by Uzi Eilam
Successful candidates for senior positions within the IDF are selected by a small group of generals headed by the CGS, and the proposed points for discussion regarding each candidate are prepared by the Head of Staff Administration. I decided to thoroughly prepare myself for the meeting with long conversations with each of the candidates. Ultimately, I decided in favor of the ground forces candidate, reflecting my belief in the priority of ground warfare in R&D.
I was on edge when I arrived to the selection meeting in the office of the new CGS, Moshe Levi. I wasn’t yet unfamiliar with the dynamics of such meetings and worried that my colleagues, the generals, might back me into a corner. I prepared a table evaluating the candidates with respect to the necessary skills and qualities, assigned a point value to each of the qualities and a total score to each of the candidates. The generals were extremely impressed by the methodical appearance of the table, which looked very professional. The fact that my table showed that a particular ground forces officer was the leading candidate quickly took the wind out of the sails of the supporters of the other candidates. After everyone in attendance made the arguments they were obliged to make in favor of their respective candidates, the CGS concluded the meeting by approving my selection. Levi understood the importance of selecting a unit director with whom I wanted to work. Relieved, I returned to my office to call Colonel Shmulik Keren, the next director of R&D, to inform him of the decision. “You won’t regret it,” he said after thanking me with his characteristic composure. Indeed, I never did.
An Overall Policy for Defense R&D
One of the first issues I worked on at MAFAT was the reformulation of a new defense research and development policy. I recalled the experience of formulating and approving policy in the R&D Unit back in 1974, when the pain of the Yom Kippur War was still so fresh in our minds. Particularly, I remembered the advice of CGS Motta Gur, who told me that I would have no trouble getting policy approved as long as it did not involve allocating budgets or setting priorities. I remembered the formidable challenges we had faced back then in the 1970s even though the policy we presented to the General Staff and the defense ministry had no explicit budgets or prioritization.
I never dreamed that this undertaking would be so long, complex, arduous and involve such intense inter-departmental battles. I called a meeting of the directors of the MAFAT units: the R&D Unit, the Technological Infrastructure Unit, the Budgetary-Organizational Unit, and the Foreign Contacts Unit. I came armed with a copy of the historic defense R&D policy document from 1974. Pointing out that the issue had not been addressed for the past decade, I told the directors present that we needed to look forward and adopt a new approach to create technological leadership for the entire defense establishment. One of the most important differences between our situation in the early 1970s and the mid-1980s was our mastery of advanced technologies. By 1986 we understood that we could no longer set our sights on what was happening in the US and say that in 10 years we would possess those capabilities. Israel’s progress during the past decade at that point meant that we had to look into the unknown future.
The fact that the Israeli defense establishment was so close to the front lines of technological development posed a challenge that we had never addressed in an organized and systematic manner. On that festive spring day, I set an ambitious three-month deadline by which we needed to formulate a new policy document. Little did I know that it would actually take three years. Nobody could have foreseen the innumerable obstacles we would face along the way. Compared to the 1974 plan, the major change in our new approach included budgets and prioritization — inevitably entailing a great deal of work and many phases of discussion and revision of the different document chapters.
The more progress we made the more new vistas opened up. It was important to begin with a chapter on the technological forecast that would serve as the foundation for defense R&D into the foreseeable future. The deeper we delved the longer this chapter grew. The subjects addressed in the technological introductory chapter were not particularly classified, enabling us to share the drafts with teams of academics and to consult with Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Technology Analysis & Forecasting. By that point, the center was headed by Baruch Raz, whom Tel Aviv University President Yuval Ne’eman and I had selected back in 1974. The vast amount of material we reviewed during our work was fascinating, and we were intrigued by studies on advanced materials for aeronautic structures and for achieving small radar cross-section capabilities. Other fascinating areas were advanced sensor capabilities that could give us a substantial advantage on the battlefield of the future if they were integrated into weapon systems, warning systems and command and control systems. All-weather vision capability in the air, on the ground, and at sea was an old and familiar operational need, and presented developers with difficult challenges. We regarded research and development of thermal vision and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technologies as essential for the significant improvement of our weapon systems capabilities in the future.
Our work on thermal vision was based on the premise that every object emits electromagnetic radiation, the spectrum distribution of which depends on its temperature: the higher the temperature of the object, the shorter its wavelength. Thermal vision devices translate thermal radiation into images of visible light that human beings can see. The two preferred regions of light for viewing, known as “atmospheric windows,” are located between 3 and 5 microns and between 8 and 12 microns. The capability of a thermal device to read radiation and produce an image based on temperature differences between various objects requires a suitable detector. At the time, the most promising direction was detectors sensitive to infrared radiation, based on indium antimonidem (InSb) or mercury cadmium telluride (HgCdTe). For years systems based on multiple detectors could not be built, and thermal vision devices used only single detectors cooled to temperatures within a few degrees of absolute zero. Images were created by a cumbersome and extremely expensive optical-mechanic system of mirrors and motors that would scan the surface at a rapid pace. But scientific research was moving towards developing multiple-detector systems that would make it possible to forego mechanical scanning. Such systems would still need to be cooled, but not necessarily to cryogenic temperatures.
