Obama's Proposed "Common Core" - Rotten to Its Core?

Random Thoughts

By Thomas Sowell

Random thoughts from wise thinkers:

• "We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." (F.A. Hayek)

• "Many respectable writers agree that if a man reasonably believes that he is in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm from his assailant he may stand his ground and that if he kills him he has not exceeded the bounds of lawful self-defense. That has been the decision of this court." (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brown v. United States, 1921)

• "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." (John Adams)

• "A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence." (Jean-Francois Revel)

• "The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie." (J.A. Schumpeter)

• "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." (T.S. Eliot)

• "The study of human institutions is always a search for the most tolerable imperfections." (Richard A. Epstein)

• "There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief." (Edmund Burke) 

• "We do not live in the past, but the past in us." (U.B. Phillips)

• "It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be to-morrow." (James Madison)

• "A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests." (Milton Friedman)

• "...leniency toward criminals contrasted starkly with severity toward the law-abiding citizen's right to defend himself or herself." (Joyce Lee Malcolm)

• "A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement." (John Stuart Mill)

• "Criticism is easy; achievement is more difficult." (Winston Churchill)

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More intrusion by Obama in education with "Common Core."  Government is akin to hell which has been said to be  paved with good intentions and usually misses the mark with unintended consequences!.

You would think Obama would give up having already begun destroying our health care system but Obama is all for change and we are getting the short end of it as now, even Congress, has been allowed to opt out and we are left  the stuckees! 

I would not trust anything Obama proposes that is billed as an improvement. After all just think about "The Affordable Health Care Act" and that should allay any concerns he knows what he is doing beyond destroying whatever he touches.

Yesterday, on our way back from Louisville, we stopped by The Savannah Classical Academy to see what progress they are making (school begins Monday) and Ben, the headmaster, took us around and introduced us to some of their faculty. WOW!  What an impressive group of young, beautiful and enthusiastic teachers. Ben said they have assembled an outstanding faculty and the training folks from Hillsdale College were overwhelmed when they were here last week.

Chatham County bureaucrats seem to be  doing everything in their power to make life difficult for this Walton Family and Hillsdale College funded Charter School,on whose Board I hope to serve, and are positioning to take credit for the school's achievements and lay blame for any problems.

I daresay, the kids who are privileged to attend SCA are going to get an outstanding education and will thrive. In speaking with one of the teachers she was giddy about the opportunity to expose her students to true learning experiences having already been stifled in/by the public system.(See 1 below.)

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Scandals are a Republican and racist myth! But then what are Obama's Czars and Czarinas doing? (See 2 below.)

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This is why AIPAC is effective. When you no longer can trust the president Congress and the American people become the only alternative.  (See 3 below.)

While Obama unilaterally disarms America it is critical for Israel to know where the IDF is going! (See 3a below.)

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Dick

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1)More, More, and More on the Common Core
By Hugh Hewitt
I spent much of last week's radio shows in conversations with proponents and opponents of the "Common Core." (Other topics were covered of course. There is a world wide terror alert, for example, and then there was a long conversation with Davis Gaines on life in the theater, but there was a lot of Common Core talk.)

The last two transcripts of this series of interviews are now posted at theTranscripts page, one with Patricia Levesque, who is the CEO of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and one with Emmett McGroarty, an opponent of the Common Core, who is with the American Principles Project.

Interviews earlier in the week on the subject were with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and current Florida Senator Marco Rubio, as well as with Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews and former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, both of whom can fairly be described as neither opponents nor proponents. As noted, those five interviews are also at the Transcripts page.

Ten conclusions, based on these interviews and a ton of email and yet another round of unexpected "Common Core" questions at an unrelated event on another topic with Dennis Prager in Sacramento on Thursday night:

1. Common Core is a well-intended effort at school reform, aimed at building an achievement standard floor on which all American public education is expected to stand.

2. Common Core is perceived as a dumbed-down "ceiling" by some, an ideological imposition of federal standards by others, and an ideological exercise by many.

3. Political momentum against the Common Core is large and growing at an almost exponential rate. Proponents of the Core set out to persuade elites, not parents and activists, and this has created widespread suspicion among groups used to being excluded from policy making and already feeling as though policy makers are insulated from voters.

