Some Israeli military secrets....(from Ha-Aretz)

The longest month
By Amir Oren
In a plain government office, in a room no different from the standard medical facility, a DNA sample from the body of a Lebanese man has been kept for almost nine years. It belongs to Hadi Nasrallah, the son of the Hezbollah leader, who was killed in a battle with the IDF in 1997. The body was taken by fighters from the Egoz reconnaissance unit and returned to Lebanon in return for the body of a Shayetet 13 (Naval Commando) fighter, Itamar Iliya, who was killed in the failed Naval Commando raid in the village of Ansariya in Lebanon. Hassan Nasrallah commemorated his son at the dock of Hezbollah's naval force in Beirut, which was attacked two weeks ago in a joint air force-navy operation - another operation that was swallowed up in the melee of the war. What remains in Israel is rare intelligence material: the DNA of the Nasrallah dynasty, in the event that the IDF or the Mossad espionage agency succeeds in killing the Hezbollah leader and want to identify the body definitively. This story is typical of the emotional seesaw of the Israeli war against Hezbollah. On the one hand, frustration that Nasrallah evaded the bombs and the assassination attempts and is making fun of his adversaries; on the other hand, determination to pursue him relentlessly, almost at any price, and implement a death sentence - "Hitler," one of the heads of the intelligence community called him this week in Tel Aviv - and thus also to overturn the gloomy atmosphere among the public and in the army.

A perusal of thick and detailed dossiers shows how deeply Israeli intelligence was able to penetrate certain levels of Hezbollah's alignments, but also how limited in importance this was in the decisive test of utilizing the secrets. The resources that were focused on Yasser Arafat in recent years were not aimed at Nasrallah. What was collected by Military Intelligence and the Mossad was so compartmentalized that it was kept hidden from its consumers in the operative bodies. "Hezbollah's Combat Concept" (January 2006) is a 130-page booklet, crammed with data, bunkers and Katyusha rockets and nature reserves. Its author is a lieutenant colonel in Military Intelligence who is the intelligence aide to MI director Amos Yadlin and formerly head of the Lebanon section in the intelligence department of Northern Command. The rub lies in the classification: not just "Top Secret" but "Restricted Purple" - for a select few, and not every major general was allowed to feast his eyes on it, only those who were cleared for this subject. The result was that the intelligence officer of the 91st Division - the Galilee Division, which was in charge of preventing abductions and of moving immediately to war - a lieutenant colonel who had clearance - would have taken his life in his hands had he dared allow the division's commander to have a look at the material.

Well-prepared for war
And contrary to the popular impression, which some in the IDF were at pains to create - as part of the envy and the competition for a place at the top - the 91st Division was in fact well- prepared for the war.
The division's deputy commander, Colonel Dror Paltin, organized an efficiency effort from the division's budget in favor of dedicated training. With the aid of Northern Command, and on the basis of a general blueprint of the material in the purple booklets, a facility at which to practice combat in conditions approximating Hezbollah's forward deployment was built at the Elyakim training base. The division's reserve brigades, Alexandroni in infantry and Chariots of Steel in armor, trained there, along with the division's regular-army Druze battalion, and these units excelled in the war in carrying out their assignments, no less than the well-known units and brigades that were rushed north from the territories and had had little training.

Northern Command also complained about the minimal training the IDF gives its combat soldiers - members of the Armored Corps go through four courses instead of 17 - and expressed nostalgia for Ground Forces Headquarters and the professionalism of its corps (armor, infantry, artillery, engineers), which withered on the vine in the transition to the present army headquarters. The report about the bombing in the village of Qana, which had the effect of prolonging the war and gave Nasrallah time to recover - in the wake of which the position of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora was weakened - reached U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice while she was in the middle of a discussion with Defense Minister Amir Peretz, minutes after she had expressed amazement mixed with displeasure at the Israeli insistence on continuing the fighting until the abducted soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, were returned.

The Americans could not understand why Israel was ready to put at risk so many soldiers and civilians for the sake of two abductees. Israel had a strategic warning concerning an abduction attempt. It was provided by a top source in Hezbollah - Nasrallah - in his public declarations. But Nasrallah did not supply the essential details for a report - journalistic or intelligence - or for a tactical warning: who, what, where, when, how. The authority to issue such warnings is the perogative of the head of MI's research division. A warning, in this context, is not just rhetoric; it has practical implications in terms of awareness of the need to reinforce the line by bringing in forces from other sectors. The division is not authorized to issue a warning. The command has limited authority. Only MI has full authority. Between the official warnings, the division resorted to stratagems and internal alerts, and for months on end was successful in this. First there was the "Hill and Valley" event at Raghar, in November 2005, and afterward preparedness that was codenamed "Dew and Rain," in the spring of this year. Finally, in June-July, following the abduction of Gilad Shalit at Kerem Shalom, on the Gaza border, the state of alert was raised to the highest level. Condition "National Asset" - recall of soldiers from leave - was declared and home leaves on successive weekends were canceled; officers did not get home for a month and more. Tension at this level cannot be maintained indefinitely. The fear of an abduction was not realized and the alert level was lowered, though it was still higher than in other sectors. The abduction occurred two days later. This was not by chance: Hezbollah monitored the IDF's activity, and if the high alert had continued, the other side, too, would have continued waiting patiently for its unavoidable end.

