ISRAEL'S SECRET WEAPON

 

I believe it was Golda Meir who coined the phrase: “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs - we have no place to go.” Because Israel MUST fight every battle to the death. When you fight for your home, family, friends and colleagues with your back up against the wall, there is no more dangerous and deadly enemy. Any number of Arab leaders have been quite clear that their intent is to finish what Hitler started. The motivation to fight is extremely strong.

The IDF has a very effective feedback mechanism for combat performance. Due to its small size, it learns lessons fast and well, and has serious public discussions when poor military performance happens. Improvements are swift and effective. This comes along with a democratic state that highly values the lives of its soldiers, which is unusual in the region.

 

The IDF does the best it can with both great tactics in battle, and by avoiding to fight the battles it can win with brains. Jews are resourceful types at the best of times, and the Israelis have mastered “waste not, want not”.

An anecdote of the Yom Kippur War was how the Israeli’s decided to build a home-grown heavy armoured personnel and equipment carrier in combat zones, based on the T-55 (medium armoured tank) – simply, because they had so many turretless T-55 hulls laying in the desert. They saw no reason why not to drag them away and re-purpose them. The result is the outstanding IDF Achzarit, the world’s first Heavy APC. It has no turret so it’s nice and short. It has a hull studded with explosive reactive armour, which is particularly effective against RPG rockets.

This was while the US was debating over how many years they could squeeze out of their aluminium M113s (armoured personnel carrier), which the IDF was already desperately trying to get rid of.

Field commanders have made “on the spot” life and death decisions on their own initiative. An outstanding example from the ‘73 war was when the Israelis were defending a hilltop on the border with Syria, with only 2 tanks. They knew that, on the Syrian side of the border there were at least 50 tanks waiting for the morning to attack. So, through the course of the night, they took the two tanks and drove them up to the top of the hill with their lights on, turned the lights off, drove back down, turned them back on and repeated this over and over. When the sun rose in the morning, there were no Syrian tanks in the valley below!

You can like or don't like the bible, but it has some good ideas. The instructions about fighting a war are among them: always leave the enemy a possibility of escape. People without a possibility to avoid fighting, would fight twice as ferociously. In Israel, every soldier knows that they can't afford to lose.