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Contents:
The Growing Threats From Multiple Arenas for Gadi Eisenkot: Yaakov Lappin, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 17, 2014 — New IDF Chief of Staff Lt.- Gen. Gadi Eisenkot will have more than his fair share of work in the next four years.
Israel’s Air and Missile Defense During the 2014 Gaza War: Uzi Rubin, BESA, Feb. 11, 2015 — In the escalation that precipitated the 2014 Gaza War (Operation Protective Edge) and during the war, Israel was subjected to the fiercest and longest reaching rocket assault in its history, including the rocket fire from Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon War.
In Prepping for Hezbollah Battle, Army Draws Lessons From Gaza: Mitch Ginsberg, Times of Israel, Jan. 23, 2014— On November 20, 2005, the IDF’s Military Intelligence directorate spread word to the army’s forward bases on the Lebanon border that a complex Hezbollah mission was afoot.
From the Shores of Nova Scotia, Israel’s First Soldiers: Rob Gordon, National Post, Jan. 5, 2015— The Fort Edward blockhouse in Windsor, Nova Scotia is one of the oldest wooden fortifications still standing in North America.
Defense Minister Ya’alon: India a “True Friend” to Israel: Ahuva Balofsky, Breaking Israel News, Feb. 18, 2015
Israel, India 'Open' to Joint Production of Military Hardware: I24, Feb. 18, 2015
Navy Installs Advanced Underwater AquaShield Detection System: Lilach Shoval, Israel Hayom, Feb. 6, 2015
Between Dresden and Gaza: Ehud Yairi, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 11, 2015
THE GROWING THREATS FROM MULTIPLE ARENAS FOR GADI EISENKOT
Yaakov Lappin
Jerusalem Post, Feb. 17, 2015
New IDF Chief of Staff Lt.- Gen. Gadi Eisenkot will have more than his fair share of work in the next four years. As he assumes the commander’s seat and surveys the rapidly changing arenas that surround Israel, Eisenkot will see a region that is falling apart, but in which familiar enemies remain, building up their attack capabilities for the next conflict. From the outgoing chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. (res.) Benny Gantz, Eisenkot has received a military that is more integrated, flexible, and hi-tech, and which enjoys more intelligence than ever before.
Military Intelligence collects tens of millions of pieces of data on Israel’s enemies every single day. Some of this information is used to build target banks, for when war next breaks out. Some is used to conduct daring, covert operations behind enemy lines, which remain classified and unknown to the media and the public.
Yet some of the most immediate challenges facing Israeli security cannot be thwarted with the help of intelligence. These include the tense powder keg that is the West Bank, which is becoming more explosive by the day. Should a third intifada break out, it will likely be characterized by unorganized mass violence that cannot be prevented by intelligence. Such a development could come by the spring, due to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s diplomatic offensive against Israel, now under way internationally. This offensive could spread from the diplomatic arena to the territories in very little time.
Elsewhere, however, the intelligence being gathered by the IDF will prove pivotal: against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon; Hamas in Gaza; and potentially, further in the future, against Iran, which poses a double challenge: its nuclear program and its regional proxy terrorism network. Hezbollah’s rocket and missile arsenal of 150,000 projectiles has no known parallel, according to Gantz, who earlier this year challenged an audience to show him “four to five countries that have what Hezbollah has” in terms of a projectile stockpile, adding, “you won’t.” In Gaza too, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are quickly replenishing their rocket supplies, and work on tunnels has begun in earnest. Global jihadi elements like al-Qaida and Islamic State are filling vacuums in Syria and the Sinai Peninsula.
Gantz has spent four years poring over these threats and restructuring the IDF to adapt to them. His efforts have seen the rise of a territorial division on the Golan Heights that specializes in dealing with the hidden threats in Syria’s chaos. They also led to a more autonomous Southern Command that is better prepared for the myriad threats developing in the Strip. Additionally, thanks to new networks of digital command and control systems, the air force, ground forces, and navy now cooperate more than ever, and are able to share target data. This allows for accurate firepower to be deployed in ways that may have been considered science fiction not long ago.
