Founded on the principle of institutional control by elected civilian officials, the LAF sees itself as the protector of a civilian republic, not a vanguard of a regime, party, or faction. Law places the LAF at the disposal of the president and stipulates that the Council of Ministers determines public defense and security policy. Based on this, the Higher Defense Council, composed of civilian government officials, makes national defense decisions and adjudicates defense budget requests. Once the Higher Defense Council gives strategic direction, LAF Command has effective operational control, while the Ministry of Defense exercises minimal oversight at a distance.

The LAF interprets its constitutional role as intertwined with preserving Lebanon’s cross-confessional character. Military commanders have been known to reinterpret or fail to implement government directives that pose a risk to the cross-confessional power balance, and Lebanon’s six largest communities are, by custom, permanently represented on the Military Council.
Civilian and military leaders regularly discuss the defense budget, military acquisition, major mission areas, and appointments of brigade commanders, deputy chiefs of staff, or Military Council members. LAF Command draws up internal planning, procurement, budgeting, and recruitment assumptions, which senior government officials vet.

The post–civil war LAF has preferred to defer public order roles to civilian security agencies, but the LAF’s high level of public trust leads to mission creep and overlap, causing public confusion about jurisdiction on matters tied to public order, internal stability operations, and counterterrorism coordination. These missions fall outside the scope of the LAF’s primary territorial defense mission.

From 1990 to 2005, the Syrian security apparatus in Lebanon curtailed the LAF’s territorial defense role, but the LAF began to resume this role with the departure of Syrian intelligence and military forces in 2005 and the resumption of international military assistance. The 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict, 2007 counterterrorism operations in the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, and the 2017 counter-Islamic State campaign accelerated this process. The armed forces now actively coordinate missions and priorities with civilian security agencies through formal channels such as the Higher Defense Council.

The jurisdiction of civilian and military courts are generally separate, but civilians continue to be tried for national security offenses in military courts. The military recognizes the moral hazard this presents, but military courts report to the minister of defense, so they fall outside the LAF chain of command. Likewise, the military judicial system sometimes tries military personnel for civil or criminal offenses. This is a declining trend, especially considering growing public awareness and scrutiny of the military, and the military’s sensitivity to maintaining popular support.

Sectarian-political elite competition cements the LAF’s preference for political neutrality. This elite competition contributed to civil wars in 1958 and 1975–1990, when the LAF struggled to maintain unity of command and control as units disintegrated or fought alongside warring factions. The officer corps works to avoid a recurrence of this episode, but this legacy makes the LAF risk averse. It obeys civilian leaders, but whether it implements or evades orders depends on whether the orders threaten cross-confessional stability or the integrity of the armed forces. The LAF’s reputation for political neutrality has contributed to the election of four senior commanders to the presidency, although most military officers do not go on to influential political careers.

The LAF struggles to balance accommodating Lebanon's sectarian politics with sustaining military professionalization. Competing sectarian-political elites have deprioritized military development and limited the military to internal and constabulary roles, to prevent the LAF from undermining elites’ political and economic autonomy. LAF Command makes career and competence-based selections for posts up to regimental commanders, but has less flexibility in selecting deputy chiefs of staff and brigade commanders. The selection of a new LAF commander can also take on divisive political overtones among sectarian-political elites, often resulting in a compromise appointment.

The LAF has sought to strengthen its corporate identity in the face of self-serving, clientelistic behavior among civilian authorities. Military cohesion is by no means uniform, but the LAF has become one of Lebanon’s most professional national institutions, in large part because of Western security assistance.

With its own chain of command and close coordination with Iran, the paramilitary group Hezbollah poses a long-term challenge for Lebanese military politics. Hezbollah enjoys broad popular support among its predominantly Shia Muslim constituency, which often forces the LAF to accommodate the group’s political preferences. This is not unlike the LAF’s approach to other factions that, like Hezbollah, also maintain irregular forces.

Lebanon’s often-divisive confessional politics inform how the military and civilian government agencies interact. Ministers of defense are civilians, but are often affiliated with sectarian-political factions within the government. A high rate of political appointments contributes to a lack of civilian defense expertise and stymies capabilities planning and budgeting. This contributes to weak coordination and institutional distrust between the LAF and other security agencies.

The LAF does not dominate political space, although it enjoys strong cross-confessional support. It is not focused on maintaining the incumbent political order, and seeks to remain neutral in the face of public debate and political change so long as these take place peacefully. Public debate on defense affairs is generally permitted, but a lack of information and poor responsiveness from the LAF and sectarian-political elites often impedes this. The public policy community actively discusses the budget, and defense analysts are not discouraged from asking the LAF or the government tough questions about defense finances.

