Fast Draw: Defense Establishment Ignores Chemical Threat

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Only the top Israeli defense establishment officials believe that there’s no longer a chemical and biological weapons threat.

It looks like in many cases decision making processes in the defense establishment are based on short discussions held at night, on the way to the Kirya parking lot. That, apparently, is how the decision to stop the manufacturing and distribution of gas masks was made.

Only two months ago thousands of scared people waited in line, trying to get the few remaining chemical protection kits. That was during the height of the Syrian chemical weapons scare.

This week Channel 2 reported that the defense establishment’s recommendation to the government will be to totally stop manufacturing and distribution, reflecting the recent agreements signed with Syria.

So far only about 60% of the populace have gotten their kits, and almost all further manufacturing has stopped due to budget constraints. The tens of thousands of masks that were already manufactured will be gone by March 2014, and no further budgets were allocated to the manufacturing of chemical protection kits in the following fiscal year. 1.3 billion shekels are needed to produce enough kits for all the citizens who didn’t receive theirs. Maintaining the production array costs an estimated 300 million shekels annually, as kits have to be replaced every 25 years or replaced for children growing older.

At present two Israeli factories manufacture the protection kits, although their rate of production is very low. In the past, when the security situation was tense, the defense establishment examined the possibility of massive acquisition of protection kits abroad, but as it turns out there are no foreign factories which match the requirements. In practice, the Israeli chemical protection kit manufacturing project is not functioning for more than two years now.

IHLS – Israel Homeland Security

And now Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon’s recommendation to the government will be to formally approve this approach. According to the Channel 2 report Yaalon based his recommendation on intelligence reports, according to which the odds for an attack with significant chemical weapons elements are much lower than before. At this stage there’s no formal recommendation on the subject of collecting the kits already distributed, and apparently there will be an attempt to continue manufacturing kits on a smaller scale for security forces and emergency response personnel.

How can the defense establishment recommend canceling the production and distribution of protection kits? Didn’t they hear about Syria’s grand deception? Don’t they understand that the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons is nothing more than a large-scale theatrical production?

Something doesn’t make sense here. Every novice analyst knows the inspectors in Syria only shut down a few production lines. The large caches of chemical weapons were never found, because the Syrians managed to hide them in time. Others, according to Damascus, are located “in rebel-controlled areas.”

And there’s more. Everybody seems to totally ignore the Syrian biological weapons. What about them?

So it looks like someone in the defense establishment isn’t basing his or her decisions on facts, and not for the first time. Only recently, for example, they decided to remove soldiers from towns bordering the Gaza strip. Something is very wrong in the decision making process of the defense establishment, and it’s definitely something to worry about.