“Success” in counterterrorism appears, on the surface, to be a technical matter: fewer attacks, degraded networks, captured leaders, reclaimed territory. Yet beneath these metrics lies a deeper struggle over who gets to define what success actually means. For local communities living with daily insecurity, success is often measured in safety, dignity, livelihoods, and trust in institutions. For external military planners, success is more frequently measured in operational terms: threat disruption, freedom of movement, intelligence dominance, and mission sustainability.
These two definitions rarely align perfectly—and when they diverge, counterterrorism may appear successful on paper while failing in lived reality.
1. The Planner’s Definition of Success
External military planners—whether national forces operating abroad or multinational coalitions—operate within institutional logics shaped by doctrine, budgets, political accountability, and alliance obligations.
From this perspective, success tends to be defined by:
Reduction in attack frequency
Elimination or fragmentation of designated groups
Territorial denial to insurgents
Operational readiness of partner forces
Maintenance of access and situational awareness
These metrics are quantifiable, reportable to political leadership, and compatible with military planning cycles. They also align with external stakeholders’ needs to justify continued engagement or demonstrate progress to domestic audiences.
Importantly, this definition of success is mission-centric, not society-centric.
2. The Community’s Definition of Success
For local communities, counterterrorism success is far less abstract.
Success means:
Being able to travel without fear
Farming, trading, or schooling without disruption
Not being arbitrarily detained or targeted
Seeing justice applied fairly
Regaining trust in state institutions
These indicators are qualitative, relational, and long-term. They are difficult to measure through dashboards or briefings. They also challenge the assumption that killing or capturing militants automatically improves security.
For communities, the absence of violence is not enough. The presence of predictable, legitimate governance is essential.
3. Why External Planners Usually Dominate the Definition
Despite the centrality of communities to counterterrorism outcomes, external planners often dominate success definitions for structural reasons:
a. Control of Resources
External actors typically control:
Funding
Intelligence platforms
Training pipelines
Logistical infrastructure
Those who control resources tend to control metrics.
b. Political Accountability Elsewhere
External planners are accountable to:
Foreign ministries
Defense committees
Domestic voters
They are not primarily accountable to local populations. As a result, success is framed in terms legible to external political systems.
c. Operational Timelines
Military planners operate on:
Rotation cycles
Budget years
Mission mandates
Communities operate on lifetimes. The mismatch privileges short-term, visible gains over structural change.
4. The Metrics Gap: What Gets Measured vs. What Matters
This divergence produces a metrics gap.
What gets measured:
Enemy killed or captured
Patrols conducted
Areas “cleared”
Equipment delivered
Training hours completed
What often matters more to communities:
Civilian harm reduction
Dispute resolution mechanisms
Economic recovery
Accountability for abuses
Inclusion of marginalized groups
When success is defined externally, the metrics reflect what external actors can do, not what communities need.
5. When External Definitions Override Local Reality
The danger emerges when external definitions of success:
Justify prolonged military presence
Mask unresolved grievances
Normalize exceptional measures
Silence local dissent as “security risk”
In such cases, counterterrorism becomes self-referential: it succeeds if it sustains itself.
From a community perspective, this is not success—it is managed insecurity.
6. Community Voices and the Problem of Representation
One might ask: why don’t local communities define success more forcefully?
Several barriers exist:
Communities are not monolithic
Voices are fragmented by ethnicity, class, and geography
Insecurity suppresses civic participation
Speaking critically can be dangerous
As a result, external planners often engage with:
National elites
Security institutions
Urban political actors
These intermediaries may not represent the lived experiences of frontline communities, further skewing definitions of success upward and outward.
7. The Illusion of Transfer: “Capacity Built” vs. “Capacity Owned”
External planners often claim success when:
Local forces are trained
Equipment is transferred
Institutions are “stood up”
But communities judge success by whether:
Those forces protect civilians
Institutions act impartially
Authority feels legitimate
Capacity that exists on paper but lacks trust is not capacity—it is fragile formality.
8. When Community Definitions Are Ignored: Historical Consequences
History shows that counterterrorism campaigns that prioritize external success metrics often experience:
Recurrence of violence after drawdown
Splintering of militant groups
Radicalization fueled by abuses
Erosion of state legitimacy
These outcomes are not failures of tactics, but failures of definition.
When communities do not recognize success, it does not endure.
9. Can Communities Define Success More Directly?
Yes—but only under specific conditions:
Genuine community consultation mechanisms
Civilian oversight of security policy
Integration of justice and development benchmarks
Protection for civil society voices
Willingness by external actors to accept slower, less visible progress
This requires a shift from operational dominance to political humility—a difficult adjustment for military institutions.
10. Hybrid Definitions: A Necessary Compromise
In practice, counterterrorism success must be hybrid.
External planners bring:
Technical expertise
Intelligence capabilities
Operational reach
Communities bring:
Local knowledge
Social legitimacy
Long-term perspective
Success should therefore be defined not solely by:
Enemy-centric metrics
…but by:
Community-recognized improvements in daily life
Reduction in fear and arbitrariness
Restoration of social trust
Where this hybrid approach is absent, counterterrorism may win battles but lose peace.
11. The Power Question Beneath the Definition
Ultimately, the question of who defines success is a question of power.
