God only knows how Hezbollah trains its fighters, but I have a pretty good idea what the Israelis are up to because Abe Lapson, an IDF director of combat engineering, hosted me at the urban warfare training center in the northern Negev near the border with Gaza.Read the whole thing and look at the pictures, which are spectacular as usual.
They built a scale model city out there in the desert where Israeli soldiers engage in sophisticated combat exercises. They fight each other in these exercises, so it’s always a challenge. Trained Israeli soldiers are far more dangerous than any army—even Hezbollah—the modern Arab world has yet produced.
I saw the skyline of the “city” as we approached on a road through desert, and from a distance it almost looks real. Up close it’s different.
“It almost looks like a set for a video game,” I said.
Lapson chuckled and said, “But it’s real.”
I could see everything from the control tower. The buildings are smaller and farther apart on the outskirts than they are in the center, just like a real village or town in the West Bank, Gaza, or Lebanon. And I have to say they did a pretty good job with the realism. Pyrotechnic teams set off explosions. Vehicles emit different colors of smoke depending on what kind of damage they’ve supposedly taken. Walls have simulated blast holes because doors and windows are often booby-trapped, forcing soldiers to create alternate entrances.
The Israelis here shoot blanks at each other, and they wear sensors on their torsos and limbs that tell them when and where they’ve been “shot” and whether or not they are “dead.”
“We’ve even argued about how much garbage we should put on the ground for realism,” Lapson said.
The casbah and the refugee camp are the most dangerous places. They’re built in a hodgepodge manner and are usually crowded. It’s hard to find adequate cover because roofs often cover the paths. None of the Israeli soldiers standing above can provide overwatch protection.
Of course, the fake casbah and refugee camp are easier to fight in than the real ones. In the real world there are people, donkeys, clothes lines, vendors, and noise, not to mention live ammunition and traps.
I’ve never been to a Hezbollah training camp, although I did ask Hezbollah officials if I could see one before they blacklisted me for “writing against the party.” They refused. Still, I’m certain they don’t have dummies representing civilians who aren’t to be touched.
The Israelis do, though. They place mannequins on the grounds dressed in the clothes of civilians and peacekeepers as well as enemy soldiers and terrorists.
“The other side includes both hostiles and civilians,” Lapson said, “and the hostiles will often embed themselves among the civilians. We go over a large number of what-if scenarios. We imbue an ethical and moral backbone in all our soldiers from the very beginning, and we have humanitarian officers with our infantry troops. We take extra precautions, even when it puts our own troops in danger.”
You could argue, I suppose, that the Israelis pulled a con job on me, that they planted these civilian-clothed mannequins as part of some Soviet-style propaganda campaign, but there’s no evidence that’s what happened. Totalitarian regimes sometimes use Potemkin stage pieces and actors to fool foreign journalists. Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) had just such an experience when he visited North Korea. Israel, though, is the sort of place that only behaves this way in the feverish minds of conspiracy theorists.
“We train our soldiers to respect sacred buildings,” Lapson said. “We have a lot of respect for the holy places of all peoples and all cultures. This is something we integrate into our training. We train our soldiers with extra sensitivity even though we know it can be used against us by our enemies.”
“What do you do if someone is firing at you from a mosque?” I said.
“That’s a decision that’s made by the higher ranks on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “It’s always case-by-case even though it slows down the pace of the fighting. It’s very slow when we have house-to-house combat. It’s already slow, but when we have to stop and judge each individual case on its merits, we have to slow down the fighting even more.”
I have mixed feelings about this. I'm all in favor of abiding by the Geneva Convention and not targeting civilians, but the IDF goes much further than the Geneva Convention requires - much further than any army in the World goes - to avoid civilian casualties on the other side. That carries a price as we saw in Jenin in 2002 - we take much higher casualties than necessary among our own soldiers. Meanwhile, the other side uses its civilians as human shields, knowing that we will continue to play by the rules.
The rules also need updating, as I have discussed before. They are designed for battles between uniformed forces and not for fighting terrorists.
