Israel Looks Past Borders, Arms for Long-Range War

Worried by the spread of nuclear weapons and the missiles that could drop them on its major cities, Israel wants to give its military a longer punch--one that could easily reach Tehran or Baghdad.

Even as Israel’s diplomats negotiate peace treaties with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization, its generals are scanning the Middle East horizon for new dangers, perhaps from Iran, perhaps from Iraq, that are farther from the Jewish state but still threaten it.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin rarely speaks about Israel’s efforts to achieve peace with its neighbors without also mentioning the dangers he sees from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

“We face the terror of extremist Islam--the enemy of peace, the enemy of the state of Israel, the enemy of the Jews--which threatens the peace of our country,” Rabin said in an oft-repeated denunciation of Iran, which he sees as the primary source of a spreading fundamentalist threat.

In the medium to long term, Rabin said bluntly last month, Israel must prepare for war with hostile Arab and Islamic powers, and as defense minister as well as prime minister he is reshaping the country’s military forces for such a conflict.

According to strategic analysts here, two sets of developments worry Israeli officials:

* The advance of Islamic fundamentalism, with a political agenda that targets the moderate, secular Arab regimes with which Israel is making peace. That agenda calls for the destruction of the Jewish state to make way for a pan-Islamic nation in the region.

* The acquisition by Iran, Syria and possibly Libya of nuclear technology, of the capability to produce highly toxic chemical weapons and of intermediate-range missiles and the know-how to manufacture them.

“Even if the peace process brings agreements with all our neighbors, we still face threats more dangerous than many we have faced in the past,” a senior military analyst here said, asking not to be quoted by name. “If Iran is able to build or buy a nuclear device, we must assume that it will find a way to deliver it, and we must act in the belief it will do so.”

As part of a five-year plan, Israel is building up its strategic forces and equipping them with the most advanced weapons it can get from the United States or develop itself.

It is strengthening its armored units, and it is buying attack helicopters, multiple-rocket launchers and precision-guided bombs and rockets, all to retain a decisive, qualitative edge on the battlefield.

Some retired Israeli generals--active-duty officers rarely speak on the record here--have gone further recently, calling for the development of larger airborne and commando units ready to strike deep in Iran or Iraq, for increased airlift capacity to carry troops to faraway battlefronts and for even more sophisticated weaponry from the United States.

Should Rabin succeed in making peace with Israel’s immediate Arab neighbors after repeatedly vanquishing them in war, it could turn them into buffer states offering protection from more radical regimes. But Israel would still remain vulnerable to missile attacks from “third-tier countries,” such as Iran and Iraq, and to biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

“The biggest problem in the next decade?” a senior military source said. “Iran with nuclear weapons. That’s the worst case our planners must currently look at.”

Although U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry said on a visit here last month that the Iranians are “many, many years” away from developing an atomic bomb, Rabin said seven to 15 years is “a reasonable estimate,” and Israel is taking this into account in developing its own force.

Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, the armed forces’ planning chief, reportedly suggested at a strategic studies conference at Tel Aviv University last month that Iran might find a shortcut to getting nuclear weapons. He said Israel might then have to decide, maybe as soon as this year, on what action to take, perhaps making a preemptive attack like the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant.

Although military sources maintained that Dayan’s remarks were taken out of context, that he was simply providing an example of strategic planning against all contingencies, the comments were widely interpreted as a calculated warning to Iran to curb its ambitious nuclear program.

“The Iranian nuclear program is not a distant and vague threat but a concrete and worrying danger that is no less a matter of concern for us than the Iraqi nuclear program,” commentator Danny Leshem wrote in Yediot Aharanot, the country’s biggest newspaper.

“Whoever was worried in the past by the setting up of an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak should be concerned at least to the same extent by the construction of nuclear reactors in Iran by the Chinese and the Russians, even if six years will pass until the first 300-megawatt nuclear power plant is completed by the Chinese.”

Leshem, as well as other Israelis, pointed to evidence collected after the 1991 Persian Gulf War that showed Iraq well along the way to nuclear status before the Israeli bombing.

Israel itself is believed by Western analysts to have more than 200 nuclear warheads. The government has never acknowledged development of such an arsenal, but it refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Despite fears about Iran, most Israeli military analysts, noting that there is no peace treaty yet with Syria and that Israeli forces continue to battle Muslim guerrillas in southern Lebanon, stress the need for “a balanced response” to threats against it.

“We have to prepare against the immediate threats, such as the fighting in Lebanon, the concentration of Syrian forces and terrorism, while building up to counter long-term and long-range threats, such as Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism against Israelis and Jews in other places, and the introduction of non-conventional weapons,” a senior government official said.

“We do this to protect the peace process against those who would destroy it in order to destroy us. At this point, Israel’s security depends very much on the success of the search for peace and on the maintenance of that peace through strength, through deterrence, through our ability even to act 1,000 miles away against threats.”

More than rhetoric, this is a strategic assessment that is gradually transforming Israel’s military forces so they will be ready to dominate what is called “the future battlefield.”

“Our enemies are arming themselves to bring a war to our home front, right to Tel Aviv, and we have to prepare to prevent that and ensure that, if there is another war, we fight it on their territory, over their cities--and win,” a retired government official said, elaborating on Rabin’s strategic views.

“In the Gulf War, Iraq taught us how vulnerable we were with 39 missiles right into Israel, and that vulnerability will increase with the sophistication of the missiles that they and others get and with the non-conventional warheads they put on them.”

The biggest step in the make-over of the Israeli forces was the purchase, largely with U.S. military aid, of 21 new F-15I fighters. The jets, able to reach targets in Iran, Iraq, Libya or Algeria, can carry out poor-visibility and nighttime raids without refueling and can hold up to 11 tons of bombs and missiles.

The Israeli air force expects its first F-15I planes in 1996, a year earlier than first anticipated, and it may purchase four additional F-15Is, to make a total of 25.

Another step toward meeting the new threats is the continued effort, again in cooperation with the United States, to develop the Arrow antimissile system to intercept and destroy incoming ballistic missiles. Tests of a second version of the Arrow will begin here shortly.

“An active defense system like the Arrow will prevent a situation in which a state with ballistic missiles will launch them against Israel in the knowledge that only a partial response is available,” Uzi Rubin, who heads the antimissile program, said of the Arrow. “The Arrow system is likely to alter the strategic situation without the firing of even one missile.”

Acknowledging the complexity and the cost of such defenses, Israeli officials said they have been able to proceed only gradually and have had to rely on a mixed strategy of deterrence, early warning, active and passive defenses and finally the threat of retaliation.

“We have to build this all up gradually--we couldn’t afford it otherwise,” another official said.

Other purchases have included Apache helicopters, the multiple-launch rocket system used by U.S. troops during the Gulf War, Dolphin-class submarines from Germany, long-range, early warning radar and radar-control firing systems.