Good to Know: Preemptive strikes

Israel has gone on the offensive, targeting Hezbollah.

Sep 25, 2024

STACIE GODDARD

On Monday, Israel conducted hundreds of airstrikes in southern Lebanon. The Israeli Defense Force reported that it targeted over 1,300 military sites, including “ buildings where Hezbollah hid rockets, missiles, launchers, UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] and additional terrorist infrastructure.” Lebanon’s health ministry reports over 500 dead, including 21 children, and alleges that Israel struck “hospitals, medical centers and ambulances.”

These attacks come on the heels of a series of September 2024 offensives. Last week, Israel launched a series of air and ground attacks against a Hezbollah missile production site in Syria. The operation began with airstrikes against Syrian air defenses near the facilities, attacks which left 16 dead, according to Syrian officials. To hit the site’s protected inner facilities, a few days later, Israel special forces launcheda follow-up ground raid against the facility.

On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, pagers and walkie-talkies used by hundreds of Hezbollah members exploded almost simultaneously in parts of Lebanon as well as Syria. On Friday, Israeli forces attacked a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, assassinating a high-ranking Hezbollah commander, Ibrahim Aqil. Other recent Israeli strikes targeted Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. Israel’s military reported that it took out over 40 launch sites, eliminating “thousands of Hezbollah rocket launcher barrels, aimed for immediate fire toward northern and central Israel.”

What is driving Israel’s increase in offensives in the north? Why is Israel willing to undertake risky operations, even as continued operations in Gaza threaten to overstretch its military resources? Israel’s recent operations demonstrate both a preemptive and preventive logic. These operations illustrate the Israeli military’s persistent belief that the best defense is a good offensive. Many outside Israel worry about the escalation of war in the Middle East. But Israelis are betting that increased use of force will get Hezbollah to stand down.

Preemptive strikes: using offense for defense

Israel’s government maintains that its offensives have a defensive logic. These moves, they claim, are necessary to thwart attacks by Hezbollah and other opponents in the region. Far from seeking to expand the war, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argues that, “We are not waiting for the threat, we are pre-empting it” by “eliminating senior figures, terrorists and missiles.”

Israel used similar preemptive language to justify the assassination of Hezbollah commanders. The Israeli military charged these men were planning to raid communities in northern Israel. Officials used similar language in defending Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in late August, arguing that its “preemptive strikes” were launched, not as an act of aggression, but in “self defense” after discovering that Hezbollah was “preparing to fire missiles and rockets toward Israeli territory.”

What is the logic behind a preemptive strike?

Political scientists define preemptive strikes as offensive strategies designed to thwart or at least diminish the damage of an opponent’s imminent attack. There are two key components to this definition. First, while preemptive operations are offensive, the intentions driving them are defensive – they aim to protect a country from harm. Second, the feared attack must be imminent; preemptive strikes aren’t a way to respond to a generalized fear of war in the future. For a strike to be preemptive, leaders must believe that their enemies are planning an attack. And, while it is often difficult to entirely prove those suspicions, those perceptions should have some basis in fact.

During the height of the July Crisis in 1914, for example, Germany launched a preemptive strike against France, which itself was mobilized for an offensive. Germany was hoping that a sweeping offensive – the Schlieffen Plan – would encircle and defeat the French military mobilized along its borders. In 1967, Israel launched preemptive strikes against Egyptian airfields, in an attempt to blunt that nation’s offensive power in the midst of a crisis.

Using this definition, some of Israel’s strikes seem to follow a preemptive logic. Following Hezbollah’s recent missile attacks, Israeli leaders have ample reason to believe that Israel is in imminent danger of attack. But other Israeli operations seem to follow the preemptive guidelines less closely. Instead, they align more closely with a preventive logic.

What’s a preventive strike, then?

In a preventive strike, a country’s military launches an offensive when it (a) believes that war is likely to occur in the future and (b) that having a war now is better than war later. This might sound similar to preemptive war, but there are significant differences. With a preventive war, the threat is not imminent – there is no sign that an enemy is about to attack. Second, the aim of preventive war is less about blunting the effects of an attack (since none is planned), and more about choosing the time and place that war will occur.

If this sounds complicated, it is! Indeed, it can be difficult to distinguish preemptive strikes from preventive ones. The United States called its 2003 offensive against Iraq a “preemptive strike” even though there was no sign that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was planning to attack in the near future. In hindsight, many analysts now characterize the Iraq strike as preventive. Neoconservatives in particular believed that war with Iraq was inevitable. Their logic was that it was better to fight it in the present – when the U.S. was far more powerful and Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. The concern was that in the future, Hussein could threaten the U.S. with a “mushroom cloud.”

