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Mideast Crisis To Drive Future Needs
Israel Wants More Active Defenses, Better Intel
By BARBARA OPALL-ROME, TEL AVIV

While the final chapters of the 2006 Lebanon war have yet to be written, far-reaching lessons are already evident to one member of Israel’s high command who authored the first draft of the nearly five-week-long work in progress.
For example, Israel needs to better defend its civilians against rocket attack, while its troops need better armor and active defenses against anti-tank missiles, and systems to detect and destroy tunnels.
What has come as a surprise to many here and abroad is what appears to be a faltering, underwhelming display of Israel’s reputed military might.
That’s because Israel’s war against the Syrian- and Iranian-supported Hizbollah is not being executed as originally planned, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Gantz, commander of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Army Headquarters, told Defense News in an exclusive interview.
According to Gantz, broader “legitimate and reasonable” considerations by Israeli political leaders served to alter the timing in which the four planned phases of the war have been executed. The former paratrooper stressed the psychological and societal factors underlying the government’s reluctance to re-enter the Lebanese quagmire, Israel’s own version of America’s Vietnam.
Instead of the rolling, sequential campaign initially conceived — up to a week of standoff air-land battle, a three- or four-day intensive ground control assault, more than a month of what he called “cleansing” operations and another two to three weeks to return to the border — IDF ground forces still have not begun full-strength ground maneuvers, Gantz said Aug. 10.
“We planned for a bullet train, but what we got was an urban bus with several stops,” he said of the planned nine- to 10-week operation which should have driven down the rocket threat to Israel’s homefront within two to three weeks.
While unstated, Gantz seemed to blame himself and the system for the huge disconnect between war planning and reality.
“The concept I described was divorced almost completely from other [political] considerations, which were perfectly legitimate, but not necessarily operationally correct,” he said
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert launched its offensive July 12 after the Shiite militia attacked an Israeli outpost on the Lebanese border, killing eight soldiers and abducting two.
At press time, more than 80 Israeli troops had died in fighting, most at the hands of a highly trained and motivated enemy using sophisticated anti-tank weapons, good communications, knowledge of the local terrain and a network of tunnels. Forty Israeli civilians have perished under a barrage of more than 3,500 rockets and missiles fired by Hizbollah.
Hundreds of civilians in Lebanon have been killed in the course of Israel’s bombing campaign across the country to destroy Hizbollah and its store of rockets. Israel claims it has killed nearly 400 Hizbollah fighters, a count that the Shiite militia refutes. Few have been captured, said Reserve Brig. Gen. Shuki Schacur, deputy commander of the Northern Command, “because they fight to the death.”
It remains unclear how much longer Israel has to press its offensive as diplomats at the United Nations race to halt the fighting and station multinational peacekeepers to calm the region in hopes of fostering a long-term settlement.
‘Introspection and Debate’
As the commander of the special liaison unit operating in south Lebanon with the IDF’s own Lebanese Christian proxies, Gantz and his men were the last Israeli troops to vacate the war-torn country in 2000 after a costly and publicly divisive 22-year occupation.
For the past five years, as corps commander and then top boss of Israel’s entire Northern Command, Gantz had been studying the enemy, managing periodic eruptions and planning for the war against Hizbollah now unfolding.
While many in Israel, including those in leadership positions, had arrogantly dismissed Hizbollah as a terrorist gang, Gantz was one of the few who eyed the enemy with professional respect.
“When we started this planning, I said I didn’t want to deploy a single soldier there,” he said. “My force was the last to leave and I couldn’t stomach the thought of going back. … But after months of careful study, I understood that if we didn’t put in three divisions, we wouldn’t get out of the situation with any meaningful advantage.”
Gantz firmly refutes those who faulted Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, IDF chief of staff and former Air Force commander, for a misplaced reliance on the air campaign.
“There was absolutely no one in any military leadership position who claimed airpower alone could deliver the goods,” he said. “But the political level wanted to maximize the standoff firepower and the air campaign and, if there wasn’t any other choice, to implement the ground war.
“From the aspect of building and fortifying [domestic] legitimacy, I recognize this kind of introspection and debate [leading up to the Aug. 9 Cabinet decision for a large-scale ground offensive] had to be done, despite my professional military opinion that it should have been done three weeks ago,” Gantz said. “But now that we have the domestic legitimacy, we need to get on with the big offensive. … All the rest will have to wait for serious evaluation when it’s all over.”
