The Land of Blood and Honey by van Creveld Martin

Author:van Creveld, Martin [Martin, van Creveld,]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2010-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Hallelujah!

While the 1970s and early 1980s represented an exceptionally difficult period for Israel, not everything was darkness. Perhaps most impressive of all was the military recovery and buildup that followed the 1973 war. By the end of the decade Israel, a small nation of no more than about 3.5 million Jews, was capable of fielding a force that, according to international sources, numbered six hundred thousand men and women. The number of fighter-bombers increased by more than 50 percent. That of artillery pieces went up by 75 percent, whereas that of tanks doubled. At peak, Israel was able to deploy more tanks than France and Britain combined. Had the Chinese owned proportionally as many tanks as the Israelis did during those years, then the figure would have exceeded a million.

Side by side with quantitative expansion went qualitative improvements. Certainly before 1967, and to some extent even in 1973, technologically speaking the IDF—the army of a relatively small country—was backward in many respects. By contrast, many of the weapons received from the United States from 1974 on, including fighter-bombers and missiles, were the most modern of their kind anywhere. The outcome was that Israel became a vast military laboratory to which foreign experts could, and did, look in preparing for future conflicts. Nor is this the entire story. Already during Mandatory times, Hagana had set up underground workshops where technicians repaired weapons and maintained them. During the 1950s and 1960s the military industries, now operating in the open, expanded until they were capable of producing small arms, explosives, most kinds of ammunition, and many sorts of electronic gear.

The events surrounding the 1967 war, which showed how vulnerable Israel could be to an arms embargo imposed from outside, provided an additional impetus. By the late 1960s the Ministry of Defense was determined to press ahead in building at least one major indigenous weapons system for each of the three services, i.e., the ground forces, the air force, and the navy. In any event, the dream of self-sufficiency proved beyond Israel’s grasp. However, the vast sums spent, and the outstanding talent mobilized both from within the country and, when necessary, abroad, did yield a powerful and highly innovative military-industrial complex. By the late 1970s it was capable of designing many excellent weapons and weapons systems from scratch, producing them at reasonable cost, and exporting them to many countries around the world.

Forming the background to this entire issue was the growing shadow cast by nuclear weapons. Israel’s first reactor, constructed with French aid, was completed in 1964.37 One or two primitive nuclear devices may have been available even as early as 1967, and more started entering the arsenal from 1968 on. By the time of the 1973 war a dozen or so are said to have been available, complete with delivery vehicles in the form of Phantom fighter-bombers and Jericho I surface-to-surface missiles with a three-hundred-mile range. If Egypt and Syria nevertheless dared to attack, then this was only because they never intended to cross the pre-1967 border.

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