According to military analysts from DEBKA-Net-Weekly (an online journal with close ties to Israeli intelligence community), the points below mark IDF’s six principal failings in the Lebanon war

1. Israeli elected leaders, Olmert and defense minister Peretz, lack military experience and the skills required for managing a war.

2. The military leadership qualities of chief of staff Lt.-General Halutz, former commander of the air force where he grew up, are questionable.

3. Olmert’s predecessor left him with a flawed legacy. During his six and-a- half years as premier, Ariel Sharon shook up the top levels of the IDF’s general command, military intelligence and the Mossad (although not the Shin Bet) and stuffed them with appointees who subscribed to his political philosophy.

Israel’s top military and security echelons have never before been picked for their political outlook. Sharon’s axe created a monolithic establishment lacking in the motivation burning in their predecessors for developing brilliantly innovative methods of warfare.

4. In six years of counter-terror warfare against the Palestinians, the IDF focused on perfecting small-time tactics for keeping local terror fires under control, but failed to produce methods applicable to a transition from fighting terrorists to waging war. Hizballah has foisted this transition on the Israeli military.

5. Israeli war planners, like the US army in Iraq, came to rely too heavily on air power, firepower and hi-tech weaponry for combating terror. They neglected to draw the lessons of the three-year Iraq war.

6. Hizballah’s tacticians and their Iranian Revolutionary Guards mentors studied every Israeli move in its 2002 Defensive Wall Operation against the Palestinian terrorist stronghold of Jenin, which ended in all the towns of the West Bank falling to the Israeli military. Taking this battle as their master plan, they invented a new war doctrine to fit a Hizballah offensive against an Israeli army which had not revised its doctrines of war in the intervening four years.