Shas Chairman MK Aryeh Deri, who despite not being a government minister is a member of PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet, admitted earlier this week that the biggest reason the IDF is yet to embark on a ground war in Gaza is not so much because it’s waiting for the Air Force to finish turning it into a parking lot, but for a different, chilling reason: “The agreed goal is that Hamas will not remain in existence, but we have to say honestly – there was no such plan. It is being prepared during the fighting. This is not a one-minute to the next thing,” Deri said.
In other words, while Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi vow to bring Gaza back to the stone age and eliminate every last member of the 40 thousand-strong Hamas terror group in so many different ways, in reality, they have no idea what exactly to do.
“It’s not as if the army is ready and the political echelon only needs to give the order,” Dery told a meeting of the Shas Knesset faction.
“Don’t envy the decision makers”, the Shas chairman, who served four months in the IDF as part of his yeshiva student deferment. “I have accompanied the cabinet for decades and I have never encountered such a scale of confrontations and challenges. I am happy that a national emergency government has been established and I think that everyone should join us. The Jewish nation in Israel and abroad is under threat.”
Enter the NY Times that on Monday reported the concerns of the Biden administration “that the Israel Defense Forces are not yet ready to launch a ground invasion with a plan that can work.”
According to the NYT, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III cautioned Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in a phone conversation about “the need for careful consideration of how Israeli forces might conduct a ground invasion of Gaza, where Hamas maintains intricate tunnel networks under densely populated areas.”
Barak Ravid reported on Axios Monday, citing two Biden officials, that the Pentagon sent Lt. Gen. James Glynn, a Marine three-star general, and several other high-ranking officers to Israel to advise the Israeli security apparatus ahead of the invasion of Gaza. Glyn, who is not commanding the operation, only advising, will stay in the war room through the ground invasion and then some.
Austin who was the head of United States Central Command, shared with Gallant his experience from the effort to eliminate ISIS from Mosul, Iraq, in 2016-17. His troops were supporting Kurdish and Iraqi fighters inside the city, and as the defense secretary told ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday, “The first thing that everyone should know, and I think everyone does know, is that urban combat is extremely difficult.”
Words to stay alive by.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee who is visiting Israel this week, called on Israel to delay the ground entry into the Gaza Strip to allow the negotiations on the release of the prisoners to continue, to bring in more humanitarian aid, and to give the IDF more time to improve its combat plans.
Reid warned that from an operational point of view, a ground invasion would be very complex, and “the more intelligence you collect to be used by the soldiers on the battlefield, the better. A little more time can be useful, haste is not the best approach.”
GEN. BRIK AS BIBI’S FIG LEAF
Meanwhile, it appears that Netanyahu has embraced his biggest military critic, General (Res.) Yitzhak Brik, whose assaults on the IDF’s state of readiness had been ignored by the PM and the IDF brass for more than a decade. These days, Brik is providing just the goods Netanyahu needs to support his greatest, and often most infuriating characteristic: hesitation.
Brik has done the TV news studio rounds warning against a ground invasion, advocating instead for a lengthy siege that would eventually exhaust the Hamas, forcing its members to come out of their underground city of tunnels.
The retired general’s plan is perfect if Israel was in a position to lay siege on the Gaza Strip, but, alas, it isn’t. This week convoys of supply trucks have been rushing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, and while the IDF claims to have taken over the job of verifying there aren’t any weapons or barrels of fuel on those trucks, it cannot stop Hamas fighters from robbing those supplies of food and water that will sustain them for years underground if need be.
There are two elementary truths about the IDF: 1. It cannot fight from a static position, it must remain dynamic, and mobile so that at any given time it maintains the advantage over the enemy in numbers and firepower; 2. It cannot win lengthy wars, it is designed to move quickly into enemy territory and destroy everything and everyone that moves.
Since the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the IDF has been relegated to working against the above two fundamentals, with the result being a gradual loss of deterrence – until it sustained a humiliating defeat at the hand of a few thousand irregulars.
Sec. Austin is correct in warning that urban warfare is tough – but the IDF used to win urban confrontations with its ingenuity and uncanny ability to improvise. In 2003, when terrorists in Jenin shot sniper fire at the invading force, the IDF units moved forward by hammering the walls between adjoining homes, protected indoors throughout the attack. The sickness that allowed for the October 7 defeat was mental, and the folks who delivered that colossal failure are still in charge, attempting to launch an effective next phase driven by the desire for revenge and rehabilitation.
They are the wrong leaders for this army of 350,000 dedicated, brave, and very smart Israelis. If you ask me, putting a Marine general in charge of the IDF is not the worst thing Netanyahu could do at this point.
