Military Intelligence

(Israelnationalnews.com)                           

The IDF, Israel's army, is in a bad way.  True, most of its units are far better trained today than sixteen months ago, on the eve of Israel's abortive war in Lebanon.  But it has a serious manpower problem.  Peace, it seems, is not around the corner, and the IDF has to plan for simultaneous fighting in Lebanon, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.  40% of Israeli males of draft age either dodge the draft or get thrown out in the middle of their stint, and there isn't enough manpower to go around.  The problem would be less severe if the IDF had a large body of trained reservists to draw upon, as it's supposed to, but up to a year and a half ago the assumption was that peace was indeed around the corner, and the IDF let reserve training slide.  Fixing this will take years.

That's far from the worst of it.  The IDF depends on thousands of young, relatively low-ranking officers to do immensely responsible jobs, anything from leading troops under fire to making sure every man in a division gets his three square meals a day.  About half the IDF's junior officers have left or want to leave.  A source tells me that about 50 critical supply and administrative positions are unfilled because their incumbents have left and there is nobody competent to replace them.

These young officers leave partly because civilian jobs pay more, but the chief factor seems to be lack of confidence in their top leadership—the score or two of top generals who actually run the army.  They don't want to serve leaders who don't inspire and whose incompetence may waste lives.

So the IDF's problem is not just numbers.  It needs motivated, dedicated, intelligent soldiers at all levels, from the top down.

As it is, there is a source of such soldiers.  Young men from the national-religious community traditionally are highly motivated to serve.  About 40% of the latest batch of newly minted officers, and 50% of those slated for combat command, wear knitted kippot.  Among the brightest are those who go to pre-military academies (mechinot) and hesder yeshivot, which combine military service with Torah study.

These soldiers represent a problem, however.  The problem is that they are not mindless automatons. (Wait, we thought that was what the IDF needed!)  They have values and convictions, and view service in the IDF as part of the larger skein of values that govern their lives.

One of these values is that one does not throw a Jew out of his home.  Some months ago several of these soldiers were ordered to help expel Jews from their homes in Hebron.  Six of them refused orders and were sent to jail.  A busload of the rest were sent to Hebron.  They stayed on the bus, and a military policeman sent to get them off was expelled from the bus at high velocity (fortunately the bus was parked at the time).

Another value is modesty with respect to the opposite sex.  This modesty is impossible to maintain where men and women train together in combat exercises, which is an experiment the IDF has been attempting in recent years.

These values have raised the dudgeon of senior IDF commanders, specifically the Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, and the head of the IDF's manpower division, Gen. Elazar Stern.  These officers maintain there is no place for private convictions in the IDF—except of course when those convictions raise a soldier's motivation to serve and make him a better soldier.  Ashkenazi and Stern seem to have a problem with real, live soldiers, whose code of values don't fit into their neat categories of good and bad. 

Recently Ashkenazi and Stern decided that the solution to the IDF's manpower problem was to draft more women and use them in every possible combat role.  This might solve the problem of quantity—though I doubt it—but it would make the problem of quality far worse.  Mixed-sex combat units in the IDF perform worse than their all-male counterparts, since soldiers find it difficult to concentrate on the mission at hand when their attention is distracted by something else.  Also, the policy bids fair to drive increasing numbers of the IDF's most motivated soldiers out of the service and into jail for refusing orders.

An interesting test case came to light recently, in the IDF's training program for soldiers who will serve in Field Intelligence.  A significant crop of this year's trainees are students from the Yeshivat Har Beracha in Elon Moreh, now doing their military-service stint.  Field Intelligence training includes a lot of nighttime cross-country maneuvers, and many of the instructors are women.

One of the trainees told his commander that it went absolutely against his religious conscience to engage in training of this sort in close contact with a woman.  His commander accepted his argument and declined to punish him for refusing orders.  The rest of the soldier's yeshiva colleagues hastened to make the same complaint.  Result:  No women instructors will be assigned to this unit.  In three months these soldiers will finish their training and begin to make life very difficult for terrorists in Hebron, Ramallah, and—who knows?—maybe Gaza and Kuneitra as well.

That junior Field Intelligence officer made an intelligent decision (remember, the IDF desperately needs officers capable of intelligent decisionmaking).  His unit needs motivated soldiers and that's what interests him.  He isn't about to make a stink over his men's private conscience and whether their convictions fits some abstract notion of obedience.  He wants his men to fight hard and serve him enthusiastically, not with reservations and lack of motivation.

What the IDF needs now is not to fight ideological battles with its best soldiers over whether their conscience suits some abstract ideal of obedience.  The IDF's mission is to attract and retain quality soldiers who have come to fight the enemy, not turn those very soldiers into the enemy.  The IDF ought to get out of the business of expelling Jewish civilians or upholding abstract principles of equality of the sexes at the expense of the combat ability of its field units.  If its top commanders are incapable of realizing this and emulating the intelligence of their subordinate in Field Intelligence, maybe they should look for something else to do.