Israel's lack of vision in multi-front war could be fatally exposed Israel

As Israelis approached the start of the High Holidays last week, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the news began to spread. Several IDF units fighting on the border with Lebanon suffered casualties in at least two different locations. Soldiers had died in battle and many were wounded.

The confirmation of the wounded and dead, if not the circumstances, served as a stark reminder to Israelis of the blows that come with war, even as Israel's punishing air offensive has killed hundreds of Lebanese and wounded more. The soldiers' deaths came after two weeks in which Israel carried out a series of strikes against Hezbollah, including the killing of the group's leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and much of its top leadership.

This sense of danger was underscored by another story that slowly emerged last week: how the wave of Iranian missiles fired against Israel was not as inconsequential as Israeli leaders initially claimed, but instead showed that a Not only could a large-scale attack overwhelm Israeli leadership's missile defense systems, but that Tehran could precisely detonate its warheads on the very targets it was targeting, in this case several military bases.

All of this raises serious questions as Israel prepares for a “significant” military response to Iran’s missile attack.

A year into Israel's rapidly metastasizing multi-front war, which now includes Iran, Lebanon and Gaza, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, Israel's undisputed military and intelligence superiority on several fronts is beginning to falter.

In Israel's expanding war, as Israeli security analyst Michael Milshtein told the Guardian last week, there have been “tactical victories” but “no strategic vision” and certainly not one that unites the various fronts.

What is clear is that last year's conflict seriously exposed Israel's reformulated operational doctrine, which called for fighting short, decisive wars largely against missile-armed non-state actors to avoid becoming embroiled in extended conflicts of attrition.

Instead, the opposite happened. While Israeli officials have tried to portray Hamas as a defeated military power – an initially questionable characterization – they admit that it survives, albeit degraded, as a guerrilla organization in Gaza.

Even though Israel has repeatedly killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, leveled large parts of the coastal strip and displaced a population plagued by hunger, death and disease, Israeli tanks attacked parts of the Strip again this weekend in a new operation into northern Gaza to prevent Hamas from regrouping.

Hezbollah also retains power despite severe leadership losses and is fighting on its own turf in the villages of southern Lebanon, where it has had almost two decades to prepare for this conflict.

All of this raises serious questions about whether Israel has a clearer vision for its escalating conflict with Iran.

Many experts are beginning to suspect that a long-range war with Iran could also become a more grueling conflict despite the relative imbalance in capabilities, even as Israel continues to plan the scale of its own response to last week's missile attack.

Speaking to Bloomberg TV, Carmiel Arbit, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Middle East Program, described this dynamic. “I think we’re going to see this as the new reality for a long time,” Arbit predicted.

“I think the question will just be how often it will happen and whether it will just be that way or whether it will just continue to escalate. And I think the hope of the international community at this point is to avert a third world war rather than this smaller scale war of attrition.”

Nicole Grajewski, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, shares some of that view but warns that a prolonged series of exchanges could prompt Tehran to respond less predictably.

“The ongoing asymmetric competition between Iran and Israel threatens to devolve into a futile cycle of Iranian missile strikes and Israeli retaliation, each of which exposes Tehran's military limits without changing the balance – and potentially pushes Iran to even more desperate and unpredictable measures .” its pursuit of credible deterrence.”

“In the long term, and it cannot be assumed that the Israeli-Iranian conflict will end soon,” wrote Amos Harel, Haaretz’s chief military analyst, “on the one hand, there will be a competition between the rate of production and the sophistication of Iran’s attack systems the Israeli interception systems on the other hand.”

With Israel now so deeply embroiled in a widening conflict, it is unclear whether it can escape what Anthony Pfaff, the director of the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, described in August as an “escalation trap.”

“If Israel escalates,” Pfaff wrote, “it fuels the spiral of escalation that could eventually exceed its military capabilities.”

“If it chooses the status quo, in which Hamas remains capable of terrorist operations, then it has done little to improve its security situation. Neither outcome achieves Israel’s security objectives…Forcing a choice between escalation and the status quo gives Iran, and by extension Hezbollah, an advantage and is a key feature of its proxy strategy.”