9 May 2026
https://thecradle.co/articles/hezbollahs-difficult-war-how-southern-lebanon-rewrote-the-rules-of-battle

Lede: The traditional and even contemporary definitions of warfare struggle to
explain what has happened and is still happening in southern Lebanon

There is no fixed defense in the familiar sense, nor even a clearly flexible
one. There are no raids or fire-support patterns as defined in military
manuals. Everything in the south today feels different from what came before,
and that shift has taken place not over decades, but in barely more than a year.

On the Israeli side, the result has been unmistakable shock, accompanied by
accusations, questions, and even ridicule traded between settlers, the army, the
security establishment, and the political leadership. Only the "ceasefire" eased
that shock, giving the occupation army the operational breathing room it needed.

But how does Hezbollah fight now, and why does it say so little? Militarily, the
party confines itself to brief statements, stripped of the inflated claims that
often accompany Arab war communiques. They serve their narrow purpose -
reporting the operation - while the psychological war is left to other releases
and platforms operating in parallel.

Whoever learns faster wins
Hezbollah military commanders acknowledge that the party has learned much from
its enemy. In their telling, the well-known Islamic maxim that "wisdom is the
believer's lost property" helped justify studying Israeli methods, adapting
them, and in some areas moving ahead of them.

The 2024 battle forced Lebanon's resistance fighters to confront what more than
sixteen years without a full-scale clash with the occupation had changed. The
long absence of direct combat, compounded by the fallout from Israel's security
war, had produced a battlefield very different from the one Hezbollah last
fought on.

There had been considerable optimism that Hezbollah's experience in Syria, Iraq,
and Yemen, followed by its close study of the Russian-Ukrainian war, had
equipped the party with a hybrid combat doctrine blending conventional military
methods with guerrilla warfare.

That optimism did not survive the war that followed. Israel caught Hezbollah off
guard, confronting it with a mix of military and intelligence strategies that
left it paralyzed, though not defeated.

"Five rings"
In Operation Arrows of the North, between 23 and 27 September 2024, Israel
applied the "five rings" principle developed by US military theorist John
A. Warden III, a security source explains to The Cradle. This became the
clearest conceptual framework for planning and execution, because the operation
was never limited to tactical strikes. Its aim was to create systemic effects on
the enemy's ability to fight and recover.

The practical lesson is that dispersed tactical victories can be turned into
strategic effect when strikes are managed as part of a synchronized and
integrated plan targeting the enemy's power structure as one interconnected
package: command, intelligence networks, logistical structures, civilian support
bases, and field forces, rather than random or isolated targets.

This is where Warden's theory becomes useful. Warden is regarded as one of the
most prominent military thinkers of the twentieth century. A US Air Force
officer who retired with the rank of colonel, he gained prominence after
publishing The Air Campaign in 1988, turning his thesis at the National Defense
University into an integrated operational theory.

For Warden, war is not merely a confrontation between opposing armies. It is a
process aimed at dismantling the enemy system from the inside out.

He therefore divided the enemy's overall structure into five rings: political
and military leadership at the center, serving as the directing mind and
decision-maker; vital systems, including command, control, communications, and
the management of energy and information; infrastructure, such as transport
networks, energy systems, and logistical facilities; the population, which
provides the material and moral base for sustaining war; and field forces, the
outermost ring, most visible in combat.

The essence of the theory is that synchronized, concentrated strikes against
several rings simultaneously can cause systemic paralysis greater than that of
conventional bombing against isolated targets. The idea is not limited to air
power, as was initially assumed.

It is a framework for setting operational priorities and sequencing strikes to
produce functional collapse within the enemy system, breaking its internal
balance faster than a gradual drain on its resources.

Leadership & Decision Making ->
Critical Systems ->
Logistical Infrastructure ->
Popular Support Base ->
Fighters on the Ground ->
Leadership & Decision Making

Israel's five-ring strike on Hezbollah
When the "five rings" are used against adversaries that lack maneuver
flexibility or alternative command networks, their effect multiplies. A
comprehensive strike can impose human and institutional costs that reshape the
political and operational arena at the same time.

Israel proceeded from this premise through an integrated execution structure
built on intelligence gathering, precise timing, and coordination between
different instruments.

First, real-time intelligence - a mix of satellite imagery, aerial and field
reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and human sources - gave strike planners a
dynamic picture of target maps and supply chains.

Second, these inputs were used to build synchronized strike packages, including
air, missile, and precision-guided attacks, designed to hit command and
communications nodes, ammunition depots, and supply routes within a short window
that limited the enemy's ability to reorganize.

