America's S.O.S to the IDF
By Amir Oren Ha'aretz 12 November 2005
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/644348.html

At the end of last month, Brigadier General Joseph Votel, a boyish-looking,
tall and smiling American, made an urgent request to an old friend of his
from Washington - also a brigadier general, but in the Golani Brigade rather
than the Rangers - Nitzan Nuriel, the chief of the foreign liaison
department of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces. So urgent was
the message that the Pentagon didn't even update their military attache in
Tel Aviv. Votel implored Nuriel to send him a top-secret item the IDF has
developed that could be useful in combating the improvised explosive devices
(IED) used against U.S. forces in Iraq.

Nuriel called the chief of the Engineering Corps, Brigadier General Shimon
Daniel, who was the Northern Command chief engineering officer during the
war against Hezbollah IEDs before the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon and who
has been holding professional contacts with Votel and his aides for the past
year and a half. Daniel convened the Israeli experts, Nuriel set off on the
obstacle course of coordination and authorization - and within a record time
of five days, the items in question and their manuals were on a plane headed
overseas.

It may sound exaggerated, unfounded, or at least pretentious, but at the end
of 2005, the salvation of U.S. President George W. Bush is in large measure
dependent on the military intelligence of Israel: the ability of the IDF,
the Defense Ministry and the defense industries to help the Americans thwart
the IED attacks in Iraq is becoming the tipping point on which the Bush
administration is tottering. This conclusion is the final link in a logical
chain, which is known to the decision-makers and those in uniform but has
been hidden from others.

Bush's most severe entanglement is in Iraq; the quagmire has resulted in the
deaths of more than 2,000 U.S. troops since the start of the war, though a
quarter of them died in accidents, from sickness or suicides. The most
lethal factor are the IEDs planted along roadways or in booby-trapped
vehicles. By the Americans' admission, the most effective aid in their
efforts to defeat the IEDs comes from Israel. The ministering angels who are
working to extricate Bush from his distress are, thus, Daniel, Nuriel and
Rafael. The last-named is not a person but a corporation: the Armament
Development Authority. A bit of Rafael's activity to protect U.S. soldiers
in Iraq and Afghanistan was revealed last summer in the form of a report
that the U.S. Army was acquiring anti-explosives protection kits
manufactured jointly by Rafael and the U.S. firm General Dynamics. Other
activity is classified.

Votel is one of the officers whom the U.S. Army is proud to present to the
public in interviews and in Congressional hearings. In his previous rank, as
a colonel, Votel was commanding officer of the elite unit of the American
ground forces, the 75th Rangers Brigade - in IDF terms: the Paratroop
commandos (sayeret), but 10 times the size. Votel's Rangers landed in
Afghanistan in 2001 and captured an airport, known as Camp Rhino, which then
became the landing base for the forces that took Kandahar and Kabul.
Afterward Votel led the Rangers in the Iraq war, until he was assigned to
head a task force to combat the IEDs. As a former Ranger, Votel initially
contacted Brigadier General Yossi Hyman, the IDF's chief infantry and
Paratroops officer. At Hyman's initiative, the Engineering Corps and Army
Headquarters were placed in charge of handling Votel's team.

Votel received an annual budget of $1.2 billion and a promotion to the rank
of general. His staff, which at first consisted of units from the army only,
was expanded to include representatives of the marines, the special forces,
the air force and the navy. The most senior levels, all the way up to deputy
secretary of defense - at the time Paul Wolfowitz and now Gordon England -
listened attentively, in gross contrast to the contempt being shown by the
office of Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz to the warnings of Colonel (res.)
Yossi Langotsky concerning the tunnels being dug by the Palestinians (and
perhaps by Hezbollah as well).

The mobilization to fight against the IEDs reflected the gravity of the
problem but did not solve it. True, fewer IEDs are striking their targets,
but the results remain brutal and intolerable: three of every five people
killed in Iraq in the past few months were killed by IEDs, planted either on
the ground or in booby-trapped vehicles. The enemies of the Americans
prepare the devices so that the explosion launches burning-hot
armor-penetrating lead projectiles, and even if the soldiers' personal
protection, ceramic vests and their like that block Kalashnikov bullets and
fragments, saves their upper body, their limbs and other organs are in
danger of being mortally wounded.

In the spring of 2004 every exploded device in Iraq caused casualties. This
year only one in four explosions have caused casualties, but the absolute
numbers of the losses is constantly accumulating. The British commander of
the Basra and southern Iraq zone, Major General James Dutton, has had 18 of
his troops killed by IEDs in the last three months.

A concealed mistress

It is dangerous to move about in Iraq in an American or British uniform, and
frightening to serve there in a bomb disposal unit. Last month, National
Defense, the monthly magazine of the U.S. National Defense Industrial
Association, which has been persistent in covering the developments in
combating IEDs, reported that the U.S. Navy's bomb disposal unit, which was
called in to reinforce the army forces and the marines, is not succeeding in
manning one-sixth of its available positions. Members of bomb disposal units
get extra pay for danger, parachuting and diving, totaling $625 a month. To
tempt them to remain in career service, if they have accumulated at least
six years of experience, the navy offers them a grant of $45,000 upon
signing the contract.

In one of its recent visits to Israel, a delegation from Votel's task force
spent three days touring IDF units, guided by the chief engineering officer
of Northern Command and with the emphasis on the Engineering Corps' Yahalom
unit, a special-operations force. The U.S. Army maintains frequent and
regular contacts with the IDF.

