Chief of Staff reflects on Lebanon conflict and military modernization

Yet the most immediate security concerns were right next door. In Lebanon, Hizbollah fighters were being armed and financed by the Iranians and by Syria as well. They were mounting increasingly effective operations against the Israeli troops we’d left in the security zone. Even closer to home, Palestinian attacks on both troops and civilians, though on nowhere near the scale of the first months of the intifada, showed no sign of ending. I had my own views on both. In Lebanon, I still believed we should pull out all our troops and focus our security arrangements on what really mattered: protecting the citizens of northern Israel. As for the lessons to be learned from the intifada, my view that we needed a political dialogue had inadvertently become public, from remarks I made in Moshe Dayan’s honor at a memorial event a few months before becoming chief of staff. “We are currently in a struggle with the Palestinians — a long, bitter and continuing struggle,” I said. “A people cannot choose its neighbors. But we will have to talk to the Palestinians about matters, especially about issues that are vital to them.” Still, I was the commander of the armed forces, not a politician. Though all chiefs of staff had political influence, if only as part of the decision-making process on all major security questions, making policy was for our elected government. My main focus was on how to improve the military’s fitness to respond. I’d lived through, and more recently fought in, all of Israel’s wars. I felt that we had yet to apply some of the critical lessons from those conflicts. Leading tanks into battle against the Egyptians’ deadly Sagger missiles in 1973, and a decade later watching whole Israeli armored columns stalled and attacked by small bands of PLO fighters or Syrian commandos in Lebanon, had hardened my conviction that Israel needed a leaner, more mobile army, with more specialised strike units, as well as more easily targeted, less vulnerable weapons systems. I wanted to shift the emphasis to weaponry that relied on Israel’s strengths in new technology, invention and engineering. In a sense, this was the macroscopic equivalent of one of the guiding principles of Sayeret Matkal: brains, not just brawn. While cost-saving wasn’t the catalyst, I did realize that a change in strategy would mean a change in how we allocated our resources. When Israel bought its first Mirage jets from France in the 1960s, they cost about a million dollars apiece. The price tag of an F-16 was now closer to fiftv million dollars. The cost of a tank had increased tenfold. I wasn’t going to deprive the air force of state- of-the-art aircraft, key to our ability to fight and win a war. But while we still needed a strong armored corps, it was important to realize that units like the 242 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028090