By BARBARA OPALL-ROME
Sep. 20, 2014
Aftermath: A Palestinian family walks past the remains of a building destroyed in fighting between Hamas militants and Israel in Shejaiya, in Gaza. The Israeli military says the next conflict will be more complex. (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/ / AFP/Getty Images)
TEL AVIV — Israeli military leaders are assessing how lessons from Gaza could apply to war planning in Lebanon, Syria and other potential theaters.
But officers charged with future war planning are already nostalgic for the relative simplicity of Israel’s summer of combat in the Gaza Strip. Although challenging to battle well-armed enemies deeply embedded among innocent civilians, Israel still had the relative luxury of targeting so-called centers of gravity in its 50-day war in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
But in a fractured region in continuous flux, those centers of gravity are giving way to pockets of gravity with no single address, officers here say.
In this new Middle East of breakaway insurgencies and blurred borders, Israel can no longer direct its “bowling ball” — as one officer here described it — against a single strongman or central government.
“When it was nation against nation, it was relatively simple,” said Brig. Gen. Oren Avman, head of Israeli Army training and doctrine. “If you selected the right ball and threw it in the right way, you could effectively strike all those pins supporting the enemy’s center of gravity.”
But in a region with multiple pockets of gravity, Israeli planners are mulling how to decapitate only immediate threats without empowering others that continue to sprout.
In the Army, they’ve already started to replace metaphorical bowling for billiards, where artful strategy and geometrically calculated tactics is more effective than brute force.
“You have a table with many balls and many pockets and you’re holding a big stick. If this stick is not efficient and it causes you to put in the black ball — let’s call it civilians — you lose legitimacy,” Avman said.
“But if you scratch with the white ball, you’re squandering your capabilities.”
Officers here said the operational concept was demonstrated in maneuvering ground war in Gaza, but will prove inordinately more challenging in the Lebanese or Syrian theater.
“We have to use this big stick carefully and with extreme accuracy, because enemies are hiding among civilians all the time,” Avman said.
“And that’s just Gaza.”
Against threats to the north, those metaphorical billiard balls must be targeted in ways that won’t strengthen the spectrum of forces operating in the same domain, Avman said.
“When we look around in Lebanon, they have an army supported by the US. But there is another huge army [Hezbollah] backed by Iran operating by guerrilla methods in villages and tunnels.
“If you look at Syria, after more than 200,000 dead, they’re still killing each other. And now this so-called Islamic State joined the party and we have al-Qaida extremists meters from our border fence.”
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has supported US calls for concerted action against the Islamic State group, he has repeatedly stressed that the Iranian-supported axis of Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime remains Israel’s most immediate threat.
“The reality is much more complicated that we used to think. Assad, he’s a murderer and our principal threat, along with all those Hezbollah forces fighting on his behalf,” said the Army’s training and doctrine chief.
“We must be prepared to fight jointly with tanks and all our combined arms capabilities,” Avman said. “At the same time, we must be flexible enough to stop an ISIS fighter on a motorcycle who may fire an anti-tank missile at us.”
Retired Maj. Gen. Yisrael Ziv, a former director of operations on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) General Staff, conceded that operational concepts must be refined to address new regional complexities.
“Obviously, you are less effective when operating as a unified system against a non-unified system,” he said.
Israel operated in Gaza in a more fragmented way with smaller forces capable of developing “micro tactical answers” during the fight, Ziv said. In Protective Edge, he said the IDF delivered division-sized punch through joint operations and combined arms at the brigade and lower-level echelons.
But in the future, the IDF may more likely face numerous amorphous, smaller threats while waging maneuvering war against immediate enemy forces. For those scenarios, an operational concept akin to that of a US Navy carrier battle group may prove more effective than metaphorical billiards, Ziv said.
“In a complex environment where many small molecular systems are threatening our forces from different places, the best way may be based on the protective rings the Americans use when moving their fleets,” Ziv said.
As for the Israel Air Force, officers said the lessons of Gaza would be refined and applied in future war beyond the northern border.
“Air power is enormously relevant and resonant in the fragmented, fractured geopolitical reality we face,” Brig. Gen. Amikam Norkin, Air Force chief of staff, said.
When asked how the Army’s metaphorical transition from bowling to billiards applies to future airpower plans, he replied: “We are playing billiards with a bowling ball.” ■
Email: bopallrome@defensenews.com
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