that had cost the Egyptians heavy losses, and reached manoeuvre spaces, the old
‘package’ of manoeuvrability, offence, and battlefield decision was revived.
The second example is the attempt to envelop Syrian troops in Lebanon during
the 1982 war. It was again Ariel Sharon—this time not in uniform but as defence
minister—who was responsible for the plan that reminded Prime Minister
Menahem Begin of Hannibal’s Battle of Cannae, during which the great Cartha-
ginian commander applied a double envelopment of the Romans. Unlike Hanni-
bal, who did not plan to give the enemy any chance to escape, Sharon was sure
that the Syrians would withdraw after realizing that the Israelis were encircling
them from three different directions—the Beka Valley (the ‘anvil’) and the central
and western axes (the ‘hammers’). There was one major problem, though: the
Syrians did not cooperate with Sharon’s plan.
The third example pertains to the battles waged by the paratrooper brigade
under the command of Colonel Yoram Yair, also during the 1982 Lebanon War,
which served the achievement of the operational objective. The paratroopers first
outflanked the enemy by landing on the seashore near the mouth of the Awali
River, and then advanced from south-west to north-east in the mountains,
encircling Beirut and bypassing the seashore axis. Despite strong Syrian and
Palestinian resistance, both in the mountains and in the streets of the Lebanese
towns and villages on their way, the paratroopers coped with the challenges
efficiently until they managed to take control of the Syrian outer defence belt
around Beirut and accomplish the mission of joining up with the Christian-
Lebanese allies north of the city. 73
The 2006 war reflected a significant decline in the indirect approach. Israeli
ground activity consisted of transparent manoeuvres, something that operational
art does not tolerate, unless such manoeuvres are carried out for deception
purposes. Had the IDF truly been committed to its sophisticated indirect-
approach tradition, its ground operations would have opened by quickly out-
flanking and encircling the enemy and using the element of surprise to capture
the northern parts of southern Lebanon first. An indirect approacha`laSun Tzu
or Liddell Hart would have caused confusion among the enemy ranks and might
have brought about its psychological collapse much better than the Clausewitzian
direct approach, which enabled Hezbollah to recover and stand strong. Contrary
to operational art’s preference for a top-down effect, IDF ground troops were
engaged in a Sisyphean effort to translate achievements in numerous battles into
operational and strategic gains.
It may be true that the IDF had planned an operation based on a ‘sophisticated
blend of amphibious, airborne and ground penetrations to swiftly extend deep
into the front, before rolling back, so as to destroy Hezbollah positions one by one
from the rear, all the way back to the Israeli border’. 74 Given Israel’s failure to
incapacitate Hezbollah’s political and ideological leadership, and based on the
assumption that ground operations were inevitable in light of the war objectives,
the air campaign during the initial stages of the war should have been followed by
a large-scale ground operation aimed at achieving a battlefield decision or, at
least, capturing the areas from which the Katyushas were fired.
186 The Evolution of Operational Art