Those with guns, data, and budgets tend to define outcomes
Those with lived experience often bear consequences without voice
This asymmetry explains why counterterrorism can be declared successful by planners while communities continue to feel insecure.
Conclusion: Success That Is Not Shared Is Not Success
So, who defines success in counterterrorism?
Formally, external military planners often do. Substantively, local communities ultimately validate—or invalidate—that definition.
A counterterrorism campaign that looks successful to planners but fails communities will not endure. Violence may recede temporarily, but legitimacy will not grow. Grievances will persist. New threats will emerge.
True success is not when planners can leave with a favorable report, but when communities no longer need them.
Until counterterrorism success is defined with communities rather than for them, the gap between operational achievement and lived security will remain—and that gap is where future instability is born.
Despite the efforts of the Lebanese Armed Forces, Hezbollah is gradually regaining strength for a future war with Israel.
Lebanon’s top general came to Washington last week to try to persuade US military officials, policymakers, and lawmakers that his country was getting serious about Hezbollah. Gen. Rodolphe Haykal’s pitch was simple: despite its “limited capabilities,” the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have raided Hezbollah weapons depots south of the Litani River, established “operational control” over southern Lebanon, and are largely completing the first phase of Lebanon’s “weapons consolidation plan,” which is a euphemism for disarming the Iran-backed militia.
The reality, as I recently saw firsthand standing on the Israel-Lebanon border, is that the LAF is working hard, but still falling far short of disarming Hezbollah. Israeli operations targeting Hezbollah decimated the group in the fall of 2024, with exploding pagers, airstrikes that targeted key Hezbollah personnel and weapons systems, and ground forces that swept the Lebanese side of the border for tunnels and underground bunkers. Now, however, the LAF’s disarmament of Hezbollah—required under the November 2024 ceasefire with Israel—is being outpaced by the militia’s determined rearmament. Assessing the LAF’s disarmament efforts requires taking a hard look not at the measures of the LAF’s performance that Gen. Haykal touted—the number of patrols, raids, or seized weapons—but rather at metrics of overall effectiveness seizing weapons stored on private property, targeting underground weapons storage and production facilities, stopping Hezbollah from smuggling weapons sent by Iran across the Lebanese-Syrian border, and transparently disposing of seized weapons.
A ‘Grave Sin’: Hezbollah’s Post-October 7 Fall from Power
Standing in the visitor’s center in Misgav Am, an Israeli kibbutz along the border with Lebanon, the view looking out through large plate glass windows at the Lebanese village of al-Aadayssah is very different from the view I saw from the same spot not long before October 7, 2023. Nearly every structure in the Shia Lebanese village has since been destroyed, and the village is largely abandoned. Israeli military briefers say that Hezbollah stashed weapons within each of the targeted homes—some of which were used to target Misgav Am and other civilian Israeli communities in northern Israel starting on October 8, 2023, the day after the massive Hamas attack from Gaza.
The Misgav Am visitor center only recently reopened; the windows have been replaced and the roof repaired, but the interior ceiling is still in tatters. A tall Hezbollah watchtower that long peered into Israeli homes from just across the border is gone. With Hezbollah no longer openly operating along the border, just outside their living room windows, Israeli civilians are only beginning to trickle back to communities evacuated under fire from Hezbollah, many of them to homes destroyed by Hezbollah rockets.
Yet residents of these border towns say they feel a bit of optimism. Israeli forces severely degraded Hezbollah’s fighting capabilities in September 2024 during “Operation Northern Arrows,” targeting Hezbollah’s command structure, missile and weapons caches, and underground bunkers and tunnels running along and under the UN-demarcated Blue Line marking the Israeli-Lebanese border. Israel and Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire in November 2024 that, despite fits and starts, has mostly held for more than a year. A month after the ceasefire, the Assad regime fell in Syria, denying Iran easy access to the land bridge it used for years to send weapons and cash to Hezbollah via Syria. The new post-Assad Syrian regime has even seized Iranian weapons shipments bound for Hezbollah, further cutting into the group’s rearmament.
Israel says its forces regularly carry out airstrikes targeting Hezbollah in response to ceasefire violations, such as when Hezbollah operatives move weapons or rebuild infrastructure south of the Litani River. LAF activity in south Lebanon is facilitated by a US-led International Monitoring and Implementation Mechanism that efficiently transmits information between the Israeli and Lebanese militaries and monitors the LAF’s progress toward disarming Hezbollah. Moreover, for the first time in recent memory, Lebanon has a government led by a president and a prime minister who are both vigorously committed to disarming Hezbollah and placing all of its weapons under government control—even as Hezbollah warns that doing so would be a “grave sin.”
The campaign to disarm Hezbollah has not been without cost. Last August, six LAF soldiers were killed in an explosion at a Hezbollah arms depot near Tyre during an operation to seize and destroy Hezbollah weapons. Some reports, citing US intelligence, indicate that Hezbollah may have led the unit into a trap. Even if this was just a case of unstable explosive ordinance going off prematurely, the incident underscored the dangers of securing Hezbollah weaponry. Either way, the LAF has persisted in its mission to dismantle Hezbollah weapons and infrastructure south of the Litani river. In fact, only a few weeks after the explosion, the LAF reported that it had blown up so many Hezbollah arms depots that the militia was running out of explosives. The Trump administration responded by approving a military aid package for Lebanon valued at $14.2 million, including explosives for building up the LAF’s “capability and capacity” to uproot the weapons caches and “military infrastructure of non-state actors, including Hezbollah.”
