Posted on 10/23/2006 5:37:53 AM PDT by SJackson
Tel Aviv – Israel's military, refusing to treat this past summer's battle with Hizbullah in Lebanon as a war, kept its commanders away from the front and sent soldiers on poorly-planned missions.
An investigation by an outside panel concluded that the General Staff did not treat the Hizbullah rocket strikes against Israel as a war, rather a security exercise.
The report, by a team led by [Res.] Maj. Gen. Yoram Yair, said commanders relayed unclear orders and failed to fulfill even tactical missions.
Yair focused on the army's Division 91, commanded by Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch, but examined system-wide failures during the war. He said the Israeli Army was hampered by inadequate training, preparations and logistics.
The report said Division 91 failed to define missions and sometimes changed orders on an hourly basis. Yair said this generated confusion and resulted in aborted operations.
Yair said seven out of the eight brigade commanders did not join their troops in Lebanon. Instead, they stayed in their commands and watched battles on video screens linked to C4I systems.
In a separate investigation, a naval panel determined that the military was not prepared for a Hizbullah cruise missile strike during the war in Lebanon. The probe determined that the INS Hanit corvette patrolled along the coast of Lebanon without operating its Barak-1 missile defense system.
On July 14, the Hanit was struck by a Hizbullah-fired C-802 cruise missile supplied by Iran. Senior naval officer's admitted at the time that they were taken by surprise, claiming that they did not know Hizbullah possessed such advanced capabilities, and as a result they had deactivated the ship's missile defense system.
The Hanit is Israel's most advanced missile ship and boasts an array of Harpoon and Barak anti-missile weaponry, along with a system for electronically jamming incoming missiles.
In the report, Maor found flaws in the transmission of intelligence information from Military Intelligence to Naval Intelligence and to the commanders of the missile ships.
Navy officials claimed they did not have the information that would have enabled them to realize that Hizbullah had possession of anti-ship radar-guided missiles. But military intelligence claims the information was transmitted to the Navy three years ago.
Reporting by MENL and JPFS
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IDF? I thought it was Olmert the f-ing lawyer that wanted to take matters to arbitrition.
However, the Hanit definitely appears to be an example of arrogant stupidity. However, it's hard to tell from what we know here if that stupidity was mainly on the part of the ship's commander or if there were orders from higher up that for some unknown reason instructed them to disable the defense system unless there was an obvious threat. The latter seem unlikely.
Good night, nurse, what a mess!
Unfortunately this whole thing is going to devolve into a CYOA operation. I still think an independent comission would have been the best form of review but it seems that Olmerde has put the kaibosh on that idea. When does Bibi start?
Actually it's Israeli political leadership itself that refused to treat the battle with Hezbollah as the War. Politicians first tie the hands of the military and then blame it for failure. Very convenient.
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