Study: U.S. must be ready for hybrid war SANTA MONICA, Calif., Jan. 20 (UPI) -- The U.S. military should learn from Israel's experience in dealing with irregular forces with advanced weapons, a Rand Corp. study released Friday said. "The United States can learn from the mistakes Israel made prior to the 2006 Second Lebanon War against Hezbollah, and the corrections it made just two years later during Operation Cast Lead, when Israel fought Hamas in Gaza," said David E. Johnson, the study's author and a senior researcher at Rand, a non-profit research organization. Those wars provide invaluable lessons for the United States on how it can -- and cannot -- defeat a hybrid foe. The study, "Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza," is available at www.rand.org. Israel trained its military almost exclusively in low-intensity combat before the Second Lebanon War, the study said. The result was that it invaded southern Lebanon with too few troops to secure the area and endured weeks of fighting ending in a negotiated settlement. The study recommends the U.S. military train the Army and Air Force to work together, incorporate conflict with hybrid adversaries into training exercises and add defenses against portable rocket launchers and similar weapons to its armament.