Working alongside Russian forces will likely enhance the group’s ongoing shift toward a more offensive-minded strategy, with significant implications for the planning and conduct of any future conflicts against Israel.

For the first time in its history, Hezbollah is conducting offensive maneuver warfare as part of its operations in Syria. The Russian intervention is only enhancing that experience, likely giving the group important lessons for future conflicts.

Thus far, Hezbollah has long followed a strategy of defense and attrition in hostilities against its main enemy, Israel — an approach that many high-ranking officers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) liked to call “not losing.” Taking into account Israel’s manpower and technological advantages, this strategy focused on prolonging the fighting as much as possible, maintaining home-front attrition by firing rockets on Israeli population centers, and increasing the costs of IDF ground maneuvers in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah displayed this defensive mindset during the 2006 war when it hid rockets and fighters in elaborate networks of underground fortifications and areas of dense vegetation that Israeli officers dubbed “nature reserves.” The group believed that as long as it did not crumble, it could claim that it survived a war with the mighty IDF, which according to its narrative was actually a win. The Syria war has changed this defensive paradigm, however.

NEW EXPERIENCE, NEW STRATEGY

In Syria, Hezbollah has had to shift its main objectives to taking over territory and maintaining control over it, all while fighting quasi-conventional forces that use guerrilla tactics. Against the IDF, the group was accustomed to fighting in small units on familiar terrain, but now it is deploying hundreds of fighters in complex offensive operations on unfamiliar territory. For Hezbollah’s commanders and fighters, such experience can change their views on the most effective way to win a battle, and Russia’s involvement means that they are learning such lessons from one of the best militaries in the world.

Read the article in full at the Washington Institute.