However, despite this US aid and the efforts of the LAF deployment in south Lebanon, Hezbollah is outpacing the LAF’s efforts to disarm it. Hezbollah has evaded LAF inspections at many sites in the south; it has ratcheted up domestic production of weapons in facilities north of the Litani; and it still manages to smuggle weapons into Lebanon. The LAF and international observers need better measures of effectiveness to truly assess the LAF’s progress in seizing the weapons Hezbollah still holds (largely on private property), targeting the group’s domestic production capacity (primarily in underground facilities), and disrupting Iranian weapons smuggling across the Syrian border into Lebanon.
Hezbollah Hides Its Arms on Private Property
As of November 2025, the LAF was still rejecting Israeli and American calls for Lebanese soldiers to inspect locations where Hezbollah was believed to have stored weapons on private property, such as in people’s homes or buried on their land.
Hezbollah’s documented track record of storing weapons in private homes is no secret; it was long reported by UN peacekeeping forces and confirmed when Israeli ground forces went into Lebanon and found weapons stored in private homes in Lebanese villages all along the Blue Line. At an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) base not far from the border, I toured a collection of Hezbollah weapons seized from the militia’s weapons stores in private homes and underground storage facilities along the border. To mark where the weapons were found, Israeli soldiers also grabbed town signs, one reading “Welcome to Adayseh.”
A town sign from Adayseh, a town in southern Lebanon along the Israeli border. IDF soldiers took the sign after Hezbollah weapons were found there.
Another sign marks the entrance to the “Martyrs of Return Garden,” adorned with a map of Israel/Palestine with a skeleton key—of the kind many Palestinian refugees still hold—running the length of the country. Jerusalem, the sign aspiringly indicates, is just 173 kilometers (107.5 miles) away.
A pro-Hezbollah sign displaying the distance from the Lebanese border area to Jerusalem. (Author photo)
As Gen. Haykal prepared to visit Washington last November, Israeli and officials pressed the LAF to follow up on information shared through the US-led mechanism and inspect private property where Hezbollah was suspected of storing weapons, but LAF commanders refused. “They’re demanding that we do house-to-house searches, and we won’t do that,” a Lebanese security official told Reuters. Israeli airstrikes then targeted locations that the LAF declined to investigate, and Gen. Haykal’s planned visit to Washington was abruptly cancelled.
The general seems to have got the message, and over the next few weeks, the LAF began inspecting certain private properties looking for weapons. For example, on December 20, 2025, the LAF announced that it had conducted a raid inside an apartment outside the Hezbollah-dominated south that had been rented “by a wanted individual,” seizing rockets, ammunition, and other arms. But such raids were still far and few between, and often took place only after informing Hezbollah of coming inspections, allowing the group to move out its most valuable equipment.
A collection of signs taken by Israeli forces from areas where Hezbollah weapons were found. (Author photo)
More incidents went poorly than smoothly. On December 13, the IDF provided the LAF with information about a Hezbollah weapons storage site on private property in the southern Lebanese village of Yanouh. Instead of inspecting the facility, the LAF reported to Abu Ali Salameh, a local Hezbollah liaison officer, that Lebanese forces would soon be visiting. When the LAF forces arrived, they encountered a gathering of female Hezbollah supporters who prevented them from entering—and gave Hezbollah a chance to remove the weapons. According to the IDF, when the incident concluded, the Hezbollah officer coordinated with the LAF to falsely document that there were no weapons at the property. In fact, the IDF reported, suspicious crates were removed from the rear door of the property. But the LAF announced that after conducting a thorough search of the property, it had found no weapons inside.
On January 20, just days before my visit to the Israeli-Lebanese border, Israeli officials said IDF airstrikes killed ten Hezbollah operatives who served as liaison officers between Hezbollah and residents of villages in southern Lebanon. Yet intelligence is not always perfect, and as we stood along the border, an Israeli official conceded to me that some of the intelligence Israel had provided the LAF through the US-led mechanism may have been outdated or inaccurate. The official insisted that Israel has documented multiple occasions when LAF soldiers took pictures of homes or facilities only after Hezbollah weapons were removed or, in other cases, photographed empty rooms but not those where weapons were stored.
Looking out at the Lebanese houses destroyed in and around al-Aadayssa, the Israeli official stressed that each structure that was hit housed weapons for Hezbollah. Given Hezbollah’s long history of storing weapons in private homes along the border and throughout southern Lebanon, the official concluded, until the LAF starts inspecting private homes where Hezbollah is suspected of storing weapons, the LAF cannot honestly claim to have established “operational control” in the south. That is especially true given the many underground weapons facilities Hezbollah still maintains in the south and across Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s Underground Weapons Facilities Are a Major Problem
In late December 2025, LAF forces raided a site near the Lebanese village of Kafra—where Hezbollah reportedly maintained heavy weapons, including Grad rockets—and dismantled makeshift cruise missiles including Russian DR-3s, presumably taken from Syrian stockpiles under the Assad regime. The DR-3 is a reconnaissance drone repurposed as an armed cruise missile. Israel said that Hezbollah kept DR-3 cruise missiles in specially designed facilities in the south more than a year earlier, so it was no small matter when the LAF found and dismantled several. Lebanese media carried photos of the weapons, timed to air two days before Gen. Haykal was set to announce the completion of phase one of the disarmament plan in the south.
