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Nostalgia Makes Bad Military Policy

June 20th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Politics and Policy

You can’t help liking Major General (Res.) Emanuel Sakal–even when you think his vision of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is totally skewed. At this week’s conference on The Decline of Citizen Armies in Democratic States (see my post on Wednesday), he offered a list of reasons why an all-volunteer army would be the [...]

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The IDF: All Conscripts, All Volunteers, Or Something In Between?

June 18th, 2008 · 4 Comments · Politics and Policy

Haim Watzman
One of Israel’s least-known secrets is that it no longer has a people’s army. I don’t say best-kept secret because no one is trying to keep it a secret. It’s a secret simply because it so clashes with the country’s mythology, and with the image it projects, that many of its own citizens and [...]

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