"Everything is in ferment here and not calm," says Rear Admiral Dror Friedman, head of the Israel Navy's Sea Division, in an up-to-date survey of the situation on Israel's borders. "The Gaza sector is always volatile, and after a long campaign last summer, there is already talk arising from the isolated rocket fire, what is called "drips", about the next round of fighting and how we should react. In the northern sector there is a greater threat: we have been in a status quo in the north for a long time, since the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. Hezbollah's force build-up is certainly more threatening, in capacity and range. If something happens there, it will be more substantial than in the Gaza sector."
This is Rear Admiral Friedman's first interview since taking up the post of head of the Sea Division at the height of last year's Operation Protective Edge. Yesterday, a few hours before the air strike in Syria attributed to Israel in which Hezbollah operatives, among them Jihad Mughniyeh, were killed, Friedman could still talk about the threats from the direction of Lebanon from a fairly comfortable, routine viewpoint. Now, the alert level and the tension in Israel have risen: the fear is that Hezbollah will recover from the blow it suffered yesterday on the Golan Heights and will seek revenge on Israel.
Yesterday's incident came a few days after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah boasted that in any future conflict with Israel he would unleash a new "tie-breaker" weapon in his organization's possession, and would conquer parts of the Galilee. In previous threats, made from the depths of the bunker in which he has hidden since the Second Lebanon War, Nasrallah has mentioned the natural gas platforms in the Mediterranean as legitimate targets for his organization. The IDF's working assumption is that Hezbollah received the weapons in question, such as Yakhont shore-to-sea missiles that can cause extensive damage to the platforms and to Israeli vessels, as well as to ports and other vital installations, years ago from Syria.
"We have a good, effective answer to all the threats in the combat arena," says Rear Admiral Friedman on the subject of the Yakhont missiles. Attempts to hit gas installations in the Mediterranean are familiar to the IDF from the 50 days of Operation Protective Edge. Hamas boasted of firing a rocket at the platforms, clearly indicating what the terrorist organization from Gaza aspires to and is striving towards. "Just as there were attempts to fire rockets at Israel, there were also attempts to fire seawards and at our ships," Rear Admiral Friedman says.
Did this in any way put the Israeli ships or the gas installations in real danger?
"Not in a way that represented a substantial threat that we couldn't deal with. But just as we constantly strive to improve our combat capabilities, the enemy will also try to become more accurate in future in this context. And if it becomes so, we will still have a suitable response to the situation."
When Friedman talks of "a suitable response" and of capabilities, he mainly means one of the most significant equipment upgrades in the Israel Navy's history, still in progress: the procurement of advanced Dolphin-class submarines that considerably expands the navy's capacity to act in any arena that Israel might be interested in; the procurement of faster and stronger patrol boats for routine security operations; new radar systems that improve the force's control over the sea; and new defensive systems designed to do for missile threats like the Yakhont what Iron Dome has done for the Grad. This is a process still taking shape that will probably be completed round about 2020, when the navy commissions the four ships it has been asking for for years in order to patrol and defend Israel's exclusive economic zone and the natural gas platforms. These ships will carry on their decks Israel Aerospace Industries' advanced Barak 8 missiles connected to the Adir naval radar system. The Barak 8 is a versatile missile system that can protect a vessel and vital installations such as the gas platforms against various threats: combat aircraft threatening to attack, and a wide range of missiles fired from land, sea or air.
Up until a few months ago, the Ministry of Defense was in the process of an international tender for shipyards around the world, to obtain attractive proposals for the supply of the protection vessels so necessary for the Israel Navy's routine activity in Israel's exclusive economic zone. The ministry's director-general Gen. (Res.) Dan Harel halted the tender when negotiations commenced with Germany on supplying the ships.
The decision was made only at the end of last year. It will take four years to supply the ships and adapt them to Israel's security needs. "These ships will be a central component of the defense of our exclusive economic zone. They carry the means of integrating all the navy's operational capabilities, and of bringing to bear fire in collaboration with air and ground forces. When we talk of our exclusive economic zone, you have to bear in mind that all at once the Israel Navy received responsibility for a large area of activity, almost twice the size of the territory of the State of Israel. Within this space, we have to carry out patrol and protection activity at all times. This means operating a whole set of assets, not just protection vessels. We don't intend to provide specific protection to a particular installation. In the next few years we will see a growing number of installations that will require seaborne protection, so we are talking about a general defensive concept in that space," Rear Admiral Friedman says.
In his previous role Rear Admiral Friedman was commander of the Israel Navy Ashdod Base, and before that he commanded the Shayetet 13 commando unit. In his current job, he is responsible, among other things, for operating and strengthening the navy's forces. His presence, or that of other senior naval officers, in the one of the most highly classified weekly security forums held by the prime minister and the minister of defense, on operations and sorties, expresses the scope of the navy's operations. "50% of all the IDF's operational activity is carried out by the navy, or else the navy is involved in it. Not every operation is an Entebbe, but the navy is engaged in some kind of operation all the time," Rear Admiral Friedman says.
The Dolphin submarine fleet, which the navy has been expanding in recent years, makes this involvement possible. The fourth submarine, INS Tanin, was commissioned in 2014, the fifth will be commissioned this year, and the sixth will arrive in 2016, all of them built at the Kiel shipyards in Germany. The German government finances a third of the NIS 1 billion cost of each submarine.
The sixth submarine is controversial: the decision to acquire it was supposedly made against the IDF's professional stance. Does the Israel Navy really need such a submarine fleet?
"Yes. I can't spell out a lot of the considerations, but the need for these submarines derives from the operations we are required to carry out. The decision to procure such a costly asset as a submarine is not made lightly and without deep thought. If there were no operational need for these submarines, we wouldn't buy them. Many people tend to focus the discussion on the number of platforms, but this quantity enables the navy to carry out the operational activity required of it, and the capacity has doubled. So two operations can be carried out simultaneously, and it's possible to act against a larger number of targets when necessary."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on January 19, 2015
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