MGBrattland Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S23 5G, an AT&T 5G smartphone -------- Original message --------From: "andy.cain" <andy.cain@comcast.net> Date: 5/30/26 4:45 AM (GMT-08:00) To: Mike Brattland <mgbrattland@gerlecreek.com> Subject: Fwd: Israel is walking into endless war in Lebanon Sent from my Galaxy---------- Forwarded message ---------From: Andrew Fox from Fox On War <mrandrewfox@substack.com>Date: Thu, 28 May 2026 at 21:10Subject: Israel is walking into endless war in LebanonHezbollah has adapted, the ceasefire has collapsed into permanent low-level conflict, and Israel faces a brutal reality: securing the northern border may now require an unsustainable occupation.͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreYou’re a paid subscriber — thank you. Today’s post is free for everyone (so you can share it widely), but your subscription is what funds the work that makes Fox On War different.Israel is walking into endless war in LebanonHezbollah has adapted, the ceasefire has collapsed into permanent low-level conflict, and Israel faces a brutal reality: securing the northern border may now require an unsustainable occupation.Andrew FoxMay 28 READ IN APP Hezbollah (or, indeed, Tehran) made its choice on 8 October 2023. The day after Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel, it opened a second front from Lebanon, launching guided rockets and artillery at Israeli positions in what it called solidarity with Palestinians. The gesture became a grinding border war: thousands of projectiles, evacuated Israeli communities, and a strategic wound Israel could neither tolerate nor easily close. By September 2024, tens of thousands had been displaced on both sides of the border, and Israel formally made the safe return of northern residents a war aim.Operation Northern Arrows achieved all that armed force could. It pushed Hezbollah’s launch teams, tunnels, command nodes, and anti-tank positions back from the border to the Litani River, proving that attrition in southern Lebanon would exact a direct price. No state could accept a militia’s veto over whether its citizens sleep at home.However, the problem was far deeper. The November 2024 ceasefire architecture was familiar: UNSCR 1701, Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) deployment, UNIFIL monitoring, US-French oversight, Hezbollah’s supposed removal from the south, and Israeli withdrawal. It rested on an old assumption: that Lebanon could, with foreign backing, enforce sovereignty against the country’s most heavily armed political-military actor. The deal required LAF disarmament of Hezbollah under US-French monitoring, while Washington acknowledged Israel’s interim freedom to remove threats by force.That caveat has now become the war. Where the LAF will not or cannot act, Israel strikes. Where Hezbollah rebuilds, Israel clears. Where civilians are near the target, Israel issues evacuation orders. On paper, this is enforcement. In practice, it is a rolling campaign without a credible end. This week, Israel expanded its area of operations and declared the area south of the Zahrani River a combat zone, roughly 2,000 square kilometres, after more than 270 strikes. More than 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced since March.Hezbollah, meanwhile, is adapting. It cannot easily recreate the rocket posture it enjoyed before Northern Arrows, but it does not need to. It has shifted towards the battlefield lesson from Ukraine: cheap First Person View (FPV) drones, including fibreoptic variants that are hard to jam, flown low into Israeli positions. Hezbollah has killed a steady drumbeat of Israeli troops in recent weeks. Israel is now pursuing rapid industrial counter-drone solutions and expediting orders of anti-drone nets from Europe. It appears that the IDF was caught unprepared for this evolution.FPV fibreoptic droneThere will be a steep learning curve for drones in Lebanon. Ukraine is the crucible of drone warfare. The Russia-Ukraine war reached the point it is at today through hot evolution in contact. The war moved from armoured battle to trench warfare to a kind of drone parity that we see today. The IDF’s experience in Lebanon will serve as a model for other armies. We are seeing a superior army experiencing drone warfare by a weaker opponent, from a cold, standing start.Fortunately, Hezbollah is not yet producing at the scale of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. They will certainly try. It is a gold-plated lesson in what start-line procurement and tactical development look like for an army facing an FPV threat. If we look at where Ukraine is now, the evolution of drone warfare is so rapid that it is almost impossible to have a full suite of defences ready in case war happens in the future. Those stocks might well be outdated by the time war comes along. What the IDF’s experience so far shows us is that what is needed is industrial and procurement capacity to produce quickly, adapt quickly, and produce quickly again. That is the IDF’s test now. The lessons they learn from this will be vital in informing Western doctrine going forward.The irony is stark. Ukraine has spent years becoming the world’s brutal laboratory for FPV warfare. Yet Israel’s relationship with Kyiv has further soured, most recently over Ukrainian accusations that Israel bought grain harvested by Russia in occupied Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian officials have been offering Gulf partners expertise in countering cheap Iranian drones, yet Israel has not signed up. Israel needs every counter-drone lesson it can get. Instead, politics and commerce have kept a useful partner at arm’s length.The wider strategic trap is becoming clear. Israel can keep pushing Hezbollah back. It can expand the buffer zone. It can destroy launch sites, tunnels, depots, and villages used by Hezbollah. It can continue to displace Lebanese civilians from areas where Hezbollah is embedded, at terrible human and political cost. However, each mile north creates a new line to police. Each cleared village becomes a requirement to hold or revisit. Each drone strike shows that tactical depth does not confer immunity.The end state Israel seeks is simple: a northern border where Israeli civilians can live without Hezbollah fire, raids, or intimidation. The means required to secure it are not simple. Without a Lebanese state capable of monopolising force, without outside powers willing to impose costs on Hezbollah and Iran, and without an Iranian settlement that alters Tehran’s incentives, Israel is left with a military substitute for a political solution. That substitute can reduce risk, but it cannot abolish it, nor bring the conflict to an acceptable conclusion as things stand. The risk is a forever war.A permanent Israeli security zone deep inside Lebanon would drain manpower from an already exhausted IDF. It would expose troops to drones, mines, ambushes, and roadside attacks. It would internationalise Lebanese displacement as a standing grievance. It would also hand Hezbollah the narrative terrain it knows best: resistance to occupation. Israel has lived through that cycle before. It should not pretend the geography has changed enough to make the politics disappear.The international community’s role is to build a real enforcement regime: money, intelligence, coercive leverage, LAF capability, border monitoring, sanctions, and a serious Iran track. At present, none of that looks viable at the required scale. Until the international community stops taking the easy and free path of issuing condemnations of Israel, and until it steps up to help Israel solve a problem that lies outside Israel’s gift to solve, it should shut up. The hypocrisy stinks: no country on earth could be expected to live with endless, unprovoked rocket and missile fire into its territory. Not helping Israel solve the Hezbollah problem (and properly) means that everyone suffers.Israel remains tactically formidable, strategically boxed in, able to punish Hezbollah yet unable to solve the Lebanon problem by force alone. It is an impossible situation for Israel, the IDF, and Lebanon’s innocent civilians. The raging hypocrisy of endlessly criticising Israel without offering help is a stain on the international community.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.SubscribedThis post went to the whole list, but your subscription is the reason it exists.Paid readers cover the cost of travel, fieldwork and the hours of research it takes to turn that into something more useful than a hot take. Thank you.If you know one person who’d value this kind of reporting, feel free to forward it — you’re the reason this community grows. 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