But much work remains. The IDF’s ability to cope with rocket fire without a large-scale ground maneuver remains limited to an unsatisfactory degree. As Iran and the US continue to negotiate over Tehran’s nuclear program, it is fair to assume that Gantz fostered the IDF’s long-range strike capability. On Monday, Gantz issued a veiled warning to the government during his farewell speech, saying, “In the hour that we will have to turn our eyes to farther challenges, it is important to remember, at the same time, to extend our hands to allies, to create fields of interest that promote solutions, and which can ensure that our nation does not dwell alone.” He remained deliberately vague and did not name those allies, but it seems reasonable to believe that Gantz hinted at the need to safeguard the strategic alliance with the US, to avoid international isolation, and to make more of an effort to reach diplomatic progress with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.
ISRAEL’S AIR AND MISSILE DEFENSE DURING THE 2014 GAZA WAR
Uzi Rubin
BESA, Feb. 11, 2015
In the escalation that precipitated the 2014 Gaza War (Operation Protective Edge) and during the war, Israel was subjected to the fiercest and longest reaching rocket assault in its history, including the rocket fire from Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon War. In preparation for the assault against Israel, the Palestinian factions in Gaza amassed more than 10,000 rockets, some with ranges reaching most of Israel’s territory. Nearly half of this stockpile consisted of locally produced rockets by the newly established Palestinian military industries, and inspired and supported by Iran. More than 4,500 rockets and mortar bombs were fired from Gaza during the fighting. The rocket fire interrupted civilian air traffic to and from Israel’s major international airport and threatened Israel’s gas fields in the Mediterranean. The Palestinians added an air threat to their rocket assault, launching armed UAVs toward Israel’s main metropolitan centers. In spite of intensive efforts by Israel’s Air Force and Navy to destroy the launchers, the Palestinian rocket fire was neither silenced nor reduced in intensity until an agreed cease fire ended the fighting.
The Palestinians’ offensive achievement was matched by Israel’s defensive success. Israel’s Air Defense Command deployed an efficient active defense array consisting of the Iron Dome rocket defense system and the Patriot air defense system. The nine Iron Dome batteries that protected most of Israel’s civilian areas shot down nine out of every ten rockets aimed at their defended areas. The Patriot batteries shot down Palestinian armed UAVs and brought their assault to a full stop. Therefore, the casualties and damage from the Gaza rockets were significantly less than in previous rocket assaults. Israel’s active defenses provided the sinews for Israel’s public resilience, safeguarded Israel’s international air and sea ports, and allowed most Israelis in the threatened localities to continue their daily lives with minimal interruptions.
Skeptics in Israel and the US voiced doubts about the disclosed achievements of the Iron Dome system. US critics used commercial and private videos of rocket interceptions to allege that the system was significantly less successful than claimed. The low number of casualties was attributed by them to the efficiency of Israel’s public alert system and extensive shelter network, as well as the supposedly low lethality of the Gaza rocket warheads. However, a comparison of losses and damages in the 2014 Gaza War to those from the 2006 Lebanon War, when no active defense system existed, refute the critics’ allegations.
The 2014 Gaza War exposed the powerful war machine that the Gaza Palestinian factions had been building since the middle of the previous decade. In spite of Israel’s defensive success, the fighting revealed gaps that require corrective action, including adding Iron Dome systems, improving the capability to shoot down UAVs, countering the mortar bomb threats and providing the Israeli Navy with the means to defend Israel’s energy sources in the Mediterranean against rockets.
[To Read the Full Booklet Click the Following Link—Ed.]
