Israel Is Making a Tactical Military Error
September 18, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
I have long been concerned about Israel’s drifting away from the idea of the next major Middle East war being nuclear, rather than conventional in nature. Israel is continuing to drag her feet in keeping the tank corps up to par with anti-tank m
issile development available to her enemies.
I first warned about it five years ago in our Archive Special Prophecy Update Number 135B, which follows.
BEGIN SPECIAL PROPHECY UPDATE NUMBER 135B
September 1, 2003
Bye! Bye! Conventional Merkava 4’s and 5’s!
I was rather surprised by some armor decisions made recently by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now the Treasury Minister in Ariel Sharon’s Cabinet. He believes Israel faces two threats – The Palestinian terrorist groups, and the weapons of mass destruction that are being developed by Arab states in the Middle East, notably headed by Iran.
Of course, both of these are real threats, but I do not agree with his statement that followed. He does not believe the threat of an invasion by Arab states against Israel on the ground is a feasible reality and, because of this, favors the decommissioning of old war systems, like the Merkava tanks, at an accele rated
rate. Netanyahu attributes great importance to the strategic view, which would provide answers to the Iranian nuclear threat and to other state’s weapons of mass destruction. He favors the continuation of the security fence to its completion, but desires to see the discontinuation of Merkava tank production. If Israel does follow this program, believing they are secure from an outside ground attack at the present, then once they finally get the Palestinians fenced in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it will give them a sense of “peace and safety” as regards their being overrun from the north. Scripture indicates it will happen.
Without the conventional old war systems, such as the Merkava 3 and the new Merkava 4 tanks, Israel would be much more vulnerable to a conventional attack like the one launched against them from Syria in the 1973 Yom Kipper War. The deterrent to non-conventional weapons, now being developed by the Arab states, lies in the Negev wilderness in the form of nuclear, chemical, and biological warheads on the hundreds of Jericho missiles found there. The mass destruction weapons possessed by Israel in the Negev are more than a sufficient deterrent to cause the Arab states not
to launch theirs against Israel.
END ARCHIVE UPDATE NUMBER 135B
Begin Jerusalem Post Excerpt via Independent Media Review Analysis
Tank defense system two years behind schedule
September 16, 2008
Tank defense system behind schedule
Yaakov Katz , THE JERUSALEM POST
September 16, 2008
www.jpost.com
Plans to equip IDF tanks with an anti-missile defense system have been
postponed by two years due to budgetary and development snags, defense officials said Monday.
According to the officials, the Trophy system, developed by state-owned
Rafael, would now likely be installed on Merkava Mk4 battle tanks in 2010 and not this year, as was initially announced following the Second Lebanon War.
During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Hizbullah fired thousands of
anti-tank missiles at Israeli tanks and infantry units, damaging 40 tanks
and killing 30 crew members.
According to a report in Defense News on Monday, tens of millions of dollars had already been invested in the Trophy program over the past eight years and it will take “double that amount” to equip hundreds of tanks in the coming years.
“We hope to start installing several of the systems on tanks in the
beginning of next year,” a top officer in the IDF’s Ground Forces Command told The Jerusalem Post. “The massive fielding though will not happen until sometime in 2010.” Industry sources told the Post that the Defense Ministry was mainly to blame for the delays and that Rafael’ s development of the
system was dependent on the schedule it received from the IDF.
“We cannot work on our own,” one source said. “The Defense Ministry has over the past two years repeatedly changed its schedule of when it wanted to conduct testing and installation and this has affected the development.”
According to the report in Defense News, the Defense Ministry and Rafael only began installing the first systems on Merkava Mk4 tanks in late 2007 for integration
and safety tests, the results of which were poor and required revisions to the ministry-provided specifications.
As a result, the Trophy system was only installed on Merkava Mk4 tanks in February 2008 and underwent a live-fire test just two months ago.
Hizbullah is believed to have today thousands of Soviet-built Sagger, Cornet and Fagot antitank missiles, the French MILAN and the US-built TOW, all supplied by Iran and Syria. These missiles are usually fired by a two- or three-man team.
Some 400 tanks operated inside Lebanon during the war and while dozens were hit by anti-tank missiles, only 20 were actually penetrated. Following the war, the IDF decided to speed up development of an active-protection system for tanks and armored personnel carriers, with officers claiming in late 2006 that tanks would be equipped with the system by 2008.
The Trophy system creates a hemispheric protected zone around armored vehicles such as the Merkava tank. It is designed to detect and track a threat and counter it with a launched projectile that intercepts the anti-tank missile.
Israel Military Industries (IMI) is also developing its own system, called
the Iron Fist.
Claimed to be capable of neutralizing all anti-tank threats,
including kinetic shells fired by enemy tanks, the Iron Fist is in its final
stages of testing and is predicted to be declared operational and ready for mass production by the beginning of the next decade.
The Iron Fist consists of a radar and passive optical system that detects
incoming threats and destroys them within a fraction of a second by using a combustible blast interceptor.
Unlike the Trophy, which fires off a large number of projectiles, the Iron Fist intercepts incoming threats by using a mortar-shaped rocket that destroys the threat by using a blast effect which crushes its soft components or deflects the incoming missile.
Rafael spokesman Amit Zimmer said the Trophy program was being “executed according to the schedule and requirements that were agreed upon between the IDF and the Defense Ministry.”
The Defense Ministry spokesman’s office said the program’s schedule was continuing according to plan.
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