Immediate Lessons Learned
What is painfully clear is the need to defend against high-trajectory rockets and short-range missiles, said Gantz, who now is entrusted with designing, training and equipping Israel’s land combat force.
“Now we have no active defense against Katyushot and short-range rockets, and we will need to invest in this area,” he said.
Gantz and others, like Uzi Eilam, a retired IDF general and former military research-and-development director, acknowledge that even the most capable system will be unable to defend completely against the type of salvos that have terrorized Israeli citizenry over the past month.
Nor, they say, will Israel be able to afford enough systems to completely cover broad areas.
“But at a minimum, we need to have a robust, deployable capability to defend highly populated and strategically sensitive areas,” Gantz said.
Eilam admits that Israeli decision-makers within the General Staff and Israel’s Ministry of Defense, himself included, “didn’t give proper respect for this threat.”
He said Israel’s defense establishment will be forced to include new parameters in the cost-benefit calculations driving military development decisions.
“This war surely has taught us that we need to start calculating all those nonconcrete benchmarks, such as damage to morale and deterrence,” Eilam said.
Another huge lesson that Gantz said will require extensive assessment is the desired balance between airpower and other precision, stand-off strike systems and ground-maneuver capabilities.
Citing the U.S. military’s campaign to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, “The Americans fired 40 Tomahawks and delivered an awesome air offensive, but in the end, it was the guy on the ground who pulled Saddam out of the ground,” he said.
Gantz also said the General Staff will have to rethink its traditional tendency to target reserve force training for the first hit when confronted with difficult funding priority decisions. Likewise, he said, training for active-duty forces should not suffer as much during budget-cutting exercises.
“In the beginning of this war, we took a battalion [Givati infantry] from Gaza and moved them north, into an entirely different doctrinal, technological, threat-driven theater,” Gantz said. “We pounced on them and equipped them with all the tools they need in a matter of hours. And even though they performed superbly when they got into the war, it shouldn’t have to be done this way.”
Lesson on Reserves
Another immediate lesson drawn directly from the fight is Israel’s need for more war reserves.
“This is an entire field onto itself, and engineers and statisticians will have to figure out what are our optimum requirements. … The emphasis here is not on quality, which we have, but on quantity,” he said.
As for new weaponry, Gantz agreed with many former defense officials that the MoD should expedite development of an active protection system to defend tanks and armored vehicles from the type of anti-tank missiles and rounds used so effectively by Hizbollah forces. Gantz also said Israel will have to give higher priority for armored heavy mechanized forces and other ground vehicles.
Israel’s MoD has developed and tested the Trophy active protection system, developed by Rafael, and another system, the Iron Fist, by Israel Military Industries, but funding constraints have slowed the transition to procurement.
Referring to Trophy, the more advanced of the two systems, Shmuel Yachin, a retired brigadier general and former military research and development chief, said, “If we would have had a budget decision in time, we could have had a few dozens of tanks with this system fighting up north.”
Finally, Gantz acknowledged a priority to develop capabilities for detecting and destroying tunnels, a threat that has confounded Israeli troops in the north and in Gaza. And while the threat differs in the two theaters, Gantz said more efforts will be needed to determine a mix of capabilities needed to deny the enemy this effective underground warfare capability.
New Systems Deployed
The greatest achievement, said Gantz, is the Northern Command’s ability to quickly equip brigade and below echelons with the IDF’s new Tzayad, or Hunter, digitized command-and-control system. He noted that Northern Command’s brigades were not scheduled to begin receiving these capabilities until the end of this year.
“It’s unbelievable, but we went from zero to five, almost six digitized brigades during the war fighting,” he said.
Gantz said results were immediately discernable in the ability of the digitized brigades to apply firepower “much smarter and more effectively.”
He credited technical representatives of Elbit Systems and other industries, who were deployed just inside Israel’s fighting front, for working around with the IDF to integrate these needed capabilities.
Another Elbit system, the Skylark tactical unmanned aerial vehicle, saw operational fighting for the first time. Imagery from the Skylark was used to actually locate and destroy many Hizbollah launchers, Gantz said.
“Our ground forces had their own independent overhead imagery, which gave them a capability they never had before,” he said.

