Plan Taoza / Audacity
The IDF will focus on precision weaponry: for land, sea and air. The Air Force will swallow most of the aid funds the American for the purchase of the first squadron of the F-35 stealth aircraft, which will begin to arrive at the end of 2016. Towards the end of the five-year plan, a second squadron will be purchased. In the next five years, the Air Force will also be equipped with helicopters and refueling planes.
A large part of the IDF's central equipment budget , in shekels, will be invested in the purchase of three new "Dolphin" submarines that will arrive in the next five years. The cost of each submarine was half a billion euros, and even though the German government finances a third of the cost, it was still a very large amount. The IDF's equipping with ships and defense means to secure the gas reserves in economic waters will come from special funding from the Ministry of Finance - outside the defense budget. In the coming year this funding will reach several tens of millions of shekels, and in a few years even a billion shekels per year.
In July 2013, the IDF launched in the media the new plan for the years 2014-2018, which was known as "Audacity". It was very similar to "Oz", and even to "Slingshot" (surprisingly or not surprisingly, Gantz was targeting exactly the number of tanks that he already indicated seven years ago) , and despite this, the program was truly revolutionary.
Some of the reforms are related to the process that the IDF has gone through in the last two or three years: through the connection of communication networks and intelligence computers, air and land, and increased collection of intelligence, the ability to handle targets has increased by hundreds of percent. Most attacks are currently carried out on the basis of real-time intelligence; the first move of its kind First and foremost, Gantz and Ashkenazi, who preceded him, are signed in the world, in recent years the Deputy Chiefs of Staff, Yair Noah and Gadi Eisenkot, the Chief of Defense Staff, Colonel Aviv Kochavi, and the Commander of the Air Force, Colonel Amir Eshel The dramatic part of the budget was the one that really forces the General Staff to cut the meat: on the agenda was a significant closure of tank units, air force squadrons, artillery and navy units, and old air defense formations. Most of the units that will be closed in "Taoza" would have been closed anyway towards the end of the decade.
According to the "Oz" plan, the IDF only anticipates their closure: on the one hand, the units will be closed before all the advanced formations intended to replace them are operationally competent. On the other hand, in the next two or three years, Syria and Egypt will be mainly busy with themselves. The chance of an all-out war developing, which would force the IDF to activate all its units down to the last of them, was considered zero.
As a general rule, Gantz was a chief of staff of the type who always thinks and hesitates (as Defense Minister Ya'alon was during his term) and less of a performanceist (like Mofaz and Ashkenazi, for example). In accordance with his nature, Gantz challenged the top of the IDF to formulate a book that describes the army's vision for 2025.
Gantz and Eisenkot carry out thinking exercises that sometimes last for hours and hours. According to Gantz, the change in "boldness" will not only be in the order of the IDF's forces, but also in the way the army operates. Among other things, the management of the projects of the intensification will be much more centralized and will be carried out for the most part by the Deputy Chief of Staff. The branches and commands will be able to implement operational projects and plans only if they are compatible with the overall IDF concept.
The IDF was also preparing for years of fighting in the Golan Heights area and on the border with Egypt, which was why a new regional division will be established in the Golan Heights. Some of the armored forces that will be cut will be converted to lighter units, with wheeled vehicles instead of tracked ones. Such units will be able to move from arena to arena more quickly and maneuver more ease in combat environments that are becoming more and more urban.
Phase I of the IDF's maneuver was crowned with great success this week: the "Taoza" program was launched in the media with great enthusiasm. The IDF did not complain about the budget this week, and thus it was not emphasized in the publications that the program will save over the next five years only NIS 7.5 billion, while the outline of the established defense budget by the government talking about a cut of at least 24.5 billion.
So how will the IDF bridge the gap? It probably won't have to bridge it, since in the next step, very soon, the IDF will present elaborate presentations to the cabinet ministers with all the details of the "Taoza" program. At the same time, the ministers will be required to decide whether they require the IDF to cut beyond "boldness". Senior officials at the General Staff have already said recently that the outline of the defense budget, which the new government decided on when formulating the state budget, "does not allow providing security to Israel." They will repeat their statements in the coming government meetings.
Netanyahu and Lapid will need the courage of samurai to ratify the budget they have already set. They will not have such courage. A wise bet: the IDF budget in the next five years will be more or less according to the "Taoza" outline. The Ministry of Finance will be required to present other ways to plug the hole that will be created in the state budget (the annual gap between the state budget approved for the time being and the minimum "Taoza" outline was greater than any The Ministry of Foreign Affairs' budget, for example), the finance officials can already start working on planning the budget again.
What else might take the defense budget cuts off the agenda this summer was war, and a major conflict in the north was not impossible. The last period was particularly tense: on Friday morning, explosions in ammunition depots near the city of Latakia were reported from Syria. The port of Latakia was used by the Iranians to transfer weapons to Syria and from there to Lebanon, but according to the publications, the target that was attacked was warehouses with Russian coastal missiles of the "Yakhont" type.
The intelligence arm was currently the highest priority in the IDF, even before the Air Force. The cyber units are even expected to continue to grow, while the combat formations in the actual combat space will suffer from the painful cuts. The IDF's absolute priority in the next five-year period will continue to be intelligence and the Air Force, as in the previous five-year plans. In the fields of equipping intelligence, the IDF was not saving even a shekel. He will invest huge sums in systems that will process the vast information that comes from countless sensors that have been deployed in the field in previous years, and transmit it as digested and processed information to the tactical level in the field.
The last time the IDF underwent a dramatic change in the order of its forces was in the 80s of the last century - after the signing of the peace agreements with Egypt, many field units, which were intended for fighting on the southern front, were closed. At the beginning of the last decade, several more armored formations were closed. "You are now taking a calculated risk: despite the fear of the collapse of the peace agreements with Egypt in the coming years, at this stage the army was not going to grow again. On the contrary - it will continue to decrease.
In recent years there have been quite a few voices in the IDF calling for a revolution - a dramatic reduction in the expenses of the land army in view of the changing threat, and the fact that there was no regular army standing on our borders.
The "Oz" program was far from revolutionary in this way, but it went in the direction of the votes. The IDF, which has already cut the number of its tanks and APCs in the last decade, will continue to close units (it was likely that the obsolete APCs will be sent to museums or sold to third world countries and metal dealers). The IDF will maintain basic maneuver capabilities, but will reduce the rate of production of Merkava tanks and Merkava APCs ("NMRim") so that it fits the retirement plan for the obsolete vehicles.
The IDF was required to determine in the "Oz" program the balance between defensive and offensive capabilities. Equipping active defense components ("Iron Dome" batteries, "Magic Wand", "Arrow 2" and "Arrow 3" will cost many billions cumulatively, but the IDF It will probably not be equipped with more than 9 "iron dome" batteries, although the previous defense minister had plans that reached dozens of batteries. An improvement in the system's software extends the effective range of each battery, and can save some expensive batteries (the cost of each "dome" battery Iron" was not only in procurement but also in personnel).
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