ISRAELI “IMPERSONATORS” KEY TO TERROR FIGHT

The Israeli mil­i­tary knows a thing or two about clamp­ing down on ter­ror­ists. And it has some advice for the Pentagon: You cant fight ter­ror [con­clu­sively] in the midst of a counter-​​insurgency cam­paign” like Iraq, Lt. Col. Erez Wiener, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) divi­sion oper­a­tions chief for the West Bank region, tells Defense Daily. “It requires con­tin­u­ous pres­ence in the field and oper­a­tions amongst the entire pop­u­la­tion.“
“Impersonation units,” have been key to the Israeli anti-​​terror fight Erez says.

Of the 2,200 arrests Israelis made in the West Bank last year, about 1,500 were con­ducted by spe­cial oper­a­tion forces (SOF), includ­ing 366 by a spe­cial Arab imper­son­ation unit, he explained. These spe­cially selected and trained per­son­nel have demon­strated the abil­ity to com­pletely blend into the oppos­ing pop­u­la­tion for intel­li­gence and oper­a­tional pur­poses.
The unit would be a com­po­nent of a much wider mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence cam­paign designed to cre­ate an infra­struc­ture for human intel­li­gence gath­er­ing and rapid dis­sem­i­na­tion, he said. You must be able to get the kind of timely infor­ma­tion, like [a ter­ror­ist] is plan­ning on det­o­nat­ing a bomb at that inter­sec­tion right there the next time one of your vehi­cles passes.

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The prob­lem, Erez notes, is that it’s hard to put these kind of units together if your side doesn’t defin­i­tively con­trol a big chunk of ter­ri­tory. That’s one of the main rea­sons the Israelis built their con­tro­ver­sial fence along the West Bank bor­der — to iso­late poten­tial ter­ror­ists, and allow the “imper­son­ators” to move in. But the U.S. isn’t about to put a wall up around Baghdad or Mosul. So how do they effec­tively infil­trate ter­ror groups? Good ques­tion, Erez says.

Erez said he believed the United States could develop the capa­bil­i­ties allow­ing it to oper­ate con­tin­u­ously in any enemy areas so as to cre­ate a real ter­ror­ist deter­rence. But the big chal­lenge is if they will achieve this before the cur­rent war is over.

March 8th, 2005 | Strategery | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.