IN PREPPING FOR HEZBOLLAH BATTLE,
Mitch Ginsberg
Times of Israel, Jan. 23, 2015
On November 20, 2005, the IDF’s Military Intelligence directorate spread word to the army’s forward bases on the Lebanon border that a complex Hezbollah mission was afoot. It’s not clear how detailed the warning was; the volume of threats is always significant and the foot soldiers doing the grunt work on the borders are often inured to alarm. More often than not, the threats are duly noted and the routine prevails. A company commander in the Paratroopers Brigade, though, sat down that afternoon and re-addressed the threat he faced. Hezbollah, were it to attack, would come for a static position near the border fence. He assessed the possible approach routes, the possible targets, and set out a string of counter-ambushes along the flanks of the stationary positions, equipping the squads with precision weapons and other essentials.
Toward evening, a four-man Hezbollah squad, moving in formation and armed to the teeth, approached, under a veil of mortar fire, from precisely the direction that Lt. Elad Yaakobson had presumed. The Hezbollah men, dressed in black and carrying an armed rocket-propelled grenade, were backed up by high-powered, off-road motorcycles and jeeps. The mission, it was clear, was to abduct a soldier. A marksman, at the time a corporal only eight months into his service, kept his cool and picked off each of the four attackers, foiling the raid.
The company commander, by changing the alignment, “solved the problem for the entire state of Israel,” said Lt. Col. Dotan Razili, the deputy commander of the army’s Company and Battalion Commander Course, which came to a close this week in the Negev Desert with a live-fire drill. “That’s what we expect from them.” He spoke shortly after Israel allegedly assassinated an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general and an iconic Hezbollah commander along with several other combatants traveling in a convoy in the Syrian Golan Heights, prompting vows of revenge, or “destructive thunderbolts,” in the words of Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Trailing a group of Golani Brigade soldiers, advancing alongside the settling skip of machine-gun fire and the mechanical screech of tank treads, Razili detailed the lessons of the last war, in Gaza, and the ways they are applicable to future conflicts, perhaps with Hezbollah. Nasrallah, he said of the organization’s leader, “wants to conquer a city,” perhaps in the Galilee. The border town at the tip of the Galilee’s panhandle, Metulla, he suggested, “is definitely a possibility.” The army constantly practices perimeter defense and the invasion of enemy strongholds or towns in which the enemy is embedded. It does not, however, drill its infantry soldiers in the practice of taking back an Israeli town seized, in its entirety, by enemy forces. “The main element is to lessen the shock and make sure they’ll act,” Razili said, noting that no Israeli village or town has fallen since Kibbutz Nitzana, in 1948, “and the trauma of that endures till today.” What, precisely, is the extent of Hezbollah’s capabilities, he allowed, remains unclear to the IDF. “There’s no doubt that it acquired certain skills in Syria” — namely, the assault of towns and cities, operating in larger groups — “and we really don’t like it. We understand that the challenge is growing and increasing.”
The solution, for the asymmetric threats lurking amid the cities of Gaza and Lebanon, are most readily addressed, he said, by bolstering two principles of warfare: adaptation, which led to the success in Rajar; and deception, which was lacking during the 50-day operation in Gaza. Deception, Razili said, “was slightly forgotten by us.” It’s in the army’s central principles of war, ranked fourth, as opposed to eighth position in the US Army, but, with time, he added, “the matter was less and less emphasized; it was diluted a bit.” He said he didn’t want to talk about the IDF as Goliath but that, at times, in an effort to cut losses and to get an operation done, the army has acted like the biblical giant of the Philistines. “But we tell the company and battalion commanders: You are David.” This means living in the field, knowing the field, and connecting the dots of evidence until, “as in a children’s workbook,” the enemy’s force structure emerges. “Look at the field,” he said. “Even if you do not always understand everything. Look at the system. Find the mines, locate the anti-tank squads, figure out the mandatory channels. See the system. Now attack the weak spots.”