A pickup truck mounted with a multiple rocket launcher near the Israel-Lebanon border.
Though this raid was portrayed as a major success by the LAF, it was the exception that proved the rule: the LAF does not systematically inspect underground Hezbollah weapons storage and production sites. Moreover, the discovery of cruise missiles has only heightened Israel’s concerns over the dangerous long-range weapons Hezbollah manages to maintain a year into the ceasefire.
Hezbollah has bragged about its arsenal for years. In September 2024, the group released a propaganda video with Hebrew and English subtitles entitled “Our Mountains, Our Warehouses,” with footage of a large underground facility for producing and storing rockets. The LAF recognizes that such sites exist, and in November even took journalists on a tour of abandoned underground facilities in areas cleared by IDF ground forces prior to the ceasefire. Clearly, declaring LAF “operational control” over the south is a far cry from actually disarming Hezbollah there.
As in the case of private property, the IDF says it has notified the LAF about Hezbollah underground weapons storage and production facilities through the US-led mechanism. But more often than not, Israeli officials say, the LAF either did not inspect the site, visited without dismantling weapons, or gave Hezbollah a heads-up ahead of time. For example, just days into the new year, the IDF provided its Lebanese counterparts with information about an active underground Hezbollah weapons storage facility. The LAF inspected the site, but Israeli officials say they found intelligence that Hezbollah was still storing weapons there and later hit it with an airstrike.
Over a six-week period from December 25 to February 6, the IDF struck at least eight underground weapons storage and production facilities, both in southern Lebanon and elsewhere across the country, according to IDF press releases. Typically, these target access shafts—and are followed by secondary explosions indicating the presence of weapons and exploding ordinance. The IDF hits moving targets, either Hezbollah operatives or weapons, in time-sensitive operations, but IDF strikes targeting underground facilities come in the wake of IDF notifications that the LAF has failed to act upon, Israeli officials explained.
This issue is especially sensitive for Israeli officials, who say that finding and destroying Hezbollah’s current weapons-production facilities—most of which are below ground—are even more important than efforts to seize Hezbollah’s older weapons stored on private property. Moreover, underground facilities are very difficult to target from the air. Access shafts can be destroyed, but the underground facilities often remain intact, meaning that Hezbollah can simply dig a new access tunnel and continue.
Israel counts hundreds of private structures to be searched for Hezbollah arms, but Israel says that the number of underground facilities is much more manageable. Israeli authorities say that dozens of underground Hezbollah facilities—in the south and elsewhere in Lebanon—must be inspected and destroyed. The number rises, however, when one includes the many cases in which Hezbollah operatives return to areas hit by Israeli airstrikes to rebuild targeted infrastructure using large engineering vehicles.
In early February, the commander of US Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, praised the LAF and the US-led mechanism and congratulated the LAF for finding and dismantling a Hezbollah tunnel—the second time Lebanon had done so in as many months. He might have qualified his praise by noting that Israel has provided information on far more than these two underground facilities.
Israel Must Also Watch the Syria-Lebanon Border
These underground facilities are Hezbollah’s preferred destination for weapons and weapons components that it continues to receive from Iran. Tehran lost a key component of its “axis of resistance” when the Assad regime in Syria fell, but Iran continues to send weapons to Hezbollah through Syria. Syria’s new leaders are no friends of Hezbollah and are working hard to counter Iranian activity inside their country, but they do not control the entire country and are being pulled in multiple directions. Damascus has seized multiple weapons shipments to the group, but certainly cannot intercept them all.
The Syrians see both Hezbollah and Iran as domestic security threats, pointing to examples like the arrest earlier this month of a group accused of attacking the Mezzeh military airport using weapons traced back to Hezbollah. By all accounts, Iran remains committed to reconstituting its weapons-smuggling routes through Syria to rearm Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Hezbollah unit that smuggles weapons and technology from Syria to Lebanon uses these routes to move weapons it procures through other channels as well, such as a Moscow-based Russian national recently designated by the Treasury Department.
But while Syrian authorities have been targeting Hezbollah arms smuggling along the Lebanon-Syria border, the LAF has not. The LAF patrols the border and even reported sending reinforcements to the Syrian border as part of the ceasefire with Israel. From time to time, the LAF has reported coming under fire during counter-smuggling operations. Yet these efforts have failed to stop Hezbollah weapons smuggling. Over the past two years, Israeli officials assess, Iran smuggled a significant amount of weapons overland through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, despite the sporadically successful efforts of the new regime in Syria.
In late January, Israel targeted a notorious Hezbollah smuggler in the coastal Lebanese city of Sidon and hit four border crossings through which Hezbollah allegedly smuggled weapons into Lebanon from Syria. The smuggled materials included weapons that were reportedly procured in Iraq and shipped overland across Syria, as well as other prohibited goods ordered through a Hezbollah front company and collected in Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf states.
The LAF’s Hezbollah Dilemma: Disarmament or Deconfliction?
Even as Israeli officials highlighted the LAF’s shortcomings, they also stressed that they are keen to see the LAF succeed—and implicitly understand its concerns that pushing too hard and too fast could lead Hezbollah to retaliate.
