THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES, 1996 (Continued from p.4) fighting commander integrates the logistical areas and the administrative areas with a thorough knowledge of other service branches to give him a wide perspective on all the aspects of his work. Until the middle of the 1960s, command appointments in the IDF were political and received approval from the top echelon of Mapai. This politicization was achieved during the long period of administration of the defense system by David Ben-Gurion. The senior officer corps and the general staff had both personal and political obligations to this one person, who made officer appointments and decided on promotions. The long lists of senior reserve officers who signed newspaper manifestoes of support for the Labor Party in the recent election testify to the persistent strength of those political ties. Hand in hand with the promotion of the yea-sayers has been the release of officers who refuse to march in Labor Party lockstep. To all this is joined an even more serious problem. Because of the organizational climate, the lack of discipline, the derision of knowledge, there is no systematic handing down of lessons learned in battle and no organized documentation that can be studied. As a result, it is necessary for the army to invent the wheel over and over again. There are people who say the U.S. army was not in Vietnam for twelve years but twelve times: each time, one year. This is a saying that can easily be rephrased for the IDF and there are those who compare the Israeli army to a recording tape that continuously erases itself. Perhaps this sounds absurd but, unfortunately, it happens to be true. There are not many armies which, since World War II, have garnered such large battle experience as the IDF. In spite of it, there are very few Israeli commanders who have achieved world recognition for their abilities and fewer still who could be ranked with the best in the history of war. This paradox derives again from the low level of command in the IDF. It suffices to note that in all these years, only one IDF commander, Moshe Bar Kochba (Brill), during his service, wrote a book on military thought and this single book annoyed the heads of the army which made every effort to prevent its publication. The lack of professionalism results in unnecessary loss of human life. In many battles, IDF commanders acted illogically, which was not only costly to the state in strategic and tactical failures, but filled the cemetaries with needless victims. One should remember the words of one senior commander on the activities of his unit in the battle for the Golan in the Yom Kippur War. "We were dummies, hence we needed an awful lot of heroism." Under conditions of pressure and uncertainty, there is a need both for personal strength and toughness

and unit strength. In the past, one used to say that belief in the Jewish and Zionist character of the state of Israel was an important component in the army's strength. But the decline of a commitment to Zionism and its replacement with aspirations for self-fulfillment and hedonism (also known as "post-Zionism"), beyond question has had a negative influence on soldiers and their willingness to serve in fighting units. Yet more serious are the findings that young people are no longer eager to join the army at all. A striking, not to say grotesque, example of the undermining of the IDF is the document known as the ethical code which Professor Asa Kasher prepared for the recent chief of staff, Ehud Barak. This code tosses out Zionism and the Jewish heritage, while glorifying the duty to treat the enemy and his values with honor. The role of chief education officer, on whose responsibility the document was produced, is unknown in the armies of democratic states. Its role in Israel today is to politicize the army. Recently, the army's education office has expended unparalleled energy in education for democracy, meaning dezionization of the state of the Jews. As a people's army, the IDF had good years, but also many periods of somnambulism. In the Yom Kippur War, the Army had one of its most difficult hours and Mordechai Gur was appointed chief of staff with the task of rebuilding it as an efficient fighting force. He did only half the job and thus preordained the failure of the so-called Litani operation, which he commanded, as well as that of "Peace in Galilee" [both in Lebanon]. The inability to derive and pass on the lessons from Peace in Galilee dragged the army down further, as its mindless performance in the intifada made clear. Apparently we have not reached the nadir yet, because we see no serious effort to change course, only public relations efforts to assure the senior command of a future political career on retirement. For Israel to survive under conditions of numerical inferiority to the Arab states, she must protect the qualitative advantage of the IDF. We need a small, high- quality army, sophisticated, creative, efficient, professional, and devastating in action. Above all, it must be an army of the nation, capable of carrying out its purposes. Hence it is necessary to regain the esteem of the public and the loyalty of the soldiers. The IDF must find suitable commanders to lift it out of the low professional level to which it has fallen. One must rebuild the institutions of officer training. The main backbone of the IDF, the permanent service people, must be suitable for fighting 21st century wars in which soldiers and commanders whose main attributes are physical strength and (Continued on p.10)

September 1996               - 5 -               Outpost