Lately a number of prominent chareidi politicians have called for Israel to move from an army based on conscription to a professional army. The advantage for the chareidi community from such a proposal is obvious enough: If military service were no longer mandatory for most of the population and the IDF had to rely on economic incentives to attract soldiers there would cease to be any basis for attacks on yeshivah students for not serving.
The goal is certainly a worthy one but the solution strikes me as impractical in the extreme. I would go further and argue that it would result in the end of the State of Israel.
First let’s consider the impracticability of the suggestion. Because Israel is numerically dwarfed by the populations of its immediate neighbors and is incapable of maintaining standing armies remotely close to the size of those of its neighbors the IDF has always relied on a large number of reserves in combat situations. Even in confrontations confined to a single battlefront — the Second Lebanon War Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank Operation Cast Lead in Gaza — the IDF was forced to call up large numbers of reserves.
But reserves require training. Each reserve combat soldier has previously done combat service in the regular army and received extensive training over the period of regular army service. The cost of a standing army equal in size to today’s regular army plus reserves would be prohibitively expensive. Nor does Israel have that kind of manpower available. One of the reasons that Israel was forced to launch a preemptive attack in the Six Dar War was that it could not afford to keep reserves mobilized for weeks at a time. The accompanying economic loss to the country was simple unsustainable.
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