Does Halutz have what it takes?
ARIEL BOLUDOVSKY
By Amir Oren
Israel Galili was sick. "Go and visit him," urged friends of Major
General Yeshayahu Gavish. "It's important." Gavish declined. He wanted
very much to be chief of staff, but not to the point of making a
pilgrimage to Galili in his sickbed. He knew that Galili, an eminence
grise with the rank of cabinet minister, wielded influence over then
prime minister Golda Meir, and that she would force upon the defense
minister, Moshe Dayan, her candidate as the next chief of staff. But
Gavish stuck to his guns.
On the agenda at that time, in the late 1960s, was the appointment of
the head of the General Staff branch, meaning the deputy to the chief of
staff, Haim Bar-Lev. This followed the departure to the Meir government
of the former head of the branch, Ezer Weizman, who was the natural
candidate to succeed Bar-Lev. The latter also would eventually enter the
government, following completion of his term as chief of staff. The two
contestants to become head of the General Staff branch were Gavish and
Major General David Elazar, chief of Northern Command. Both of them had
already served in one capacity as major general (Gavish in the training
department, Elazar in the Armored Corps) and both had been officers in
the Palmach, the pre-state commandos - links in the chain that began
with Yitzhak Rabin and continued with Bar-Lev.
"The chief of staff has to be a former chief of Southern Command," Dayan
said, explaining his support for Gavish as head of the General Staff,
and asking Elazar to take over from Gavish as chief of Southern Command
to give them both an equal opportunity at the chief of staff slot. "The
south is the main front," Dayan said. "If I had not been chief of
Southern Command [in 1950], I would not have been qualified to serve
afterward as chief of staff."
David Elazar did not take the bait. He made do with the support of Meir,
Galili, Bar-Lev and Yigal Alon - and Dayan failed in his bid to advance
Gavish. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War there were some who claimed that
one of the reasons for the Israel Defense Forces' faulty preparations in
Sinai was the limited knowledge of the chief of staff, Elazar (and by
the new chief of Southern Command, Shmuel Gonen) with respect to this
principal front.
Two missions
Thirty-five years later, this sequence of events provides keys to
understand- ing the preference for Major General Dan Halutz as the next
chief of staff. One key is a background in commanding the main front -
which today, in contrast to the past, is the skies, and whatever may be
unleashed from them. A second key is the difference between building up
forces and activating them. If there is no war during the term of a
chief of staff, his performance is measured by his force-building
achievements. However, the traits required for these two missions are
not identical and it's rare that they are found to an equal degree of
excellence in one individual.
A chief of staff might be remembered as a successful "builder," but have
his flaws revealed in a war at the very end of his term. Details of this
kind, which can be decisive in judging candidates, are generally known
at the time only to superiors, subordinates and colleagues, and generate
internal public opinion within the army. They do not appear in the
curriculum vitae, in the succession of posts listed on the business card
or in the superficial image that is projected to the public.
Ezer Weizman did a fine job of building up the air force, which
Mordechai Hod did a fine job of commanding in 1967 - probably better
than Weizman himself would have done, as far as can be conjectured.
Yitzhak Rabin played a major role in building up the IDF for the Six-Day
War as head of the General Staff, deputy chief of staff and chief of
staff, but shortly before the war he collapsed. This development was not
unprecedented: David Ben-Gurion remembered for years how Rabin had
disengaged early in the War of Independence after five soldiers were
killed in the Harel Brigade under his command. In tense situations - the
commanding officer's ultimate test - he lost his sangfroid and self-
control.
At the time of Rabin's assassination Halutz was already a brigadier
general and chief of staff of the air force, and had begun to be talked
about seriously. Major General (res.) David Ivri, former commander of
the air force and deputy chief of staff, was then the director general
of the Defense Ministry and a natural person for fielding the questions
of Shimon Peres, the defense minister, concerning the appointment of the
next commander of the air force following the retirement of Major
General Herzl Bodinger. The obvious candidate was Major General Eitan
Ben Eliahu, who was waiting in an non-air force post (in which he was a
great success), as assistant to the head of the General Staff branch. It
was a period of terrorist attacks and of Operation Grapes of Wrath in
Lebanon.
"If I were promised that the next four years would be quiet and that war
was not expected," Ivri said, "I would have suggested leapfrogging over
the generation of Ben Eliahu and going for Halutz - but any such promise
would be irresponsible."
