Pentagon studying Israel's war with Hezbollah very, very closely

The Army and Marine Corps have sponsored a series of multimillion-dollar war games to test how U.S. forces might fare against a similar foe. “I’ve organized five major games in the last two years, and all of them have focused on Hezbollah,” said Frank Hoffman, a research fellow at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico…

“From 2000 to 2006 Hezbollah embraced a new doctrine, transforming itself from a predominantly guerrilla force into a quasi-conventional fighting force,” a study by the Army’s Combat Studies Institute concluded last year. Another Pentagon report warned that Hezbollah forces were “extremely well trained, especially in the uses of antitank weapons and rockets” and added: “They well understood the vulnerabilities of Israeli armor.”

Many top Army officials refer to the short battle almost as a morality play that illustrates the price of focusing too much on counterinsurgency wars at the expense of conventional combat. These officers note that, before the Lebanon war, Israeli forces had been heavily involved in occupation duty in the Palestinian territories.