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RAND Arroyo Urban Operations Team Hosts Conference in Israel

The RAND Arroyo Urban Operations Team hosted its fifth annual conference from February 11 to 14, 2002, in Haifa, Israel, marking the first time that the annual conference has been held outside the United States. The team's partners for this year's event were the University of Haifa National Security Studies Center and the United States Marine Corps Non-lethal Weapons and Urban Warfare Program. For the second consecutive year, the objective of the event was predominantly problem solving rather than education and issue identification.

Tim Thomas and Les Grau of the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office used Russia's recent Grozny campaigns and the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, to the Soviet Army to spur discussions regarding media-military relations during urban contingencies and the necessity of identifying critical points at which to focus limited available resources. Retired Israeli Brigadier General Gideon Avidor expanded on his original urban warfare theory introduced at the 2001 conference in Santa Monica. Former commander Major General Eitan Ben-Eliyahu and current Head of Helicopter Operations Brigadier General Shlomo Mashiah of the Israeli Air Force addressed historical lessons learned and their implications for future air operations in and over urban terrain.

The urban terrorism threat was a predominant topic of analysis. Sir Tom Arnold, formerly a minister to Northern Ireland under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, reviewed the strategic and operational implications of the United Kingdom's campaign in Belfast. Captain Sid Heal, commander of the Los Angeles County SWAT Team who has long-time experience as a USMC reservist, addressed the demands of "Maintaining Law and Order During Emergencies and Wartime." Israel's former Home Front commander, Major General Gabriel Ofir, analyzed his nation's security challenges in "Deployment of the City for Defense Against War and Terror." The three days of formal presentations were rounded out with two very different perspectives on the future of military operations in modern cities -- one presented by the Israeli Defense Force's (IDF) Head of Doctrine, Brigadier General Gershon HaCohen, the second by Major General Yaacov Amidror, Commanding General of IDF Military Colleges. RAND was represented by Russ Glenn, Jamie Medby, and James Lew. Russ Glenn responded to a request to address the ethnic, religious, and national mosaic of the metropolis with "It's About the People: Urban Demographics and Threats." The above represent just some of the conference's academic, military, and diplomatic experts who addressed the continuing challenges confronting leaders and analysts in the years to come.

Participants left the auditorium behind and climbed aboard a bus for the fourth and final day of the event. Arnon Soffer, the University of Haifa's Chair of Geo-strategy, and Gideon Avidor took conference participants on a tour of Israel's Seam Line, the dividing line between Israel and opposing forces at the termination of the 1967 Six Day War. Political, diplomatic, military, and economic national strategy implications of settlement development and demographic differences were all too clear as the group moved from terrain near Tel Aviv to the outskirts of Jerusalem. Cold War-style concrete walls and barbed wire fences running through communities in the area served as a reminder of Palestinian and Israeli leaders' struggles to solve some of the world's most intransigent political challenges, which all have significant urban undertones.

Selected representatives of U.S. and Canadian organizations participating in the conference joined their Israeli hosts for less formal studies after the conference's close. Dave Hansen, another conference speaker and representative of RAND Arroyo's co-hosts from the Marine Corps, was asked to lay a wreath at the wall of remembrance in Latrun, home to the Israeli Army's Armor Corps Museum and Memorial, en route to the group's tour of Jerusalem.

The RAND Arroyo Urban Operations Team will continue to work in close cooperation with their University of Haifa co-hosts in the immediate term to assemble conference proceedings and thereafter to continue their multi-spectral cooperative efforts.