Wampum

Writing in Ha'aretz Barak Ravid claimed that planing for the Gaza war started six months ago, Tsahal needing the time to prepare and the time to target. The bulk of yesterday's targeting was masses of peace officers and recruits, not the Opfors own targeteers and rocketeers.Deception allowed Tsahal to target people "in uniform" but hardly "hostiles" in any effective sense.

Today Tsahal targeted tunnels, the logistical tail of any serious force-on-force conflict. The deceptions of last week created a fiction as to Tsahal's tempo and non-combatant civil servants reported to their jobs. To have killed police out of military necessity, Tsahal's senior staff must be planning sustained combat for a period sufficient for those non-combatants to be armed and re-organized as infantry squads. Days, even weeks. A tempo similar to the First Battle of the Marne -- the battle won (in the sense that the Germans were unable to outflank the defensive forces north and west of Paris) by taxi cabs. So ground ops, and Tsahal's share of toe tags, may have been on plan for T+3 or T+4 for several months.

The more non-effectives targeted, the more incompetent the Tsahal planners, targeteers, and operational tactical leaders are, the shorter and more " political" (remember, this is a war of election) this war will be. The fewer non-effectives Tsahal kills, the more careful Tsahal is in expending it's inventories of munitions, of targets, and "international opinion", the more "military" this war will be.

There is a problem with the claim that yesterday's mass execution can be justified by appealing to the latent capability of policing trained civilians -- if their "readiness" to be re-trained as infantry makes them operationally capable within the window of combat operations -- and if this "window" is deeper than a few days -- then targeting any group of men between the ages of 15 and 50 has equal utility.

Deception is not limited to just the war planner who strikes first. How many Qassams rockets does it take to get Tsahal to enter it's Opfor's kill zones? How many Grad-P rockets? In all those years of preparation, is the primary weapon to engage main battle tanks and lighter armored targets mere artisinal rockets?

I don't have the answer, I simply assume technical competence in the beseiged defenders, and so the pan-Israeli electoral political party policy of "destroying Hamas" means a willingness to kill several hundred Israelis, by sending them back into Gaza and the refugee camps. With the certain knowledge that the announced strategic goal cannot be obtained by mere military means.