US intel wrongly envisioned catastrophic outcome if IDF escalated against Hezbollah

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1. American assumptions on Ukraine were also quite consistently wrong, including “escalation risk”, “managed” in a way which put things where they are now. I think the failure (on the Israeli side as well) wasn’t an overestimation of Hezbollah but rather an underestimation of Israel’s capabilities against Hezbollah. The most crucial of these capabilities were known to very few, and this underestimation likely grew in the U.S. after the October 7 failure.

2. To be fair I don’t think anyone expected Israel to slip a hand grenade into the pocket of every single important Hezbollah member while simultaneously executing the entire upper leadership with air strikes. 

   All things considered I’m surprised Hezbollah lasted as long as they did.

3. The biggest of mistakes is imagining that Putin would use nuclear weapons on a neighboring state. They played into Putin’s hands and refused to give Ukraine the necessary support at the right time to win the war. That was foolish of them – there was never a threat of escalation, in fact if they gave Ukraine deadly weapons prior to the war, it would have been sufficient to either deter the war or leave Russian desolate.

4. Weird to single out the US in the title considering the very first sentence states Israel’s assessments were nearly identical…

5. Between oct7, and now this, I’m genuinely concerned about US Intel’s imagination.

6. Remember when Hezbollah’s 100k + arsenal of guided missiles was the ultimate deterrent against Israeli agression towards Lebanon? Does anyone know if these missiles were preemptively destroyed in Israeli airstrikes over the past few months, as Hezb fell into disarray due to the pager explosions and decapitation strikes? Or was the claim untrue/exaggerated in the first place? It’s absolutely crazy how much the geopolitical calculus has changed between Israel and the axis of resistance.

7. Is this really news?

   It’s good to get formal confirmation but basically everyone including myself thought Hezebelloh could take out the Israeli power grid.

   We just got it massively wrong.

8. When you take out all the mid level managers of an organization so they are running around like headless chickens it does tend to make it easier to dismantle them.

9. Everyone was wrong. Everyone believed that the result of an all-out war would be a rain of thousands of Hezbollah missiles, which would of necessity overwhelm Israeli defences and inflict widespread damage and destruction.

   This isn’t an indictment of the US intelligence service. As the article points out, their assessment ought-backed on Israel’s own assessment. In fact, it was universally believed – by Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, the US and neutral observers. **No-one** publicly and correctly predicted, in advance, what actually happened.

   Why did literally everyone get it so wrong?

   I have my own theory, and it is this: the prediction may well have been pretty accurate – at the beginning of the conflict. What it relied on, was the ability of Hezbollah to keep its missile storage and launch locations relatively secret, and to be able to coordinate. Those were relatively intact as of October 8.

   However, the year long relatively low-level conflict completely undid Hezbollah. The Israelis quite evidently spent the time adding to their knowledge of Hezbollah’s storage and processes. They already knew much, but Hezbollah actually going through the process of shooting off some (but only a few) missile at them taught them a lot more – they could zero in and pinpoint their whole system.

   Then of course they pulled off the operation of the century – the pagers, followed by taking out the remaining leaders with air strikes. There is no way to have predicted in advance that this would actually work, and work so successfully. The Israelis certainly could not count on it in advance. Their models no doubt assumed Hezbollah had functioning leadership when the all-out conflict began.

   These two unpredictable factors – a year long delay with lower level conflict, revealing the secrets of Hezbollah’s network of missiles; plus actually decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership – completely changed all the assumptions. The Israelis were able to blow up much of Hezbollah’s arsenal before it could be launched, and Hezbollah was unable to adapt under fire without leadership.

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