Israeli security officials told me that they tended to disagree with the assumption that a concerted LAF effort against Hezbollah would lead to civil war in Lebanon, but they understand their Lebanese counterparts’ concerns. The issue, they argue, is that senior Lebanese officials from President Aoun to Gen. Haykal have yet to make the decision to take on Hezbollah in earnest. Indeed, Gen. Haykal reportedly told US officials during his visit to Washington that the LAF seeks to avert any open clash with Hezbollah.
The problem runs much deeper. The LAF seeks to avoid clashes with Hezbollah at almost any cost, leading senior Lebanese officials to prioritize deconfliction with Hezbollah over disarmament of Hezbollah. Not only do local LAF commanders often inform Hezbollah of pending patrols and inspections, Israeli officials say, but senior LAF commanders are sometimes directly in touch with senior Hezbollah officials themselves. The LAF might describe this as deconfliction; frustrated Israeli and American officials rightly regard it as collaboration.
Washington has long expressed concern about “Hezbollah influence” within the LAF, leading the United States to suspend a hundred million dollars in military aid to the LAF over the past several years. More recently, the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act includes language classifying aid to the LAF as counterterrorism support and specifying that aid to the LAF may only be used to counter the threats posed by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. US aid is conditioned on disarming Hezbollah as a counterterrorism priority. But as former State Department Assistant Secretary for the Near East and longtime Lebanon watcher David Schenker recently lamented in congressional testimony, “Unfortunately, notwithstanding its relatively good performance to date, incidents of LAF collusion, collaboration, and deconfliction with Hezbollah persist.”
Such incidents create a sharp trust deficit that hurts other aspects of the ceasefire. LAF officials are keen to avoid all-out war with Hezbollah while slowly establishing a monopoly over weapons within the country. But Israelis worry that the LAF has neither destroyed nor taken possession of all the weapons it has seized from Hezbollah. Some unaccounted-for weapons may have ended up back in Hezbollah’s hands through a revolving door, Israeli officials say, leading them to ask whether the US-led mechanism could verify the disposition of seized weapons.
The Hezbollah Disarmament Process Needs Better Metrics
On the ground, a senior Israeli official told me, the LAF has been more active over the past three months, sending out more patrols, assigning more manpower to its Homeland Shield operation in the south, and working in more geographic sectors. These efforts have periodically earned praise and congratulations from senior US military officials. But as soon as Lebanese officials said that they had established “operational control” over the south, the number and pace of the LAF inspections dropped off, presumably calculating that finding more weapons in the south would undercut their declared completion of phase one of the ceasefire plan.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah is steaming ahead with its plans to reassert its presence in southern Lebanon and rebuild its weapons stockpile. Though most of the houses in the village have been damaged, Israeli forces continue to enter al-Aadayssah almost every other day. By December 2024, Israel says, its forces had mapped out the massive amount of weaponry they found stored in border villages, including al-Aadayssah. But today, local Hezbollah liaison officers again work to reestablish the group’s presence in villages between the Litani River and the Israeli border. By October 2025, Hezbollah had launched a “Returning to al-Aadayssah” campaign, with volunteers reaching out to the few remaining residents and encouraging others to join them. This January, when Israeli airstrikes targeted ten Hezbollah liaison officers, one of those killed was Hassan Muhammad Sayyid, who served this role in al-Aadayssah.
Nobody should be surprised by Hezbollah’s actions. The group’s secretary general, Naim Qassem, said last March that Aoun’s remarks about the Lebanese state establishing a monopoly on weapons did not apply to Hezbollah. “If anyone thinks the president’s words were directed at us,” Qassem stated, “we don’t see it that way.” He went on to invite the Lebanese government to negotiate with Hezbollah, rather than try to disarm it. That is largely what the LAF has done, which made Gen. Haykal’s visit to Washington somewhat contentious. (In a moment of political theater, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham asked Haykal whether he believed that Hezbollah is a terrorist group and then walked out of the meeting when the general replied, “No, not in the context of Lebanon.”)
Lebanese officials are acutely aware of Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem’s threats of a civil war if the LAF tries to forcibly disarm it. Qassem has declared that Hezbollah “will not surrender” if the Lebanese government tries to take its weapons—and, if needed, will fight until there is “no life” left in Lebanon. And yet, in the wake of Hezbollah’s decision to attack Israel and then Israel’s devastating strikes against the group, the new government in Beirut has a chance to establish a monopoly over the use of force and end the ability of unelected Hezbollah officials to make decisions of war and peace for all Lebanese.
In other meetings in Washington, Haykal made a pitch for increased military aid to the LAF to purchase equipment and pay soldiers’ salaries. The former is only necessary if the LAF will actually take on Hezbollah, but the latter is badly needed in any event. At any given time, about half the 8,000 or so Lebanese soldiers assigned to the south are out of uniform, working second jobs to put food on the table for their families. Even today, Hezbollah operatives earn multiple times the salary of an LAF soldier.
Shortly after his return to Lebanon, Gen. Haykal hosted French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot in Beirut. Barrot said that Lebanon stood “at a crossroads.” He urged Gen. Haykal: “You have a unique window of opportunity. Seize it.”
