[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:
The considerably longer Hebrew version of the article
www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1014135.html?more=1
begins with the ironic observation that "the rockets stored in the armories
of Hamas in Gaza reach, at least, the southern part of Ashdod, up to around
Yitzchak Rabin Boulevard...."
Then Prime Minister Rabin ridiculed opponents of Oslo for suggesting that it
would ultimately lead to a situation in which rockets would hit Ashkelon.
Now, thanks to the profound failure known as Oslo, and the equally
shortsighted retreat from Gaza, the people living on the street named in
Rabin's honor in Ashdod (that is considerably farther away from Gaza than
Ashkelon) are now within reach of Palestinian rockets.]
Syria, with all the dangers it represents, is less worrisome to the
government and the IDF than Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak is 80. His
successors are liable to cool the country's relations with Israel. A Muslim
revolution would rattle Israel's strategic equilibrium. It will be enough
for Egypt to retract its agreement to the presence of the multinational
force in Sinai, whose main foreign participant, the United States, has long
been eager to leave the force for reasons of its own.
Country or family? Israeli soldiers may have to choose which to defend
By Amir Oren Haaretz last update - 08:17 23/08/2008
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1014152.html
Some 225,000 Israelis live in Ashdod, the country's fifth-largest city. The
rockets that are now stored in Hamas depots in Gaza can reach at least the
southern part of Ashdod. Tens of thousands of the city's residents will
prefer not to take a chance when dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred,
rockets slam into an adjacent neighborhood, even if the Home Front Command
develops an early-warning system so sophisticated that it can distinguish
between the different neighborhoods.
Two years ago, celebrations were held in Ashdod in honor of "the
second-largest ethnic community in the city" - as the city fathers put it -
namely those whose origins lie in the Republic of Georgia. One of the guests
of honor was the defense minister at the time, Amir Peretz. The following
morning - July 12, 2006 - the patrol of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser on
the Lebanon border was attacked. In the escalation that followed the
response of the Israel Defense Forces, the city of Haifa was hit. In the
likely escalation that will follow a large-scale IDF operation in Gaza, the
Palestinians will try to fire similar and even larger volleys at Ashdod. It
is even possible to foresee a scenario in which Israel's two main maritime
entryways are attacked simultaneously: Haifa from Lebanon, Ashdod from Gaza.
In its preparations for the next round of violence, the IDF will find it
difficult to apply lessons from the recent campaign between Russia and
Georgia. Various security institutions have been occupied for the past two
weeks in collecting data, formulating conclusions, and wondering whether
there is any purpose to drawing inferences from the events there about the
situation here.
Interim conclusion: It's not similar, it's inapplicable - apart from some
general truths. The large, strong army of a great power easily overcame the
small, weak army of a neighboring country. They fought each other using
conventional forces - armored, airborne, infantry, maritime - and not as an
army versus guerrillas, other than the Russian-backed militias ("gangs,"
according to the Georgians) in South Ossetia. Georgia did not have
surface-to-surface missiles or rockets to use against military or civilian
targets in Russia.
According to a reliable report, a Russian Tupolev Tu-22 plane was shot down
by a SAM-5 surface-to-air missile battery, originally of Soviet manufacture
and now used by Ukrainian armed forces. Similar batteries, which were
deployed in Syria in 1983, can threaten planes from a range of dozens or
more kilometers. It was the second plane downed by the Ukrainian SAM-5
batteries. The first, in the course of a test firing, was a passenger plane
(carrying many Israelis) over the Black Sea, in 2001. The Russians' success
in downing Israeli-made unmanned, slow, obsolete aircraft with warplanes is
not surprising. It shows that in a contemporary war, the best chance for
survival lies with evasive aircraft possessing zero radar signature.
A more important lesson from Georgia was reported 144 years ago. That was in
the Georgia of the American south, in the campaign of devastation waged by
the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, as portrayed in "Gone with the
Wind" and elsewhere. A new and updated U.S. Army training manual waxes
nostalgic as it quotes this remark made by Sherman in 1864: "Man has two
supreme loyalties - to country and to family," he wrote as the Civil War
wound down. "So long as their families are safe, [soldiers] will defend
their country, believing that by their sacrifice they are safeguarding their
families also. But even the bonds of patriotism, discipline and comradeship
are loosened when the family itself is threatened."
The State of Israel, with its tremendous armed forces and the nuclear
capabilities attributed to it by foreign sources, together with its air
force's attack planes and intercept missiles, plus the existence of the Home
Front Command and the 95 public bomb shelters the Ashdod Municipality says
it has, does not possess the ability to protect the families of the soldiers
at the front, or other residents whose homes will be attacked.
One of the goals set for the country-wide, home-front exercise, codenamed
"Turning Point 2," which was held in April to test preparedness for states
of emergency, was the drafting of an inter-departmental plan for the
evacuation of 50,000 residents of the north to national absorption centers.
