Lemons for Lebanon

I hope I am wrong about this, but as I understand it the prospect of avoiding war in the Lebanon does not look good. Not just for political reasons, but for a military reason.

If the analyses are even half right, the position is something like this. Hezbollah have tens of thousands of rockets ready to fire at Israel. The bulk of these are relatively unsophisticated unguided missiles, which cost Hezbollah a couple of hundred dollars each. The Israelis have a highly sophisticated Iron Dome system. These anti-missile missiles have something like a 90% prospect of shooting down any missile which Hezbollah fire into Israel, at a cost of around $50,000 a pop. In recent weeks, Hezbollah have been firing some of these missiles, but only a very small proportion of their available arsenal. They have probably been doing this partly for political reasons, and partly to make inroads into Israel’s stock of Iron Dome anti-missile missiles. More recently, Israel has been taking out some of Hezbollah’s missile capability, but again only a small proportion of the whole available arsenal.

Israel has probably a dozen Iron Dome batteries, and these have been effectively coping with most of what Hezbollah has been throwing at Israel over the past few weeks. But if Hezbollah were to launch a much larger proportion of its missiles (i.e. twenty thousand or so), Israel’s Iron Dome capability would soon be overwhelmed and exhausted, and Israel would be pretty much defenceless against both Hezbollah’s cheap crude missiles and, more importantly, its more limited stock of bigger, longer range guided missiles, which could hit Israel’s major cities with devastating effect.