Hezballah's army

Bill Roggio takes another look at the Hezzies' army and while he thinks Israel can still defeat it he questions the cost.

...

Hezbollah's actions on the battlefields of southern Lebanon should give the Israelis, the West and neighboring Arab governments reason to worry. In just two weeks, Hezbollah has been fighting the Israeli military to an effective standstill on the ground (remember that time is not on Israel's side due to pressure to accept a cease fire). Not only is Hezbollah fighting at the platoon and company level, but fighting effectively during the initial engagements. al-Qaeda in Iraq (3 years of fighting) and the Taliban in Afghanistan (almost 5 years of fighting) have yet to reach such a level of effectiveness on the battlefield.

Iran has trained a proxy army that now sits on the border with Israeli, an army that cannot be dealt with from the air. If this problem is kicked down the road, Hezbollah will be that much more dangerous. And everything we think we know about Iran's conventional military capabilities needs to be rethought.

The Israelis are fighting the Hezzies the way they fight the Palestians and Hezballah has adapted tactics to counter the Israeli way of clearing terrorist. However, the US has shown at least two different, but effective, ways of dealing with terrorist in similar situations. Both the Fallujah model and the Tal Afar model would probably be effective. My inclination at this point would be to lean toward the Fallujah model, because the Hez vills more closely resemble Fallujah in the make up of their population. In Tal Afar the bad guys were basically holding the population hostage. In Bint Jbail most of the non combatants had apparently already fled leaving the Hezzies to set up booby traps and ambushes. One of Israel's problems in the Bint Jbail attack is that they did not commit overwhelming force and they apparently were not willing to destroy buildings to kill the enemy.