Two underlying assumptions guided Israel’s
security establishment for the past generation. The first asserted that
with the end of the Cold War, the era of conventional wars had ended.
In the present age, brains, rather than brawn, would rule the roost.
The primary author of the “small and smart
IDF” doctrine was Ehud Barak, who served as Chief of General Staff of
the Israel Defense Forces when the Berlin Wall crumbled. In later years,
the slogan was finessed.
A generation of IDF Chiefs of General Staff organized around the vision of a “small, technological and lethal army.”
As Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick, (retired) who
served as the IDF ombudsman for ten years, has documented, operating
under the spell of Barak’s doctrine, the IDF shut down multiple reserve
divisions. It cut its artillery forces by 50%. Armored brigades were
shut down. The reserve force was reduced by 80% between 2003 and 2017.
The non-commissioned officer corps was gutted. The bulk of the IDF
budget and nearly all the U.S. military aid were diverted to the Air
Force—the strategic arm of the “small, technological and lethal” IDF.
The doctrine was repeatedly exposed as a
farce. But to no avail. The air force didn’t defeat the Palestinian
terror factories in Judea and Samaria in 2002. The ground forces did.
The air force never had a response to missiles from Hezbollah to the
north and Hamas to the south. Without regional brigades defending the
borders, Israel’s “peacetime” borders with Jordan on the east and Egypt
at its west became highways for weapons smugglers.
Brick’s warnings fell on deaf ears until
the “small, smart army” fallacy was obliterated by Hamas invaders on
Oct. 7. Israel’s multi-billion shekel “smart fence” was felled by
bulldozers. Its automatic response system was obliterated by RPGs.
Hundreds of soldiers manning these worthless technological wonders were
slaughtered or kidnapped. Everything failed.
A microcosm of all things oppressive
This brings us to the second underlying
assumption that guided Israel’s security establishment for the past
generation. This assumption, also championed by Barak, asserted that
Israel’s most important strategic asset was the United States.
Leaving aside the obvious fact that a
strategy of dependence on an outside actor effectively gutted Israel’s
national independence, on the surface, Barak’s dependence concept seemed
reasonable.
The Americans rescued Israel with its
weapons airlift in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 1992, the United States
was the sole global superpower. Because Israel was seen as Washington’s
“mini-me,” countries worldwide lined up to be friends with Israel, which
they perceived as the gateway to Washington. The vast majority of
Americans supported Israel. U.S. military aid to Israel enjoyed wide
bipartisan support.
Under the spell of Barak’s U.S. dependence
doctrine, Israel gutted its domestic military production capabilities.
Nearly everything that it had produced domestically—from uniforms to
rifles to bullets, to artillery and tank shells—was shut down. Thousands
of military industry workers lost their jobs. Knowledge was lost. The
contracts moved to the United States. Even projects developed jointly by
Israeli engineers financed by America were transferred to the United
States for production. So it happened that Israel’s Iron Dome missiles
are solely produced in the United States.
Along with Barak, the dependence
doctrine’s biggest champions were the air force generals. Under their
leadership, Israel’s air force effectively became a U.S. asset. The air
force cannot operate without U.S. platforms, spare parts and bombs. All
air force ordnance is made in America.
But even during the 1990s and 2000s, the
writing was appearing on the walls telling us that things were changing
in America. A generation after the United States emerged from the Cold
War as the sole global superpower, it struggles to contend with the
threat of China, which surpasses it in several key technologies.
Under the spell of globalization, the
United States gutted its industrial base. Even if it wanted to, today it
is hard-pressed to repeat the 1973 airlift in real time.
Even worse, the end of the Cold War
initiated changes in American society that over the past 20 years have
exploded in convulsive transformations.
Since the early 2000s, hard-core cultural
Marxist progressives have seized control over the U.S. education system
at all levels. As a result, young Americans are emerging from high
schools and universities with values unlike anything we have ever seen.
The new American values are built around a
division of humanity into two classes: oppressor and oppressed.
“Oppressors,” young Americans now believe, are evil and must be
punished. “Oppressed” are pure and must be empowered. The United States
is the chief oppressor. Its social and economic orders must be radically
transformed to expiate its sins.
Israel (America’s “mini-me”), and Jews generally, are presented as a microcosm of all things oppressive.
The implications of this progressive
indoctrination present America with an existential challenge. If allowed
to continue into the next generation, the United States will be
destroyed.
For Jews, the threat this indoctrination poses is immediate, as a survey published last week by Harvard-Harris demonstrated.
Harvard-Harris asked their respondents’
views on the Israel-Hamas war, and more broadly, about Jews and
Jew-hatred. The answers showed that unlike their parents and
grandparents, young Americans have embraced a comprehensive, internally
consistent and genocidal hatred for Israel and Jews.
Two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24
believe that Jews are oppressors and should be treated as such. Around
70% in that same age bracket believe that antisemitism is rising in the
United States generally and on university campuses specifically. They
believe that calls for genocide of Jews are hate speech and a form of
harassment.