The next test of Lebanese commitment to disarming Hezbollah and preserving the ceasefire will come within weeks, as the LAF is about to release its plan to disarm Hezbollah north of the Litani river under phase two of the ceasefire. Then, in early March, France is scheduled to host a donor conference to support the LAF, “but only if reforms continue, legislation is passed, and decisions are implemented,” according to a report of Barrot’s meetings in Beirut. Those decisions include LAF plans for disarming Hezbollah beyond the south.
Ultimately, it remains in the US interest to provide aid to the LAF, especially funds to pay soldiers’ salaries. But this must be strictly conditioned on measures of effectiveness, meaning results, not measures of performance. The number of patrols and sites inspected is far less important than the amount of confiscated and verifiably disposed weapons. Hezbollah’s single-minded rearmament drive is still outpacing the LAF’s half-hearted disarmament operations. Lebanon still has the opportunity to flip this equation, but time is running out. The alternative to disarming Hezbollah is a return to open hostilities. In the words of Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji, “As long as weapons are not fully monopolized by the state, Israel unfortunately retains the right to continue its attacks in accordance with this [ceasefire] agreement.”
The development of sophisticated anti-missile and counter-drone platforms could reintroduce maneuver warfare to Ukraine—and modern war planning more generally.
It would be difficult to think of a more stimulating book than ‘Mine Were of Trouble,’ Peter Kemp’s memoir of his service with General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. While the Soviet-backed Spanish Republic garnered much sympathetic press and the majority of international volunteers, the Nationalists (backed by Nazi Germany) emerged victorious after a long and bitter conflict.
Kemp explains that the war served as a test range and incubator for new technologies and tactics—as with so many other “proxy wars” between great powers. (In the Spanish case, we need to be careful with the “proxy” characterization. The Nationalists were initially no one’s proxies. It was the Republicans who served as Stalin’s foot soldiers; the Nationalists became a German proxy out of necessity, since their opponents were receiving extensive support from Moscow.) The war provided an opportunity to discover what worked, and what didn’t.
The Germans, whose assistance was sought by General Franco, took full advantage of the opportunity to mature aerial bombardment—notably in Guernica—and to develop the tools and tactics that later became central to the Nazis’ “Blitzkrieg” offensives. A relatively small number of German tanks and bombers, used very effectively, broke the Republican lines in critical places and permitted rapid advances behind these lines.
Military revolutions often happen quietly—and the import of these victories was not lost on the German high command. But it is far from clear that their future adversaries took away the right lessons. Given continued French reliance on the Maginot line, history suggests that the key lessons were not, in fact, learned.
Modern Militaries Rely Too Much on Static Defenses
The situation today is not entirely dissimilar. The Europeans are, for instance, focused on building “drone walls.” This may well be a dangerous strategy—static and quasi-static defenses are relatively easy to detect, understand and disable with adequate planning, technological innovation, and a willingness to engage in tactical improvisation. Even Hamas, operating at the end of complex underground supply chains, was able to locate and disable the high-tech Israeli defenses around Gaza. It took the terrorist organization years of infiltration and surveillance, but it discovered the weak points and exploited them. If there is any lesson from the October 7 attack, it is that static technological defenses, while useful, are no substitute for an armed population, constant vigilance, a recognition of enemy intentions, and rapid reaction forces held in reserve.
Static defenses certainly have their place. They are comparatively inexpensive, they delay an adversary, and they impose operational complexity. But the Europeans’ decision to rely primarily on static defenses today is most likely a terrible mistake. When static defenses are overwhelmed or saturated, there needs to be a maneuvering reserve to deal with surprises. And behind that, as Ukraine has made clear, the broader society needs to be trained and armed to resist invasion, create delay, and blunt an invading force.
There have been many eras when land warfare has been defensive-dominant. Forcing an adversary to blunt its army in attacking a prepared defensive position has been a winning strategy at many moments. There have also been eras of offensive dominance. For instance, today, the comparative costs of offensive and defensive cyber-warfare make this arena clearly offensive-dominant. By contrast, for many years, it was widely assumed that ballistic missiles were too expensive to intercept, and doing so against a large-scale attack was difficult or impossible. This set of assumptions gave the Iranians very strong strategic leverage against Israel, until the point when Israel demonstrated the capability to intercept their ballistic missiles at scale.
Are Tanks Moribund in Modern Warfare? Not Exactly
Another lesson that many are taking away from Ukraine is the death of the tank, largely driven by the availability of inexpensive tank-killing missiles and drones. Both are powerful weapons, but there is also excellent portable counter-drone and counter-missile technology, based both on directed energy and on kinetic systems, in the field and under development.
There has been a long pattern of ebb and flow between tanks and anti-tank systems, with each new generation of anti-tank weaponry resulting in new defensive systems. The first tanks were countered by tactical innovations among infantry, aimed at disabling them through attacks on their fuel tanks using anti-tank rifles, the fielding of anti-tank field guns, and the use of specialized explosives (i.e. bundles of grenades) aimed at the tracks.
Specialized anti-tank units were deployed shortly after the first British Mark-1 tanks made their way into combat in World War I. Kinetic energy rounds were upgraded to shaped-charge rounds, which spawned reactive armor, and later detachable/replaceable armor plates. Israel, Russia, and the United States have all deployed various active, hard-kill anti-missile systems (Arena, Quick Kill, Trophy), aimed at destroying incoming munitions; such systems can be enhanced to destroy drones or even drone swarms. There are also a variety of soft-kill, dazzler, and electronic warfare systems.
