The Lebanese army can barely fight – even after $3 billion from the US

“Today more than ever, the Lebanese army has a decisive role to play,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.

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

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

The Lebanese army is outgunned and out of weapons. The country has roughly 70,000 to 80,000 soldiers on active duty, compared to estimates of up to 100,000 for Hezbollah. According to the Lebanese Armed Forces, the country lacks advanced air defense systems and only has about five operational fighter jets and limited missile capabilities, while Hezbollah has tens of thousands of missiles, rockets and drones.

“It is one of the weakest armies in the Middle East,” said Amal Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University and an expert on Lebanese affairs. “That’s part of the reason why Hezbollah emerged in the 1980s – the Lebanese army was not. able to oppose Israel,” Saad said, referring to a previous Israeli invasion of Lebanon that helped establish Hezbollah as an opposition force.

The Lebanese army is said to have disarmed Hezbollah with the help of a United Nations peacekeeping force, part of a 2006 UN deal that ended a previous war between Israel and Hezbollah. Instead, Hezbollah imported more weapons through Syria, in violation of the resolution.

The militant group also had a presence south of the Litani River in Lebanon, an area it was forced to leave.

These circumstances contributed to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The invasion began in September, when Israeli soldiers crossed the border as part of an offensive to stop Hezbollah from firing rockets into northern Israel, which the country has done daily for the past year to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

Lebanese forces withdrew from the border, avoiding a confrontation that would pit the country against a much better equipped Israeli force, Lebanese military officials said, and which analysts say could alienate the country from the US.

The Lebanese army says it has carried out its missions, including coordinating with U.N. peacekeepers to implement the 2006 agreement and defending Lebanon’s national sovereignty, including against Israel.

Defenders say there are a multitude of reasons why the armed forces have been unable to fulfill mandates.

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

The US has also long been at odds over how far to go in providing weapons and financing, as the Lebanese military views US ally Israel as an enemy. And Hezbollah’s continued dominance over the country requires the Lebanese Armed Forces to work with the group.

But if the US and its allies want a stable Lebanon, they have little choice but to cooperate with the country’s military, defenders say.

“The Lebanese army is the only military alternative to Hezbollah,” said Samy Gemayel, the head of a historically Christian Lebanese party that opposes Hezbollah. “It needs to be strengthened. Without this army, Hezbollah would be in control of the entire country.”

Since the end of the country’s brutal civil war in 1990, the Lebanese Armed Forces have largely served as a unifying force. They helped disarm several non-state actors, seized their war equipment, and played intermediaries between rival political factions.

Over the years, however, Hezbollah has grown into a more powerful player, with the support of Iran. It took advantage of its success as a fighting force to take on a formal political role in Lebanon, with seats in the country’s parliament and a major social welfare operation.

The US and Europe provide much of the Lebanese army’s funding and training. As a financial crisis undermined 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 come from the military because so many soldiers have to take second jobs on delivery motorcycles.

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

Supporters of the funding say it has benefited Lebanon’s and U.S. interests in the region. The military has cracked down on drug trafficking and organized crime. Working with Hezbollah, the country defeated Islamic State militants.

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

All this means that American and European officials face difficult decisions about the extent of their support for the Lebanese army.

At the conference last week, Western leaders said their latest round of funding was aimed at buying fuel and weapons and recruiting 6,000 new soldiers.

U.S. Special Envoy Amos Hochstein said last week that the Lebanese Armed Forces “should be allowed to actually deploy and do their work in southern Lebanon and need support from the international community to do so.”

But U.S. officials have also argued over the amount of support to provide over the years, partly out of fear that U.S. aid could fall into the hands of U.S. adversaries. Israeli officials have in the past urged the U.S. to halt arms shipments to Lebanon, fearing 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 US in recent years equipped with rocket launchers, the request was denied.

“Instead, we were only given the boat and not allowed to attach any missiles,” the former general said. “That 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, DC.

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

“The LAF is also different,” she added. “It is more capable and better trained thanks to years of US and EU support.”

Write to Omar Abdel-Baqui at [email protected]