Hudson Institute’s Adm. Gary Roughead, former US chief of naval operations, says Israel “must reconsider its naval capabilities in the face of new threats from the sea.”

The University of Haifa hosted leading American security experts and former US defense officials representing the Hudson Institute think tank from Aug. 22-23 for a high-level workshop on topics including naval warfare, the geopolitics of natural gas, and American and Israeli capabilities in dealing with the Mideast region’s evolving challenges.

As the US and Israel continue to cooperate extensively in arenas such as addressing maritime security challenges, intelligence-sharing, military R&D, security diplomacy, and more, University of Haifa is at the forefront of the academic and strategic landscape of those issues through its Haifa Research Center for Maritime Policy & Strategy (HMS), which develops strategic knowledge by focusing on Israel’s maritime surroundings. The center prioritizes five areas of research: regional security and foreign policy; the mobility of goods, people, ideas; law; energy; and the environment.

The visiting delegation of senior researchers from the Washington, DC-based Hudson Institute’s Center for Future Security Studies featured Adm. Gary Roughead, the 29th US chief of naval operations from September 2007 to September 2011, as well as Douglas J. Feith, who served as US undersecretary of defense for policy from July 2001 to August 2005. Roughead and Feith held a workshop with Prof. Shaul Horev, head of HMS and the immediate past leader of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, and Maj.-Gen. (res.) Ami Ayalon, chairman of the HMS Executive Committee.

“Israel must act on several fronts. It must reconsider its naval capabilities in the face of new threats from the sea, implement legal and regulatory policies like other countries that export energy, and above all adopt the mentality of a country that is a regional maritime power that guarantees its energy future and effectively protects its borders,” Roughead said at the workshop. He also noted that “neglecting to handle the delimitation of maritime borders with Lebanon could lead to a military flare-up for Israel.”

HMS was established in response to the rising significance of the maritime domain both globally and in the Middle East—including oil discoveries in the eastern Mediterranean, the evolution of the Israeli Navy into a national strategic arm, Israel’s total dependence on sea trade, and the growing realization that future development of national infrastructure worldwide might need to be done in the sea as land becomes scarce.

“The purpose of this week’s workshop was to jointly study and evaluate what we expect to be the nature of naval warfare in the region in the coming decades, and to examine ways in which the governments of the United States and Israel can cooperate in dealing with maritime security challenges,” said Horev.

He added, “The strategic importance of the Mediterranean Sea is only increasing. The sea provides Israel with strategic depth and increases the territory from which it is possible for the country to operate militarily, rather than exclusively on land.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)