For the United States, the most important issues raised by the war between Israel and Hezbollah concern the way force transformation and network-centric warfare will work. Most accounts of both are highly theoretical. Only actual examples can clarify what we need, and the limits of this new style of warfare. One question is whether what the Israelis did, or tried to do, was much like what the United States hopes its transformed forces can do. Other questions are what, if anything, the Israeli experience says about our own ability to deal with similar quasinational forces.
Network-centric warfare is a means of seeing and engaging targets. It creates a shared tactical picture that allows many units to deal with an array of point objects. Because the shooter need not see the target directly, thinly spread forces can, in theory, deal with targets over a very broad area. Because they do not conduct their own reconnaissance before striking, most attacks are surprises. If the tactical picture can be combined with some sort of interpretive framework, it can also be a way of imposing effects on an enemy to break his will. That is, however, a very long leap from being able to see, say, a missile launcher in a parking lot with enough time to destroy it before it fires.
The first thing the Israeli experience reminds us of is that the picture is generally imperfect. Having a perfect picture allows us to use strike techniques both offensively and defensively: we can see before we are seen and attacked (unless, of course, our enemy uses the same techniques against us). If the picture is imperfect though, it is still useful as an offensive tool. For example, because shooters need not be the ones creating the picture, most or all attacks can be surprises, and that can make a considerable difference, not least to the enemy's will to fight. However, while perfect information may be a form of armor, imperfect information is not. One of the attractions of networked warfare has been the hope that heavy forces can be foregone in favor of light weight and high mobility. Heavy weight was always partly to provide massive firepower, to make up for targeting and aiming errors. However, it also provided a degree of passive protection against errors in which attackers arrive unseen. A large ship can absorb considerably more damage than a smaller one.
The sensors used to create the tactical picture include not only familiar ones but also intelligence sources. These can be very difficult to evaluate or calibrate. Before the war, it was generally assumed that Israel had the best intelligence agency in the Middle East, and that it was careful to keep watch over neighboring areas. Now it appears that the Israelis failed badly. They seem not to have been aware of the sheer scale of the Hezbollah arsenal. They were also apparently unaware of the presence of some rather sophisticated weapons, the C802, which damaged the corvette Hanit, and the advanced anti-tank rockets, which caused some tank casualties.
Current Israeli scrambling to explain what went wrong is suggestive. An Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, published a headline to the effect that Israeli intelligence knew that a C802 was in Lebanon, but that an arrogant Israel Navy refused to do anything about it. Reading the story, one discovers that in 2003 Israeli intelligence told the services that Iran had a variety of weapons, including the C802, and therefore that it should be assumed they were in Lebanon.
Cynics of the intelligence world will see exactly what this was: insurance against future embarrassment. Many with no security clearance at all were well aware that the Iranian Navy had a variety of antiship missiles, including the C802 (which is nothing very special, in effect a turbojet-powered derivative of Exocet, probably with an inferior seeker). That never translated into imagining that such weapons, which are relatively valuable to the Iranians, would be brought into guerilla territory in Lebanon. Perhaps there was also real intelligence that particular weapons were present and that Hezbollah had sophisticated friends in place.
Advocates of transformation have to explain how very lightweight forces can have as much impact as the much heavier and less mobile forces of the past. One theory of victory is to use effects-based operations, in which efforts are carefully tuned or focused to achieve the desired result, which is usually a change in enemy behavior.
It may be that the key advantage of networked forces is that they can move rapidly from surveillance to attack, thereby compressing the decision loop. It seems that, whatever the underlying philosophy, an enemy commander who loses track of what is happening (because his decision loop is more protracted) can be broken. That actually happened in Afghanistan, where the United States certainly had very little idea of how the locals thought (or now think). If this is true, then the sort of slowmoving coalition effort that fought in Kosovo is unlikely to achieve much in the future. To the extent that we can move faster, we must (and do our best to slow the other side's information-decision loop). This point already seems very well understood.
Few if any advocates of networked warfare imagine that all war can be reduced to strike operations. In land warfare the question is how to trade off forces that occupy space against those which attack. The conflict in Lebanon reminds us that this is a big question. Hezbollah was often able to simply flee Israeli bombs and fight another day. A large ground force might have formed a very useful anvil against which the same fighters could have been broken. Without it, they learned that they could survive, which is very unfortunate from the Israeli point of view.
Advocates of strike warfare can take a very different view of the mass versus information issue. The Hezbollah fighters lived because they had sufficient warning to flee. Generally, that meant that whatever bombs hit came a few minutes after a rocket was launched. The shooters learned to leave the launcher well before it fired. What if Israeli reconnaissance had been more pervasive and persistent? What if they had been able to detect the launchers, even those inside buildings, and had attacked much more quickly? Might it be that the Israelis did poorly because they tried to play high-tech war on the cheap?
Many accounts of networked warfare assume implicitly that it is a high-tech business in which the United States is likely to lead for a long time. The attack on the Israeli corvette should sound a cautionary note. In the past, the assumption seems to have been that a coastal defense missile would generally be associated with a specialized fire control radar. Lighting off the radar would thus be useful warning of a potential attack. That is a kind of platform-centric warfare. The alternative would be to use a commonplace coastal surveillance radar net to indicate the target. That would be network-centric, albeit on a very primitive level. Just how useful the radar net would be would depend on how much precision the missile would need, e.g. how much it would search for its target after arriving in the target area.
In this case, the C802 crew apparently relied on the Lebanese coastal surveillance system. Clearly it was imperfect because, of two missiles fired, one homed on a freighter offshore. However, the point remains: Hezbollah and the Iranians converted a very common surveillance system, intended mainly to monitor coastal traffic, into an effective means of targeting ships offshore. The Israelis understood as much, and destroyed the Lebanese radars after the Hanit was hit. It is possible that only one well-situated radar was involved, rather than a net, but usually vessel traffic surveillance radars all report to a control center, and often they have only minimal readouts on site.
The implication is that we will often, rather than rarely, face some sort of networked surveillance and command system in the Third World. Often the systems will be quite primitive. However, because they are netted, they produce integrated pictures that may make it more difficult for us to surprise our enemies. A net against net fight is quite different from a net against conventional fight. Information and intelligence play much larger roles. To some extent the problems of working with allies whose forces may not be altogether loyal (i.e., which leak badly) may give a hint of what would be involved, as the leaks would be a sort of enemy information network looking over our side of the fence.
This type of world emphasizes the importance of information. Although information itself is an enabler, not a weapon, operations that enhance our information or destroy enemy information become very important. This is nothing new, but the emphasis seems to be changing. Thus we have, as far as one can tell, emphasized acquiring information and defeating enemy deception by using the widest variety of sensors possible, correlating their outputs. We have spent very little time thinking about the tactical deception techniques that can destroy the enemy's information. On the other hand, we seem very aware of the value of destroying his information-processing and transmission capability, which is also part of this concept.
Finally, the information war obviously includes civil societies. The Lebanon war showed again that organizations such as Hezbollah can and will exploit all opportunities to paint the West as callous, while in fact they have no qualms about risking casualties among their own populations. In their view, the West is actually so sensitive to causing unneeded casualties that the charge, with any sort of evidence, however unrealistic, is enough to hamstring us. The Iraqis tried to use this technique both during the 1991 war and as a way of ending the subsequent embargo against Saddam Hussein (remember all the claims, later disproven, of hundreds of thousands of starving Iraqi children). Our history suggests that this is a very simplistic view. Democratic societies have a record of extreme sensitivity followed by sudden hardening and great viciousness without much regard for enemy civilians.