At the same time, 53% of them think this harassment and hate speech should go unpunished.
Similarly, 66% of 18- to 24-year-olds
agree that Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 was genocidal. All the same, 60%
believe it was justified.
Logically flowing from these sentiments,
51% of young Americans believe that the proper end of the
Palestinian-Israel conflict is the destruction of the Jewish state and
its replacement with a Hamas-controlled Palestinian entity. That is, the
majority of young Americans support the annihilation of the Jewish
people.
Unlike the generals’ “small, smart army”
doctrine, it took several weeks for the public to see the devastating
consequences of their “America-dependence doctrine.”
America in a holding pattern
In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7,
their faith in American support seemed to be borne out. President Joe
Biden and his top advisers pledged their total support for Israel. Biden
deployed U.S. aircraft carrier groups to the Eastern Mediterranean and
promised $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to Israel to ensure
that Israel has what it needs to successfully win the war.
But in recent weeks, particularly since
Israel resumed its operation in Gaza at the end of November after the
10-day hostages-for-terrorists ceasefire, that assessment has changed
dramatically. The public has realized that friendliness and declarations
of solidarity aside, the United States does not share—and in some areas
opposes—Israel’s war aims. To win the war, Israel must eradicate Hamas
in Gaza and remove the threat Hezbollah poses to northern Israel. It
must also take action to prevent the Houthis from maintaining their
effective maritime blockade of the Port of Eilat.
On all of these fronts, Biden and his top
aides have made clear that their goals are not the same as Israel’s.
They do not seek the eradication of Hamas and the return of the
hostages. They seek the end of the war and the return of the hostages.
And at the end of the war, they want to rebuild Gaza. They want to use
the war’s end as a means to compel Israel into a “peace process.” The
goal of that process is to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, and
Judea and Samaria, led by terrorists from the Palestinian Authority
which, like Hamas, seeks the annihilation of the Jewish state.
In Lebanon, the administration seeks to
prevent war, even though doing so will leave Hezbollah with its capacity
to invade the Galilee and destroy strategic targets all over Israel
with its massive missile arsenal.
As for Yemen, the United States has
demanded that Israel take no offensive action against either the Houthis
or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ overlords directing Houthi
operations from their spy ship in the Red Sea.
Instead, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd
Austin has formed a multinational task force from which Israel has been
excluded. While its purpose is subject still to speculation, to many
U.S. and Israeli observers, it appears that America intends to use its
coalition to beef up its efforts to intercept Houthi missiles and drones
launched against merchant vessels in the Red Sea. That is, as with
Hezbollah, the U.S. goal vis-à-vis the Houthis seems to be to end Houthi
assaults on merchant ships without diminishing their capacity to carry
them out.
As for military supplies, the $14.3
billion is still languishing in Congress. It won’t be considered until
Congress reconvenes on Jan. 9 after the Christmas and New Year recess.
It will take years to correct the damage
the generals wrought by reducing the size of the IDF and inducing its
total dependence on the United States.
‘The IDF is changing its view’
But this week, the Defense Ministry let it be known that it is moving to correct the situation. On Tuesday, Ynet reported that the Defense Ministry is initiating what it refers to as “Independence Project.”
According to the report, the Defense
Ministry is launching a crash program with Israel’s military industries
and major industrialists to make Israel independent in everything
related to ordnance. In the initial phase, Israel will begin producing
bombs for its aircraft. Jerusalem also intends to expand its production
of tank and artillery shells, as well as assault rifles and bullets.
Separately, there is increased discussion regarding the establishment of
a missile force as an independent arm of the IDF. The force would
reduce reliance on the air force and develop more versatile, more easily
defended missile launch platforms and massively expand Israel’s missile
and drone arsenals.
After meeting with Defense Ministry
Director General Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir, Ron Tomer, the head of Israel’s
Industrialists Union, told Ynet, “The war demonstrates our need
for a powerful and advanced industrial base to ensure Israel’s national
strength and independent capabilities. The IDF is changing its view of
how it arms its forces, enlarging domestic production lines in order to
be less dependent on ordnance from abroad. The ideal of a small
high-tech military did not prove itself.”
Brick and others argue that had Hezbollah
joined Hamas in invading and bombing Israel on Oct. 7, Israel may well
have been destroyed that day. A combination of Hezbollah’s 10,000-man
Radwan Brigades perched at the border and capable of invading the
Galilee, and a barrage of up to 4,000 missiles with various payloads
targeting Israel’s air bases, and other strategic sites and civilian
population centers every day for weeks, would have caused irreparable
damage equal in force to a nuclear bomb.
Iran’s decision not to involve Hezbollah
on Oct. 7 has given Israel the opportunity to reorganize its forces and
prepare for the multi-front war that awaits us. We don’t have a moment
to lose.
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