4. The overreach of the Obama Administration is greatly resented and Common Core is seen as a part of that overreach. Tying adoption of the Common Core to federal education dollars is understood to be blackmail of the standard D.C. type, and not unlike the attempted jam down of Medicaid expansion via Obamacare which the Supreme Court struck down even as it upheld the individual mandate in the summer of 2012.

5. There are "big data" implications of the Common Core, and in this environment of sudden and widespread hostility to the collection of data which could possibly be misused by government in the future, the reality of the vast collection of data on students is hitting at exactly the wrong time for pro-Common Core forces.

6. There is a whole lot of money being made via the adaptation of the Common Core, just as any enormous government program creates wealth among those provided mandated services, testing and supervision. Opponents of the Common Core have begun to "follow the money" and the MSM will not be far behind.

7. There is very little upside and enormous downside for center-right politicians to be pro-Common Core. Education reform is a huge issue on the center-right, and there are many causes to promote such as charter public schools. Candidates seeking to attract pro-reform votes can do so by singling out many reforms other than the Common Core, support for which --fairly or unfairly-- will in fact cost them votes.

8. There is very little political upside for Common Core as teachers' union are at best ambivalent about it. Many fine teachers who have emailed or called me this week strongly support Common Core reform, but the political realities are heavily stacked against the innovation.

9. Local school board members and administrators should be prepared to pause and listen to criticism as the anti-Core movement spreads, and not to react defensively to it, even if the local district is responding to state mandate. Rather, every district that can do so should stress that the Core is a floor, and that its ceiling is going to be much, much higher, and that its children's data will not be shared if it has anything to say about it.

10. Common Core proponents had better huddle quickly and develop a systematic, wide-spread and responsive outreach to Core opponents or the work they have done will be undone, and quickly. It won't be long until "Sweeps Weeks" find the right viewer demographic with "Is the Common Core Dumbing Down Your Kid?" One of the key charges of the anti-Core folks, for example, is that algebra is being moved from the 8th grade to the 9th grade. I don't know if that is true, or if true, if it is a good thing, a bad thing, or a "it depends" thing, but the conflict is going to make for great television, and pro-Core people have to defend a change that has nameless, faceless Washington D.C. bureaucrats dictating via the purse what must be taught, and collecting data on kids.

My last observation is not about the Common Core but about the MSM: It has again largely missed --wholly missed in some places-- a major story from the world of education which their readers and watchers are finding about via new media. Jay Mathews of course was up to speed, but this is front page stuff with great story potential (follow the money, again) and enormous implications or state and local politics and indeed for federal elections in the next cycle.

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2)Cracking the Czars

By J.R. Dunn

As expected, Obama's second term has deteriorated into a welter of scandals unmatched by any previous administration, including those of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Watergate was a minor scandal that simply grew amid the hothouse of D.C. politics and media, while most of the Clinton scandals involved either skirt or money grabbing. The Obama scandals uniquely strike at the heart of American democracy, based as they are on Obama's attempt to transform the nation to reflect his Augustan image of himself.

The scandals have not yet had the impact they should, due largely to media manipulation, public inertia, and serious fumbling among Republicans and conservatives -- for instance, Darryl Issa allowing the odious Lois Lerner 5th Amendment protection she was not entitled to.

The only solution is to continue the pressure. Watergate required nearly eighteen months of simmering before it boiled over. The same is likely to be true here. This leads us to the question as to why one of the most potentially fertile fields for administration scandal, the Obama czars, has been so far overlooked.

As with everything else, the concept of the czar -- extra-constitutional public officials hired by the Executive branch to spearhead particular efforts on an emergency basis -- has been abused by Obama. Czars go back to FDR's "dollar-a-year" men appointed to oversee various aspects of the war effort. The concept was revived in the 1960s to attack drug abuse, presented as a crisis situation not amenable to ordinary solutions.

In truth, the "drug czars" were no more than a PR gimmick. Drug smuggling could have been (and still could be) shut down utilizing already existing resources. This has not been done for a number of reasons, including relations with Mexico, criminal infiltration of law enforcement and politics, and the fact that many leading political families - the Kennedys and Gores, for example -- have drug addicts in their ranks. It would be going too far to assert that thousands have died, a criminal class has been nurtured, and American cities crippled to assure that David Kennedy had a steady supply of heroin and cocaine, but that factor can't be overlooked either.

The drug czars were a method of making it appear that something was being done without actually going to any real effort. This remained true as the concept was expanded to include other "intractable problems" such as race relations, health care, and housing. By Bill Clinton's term, their number had expanded to eight, not a single one of whom is on record as having accomplished anything.

