Last update - 00:00 09/11/2007
When Assad blinked
By Amos Harel
The forecast presented by Major General (res.) Yaakov Amidror at last month's meeting of the Israel Missile Defense Association (IMDA) was quite worrisome. While Amidror, the former head of the research department in the Israel Defense Forces' intelligence branch, is generally not the optimistic type, the scenario he sketched this time was particularly disturbing. He predicted that if, in the future, Israel gets into a war with the conventional army of a neighboring country (Syria is the most likely opponent), the missile and rocket threat the country will face in such a situation will make the Second Lebanon War look like child's play.
Amidror's public assessment appears to match quite closely the scenarios for which the IDF is currently preparing, far away from the media and the public eye. Not just scenarios involving a threat to population centers on the home front, which this time would not end, as in the war of the summer of 2006, at the Afula-Hadera line, but would cover most of the country. At the same time, Syria and Hezbollah are expected to use artillery, rockets and missiles against two other types of targets as well: the forces at the front and military targets located toward the rear - from headquarters and army bases in the North to the Kirya (army headquarters) in Tel Aviv, as well as areas where reserve units have been mobilized.
Launching of mid-range rockets, of which the Syrian army has an ample stock, would require the army to deploy differently even before reinforcements could reach the front. "We've never had a war in which the IDF was so threatened by fire on its permanent bases. We have no experience with this. We got just a whiff of the threat with the strike on the base at Mount Meron [in May 2006, during the escalations with Hezbollah that preceded the outbreak of the war - A.H.], but that was nothing compared to what we could face in the future," said Amidror. "In two hours, a Syrian rocket battalion could produce more fire than everything we took from Hezbollah in the entire war."
The Second Lebanon War significantly altered the way Israel views the threat to its home front. It's hard to picture defense ministers and chiefs of staff claiming, as former chief of staff Dan Halutz did during the first days of the military campaign, that "the home front is not relevant." The IDF is currently talking about a fourth principle to be added to the Israeli security doctrine's three existing, classic components: early warning, deterrence and decisive victory. The new one is: protection.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak also derives his diplomatic outlook for the coming years from the current threat. There is an urgent need, he believes, to develop supplementary defense systems against rockets of various ranges. An initial sum was allocated for this purpose after the war, when Amir Peretz was still in the Defense Ministry. But Barak believes that only after Israel possesses, in addition to the Arrow - which is supposed to protect it from the Syrian scud and the Iranian Shihab - an adequate defense system against the Qassam and the Katyusha, will it be possible to discuss further withdrawals from areas in the West Bank. In practical terms, Barak's position translates into a delay of three to five years in the political process, and that's only if one accepts the defense establishment's most optimistic forecasts as to when the project of developing a defense system against short-range rockets will be ready.
While a proper defense system is being developed, another question must be asked: Is Israel capable of deterring its hostile neighbors from launching a missile attack on its territory? After Lebanon, the conventional wisdom in Israel says the answer is no. The investments made by Syria, Hezbollah and the Palestinian terror organizations in the production and acquisition of longer-range weapons have steadily increased in recent years (and with even greater momentum since last summer). With encouragement and funding from Iran, a comprehensive threat to the Israeli home front has begun to take shape: From the North (Syria and Lebanon) and from the southwest (Gaza), with the only real deterrent to rocket fire from the east (the West Bank) being intensive IDF and Shin Bet security service activity against the terror networks there.
However, there is a big gap between building up a threat and actually carrying it out, at least when the adversary is a state. Damascus ought to have learned two lessons from last year's war that should cool its eagerness to test Israel's ability to take a hit. The first has to do with strategic infrastructure: Despite the pressure Halutz exerted on the political echelon, Israel did not extensively attack civilian infrastructure in Lebanon during the war, and in any case, would have had trouble defeating Hezbollah in this way, since the organization feels no real commitment to the welfare or quality of life of non-Shi'ite Lebanese civilians. Syria, as a full-fledged nation, has a large number of strategic targets (electricity, water, even computer networks) that the government would strenuously seek to protect in the event of war.
The second has to do with the "night of the Fajrs" - the successful predawn aerial attack on Hezbollah's mid-range rockets on July 13. If the Israel Air Force and intelligence community are able to accumulate such effective information on one of the organization's secret systems and destroy most of it in one blow, would they be able to act with similar efficiency against the rockets of a much larger and organized army like that of Syria?
These arguments sounded like an Israeli attempt to reassure itself - until September 6th of this year. The target of the IAF strike in northern Syria (according to American media, a North Korean nuclear facility) is still subject to military censorship in Israel and cannot be identified. What's clearer is the decision made by Syrian President Bashar Assad that same morning, hours after the attack.