Armies, though, as opposed to small organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah — whose learning curve has been improved by a series of massive Israeli blows, Razili said — learn slowly. In order to bridge the gap, the Company and Battalion Commander Course staff went down to the Gaza border staging area during the war and conducted Q&A sessions with recent graduates who had fought in the war, asking what, in the trial by fire, was found to be lacking. The results were both surprising and intuitive. The staff found that the armor-infantry union worked well, even in the urban environment; that dogs, so long as they are not too hot and tired, are invaluable in detecting explosives; that army radio frequency and not encoded telephones were crucial to successfully managing a field force; that the army still has no real notion of how to silently or noiselessly cross its own border fence en masse; and that mines often chart a path to gunmen and gunmen to mines.
On tunnels, Razili and other officers were understandably tight-lipped, saying only that the lessons learned surrounded locating the tunnels, flushing the militants out, and fighting around them but not within the underground space, which is generally the domain of Special Forces. Surprisingly, diarrhea represented a significant problem. The people of Israel brought food down to the staging area en masse. The soldiers ate and took more for the road. “The mom made the schnitzel in Tel Aviv,” Razili said, “so by the time it reaches the guys, it can be a problem.” Additionally, living in the field often means living without bathrooms. Alcohol gel, the officers told the staff, was shipped in mid-operation, and only then was the problem contained.
Lt. Ilay Galon, the deputy commander of the Paratroopers Brigade’s recon unit during the operation, completed the course this week and will command a paratrooper Basic Training company in March. He fought in Gaza for five days. On July 21, in southern Gaza, after moving from house to house to locate tunnels and Hamas squads, his team came under a highly organized attack: One soldier was killed, 14 more were wounded. The battle was face-to-face, at close range. Galon took a bullet in the thigh. One lesson, Galon said, is that every soldier needs to know the basics of first aid. “It’s talked about a lot, but it’s not always really practiced,” he said. Additionally, in the battles awaiting Israel, he said, the concept of gathering force in a line for a charge against the enemy is not relevant. “It’s one on one,” he said, explaining that a soldier’s individual skills, in what he termed guerrilla warfare, would decide many battles.
And finally, the new graduate said that although many of the battles would seem to be based in urban environments, the army is right to keep the initial emphasis on the field and then, in more advanced training, to teach the elements of urban and subterranean warfare. “It’s the base,” he said, “and the base comes first.”As for the old adage that armies tend to prepare for the previous war, Razili acknowledged the difficulty. “It’s always true,” he said. “We could be wrong. A new war is always a challenge. But if you give the basics — how to take apart the enemy’s system, how to pick the right tool from the toolbox — then it should work.”
FROM THE SHORES OF NOVA SCOTIA, ISRAEL’S FIRST SOLDIERS
Rob Gordon
National Post, Jan. 5, 2015
The Fort Edward blockhouse in Windsor, Nova Scotia is one of the oldest wooden fortifications still standing in North America. It played a major role in the Explusion of the Acadians in 1755, helped defend Nova Scotia in the War of 1812 and, in a truly odd twist of history, assisted in the creation of the State of Israel. Fort Edward sits atop a wind-swept hill over looking the former mill town of Windsor. The town has bragging rights as the birthplace of ice hockey and hometown to some of the world’s largest pumpkins.
But there is another less known boast; in the summer of 1917, Windsor was home to some of Israel’s founding fathers and the place where the forerunner of the Israeli Defence Force was forged. In the shadow of the blockhouse, hundreds of Jewish boys from New York, Montreal, Russia and Palestine first put on a uniform and learned how to handle a rifle. It was here that the Jewish Legion was formed up — one of the first all-Jewish military forces in modern times. Although the legion trained in Canada, the soldiers where never part of the Canadian army. They were considered British imperial forces and came under British command.
