Is anyone questioning this one? I’m actually not and for good reason.

Peretz is an incredible administrator (or to use a different term, a boss, but not just a boss, but a boss’s boss – I bet he wouldn’t like that). Look what he did to the Histadrut. He took a crumbling edifice, destroyed and ransacked by its own masters (Labor) and rejuvenated and regenerated it into a monster that caused billions of shekels worth of damage to our economy over and over with the single twist of his mustache. There was never a single man in the history of this country with so much destructive power available to him at will. An economic terrorist if you will – though one without the cajones to be Prime Minister despite the opportunity handed to him on a silver platter.

But why ‘Defense Minister’? It’s actually quite simple. The Army is the largest (non-unionized too, I might add) employer in the State of Israel. It has a manpower efficiency rate worse than the even the laziest protected union employee. It is also the largest black hole this country has ever seen, gulping down public funds (not to mention US Aid) at a rate that is simply draining our economy to the max.

Can you imagine if Peretz put his hands around the IDF with a mandate to ‘thin and trim’ it to half its cost and half its size?

And it can be done. As someone who spends far too much time at various bases and installations I can tell you that there is so much wasted overhead that can be trimmed away, there are jobs and departments to be reorganized and closed down, and purchasing processes to be improved.

If there is anyone that can do it, then that would be Peretz.

And now you’re asking yourself, what about defense? Peretz knows nothing. (True).

That’s not just irrelevant to the issue, but it also fixes a major flaw in the Israeli MoD.

We’ve almost always had generals as defense minister who simply looked at the job as being an ‘uber general’ who then continued to play internal army political games with their staff as opposed to a politician who actually let the army do what it does best, while he defined the goals and missions and concerned himself with its administration and finances. It's always been the Prime Minister who has actually decided on military missions anyway.

But what does Peretz get in return for destroying/revamping the IDF?

I think that the answer is pretty clear. Every billion shekels he saves will go towards social issues.

For Olmert, Peretz (the Communist) stays clear of the Ministry of Finance, while taking advantage of his skills as a powerful and able administrator. Peretz in return gets to redirect the money he saved for his social concerns.

Time will tell.