The Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah may be one of the most successful and elegant acts of warfare in the history of man.
In a moment, across Lebanon, some 4,000 terrorist fighters were disabled by individual kinetic devices with no disruption to the infrastructure or economy and with minimal impact on non-combatants. It was brilliant. Not since the Battle of Midway has such a combination of excellent intelligence and tactical capability been deployed on the battlefield.
In a moment, Hezbollah was eliminated as a fighting force for an indefinite period of time.
History will hopefully record the details, but the overview at this point is impressive. Hezbollah, fearing correctly that Israel was surveilling its cellular-phone communications, decided in the spring to shift to pagers as the means of tactical communication for its terrorist fighters.
That fact became known to the Israelis, who conceived a plan to exploit it.
Specifically, the Israelis interposed themselves in the supply chain and provided Hezbollah purchasing agents with thousands of pagers which had been internally altered to contain an ounce or two of high explosive and a detonation device which could be remotely activated. That can be communicated in a single sentence, but the actual doing of it is a deed of incredible complexity and bravado. In terms of military innovation and creativity, it ranks next to the Trojan Horse.
And for who knows how many weeks or months, anti-Semitic terrorists walked around with Israeli bombs on their belts.
Here’s some background. Hezbollah is scum. It is a surrogate Iranian army which has bloodied both Israel and the United States. In 1983, it was Hezbollah that butchered 241 American servicemen – overwhelmingly United States Marines – in their sleep in a barracks in Beirut. These are monsters who deal in death and whose predations have displaced as many as 100,000 Israelis from their homes in northern Israel.
And it was those displaced families who were the subject of a vote this week by the Israeli war cabinet. Returning them to their homes was officially declared as a military objective of Israel.
But standing between those people and their homes was the shelling and incursions of Hezbollah terrorists.
And within hours of the declaration, Israel took care of Hezbollah.
The tradition of many anti-Israeli terrorists in the Middle East is to hide behind civilians, especially children and in hospitals and schools. The Hezbollah terrorists integrate themselves into the populace of Lebanon, which borders Israel to the north. They hide their terrorists there and they shoot their missiles from there.
That means that conventional warfare against Hezbollah terrorists would essentially be warfare against Lebanon and its people. Bombs, missiles and artillery shells fired on terrorist positions are going to blow up the civilian community around them, and military incursions into Lebanon by armed Israeli troops are going to be similarly disruptive and damaging.
That destroys homes and infrastructure, and the economy of the region, and kills a lot of innocent people – as demonstrated in Gaza and every other warzone across the world.
That’s what war does, it’s unavoidable.
At least it was until this week.
By conceiving and executing a plan in which the terrorists were duped into carrying around the device of their own individual destruction, the Israelis were able to achieve two previously incompatible goals: destroy an army and protect the location of that army.
With a keystroke or two, the detonate message was sent and some 4,000 terrorists became casualties, injured most of them in a fashion as to remove them from military service for months if not indefinitely. In an instant, the Hezbollah terrorist army was rendered combat ineffective – unable to take the field or engage in significant action.
And all of that was achieved without destroying Lebanese property or prosperity. Homes, businesses, schools, highways, power and water supplies were all left undamaged and functioning, and non-combatant casualties were in the single digits. This was as precise a strike as the world has ever seen.
It was like when the destroying angel struck down the first born of the Egyptians.
It was the battle that was over in less than a second.
And Israel won.
And so did the world.
The Marine Corps barracks were avenged, the settlers were protected, the terrorists were stopped, and Iran was temporarily foiled.
And a new chapter was written in the history of war.