National Agenda : Israeli Military Forced to Do More With Less : * Reduced budgets and shifting strategies in the Middle East.

By DANIEL WILLIAMS

July 16, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TEL AVIV —

Deep and painful change is in store for the Israel Defense Forces, the Middle East’s most powerful army, as it tries to reduce costs while strengthening itself in a region that is speedily rearming only months after the short and devastating Persian Gulf War.

So far, cuts for Israel’s army have been cosmetic: the closure of about 30 military journals, a threat to silence the rock’n’roll-heavy army radio station. But the first slices foreshadow a new, lean era for the IDF in what is described as the most thorough shift in resources and priorities in the last 30 years.

Long-delayed cutbacks in troop numbers are expected. Noncombat units may disappear from the map. Planes and tanks are going into storage.

A plateau in defense spending is the primary cause for the coming moves, but money is only part of the issue. Israel wants to proceed briskly into the era of high-technology warfare to maintain its military edge over Arab neighbors. High-tech can mean high costs, especially during a transition period. That’s where the balancing act between money and modernization begins.

“Israel has to be ready for war at any moment, change or not,” said Ariel Levite, an expert on Israel’s military doctrine. “Long-term change cannot get in the way of immediate readiness.”

Signs of distress have begun to break out, and there are suggestions that rather than cut, the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir would prefer that Washington provide extra money.

Two weeks ago, Defense Minister Moshe Arens appealed for a sharp increase in U.S. military aid, to $2.5 billion from the $1.8-billion annual rate that has prevailed since 1986. He also called on Washington to invest in the Israeli arms industry and buy more Israeli weapons to keep military factories afloat.

Arens also wants to increase the amount of U.S. aid that Israel can use to pay for Israeli-made arms. Under an arrangement unique to the Jewish state, Washington currently permits Israel to spend almost $500 million of its American aid at home rather than in purchases from U.S. arms makers.

Arens justified the request for increased aid on the grounds that inflation has eroded the value of the U.S. military aid package, and that U.S. arms sales to Arab countries require a parallel boost for Israel.

“The sale of weaponry to Arab armies, including sale of American arms, has put an increased burden on Israel,” Arens said in an interview here.

“Everyone wants to have everything. You can imagine what will happen when forces are cut and people lose jobs,” declared Zeev Eytan, who researches defense issues for Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

Beneath the surface lie subtle modifications in the way Israel plans to defend itself. Since the mid-1950s, Israel has committed itself to decisively taking combat to the territory of its adversary. For Israel, small and poor in resources, quick and powerful offense was considered the best defense.

But the Gulf War, in which Israel became a target for Iraq’s erratic Scud missiles, suggested to some that Israel may have overplayed offense and deterrence. Deterrence did not deter; Iraqi missiles killed at least two and injured scores of civilians, damaged hundreds of apartments and disrupted life in two of Israel’s biggest cities--all this despite solemn and repeated warnings that any attack on Israel would be repaid hundredfold.

“An Israeli weak point was exposed,” said Aharon Levran, a retired general and former analyst at the Jaffee Center. “Deterrence is not a solid component, but something fluid. It may work or not work, depending on the situation.”

Israel was restrained by Washington, which worried about expanding the war into a generalized Israeli-Arab conflict. But had Israel been let loose, it would have been faced with new and difficult choices. For the first time, Israel was hit not by a country on its border or by armies trying to cross its frontier, but by an enemy two borders away. To stamp out the missiles, Israel would have had to mass scores of jets to scout out and hit the elusive launchers in repeated sorties over Iraq. One plan called for Israel to ferry troops to western Iraq in order to destroy the missiles at their hidden sites.

Had Israeli jets flown over Jordan, they would have risked widening the war, exactly what Iraqi President Saddam Hussein wanted. Given the unusually complex transport problems and dispersal of the missile launchers, success of commando operations would have been even more problematic.

“Even if Israel used the offensive option, good results were not guaranteed,” Levran said.

