Israel will have to evacuate civilian populations during a future conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip or Hizbullah in Lebanon, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi said on Tuesday.
“In the future, will not meet the enemy on the traditional battlefield,” Ashkenazi said. “Hamas chooses to fight within an urban setting. It could have alternatively chosen to fight in the open areas.”
Speaking at the International Conference on Fire and Combined Arms in an Urban Terrain, Ashkenazi said that in a future conflict the IDF will use ground forces and standoff firepower in conjunction.
“It would be elegant if we could stop rocket and missile fire with just standoff firepower,” he said. “But it is not possible and we will need to combine our capabilities and also to maneuver on the ground.”
As a result, Ashkenazi said that the IDF was already working now on creating target banks for future conflicts with Hizbullah and Hamas so that the forces will not enter a conflict and need to begin to look for the enemy which hides among civilians.
“During the Yom Kippur War all we had to do was pick up a pair of binoculars and look for the divisions,” he said. “Nowadays, there are not divisions…and therefore we will need to make an effort to turn the enemy from asymmetric to symmetric.”
A reported recently in The Jerusalem Post, Ashkenazi said that the IDF was looking into procuring new accurate rockets to increase the ground forces’ capability to independently destroy targets with great precision and without needing to rely on air support.
“In a future conflict we will need new weapons systems that are large enough to destroy targets but are small enough to minimize collateral damage,” he said.
The IDF’s Planning Division is currently conducting a review of a procurement plan for new rockets which needs to be approved by the General Staff and if so will be inserted into the IDF’s next multi-year plan, set to go into effect in 2011.
One system under consideration is Accular, developed by Israel Military Industries (IMI), a 60 mm. autonomous surface-to-surface missile guided by a GPS system that puts it within 10 meters of a target. The rocket, designed to destroy artillery batteries and infantry command posts, was successfully tested several months ago in the South.
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