All the stern rhetoric that emanated from Damascus in the tense months preceding the air strike would have led one to expect a harsh Syrian response, such as rocket fire directed at IAF bases, for example. Why didn't this happen? One possible explanation is that Assad wasn't comfortable with what was starting to be exposed, according to various reports at least, about the nature of that project of his in the desert. Another important consideration, apparently, has to do with the dramatic illustration he was given of the real discrepancy between the IDF's capabilities and those of the Syrian army. Assad may have concluded that Syria doesn't have much to offer against an army capable of carrying out such a complex operation (an efficient combination of intelligence and operations, and successful evasion of Syrian anti-aircraft systems). At any rate, when he woke up that morning, the Syrian president blinked - and chose to exercise restraint. The danger of war has receded slightly since then, although it certainly has not disappeared.
By air or land?
A senior IDF officer says Israel must make it clear to Syria from the outset that even in the event of a future war, there are certain red lines that it will never allow an enemy to cross. "I reject the view that the war in Lebanon shattered the taboo about future assaults on the home front. Why should that be? A country like Syria has to understand that it mustn't fire on our civilians, regardless of what exactly our air force is capable of achieving after two or three days of combat. We have tools to remove our civilians from the arena of fighting, right from the start. This could be done by means of deterrence already now, by making it clear to the Syrians that it is absolutely unacceptable to us and that for every rocket fired at Tel Aviv, there will be a totally disproportionate response from our side. Syria has a lot to lose."
In exercises the IDF held this year, which culminated in Northern Command's wide-scale exercise last month, much time was devoted to the question of how to handle the rocket threat. IAF officials admit that basically, the situation hasn't changed dramatically since the war. Israel's ability to locate and destroy short-range Katyushas prior to their launching is not satisfactory. The situation is much better when it comes to longer-range rockets and missiles, which leave a significant intelligence "signature" that often makes it possible to locate and destroy them before the first launch or immediately afterward.
Incidentally, there is also some disagreement as to just how successful Israel was during the war in dealing with Hezbollah's mid-range rockets. Missile expert Uzi Rubin (former head of the counter-missile project known as Homah, which includes the Arrow missile system) maintains in a paper he published last April that the air force exaggerated its achievements in this area. Having analyzed the number of mid-range rockets launched throughout the war, Rubin found that there had been no substantial change. He suspects that some of the launchers that were hit were decoy launchers and that Hezbollah was able to replace launchers that were hit during the war. An air force official who was asked about this was surprised to hear about the research and said he stands behind the corps' conclusions, although he added that Rubin's arguments "should definitely be studied."
About two months ago, Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and his deputy at the time, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, presented the main points of the IDF's new multi-year plan. Its major emphases include the importance of achieving a rapid victory and the need to significantly upgrade the ground forces, which were dealt a serious blow in the war in Lebanon. This entails expanded training as well as a massive increase in equipment: more, higher-quality armored personnel carriers, a few more tanks, even a new division headquarters.
The bottom line of all this is the rebuilding of the army's maneuvering capabilities on the ground. The army appears to see this as the main reason for its failure to stop Hezbollah - because it did not employ the ground forces (despite their low preparedness) for an early assault in the initial stage of the war. In the event of a future confrontation, the IDF wants the political echelon to know it has this capability at the ready. On several occasions, Ashkenazi has said that in case of war, one of his main objectives would be that, at the end, "no one will ask who won, because it will be obvious that we won."
This strategy is troubling to some reservist generals, former members of the General Staff under Moshe Ya'alon and Dan Halutz. To achieve a decisive victory on land, they say, a significant strike on the enemy's parallel system is required: Their anti-tank forces, artillery and military headquarters must be hit. This would be achieved, at least partially, by air. No one disputes that the IAF is one of the best air forces in the world (and its capabilities in Lebanon were far better than those of the infantry and the armored corps), but its resources are also limited.
The dilemma, in a nutshell, is this: If war breaks out, during its first days, the General Staff will have to decide which task is more urgent: striking at the enemy's ground forces to bring about their surrender, or paralyzing its missile system, to neutralize the threat to the home front. It's possible, of course, to try to do both, but only up to a certain point. An emphasis on the ground battle could leave the enemy with the ability to inflict serious damage on the home front, a threat that becomes more worrisome when one recalls that Syria is a major power in the field of chemical weapons.
And there's another problem, too: Intelligence about the missiles, as good as it may be, is only temporary. The adversary can always choose to move them in the early stages of the war and make their new hiding places more difficult to locate as the war continues. The IDF may be ready to swear that its handling of the home front will be completely different next time around, but the last war leaves room for concern as to how much the public can take (particularly in terms of how well the national authorities can aid the civilian population).
Amidror, in his address to the IMDA conference, enumerated the anticipated difficulties: "There will be very great pressure on the IDF to finish off this thing [the missile threat]. The pressure on the home front will have a detrimental psychological effect at the front itself. Soldiers will wonder whether their families back on the home front are well-protected. The air force will be able to hit the long-range missiles, but will have a very hard time getting at the short-range rockets. The IDF will have to dispatch ground forces to deal with the rocket-launching areas, even if, from a pure military consideration, it wouldn't be correct to do so."