Live Israel A leadership and a society in a constant state of high uncertainty, which puts society in a state of anxiety, panic and constant anticipation, and forces the leadership to make decisions and adopt directions that are not based on real and complete data, and all of this is reflected in the preparation of military and security budgets, so how is that?
As the Israeli war of extermination continues, Gaza Strip And facing several other fronts including: West BankThe Israeli general budget deficit continues to rise, and the budget has been amended more than once. In this context, Israeli Colonel Ram Aminach (62 years old), who served as a financial advisor to the Chief of Staff, head of the Budget Department in the Ministry of Defense, and a member of the General Staff Forum and the Ministry of Defense Administration, believes that preparing the Israeli defense budget faces fundamental challenges represented by poor planning and uncertainty. Israel has previously succeeded in recognizing security threats and assessing their source, size, nature, and timing, and thus designed military budgets and plans capable of confronting threats within the framework of preserving the security doctrine and its main pillars, such as rapid, lightning wars and high deterrence. This is what Israel did not succeed in under the rule of its Prime Minister. Benjamin Netanyahumaking her fall prey to Al-Aqsa Flood And led to the collapse of its security doctrine.
In recent years, under Netanyahu’s rule, Israel has witnessed a trend towards continuous reductions in defense budgets, which has been directly reflected in the number of aircraft, tanks, and various other types of military equipment, along with a reduction in the research and development budget. It has also been reflected in the shrinking size of the army compared to the size of the challenges and threats within the framework of the transformation into a “small, clever, and brilliant” army.
The Al-Aqsa Intifada and its consequences of the outbreak of multiple and ongoing fronts have proven the failure of this approach. Consequently, Israel is now paying the price of reducing military budgets in recent years, which forces it to compensate for this cumulative decline over the years within a few months and under the pressure of the raging war. This will exhaust the government’s general budget, as rapidly inflating military spending in the form of a shock will be at the expense of other items that may be related to developing infrastructure or social and health services for citizens. It will force Israel to bridge the budget deficit resulting from the inflation of military spending by amending tax systems and policies or internal and external borrowing, all of which are options that directly affect the standard of living of Israelis and their financial stability and that of the occupying state.
How are defense budgets made?
The first step in preparing military budgets, according to Colonel Aminakh, begins with the correct and accurate assessment of internal and external security threats by reading and evaluating the enemy’s military budgets, size, capabilities and plans. On this basis, the budgets, defensive and offensive plans, equipment and preparation in the military and security sectors and complementary sectors are designed.
To approach this argument, the colonel assumes the existence of a specific Iranian threat, represented by an unknown number of attacks (S), and each attack includes an unknown number of missiles (Y), and thus the size of the threat is the product of (S) and (Y), i.e. the number of attacks multiplied by the number of missiles in each attack.
Based on the colonel’s experience in preparing military budgets, the cost of Israeli defense is 10 times the cost of an Iranian attack. To confront each ballistic missile, Israel needs at least two Arrow 3s, and if the number of ballistic missiles expected in one attack is 110, Israeli defense needs at least 220 Arrow 3s, at a cost exceeding 3 billion shekels ($827 million). However, it is expected that Iranian ballistic missiles will be accompanied by waves of cruise missiles and drones, which requires the activation of more defense systems. In this case, the cost of repelling a single attack will reach about 4-5 billion shekels ($1.1 to 1.4 billion), meaning that the cost of repelling 10 attacks of this level could reach 50 billion shekels ($14 billion).
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However, this assessment of external threats is limited to Iran only, and when taking into account other attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and the West Bank, the cost of defense will exceed Israel’s ability to bear it, forcing it to request the participation of defense capabilities from the United States and other countries. However, this requires complete trust in friends and allies and their willingness to exert all their capabilities to defend Israel. However, even under this scenario – which is what happened in the Iranian attack last April – part of the air attack succeeded in hitting its targets in Israeli geography. In light of this, it is necessary to resort to the second approach, which is to raise the price of attacking enemies, based on the principle that attack is the best means of defense or deterrence through preemptive attack.
The above considerations place Israel before the following necessities:
- The necessity of recruiting ultra-Orthodox Jews, a trend that still faces great rejection and widespread protests from the Haredim.
- The necessity of raising the military budget to its maximum limits and enhancing investment in both defence and attack.
The impact of uncertainty on the preparation of the Israeli military budget?
The Al-Aqsa Flood proved Israel’s failure in the first basic step when preparing the military budget, which is the ability to estimate the enemy’s capabilities and plans, which was described as an intelligence failure. That is, the flood proved that (X) and (Y) for Israel are still (X) and (Y), that is, variable, unknown and uncertain values.
Faced with unknown (S) and (P), Israel is forced to raise the level of financial, logistical and military hedging, especially since Israel is facing quantitative uncertainty represented in the cost of defense and attack, and qualitative uncertainty represented in understanding the source of the attack, its nature, geography and timing, and this will lead to:
- The cost of Israeli defense and attack is higher than the actual cost required, due to the uncertainty factor.
- The share of military hedging items in the total budget has increased. Hedging is the financial amounts allocated to enhance military capabilities that are not defined or specified in advance.
- This uncertainty in the budget and the reverse in the hedging clause will appear in the operational arena in the form of delayed readiness or confusion.
On the other hand, uncertainty is not limited to quantity and quality only, but also includes time. The continuation of uncertainty over a relatively long period of time leads to the continuous increase of hedging in the budget and in the field reality, and this equation constitutes one of the most important elements of wars of attrition in the modern era.