Young recruit David Ben-Gurion arrived to train with the Jewish Legion on June 1, 1918. Like all the legion’s recruits, Ben-Gurion was paid 50 cents a day. The future first prime minister of Israel roughed in a bell tent and slept on the bare Nova Scotia earth. “In this camp there are all types to be found among Jewish people, from the most lofty-minded idealists and the highly educated to coarse and evil-minded individuals, born criminals,” is how Ben-Gurion described his first impressions of the camp in a letter to his wife Paula just days after getting Nova Scotia. One of Ben-Gurion’s brothers-in-arms in Windsor was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an ardent Zionist who was one of the co-founders of the Jewish Legion. Jabotinsky, like many of the legion soldiers, saw forming a Jewish military unit as essential to their dream of creating an Israel. While learning the ins and outs of military life in Nova Scotia in April 1918, soldier-poet Abraham Isserman wrote the following:
“A million more must follow:
You! Join in with the brave:
Or else their faith is hollow,
And Zion seeks her grave.”
The coarse, the evil-minded and the lofty that Ben-Gurion trained with appear to have been well-treated by the local people of the Annapolis Valley town. One account in the local paper talks about the joyous celebration of the Jewish New Year in 1918 when 500 legionaries gathered at the Windsor opera for a kosher meal. On July 1, 1918 Windsor celebrated Dominion Day, the Jewish Legion was invited to take part but the soldiers wanted the “Jewish flag” to fly along side the Canadian and British flags. “At first they didn’t fly the Jewish flag, and our boys were going to refuse to take part in the parade. I went to the major and demanded that the Jewish flag be displayed as well, and at once he gave the order to fly the blue and white flag,” Ben-Gurion wrote to his wife.
The 39th Battalion of the Windsor-based Jewish Legion was dispatched to fight the Turkish troops of the Ottoman Empire in June 1918. The legion fought in the Jordan Valley with the 39th Battalion, listing 23 dead. Many, many more were disabled or died because of malaria or other disease. But the First World War was coming to a close and that meant the Jewish legion was be stood down by the British. Still the legion achieved what many of its members wanted; formally-trained, professional Jewish soldiers stationed in the Middle East. And many of the legion’s former soldiers formed the backbone of Jewish defence teams protecting villages.
The rifle training, the marching in unison and the military mind-set learned at Fort Edward stuck with Ben-Gurion all his life. In 1996, a letter was discovered from the former prime minister of Israel to the mayor of Windsor describing the importance of what happened beneath Fort Edward in 1917-1918. “In Windsor one of the great dreams of my life — to serve as a soldier in a Jewish Unit to fight for the liberation of Israel (as we always called Palestine) became a reality, and I will never forget Windsor, where I received my first training as a soldier, and where I became a corporal.”
Today there is no mention of the Jewish Legion at Fort Edward. That should change, says Jon Goldberg of the Atlantic Jewish Council. “Its important what happened there. Important for Canada, Nova Scotia and Israel,” said Goldberg in an interview. Goldberg had always heard rumours of the Jewish Legion, but only became fully aware of the unit and its Nova Scotia roots 15 years ago when he was shown a picture of the unit on parade at Fort Edward. Parks Canada has studied the contribution of the Jewish legion to the history of the Fort Edward, but so far the tale of the corporal-turned-statesman, and the 1,100 Jews who joined him, hasn’t been publicly etched into the fort’s official history. Perhaps that will soon change.
Defense Minister Ya’alon: India a “True Friend” to Israel: Ahuva Balofsky, Breaking Israel News, Feb. 18, 2015 —Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon left Monday for a historic, official visit to India, the first ever by an Israeli defense minister.
Israel, India 'Open' to Joint Production of Military Hardware: I24, Feb. 18, 2015 —Israel's Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon on Wednesday attended the biennial Aero India show, which is at the center of India's military modernisation plans.
Navy Installs Advanced Underwater AquaShield Detection System: Lilach Shoval, Israel Hayom, Feb. 6, 2015—During Operation Protective Edge in the summer, a small force of Hamas naval commandos managed to approach the Israeli coast from the sea, undetected by military surveillance until the group reached the shore.
Between Dresden and Gaza: Ehud Yairi, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 11, 2015—It is the appropriate time to acquaint some readers with, and remind others of, events that took place 70 years ago.
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