Distinguishing preemptive from preventive strikes is even more difficult in the midst of an ongoing conflict. Given intensifying hostilities, all sides can make credible claims that an attack is imminent. At the same time, when we apply the imminent attack standard, some of Israel’s strikes appear more preventive than preemptive, despite the language and justification Israeli officials rely on to describe these decisions. As with many targeted killings, it is unclear that the Hezbollah commanders targeted for assassination were planning to attack Israel in the short term. If the objective was to prevent the planning of a future attack, then these strikes were preventive, not preemptive.

A distinction with a difference

It may be challenging to distinguish preemptive from preventive strikes, but the distinction is important for at least two reasons. First, research suggests that the causal mechanisms driving preemptive and preventive strikes are different. In preemptive attacks, uncertainty, fear, and a lack of information typically lead one side to go on the offensive against another. In contrast, a shift in material power among countries often drives preventive wars. Returning to the example of Germany during the July Crisis, some argue that Germany’s motives were as much preventive as preemptive, as they were attempting to strike France while they were still among the most powerful countries on the European continent.

Second, while preemptive wars are legal, preventive wars are not. According to international law governing warfare, offensive attacks are only justified in the name of self-defense. Any claims of self-defense must be immediate – and rooted in fact. Even if Israel sees itself as facing a significant threat in the future – say, a threat from a nuclear Iran – striking that country is considered a preventive act. Going back to 2003, some scholars maintain that the U.S. framing of its war with Iraq as “preemptive” was not a simple mistake in jargon. Instead, the U.S. invasion was designed to legitimate a preventive war as a preemptive one, in an effort to portray the war as legal.

Why do militaries use preemptive and preventive strikes?

Scholarship provides several explanations for why a military might turn to preemptive or preventive strikes. There’s a straightforward costs/benefit model – a military will use an offensive strategy against an opponent when it believes that these strategies have an advantage over defending against an attack. This logic, known as the offense-defense balance, might lead even defensively inclined leaders to choose to strike first.

But a country’s military leaders might opt to launch preemptive and preventive strikes for other, more parochial reasons. Some scholarship suggests that officers, in general, prefer offensive strategies because this approach provides the military with more autonomy, more material resources, and more prestige than going on the defense. The Schlieffen Plan was both expensive and complicated. That allowed the German army not only to demand more investment, but also kept bewildered civilians at arms’ length.

Other evidence suggests that a military’s organizational culture can push its leaders towards preemptive or preventive strikes. In this argument, military leaders come to see striking first as part of the identity and practice of their organization. Thus, they see the strike as a preference embedded in historical practices – and less as a rational response to current strategic circumstances.

The strategic studies literature suggests that several of these factors guide Israel’s proclivity for preemptive and preventive strikes. Before 1967, Israel relied on a very “offensive, though unofficial, military doctrine based on the assumption that the country was too small and vulnerable to risk a war to be fought on its own territory.” After that particular war, Israel shifted to a more defensive position. But the shock of the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack on Yom Kippur in the 1973 war cast doubt on the wisdom of abandoning offensive strikes.

Both preemptive and preventive strikes are also part of Israel’s strategic culture. Scholars argue that an offensive culture drove Israel’s 1981 decision to strike Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, as well as the 2007 attack against a Syrian reactor thought to be producing material for weapons of mass destruction. Recently, Israeli leaders have been far more vocal than their U.S. counterparts in advocating for a preventive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Risking expansion or deterring escalation?

U.S. defense officials have expressed alarm that Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah is in danger of spiraling out of control. On Sunday, Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Kassem, declared an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel. Hezbollah has already responded by firing missiles deep into Israeli territory. Now observers are increasingly concerned that these exchanges could escalate into a land war.

These worries are based on the spiral model (see our Good to Know on this topic). Here the concern is that Israeli offensive strikes will unnecessarily drive escalation, leading to an all-out war with Hezbollah and Lebanon – and potentially with Hezbollah’s supporter, Iran.

In contrast, Israel’s leaders seem to be acting in accordance with the deterrence model. From this perspective, Israel’s offensives are necessary to “restore deterrence” and demonstrate to its recalcitrant opponents to stand down. As one commentator put it, Israel’s offensives are designed to “convince its enemies that it has the ability to wreak overwhelming destruction on any that harm it.”

What happens next depends on whether we are in a world where spirals or deterrence dominates. If Hezbollah is prepared to escalate their attacks in retaliation for Israel’s use of force, then the Israelis are playing a very dangerous game. If, alternatively, Israel’s offensives make Hezbollah more likely to cease firing missiles at Israel, then the use of force, paradoxically, may be stabilizing.

Research suggests that preemptive wars are rare. Retaliation may happen, but countries – including Iran – tend to think twice before escalating towards all out war.

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