Humbling of the supertroops shatters Israeli army

morale
Source: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.martialarts/200608/msg04921.html
From: rchrdkilgore@xxxxxxxxx
Date: 28 Aug 2006 13:22:50 0700
Moral: The IDF has been practicing being an occupation police force,
not war against real soldiers.
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Humbling of the supertroops shatters Israeli army morale
08.27.2006 | The Sunday Times
HUNDREDS of feet below ground in the command bunker of the Israeli air
force in Tel Aviv, a crowd of officers gathered to monitor the first
day of the war against Hezbollah. It was July 12 and air force jets
were about to attack Hezbollah's military nerve centre in southern
Beirut.
Among the officers smoking tensely as they waited for news, was
LieutenantGeneral Dan Halutz, 58, a daring fighter pilot in the 1973
ArabIsraeli war who had become chief of staff a year earlier and now
faced the biggest test of his career.
Over the Mediterranean, west of Beirut, the elite F15I squadron made
its final preparations to strike with precision guided weapons against
Hezbollah's Iranianmade longrange Zelzal rockets, aimed at Tel Aviv.
Just before midnight, the order "Fire!" given by the squadron
leader could be heard in the Tel Aviv bunker. Within moments the
first Hezbollah missile and launcher were blown up. Thirtynine tense
minutes later the squadron leader's voice was heard again: "Fiftyfour
launchers have been destroyed. Returning to base."
Halutz smiled with relief and called Ehud Olmert, the prime minister,
who was enjoying a cigar as he waited by a secure red phone at his
residence in Jerusalem.
"All the longrange rockets have been destroyed," Halutz announced
proudly. After a short pause, he added four words that have since
haunted him: "We've won the war."
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Even as Halutz was declaring victory, 12 Israeli soldiers from the
Maglan reconnaissance unit were already running into an ambush just
over the border inside Lebanon near the village of Maroun aRas.
"We didn't know what hit us," said one of the soldiers, who asked to be
named only as Gad. "In seconds we had two dead."
With several others wounded and retreating under heavy fire the
Maglans, one of the finest units in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF),
were astonished by the firepower and perseverance of Hezbollah.
"Evidently they had never heard that an Arab soldier is supposed to run
away after a short engagement with the Israelis," said Gad.
"We expected a tent and three Kalashnikovs that was the
intelligence we were given. Instead, we found a hydraulic steel door
leading to a wellequipped network of tunnels."
As daylight broke the Maglans found themselves under fire from all
sides by Hezbollah forces who knew every inch of the terrain and
exploited their knowledge to the full.
The commander of the IDF's northern sector, LieutenantGeneral Udi
Adam, could barely believe that some of his best soldiers had been so
swiftly trapped; neither could the chief of staff.
"What's wrong with the Maglans?" Halutz demanded to know. "They are
surrounded," Adam replied quietly. "I must send in more forces."
As the reinforcements of the Egoz brigade prepared to enter Maroun
aRas and rescue their comrades, however, several were mown down in a
second ambush. Hours of battle ensued before the Maglan and Egoz
platoons were able to drag their dead and wounded back to Israel.
Hezbollah also suffered heavy casualties but its fighters slipped back
into their tunnels to await the next round of fighting. It was
immediately obvious to everyone in Tel Aviv that this was going to be a
tougher fight than Halutz had bargained for.
As the war unfolded his optimism was brought crashing down to earth
and with it the invincible reputation of the Israeli armed forces.
In five weeks, their critics charge, they displayed tactical
incompetence and strategic shortsightedness. Their muchvaunted
intelligence was found wanting.
Their political leadership was shown to vacillate. Their commanders
proved fractious. In many cases the training of their men was poor and
their equipment inadequate. Despite many individual acts of bravery,
some of the men of the IDF were pushed to the point of mutiny.
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Last week, in an contrite letter to his soldiers, Halutz admitted to
"mistakes which will all be corrected". It is far from clear whether
Halutz will remain in position to correct them.
As calls mounted this weekend not least from the families of many
of the 117 fallen Israeli soldiers for the resignation of those
deemed responsible for the failures, Olmert was expected to set up an
inquiry into the conduct of the war. A poll showed that 63% of Israelis
believed Olmert should quit, while 74% called for Amir Peretz, the
defence minister, to go, and 54% wanted Halutz out.
