‘Defensive walls and long-range strikes’
Israel can best ride out the regional storm raging around it by adopting a defensive “wall” strategy, mixed with an enhanced long-range strike capability, while cooperating with the surviving Arab powers and kingdoms, a former intelligence and operations officer told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
Lt.-Col. Ron Tira, a reservist at the Israel Air Force’s Campaign Planning Department, and author of The Nature of War: Conflicting Paradigms and Israeli Military Effectiveness (2009), is a former fighter pilot with more than 30 years of experience.
He said the Sykes-Picot system of Arab states is continuing to collapse across much of the Middle East, as Iran exploits the situation to expand its influence in areas that reach right up to Israel’s borders. Anti-state Arab actors, most of them following a radical jihadist agenda, are not far behind, filling the vacuum as well.
“The environment that we’re seeing is fundamentally changing, in that several countries that were a main concern of Israel have disappeared, are in the process of disappearing, or at risk. We have a vacuum created around us. Into that vacuum, new players enter some of them are distant, and which are far stronger than the old players; Iran is far stronger than Syria,” Tira said.