Politics

Don’t discount the Lebanese Army in a fight with Hezbollah

Lebanon's president and prime minister have a big decision to make: whether, and how, to use the army to disarm Hezbollah. Today's army can be trusted, but its task must be well thought through.

Houssam Shbaro / Anadolu via Getty Images

Lebanese Armed Forces personnel in the Al-Mafilha area of Meiss Al Jabal, a town in Lebanon's Nabatieh Governorate.

Don’t discount the Lebanese Army in a fight with Hezbollah

Bilal Y. Saab

last update on 31 Jul 2025

In his inaugural speech in January, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said the Lebanese state should regain its monopoly over the use of force, to applause from lawmakers and international partners alike. A former Lebanese army commander, Aoun repeated that pledge in April. A decision “has been taken,” he said.

Until it becomes clear when and how this goal will be achieved, everything in Lebanon will be put on-hold. Indeed, supportive countries such as the United States, France, and Saudi Arabia will not help reboot Lebanon’s debt-stricken economy or wade into the reconstruction task in the south until Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam present a concrete blueprint for disarming Hezbollah.

Washington wants there to be a public commitment from Beirut. If this is not forthcoming, US special envoy Thomas Barrack may end his shuttle diplomacy. Likewise, Israel may suddenly feel less pressure to end its airstrikes and pull its troops away from the five hilltops it is occupying in southern Lebanon.

Unlikely to disarm

Israel is believed to have destroyed most of Hezbollah's arms, but the Iran-backed group reportedly still has weapons stored north of the Litani River, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut, including armed drones and long-range precision-guided missiles. What it still has, it will keep, says leader Naim Qassem, who succeeded Hassan Nasrallah after Israel killed him in September 2024. “We will not surrender or give up to Israel,” he said in a video message on 18 July. “Israel will not take our weapons away from us.”

Qassem’s words should shock no-one: Hezbollah was always unlikely to disarm voluntarily and transition to a ‘normal’ political party, since this would have meant ‘throwing in the towel.’ Surrender is antithetical to the group’s philosophy of armed struggle and martyrdom. Without its guns, Hezbollah is just another sectarian group in Lebanon, with less political acumen and experience than others, and little ability to compete fairly in local and national elections.

Anwar Amro / AFP — US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack (R) arrives to meet with Lebanon's Prime Minister at the government palace in Beirut on June 19, 2025.

Given that Hezbollah has no intention of disarming unless forced to, and given that it may even seek to restore its depleted stockpiles, there would seem to be two remaining options: either Israel finishes the job militarily, or else the Lebanese army steps in. Each comes with risks and complications.

The Israeli option

Israel has already carried out more than 500 airstrikes against Hezbollah targets since the November 2024 ceasefire to further degrade the group’s military capabilities and lower the chance of rearming. According to the Israeli military, it has killed at least 230 Hezbollah operatives, and destroyed more than 90 rocket launchers and thousands of rockets, 20 command centres, 40 weapon depots, and five arms production sites, alongside other infrastructure.

Whether this continues or escalates remains to be seen. When asked, Barrack said a new Israeli war was not expected, but cautioned that the US could not “compel” Israel to do anything. By sticking to its current formula, Israel can further dent Hezbollah’s remaining combat power, but will not eliminate it. To do that would require another ground invasion.

Getty Images — Hezbollah members attend the funeral of a fighter killed in conflict in the mountainous area around the Lebanese town of Arsal on August 28, 2017.

The political and military costs of this may seem less tempting in Tel Aviv, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already under tremendous pressure for his disastrous handling of the war in Gaza. Invading Lebanon may divert attention from his problems temporarily, but it would also further isolate Israel at a time when states such as the UK, France, Canada, and Saudi Arabia are cooling rapidly.

The in-house option

The second option, then, is the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) helping to push Hezbollah to disarm. Since the November ceasefire, the LAF has played a central role as part of the Cessation of Hostilities Implementation Mechanism, a reformulated version of the tripartite mechanism established following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Under the terms of the cessation-of-hostilities arrangement, the revised mechanism is chaired by the United States and hosted by United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL. It also includes the Israeli military and the LAF, as well as France.

