In normal times, cadets in the IDF Naval Officers Course spend almost all of their two-and-a-half years in classrooms or working on skills inside a ship at port.
That is not what happened with three naval commanders, with whom The Jerusalem Post recently spoke, whose course fell out in parallel with the war in Gaza.
The course’s commander, IDF Maj. A., and the two course trainees, now lieutenants, G. and Y., somehow had to reconcile classroom time with also participating in attack and defensive activities versus Iran, Yemen, and Syria.
A. told the Post that it was interesting to compare the trainees of this course to those of earlier courses.
This course started in April 2023, six months before the war, but then the war barged into their course.
There were big changes regarding the naval commanders’ training, said A.
How do you conduct training when you also are fighting an extended large-scale war? he asked rhetorically.
“This was very complex and a difficult challenge for me in managing the course. The trainees run into a lot of new situations with less of an ability to prepare [for] them, and this even occurred sometimes with course commanders,” stated A.
So, A. remarked, the course needed to change to be more flexible, to tie in more real operational activity as part of the training.
This meant that the trainees spent 2,500 hours at sea – which is 60% more than normal for a peacetime course.
The Shayetet 3 and 7 squadrons in particular made an even greater operational shift during training than some of the other naval units.
The operations which the trainees participated in were more intense, used more firepower, and were busier than training operations during peacetime. If, in peacetime, an operational training event might have a simpler and narrower task, in wartime this is not always possible, and the mission may even evolve in real time.
Also, operational training led to traveling to locations which were far more distant than the standard peacetime ones.
A. said that this meant that these trainees are and will be far more seasoned and battle-ready than trainees normally are at the end of the course.
He said there is no replacement for serious operational time at sea.
On a personal note, he added that when he himself graduated the course in 2021, he had been less well trained for operations than the latest trainees.
In the course, there were 35 trainees, of which 33 were male and two were female.
All of them had siblings and close friends fighting in a variety of the IDF’s armed forces, often on both the northern and southern fronts.
These trainees, noted A., found it very difficult to study for tests while their friends were already risking their lives.
But their commanders, like A., knew that although the easier route would have been to cut short their training and then to just rush them into battle, the harder route and the one which the IDF and the navy needed more in the long term, was to make sure they would complete all of their studies. This way, A. explained, they would eventually be able to hold diverse command positions in the navy and develop into the top naval commanders of the future.
In the end, all of the trainees stayed in the course, as opposed to exiting early to join some kind of infantry combat unit.
A. has participated in a number of classified operations, many of which remain secret, even as he ran the course. One operation he participated in which has been made public was the navy’s historic elimination of the Syrian Navy after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024.
Though A. would not discuss the specifics, the IDF previously acknowledged that during that operation, it attacked 15 Syrian naval vessels at the Al-Bayda and Latakia ports.
Israel wanted to destroy those ships’ Noor missiles, which have a 200-kilometer range, and their Styx missiles, which have a 90-kilometer range, to prevent unpredictable Israeli adversaries from seizing them and using them against the Jewish state at some later date.
Generally, A. said he had served in 15-20 operations.
G., 20, FROM Ramat Hasharon, is one of the captain’s course graduates and is serving on the Sa’ar 6 missile boat known as the Atzma’ut. During the June war with Iran, his ship was stationed off the coast of Eilat, and he helped shoot down around 20 Iranian attack drones.
He served as the ship’s bridge commander.
This means, noted G., that he and his team were the eyes of the ship. They were responsible for identifying the drones with a mix of using naked-eye observation or other nonelectronic means for viewing threats from a distance, their radar, and other surveillance equipment.
His ship is the largest in the navy, and it is a critical part of the country’s multilayered air defense.
Completing the course, G. was slated to continue as the ship’s bridge commander, including managing the team that fires on threats, such as drones, as well as setting the schedule for the various navy shifts of combat sailors on the bridge.
G. has coordinated multiple times with the air force in the Red Sea to also identify far-off threats and direct the air force to eliminate the threats before they can reach closer to Israeli territory.
His shoot-down role is for threats that have already passed through the first layer of air defenses, such that his ship shoots down these threats at much closer range.
Moreover, G. said he has observed shoot-downs of aerial threats from very close range, giving a feeling of truly being inside the maritime battle-space. In other instances, though his team may shoot down a threat from close range, he still may not be able to see the result of the shoot-down fully with the naked eye.
All of these situations raised G.’s adrenaline levels substantially, especially when he saw the smoke of an aerial threat shot down by the maritime-ship version of Iron Dome on his Sa’ar. “It’s mind-blowing, but that is why we are here,” said G.
G. is on track to serve as a lieutenant for around 18 months, followed by another course to prepare to be promoted to the rank and command role of captain, where he will be in charge of an entire platoon of sailors.
He echoed A.’s statements that it had been hard to “stay in school” for portions of the war when many people his age whom he knew were in the heat of fighting.
“But finally, during Operation Rising Lion against Iran, I was a in a bunch of operations. To be part of these operations felt like a substantial contribution,” said G.
G. added, “For two-and-a-half-years sometimes it was hard to see why the training mattered. But when you are on the front lines at sea, it helps you connect everything you studied to something real and practical. The climax was against Iran; we had the chance to perform all of the skills we learned during the course.”
Y. graduated from the same course as G.
He agreed with G. that “there are difficulties in staying the course of academic military studies for two-and-a-half years when all of your friends are fighting in Gaza. You are cut off from all of that.
“But the course is designed to build your capabilities. It is a great honor to participate in an operation. Then you contribute to it directly, and you see both your progress and which skills you still need to improve on,” Y. explained.
Y. is also serving as a ship’s bridge commander and is also involved in aspects of mission planning and assignments for sailors.
Whereas G. discussed his involvement in defending Israel against Iran in June, Y. commented on his involvement in operations against the Houthis of Yemen at a distance of around 1,700 kilometers from Israel.
“No one can help you when you are that far away. You need to be independent. If there is a problem, no one can send a helicopter to perform a rescue. And I got to see up close the impact of the operation. Then there was nothing close to the great feeling when we finally returned home from so far away,” said Y.
While Y. declined to discuss the specifics of the operation against Yemen, the Post and other Hebrew media previously reported on June 10 that two of Israel’s navy missile boats, one of them a Sa’ar 6, fired two long-range precision missiles from hundreds of kilometers away at the Houthi port in Hodeidah.
The first attack on Yemen
That attack marked the first time during the Israel-Hamas War that the navy attacked Yemen.
Regarding that attack, some of the Houthi targets that were struck were platforms for ships to anchor within the port.
Furthermore, the IDF said that the explosive power of sea-to-land missiles would leave a lasting mark and increase deterrence in a different way than air-to-ground bombs.
Getting the navy involved was part of Israel’s broader strategy to deter foreign ships from using the port, since naval vessels can remain in the area and strike repeatedly. They can also accomplish this much more easily than aircraft, which attack and then must immediately fly back to their home air base, before running out of fuel.
Moreover, because the navy has the capability to remain at sea for an extended period, it can be more exact regarding the ideal operational moment to strike.
In contrast, airstrikes get planned in advance with intelligence focused on the coming hours as a general matter, but with a reduced capacity to follow what will occur in the ports at the moment of the airstrike.
Another interesting aspect of the navy’s operation against Yemen was that one-quarter of the naval sailors involved in the operation were women, a new record for female naval combat personnel.
Coming full circle, A. concluded that “the trainees are the next generation of naval commanders. They will defend Israel. I know we can rely on them, and they are ready for any mission.”