page_title: Hezbollah armed strength
section_title: 1980s
hierarchical_section_title: Hezbollah armed strength / History / 1980s
caption_attribution_description: English: A CIA map of Syrian and Hezbollah presence in Beirut on 26 February 1987.
context_page_description: Hezbollah has the armed strength of a medium-sized army. Hezbollah is generally considered the most powerful non-state actor in the world, and to be stronger than the Lebanese Army. A hybrid force, the group maintains "robust conventional and unconventional military capabilities." The party's fighting strength has grown substantially since the 2006 Lebanon War.
  Hezbollah does not reveal its manpower and estimates vary widely. In 2017, Jane's assessed that Hezbollah had more than 25,000 full-time fighters and perhaps 20,000–30,000 reservists. They are financed in part by Iran and trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Hezbollah's military budget runs about one billion dollars per year.
  Hezbollah's military strength is somewhat based on the quantity and quality of the rockets they possess, which they use against their primary enemy, Israel. The group's strategy against Israel uses rockets as offensive weaponry combined with light infantry and anti-armor units to defend their firing positions in southern Lebanon. Estimates of Hezbollah's total rocket count range from 40,000 to 150,000, which is considerably more than most countries.
context_section_description: In 1982, hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guards traveled to Lebanon's rugged Bekaa Valley and began training various radical Shiite groups, including Islamic Amal and the Dawa Party. The ongoing civil war and Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon created a radicalizing environment where Hezbollah's religious fanaticism flourished. "The movement gained momentum quickly due to logistical, financial, and military support from both Syria and Iran" and engaged Israel in guerrilla warfare. The physical geography of southern Lebanon is green and hilly with deep valleys, which favored the defender and was ideal for Hezbollah's "classic" guerrilla warfare. Hezbollah's initial tactical choices involved human wave attacks, similar to those used by Iran in the Iran–Iraq War in which some Hezbollah elements participated, and terrorist tactics like kidnappings, aircraft hijackings, and mass-casualty suicide attacks to hurt Israel's resolve to fight. Hezbollah engaged in short raids to harass and kill and did not try to hold territory. Although initially very successful, these choices imposed a heavy cost on the organization in casualties and in public opinion. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1985 said the group's command and control was "virtually non-existent" and described the organization as not a hierarchy but defined by personal loyalties, personal rivalries, and family ties. At this time, operational decisions were inefficiently passed through multiple clerics and imams in Beirut, who were far from the front lines. Hezbollah did have a military structure and separate responsibility for operations, logistics, communications, intelligence, training and recruitment. This lack of a hierarchy was similar to contemporary left-wing liberation movements. Tactics around 1985–1986 were mainly planting landmines, detonating IEDs and occasionally gathering bands of armed men to shoot at the Israelis. Hezbollah was not able to use sniping at this time. An IDF intelligence officer described Hezbollah in the mid-1980s as a "rag-tag group" that "failed every time," and a 2014 review considers the group's tactical performance during this period poor and "very amateurish." The CIA says that prior to spring 1986, the party's attacks were more "undisciplined acts of desperation" rather than military actions.
  Despite these problems, the party continued to grow in size, and in 1986 the CIA considered its military strength comparable to Lebanon's major militias. The total membership of Hezbollah and closely affiliated groups grew from "several hundred" in 1983 to 2,000–3,000 in 1984 and to a few thousand in 1985, and in mid-1986 the group massed 5,000 fighters for an event in the town of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley. Hezbollah was numerically smaller than Amal in 1986, but trends were favoring Hezbollah. At this time, the organization had many part-time fighters and very few full-time members, making it sensitive to casualties. The organization's "skill in fighting the Israeli Army and Israel's proxy militia forces", as well as the corruption and inefficiency of Hezbollah's rival Amal, were critical in building credibility and public support. In south Lebanon, Amal was widely seen as "too moderate" and accommodating of Israel, leading many radicalized Shia to back Hezbollah. Hezbollah also received backing from pro-Hezbollah factions of Amal that had split from top Amal leadership. Assessments of Hezbollah's position at this time vary. The CIA assessed at the time that "Hizballah's policy of confronting Israel and its surrogates is working" and that Hezbollah held a "qualitative edge" in warfare over the SLA and Amal, while an independent review says that by 1987 Hezbollah's strategic position was deteriorating. On April 18, 1987, a Hezbollah human wave attack on a fortified SLA outpost failed and resulted in 24 dead, killing around 5% of the organization's full-time fighters in a single day. As a consequence of this setback and others like it, Hezbollah was forced to change its strategy. Outgunned by the Israelis and outspent by richer Le
caption: Map of Hezbollah and Syrian control of Beirut in 1987.
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