for an essay on the difference, see The Serious Study of War on Mark Grimsley's Blog Them Out of the Stone Age) by Anthony Cordesman (.pdf, 25pp).

General comments:

1. all references to the military wing of Hizballah should be specific to the IRML -- the Islamic Resistance Movement in Lebanon, and not to the political and social institution,
   
2. the transposition to Iraq and a US-centric focus in "Limits of Intelligence, Targeting, etc" is a distraction, and obscures the reality that in Iraq, it is elements of the Iraqi Regular Army and the Iraqi Reserves, as well as elements formed after April 2003, that are engaging US forces and US proxy forces,
   
3. the inventory assertions for rocket artillery and ballistic missiles appear to all originate in IAF BDA claims,
   
4. the trendy "netcentric" page is ahistorical rubbish, it is well known that the Hizballah is structurally similar to many "democratic centralism" political organizaitons, and the military wing is operationally cell structured,
   
5. the structural criticism of doctrinal air power is good, but is not generalized to political (appropriations) problems posed by integrated military aviation (consumer) and military industrial (producer) lobbys to military planners created by democratic governments, nor generalized to the ROI for offensive strategic (nuclear) air power.
   

Overall the paper is a good-read, but about a third of the content is intended for US consumption and makes only tangential use of the operational experiences of either the Tsahal or the IRML, and should be ignored. The point isn't to "learn" how to win the Iraq War, nor is it to prepare the US for further "asymetric warfare", but to match the expectations of the military planners with the results of the articulations of the forces available to them.

There are some things that stick out, in my mind, as serious errors. The critique of US involvement, the "lessons learned" for the US, should not be limited to how JDAMs are deployed, but to whether the US should have put up an airbridge to resupply the IAF of its depleted JDAM inventory. Cluster munitions don't have an unexpected residual unexploded ordinance problem, the lack of assured detonation fusing is a design failure of many cluster munition products, which is why MLRS and other cluster munition delivery systems are, outside of the US, discussed in the context of violations of the Land Mines Treaty. The US does not face an alphabet soup of policy-indifferent actual or potential "asymetric warfare" actors, rather, US policy, the dominance of military over police, of force insertion over conflict resolution, transforms existing indigenous political institutions, and creates new ones, which rationally pursue military goals in response to actual, or perceived, US pursuit of conflicting military goals.

Typos:

1. page 10, the text "... the Hezbollah did attack Lebanese civilian targets early in the war ..." should read "the IDF" (Tsahal), not Hezbollah,
   

Update: There are more comments on the Cordsman draft at Cordesman on Iran-Hizbullah 'link'. Here's the best bit which I missed:

... no serving Israeli official, intelligence officer, or other military officer felt that the Hezbollah acted under the direction of Iran or Syria.

Worth the detour is Le Moineau's Discipline and Punish.