Weekly Commentary: Time for Respectful Red Team Analysis
Dr. Aaron Lerner Date: 19 August 2010

What would you do if you had an underground bunker network more complex than
the New York City subway system spread under villages straddling Israel's
northern border - armed with, among other things, many tens of thousands of
rockets of various ranges?

And what would you do if you had bunkers and rockets - and more - and you
were positioned within striking range of the Ashkelon terminal and Ashdod
Port?

And what would you do if you had a large and well equipped trained infantry
deployed within the very heart of Israel with no real barriers between you
and almost every significant target in the country?

And, finally, what would you do if you had enough nuclear devices in your
possession with delivery capabilities, which, if successfully detonated,
could literally incinerate most of the Israeli population?

The answers to these questions are not, of course, just a question of
capabilities.

They are driven by the assumptions one makes about the goals of the decision
makers and their value system.

And it is dangerously easy to err on both the goals and the value system.

Dismiss the enemy's goals that threaten the existence of the Jewish State as
"rhetoric" and your analysis is distorted from the very start.

Assert that all human beings share the same "universal" (Western) value
system and that religious, political and other beliefs that are at odds with
these universal values are no more than window dressing but not truly
adhered to by those who claim to embrace them and your analysis may be
catastrophically blind.

And it happens.

Not so long ago an Israeli acting out Iran's president in a simulation
exercise assumed that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would not use nuclear weapons to
destroy Israel if he had the opportunity. The Israeli, who spent years in
the intelligence community, could not accept the notion that Ahmadinejad and
his top echelon genuinely believed in a well-documented value system. A
value system that, when weighing the "cost" of a devastating Israeli second
(according to foreign press reports nuclear) strike against Iran against the
"benefit" of destroying the Jewish State concludes that the benefit is worth
the price.

We should respect our enemies.

And the first element of respect is not to dismiss either their stated goals
or their stated values.

Yes. It means preparing for far worse scenarios than those derived from
potentially dangerous simplifying "best case scenario" assumptions.

But the purpose of the exercise isn't for Israel to come out nicely in the
simulations.

It's to prepare for the very serious existential challenges of the real
world.

Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)
(Mail POB 982 Kfar Sava)
Tel 972-9-7604719 Fax 972-3-7255730
INTERNET ADDRESS: imra@netvision.net.il
Website: http:www.imra.org.il