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Friday, October 26, 2007      New: Take a Stand

Israel to drop preemptive strike doctrine in favor of missile defense

JERUSALEM — Israel is seeking a missile defense capability to replace its decades-old policy of preemptive military strike.

Leading former military commanders and officials said the Israeli government has sought to develop a missile defense shield as part of a new doctrine that rules out preemptive strikes, even against a nuclear Iran. They said Israeli fear and dependency of the United States has shelved a first-strike option, employed to win the Arab-Israeli war in 1967.

"A preemptive strike becomes more difficult with time," David Ivry, a former Israel Air Force commander and ambassador to the United States, said. "A preemptive strike is correct in concept. It is virtually infeasible."

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The former commanders, addressing a U.S.-Israel missile defense conference on Oct. 22 in Jerusalem, said Israeli military options were more limited than ever. They cited the 34-day war with Hizbullah in mid-2006 in which Israel was widely condemned by the West for its air strikes on suspected Hizbullah strongholds, most of them located around Beirut and villages in southern Lebanon.

"As a democracy and Western-oriented country, we have no option of launching harsh strikes on the enemy in which civilians are harmed," [Ret.] Maj. Gen. Herzle Bodinger, a former air force commander, said. "The Hizbullah lesson that it projected to all Arab countries is that Israel has a problem with rockets and missiles."

Israel has never formally ruled out a preemptive strike. But a Defense Ministry official acknowledged that an Israeli preemptive strike was virtually unthinkable without approval from the United States, which provides more than $2.4 billion in annual military aid to the Jewish state.

"The Israeli strategic decisions over the last 20 years show the increasing dominance of the United States," the official said. "Even our strategic programs are decided by Washington."

Speakers at the missile defense conference envisioned a shield able to counter any Arab or Iranian conventional or nonconventional missile strikes on the Jewish state. They said an effective missile defense system would also allow the Israel Air Force to concentrate on targeting enemy strategic facilities rather than short-range missile or rocket launchers.

"It could be that if we can't intercept enemy missiles, then the Israel Air Force will spend time looking and destroying enemy launchers rather than focusing on destroying enemy strategic facilities," Bodinger, now a senior defense executive, said. "In the last war [with Hizbullah], there was a total failure [to destroy Hizbullah rockets]."

Still, the shelving of Israel's preemptive strike option raised concern among missile defense proponents. They said the new policy could eliminate the Israeli option of destroying missile and rockets in their boost-phase of launch.

James Roche, a former U.S. Air Force secretary and senior executive at Northrop Grumman, said Israel as well as the United States must deem BPI a major missile defense option. Roche, who in 1986 authored a missile defense study with the late Israeli defense analyst Zeev Schiff, said BPI could deter Iran.

"You ought to think about where you destroy the missile," Roche said. "I believe that if hostilities are imminent and missiles are erected, then attack them. Why wait until it's [enemy missile] over our territory."

Several of the speakers supported the procurement or development of a laser-based missile defense system. They cited the Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser, or M-THEL, a joint Israel-U.S. program suspended in 2005. M-THEL, based on the earlier THEL, or Nautilus program, was said to have destroyed all 46 rockets, missiles, artillery shells and mortars fired in tests at White Sands, New Mexico in the late 1990s.

"Since the [Lebanon] war last summer, there has been a fundamental change in our attitude toward missile defense," said Avi Schnurr, a former THEL official and now executive director of the Israel Missile Defense Association. "Comprehensive missile defense means also active defense."

Schnurr cited four elements of what he termed an effective policy toward missile defense. He listed clear goals, understanding the missile threat, available responses, and the application of option-based scenarios.

"If the threat is moving toward cruise missiles, then we have to take that into account," Schnurr said. "Missile defense must also be a factor in urban planning."

But several former Israeli defense officials stressed that the missile defense shield developed by Israel relied heavily on U.S. funding. They cited the cancellation of M-THEL by the U.S. Army, which led to the Israeli decision to shelve the program a year later.

"The Americans said they were stopping Nautilus," Amos Yaron, a former Defense Ministry director-general, recalled. "We said we would continue and did so for another year. Then came the big budget cuts and we had to drop the project for other priorities."

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