Sovereignty Without Defense: The Army, the State, and Hezbollah’s Weapons

As Israel broadens its aerial bombardment of Lebanon and attempts a ground invasion of the South, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have yet to meaningfully respond. Echoing the dominant U.S.-Israeli framing, some commentators continue to blame Hezbollah’s military operations against Israel as the root issue undermining Lebanon’s sovereignty. Fundamentally, however, the issue of sovereignty has much more to do with the history of the Lebanese state and the question of who protects Lebanon from external threats — most notably Israeli hegemony and expansionism.

On March 2, two days after U.S. and Israeli forces launched their war on Iran, Hezbollah fired projectiles from Lebanon targeting an Israeli radar system near Haifa. The strike marked the Lebanese group’s first military operation since the so-called cessation of hostilities agreement was signed between Lebanon and Israel on November 27, 2024. As  Hezbollah ceased its operations and retreated north of the Litani River, the LAF deployed across the South and began seizing and destroying Hezbollah’s weapons and dismantling its infrastructure. Israel, however, never complied with the agreement, refusing to withdraw from its military outposts on Lebanese territory and continuing to launch strikes at will.

By November 2025, Israel had carried out more than 7,500 airspace violations, around 2,500 ground incursions, and at least 669 strikes on Lebanon. These attacks killed at least 331 people, injured 945, and prevented 65,000 displaced people from returning to their homes and villages in south Lebanon. The Lebanese government failed to effectively challenge these violations — politically or militarily — let alone substantially mitigate their impact on the civilians enduring them.

Over the past 20 years, and especially since the agreement in November 2024, fierce debates over sovereignty have dominated Lebanese politics: who holds the monopoly over the use of force, who controls territory and the movement of people within it, and can and should Hezbollah be disarmed. This debate reached a tipping point on March 2, when Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s cabinet declared Hezbollah’s military activities “illegal” and called on the LAF to advance a plan approved last year to consolidate all weapons under state authority. LAF Commander-in-Chief Rodolphe Haykal has reportedly resisted using force against Hezbollah, and there are indications that the cabinet is considering replacing the commander, a move favored by the United States.

Since assuming office in January 2025, Salam’s stance toward Hezbollah reflects the interplay of two forces in Lebanon. Domestically, parties and figures long opposed to Hezbollah — some allied with Washington and, tacitly, Israeli strategic interests — are seeking to exploit what they portray as the group’s weakness after the 2023-2024 war. They desire to politically isolate and militarily dismantle the organization. Externally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has leveraged its continued strikes, the occupation of Lebanese territory, and the displacement of civilians to pressure the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah. 

On March 13, Israel struck the Zrarieh Bridge over the Litani, warning that such attacks represent the growing cost the Lebanese state and people will bear for not disarming Hezbollah. That same day, Israeli planes dropped leaflets over Beirut calling on the Lebanese people to disavow Hezbollah and warning them that Lebanon could face the same fate as Gaza. In the face of this mounting pressure, Haykal’s reluctance to confront Hezbollah is widely seen as an effort to avoid direct conflict that could fracture the LAF or plunge the country into renewed civil war. 

There are those who measure the capacity and sovereignty of the Lebanese state against the existence and conduct of Hezbollah’s military organization. This constitutes flawed analysis at best, and propaganda at worst.

There are those who measure the capacity and sovereignty of the Lebanese state against the existence and conduct of Hezbollah’s military organization. This constitutes flawed analysis at best, and propaganda at worst. Hezbollah’s military confrontation with Israel emerged in response to the absence of any genuine state-led attempt to expel Israeli occupation and deter Israeli aggression. Many of those invoking sovereignty as justification for disarming Hezbollah rarely, if ever, take issue with Israeli military violations, U.S. or Saudi political interference, or the entrenched power of Lebanon’s banking elite. 

Amid longstanding debates over Hezbollah's weapons and their implications for Lebanese sovereignty, external threats remain a daily reality — Zionist territorial ambitions in Lebanon date back to at least the 1920s, and Israeli military interventions began in 1948. As the current moment demonstrates, the LAF is unable – by design – to defend the country against persistent violations of its airspace and territorial integrity, nor has it prevented the killing, injury, and displacement of residents.

