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Country or family? Israeli soldiers may have to choose which to defend
By Amir Oren
Tags: IDF, Israel, Hamas

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.
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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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