Partially because of the broad deployment of counter-armor drones, and the lack of effective air support, trenches—an ancient but still very effective form of static defense—are dominating the battlefield in Ukraine today.
Truly effective anti-drone/anti-missile systems necessarily start out heavy and complex. They are appearing first as static defenses and on-board naval ships, in places where they can draw a lot of power, and where a heavy, complex system can operate without being shaken and jostled in motion. The next step will be for these systems to become robust and cheap enough to be mounted on tanks and trucks, moving at speed. Once this happens, I hope (though I cannot say that I expect) that a large number of these systems will be deployed to Ukraine, so as to re-inject maneuver into the fight. A couple of armored divisions, equipped with tanks with truly effective counter-drone systems and with trucks that could provide bubbles of drone protection for supply convoys, could produce a Blitzkrieg-style breakthrough across the Russian lines, especially if the Ukrainians were supported to achieve localized air superiority.
The West Is Well-Suited to Offensive War
Deploying such a system at scale is well within the technical capabilities of the United States—or perhaps of Germany, if they chose to prioritize it. In fact, it’s the kind of initiative that would play to Western strengths. Building a modest number of platforms with exquisite capability is the sort of thing that our industrial base is very well-suited to do.
One further consideration for the use of armor, of course, is minefields. While mines can be very effective in delaying or shaping the environment for maneuver, there are now very effective counter-mine technologies. Tanks equipped with specialized equipment can clear paths through minefields rapidly, as can dense artillery barrages. And sophisticated anti-tank mines are neither cheap nor quick to deploy at scale.
I fully expect to see the return of armored maneuver warfare in the next decade. Just as static defenses and trench warfare have returned, we can expect the breakout from this mode of warfare soon. It will be a return to the importance of heavy armor, and to mechanized infantry protected by active anti-drone and anti-missile systems.
Against first-class enemies, with modern air forces, this mode of warfare will be very expensive and will require serious anti-aircraft capabilities, in addition to counter-drone. But against a second-rate power that cannot achieve air superiority—in other words, most armies in the world today—the combination of air power and tanks will serve, as it did during the 1930s, to break through static defense lines and achieve re-inject maneuver into warfare.
If we want to bring the Ukraine war to an end, the best and fastest way to do so is to develop and deploy armor and transport with a new generation of counter-drone systems. A couple of hundred tanks would probably do the trick, with the right kind of active protection systems on them. Until then, the death of the tank is being greatly exaggerated.
President Donald Trump has been weakening Russia’s position as a great power in myriad ways, even as his critics say he is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet.
Kto kogo? is the blunt question Vladimir Lenin would pose. Who is outplaying whom: President Donald Trump or Russian President Vladimir Putin?
For Trump’s critics, the answer is obvious. Putin, in their view, has deftly manipulated Trump to avoid any serious repercussions while defying his efforts to settle the Ukraine war. While Trump insists Putin is engaged in good-faith peace negotiations, the Russian strongman continues a brutal assault on Ukraine and gives no public indication that he is prepared to back away from his maximal goal of subjugating Ukraine for the sake of peace.
The critics might be right if US–Russian relations are viewed through the narrow prism of the Ukraine war. But widen the aperture, and the situation looks quite different.
Trump’s assertive foreign policy has markedly eroded Russia’s geopolitical position and tarnished its reputation as a great power. Yet Putin has remained largely silent.
Start with the Middle East. For the past two decades, Putin has positioned Russia as a major player there, building up ties with all the key regional powers—Egypt, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Trump has, however, acted as if Russia did not matter. He ignored its interests as he worked closely with Israel to weaken Iran, with which Russia had recently signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” agreement. Trump’s judgment was on the mark. When he bombed Tehran’s nuclear sites last summer, Moscow provided little diplomatic or material support. Shortly thereafter, he abruptly dismissed Putin’s offer to mediate between Washington and Tehran.
Trump is now engaged in a high-stakes contest with Iran over its nuclear-weapons program and broader role in the Middle East. He has moved a substantial armada into the region, threatened military action, and talked of regime change, even as his representatives sit down to talk with Tehran. The best Moscow could do was muster a small joint naval drill with Iran in the Gulf of Oman.
Similarly, last fall Trump negotiated a ceasefire in Gaza, in which Moscow played no visible role. He has now set up a Board of Peace to deal with the enclave’s future, on which Russia, if it joined, would be just one of dozens of other participants without any special privileges. Moscow has so far refused—and remains on the sidelines as Trump’s diplomatic effort moves forward.
Meanwhile, in Latin America, Trump has paid no heed to Russia’s interests. He deposed Putin’s partner, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, in a flawlessly executed, complex military operation that Russia cannot hope to replicate. For all practical purposes, Washington has now taken control of Venezuela’s oil sector, threatening eventually to restore the country’s exports—an act that would put downward pressure on world oil prices, to Russia’s detriment. At the same time, Washington is stepping up pressure to bring down the regime in Cuba, Russia’s longstanding ally in the Caribbean. Moscow has done little to alleviate that pressure.