No complacency
One floor up, in Northern Command, understanding was shown for the division's approach, but as part of the policy of "containment," restraint and cooling down - passive observation of Hezbollah's preparations, monitoring of its ability to mount a sudden attack on targets on the Israeli side of the border, put a ban on a preemptive operation on the Lebanese side. The list of Northern Command goals, which was presented in June to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, contained, in third place "rapid passage from routine to combat." In second place was "preventing abduction." These goals constitute irrefutable proof that there was no complacency - but first place on the list was reserved for "security and tranquillity for the communities in the north," meaning prevention of escalation that would bring in its wake volleys of Katyushas, cause civilian casualties and damage the economy. During the first days of the fighting there were pointed arguments and heated exchanges between the GOC Northern Command, Major General Udi Adam, and the division commander, Brigadier General Gal Hirsch. According to members of the General Staff, who heard faint echoes of all this, the differences of approach between Adam and Hirsh concerning the format and consecutiveness of combat left the two on the verge of an irreparable personal and professional rift. As time passed, and Adam understood that the dangerous front for him was above him and not below, tempers cooled and a uniform line was adopted in the north. Now one can hear personnel in the Northern Command war room, the "Castle" on Mount Canaan, quoting effusive praise Adam is heaping on Hirsch and on the commanders and fighters in the division's brigades and battalions.

One of the positive surprises of the war was the quiet influence of a bland, almost anonymous major general who is on retirement leave - Eyal Ben Reuven - who was until recently the commander of an armored formation and of the National Defense College. Ben Reuven acted as Adam's deputy. Alongside a GOC who sought to delay, but without trying to overshadow him, Ben Reuven suddenly stood out as the spokesman for an aggressive and decisive approach, which impressed the General Staff and the divisions. "A wolf in sheep's clothing," one of his colleagues said of him, and also gave grounds for his assessment. Ben Reuven is the last of the IDF's ground generals who went through a real war - the Yom Kippur War of 1973 - in addition to fierce armored battles in the Lebanon War of 1982. The chain of knowledge that characterized the IDF from one generation to the next was severed toward the end of the 1990s with the retirement of the generation of Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Matan Vilnai. The territorial commanders in the Six-Day War of 1967 were brigade commanders (or heads of departments in the General Staff) in the Sinai War of 1956 and battalion and company commanders in 1948. The territorial commanders of 1973 were the brigade commanders of 1967; the brigade commanders of 1973 were the major generals of 1982. In 2006 it is difficult to find a major general, let alone division and brigade commanders, with experience in activating large troop formations in a war against an army that is deployed for defense - which, according to Adam, is how Hezbollah units deployed in southern Lebanon. The demand from the IDF to operate against an enemy in Lebanon but not against Lebanon, created a serious limitation: to swat a mosquito on a porcelain statuette. Fouad Siniora was marked as the designated postwar partner, and therefore the bombings were concentrated on Hezbollah infrastructures - they sustained damage of $10 billion, in the IDF's estimate - but not on those that the Siniora government would have to rebuild. And there was also the fear of the military advocate general, Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit. Any target that is not saliently military requires his approval or that of his assistants or of the legal advisers of the air force and Northern Command. Mandelblit sent the army to carry out operation "Salvation for the South" - the dissemination of flyers warning civilians of an impending attack and urging them to leave. The old method of two previous operations in Lebanon, "Accountability" (1993) and "Grapes of Wrath" (1996) - getting masses to move north in order to pressure Beirut to pressure Damascus to pressure Hezbollah - was barred as too dangerous: not for civilians, but for soldiers, and not in Al Khayam but in The Hague.

Fish in an aquarium

The central personnel operated in the war like fish in an aquarium. Everything is transparent, everything is exposed, everything is reported to the world even before it happens. In these circumstances it would have been better for Moses, too, not to come down from Sinai with the Tablets of the Law straight into a special day of broadcasts brought to you by the Golden Calf. A disparity was created between substance and show: what is seen is not necessarily, not always, what is actually going on, and between the events that did occur there was no simple causal connection. The hitches with the equipment and training of the reservists, and to a lesser extent with the regular army, are intolerable but not exceptional. They have characterized all the wars with perhaps the exception of the Six-Day War, thanks to the three-week waiting period that preceded it. Wars are not one-time operations (of the likes of Entebbe or the Iraqi nuclear reactor). In June 1982 the ground divisions marked time and the air force excelled in downing Syrian planes and destroying surface-to-air missile batteries, but also killed dozens of Israeli soldiers in attacks on ground forces; and then, as we know, the defense minister and the chief of staff were seasoned war veterans, experienced commanders of Paratroop brigades and armored divisions and territorial headquarters. It is foolish to say this time the IDF performed less well than in other wars just because the chief of staff comes from the air force. Not every chief of staff who was a skilled force builder also knew how to activate it - a case in point is Yitzhak Rabin - and not every chief of staff who projected charm justified his image, in war or ahead of it (Moshe Dayan). It was not Dan Halutz who raised the generation of senior ground commanders who were put to the test this time; he only headed it for the past year, and before that was commander of the very air force which proved again this time that it is unsurpassed. Despite the traditional rivalries between the Golani Brigade and the air force and between both of them and the Armored Corps, the voodoo rite of sticking pins into the Halutz doll had the scent of a khaki putsch, an effort to liquidate the competitors from the air. Halutz contributed to this: the commander who was known for his warm interest in subordinates who were hurt broadcast waves of coldness in the war. And they returned to him as frost in his hour of distress. Two weeks ago it was already clear that he was disappointed in the behavior of the major generals who until the war were the closest of his loyalists. Even as he talked about a "bank of targets" it turned out that he is the target in the bank. The chief of staff and the army were senior partners, albeit not exclusive ones, in one of the three components of the war - the military aspect, of which the supreme commander is the government. In the case of the other two aspects - the civilian population and the diplomatic effort - the failures are those of the political level alone.