"Olmert faces a serious risk of a noconfidence vote in the Knesset,"
said Hanan Kristal, a leading political commentator. "A State
Commission will give him four to six months of critical breathing
time."
Meanwhile the Israeli public are struggling to accept that the
country's security might now depend on whether a Frenchled United
Nations peacekeeping force proves able to disarm Hezbollah in southern
Lebanon. In addition to 7,000 troops already promised by EU states, the
UN has received offers from several Muslim countries, some of which do
not even recognise Israel. The force is unlikely to reach full strength
for at least two months.
Much attention is being paid, however, to the deployment of these
forces and especially to Israel's apparent overreliance on air power
under the command of the Halutz.
Critics of Halutz, a former air force commander, believe he should have
sent in overwhelming forces on the ground to drive Hezbollah back from
border areas where they remained active right up to the end of the
34day conflict.
"The air force can only assist ground forces; it can never win a war
any war," said one veteran Israeli officer last week.
Another critical factor under consideration was that Hezbollah seemed
so much better prepared. They launched nearly 200 rockets a day at
Israel. They used advanced antitank missiles with lethal
professionalism and stunned their opponents with their coolness under
pressure and their willingness to "martyr" themselves in battle.
Apparently using techniques learnt from their paymasters in Iran, they
were even able to crack the codes and follow the fastchanging
frequencies of Israeli radio communications, intercepting reports of
the casualties they had inflicted again and again. This enabled them to
dominate the media war by announcing Israeli fatalities first.
"They monitored our secure radio communications in the most
professional way," one Israeli officer admitted. "When we lose a man,
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the fighting unit immediately gives the location and the number back to
headquarters. What Hezbollah did was to monitor our radio and
immediately send it to their AlManar TV, which broadcast it almost
live, long before the official Israeli radio."
Hezbollah appears to have divided a three milewide strip along the
IsraeliLebanese border into numerous "killing boxes". Each box was
protected in classic guerrilla fashion with boobytraps, land mines,
and even CCTV cameras to watch every step of the advancing Israeli
army.
"Our brass stupidly fell into the Hezbollah traps," said Raphael, an
infantry battalion reserve major. "The generals wanted us to attack as
many villages as possible for no obvious reason. This was exactly what
Hezbollah wanted us to do they wanted to bog us down in as many
small battles as possible and bleed us this way."
The casualties from Russianmade antitank missiles have caused
particular concern. An Israeliinvented radar defence shield codenamed
Flying Jacket and costing 200,000 was installed on only four tanks.
None of them was struck by antitank missiles.
But Hezbollah hit 46 tanks that lacked the shield. "200,000 per tank
is not beyond Israel's means," noted one military source acidly.
While the regular army was reasonably well equipped, the reservists
were not. "We arrived at our depots only to find that our combat gear
had been opened and equipment given to regular soldiers," revealed
Moshe, a fighter in the Alexandroni brigade. "The equipment was, of
course, never returned."
The Alexandroni fought in the west, near the Mediterranean, and did
well initially. But logistics were appalling. "We had no fresh water as
it was too dangerous to ship it to us," Moshe added. "I'm ashamed to
admit we had to drink water from the canteens of dead Hezbollah, and
break into local shops for food."
The Israeli leadership became determined to destroy the Hezbollah
stronghold of Bint Jbeil because of its powerful symbolism to the
enemy.
This was the place where Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's general
secretary, had given his keynote speech after Israel withdrew in 2000,
ending 18 years of occupation. Nasrallah said in Bint Jbail that Israel
would be destroyed. Now Israeli leaders wanted to show him how badly
mistaken he had been.
"Conquer Bint Jbail," Halutz told Adam, the northern sector commander.
Adam is said to have replied: "Hold on, Halutz. Do you know what that
means? Do you realise that the casbah [old quarter] of Bint Jbail alone
contains more than 5,000 houses? And you want me to send in one
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battalion?"
Adam nevertheless did as he was told and sent the 51st battalion of the
Golani brigade to fight a heroic but hopeless, battle.
As the Israeli soldiers approached the town from the east they fell
straight into yet another ambush. Hand grenades killed battalion
commanders. Then a rescue operation was mounted, which took all night.
Hezbollah fighters were also hit but retreated and waited for Israeli
reinforcements to arrive. Brig Gen Gal Hirsch, the commander of the 91
Galilee division, announced: "We control BintJbail." The next day more
Israeli soldiers died as they, too, were ensnared in Hezbollah's trap.