In his genius for sleaze, Obama saw something else in the position of "czar": a means of overcoming the limitations of the system of checks and balances that would enable him to carry out programs under the radar and without oversight by Congress -- or anyone else either. The czars were tailor-made for Obama's cards-in-sleeve method of government. A more fitting example of the perils of monkeying with the constitutional order could not be devised.

Obama has applied the concept of czar with alacrity unknown to previous administrations. He began with 32, shortly expanded to 39, and thereafter to the mid-40s. The numbers have shifted but have always remained within that range. 

How many are there now? That's difficult to say. So opaque is the cloak of bureaucratic secrecy surrounding these positions that there is no complete, accurate, and up-to-date list of Obama czars active in 2013. The administration has played a consistent game of three-card monte all down the line, abolishing some positions only to reestablish them under other names, consolidating some into a single position while spinning off others, and every other conceivable bureaucratic trick.

What have the Obama czars accomplished? We don't know. They don't report to anybody (except perhaps the Chicago Augustus himself). They don't testify before Congress. They don't publish. We don't know how many personnel are involved, or who they might be. We don't know how much has been spent by them, and on what. We don't know, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, what we don't know.

We do know the names (well, some of them). While a few are well-known figures of weight and achievement such as Paul Volcker and Ashton Carter, most are political and academic hacks of the progressive type who share in Obama's vaporous ideals and, much like him, have never directed or managed anything in their lives.

And like their master, a number of them have been involved in scandals.

● Vivek Kundra - Obama's first "infotech czar" (excuse me -- Federal Chief Information Officer) was appointed in 2009. In between leaving his previous job as chief tech consultant for D.C. and taking up his new federal post, his business was raided by the FBI and two of his staffers, including his right-hand man Yusuf Acar, were arrested. Acar had been steadily promoted by Kundra to positions of increasing responsibility. Along with Sushil Bansal, he had formulated a scheme combining bribery and kickbacks utilizing ghost employees and forged time sheets. Kundra went on leave for five days before it was confirmed that he was not under suspicion, whereupon he ascended to czarhood. For the next two years, American infotech was given to the oversight of a man who had no idea that a vast fraud was being run out of his own office.

● Nancy-Ann DeParle, erstwhile health policy czar, could serve as a revolving-door poster girl. After a stint as Medicare chief for Bill Clinton, she departed government for the health-care industry, where she earned something on the order of six million dollars from various directorships and boards. Unfortunately, many of those companies wound up under investigation or worse. Several were involved in kickback and related billing schemes, others violated federal quality standards, (including one that "neglected" to issue warnings about a flawed implanted heart defibrillator responsible for 12 deaths), while still others were hit with whistleblower lawsuits. One company, Boston Scientific Corp., received no less than five state or federal subpoenas during a single year. While it can be argued that as a director DeParle was not directly responsible for operations, we could also paraphrase Oscar Wilde to note that while sitting on the board of one corrupt company might be a misfortune, sitting on the boards of six seems a little... careless.

● Adolfo Carrion was Obama's original "housing czar", or "Head of the White House Office of Urban Affairs." While serving as Bronx borough president, Carrion benefited from tens of thousands of dollars  in donations from development companies that coincidentally received borough contracts worth hundreds of millions shortly afterward. An architect who renovated Carrion's City Island home magically ended up working on three Bronx housing projects, though he didn't actually get paid for the work he did for Carrion until questions arose surrounding Carrion's nomination. Funny how New York politics looks so much like Chicago politics, isn't it?

● Steven Rattner, Obama's car czar, was actually nudged out of office due to scandal. His previous investment firm, the Quandrangle Group, came under SEC scrutiny so intense that not even an offhand word from the Chicago messiah could avert it. The company wound up paying $12 million in fines due to a kickback scheme involving a New York State pension fund -- a scheme in which Rattner, it seems, had personally arranged the payments.

● Then there's Carol Browner who... well, we actually have no idea what Carol might have done. You see, when selected as Obama's climate czar, the first thing she did was order all electronic records of her previous government service as EPA chief, including hard drives, to be destroyed. She also refused to use email under any circumstances. It seems that an email involving a department she once worked for had been subject to some kind of "misinterpretation." All perfectly understandable -- if somebody working for the government didn't want to use phones, or writing, who would ever object?