In technologically advanced areas, such as the growth of unsoiled crystals for thermal vision detector systems, it was clear that Israel would need to make significant advances on its own. We already knew that the Americans would be willing to exchange knowledge with us, and perhaps also to supply us with systems based on advanced technology — but only once they were convinced that we already possessed such technology or were close to acquiring it. Policy regarding the development of future night-vision capabilities set a high priority for the production of crystals for sensors, including the capability to produce gallium arsenide crystals, which were the latest development in modern night-vision devices. The work of crystal production is close to alchemy. It requires clean crystal and a system capable of maintaining stable and precise temperature and pressure conditions to enable the ions of the substance to join the original core and produce a large crystal with a perfect crystalline structure.
For years, the Americans refused to allow companies that developed advanced detectors of radiation in the 3-5 micron and 8-12 micron regions to provide us with models. After searching all the advanced industries in the West, we learned that the French possessed the knowledge and were willing to sell models of advanced sensors for a hefty sum. The French technology was the product of research carried out in the Grenoble laboratories of the CEA, France’s Atomic Energy Commission. It did not take long before the research centers of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission at Nahal Sorek and the Dimona Nuclear Research Campus also began the alchemy of growing crystals and achieved impressive results. The French crystals provided us with a shortcut in the development of advanced night-vision sensor systems by Rafael, Israel’s electro-optic industr
y, and a few smaller companies that were the start-ups at the time.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been one of the most important inventions with relevance to remote sensing in the battlefield in all-weather conditions. The underlying principle is ingenious: instead of building a radar device with a massive antenna to achieve high resolution, the technology involves using a relatively small device to produce the effect of a much larger one. This breakthrough could only be realized only after the development of computerized processing capacities that could interpret reflected radar radiation. The technology enabled developers to achieve the effect of a gigantic radar device many times larger than the aircraft itself by sending signals during flight and amassing the data received for computerized processing. At the time, the small bits of preliminary information we had gathered on SAR technology encouraged us to incorporate it into the technological goals of the still-evolving policy. Today, 15 years later, Israel is capable of producing synthetic aperture radar for its reconnaissance satellites, using this technology to achieve differentiation and photography capabilities from space under all-weather conditions.
The second chapter of the policy document was supposed to map out our future operational needs and use them to derive the directions of future development. Writing it was as challenging as the first chapter. It required working with various parts of the IDF to learn the needs and priorities of the users of future weapon systems. The chapter also served as a means of heading off opposition and criticism later in the policy development process.
Armies are typically strict and have formal frameworks that stringently adhere to rules and procedures; they oftentimes find it hard to engage in creative and imaginative thinking. This limitation is less serious within the IDF because Israelis are creative and like to improvise. Incorporating officers trained in engineering and the exact sciences into all the corps and services of the IDF has been another dimension of the Israeli army’s ability to think ahead and make leaps of logic that would be extremely rare in other armies.
Our work on the third chapter of the policy document, which dealt with priority recommendations and budget estimates, emerged as the most formidable obstacle to achieving broad agreement on overall policy among the corps and services of the IDF. The draft we distributed for comments set off a massive earthquake within the defense establishment. It was easy for the General Staff to accept the first technological chapter, which gave the impression of a general introduction requiring no commitment. It also had little problem agreeing with most of the assertions in the second chapter, which referred to discussions conducted during our meetings with the corps and services and the insights they generated. However, discussing budgets and setting priorities regarding issues typically under the jurisdiction of the individual corps appeared to be too much for the General Staff. However, the discussion of policy turned out to be a constructive and educational process, and we soon realized that the bitter debates actually filled the participants with adrenalin and helped them better understand the significance of many of the issues. In any case, in accordance with the system in place, it was general practice within the IDF to plan and commit to one budget year at a time. Looking ahead was therefore important, but did not necessarily result in commitment.
The Defense Minster’s Advisory Committee on Defense R&D
An important component of the decision-making process with regard to defense research and development was the reestablishment of the defense minister’s Advisory Committee on Defense R&D. I recalled Dr. Ernest David Bergman, David Ben-Gurion’s science advisor, and the days when (the late President of Israel) Prof. Ephraim Katzir served as the chief scientist of the defense ministry. Ben-Gurion had a profound awareness of the importance of science and technology for a small nation with such limited resources. Because of his undisputed authority, Ben-Gurion, who was both prime minister and defense minister, was able to support and nurture the country’s technological capabilities and to create a national agenda that would ensure its continued development.
