Preparedness Takes Lots of Preparation

We're having a week-long nationwide Home Front defense drill. Granted, the entire nation is a bit small, about the size of New Jersey with fewer people, but it's hard to overestimate the importance of such preparations. A drill such as this is planned for an entire year, and thousands of people are involved in the process. Should a missile land on a water station it's not obvious that the water company's teams will know, and will know what to do about it, and will know how to equip themselves, and will know how to get there; if the phone system, the electric system and the mobile phone system have all crashed, and the roads are jammed with vehicles trying to reach the hospitals, how does that water company team come together and fix the problem? And if the problem can't be fixed today, how will water be distributed and who announces it how?

This is merely one scenario, for one municipal water company. Multiply it by all the other things that can go wrong all over the country, and throw in the need to fight and win a war as quickly as possible because the enemy has more rockets and will keep on shooting them for as long as it can unless it's stopped.

If and when it happens (I tend, alas, to the When camp) there will inevitably be mass chaos. Having thousands of people in all the relevant agencies who have at least thought about it, have tried to imagine all the scenarios, have mooted solutions, and perhaps even experimented with the ones that will inevitably be not what happens - all this is crucial. It will be the difference between life and death for people who at the moment are simply going about their ordinary lives.

It will also mean that when the war comes, our preparations will be vastly better than those of the other side, so that the televised chaos over there will look worse, the ability to recuperate will be held up as proof the danger wasn't so dramatic, and the "proportionality brigade" of self anointed legal experts will swing into action, followed by the world's media, then the UN, and eventually even some of America's anguished Jews. This is all inevitable, but quite irrelevant. Should we refrain from trying to prepare for the worst so as to win some world opinion brownie points for our suffering? Of course not.