From Lean and Keen to Potluck and Party!
June 25, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
When one is long absent from young children, it is instantly observed how much they have changed upon return. Had I lived in Israel on a continual basis, the change in the demeanor and character of the Israeli military men would not have seemed as drastic as it did during visits on an intermittent basis from 1952 to 1999. I have written many articles on the declining physical attributes and patriotic attitude of the average individual in the Israeli military apparatus. The high ranking officers are now attempting to rebuild the attributes and attitudes of the armed forces.
In order for the soldier to be effective as a part of the whole he must be lean physically and keen mentally, and there is no substitute for combat experience where he or she faces an enemy with deadly weapons, rather than rocks hurled at them. A soldier must be strong physically, as well as mentally prepared to patriotically defend his country, much as the Apostle Paul inferred in his Epistle to his son in the Faith, Timothy.
II Timothy 2:3,4 – Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. [4] No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.
There was a valor and patriotism in the military men and women I met after the 1948 War, and it was still there after the 1967 War but, in my opinion, from 1982 to last years conflict I witnessed a steady decline in both valor and patriotism of the average Israeli soldier. My contacts were with the foot soldiers of
the IDF. I had little contact with the tank corps or the IAF, so I have nothing to say about either branch.
I hope there will be a revival of the spirit of willingness to pay whatever price is required in a spirit of valor and patriotism before the war which now looms in Israel’s future. This is not the time for appeasement to a brutal fanaticism that will give no quarter once it strikes.
Begin Article from Lebanon Daily Star
Are Israel’ s armed force
s destined for more decline
?
By Uri Bar-Joseph
June 16, 2007
Approximately six months before the Six-Day War, the Israeli armed forces rejected an American proposal to assist Israel in finding technological solutions to the intensifying infiltration of Palestinian guerrillas into Israel. Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin and his generals expressed the view that the right answer to the problem was increasing military pressure on Syria, rather than electronic fences that would turn Israel into another ghetto and consume the scarce manpower and financial resources that were needed to reinforce the army. Forty years later, the Israeli Army – which is by far
the strongest between Morocco and the Indian subcontinent – failed to defeat a few thousand Hizbullah fighters who kept launching Katyusha rockets until the very last moment of the July-August 2006 Lebanon war.
The gap between the aggressive, lean military machine of the 1960s and the far bigger, bureaucratic and less effective army of the early 21st century was, to a large extent, the result of the June 1967 war. Before the war, Israel’s armed forces had to defend a vulnerable state, most of whose territory was within the range
of Arab artillery. The territorial outcomes of the war turned Damascus, Amman, and Cairo into prey for the Israel Air Force,
and the Suez Canal and its industrial area into an easy target for Israeli artillery. Most importantly, the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip made the Israeli military responsible for administering the lives of nearly 1 million Palestinian civilians.
In the first decade after the war, when Israel’s main challenge was still conventional Arab forces, the armed forces succeeded in maintaining their professional quality. This was proven in October 1973, when Israel came back from a near defeat in the first days of the war to a situation where only a United Nations resolution saved the Egyptian Army from complete destruction. But the war was Israel’s last conventional conflict. The peace treaty with Egypt rendered the Arab conventional military option more remote than ever. And even though, in the short run, the traditional threat was replaced by that of the eastern front coalition headed by Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s 1980 attack on Iran almost completely nullified that, too. The collapse of the USSR, Syria’s strategic ally, and the 1991 Gulf war that destroyed much of the Iraqi Army completed this process. The end of the Cold War left Israel’s armed forces with no real effective enemies.
In parallel to the decline of the conventional threat, the non-conventional challenge of Arab guerrilla and terrorism began to rise. The Israeli war initiative against the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1982 was the first Arab-Israel war in which the Israeli armed forces fought a relatively low-intensity conflict against a far weaker opponent. As a number of studies show, the military’s performance level in this war was quite low
in comparison with past conventional conflicts. The outcome of the war was frustrating as well. Although most of the Palestinian force was destroyed and the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, Israel suffered many casualties. And when it withdrew from the territory it had occupied three years earlier, it left behind a new type of enemy: Hizbullah.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
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