When I began my work as director of MAFAT, the defense ministry had no chief scientist, and it was clear that as director of MAFAT I was also the defense minister’s senior advisor on defense-related science. However, the responsibilities of the position and its focus on day-to-day work with the IDF and the defense ministry meant that the director of MAFAT enjoyed neither unfettered observation nor objective judgment when it came to the desired direction of future research and development. A meeting with Rabin was set to propose reestablishing the Advisory Committee on Defense Research and Development. “All I request, Uzi,” Rabin said to me at the end of the meeting, “is that you go discuss the matter with the CGS.” When I entered Levi’s office he was seated behind the desk I knew so well since the days of Haim Bar-Lev and David Elazar. He leaned back in his chair comfortably with his long legs stretched out underneath the desk, almost touching mine. His brown eyes looked tired but not exhausted when he asked: “What’s the issue?” I briefly explained the idea of reestablishing the Advisory Committee on Defense Research and Development, emphasizing its past influence in research and development decisions within the defense ministry. The structure I proposed incorporated not only representative figures from within the defense establishment, but highly experienced individuals from outside the defense establishment as well. The chairman of the committee, I told him, needed to be a prominent experienced scientist and, most importantly, someone from the outside.
Levi did not like the idea: “Why should we bring in civilians?” he asked, and continued as follows: “In the end, everything will get to the Knesset and the newspapers! And why choose an outside person as the chairman? Why shouldn’t you be the chairman?”
“Slow down Uzi,” I thought to myself, taking a deep breath. “Don’t get into an argument with Moshe Levi. After all, you know him so well and this is a new playing field with which the CGS is unfamiliar. Try to explain the whole issue again in a way that alleviates his concerns.” I told him the names of a few of the people I thought to include as members of the Advisory Committee: Lieutenant General Tzvi Tzur, Major General (Res.) Amos Horev, Major General (Res.) Aharon Yariv, Prof. Israel Dostrovsky, and Prof. Haim Harari. I also told him that I was recommending Prof. Joshua Jortner as chairman. Once he heard the names, Levi’s opposition began to dissipate. I stressed the importance of having someone to oversee the director of MAFAT, who was deeply involved in the day-to-day work of the military and the defense industries. I expressed my faith in the experience, wisdom, and honesty of the prospective committee members, as well as their ability to maintain confidentiality. I could see that I was managing to convince Levi, who ultimately reluctantly agreed to the establishment of the committee.
Immediately after the defense minister signed the letters of appointment, the Advisory Committee began to operate. The director and personnel of the R&D Unit prepared detailed reports on a variety of subjects and their plans for research and development, as did the director of the Technological Infrastructure Unit. The material contained in these reports was fascinating for the committee members from within the IDF and the defense establishment, as well as the members who had formerly held central positions within the defense establishment and research laboratories.
The surveys presented to the committee were candid and provided a transparent presentation not only of the success stories but of the failures and the issues that had yet to be decided. At first, we were concerned that our work might be received with excessive criticism by the committee’s extremely experienced professionals who had formerly held such senior positions. All our fears evaporated once the committee began meeting. MAFAT personnel surpassed themselves with the clear and thorough reports they prepared, and they now felt that they were working with people with a profound understanding of the subject at hand who asked important questions from which much could be learned. Prof. Joshua Jortner, who had a deep baritone voice and took care to make use of its low registers,
ran the meetings in a skillful and businesslike manner. Jortner possessed a combination of a good temperament and the calm confidence of a person who was completely at ease in the world of science. Despite all his academic pursuits and his weighty responsibilities as the president of the Academy of Sciences in Jerusalem, Prof. Jortner dedicated much time to committee meetings and preparatory sessions. He even agreed to remain in the position for a second term, after his first term came to an end.
The subjects the committee addressed included annual and multi-year research and development programs, as well as many other issues. The defense minister regarded the committee as a body with which to consult on weighty issues, such as the Arrow (Hetz) program, the satellite program, and Rafael’s conversion into a government-owned company.
The Arrow project had its ups and downs and a number of failures during its initial phases of development. The undertaking was controversial from the outset, and the Israeli military, led by the air force, was one of the staunchest opponents of the development of a missile defense system. The Israeli satellite program was also the subject of fierce debate. At the General Staff, most people lacked confidence in Israel’s ability to develop a satellite on its own. Indeed, the program was unusually audacious on our part, but the defense industry teams that engaged in the work were convinced that it was possible. These teams were led by Dov Raviv in the area of satellite launching and Israel Aerospace Industries MABAT space facility personnel, the experts from the electro-optic industry who worked on the development of a space telescope. As with any other development project, there were setbacks which added fuel to the fire among the opponents of Israeli satellite development. Rabin asked the committee to undertake detailed assessments of both major projects and to provide its opinion on the chances of success and the best ways to move forward. The committee endorsed the defense R&D policy and provided us with a strong tailwind for planning of multi-year programs. However, more enlightening than the clear, concise meeting summaries were the discussions themselves, and the dozens of intelligent questions asked by the committee members.