July 9, 2007: Israel continues to seek lessons from
their war last year with Hizbollah, and now there's a government report
pointing out at, when the fighting broke out last Summer, Israel had not
conducted a large scale military operation since 1982 (when they went into
Lebanon to stop terrorist attacks on northern Israel.) That was 24 years ago,
and there were no senior Israeli commanders with any experience in large scale
operations. That's a first for Israel, because previously, there had always
been a recent war (as in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982), and officers who
remembered how to fight it. But that was not the real problem. No, the big
mistake was, in the last decade, dropping training for large scale military
operations. Oh, the military staffs continued to maintain and update plans for
large scale combat with Israel's neighbors. But the generals did not
participate in training exercises and wargames for these large scale
operations. Part of that was budget problems. Israel always spent a lot on the
military, and there was always pressure to cut back. Moreover, there was an
attitude among senior political and military leaders that the major problem
was, for the foreseeable future, going
to be Islamic terrorists, not Arab armies from neighboring nations. The
terrorism angle became crucial after the Palestinians began their terrorism
campaign against Israel in late 2000. Getting ready for a major conventional
war fell off the radar after that. What happened last Summer was a reminder of
what happens when you guess wrong, and prepare for the wrong future. As a
result, the generals, and those destined to be generals, are now all about
training for large scale operations.
