Israel's Strategy: Shooting Pool With a Bowling Ball
Sep. 20, 2014 - 03:57PM | By BARBARA OPALL-ROME
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140920/DEFREG04/309200020/Israel-s-Strategy-Shooting-Pool-Bowling-Ball

TEL AVIV — Israeli military leaders are assessing how lessons from Gaza
could apply to war planning in Lebanon, Syria and other potential theaters.

But officers charged with future war planning are already nostalgic for the
relative simplicity of Israel’s summer of combat in the Gaza Strip. Although
challenging to battle well-armed enemies deeply embedded among innocent
civilians, Israel still had the relative luxury of targeting so-called
centers of gravity in its 50-day war in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

But in a fractured region in continuous flux, those centers of gravity are
giving way to pockets of gravity with no single address, officers here say.

In this new Middle East of breakaway insurgencies and blurred borders,
Israel can no longer direct its “bowling ball” — as one officer here
described it — against a single strongman or central government.

“When it was nation against nation, it was relatively simple,” said Brig.
Gen. Oren Avman, head of Israeli Army training and doctrine. “If you
selected the right ball and threw it in the right way, you could effectively
strike all those pins supporting the enemy’s center of gravity.”

But in a region with multiple pockets of gravity, Israeli planners are
mulling how to decapitate only immediate threats without empowering others
that continue to sprout.

In the Army, they’ve already started to replace metaphorical bowling for
billiards, where artful strategy and geometrically calculated tactics is
more effective than brute force.

“You have a table with many balls and many pockets and you’re holding a big
stick. If this stick is not efficient and it causes you to put in the black
ball — let’s call it civilians — you lose legitimacy,” Avman said.

“But if you scratch with the white ball, you’re squandering your
capabilities.”

Officers here said the operational concept was demonstrated in maneuvering
ground war in Gaza, but will prove inordinately more challenging in the
Lebanese or Syrian theater.

“We have to use this big stick carefully and with extreme accuracy, because
enemies are hiding among civilians all the time,” Avman said.

“And that’s just Gaza.”

Against threats to the north, those metaphorical billiard balls must be
targeted in ways that won’t strengthen the spectrum of forces operating in
the same domain, Avman said.

“When we look around in Lebanon, they have an army supported by the US. But
there is another huge army [Hezbollah] backed by Iran operating by guerrilla
methods in villages and tunnels.

“If you look at Syria, after more than 200,000 dead, they’re still killing
each other. And now this so-called Islamic State joined the party and we
have al-Qaida extremists meters from our border fence.”

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has supported US calls for
concerted action against the Islamic State group, he has repeatedly stressed
that the Iranian-supported axis of Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Bashar
al-Assad’s Syrian regime remains Israel’s most immediate threat.

“The reality is much more complicated that we used to think. Assad, he’s a
murderer and our principal threat, along with all those Hezbollah forces
fighting on his behalf,” said the Army’s training and doctrine chief.

“We must be prepared to fight jointly with tanks and all our combined arms
capabilities,” Avman said. “At the same time, we must be flexible enough to
stop an ISIS fighter on a motorcycle who may fire an anti-tank missile at
us.”

Retired Maj. Gen. Yisrael Ziv, a former director of operations on the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) General Staff, conceded that operational concepts must
be refined to address new regional complexities.

“Obviously, you are less effective when operating as a unified system
against a non-unified system,” he said.

Israel operated in Gaza in a more fragmented way with smaller forces capable
of developing “micro tactical answers” during the fight, Ziv said. In
Protective Edge, he said the IDF delivered division-sized punch through
joint operations and combined arms at the brigade and lower-level echelons.

But in the future, the IDF may more likely face numerous amorphous, smaller
threats while waging maneuvering war against immediate enemy forces. For
those scenarios, an operational concept akin to that of a US Navy carrier
battle group may prove more effective than metaphorical billiards, Ziv said.

“In a complex environment where many small molecular systems are threatening
our forces from different places, the best way may be based on the
protective rings the Americans use when moving their fleets,” Ziv said.

As for the Israel Air Force, officers said the lessons of Gaza would be
refined and applied in future war beyond the northern border.

“Air power is enormously relevant and resonant in the fragmented, fractured
geopolitical reality we face,” Brig. Gen. Amikam Norkin, Air Force chief of
staff, said.

When asked how the Army’s metaphorical transition from bowling to billiards
applies to future airpower plans, he replied: “We are playing billiards with
a bowling ball.”

Email: bopallrome@defensenews.com.