Ben Eliahu was appointed, while Halutz continued to gain a reputation as
a force builder, both as deputy to the air force commander for that
purpose and in the IDF overall. The head-hunter who located him was the
deputy chief of staff, Major General Matan Vilnai. Vilnai invited him to
the "force-builders' team," whose work provided the basis for Shaul
Mofaz - Vilnai's successor as deputy chief of staff - to launch "IDF
2000," a plan to revamp the army.
A better system
The method of making appointments in the top ranks of the air force
ensures experience in both types of activity. It transfers senior
officers who are on a track that could possibly lead to command of the
air force, from head of an important department at the force's
headquarters (operations, munitions, planning and organization) with the
rank of colonel, to command of a squadron (colonel) or a base (brigadier
general), from there to the "air group" (force activation) and then to
the corps chief of staff (force building). Deviations to assuming
another station, such as chief of air force intelligence division, in
practice reduce the prospects of reaching the top spot, even though the
chief of intelligence is a weighty partner in operations and is
authorized to act as duty commander in the control post.
Since the deputy command of the air force was split into two - group
commander and head corps chief of staff - no one who has not held at
least one of the posts has become commander of the air force. This is a
far better system than that of the ground forces. There the chain of
command can include Paratroops battalion, special unit, territorial
brigade in the territories or Lebanon, regular brigade, division,
another division, corpus, territorial command - from private to major
general without serving on the General Staff, as distinct from attending
the weekly General Staff meeting. A case in point is, for example, Major
General Benny Gantz. The exceptions are officers who served in the
operations division (Gabi Ashkenazi, Dan Harel, Yair Golan) before
returning to a field command.
When Ashkenazi was appointed chief of Northern Command, Mofaz brought in
Halutz from the air force to the General Staff, as assistant to the
deputy chief of staff, Major General Uzi Dayan, and in order to
establish the Operations Branch. This was also a period in which
cooperation between the General Staff and air force headquarters
blossomed. Those particularly active in this regard were Giora Eiland,
who was head of the operations division for Halutz, and Amir Eshel, who
was chief of operations in the air force. The primary sector was Lebanon
and the partners on the ground were the divisional and brigade
commanders there. It was here that the foundation was laid for
integrated air and ground operations - a development that was pronounced
during the withdrawal from Lebanon and was further upgraded during the
fighting against the Palestinians.
Halutz, as commander of the air force (he was appointed in April 2000),
grasped at an early stage two facts that today seem self-evident. The
second was the practicability of his personal candidacy for chief of
staff; wasting no time, he revealed this ambition in these pages just
four months after taking over as commander of the air force. The first
fact was recruitment of the air force to take an ever-larger part in the
battle against terrorism, without waiting in the grandstands for a major
war of some sort to break out against Syria, Iraq or Iran. The result
was the demonstration of the capability of the air force, and of its
commander, to swim in the mainstream of the IDF's missions, and also to
be sullied in them.
cross
Halutz's opponents cite his remarks after the aerial bombing that
eliminated the terrorism planner Salah Shehadeh and 14 Palestinian
civilians who were not involved in terrorism. True, Halutz was a leading
advocate of assassinations launched from the air, some of which were
carried while others were canceled to prevent injury to innocent people,
but in "Operation Standard-Bearer" against Shehadeh, Halutz only
volunteered to serve as spokesman, as he had been out of the country and
out of the chain of command - which included Chief of Staff Moshe
Ya'alon, his deputy Gabi Ashkenazi and the chief of staff of the air
force, Eliezer Shkedi (its present commander). But no one sought to
disqualify them when Halutz was the object of criticism and High Court
of Justice petitions.
The State of Israel does not need anyone to protect it from Halutz, but
he is badly in need of someone to protect him from himself. He did not
maintain the high level of air force spokesmanship that existed during
the tenure of Ben Eliahu, and he also failed in the episode of the false
announcement concerning attacks by "helicopters of the [air] force" in
Gaza - again at center stage while behind the scenes were Ya'alon,
Ashkenazi and the head of the Operations Branch, Yisrael Ziv.
Halutz's most important period in the IDF was the one he spent outside
the IDF. An officer who was also a civilian and has experience in the
economic struggles for existence out there has an advantage over those
who know only life inside the army. Recently, Military Intelligence (MI)
also recognized this fact of life. Ahead of the retirement of the
commander of Unit 8200, MI approached an individual who held the rank of
colonel and was commander of the Comint (communications intelligence)
center, but is now involved in a completely different side of
communications - Nir Lampert, the director of Channel 10 - and asked him
to return to the IDF as commander of 8200. Lampert has not (yet) been
persuaded.
