A combination of political error and military weakness is causing the continuing casualties in Lebanon. The army is imprisoned by outmoded concepts and the politicians are doing all they can to avoid a settlement

"At the Systems Analysis Center of the IDF* General Staff Planning Division, life, like death, is a computer game. Software developed over the last decade allows unit and formation commanders, commanding generals and general staff chiefs - and if they want to, defense ministers and prime ministers - to move corps around and destroy them, courtesy of a standard, army-issue mouse. The developers of the software, which has also been purchased by the armies of Switzerland and Singapore, say that although the officers sit in front of the computer and are not in any physical danger, they still experience anxiety, surprise, resourcefulness and confusion.At the Systems Analysis Center, they are still wary of analyses that lead directly to political conclusions, although seemingly innocent research also tends to lead in that direction. For budgetary reasons, the IDF must keep maintenance costs down and maintain a ceiling on stocks of ammunition, spare parts and fuel (and also training exercises, which require engine, sea and flight hours).

"The IDF, for lack of choice, recognizes the weakness of standing power, and tries to make up for this weakness by honing its striking power. The clash of paratrooper reconnaissance troops with a small Hezbollah force this week demonstrated, once again, that our striking power is not infallible. One could easily imagine the public's response if the numbers had been reversed and three "Israelis" had defeated a much larger enemy force. In the 1950s, Unit 101 and the paratroopers were celebrated for achieving victories like these".

"Times have changed and our enemies are different, but the earth shakes when operations go wrong and casualties are suffered by elite frameworks like Sayeret Matkal, paratrooper reconnaissance troops, Flotilla 13, the Mossad and the Shin Bet. The naval commando has never really discovered what happened at Ansariya a year and a half ago. Without knowing what went wrong, it is difficult to fix things. Mossad agents are still locked up in Cyprus. The security guards at the "Israeli" consulate in Berlin bravely fought off the Kurdish mob that stormed the building, but not before some of them infiltrated the "holy of holies" - the code room. This time, the codes were safely locked away in a safe, but one cannot be sure that "Israel's" state secrets were not leaked to a certain Western country - one that is friendly toward us and angry with us by turns - after the discovery of a surveillance system installed at one of "Israel's" foreign embassies".

"Brigade commander Col. Gershon (Gerry) Yitzhak, who was authorized this week to speak to the media about paratrooper reconnaissance operations, will soon be appointed to another senior post, although his affiliation with airborne combat divisions will continue. Until then, the paratroopers and rest of the army have little choice but to go on playing cat and mouse in Lebanon."

"A fiasco that costs human lives is the joint product of political error and military weakness. "Israelis", who have no patience for a prolonged fight, are always crying for a cease-fire or an escalation that will end in a cease-fire. Without one or the other, the situation seems like an endless nightmare. If the IDF enjoys a technological advantage over its enemies, this does not seem to show itself on the battlefield in Lebanon (although without this advantage, the number of casualties would perhaps be higher). What is particularly astonishing is that when "Israel" initiates a strike in Lebanon, there is no on-the-spot intelligence, despite all the apparatus - carried, transported or airborne - which is available for this purpose and could be used to keep tabs on the situation every step of the way. The Hezbollah does not have such intelligence either, but it does have good instincts for analyzing the moves of the troops it encounters. The game is a dangerous one: a Hezbollah force sits in ambush for an "Israeli" force that sits in ambush for another Hezbollah force. Some day it may become known that "Israel" scored hundreds of successes, proclaimed or unproclaimed, for every failure that ends in military funerals. But that scorecard has no value because it does not advance a political settlement (which the politicians are doing all they can to evade)".

"Although the refusal to move forward with negotiations with Syria is the major reason why "Israeli" blood is being shed in Lebanon, the IDF senior command cannot evade responsibility for military failures. A recent issue of the IDF journal Ma'arakhot contains an article that is unusually frank for an officer in active service and an official army publication. Col. Yehuda Wagman, an instructor at the Command and General Staff College and the former head of the armored corps, writes about the "decline in the performance graph of the IDF since the Yom Kippur War," and a "chain of failures" which he attributes to "patterns of thought and action nourished by an anti-academic military ethos."

Wagman finds "serious flaws in an organization that perceives itself as a professional body," among them a lack of professional training and a mindset that prevents it from operating as an efficient war machine. Mistakes made in 1973 were repeated with even greater severity in 1982, and no lessons were learned because the army clung to the simplistic belief that the outcome of the Yom Kippur War was determined chiefly by the fact that "Israel" was surprised and did not have enough armored formations. The mistaken credo of IDF land forces (as opposed to the air force) was "If force doesn't work, apply more force."

"Until 1967," Wagman writes, "the average officer grew up in an atmosphere in which the importance of studying the military profession was scoffed at." The successes (or what were believed to be successes, thanks to propaganda and censorship) appeared to justify the system, "and improvisation and fighting experience were sanctified as the solution to every problem on the battlefield."

"The early founders of the state were a special breed, and that made up for their lack of military expertise. The fact that the standards of the other side were so low was also crucial in the series of successes "Israel" chalked up during the first two decades of the state. Over the next three decades, "Israel's" military failures were a product of "the unwillingness of the intellectual elite to join the career army, the continued disregard for professional military education and the steady improvement made by the Arab guerrilla and terrorist organizations." Military operations in Lebanon like operations "Accountability" and "Grapes of Wrath," says Wagman, have proven that the primitive "more force" credo is still alive and well in the IDF".

"In Lebanon, this plodding army, with its declining performance graph, now confronts an organization whose performance graph is soaring upward. "Hezbollah has never been so well off," states a report of the Foreign Ministry's Political Research Center. "It has expanded its social, economic and political activities all over Lebanon; the character of the new Lebanese administration and Syria's new operational strategies have increased support for the organization's resistance activities; it sees itself as winning in the battle against "Israel" and the public debate in "Israel" is growing. At the moment, say the researchers, Hezbollah believes that it is abiding by the "April understandings" (a tacit agreement reached between "Israel" and this organization in 1996) and working to prevent an undesirable escalation of tension".

The policy it plans to adopt after "Israel" withdraws from Lebanon is being kept intentionally vague, "although there are signs that the struggle will not end here, and will continue through other means."

During a visit of Hezbollah leaders to Iran last November, the organization stepped up its operations against the IDF and decided, after consultation with its Iranian hosts, against joining the Lebanese government .Not that the term "Lebanese government" means much when it comes to foreign affairs and defense issues. It might be more correct to talk about a regional council of southwest Syria - a body that is about as independent as the Upper Galilee regional council is in "Israel". Hezbollah will be faced with a real dilemma if "Israel" decides to withdraw in an orderly fashion, as part of an agreement with Syria on the Golan Heights. If that happens, the organization will have to resign itself to being dictated to by Syria - or confront it head on, but none of this seems likely in the near future.

Over a period of three years, ending this June, Benjamin Netanyahu has been responsible for making the above scenario a remote possibility. His refusal to renew talks with Syria at the point where they were broken off may be in line with international law, but the bloody game in Lebanon is played by different rules. Yitzhak Rabin's choice of the Palestinian channel over the Syrian channel prolonged the battle in the north. But Netanyahu made things even worse: He managed to dry up both channels.
In the five years since the Oslo accords, the IDF has lost 135 soldiers in Lebanon, not counting the 73 who died in the Yasur helicopter crash".