Israeli Strategy After Desert Storm

Lessons of the Second Gulf War

Aharon Levran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135219178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War had a traumatic effect on the Middle East and its implications were particularly serious for Israel, which felt obliged to reassess its strategic and military perspectives. This is an examination of the lessons that the Gulf War holds for Israel.

1

SSM Attacks on Israel

For the first time in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict an Arab state made use of surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) against Israel, and, in particular, against its home front.¹ Previously, Israel’s civilian population had indeed faced the risk of Arab fighter planes penetrating its skies, but this menace had been negligible due to the overwhelming superiority of the Israel Air Force (IAF) in general, and certainly in Israeli airspace. In the Second Gulf War, however, Israel’s home front was actually its only battlefront. This marked the violation of an unwritten but long-standing rule between Israel and her neighbours that cities and civilian population centres should not be attacked in war. This calls for close analysis of the scope and dimension of the SSM threat against Israel, as well as of ways of coping with it.

SCOPE AND DIMENSION OF THE SSM THREAT AGAINST ISRAEL IN THE WAKE OF THE SECOND GULF WAR

In the Second Gulf War Iraq launched about 40 SSMs at Israel (the number generally cited in public is 39, however there may actually have been as many as 43 missiles) in a total of 17 attacks. The launchings spanned a period of 39 days (from 18 January to 25 February 1991) out of 42 days of battle (17 January–28 February). Although only seven of the 17 missile attacks resulted in loss of life² and severe material damage, they nevertheless created a considerable strategic problem for Israel, as could have been expected.³ Although there was little loss of life, damage and material destruction were significant. Two people were killed in direct strikes and another 11 were killed indirectly, as a result of heart ailments and ‘selfprotection accidents’. Approximately 1,000 others were affected or wounded, most of them quite mildly.⁴ At the same time, over 10,000 apartments and other structures were damaged.⁵ Severe to moderate damage was inflicted on a total of 235 structures and 1,250 residential units respectively. Thousands of people were evacuated to hotels from destroyed homes.

It is difficult to precisely estimate the direct and indirect costs to the economy, the greater part of which was paralysed for several weeks. In addition, the educational system and various activities involving large public gatherings were totally shut down. Of course the war incurred special costs on the defence establishment due to the IAF special alert and the increased activity of the intelligence and civil defence services and similar organisations. The American Administration at the time was willing to compensate Israel to the tune of $650 million for the cost of its mobilisation and war damage, even though the total cost of this war for Israel actually came to several billion dollars.⁶ Interestingly, a year after the war, a press survey⁷ cited a figure of some 5 billion IS (or more than $2 billion), including the cost of direct damage to buildings and property, exceptional costs to the defence establishment, disruption of the economy in manufacturing, construction, export, tourism, agriculture, foreign investment, and air travel, and increased costs for shipping, insurance, fuel, and so forth.

Estimates of possible SSM casualties made before the war, based on the toll taken by Iraq’s missile attacks on Teheran in March–April 1988, and adjusted for different conditions in Israel, projected figures of three people killed and seven or eight wounded per missile.⁸ Indeed, the number of direct SSM casualties in Israel – approximately 300 (after subtracting casualties due to panic and atropine misuse) – shows that these estimates were generally quite accurate. However, the number of direct and indirect fatalities from SSM attacks on Israel was far lower than in the Iraq–Iran war (1980–88), yet the one successful Iraqi missile strike on an American installation in Daharan (Saudi Arabia) on 27 February 1991, which inflicted a toll of 29 lives and wounded another 90 people (similar to the effect of other successful SSM strikes in the First Gulf War) indicates that the losses in Israel could have been far worse. In any event, although loss of life in Israel was light, material damage was not and it provides concrete evidence of the destructive potential of missiles.

Overall, the impact of the SSM threat to Israel was more severe and far-reaching than its manifestation in terms of loss of life, material damage and disruption of normal life. The attacks on Israel by Iraqi al-Hussein missiles (Soviet Scud Bs whose range had been doubled to approximately 650 km by reducing the weight of their warheads from one tonne to about 250 kg and by extending their fuselages to add fuel) should be viewed through a broader strategic prism in which psychological and strategic aspects carry great weight. It may be said that, although the SSMs launched at Israel achieved no significant strategic gain, they nevertheless put Israel’s national strength and staying-power to the test.