The Education Ministry was given the task of creating an alternative school
system that would operate in absorption centers and other public facilities,
as well as in private homes. Those who are unable to leave, because of their
official tasks, will not have sufficient protection. A new type of emergency
shelter was defined for government buildings, local authorities and IDF rear
bases: "best possible protection." In other words, not really protected, but
less unprotected than all the rest.
This week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited the Home Front Command base in
Ramle. It used to be called "Camp Danny" for Danny Mas - the commander of
the platoon of 35 soldiers who were massacred on the way to the Gush Etzion
bloc in 1948 - until being renamed "Camp Rehavam Ze'evi." Olmert will soon
no longer be prime minister, but Israel's security problems will remain.
These include: Iran, Gaza, Hezbollah, and Syria, which is acquiring the
"Panzir," a Russian-made, state-of-the-art air defense system that utilizes
cannons, missiles and rockets, some of them long-range.
Syria, with all the dangers it represents, is less worrisome to the
government and the IDF than Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak is 80. His
successors are liable to cool the country's relations with Israel. A Muslim
revolution would rattle Israel's strategic equilibrium. It will be enough
for Egypt to retract its agreement to the presence of the multinational
force in Sinai, whose main foreign participant, the United States, has long
been eager to leave the force for reasons of its own.
A shift by Egypt, even to a stance of passive hostility, will relocate the
center of gravity of the IDF (which is now moving many important bases to
the Negev) to the southern front. The fighting against the non-state
organizations, which in recent years was almost the be-all and end-all of
IDF activity, will lose its significance, as compared to the old-new needs
arising from an army vs. army confrontation.
After the Second Lebanon War, the IDF dissociated itself from the conceptual
orientations of its Operational Theory Research Institute. However, the U.S.
military views the process developed by the institute, notably Systemic
Operational Design, having to do with the discourse between all ranks and
echelons, as an important innovation. In the series of exercises known as
"Unified Quest," the officers, along with representatives of government
departments and of allied countries, are asked to describe how they intend
to fight the fictitious superpower "Redland" in the decade ahead. On maps,
and long before the Russia-Georgia war, Redland was drawn over sections of
Russia reaching the Black Sea. The capital is not Moscow, but "Kazimir." The
regime and its policy - fanatical Islam in possession of weapons of mass
destruction - is similar to what will exist in Iran in a few years.
The arrows that appear on the American maps relating to a clash with Redland
become more sophisticated with each passing year, based on lessons learned
from Afghanistan, Iraq, IDF versus Hezbollah - and now undoubtedly also
Russia-Georgia. The U.S. military noted with satisfaction the bewilderment
of the commanders of the supposed maneuvering forces, when the field
commanders refused to accept a routine plan to seize control of the capital,
a metropolis of 12 to 15 million people. In the world wars, and even in
Korea, Vietnam and the Israeli-Arab wars, seizing control of the capital was
considered equivalent to vanquishing the enemy. No longer: Now the highly
experienced commanding officers fear that the enemy troops will shed their
uniforms and blend in with the population, in order to harass the occupying
army using terror and guerrilla methods.
American military literature admires the brazen but vital idea propounded in
the IDF of a discourse between echelons, which entails readiness by junior
officers to level harsh professional criticism at their seniors. Such
criticism is unacceptable in the rigid American hierarchy, sigh colonels who
want to adopt the Israeli custom. No one has bothered to tell them the
latest: that in the IDF the preference these days is to remain quiet and
save the criticism for virulent behind-the-back whispers.
Olmert's departure from the governmental stage will afford an opportunity
for a reshuffling of the respective responsibilities of the political and
security echelons. The weight of the National Security Council is expected
to increase. The status of that body and its chief was strengthened in the
wake of the state comptroller's report of two years ago, which Olmert
internalized and implemented, and it has now also been enshrined in
legislation sponsored by MKs Amira Dotan and Tzachi Hanegbi from Kadima. The
head of the NSC will take part, by right and not by favor, in meetings of
the committee of chiefs of services, a problematic framework that is itself
crying out for institutionalization. The committee consists of the heads of
the Mossad espionage agency and the Shin Bet security service, who are
accountable to the prime minister, and the director of Military
Intelligence, who is accountable to the chief of staff, the defense minister
and the government, but not to the prime minister.
The civilian oversight of the IDF, the intelligence services and the Atomic
Energy Commission has been tightened in recent years. The three key agents
involved in the oversight are the state comptroller; the minister in charge
of reviewing the services (currently Meir Sheetrit), who presses the Shin
Bet and the Mossad on behalf of the prime minister, taking into account the
work of the state comptroller; and two Knesset committees, Foreign Affairs
and Defense (particularly its subcommittees) and State Control. Highly
sensitive issues that surfaced in the wake of reviews were considered in the
"committee of two," consisting of the chairmen of the two Knesset
committees, Hanegbi and Zevulun Orlev (National Union-National Religious
Party). When the volleys of rockets from Gaza start to land, even north of
Ad Halom, the site at which the Egyptian army was stopped in 1948, it will
become clear whether, besides the rhetoric, anything has really changed in
the Israeli capability to attack on the war front and protect the home
front.
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