Former Israeli Chief of Staff recounts military restructuring and radio station closure attempt

new air mobile division we’d planned to use against Saddam’s Scud launchers were likely to be a lot more important than tank formations in future conflicts. Six days into the job, I called together every officer in the army, from the rank of lieutenant-colonel up. I said we needed to remind ourselves of the army’s purpose: to protect Israel’s security and, if a war came, to win it. My budgetary rule of thumb over the next four years would be simple: anything that didn’t directly contribute to that mission was expendable. In fact, I put it a bit more bluntly: “We need to cut anything that doesn’t shoot.” My first attempt failed utterly. I proposed to close, or sell off, the army’s radio station, Galei Tzahal. Running it cost serious money. If we were going to cut everything that didn’t shoot, it was an obvious candidate. But what I failed to take into account was its popularity with the listening public. Although other radio stations had opened recently, for many years it had been the only major alternative to the state-funded Kol Yisrael. It also provided a training ground and employment feeder for future journalists. Galei Tzahal’s alumni included some of the country’s top media figures, and more than a few members of the Knesset. Within weeks, a lobbying effort was underway to “save” the station. I went to see Misha. He agreed that, from a military and budgetary standpoint, closing it was the right thing to do. But in an early lesson in how different politics were from the army, he told me that politically, it simply wasn’t going to fly. “Drop it, Ehud,” he said. So I did. Still, I did end up fundamentally retooling the armed forces during my time as chief of staff. We developed agile new strike forces and high-precision, high- tech weapons systems with “stand-off” munitions designed to be fired from many miles away. In the 1973 war, and for the decade or two that followed, Saggers, and the US-made TOW missiles that Israel acquired after the war, had the capability to transform a battlefield. Now, Israeli developers came up with small, ground-launched missiles that could take out a tank from five to 10 miles away, even without a direct line of sight to the target. Of even more long-term military significance, I pushed ahead with developing pilotless drones — so- called UAVs — making us the first army in the world to produce and deploy them. Yet for a security challenge like the intifada, even the most advanced stand- off munitions or UAVs offered no practical answer. The latest stage in the violence involved knife attacks by Palestinians against Israeli civilians, both on West Bank settlers and inside Israel. Days after I took over, a 26-year-old from Gaza, wielding a butcher’s knife and shouting Alahu Akhbar, killed four people, 243 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028091