Third, Israel moved to consolidate the results through continued intelligence
activity and persistent surveillance, hitting resupply networks, preventing the
restoration of operational capacity during the recovery window, and maintaining
a political and operational price for any redeployment.

At the same time, the field impact of the Israeli attack cannot be separated
from its political and social dimensions. Disabling the enemy's capabilities may
produce internal political shifts: popular pressure, fractures inside alliances,
or changes in local balances of power.

These may then generate regional dynamics that affect the attacker's own ability
to sustain operations. This was the additional outcome Israel was betting on. It
got nothing from it.

The executive structure of the Israeli attack on Hezbollah, 2023-2026:
Coordinating Intelligence Data ->
Targeting Key Nodes and Stockpiles ->
Consolidating the Results of the Strikes ->
Reaping Political and Social Gains

In this context, Oded Eilam wrote in Israel Hayom on 17 April 2026 that Israel
must abandon what he called the defensive posture of "degradation" and move
instead to a strategy of "dismantling and reassembly." The steps required after
Israel's failures in Lebanon, he argued, involve combining military, economic,
and political action into "a decisive fist," with all efforts focused on
achieving a decisive outcome.

Eilam then maps the arenas he believes Israel should target. Beirut's southern
suburb, he writes, is not merely a "Shia stronghold," but a "multi-layered
center" of leadership, propaganda, community institutions, and, at times,
financing infrastructure - the place where Hezbollah functions most clearly as
an "organization within society," not just an armed force.

The Bekaa, in his reading, is less a political symbol than a depth zone of
social presence, logistics, financing, and smuggling routes, while
Baalbek-Hermel forms Hezbollah's "strategic rear," with training centers,
weapons storage, the Damascus-Baalbek supply axis, missile-production workshops,
and rocket depots.

He pairs this with calls to strike Hezbollah's welfare networks, intensify
US-led political warfare, outlaw the party, dismiss its ministers, close the
Iranian embassy, apply Gulf economic pressure on Beirut, and encourage internal
Lebanese alternatives to Hezbollah's monopoly.

Lebanon's new shock
Any serious assessment of the offensive campaign must include social and
political indicators, not only firepower or logistics. These indicators
determine whether the window created by a strike can be turned into lasting
change in the enemy's position, or whether it will remain a temporary opening
that is quickly exhausted.

This is where Israel fell into the trap of numbers and exaggeration, becoming a
victim of its own psychological war against the resistance.

All of this was supposed to make the next battle easy, or at least short and
contained. Instead, for nearly a month and a half, Israel found itself replaying
the same scenario its army had faced in 2024, losing soldiers, equipment, and
vehicles to enforce a reality the occupation believed it had already settled.

All of the above was supposed to lead to an easy victory in the next battle, or
at least to an easy and rapid battle, not to a repeat, over nearly a month and a
half, of the same scenario the Israeli army faced in 2024, which drained
soldiers, equipment, and vehicles in order to consolidate a reality that the
occupation thought was already behind it.

What stands out is that Israel tried to repeat the same method of action in
2026, "but it made several mistakes," a military source in the resistance tells
The Cradle. The first was its firm conclusion that Arrows of the North, followed
by thousands of strikes over 15 months, had produced a weakened Hezbollah that
could barely stand in any later confrontation.

The second mistake, according to the source, was treating Hezbollah's visible
body as the main and only body. "Israel proceeded on the basis that it now knew
everything - how could it not, when it had killed the party's historic
secretary-general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and continued its intelligence
encirclement?" he says.

"Qualitative superiority took over Israeli minds at every level, from
decision-makers to the lowest military rank on the ground."

On this specific point, the party worked intelligently to "let the Israeli live
his theory to the end," the source says, while building small parallel bodies
operating in separate rings:
"The person who transports the missile or drone from the Bekaa or Beirut to the
south is no longer the same person who delivers it to the relevant facility. All
chains were separated from one another - manufacturing, assembly, delivery,
fortification, and so on."

The same source explains:
"The party's military commanders, including some who were martyred in
assassinations during the months of ceasefire before the current confrontation,
worked in absolute secrecy, to the point that the political level itself no
longer had clear answers to many detailed questions as it once did. We can say
that we returned to the 1980s and 1990s, when the secret of our success was that
we worked amid a hostile environment on every side: a large part of the Lebanese
state, the Syrian authorities, international forces, the Israeli occupation, and
endless western and American intelligence agencies."

Cont'd