Lebanese defense spending proposals, like all elements of proposed national spending, make clear where funding goes at the top level, but budget details under this level remain internal to the LAF, the Ministry of Finance, and the government. Five-year Capabilities Development Plans, generated with the support of foreign partners, contain sections on budgeting that are granular, but these plans are not circulated widely or discussed publicly. LAF budget formulation procedures span its planning, personnel, operations, logistics, and intelligence branches. Once budget proposals make their way to the government they follow much the same vetting, justification, markup, and markdown processes that other agencies’ budgets undergo, in coordination with the Ministry of Finance.

Sectarian-political dynamics and the absence of a mechanism for developing and negotiating broad national defense needs limits funding for defense sector needs. The LAF does not broach the wider discussion of defense needs for fear of exacerbating confessional tensions. Civilian leaders—the president, prime minister, minister of finance, parliamentarians, and sectarian-political elites outside the government—favor maintaining current expenditures rather than approving capital expenditures that could augment the capabilities and professionalism of the military. However, once civilian leaders decide to accept foreign military aid, especially from Western nations, the LAF and the donor nation determine the trajectory of that aid. This reflects the general disinterest of sectarian-political elites in aid from which they may not benefit directly.

Transparency in defense spending is inconsistent. Extra-budgetary expenditures are uncommon, but in the absence of an official budget from 2005 to 2017 Parliament allocated funding directly to the LAF. The state’s central auditing agency, the Court of Audit, does not have a track record of submitting audit reports on state budgets, let alone defense budgets, although the LAF does coordinate with the Court on tenders and bids. Little legislation exists on corruption risks in defense procurement, and unlike civilian agencies, the LAF are exempted from the scrutiny of the Public Procurement Directorate. Instead, the LAF’s General Directorate for Administration manages defense procurement. On rare occasions, senior officers have asked for kickbacks to facilitate tenders or secure military contracts, but LAF Command has punished these personnel or Western contractors have rebuffed the attempts, in compliance with anti-corruption laws in their own countries.

The LAF engages only in small-scale commercial activities. There is little extra-budgetary income, and external aid is generally in-kind or spent in donor countries, as credit against which purchases are made. Cash transfers tied to aid or arms purchases are a declining feature of LAF funding. Military personnel rarely engage in public or private business ventures. This reflects the reality that Lebanon’s competing sectarian-political elites reserve that domain for themselves and their clientelist networks. The LAF owns a few private businesses that are open for civilian use, such as the Monroe Hotel in downtown Beirut, but the negligible revenues from these businesses are not revealed in a transparent way.

The paucity of professional civilians in defense affairs leaves a considerable gap in the LAF’s ability to develop its capabilities and respond to national defense policy needs. Most civilians in defense are either politicians in leadership roles or political appointees from one of the sectarian-political clientelist networks. As a result, civilians involved in defense affairs lack a grasp of military capabilities, needs, or development goals, and have little incentive to close this knowledge gap.

Political agendas undermine critical aspects of Lebanese national defense planning and military development. Sectarian-political parties, which often enjoy more power and autonomy than state institutions, espouse competing foreign policy priorities, undermining coherent foreign policy formulation. This in turn hamstrings national defense policy making, force development, and defense budgeting. LAF effectiveness and efficiency are limited as a result, compelling it to seek out the “least bad common denominator” preferences and develop at least some of the capabilities it deems necessary to address national defense needs.

The Lebanese military has grown accustomed to civilians limiting capital expenditure, and civilian authorities rarely consider the need to reform personnel expenditures. This mutual apathy for reform, on the part of both civilians and military officers, endangers the long-term professionalization and capabilities development of the LAF by disconnecting available resources from realistic strategic objectives.

The LAF likewise tends to fill capability and future force planning gaps by relying on military personnel instead of developing the competence of civilians who could act as an institutional memory for the force. There is less turnover in civilian positions than military ones and military personnel take knowledge of effective practices and procedures with them when they leave a position. In addition, civilian officials are generally uninterested in what few opportunities exist for training in defense affairs abroad, and many do not believe that such courses would benefit their careers. When the LAF has turned to Lebanese civilians, it has most often done so in areas such as civil-military cooperation, public diplomacy, or information operations, areas that are important, but not critical, to combat operations.

In strategic planning, procurement, and financial management, the LAF is far more comfortable dealing with donor or partner-supported civilians on a short term or limited basis than it is in hiring full time Lebanese civilian defense professionals. For example, the Rapid Land Border Project, put into place after 2010, employed UK-funded foreign civilian and retired military experts to plan for and execute the LAF’s northern and eastern border security requirements. The absence of a competent and empowered cadre of civilian defense professionals and senior civilian officials at the ministerial level undermines structural reform of decisionmaking that the LAF cannot, or will not, pursue in a vacuum, and leaves national defense strategy less coherent.