11 - Conclusion

Summary

In 2006, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded Lebanon with the express aim of destroying the Shi'a militia, Hezbollah, and ending its annoying habit of firing rockets into northern Israel and conducting raids on Israeli garrisons along the Lebanese border. The Israeli military venture was a failure. Despite overwhelming conventional military power, complete air superiority, precision-guided munitions, and considerable conceptualization about how technology might change war in the present and future, the Israelis ran into an opponent who surprised them on a number of levels.

Ironically, to a considerable extent, the IDF's difficulties resulted from its considerable buy-in to the technophilia that had marked the American enthusiasm in the 1990s and early 2000s for what many termed “the revolution in military affairs.” The stunning success of the coalition in the Gulf War of January to February 1991 suggested to some Pentagon analysts that the U.S. military had created capabilities that would revolutionize war, at least for those who held the technological high ground. The advocates of the revolution in military affairs argued that technological advances in precision weapons, surveillance capabilities, computers, information systems, and sensors would allow the American military in future wars to see, grasp, and destroy enemy forces before they could effectively respond. Despite the best efforts of the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Office of Net Assessment to underline that such revolutions in the past were largely conceptual rather than technological, the pursuit of a technological nirvana came to dominate the thinking of much of the American military.