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Israelis Reexamine Warfare

(UPI/Washington Times) Joshua Brilliant - Imagine a battlefield saturated with sensors, drones, intelligence-gathering balloons, and planes that see everything the enemy has. All data is fed into very advanced communications, command and control systems that fuse it, identify targets, transfer the information hundreds of miles away to systems that fire accurate weapons, attack the targets in quick succession, and destroy them. "Who would want to enter such a battlefield (knowing) that in a short time he would be destroyed?" asked the outgoing Head of the Israeli army's Strategic Planning Division, Brig. Gen. Eival Gilady at a Tel Aviv University conference last week. The Israeli army is already developing such a capability, Gilady and other generals indicated. Israel still faces "a danger to its existence," stressed Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon. Israel needs "a strong defensive army in the foreseeable future. It should be able to react to current security activities along the borders, fight terror, engage in a high intensity (conventional) conflict, (cope with) the threat of rockets and surface-to-surface missiles, as well as a non-conventional threat," Yaalon added. It should seek "a relative advantage in every arena so that it could contribute to deterrence," he said. Should Israel's deterrence fail, the most likely scenario would see a deterioration along the Lebanese border spread to Syria, prompt Palestinians to escalate their attacks, and possibly lead Egypt to violate the peace treaty and send troops into the Sinai Peninsula, several recently retired generals and security experts said.
2004-01-09 00:00:00
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