When Halutz became commander of the air force, he asked Brigadier
General (res.) Uzi Rosen, former commander of the force's bases at
Hatzerim and Tel Nof, to return to the force in a senior headquarters
capacity. Rosen declined the offer. Contrary to his custom, Halutz was
then forced to choose between other officers - thus Shkedi moved from
the Ramat David base to group commander - and to shelve his inclination
not to become involved in anguishing interpersonal situations in which a
commander has to inform a subordinate that he will not be promoted. It
is characteristic of Halutz that when the time came to appoint his
successor as commander of the air force - a decision that was to be made
by Ya'alon and Mofaz - he made no effort to influence the decision and
instead submitted a chart listing the virtues and shortcomings of the
three candidates: Shkedi, Major General Amos Yadlin and Brigadier
General Ido Nehushtan.
Two members of the General Staff, Major Generals Moshe Kaplinsky and Dan
Harel, are known t o be close to Halutz. Halutz expressed opposition to
the promotion of Elazar Stern to the rank of major general and to chief
of the Personnel Directorate. At that time his advice was not heeded,
including his suggestion to do away with the Home Front Command and the
Plans and Policy Directorate, to transform the navy into the coast guard
and to unify separate reconnaissance and commando units into a Special
Forces brigade. Now he will have the opportunity to implement his ideas,
including the diminishment of the techno-logistics and personnel
branches, and the annulment of their corps.
Halutz will be the last IDF chief of staff to be born in the first half
of the 20th century and the second, after Ya'alon, who is younger than
he is, whose first war was the War of Attrition (he was an air force
cadet at the time of the Six-Day War). In the wake of Ben Eliahu,
Halutz, too, built the air force up "based on a strategic view of
working within a coalition," as he said at an air force event, referring
to a possible future of combat alongside other advanced armies against
common enemies. Although such combat is expected to be primarily
airborne, Halutz's mission will be to impart the advanced approach of
his Ffrce to the entire army. The new air force planes have a system
(the Shaknai, which means "pelican"), which enables every pilot in the
structure, and the commander in the control post, to get a picture of
the battle - forces, enemy, munitions, fuel - that helps to bring out
the full potential of the weaponry and the soldiers. The land corps are
still far from this capability.
Reports of external review and control bodies, which are familiar with
the defense establishment in segments that are not known even to
personnel who work in its various organizations, show that the different
between the air force and the rest of the IDF is indeed "the difference
between heaven and earth," according to an expert who offers the
following ranking: Above them all is the Shin Bet security service,
followed by the air force, and then far below the "green army" and the
Mossad espionage agency at the bottom.
In the past few weeks Ya'alon and Ashkenazi were blind to what was going
on around them. Ya'alon - who, like Mofaz, came up through the
Paratroops and Sayeret Matkal, the ultra-elite reconnaissance unit, was
Mofaz's deputy and sat within spitting distance of him at General Staff
headquarters - was seriously mistaken in his assessment of Mofaz's
reactions. If this is what a former director of MI and present chief of
staff knows about his defense minister, what can he possibly understand
about Bush and Nasrallah and Khamenei? Last week, when Mofaz stunned him
by informing him that he would not extend his term as chief of staff for
a fourth year, Ya'alon revealed the secret to two of his aides, but for
some reason thought that what Mofaz told him was binding only on him and
that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would overrule the decision. Ashkenazi
is a smoother and more experienced operator, but he too fell into the
trap. Mofaz sat with him like a student with his rabbi, and wrote down
diligently Ashkenazi's plans to build and run the IDF, including the
evacuation of Gaza. Before from the official - and almost superfluous -
announcement, it was obvious that one of the two people sitting in the
room was the former chief of staff and the other would be the next chief
of staff.
Halutz's brilliant maneuvering to chief of staff - through the
Operations Branch and command of the air force, and his insistence on
being appointed deputy chief of staff while he still held that post -
and his friendship with Omri Sharon, who is to his father what Galili
was to Golda, hold out good prospects for him as chief of staff in a
turbulent political and media environment, but promise him nothing. Now,
overnight, he will be transformed from supporting actor to a central
national figure. If he fails, he will crash; if he succeeds, he will fly
even higher.
--
IDF babes
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