Experts in and out of the IDF view the circumstances of the Gulf War as probably unique (especially Washington’s close supervision). But they nonetheless drew a common lesson: Israel needs to improve the defense of its civilian rear area. That marks a change from a 30-year trend, when cities and towns inside Israel were considered all but immune to attack. Israel had long warned about the possibilities of a chemical or biological attack but had taken no concrete steps to protect itself from them until the eve of the Gulf War, when it distributed gas masks to its population.

The new focus on defense buttressed arguments in favor of an antimissile system that Israel is putting together in cooperation with the United States. The system, called the Arrow, is meant to be an improvement over the Patriot antimissile rockets provided by Washington during the war. The Patriots gave only spotty protection against the Scuds. Promoters of the Arrow promise that it will cover large areas better and intercept incoming rockets at a greater distance.

The Arrow alters Israel’s basic defense doctrine in two ways. First, it represents a tacit admission that deterrence is not absolute and that an adversary may even ignore the Israeli nuclear threat and strike at Israel’s cities. Although no one is suggesting that Israel give up its 200 or so atomic warheads, a missile defense system might make it less likely that those bombs will be used.

“I think that the Arrow, when deployed, is going to bring about a tremendous improvement in the situation in the world in the sense that all the dictators who have amassed hundreds and thousands of Scud-type missiles will have a bunch of junk on their hands,” Arens said.

The Arrow also departs from standard IDF preference for weapons systems that perform multiple tasks. The air force is the home of multiple-use systems (jets are designed to hit ground targets as well as fight off attacking planes), and air force officers have been the main critics of the Arrow system.

The Arrow is costly. It will take anywhere from $1 billion to $7 billion to develop and put into place (U.S. taxpayers are picking up about three-fourths of the development bill). It is a taste of the price for entering the high-tech era.

Changes in civil defense are also being considered. Israel plans to create a “rear command” to take charge of evacuation, shelters and public utilities. Still at issue is whether civil defense will be run by the IDF or some civilian agency, such as the police or Interior Ministry.

Israel’s offensive tools may also be upgraded, and change appears to be in store for Israel’s game plan on the ground, which until now has relied successfully on tanks. The ability of tank-killing helicopters to strike effectively during the Gulf War raises doubts about the superiority of armor.

Cruise missiles challenge another of Israel’s favorite weapons, the jet fighter-bomber. The air- or sea-launched missiles can avoid destruction by Israel’s pilots, negating Israel’s edge in the air.

Proposed IDF changes are so sensitive that the new chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, has forbidden interviews on the subject. The five-year plan for the IDF is due to be unveiled later this summer.

Barak, a veteran of Israel’s counterterrorist wars, took over as chief of staff April 1 with ambitions to both trim and harden the IDF. His inaugural message to top officers included a complaint that the armed forces had grown soft and a promise that he was going to whip them into line.

First to go would be noncombat units. Arens quoted Barak as saying that “unless we cut drastically for anything that doesn’t shoot, we won’t have money for those items that do shoot.”

In his early weeks in office, Barak is reported to have trimmed his own headquarters staff and to have proposed cuts in the number of days for reserve training, long a key component of Israel’s backup citizen army.

He favors development of “smart bombs” and other advanced weapons, a position in agreement with Arens, who also had a high-tech education.

Barak’s predecessor, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, held similar ambitions. But observers say that the Arab uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, and then the Gulf War, devoured his energies. “Shomron also wanted to make changes, move to a more sophisticated force, but his timing was unlucky,” said Levran.

Barak, observers say, hopes to overcome distractions with a can-do style that dates from his service in secret army units that operate directly under the top command. In 1972, he led troops dressed as airport maintenance men who stormed a hijacked airliner in Tel Aviv to free a planeload of hostages. He belonged to an assassination team which infiltrated Beirut to kill three leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization. During the rescue of Israeli hostages on an airliner hijacked to Entebbe, Uganda, he oversaw a backup team for use in case the initial assault failed. In 1988, Barak, operating from a reconnaissance airplane in the Mediterranean, directed a commando team that assassinated a top PLO official Abu Jihad in Tunisia.

“He’s a maverick with the prestige to carry out what he needs to,” concluded Ariel Levite.