And the others? See Rumsfeld, Donald. We don't know, and nobody -- in the Congress, the media, or anywhere else -- has bothered to ask. (And I'm not overlooking Van Jones -- being a communist is an abomination, not a scandal.) But nobody is going to tell me that among several dozen handpicked Obama goofs, operating in complete secrecy and under Chicago rules, there is no mischief going on.

The czars represent rich pickings for any congressman with a spine of titanium and a suitable committee seat. Staffers and investigators need to be dispatched like Bolshies storming the Winter Palace. Obama will doubtlessly squeal "executive privilege," but it would be worthwhile in and itself to establish once and for all just how far that extends.  If necessary, the courts can be utilized, with subpoenas aimed at where the funding for these positions came from, who got how much, and where it all went.  I guarantee you that rocks will start to flip over, with all kinds of interesting specimens wriggling out. Those with the power of speech will start to talk. Who knows -- one of them may even have an old hard drive of Carole B. in its mandibles. 

Hitting the czars would open a valuable second (or third, or maybe fourth, if anyone's counting) front in the scandal campaigns against Barack Obama. Increase the weight and pressure and eventually something will give.

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3)Barring the IDF, Netanyahu’s last resort against possible Obama détente with Iran is US Congress

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at his first news conference Tuesday, Aug. 6, said his government would not discuss his country’s nuclear program with the world powers under pressure. No sooner had he spoken than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu shot back: The only thing that worked in the past was pressure, so the answer now is increased pressure.

It is an open secret that what Rouhani is after is the lifting of US and European sanctions which are crippling Iran’s economy. He is not altogether unrealistic: Only last February, the Six World Powers made Tehran an offrer to gradually ease sanctions if Iran stopped enriching uranium – even temporarily.
That was before he was elected. Now, Rouhani wants more dramatic concessions on sanctions to prove his worth to the Iranian people and assure them he will be alleviating their economic hardships very soon.

The Obama administration is sharply divided by the debate for and against removing sanctions. Proponents argue that Rouhani, who is perceived in the West as a moderate, should be encouraged because he may be the man to eventually persuade Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to freeze Iran’s nuclear program.

He succeeded once before, in October 2003, when he was Iran’s senior negotiator, they maintain - forgetting that Tehran was then gripped by fear that the US army, which had invaded Iraq in March of that year, would turn on next-door Iran and wipe out its nuclear program.

After a pause of less than a year, when Khamenei and Rouhani saw the US army becoming mired in Iraq and therefore no threat, they switched their nuclear weapons program back on at full power.

Judging from this precedent, Netanyahu advised a visiting delegation of 36 US Members of Congress in Jerusalem not to heed Rouhani’s demand to drop the pressure, i.e. sanctions. Nothing else works, he said.
At the same time, the prime minister, like his American guests, is well aware that pressure in the form of sanctions never slowed Iran’s race for a nuclear bomb, but rather accelerated it.

On Monday, Aug. 5, The Wall Street Journal divulged a fact known for six months to Israeli and US intelligence communities – that in mid-2014, Iran will finish building a heavy water reactor at Arak in northwestern Iran and be able to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs from the reactor’s spent fuel rods, a method used by India, Pakistan and North Korea. Plutonium for bomb-making will therefore be available sooner than enriched uranium.

However, a large surface reactor is an easier target to hit than the underground facilities at Fordo that house Iran's uranium-enrichment facilities.

This was behind the thinking of an unnamed senior Israeli official, when he commented to the media on Tuesday that Israel was capable of attacking the Iranian nuclear program on its own without American back-up – albeit less effectively than an operation by the US or with American operational support. He meant that Israel could destroy key components of Iran’s nuclear program, but not disable it entirely.

Military and intelligence sources find in these remarks a growing acceptance in Israel’s political and military officials that President Obama’s reluctance to involve the US in military action in Syria applies equally to Iran. Netanyahu is going to great lengths to present Israel’s case to members of Congress, whom he sees as his last resort for winning Obama around. He figures that even if the US President is resolved to go easy with Rouhani and lift sanctions, Congress will block him.

This is of course no more than a holding tactic and therefore susceptible to compromise at some point.

Its weakness lies in the fact that not only is Obama balking at military options, so too is Netanyahu. The Iranians, including their new president Rouhani, who monitor every twitch of every US and Israeli political and military muscle, will understand that for now, they can keep going forward with their nuclear plans without fear of interference.