This pattern long predates Hezbollah’s founding in the early 1980s.  Since its establishment, Hezbollah has assumed and exercised a defensive role that the LAF was never mandated to perform, was never politically authorized to pursue, and has rarely attempted to carry out. 

Some might point to the LAF operations against Fath al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared Refugee Camp (2007) or the Islamic State on Lebanon’s northeast border with Syria (2017) as examples of its effectiveness as a fighting force. While these cases are very different from one another, military analysts nevertheless broadly describe them as “counter terrorism” operations focused on specific “insurgent groups” rather than a conventional military operation against a standing military force of another state. In this sense, both cases demonstrate the point of investing in the LAF as an internal security force without a corollary aspiration for defense against the historical ambitions, repeated invasions, and continuous airspace violations of the Israeli military.

Hezbollah has assumed and exercised a defensive role that the LAF was never mandated to perform, was never politically authorized to pursue, and has rarely attempted to carry out.

The Lebanese state formally established the LAF in 1945, following the 1943 uprising that secured political independence from France. Groups from across the political and social spectrum demanded the establishment of a national army as a necessary corollary of sovereignty. Yet from its inception, the LAF’s development was shaped by the logic of creating an internal security force. At the same time, the LAF served as a key channel for diplomatic, military, and economic relations with other states, primarily, but not exclusively, Western ones. In this sense, territorial defense was always subordinated to other considerations. 

Successive presidents, cabinets, military commanders, and parliamentary majorities understood and operated within this framework. The result was an army structurally oriented toward shoring up state power domestically, managing Lebanon’s internal fractures, and maintaining international alliances rather than confronting Israel’s repeated violations of Lebanese territory. This historical dynamic underlies the current moment and the sovereignty debate it has reignited.

The LAF’s lack of meaningful defense against Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty is, in part, a reflection of the political settlement that followed the 1975–1990 Civil War. At that time, Syrian hegemony and Western aid flows ensured that the LAF’s role was restricted to internal security while avoiding direct confrontation with Israel — a role Hezbollah has historically undertaken. 

After Hezbollah liberated south Lebanon in 2000, that division of labor was further institutionalized. This was due, to a certain degree, to the pro-Western orientation of key political factions. The 2006 war marked a paradoxical turning point. Militarily, it represented a high point for Hezbollah, which withstood and ultimately repelled an Israeli ground invasion. Politically, it exposed the depth of Lebanon’s internal fractures and marked a low point for Lebanon’s political leadership. Images circulated of cabinet members meeting with U.S. Embassy officials, and WikiLeaks cables exposed Lebanese leaders privately urging Washington to press Israel to prolong its aerial bombardment in the hope of weakening, or at least discrediting, Hezbollah. This episode crystallized the enduring split between a resistance project carried out by Hezbollah’s military wing and a Lebanese political class whose strategic calculations and very survival were largely tethered to Western patronage.

The LAF’s constrained role, however, predates the post-civil war order and reaches back to the French Mandate (1920–43). The nucleus of the LAF dates back to the Lebanese contingents of the French-created and -commanded Special Troops of the Levant. Established in 1930, the Special Troops were themselves drawn from reorganized, French-recruited local forces designed to quell local anti-colonial rebellions and mobilizations and enforce French rule. These local forces supported the French Army of the Levant as it repressed armed and unarmed resistance to the imposition of the borders, economic policies, and political hierarchies of colonial Lebanon. Unsurprisingly, the Special Troops played virtually no role in securing Lebanon’s independence in 1943.

The nucleus of the LAF dates back to the Lebanese contingents of the French-created and -commanded Special Troops of the Levant. Established in 1930, the Special Troops were themselves drawn from reorganized, French-recruited local forces designed to quell local anti-colonial rebellions and mobilizations and enforce French rule.

