Lebanon’s military can barely fight—even after $3 billion from the US

A Lebanese soldier by the site of an Israeli strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs. (Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ)
A Lebanese soldier by the site of an Israeli strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs. (Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ)

Summary

  • The country’s armed forces are ill-equipped to secure its borders and push aside Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that is now battling Israel.

BEIRUT—At an international conference in Paris last week, European leaders singled out the Lebanese Armed Forces as key to stabilizing the country. Some $200 million in contributions were announced, including sums provided by the U.S., France and Germany.

“The Lebanese army has a decisive role to play, today more than ever," French President Emmanuel Macron said.

The only problem: The Lebanese military has for years fallen short of the West’s aspirations, strangled by limited resources and the fragile political reality in Lebanon.

Despite $3 billion in U.S. funding since 2006, Lebanon’s armed forces are ill-equipped to secure the country’s borders and push aside Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that is now battling Israel.

Lebanon’s military is outmanned and outgunned. It has roughly 70,000 to 80,000 active-duty soldiers, compared with estimates of up to 100,000 for Hezbollah. It lacks advanced air-defense systems and possesses only around five operational jet fighters and limited missile capabilities, according to the Lebanese Armed Forces, while Hezbollah has tens of thousands of rockets, missiles and drones.

“It is one of the weakest armies in the Middle East," said Amal Saad, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University and an expert on Lebanese affairs. “That is part of the reason Hezbollah emerged in the 1980s—the Lebanese army wasn’t able to stand up to Israel," Saad said, referring to an earlier Israeli invasion of Lebanon that helped trigger Hezbollah’s creation as an opposition force.

Lebanon’s military was supposed to have disarmed Hezbollah with the help of a United Nations peacekeeping force, part of a 2006 U.N. agreement that ended an earlier war between Israel and Hezbollah. Instead, Hezbollah imported more weapons through Syria in violation of the resolution.

The militant group also maintained a presence south of Lebanon’s Litani River, an area it was supposed to vacate.

Those conditions contributed to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. The invasion began in September, when Israel’s soldiers crossed the border as part of an offensive to stop Hezbollah from firing missiles into northern Israel, which it has done daily for the past year to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

Lebanon’s armed forces pulled back from the border, avoiding a confrontation that would pit it against a far better-equipped Israeli force, Lebanese military officials said, and could alienate it from the U.S., according to analysts.

The Lebanese military says it has been executing its missions, which include coordinating with U.N. peacekeepers to implement the 2006 agreement and defending Lebanon’s national sovereignty, including from Israel.

Its defenders say there are a host of reasons the armed forces haven’t been able to fulfill the mandates.

For starters, it has had to straddle the country’s complex sectarian divides, including Christian, Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim and Druze communities.

The U.S. has also long been conflicted over how far to go in providing weapons and funding because the Lebanese military considers U.S. ally Israel an enemy. And Hezbollah’s continuing dominance over the country requires the Lebanese armed forces to coordinate with the group.

Still, if the U.S. and its allies want a stable Lebanon, they have little choice but to work with the country’s military, its defenders say.

“The Lebanese military is the only military alternative to Hezbollah," said Samy Gemayel, the head of a historically Christian Lebanese party opposed to Hezbollah. “It should be strengthened. Without it, Hezbollah would be in control of the entire country."

Since the end of the country’s brutal civil war in 1990, Lebanon’s armed forces have largely served as a unifying force. They helped to disarm various nonstate actors, confiscating their war equipment, and played intermediary between rival political factions.

Over the years, however, Hezbollah emerged as a more powerful player with Iran’s backing. It leveraged its success as a fighting force to take on a formal political role in Lebanon, with seats in the country’s parliament and a sizable social-welfare operation.

The U.S. and Europe provide much of the Lebanese military’s funds and training. When a financial crisis gutted the armed forces’ budget, the Biden administration stepped in last year to help pay soldiers’ salaries. Wages are still so low that locals joke that their food deliveries are coming from the army, because so many soldiers have to take second jobs on delivery motorbikes.

Lebanon’s military spending last year was $241 million, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. U.S. funds accounted for more than half the spending from 2021 to 2023, with $150 million requested for next year.

Supporters of the funding say it has yielded benefits to Lebanon and U.S. interests in the region. The military has cracked down on drug smuggling and organized crime. At times working with Hezbollah, it defeated Islamic State militants.

Last year, before the latest war began, the army helped convince Hezbollah to take down tents its members had placed on disputed territory that Israel controls, preventing an armed clash, according to a former general.

All of that leaves U.S. and European officials with difficult decisions over the scale of their support for the Lebanese military.

At the conference last week, Western leaders said their latest round of funding was meant to buy fuel and arms and recruit 6,000 new soldiers.

U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein said last week that the Lebanese Armed Forces must be allowed to “actually be deployed in south Lebanon and to do its job, and for that it needs support from the international community."

But U.S. officials have also argued about how much support to provide over the years, partly because of fears that U.S. assistance could fall into the hands of American adversaries. Israeli officials have in the past pushed for the U.S. to halt arms transfers to Lebanon, out of fear the weapons would be used against them, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2011.

A former Lebanese general told the Journal that when the military requested ships from the U.S. equipped with missile launchers in recent years, the request was denied.

“Instead, we were given just the boat, and were not permitted to attach missiles," the former general said. “It would be useful—for fishing."

Despite the military’s past failures, this time could be different, said Randa Slim, director of the Conflict Resolution and Track II Dialogues Program at the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

“Today, we have a weakened Hezbollah, with most of its leadership wiped out, a major part of its arsenal lost, its strongholds destroyed and 1.2 million of its constituents displaced" by Israeli bombing, she said.

“The LAF is also different," she added. “It is more capable and better trained thanks to years of support by the U.S. and EU."

Write to Omar Abdel-Baqui at omar.abdel-baqui@wsj.com

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