3a)  Where Is the Israeli Military Heading?

by Amir Rapaport
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 210

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The army’s new multi-year plan shows that the IDF is
reorganizing its priorities for the coming decade. Military priorities
include the attainment of intelligence superiority, development of knockout
fire delivery capability, active defense systems, cyber warfare, and border
protection systems, while the ground forces are to be downgraded in
importance and priority.

The recent announcement regarding future cuts in the defense budget, as well
as the launching of the new multi-year plan for the IDF (“Te’uza”), prompt
the question: where is the Israeli military heading?

The IDF formulated several principles of warfare in recent years: keeping
the campaign as short as possible, allowing minimum damage to the home front
(assuming that the home front will have a hard time facing a prolonged
missile attack), and achieving a clear and definite image of victory. The
Israeli military is not interested in another confrontation whose outcome is
less than unequivocal, like the 2006 Lebanon war.

In order to uphold these principles, several objectives must be met. At the
top of the list stands the attainment of intelligence superiority, followed
by the development of a knockout fire delivery capability, mainly from the
air. A high priority is also assigned to active defense systems, cyber
warfare, and protecting borders (specifically those with Syria and Egypt).
These objectives were formulated at a workshop attended by the most senior
officers of the IDF in the summer of 2013, in which participants were
divided into work teams. One team, led by the head of the IDF Operations
Directorate, Maj. Gen. Yoav Har-Even, addressed the operational concept. A
second team, led by the head of the IDF Planning Directorate, Maj. Gen.
Nimrod Shefer, addressed the reorganization of the various IDF branches. A
third team, led by the head of the IDF C4I Directorate (responsible for
telecommunications), Maj. Gen. Uzi Moscovitch, addressed the advancement of
ideas for improving firepower and command and control (C2) through the
computer network. The fourth team, led by head of the IDF Manpower
Directorate, Maj. Gen. Orna Barbivai, addressed the feasibility of revising
the model of the standing army in view of the expected cuts in army
personnel.

According to the army Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, Israel is a
world power in three major fields: unmanned vehicles (mainly in the air),
precision fire, and C2. The main question going forward is whether to place
the emphasis on fields regarded as relative weaknesses of the IDF – such as
the maneuvering capabilities of the ground forces – or to further strengthen
the fields in which the army excels anyway. Gantz ruled for the latter
option.

Continued Spending for R&D and Platform Procurement
Many of the ideas currently on the agenda were in fact included in a
previous multi-year plan (“Kela”), led primarily by Gantz, Deputy Chief of
Staff Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, and then Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, who is
currently Defense Minister.

As part of the battle over the defense budget, the army recently created the
impression that the cuts annulled much of the procurement and R&D projects
designed to significantly strengthen the IDF. This is not exactly the case.
The Israeli defense industries and the army itself currently have more than
100 different development projects in the pipeline, most of which are
secret.

At the same time, the procurement budgets of the IDF for submarines and
fighter planes remain untouched. By the end of the decade the IDF will have
six Dolphin-class submarines, with the cost of each submarine touching the
billion dollar mark. The army will also receive two squadrons (of 24
aircraft each) of the F-35 future fighter, a deal to be covered by US aid.
One squadron has already been ordered, and the actual aircraft delivery will
begin in late 2016. The second squadron will be requisitioned in the
following years.

Investment in UAVs, Satellites, and Missiles

Over the last decade the Israeli military has invested a fortune in the
procurement of unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs). This trend will continue;
in the coming years, new tactical UAVs, as well as larger Hermes-900 UAVs,
will be delivered to the IDF. IAI will supply additional super-UAVs, like
the Boeing 737-sized “Eitan” (Heron TP) UAV, as well as an abundance of
miniature drones.

By the year 2025, the army’s UAVs will probably be executing all missions,
from intelligence gathering – capable of detecting any minor suspect
movement on land or at sea – to strike missions. Even today, the operational
range of the UAVs employed by the IDF easily covers long-range destinations,
such as Iran. It is for this purpose that satellite-based C2 systems were
developed for the IDF. These systems render irrelevant the limitation
regarding the radio communication required to operate these vehicles at
extreme ranges.

In the coming decades, the IDF will continue to invest in satellites as
well, though at a somewhat slower pace than the Ministry of Defense would
have preferred. Some satellite projects are in real danger in view of the
expected cuts (such as the development of “mini satellites”). The major
projects in this field will not be interrupted, and the IDF will continue to
employ satellites as a primary tool for intelligence gathering and
communication.