That constrained orientation persisted after independence. In June 1948, the LAF launched a limited military operation to take al-Malikiyya, a Palestinian village just south of the border, and subsequently handed control over to the Arab Salvation Army the following month. As Zionist forces advanced through northern Palestine later that year, the LAF reportedly declined requests for military support from Arab Salvation Army contingents stationed just south of the Lebanon-Palestine border. When Israeli forces subsequently crossed into Lebanon, occupying more than 15 villages, including Houla — where they massacred scores of civilians — the LAF reportedly declined to formally engage. This first Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended in March 1949, following the Israeli-Lebanese armistice that decreed its withdrawal.

Since independence, the LAF has undergone significant organizational, personnel, and material development. As in the 1945–75 period, the post-1990 era, especially after 2005, deepened the army’s ties with its U.S. and European counterparts. The United States, for example, provided Lebanon more than $3 billion in military aid between 2006 and 2024. Through joint exercises, training programs, security cooperation initiatives, and weapons transfers, the LAF became an important node linking Lebanon to Western diplomatic, military, and economic networks. Most foreign military aid packages to the LAF have explicitly avoided building up a genuine defensive capacity for Lebanon and instead focused on internal security. U.S. support to the LAF, in particular, is effectively conditional on not being used against Israel under any circumstances.

Following Lebanon’s post-2019 economic collapse, patterns of foreign aid shifted dramatically. The LAF became one of the preferred conduits for bilateral foreign assistance. The United States has since become the largest provider of development, humanitarian, and security assistance to Lebanon. U.S. bilateral assistance averaged $285 million per year between 2021 and 2024, much of it in the form of Foreign Military Financing to the LAF. 

Given the Lebanese lira’s depreciation of more than 90 percent, the collapse of living standards, and severe foreign currency shortages, the institution may not have survived the past six years without sustained external support. Such lifelines have further enmeshed Lebanon within U.S., U.K., and French spheres of influence, reinforcing the external dependencies that help explain the army’s long-standing position. Its Western partners have reinforced the LAF’s role as an internal security force, shaping both its aversion to and lack of capacity for confronting Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty. 

In 1948, when Israeli forces crossed into Lebanon, occupying more than 15 villages, including Houla — where they massacred scores of civilians — the LAF reportedly declined to formally engage.

Given this history of patronage, the presidency and cabinet’s decision to withdraw the army from southern Lebanon and other border regions following Hezbollah’s March 2, 2026, projectile attack does not come as a surprise. This background also helps explain reports that the cabinet rejected Commander Haykal’s request for permission to position the army against an anticipated Israeli invasion. The LAF was neither designed nor equipped for such a confrontation.

In 2000, Hezbollah’s nearly two decades of military operations against the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon resulted in its withdrawal from territories it had seized during the 1978 and 1982 invasions. Despite establishing a remarkable level of deterrence, especially after 2006, the resistance group did not fully prevent Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty. Between 2007 and 2022 alone, Israel violated Lebanese airspace more than 22,000 times, including over 8,200 fighter jet incursions and more than 13,000 unmanned aerial vehicle incursions. Yet the LAF and the Lebanese government did not meaningfully respond.

Whatever one’s assessment of Hezbollah’s roles in Lebanese domestic politics or in neighboring Syria, roles that are hardly above reproach, the raison d’etre of the organization’s military apparatus since its founding in the 1980s has been the expulsion, deterrence, and repulsion of Israeli military forces from Lebanese territory. That the LAF leadership recognizes itself as neither structurally prepared nor having a popular mandate to confront Hezbollah is expected. The former was built to manage internal order, the latter to confront one of the world’s most powerful military forces, regardless of any nationalist or anti-colonial sentiments LAF members may or may not hold.

The LAF became an important node linking Lebanon to Western diplomatic, military, and economic networks. U.S. support to the LAF, in particular, is effectively conditional on not being used against Israel under any circumstances.

In principle, a state monopoly on the use of force — including exclusive authority over decisions of war and peace — is worthy of support. In practice, however, such demands are currently void of any consistent and comprehensive application of that principle, particularly in defending Lebanon’s territory from external attack. Calls for the LAF to confront Hezbollah are therefore neither strategically coherent nor grounded in a substantive vision of Lebanese sovereignty. As Israel expands its occupation and depopulation of the South, it is time the Lebanese cabinet, parliament, and presidency take the active defense of the South and Lebanon seriously, more broadly.