I've been pretty silent on what I think of the last conflict because I am in shock of what I saw as an Israeli failure. I was cruising around this morning, and found an assessment, of which part is below:

A Military Assessment of the Lebanon Conflict

by Guest Author at August 24, 2006 02:13 AM

by Ben Moores. Links added by Joe for various military systems to improve reader comprehension; holding the mouse over any dotted line will also show what many acronyms mean.

This is an attempt to assess the Israeli Defence Forces' performance in round 1 of the recent war, based on a variety of published sources. The analysis will look at various components of the IDF in turn.

IAF Performance

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) has come in for considerable criticism during the conflict. The majority of this has been more in relation to the strategic use of the Air Force as opposed to its actual tactical utility. However, the IAF's tactical utility, for so long unquestioned in Israel, needs to be examined.

Despite having excellent ISTAR and a formidably short kill chain the IAF was unable to interdict the small pockets of rocket firings from the border area into Northern Israel. F-15s and F-16s using GPS-gided JDAMs and laser-guided Paveway bombs, and armed UAVs, were all used. After 16 days of aerial bombardment Hezbollah was still quite capable of sustaining a barrage of 100 or more rocket firings against Israel, despite thousands of combat sorties by the IAF. Hezbollah is estimated to have some 1,250 launchers of all types of which about 300 were destroyed (or 25%). This IAF operational failure caused the IDF to mount a full blown invasion of the region to reduce Hizbollah's capability.

The major outcome os this conflict will, in my opinion, be a larger one in the future. I have a number of links on my sidebar, especially those in Israel, you should become familar with them if you want to understand the domestic repercussions of the conflict in Israeli politics. I hope that one of them will be the election of Bibi Netanyahu as the next Prime Minister of Israel.