The best war

Haaretz

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz assigned Israel Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel a new responsibility over the past year: commanding the war in between the wars, a series of operations whose secrecy is revealed sometimes by a loud explosion and sometimes in politicians' speeches at IAF graduation ceremonies.

Additional entities were subordinated to Eshel and his staff for the purposes of these missions, including non-IDF agencies such as the Mossad. This decision was taken in consideration of the aerial force's particular capabilities, its flexibility to move from one front to another front, to attack and to photograph and to lead and to provide cover to naval vessels.

So great is the reliance on the air force that one begins to wonder if there was a point in Gantz's decision to create a separate strategic depth command, headed by a general. The air is the strategic depth. Two commands are only justified if the relationship between them are defined, as it is between the Northern Command and the Lebanon corps. In the event of an operation far from Israel's borders, the ground forces will be subordinated to the Strategic Depth Command, with the air force assigned to providing protection and support.

But in such an event additional depth operations will likely be required, not necessary nearby. Since the Strategic Depth Command will be too preoccupied to oversee these as well, these operations will remain mainly aerial in nature.

While the missions have expanded, aspirations have contracted. As a consequence of the disappointment with the IAF's performance in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Benny Peled, the commander of the branch during the war and the four years that followed, demanded and received independent authority in intelligence and other areas that was separate from the priorities of the ground forces.

This approach guided successive IAF commanders in the last four decades, but Eshel, who as a former head of the IDF Planning Directorate is well-versed in the vicissitudes and shortcomings of the budget, would not argue that cooperation with the Shin Bet security service, for example in targeted assassinations, necessitates a duplicate system and the establishment of an aerial Shin Bet. He needs only to request an increase in operational planning personnel.

Last week's IAF wing ceremony was dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. In honor of the event - and the accompanying Golani Brigade exercise - the prime minister, defense minister and chief of staff joined the salvos of speeches, briefings and war stories aimed at elevating the esprit de corps and sowing fear from the Arab states to Iran. Much saber-rattling was in evidence. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the soldiers that the battlefield is the realm of the uncertain, he forget to note that the same is true for politics.

Perhaps it was no coincidence. When he speaks about Iranian nukes, a subject about which no one is gloomier than he, the prime minister tries to create the impression that everything is certain, clear and known to him. As usual, he displayed the arrogance of a self-appointed prophet, rather than the humility of someone who takes responsibility for the fate of a nation.

When red lines meet red lines, blood is spilled. When both sides observe the commandment to "be killed rather than sin," people really are killed. It confers a double responsibility upon the national leadership: First, to clearly ascertain, both within itself and among the public it represents, whether those who will have to pay the price would choose war over negotiated compromise. And second, to work toward reducing that price through a considered process of building and employing the forces.

The IDF shows interest in the lessons of the 1973 for professional reasons. That is insufficient, because it is not the military that defines the purpose of its employment. The main lessons are national, political and cultural ones, that governments, especially the current Israeli one, so many of whose members are neophytes, prefer to repress rather than learn from them.

The supreme obligation of the prime minister and the defense minister to the new pilots and soldiers and to their families is to prevent war. For some reason, we never hear Israeli politicians of their ilk saying they recognize that they put at least as much effort into trying to prevent another unnecessary war as the air force does to be ready to carry out its missions.

The best war is the one that is prevented.