IMRA Weekly Commentary..
11 July '13..
Israel won’t be challenged by the conventional forces of a coalition of enemy states for the foreseeable future.
That’s the critical working assumption that serves as the basis for decisions now in the process of being made that will determine what the IDF will look like for years to come.
What a convenient and comforting premise.
Then again, how much comfort can one really get from the assessments of experts who failed to accurately predict any major development in the region in the last half a century?
Yes. As of this afternoon it seems that Sunni-Shia animosity take precedence over the Arab-Jewish conflict.
But what about tomorrow?
Yes, the Syrian army has no doubt been eroded by their civil war. But there’s a lot more to the region than Syria.
The armies in our neighborhood have huge quantities of advanced conventional weapons for land, sea and air based combat.
And there is absolutely no way to predict with any degree of reasonable certainty who or what will be giving the orders to those armies within the relevant planning horizon.
It would appear that the plans for a “slimmer smarter” IDF includes devoting huge resources for a second squadron of F-35Is - a platform whose very justification of existence is predicated on the working assumption that in the coming decades no one is going to come up with a gizmo that facilitates identifying, targeting and shooting down what at this time is hard to pick up using instruments now deployed in the field.
Question: Is this a rational working assumption?
Hint: F-35's can't defend against enemy F-35's or their Russian equivalents. So you can be pretty sure that everyone is working in earnest to develop this gizmo.
But there’s another equally troubling aspect of the F-35’s that demands consideration: almost all, if not all, maintenance on the F-35’s will be performed by the United States.
This puts America in the position that it can essentially veto any major Israeli operation either by withholding services or by making it known that if the operation is launched that Israel can expect to experience service
delays.
That’s bad enough. But consider this: There are Israeli operations that the White House may welcome behind closed doors as it officially distances itself from them. Everyone else in the world also will know that Israel relies on American maintenance services for the F-35’s. The world, therefore, may take the position that any Israeli operation using F-35’s has Washington’s approval.
[Please note: Washington doesn't have to announce a freeze - though this has, indeed, happened in the past. Instead it can simply have the American companies notify Israel of delays for ostensibly technical reasons.]
How could this impact the use of the F-35’s?
How will this very overt dependence impact US-Israel relations?
As we mark the 40th anniversary of the consequences of failed "concepts" - the Yom Kippur War, it would be most appropriate that we take special care to avoid finding ourselves driven by some kind of herd mentality to embracing false "concepts" today.
Link: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=61498
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.
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