Israel May Disrupt Commercial Broadcasts

By BARBARA OPALL-ROME, TEL AVIV

by their inability to silence Hizbollah TV broadcasts during an unsuccessful five-week campaign to roust the Islamist group from southern Lebanon, said they need to be able to disrupt transmissions of enemy programming carried by commercial satellites. Despite directly targeting Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the organization’s Al-Manar TV network with bombs and electronic warfare, Israel was unable to prevent the radical Shiite cleric from reaching his audience regularly. Officials at Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters here and at Israel’s Galilee-based Northern Command said Nasrallah’s public resilience in the face of the onslaught boosted the morale of Hizbollah’s fighters and sympathizers.

We struck their antennas, which prevented transmissions for a limited time,” said Shuki Shacur, an IDF Reserves brigadier general who served as deputy commander for Northern Command during the war. “We also succeeded in penetrating their broadcasts and inserting our own programming. But ... it’s very difficult to block their satellite communication, since they’re constantly changing their signals. After the war is over, we’re likely to see more effort invested in denying Hizbollah its ability to use this means of communication.”
Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, an Air Force officer on the IDF General Staff, agreed. “No doubt, we understand the power of the media, public opinion and mass psychology,” said Nehushtan, who is responsible for IDF modernization planning. “Al-Manar is a liability, and we’re going to have to improve our ability to counter this threat.” Nehushtan declined on Aug. 2 to elaborate on potential broadcast-denial solutions or developmental work presumably under way within Israel’s Ministry of Defense (MoD). He said, however, that jamming efforts thus far have not been directed at commercial satellites servicing Al-Manar. “We’ve done some jamming and managed to burst through broadcasting, but it’s been through local channels, not satellite signals,” he said, declining to elaborate. Jamming transponders on a commercial satellite is a relatively easy thing for a technically advanced country like Israel to do, but would carry negative repercussions internationally and could invite others to disrupt broadcasts over Israel’s own satellites. It was not clear exactly what the IDF official has in mind in suggesting the need for a way to disrupt the Al-Manar broadcasts. Tal Inbar, senior research fellow at Israel’s Fisher Institute for Air & Space Studies, said the war revealed limitations in Israel’s ability to silence Al-Manar. Conventional bombing is ineffective, he said, due to Hizbollah’s ability to transmit from cars or trucks. “It’s very difficult, almost impossible, to hit all those mobile transmitters,” he said. As hostilities began, Israeli aircraft destroyed Al-Manar’s five-story headquarters in south Beirut, Inbar said. “But thanks to elaborate advance planning, Al-Manar’s signal returned after just two minutes of down time.” Inbar said the only way to ensure persistent, reliable, wide-area broadcast denial is through an anti-communication satellite system. Israel must develop the means to surgically target signals serving Hizbollah without damaging the spacecraft or disrupting operations of other customers serviced by the broadcast frequencies, he said. Hacking Trumps Jamming Israeli military and industry sources said other broadcast denial methods used during the war, such as computer-based tampering, have met with some success. “It was a desktop operation. We didn’t jam it,” a former MoD official said. “What we did was implant our own content on a fairly broad scale in a way that was difficult for them to override.” He declined to provide additional operational or technical details, and Israeli authorities denied repeated requests for information on broadcast denial capabilities. An Israeli industry executive and former Air Force officer specializing in satellite technology confirmed that Israel did not jam commercial satellites during the war. “I’m not saying we don’t have this capability, but we haven’t been able to do this in a way that does not interfere with other users of the satellite,” he said. According to the executive, jamming a communications satellite is “like interfering with civil aviation. You can do it, but it’s against international law and you’ll be subject to all kinds of lawsuits.” It is technologically impossible, he said, to selectively jam only those satellite signals that carry enemy broadcasts. “Everything goes out as a single beam, and it is impossible to jam only those channels viewed as a threat,” the executive said. “If you make the decision to interfere with one [satellite signal], then you must be prepared to face the consequences of the collateral damage incurred to the many other legitimate users of the signal.” Robert Ames, chief executive of the Satellite Users Interference Reduction Group, a Punta Gorda, Fla.-based industry association, said it is relatively easy to jam a specific satellite transponder.
“Transponders are separated by frequency,” he said. “All you have to do is know the frequency which it operates on and then put up a signal that is stronger than the programming carrier of the satellite.
“This occurs globally on perhaps a monthly basis, typically due to political or religious disagreement between countries or organizations. They make their discomfort known through intentional jamming,” said Ames.
Satellite interference capabilities have been around since the mid-1970s, he added. “But if the Israelis are talking about technological challenges, I assume they are aiming for a capability that goes way beyond what our companies have experienced to date.”
Satellite industry experts, who generally are tight-lipped on the subject of jamming, said overwhelming an entire transponder with signals beamed up from the ground is far easier than trying to surgically deny broadcast signals over a given geographic area.
Doron Tamir, a retired IDF brigadier general and former chief intelligence officer, questioned whether developing the means to surgically jam satellite broadcast signals is worth the cost.
“You can come up with all kinds of systems for high-power, wide-area jamming,” he said. “But the dilemma remains: Will it be cost-effective? Is it truly needed?”
Balancing Benefits
Tamir, a fellow at theInternational Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Herlzliya, Israel, said war planners often benefit from Al-Manar and other broadcasts in ascertaining nuances about enemy capabilities and intentions.
“It would be a mistake to consistently deny the enemy this capability over the long term,” he said. “Perhaps it’s better to hold [an ability to disrupt satellite signals] in reserve, and deploy it only ... when it can contribute the optimum impact to our own war effort.”
An Israeli defense expert here suggested that the IDF may ultimately pursue what he called an on-demand countersatellite capability deployed aboard a long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle.
The MoD rejected requests for information about Israeli broadcast-denial capabilities. “The entire subject is classified,” said spokeswoman Rachel Naidek-Ashkenazi.
Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper estimates that Al-Manar reaches up to 200 million viewers through satellite packages offered by the Arab Satellite Communications Organization of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and partner firms. Al-Manar broadcasts are also carried by Egypt’s Nilesat, experts here said.
In 2004, Washington declared Al-Manar a terrorist entity and barred broadcasting of its signal to the United States. Since then, several European governments, including France and Germany, have also banned Al-Manar transmissions.

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