Bøger af David Rodman

Israel will not allow any of its Middle Eastern foes to produce nuclear weapons. This bold statement captures the essence of what has become known as the Begin Doctrine. Named after the prime minister who first enunciated it, this doctrine has been enforced in a most emphatic way on two occasions. In 1981, the Israel Air Force (IAF) reduced Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor to a pile of rubble. In 2007, it did the same to Syria's al-Kibar nuclear reactor. Furthermore, the Jewish state has waged an unceasing campaign of sabotage against Iran's burgeoning nuclear weapons research program throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and may yet decide to attack Iranian nuclear installations in the same manner as those struck in Iraq and Syria. The story of Operation Opera, the raid on Osirak, has been told before, but not for quite some time. The story of Operation Orchard, the raid on al-Kibar, has received almost no attention. With the Iranian nuclear threat against Israel looming in the background, then, it seems an appropriate moment to revisit these operations in order to examine how the Begin Doctrine has been acted upon in the past. Doing so can provide some clues as to how it might be acted upon in the future. To this end, the present book is divided into five chapters. An introductory chapter briefly reviews the history of attacks on nuclear weapons research programs around the world, demonstrating that the Israeli raids against Osirak and al-Kibar are far from unique events. The next chapter probes the birth, expansion, and rationale behind the Israeli nuclear arsenal, because the Jewish state's commitment to retain its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East cannot be understood without some sense of its attitude toward the bomb. The following two chapters, the core of the book, describe and analyze the diplomatic and military dimensions of Operations Opera and Orchard, respectively. Finally, a concluding chapter offers some educated guesses about a potential Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear weapons research program, using Operations Opera and Orchard as a tentative guide to how such an attack might unfold.

Three outcomes are possible on the battlefield: victory, defeat, or draw. An adversary may defeat or be defeated by its adversary, or neither of the two may emerge victorious or vanquished. Observers of military history have long tried to identify the variables that determine victory, defeat, or draw. While most would certainly acknowledge that decisions on the battlefield are dictated by a combination of variables rather than by a lone circumstance, many observers nevertheless tend to stress a single variable-for example, the number of fighting men and fighting machines deployed by the adversaries, or the operational doctrines employed by the opposing forces-as far more significant to the explanations of these decisions than other variables. This book, in contrast, takes a multicausal approach to the question of victory, defeat, or draw, proposing that a combination of six organizational, materiel, and environmental variables are pivotal to the explanation of decision on the battlefield. Using the extensive history of the Israel Defense Forces, the book examines a sample of eight battles across the Arab–Israeli conflict from 1948 to 1982 in order to determine the collective impact of the six variables on the outcomes of these battles, concluding that this basket of variables captures much of the explanation behind victory, defeat, or draw on the battlefield, at least insofar as concerns the record of the IDF. While the research in this book is aimed primarily at military historians and military practitioners, it is fully accessible to any layperson interested in Israeli military history in particular or international military history in general.

The State of Israel faced one of its most difficult challenges during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Though the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) eventually emerged as the clear victor in the war, it suffered serious reverses at the outset of hostilities, as well as substantial losses in men and equipment. This book revisits the Yom Kippur War by exploring a number of issues that have not previously received the attention they deserve or that would benefit from a fresh evaluation. Among the issues examined are: the American-Israeli and Jordanian-Israeli relationships during the war; the roles of Israeli nuclear weapons and airpower; the IDF's practice of combined arms warfare; the reasons why the IDF turned the tide of the war more quickly on the Golan front than on the Sinai front; the impact of American arms transfers; and the lessons derived from the war by the United States Army and the IDF. This book, which relies heavily on government documents and other primary sources of information, fills important descriptive and analytical gaps in the academic literature about the Yom Kippur War. No other book compares to it in respect of content and interpretation. It is, in short, essential reading for all scholars interested in the diplomatic and military dimensions of the war.

"The State of Israel faced one of its most difficult challenges during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Though the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) eventually emerged as the clear victor in the war, it suffered serious reverses at the outset of hostilities, as well as substantial losses in men and equipment. This book revisits the Yom Kippur War by exploring a number of issues that have not previously received the attention they deserve or that would benefit from a fresh evaluation. Among the issues examined are: the American-Israeli and Jordanian-Israeli relationships during the war; the roles of Israeli nuclear weapons and airpower; the IDF's practice of combined arms warfare; the reasons why the IDF turned the tide of the war more quickly on the Golan front than on the Sinai front; the impact of American arms transfers; and the lessons derived from the war by the United States Army and the IDF. This book, which relies heavily on government documents and other primary sources of information, fills important descriptive and analytical gaps in the academic literature about the Yom Kippur War. No other book compares to it in respect of content and interpretation. It is, in short, essential reading for all scholars interested in the diplomatic and military dimensions of the war"--