Detractors say he is self-centered and insensitive to traditions of the IDF. One veteran officer described him as “megalomaniacal.”

Barak is also said to harbor political ambitions. He has already been criticized for grandstanding when he revealed the existence of undercover units that pursue Palestinian activists in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Still, Labor Party insiders see him as a potential savior of the ailing organization. His upbringing on a kibbutz, a traditional breeding ground of Labor luminaries, makes him a natural. Barak is often compared to Moshe Dayan, the 1967 war hero who once was viewed as prime ministerial material. Labor is trying to develop a tougher-on-Arabs image, and Barak, with his history of derring-do, would fit the bill.

In any case, his will may be tested most severely in the air force, the place where the need for cost cutting and new ideas about technology collide most sharply.

Mothballing jets would be unwelcome, and so would a shift toward antimissile missiles. For the air force, things like the Arrow, not to mention the Patriot, are viewed with disdain. Defense and deterrence are jobs for the jets.

At least they were until the Gulf War. In the 1973 Middle East War, Syria launched missiles at northern Israel. The response was a devastating bombing raid on military headquarters in Damascus. In the Gulf War, however, Israel’s planes were limited to patrolling the skies over Israel while Patriot missile operators, both Israeli and American, earned the heroes’ laurels.

“Antiaircraft suddenly found its representatives marching through a ticker-tape blizzard in Manhattan,” an article in the Jerusalem Post noted, “while the fliers and other aircraft-associated personnel of the (air force) were nowhere in sight.”

Although Israelis hope that new weapons purchased from the United States and home-grown advances will keep Israel a step ahead of the Arabs, experts suggested as early as 1983 that Israel’s modernization programs were paying slimmer and slimmer dividends.

Adversaries defeated in the wars of 1967, 1973 and 1982 regrouped and bought more and newer weapons, experts noted. These weapons made it harder for Israel to win decisively.

In 1983, Col. Immanuel Wald, the army’s chief long-range planner, described an adverse trend in the economic costs of three conflicts: “In the Six-Day War (of 1967), the IDF beat more than three Arab armies, on three fronts, with an investment of only 6% of the gross national product. In the Yom Kippur War (of 1973) the IDF was barely even against two armies, on two fronts, with double the investment. In the Lebanese War (of 1982) the IDF did not even manage to defeat one army, on one front, under optimal conditions and with an investment of 18% of the GNP.”

In 1988, a Haifa University study concluded that Israel’s armed strength had reached an acceptable ratio vis-a-vis the Arabs, and that it was a good moment to put a brake on spending. “This is the time to cut defense spending and concentrate on economic growth, techno-scientific progress, education and welfare,” said Gavriel Ben-Dor, the rector of Haifa University.

With a sudden and massive influx of new immigrants from the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Eastern Europe, Israel faces a new cash crunch.

Neither cost cutting nor new weapons may be able to resolve other worrisome trends. Israel’s ability to preempt danger has diminished. In a single raid in 1981, Israeli jets knocked out a nuclear reactor in Iraq and set back Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program. Now, Iraq has altered and dispersed nuclear facilities that eluded even the heavy bombing from U.S. jets during the war.

Throughout the Arab world, the number of missiles and launchers has multiplied, and a preemptive strike on an Arab country could bring retaliation on Israel that was inconceivable a decade ago.

Whatever the balance, in some minds the next war is unthinkable. Zeev Schiff, an influential defense columnist, wrote in the American quarterly Foreign Affairs that if political efforts to resolve Arab-Israeli differences fail, conventional deterrence will not be at issue: Chemical, biological, even nuclear arms could come into play.

“This (the Gulf War) will have been the last major war in the Middle East to be fought with conventional weapons,” he warned.

ISRAEL AND THE ARABS: A MILITARY COMPARATISON

1991 figures EGYPT

Armed forces: active: 450,000

Armed forces, reserves: 623,000

Tanks: 3,190

Artillery: 2,020

Combat aircraft: 495

Armed helicopters: 74

ISRAEL

Armed forces: active: 141,000

Armed forces, reserves: 504,000