The SSM attacks were traumatic for most Israelis. For the first time in its history, Israel was in the embarrassing position of requiring most of its people to close themselves in hermetically-sealed rooms. Many chose to flee from high-risk areas to more secure regions of Israel and some even fled abroad. The unique circumstances of the war gave rise to a sense of danger and helplessness which lasted several weeks.⁹ The axiom that had characterised the public’s way of thinking – that the Israeli home front would be safe against substantial threat in time of war – had been disproved, adversely affecting national morale.¹⁰ Nevertheless, throughout the war, the government’s policy of restraint received massive public support.¹¹ There were certainly rational reasons for this – a desire not to grant Saddam’s wish of dragging Israel into the war, to leave the work of weakening Israel’s enemy to the Coalition, and so forth; however, it may also have reflected a certain lack of resilience, and it certainly revealed the public’s readiness not to react to the blows inflicted on the nation (as long as those blows could be perceived as tolerable); in other words, to a large extent, it revealed a population weary of struggle and war and the weakness of Israel’s staying power.

It is worth noting that the SSM attacks on Israel occurred under less severe circumstances than the Iraqi SSM attacks on Teheran in 1988. The Iranian population had not received the benefit of five minutes advance warning. In Israel missiles fell only at night, so that after a while the country and its economy were able to return to a more normal way of life, whereas in Iran, by contrast, missiles fell mostly in the daytime, thus causing higher casualties, as well as greater fear and disruption of life. In Teheran most of the missiles (approximately 150) fell in salvos, whereas in Israel the vast majority of them fell singly.¹² More important was the fact that, in the Second Gulf War, the Iraqi missile launchers were hunted from the air by the Coalition’s air force, whereas in the war with Iran the Iraqi missile launchers operated without any impediment. Israel probably had fewer casualties because of these differences but her population still suffered a psychological impact.

The SSM attacks posed an acute strategic problem for Israel for three reasons: the lack of a specific military-technological countermeasure against missile attacks; the US politically blocking Israel from launching an offensive option to cope with the missile threat; and the embarrassing situation of Israel’s population being subject to missile attack without the Israel Defence Force (IDF) fighting at the front. In other words, despite their singularity, the SSM attacks were indeed meaningful for Israel.

Israel was attacked by ballistic missiles at a time when no specific appropriate, military-technological response to such a threat existed anywhere in the world. This does not mean that SSMs are absolute weapons with no technology to counter them. We are currently in a period of transition, at the end of which an appropriate countermeasure will be found, developed and deployed; for this is the historical dialectic of weapons development. Recall that, in the Lebanese war (1982), Israel demonstrated an effective solution for the problem of coping with the threat of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), a substantial menace to its air force which first seriously emerged in the Yom Kippur War (1973). Ironically, in 1973, too, some ‘wise’ experts maintained that the missile had twisted the airplane’s tail and even went so far as to predict that fixed-wing aircraft would soon be obsolete.

The seriousness of Israel’s position, and the condition of its national morale during the Second Gulf War, were worsened due to the political constraints placed on her by her ally, the United States, whose sensitivity about preserving the Coalition intact (especially with regard to its Arab partners) bordered on extremism. These constraints prevented Israel from invoking the offensive option at her disposal to counter the source of the threat – the SSM disposition in western Iraq – or from attacking Iraq’s infrastructure. Before the war broke out Israel had been planning to eliminate, or at least neutralise, the Iraqi SSM threat by means of its offensive option – specifically by using its air force in conjunction with ground units. But since the IDF lacked special technological countermeasures, and since the offensive option was not available due to political constraints, Israel found itself helpless in the face of repeated SSM attacks.

Israel’s distress was deepened by the fact that its population had become a hostage and a punching-bag for Saddam Hussein in a war in which Israel was not party and which was being fought far from its borders and under unique circumstances. If the IDF had been involved in active fighting on the front, or even if Israel had struck back at Iraq, the impact made by the SSMs would surely have faded in the din of battle and the matter would have been perceived in a different way by the public. But when a considerable proportion of Israel’s population had to bear the brunt of SSM strikes alone, it is no wonder that fear of the missile threat, and perhaps even fear for Israel’s overall security, were greatly magnified. The sense of hardship and embarrassment were further aggravated by Israel’s failure to deter Iraq since deterrence has always been a crucial pillar of Israel’s security doctrine and posture.

