I am still amazed at how massive Israel's intelligence penetration of Hezbollah is. This level of precision dismantlement of a terrorist organization by air strikes should not be possible. The USA tried and failed at this for years in Afghanistan and Iraq. I wonder if we will ever find out how they did it.
I had chance to get some uncensored vent from a guy who was a military analyst and then, to put it simply, stayed around glowing for a while.
Basically they knew who everyone was and roughly where they were. You could have just dispatched drones, laser bombs, and sniper teams and completely vaporized the Taliban inside afghantisan in a matter of days, just killed everyone affiliated with the org. But once you did that, this would have removed what was effectively the ethnic militia from several areas, and without them Helmand would have turned into a massive orgy of genocide and rape as all the other ethnic groups would have exploited the power vaccuum, and likely while they had their guys raping and genociding, it would have opened them up for a domino effect.
Additionally the Taliban were needed because complex ethnic interplay at the Iranian border. The Taliban hated some Iranian ethnic group that hared the Iranian government and if you removed the taliban they would genocide thier way over the border, set up operations, start fucking with Iran and now a US protectorate is on a course for war with Iran.
You destruct the Taliban and you have kill everyone within 150 miles of an Afghani border.
All of the cloak and dagger and fucked up ops where there dude vanished was because they were trying to capture and extract guys instead of turning them and their inner circles into fine red mist.
In addition, a lot of the US "allies" in those hotter regions were not pro-US by any stretch and more "Fuck those other sand niggers"; once you remove the sand niggers they hate, you'd have to eliminate their leadership, which because they had friends in other ethnic groups would mean those pro-US ethnic militia would be honor-bound to start trying to fuck with the US.
Basically the politicians and generals refused to let us win because sand niggers are subhuman.
It would a net gain for humanity to just start at Haifa and start glassing everything to the east until you hit the pacific.
Also, a general Israeli -Hezzbollah war would definitely extend into Syria as well and everything suspected of being an IRGC base would get leveled ASAP.
This key here. With things in Ukraine going less than goodly, Iran/Hezbollah has had to take over a lot of slack.
If Hezbollah bases in Syria are targeted again, as they have in the past, it might have negative consequences for the Government side in the Syrian civil war.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Israel have a pretty strong air force relative to its size? I feel like any time I've ever heard of modern Israeli military brags it's been the air force.
They have a very strong airforce, outsized for the size of the country.
Israel is a small country that has to fight on multiple fronts. Air Forces are major force multipliers and more importantly they can be everywhere at once very quickly. Israel has a powerful Air Force BECAUSE it's small, not in spite of it.
I think he's more making the point that a modern air force is expensive. I'm sure Lativa would would love to a giant powerful airforce, but economic realities force them to only have a few squadrons.
The UK has 6 times the people of Israel but the IDF airforce has nearly double the RAF's combat jets.
.