The IDF takes pride in this. The U.S. Army is ashamed, citing outdated and
transparent pretexts - what will the Arabs say- - which are unable to
conceal professional embarrassment. This is not a matter of joint
operational planning or intelligence secrets; it is a matter of saving
lives - American lives - an issue that is the epicenter of the concern of
politicians in Washington. However, instead of congratulating themselves
about know-how that was acquired with the blood of the IDF soldiers who were
killed in Lebanon and the territories and which is the property of the
entire Israeli public, Israeli politicians - the latest of them was Mofaz in
his visit to Washington a week ago - are willing to forgo the status of
common-law wife and make do with the appearance of a concealed mistress.

Officially, Centcom (U.S. Central Command) is barred from talking directly
to Israel - it is supposed to do so only through Eucom (European Command?)
or Washington. The prohibition is usually maintained, but life-and-death
issues override it. Centcom despaired of the bureaucracy, while soldiers are
being killed every day, and three officers who are serving in Iraq came to
Israel to learn from the IDF how to combat IEDs. There are also Israeli
combatants in Iraq who were released from the IDF to enlist in the U.S.
Army. These are not two-footed warriors but members of Oketz, the IDF's
canine unit, whose American trainers came to the unit's base to learn how to
work with the dogs.

A problem of stars

In the best tradition of official Washington doublespeak, even as Israel was
requested to say nothing, the Pentagon decided to mention the Israeli angle,
to prove that no stone is being left unturned in the effort to defeat the
IEDs. A week ago the Los Angeles Times reported that the lone star worn by
Votel is making it difficult for him to move along the corridors of the
Pentagon. A more senior officer is needed, a three-star general. This is a
peculiar idea: another two pieces of serrated tin on a general's shoulder
and the explosive devices will be gone. The navy respects expertise and
experience, the army respects ranks, the commander of the navy's bomb
disposal unit was quoted as saying in National Defense. Maybe it will be
Lieutenant General Russel Honore, who gained glory in commanding his troops
in post-Katrina New Orleans. Honore, who commands the reserve units and
National Guard forces being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, was outraged that
the soldiers' training does not include sufficient preparation to deal with
the IEDs.

In a self-defensive press briefing at the Pentagon, Lieutenant General James
Conway, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that
supreme priority has been assigned to combat the IEDs. "The only remaining
effective tool Iraqi insurgency has against coalition forces is the
improvised bomb," Conway said, and once U.S. and coalition forces find a way
to eliminate IEDs, "it's over." The "it" in question is the campaign in
Iraq, but before that happens, Conway confirmed it has been proposed to
appoint a three-star general above Votel - like Conway's rank - to oversee
IED work.

To prove the Americans are learning from the best and most experienced
sources, Conway noted that the British had encountered the problem of
explosive devices in Northern Ireland and the Israelis have coped with
suicide bombers in Israel and Lebanon. "We've tried to study what their
experiences were and learn from that." Dutton, the British general, added
another piece of information which explains why it is vital to draw on the
knowledge the IDF gleaned coping with Hezbollah devices: the materials and
the technology used in making IEDs are entering Iraq from the same source -
Iran.

Votel and his colleagues reviewed in public a range of systems and
stratagems in use by the enemies of the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan:
detonation by wireless, by tripwire, by remote control of cars and by dog
and sheep carcasses. Thousands of disruptive systems have been supplied to
the forces, but according to reports these also disrupt the U.S. forces'
communication network, so the soldiers tend to shut them off. Another
difficulty the U.S. has is collecting accurate data about the attacks
perpetrated by the IEDs, such as the time of the detonation, the location of
the device and the situation of the force that was attacked. An analysis of
this data in southern Lebanon helped the IDF improve its combat tactics
against Hezbollah.

The key to booby-trapped cars

The key to the booby-trapped cars, an Israeli officer told his American
colleagues, lies in mapping the fleet of vehicles in Iraq and marking them
in a way that makes it possible to spot them from a safe distance and to
identify suspicious vehicles which were not present along the route earlier.
The weak point of the Americans is the movement on the roads, for patrols or
in convoys. The U.S. Army also understood it is essential to train all
logistics personnel and drivers as riflemen who are liable to encounter an
attack aimed at killing or kidnapping them, and just to be on the safe side,
a simulator for practicing responses in convoys was upgraded.

A soldier who is not present is not hurt, and the original sin of the U.S.
Army in Iraq, in its mission to protect the emerging regime in Baghdad, is
its failure to develop "control without presence" - a swift action, sparing
in manpower and focused, that achieves results without banking on
large-scale presence that eventually becomes bankruptcy. The IDF learned how
to do this, on an impressive albeit not absolute scale, in its activity
against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank. This is a decentralized
combat doctrine, on which the copyright belongs, in part, to the former
commander of the Israel Navy, Rear Admiral (res.) Yedidya Yaari, now the
president of Rafael.

In the area of combating explosive devices, and in other areas as well, the
IDF and sophisticated defense corporations in Israeli industry are so far
ahead of their American counterparts that self-admiration needs to be cooled
with a doze of modesty; it is not that the Israeli ability is small but that
the American needs are large. "The new brigade that is equipped with the
Striker combat vehicle is responsible for an area of 38,000 square
kilometers in Iraq, almost twice the size of Israel," a realistic IDF
officer said this week, "and without diminishing the importance of the
lessons we learned and taught others from convoys of eight kilometers to the
Beaufort and to the Dlaat outpost [in Lebanon], their convoys have to cover
80 and sometimes 180 kilometers. So we, with all respect, are a drop in the
ocean."