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."
on May 10, 2026, 2:22 pm