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Israel’s space programme both provides tangible capabilities to deal with security threats and projects a message of national might. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past and planned reductions in ground-force units are imperilling the Israel Defense Forces’ ability to provide for Israel's security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A difficult security environment, electoral system and bureaucratic structure create five pathologies for Israel's national-security decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israel's security barrier is under construction and it is likely to be finished, so arguments about whether it should be built at all are pretty much academic. Far more important now is the nature and route of the barrier. Routes that go too deep into West Bank territory, that cut off and isolate Palestinian villages and encompass remote Israeli settlements are indeed likely to heighten the Palestinians' humiliation, harm them economically, and provoke worsened violence and terrorism. But other routes, closer to the 'Green Line', could exert more positive influence, not least because they would logically entail the abandonment of unviable settlements. A sensibly routed barrier has the potential not only to help protect Israelis from terrorists, but also to make a broader strategic contribution as a mechanism for managing the conflict and as a back-up plan as the prospects for a formal agreement fade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the half century of its existence as an independent yet besieged state, Israel has had a coherent and generally effective national-security doctrine, predicated upon the existence of a mass, reserve-based army, and an offensive operational style. Despite a well-deserved reputation for innovativeness in the tools and techniques of war, the Israeli defence establishment has generally been conservative in its outlook, preferring aggressive incremental change to wholesale reform or transformation. Today, however, new geopolitical conditions, a changing technological environment, evolving threats and, perhaps most important of all, profound changes in Israel's society and economy, have come together to force just such dramatic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]