Moreover, in the foreseeable future, outer space is expected to evolve into
an actual battlefield. Various countries are preparing to intercept one
another’s satellites using long-range missiles. One of the options discussed
in this context involved the employment of fighter aircraft during wartime
to launch miniature satellites that will promptly begin to orbit the earth,
so that the enemy would not have sufficient time to study their orbits and
intercept them.

Only minimal details have been released regarding a recent secret test of a
rocket propulsion system for long-range missiles. According to foreign
publications, this test was a part of a major project associated with the
development of an advanced surface-to-surface missile, the Jericho-4, which
has a range of thousands of kilometers.

Within the shorter ranges, the IDF is regarded as the world’s most advanced
military organization in the field of precision fire delivery using missiles
launched from the air, ground, sea, and submarines. The world media has even
claimed that precision-guided missiles of these types were responsible for
the attacks staged in recent months against strategic weapon stores in
Syria. In order to hit a target that emerges and becomes visible for only a
number of seconds, a state-of-the-art intelligence gathering network is
required, along with a permanent link between the intelligence gathering
resources and the various types of fire delivery elements.

In order to meet this challenge, new fields of activity have been launched
by the IDF, with such impressive definitions as NCW (Network Concentric
Warfare) and IBW (Intelligence-Based Warfare). Through the contribution of
NCW and IBW systems, the army’s fire delivery capacity has increased several
times, in comparison to the 2006 Lebanon war. By 2025, the fire delivery
capability of the IDF is expected to be more similar to a computer game than
to the battlefields of old.

According to the decisions of the IDF General Staff, only projects led by
the General Staff – and not those led by the military branches – will be
authorized henceforth. The prerequisite to be met by each project is that it
must make a contribution to the entire operational capability of the IDF,
rather to the capability of a specific branch (such as the air force, navy,
or the ground forces). As a rule, the Intelligence Branch and IAF will enjoy
total precedence within the IDF until the middle of the next decade, with
the Intelligence Branch enjoying a higher priority than the IAF. While all
the other arms and service branches, including the IAF, will be closing down
units, the intelligence budget will not be reduced. Up until now, the IDF
assigned top-quality personnel to the pilot training course of the IAF. Now,
however, the cyber warfare teams get top priority.

Until the year 2025, substantial investments will be made in anti-missile
and anti-aircraft defense systems (including the new systems Arrow-III and
David’s Sling, which cannot be “frozen,” as these are joint Israeli-American
projects). Substantial funds will also be invested in radar systems designed
to spot sources of enemy fire and in active protection systems for vehicles,
capable of identifying incoming missiles and destroy them in mid-air. In the
coming years, IAI will complete a major project, Barak-8, involving a
state-of-the-art naval missile defense system.
Reduction in the Ground Forces

The ground forces of the IDF will take the most substantial cut. Between
2002 and 2006, the ground forces budget was cut by no less than 25 percent.
This trend was suspended pursuant to the 2006 war, but will be resumed soon.
The development of fast, continuous maneuvering capabilities is an issue
that is disputed within the military and political echelon.

IDF authorities do not believe that the ground forces will become obsolete
because of drastic reductions in training activities, but its order of
battle will be reduced. The demobilized armored formations will be replaced
by less-expensive formations, equipped with light, agile vehicles, wheels
instead of tracks, and by regional formations that would be assigned to cope
with the ever-increasing number of terror incidents along the borders.
The IDF is expected to announce a substantial reduction in the manufacture
of the newest Merkava tanks – whose rate of production has been slow
anyway – and the complete halting of the production of Namer APCs (armored
personnel carriers). This decision will require a $15 million compensation
to the General Dynamics Corporation, which had developed a production line
for this APC in the US – in view of the Israeli commitment to requisition a
guaranteed minimum amount, a commitment the army will not uphold.
Conclusion

The army’s plans look excellent. The main problem is that certain
scenarios – such as the collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan, the
demise of the peace agreement with Egypt, a third Intifada, or a nuclear
threat from Iran – can no longer be regarded as unreasonably fanciful. Such
developments, or other unforeseeable ones, could render all of these plans
irrelevant.
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Amir Rapaport is a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies. He is also editor of Israel Defense magazine, defense
analyst for Maariv, and a former military correspondent for Yediot Ahronot.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the
Greg Rosshandler Family

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