Here's A Failure of Ramon

Akiva Eldar informs us of Haim Ramon's failures:-

In the last government, Ramon...headed the ministerial follow-up committee on the implementation of the state comptroller's report. Officials at the Prime Minister's Office yesterday confirmed that Ramon, in this capacity, did not hold even a single discussion on the comptroller's findings concerning the defense establishment.

"He had a different agenda," they explained.

...here are selected extracts from that report:

"The Finance Ministry's budgets division did not evaluate the economic and budgetary implications of cuts and the extent of their implementation - the IDF Planning Directorate and the Defense Ministry's budget division, which are responsible for drawing up and pricing the IDF's work plans, did not examine the economic significance of changes to the work plans due to the budget cuts...

The price of the budgetary failure, a mixture of plain old carelessness and scorn for the comptroller's grave findings, was paid by the infantry and armored corps soldiers. The comptroller examined the issue of armoring from July 2002 to February 2003 and found "large gaps between the flak-vest and helmet stocks, and the needs the IDF had defined in the case of an all-out war." According to figures he received from the IDF, the issue was primarily the hundreds of thousands of flak vests and helmets "that should be replaced because they do not completely fulfill the IDF's requirements."

When the investigation was completed in March 2003, the Ground Forces Command had not yet prepared a multi-year plan for replacing the flak vests and the helmets...

...In any case, the IDF lacked thousands of bullet-proof vests - some 50 percent of what the IDF said it needed at that time. The bodies that handle personal protective gear did not cooperate or coordinate with one another, and their vast knowledge was not put to use...