Be that as it may, SSM attacks on Israel did not pose a threat to its survival. The missiles did not create a situation which could be viewed as an unbearable threat to the country in terms of physical conquest or the destruction of its power centres. We were not dealing with weapons that were particularly militarily decisive or effective, thus posing an intolerable threat to Israel’s existence. In fact, Saddam’s only strategic response in the war was to launch SSMs – essentially a feeble response. Firing missiles at Israel did not even succeed in drawing her into the war, as Saddam probably desired. Missiles alone cannot win wars, and they certainly cannot determine their outcome, just as fire power alone cannot do so in conventional warfare. Saddam could have fired all his missiles on Kuwait, and still he would not have succeeded in conquering one inch of her soil, or of Saudi soil (see the discussion in Chapter 7).

It should be noted that the above discussion pertains to conventional SSMs landing on a civilian home front, and not to missiles with non-conventional warheads or conventional SSMs fired with great accuracy at sensitive military objectives. Summing up the discussion thus far, we can make the following observations:

• The Israeli home front is no longer immune to enemy attack, especially by missiles.

• Even though Iraq’s missile attacks were not strategically successful, their strikes on the Israeli population had a severe psychological impact, whether due to the shock of their first occurrence or the unique circumstances of these attacks.

• SSMs are weapons easily employed by a country that either has inferior air power or is reluctant to risk what air power it has. The purpose of these weapons might be to wear down enemy resilience by significant physical, and especially psychological, harassment.

• Today, in contrast to the past, Israel faces a threat of fire power launched from distant countries having no common border with her.

• Missiles alone cannot produce victory, and most probably will not be able to win wars, just as fire power alone cannot determine the victor in conventional warfare. On the other hand, missiles, in contrast to other components of military might, are quite easy to employ.

• In the final analysis, the cost of missile attacks in damage and loss of life is not intolerable; but this depends on the resolve of the population hit and the circumstances of the strikes. The overall impact on Israel, including the psychological anxiety as well as some of the general damage, also stemmed from the apprehension (which proved unfounded) that Saddam would use chemical weapons.

In short, the SSM threat was not negligible, as various military leaders tried to portray it before the war and, regrettably, also after the war.¹³ It is certainly a strategic threat, although it may be of little importance from a strictly military point of view.

In the future, SSMs may well become a greater threat to Israel in the light of the lessons the Arab states in the region might learn from the Second Gulf War. These states are likely to be impressed by the great damage and potent effect that simple surface-to-surface missiles were able to inflict on Israel. Well before the Second Gulf War, most of the Arab states viewed SSMs as a force equaliser countering the proven superiority of the IAF over their own air forces. The Syrian Scud C deal with North Korea, for example, was concluded well before the Second Gulf War (in 1989), although delivery of the missiles did not begin until after the war. Similarly, Syria’s negotiations for M-9 surface-to-surface missiles from China (the outcome of which is not yet clear) were initiated before the war.

In any event, the present and the developing Syrian SSM disposition appear more threatening to Israel than the Iraqi missile arsenal in the Second Gulf War because of the greater weight of the original warheads of the Scud B (approximately 1 tonne), the greater accuracy of the missiles, especially the SS-21 (capable of hitting military point targets within an accuracy of 50–100 metres), and the large number of chemical warheads (several hundred) on their Scuds. The Syrian SSM threat has been substantially increased by their recent acquisition of Scud Cs together with the technology for producing them in Syria.

In general the Arabs view SSMs not only as a force equaliser, but also as a means of striking at distant targets (a so-called ‘long-arm’ capability). Israel’s attacks into Egypt in the War of Attrition (1969–70) and its strategic attacks into Syria in the Yom Kippur War (1973) led the Arabs to conclude that they needed to possess an appropriate response in order to deter Israel, especially since their own air forces did not seem to have the capability to carry out attacks deep into Israel.¹⁴ The Second Gulf War is bound to lead the Arabs to conclude that SSMs can offset Israel’s qualitative superiority, at least as long as there is no adequate countermeasure for coping with missiles. They will therefore undoubtedly continue attempting to increase the quantity of their SSM arsenal and improve its quality in terms of such factors as range, accuracy, warheads, and manoeuvrability.

Improved SSMs wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 SSM Attacks on Israel
• 2 The Rôle of Air Power and Qualitative Weaponry in the War
• 3 Functioning of US Intelligence in the Crisis and the War
• 4 Iraq Refraining from Chemical Warfare: Reasons and Implications
• 5 Israel’s Self-restraint and its Deterrence Posture
• 6 Diminished Risk of War Despite Persistent Military Build-up
• 7 Implications of the Second Gulf War for Israel’s Defence Doctrine
• 8 Principal Findings and Conclusions
• Index