If Hezbollah will not disarm voluntarily, either Israel finishes the job, or else the Lebanese army steps in. Each comes with risks and complications

The LAF has been praised by US generals for its role in helping to dismantle Hezbollah's military infrastructure in the southern part of the Litani. Israel, however, believes that the LAF is too slow and too hesitant to move up north, yet this hesitancy has nothing to do with the LAF. On the contrary, it comes from the Lebanese authorities. Like other national armies, the LAF takes its direction from the civilian leadership over which battles to fight and which responsibilities to assume.

Aoun and Salam face a tough decision. Ordering the forcible removal of Hezbollah's weapons carries great risks. Even though Hezbollah answers to a foreign power (Iran), receives assistance from a foreign power and follows an ideology that is foreign to Lebanese culture, all its members are Lebanese, so an LAF-Hezbollah confrontation would most likely lead to the killing of Lebanese citizens.

That would be the tragic consequence of Hezbollah having hijacked most of the Lebanese Shi'ite community, endangering its safety and security by tying the community's fate to its own and to that of its sponsor, Iran. An LAF-Hezbollah conflict could lead to wider sectarian clashes. It would also make it difficult for the LAF's Shi'ite soldiers to do battle with their own community members.

Weak no longer

These are all perfectly legitimate concerns, hence Aoun and Salam's cautious approach. Yet it is a fallacy and common misconception that the LAF is much weaker than Hezbollah and thus cannot disarm it (or play a role in doing so). That may have been true many years ago, but not today.

Houssam Shbaro / Anadolu via Getty Images — Lebanese army units stationed in the Aitaroun municipality of southern Lebanon on 2 February 2025 after the Israeli armywithdrew.

I have spent the last decade studying the LAF and interacting with its personnel, including commanders. In 2017, as part of my duties in the Office of the Secretary of Defence in the first Trump administration, I oversaw the US military assistance programme with the LAF, liaising closely with the Office of Defence Cooperation in the US Embassy Beirut and US Central Command (CENTCOM).

I witnessed first-hand the remarkable evolution of the LAF from a dilapidated force to a professional army, as evidenced in 2017 by its battle against the Islamic State (IS), another irregular army. This was while I was in the Pentagon, so I could observe it closely, and later helped produce the Department of Defense evaluation of the LAF's performance. It scored very well.

Over several days, the LAF crushed IS in Operation Fajr al-Jouroud (Dawn of the Outskirts) in August, just five months after Gen. Joseph Aoun took over as army commander. IS had established a presence along Lebanon's north-eastern border four years earlier. It took the LAF just over a week to defeat its opponent and would do so with minimal casualties, impressing CENTCOM leaders and senior officials in the Pentagon.

Showing its abilities

The LAF excelled in planning, rehearsing, deploying, moving, and fighting with determination, effectiveness, precision, speed, and ingenuity. It leveraged its extensive US training and successfully employed its US-made weaponry both from the air and the ground (often in a combined fashion meeting NATO standards), giving IS no chance to fight back. Inspired by Sun Tzu's famous dictum, the LAF essentially defeated its enemy with little to no fighting. Its preparation and mastery of its own military strategy was such that IS, a radical entity not known for surrendering, quickly gave up and fled back to Syria.

Marwan Naamani / Getty Images — Lebanese army soldiers secure the site where a building was hit by an Israeliairstrike in Beirut southern suburb on 24 September 2024.

Of course, IS and Hezbollah are different propositions. An LAF confrontation with Hezbollah would likely not be as clean or decisive as Fajr al-Jouroud. Likewise, IS is not Lebanese and there is broad consensus in Lebanon against it. The same cannot be said for Hezbollah. Still, the LAF is more than capable of making serious contributions to the goal of Hezbollah's disarmament, should it be asked to. Its mission would not be to remove every Hezbollah gun, but to apply enough military pressure to bring it to the negotiating table for disarmament to be thrashed out.

Importantly, however, the LAF's remit would need to be integrated into a broader political strategy of the Lebanese government. What that political strategy would entail is up to the Lebanese people and the government to decide, but in making those decisions, the public and the government should stop discounting the LAF, and recognise that it has undergone nothing short of a transformation, thanks in large part to US coaching and assistance over more than 18 years.

The LAF exists for a single purpose: to defend Lebanon from all threats, foreign and domestic. Under the right set of political circumstances, it should be seen as part of the solution to the Hezbollah problem. It could not play a meaningful role in the past, but now it can, and it should. Otherwise, Israeli pounding is likely to continue, and the prospect of another destructive war will not recede. That costly scenario, when compared with a local solution that is backed by international partners, should be part of Aoun and Salam's cost-benefit calculations.

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