Israel Matzav: Time Magazine: Israeli military expert told cabinet Israel can't delay Iran for more than a year

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Time Magazine: Israeli military expert told cabinet Israel can't delay Iran for more than a year

Time Magazine is claiming that a senior IDF officer told the cabinet last year that an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear installations will not set Iran back more than a year.

But could Israel go it alone?

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But as quoted by a senior security official, the assessment offered to the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last autumn was not altogether encouraging:
“I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,” the official quoted a senior commander as saying. “If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way.”

The key word is”meaningful.” The working assumption behind Israel’s military preparations has been that, to be worth mounting, a strike must be likely to delay Tehran’s nuclear capabilities by at least two years. But given the wide geographic dispersion of Iran’s atomic facilities–combined with the limits of Israel’s air armada–the Jewish State can expect to push back the Iranian program only by a matter of months — a year at most, according to the official, who attributed the estimate to the Atomic Energy Commission that Israel has charged with assessing the likely effect of a strike.
That assessment comes as no surprise to military experts both inside and outside Israel. ”That’s a perfectly logical calculation, for somebody who actually knows how Israel assesses this,” says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Perhaps the most respected military analyst working stateside, Cordesman went on for a while in our telephone interview about how weary he’d grown of reading back-of-the-envelope estimates of “former Israeli officials.” The reality, he says, is that the decisive, actual capabilities are known only to the military professionals who have the details in front of them. Even then, the course of action – in this case, whether Israel will launch the attack it has spent more than a decade equipping and training its military for — will be determined by more than strictly military matters:
Israel is going to act strategically. It’s going to look at the political outcome of what it says and does, not simply measure this in terms of some computer game and what the immediate tactical impact is.
What everyone agrees, however, is that as formidable as the Israeli Air Force is, it simply lacks the capacity to mount the kind of sustained, weeks-long aerial bombardment required to knock down Iran’s nuclear program, with the requisite pauses for damage assessments followed by fresh waves of bombing. Without forward platforms like air craft carriers, Israel’s air armada must rely on mid-air refueling to reach targets more than 1,000 miles away, and anyone who reads Israel’s order of battle sees it simply doesn’t have but a half dozen or so. Another drawback noted by analysts is Israel’s inventory of bunker-busting bombs, the sort that penetrate deep into concrete or rock that shield the centrifuge arrays at Natanz and now Fordow, near Qum. Israel has loads of GBU-28s, which might penetrate Natanz. But only the U.S. Air Force has the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator that could take on Fordow, the mountainside redoubt where critics suspect Iran would enrich uranium to military levels.

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Labels: bunker busters, IAF, Iranian nuclear threat