Trump is even encroaching on Russia’s position in the former Soviet space, which Moscow has long considered its sphere of influence. He has stepped in to ease tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, displacing Russia’s efforts to stabilize relations between the two South Caucasian rivals. The United States is elevating relations with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two key Central Asian states. It is also flirting with Putin’s Belarusian ally, Aleksandr Lukashenko. The pushback from Moscow has been minimal.
Even in Europe, where Trump is seemingly acting in ways that benefit Russia, the situation is not as straightforward as it might seem. The rupture in transatlantic relations—an enduring Russian dream—is not leading to a weaker Europe but to one more determined to develop its own hard-power capabilities and exercise strategic autonomy. That could eventually consolidate Europe as a geopolitical actor that would dwarf Russia in population, wealth, and usable power. Moreover, the issue that precipitated the rupture—Trump’s claim to Greenland—should worry Moscow. Trump said the United States needed to control the Arctic island to protect it against a growing threat from Russia and China. That is an indication that he sees Russia as a competitor, not a potential partner, in the Arctic, despite Moscow’s persistent effort to portray the region as a zone of lucrative commercial cooperation.
The geopolitical challenges alone should suffice to give Moscow pause, but Trump has also shown little interest in dealing with Moscow on nuclear weapons—the one area in which Russia considers itself America’s equal. Washington never responded to Putin’s proposal to adhere to the ceilings on warheads and delivery vehicles after the expiration of the New START agreement. Instead, Trump boasted that he could negotiate a better agreement with both Russia and China. In the meantime, he has not ruled out a nuclear arms race—which Russia has long sought to avoid and cannot win—and he is pressing ahead with the Golden Dome missile defense system. Even if never fully operational, that system will still raise profound concerns in Moscow about the reliability of its strategic deterrent.
It is unlikely that all these actions are part of a concerted effort to diminish Russia’s standing as a great power—Trump, after all, has repeatedly said that getting closer to Russia would be a good thing. But they do reflect a calculation that, on issues of utmost importance to Trump, Russia does not matter all that much. He neither needs to worry about its resistance nor seek its support, in part because Putin’s Ukrainian obsession has left him with few resources to protect Russia’s interests farther afield.
This geopolitical and strategic pressure, even if not deliberate, casts the negotiations over the Russia–Ukraine war in a different light. Putin may indeed be dragging out negotiations in the hope of ultimately achieving his maximal goal. But he might not be playing Trump as skillfully as many observers contend. Rather, while he single-mindedly pursues his objectives in Ukraine, Trump is vigorously advancing US goals worldwide at Russia’s expense.
Helicopter pilot Eric Slover was shot four times during his descent into the Venezuelan presidential compound, but maintained control of the aircraft.
A special operations aviator received the Medal of Honor, the US military’s highest award for valor under fire, for his part in the recent operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro—as announced by President Donald Trump at the conclusion of his recent State of the Union address.
Slover’s Courage Under Fire
Near the end of the speech, President Trump announced that Army Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award for valor under fire, for his actions during “Operation Absolute Resolve”—the special operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife in January.
Slover is a member of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, better known as the “Night Stalkers.” This is the first Medal of Honor for the unit.
A few weeks ago, Trump visited Fort Bragg, the home of the Delta Force, and indicated that a soldier would receive the Medal of Honor for his role in the operation. Although many thought he was referring to a member of the ground force that stormed Maduro’s presidential palace, neutralized his elite Cuban guards, and captured him, he was referring to a Night Stalker.
Slover was the lead pilot in the first MH-47G Chinook helicopter to descend on Maduro’s presidential palace. Although the US military had neutralized Venezuela’s Russian-made air defense umbrella through a combination of electronic warfare, precision strikes, and cyberattacks, Maduro’s residence was heavily guarded by ground forces, who began to shoot at the helicopter.
“While preparing to land, enemy machine guns fired from every angle, and Eric was hit very badly in the leg and hip — one bullet after another,” Trump said during the State of the Union. “He absorbed four agonizing shots, shredding his leg into numerous pieces. Yet, despite the fact that the use of his legs was vital to successful helicopter flight, to deliver the many commandos who would capture and detain Maduro was the only thing Eric was thinking about.”
During the operation, Slover inserted the Delta Force assault force on target, even though he was bleeding profusely. An MH-47G Chinook can hold dozens of troops, and his steady flying in spite of his injuries certainly saved the mission—and the lives of some of America’s best soldiers.
After safely landing the helicopter, Slover directed his co-pilot, who was also wounded, to take control of the aircraft.
“The success of the entire mission and the lives of his fellow warriors hinged on Eric’s ability to take searing pain,” Trump added.
Army Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command and a former commander of Delta Force, placed the medal around Slover’s neck.
About the Night Stalkers
The 160th SOAR has the most capable helicopter pilots in the world. The unit only accepts seasoned aviators with years behind the stick and often considerable combat experience.
The Night Stalkers’ restrictive recruitment practices are in place for a good reason. The unit directly supports the world’s most elite special operations forces in high-stakes missions. It was the Night Stalkers, in special stealth MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, who ferried the SEAL Team Six squadron that killed Osama bin Laden in and out of Abbottabad, Pakistan. It was also the Night Stalkers who inserted the Delta Force assault force that took out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State.
In addition to the MH-47G Chinook and MH-60 Black Hawk, the Night Stalkers fly the AH/MH-6 Little Bird and the MH-60 Direct Action Penetrator (DAP), a heavily armed version of the MH-60.