The Israeli media began to attack the army. "Idiotic military
manoeuvres," was how one commentator on TV1, the stateowned station,
summed it up.
Tension now set in among the top brass. Halutz dispatched his deputy,
Maj Gen Moshe Kaplinsky, as his special representative to the north,
placing him above Adam.
Adam threatened to resign if Kaplinski issued orders to his units.
Kaplinski nevertheless did so. Adam did not resign but is expected to
go public soon with his story of the war.
Relatively inexperienced reservists were called up. Oded, 27, a
reservist from Jerusalem in a combat infantry brigade, was among those
summoned to active duty. "In the past six years I've only had a week's
training," he revealed.
"Soon after we arrived, we received an order to seize a nearby Shi'ite
village. We knew that we were not properly trained for the mission. We
told our commanders we could control the village with firepower and
there was no need to take it and be killed for nothing.
"Luckily we were able to convince our commander," he concluded with a
faint smile.
Oded blamed the Palestinian intifada for his unit's insufficient
training. "For the last six years we were engaged in stupid policing
missions in the West Bank," he said. "Checkpoints, hunting
stonethrowing Palestinian children, that kind of stuff. The result was
that we were not ready to confront real fighters like Hezbollah."
On the day the chaos in Bint Jbail reached its peak, Amir Peretz, the
new and inexperienced defence minister, flew to the northern border to
meet reservists about to go into action.
Aviv Wasserman, a reserve major with the 300 brigade who is about to
study for a doctorate at the London School of Economics, asked Peretz
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not to throw them into "unnecessary adventures".
Lieutenant Adam Kima, of the combat engineering battalion, was in even
more rebellious mood after being asked to take his men and clear the
road leading to Bint Jbeil from the west. Studying the plan, Kima
rejected the idea 10 Israeli soldiers had already died there "We
were foolishly told it was all right there are no Hezbollah forces
ahead of us," said Corporal Nimrod Diskin, one of Kima's soldiers. "We
didn't have the equipment to clear this road. We were not ready for the
mission."
When the brigade commander realised that Kima and his soldiers would
not carry out their orders, he called the military police. The men were
sentenced to 14 days in jail, although they were released a few days
later. The soldiers, most of them fathers of small children, believe
Kima saved their lives.
"I noticed behaviour I'd never heard of in the Israeli army," Kima said
last week on Israeli television. "In my training I got used to the idea
that the commander shouts 'Advance!' and is the first to face the
enemy. Here my battalion commander was in the back of the group and the
brigade commander didn't even cross the border into Lebanon."
As the fighting dragged on, some veteran officers lost patience with
what they saw as the inexperience of the chief of staff and defence
minister. "What are you doing in Lebanon, for God's sake?' the former
defence minister, General Shaul Mofaz, asked Olmert. "Why did you go
into Bint Jbeil? It was a trap set by Hezbollah."
Mofaz proposed an oldfashioned IDF assault plan to launch a blitzkrieg
against Hezbollah, reach the strategically important Litani river in 48
hours and then demolish Hezbollah in six days. Olmert liked the idea
but Peretz did not appreciate his predecessor's intervention and
rejected it.
Olmert appeared to lose confidence and began to issue conflicting
orders. "Our mission changed twice, three times, every day," complained
one soldier.
Many Israelis have been left furious that the legendary deterrent power
of their army has been shattered. Even though Hezbollah has lost a
quarter of its fighters, its military base in Beirut and its bunkers in
the south, Israelis feel less secure.
They hear President Bashar alAssad of Syria warning that he may retake
the Golan Heights by force and the Iranians threatening that if the
Americans attack them, Tel Aviv will be hit by ballistic missiles in
retaliation.
On the final day of the war, Halutz was sitting in his favourite seat
at the air force bunker in Tel Aviv, waiting for the results of a
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massive airborne operation. Then the news came through that a Sikorsky
CH53 helicopter had been shot down by a Hezbollah rocket. He is said
to have felt defeated, both personally and professionally.
Halutz and his political masters may now be living on borrowed time.
Israeli's military elite, such as its fighter squadrons and commando
units, may still be among the best in the world but the mediocrity of
much of the army has been exposed for all in the Middle East to see.
Israelis can forget and forgive many things, but not the perceived
defeat of an army that commanded worldwide respect but suddenly no
longer strikes so much fear into its enemies.
.
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