Meet the dean of the educational program that has turned out probably more Israeli high-tech leaders than any other. Each year Albert Tregar is responsible for educating between 300 and 400 students who represent some of the best computer talent graduating from Israel's high schools. But that's about all the program has in common with CalTech or M.I.T. Students graduate after six months of grinding 14-hour days. The campus, rather than a collection of ivy-covered quadrangles, is a mishmash of tumbledown prefab huts and office buildings. There are no football teams and no frats. And Albert Tregar is just as likely to be toting an automatic weapon around campus as he is a briefcase.

That's because he is a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) signal corps, and his students are privates. He presides over the corps' training course for programmers and is responsible for computer logistics for the army, air force, and navy. His graduates, along with those of other elite programs, are deployed throughout the armed services to do everything from reviving crashed computers to heading sophisticated military intelligence projects.

Never mind what you've heard about Israel's world-class universities like the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Col. Tregar's students are likely to have graduated from one of these schools, but their real education -- from concrete technical skills to more amorphous leadership and problem-solving skills -- has come from their army service. Col. Tregar's IDF programming school gets to choose the best, train them, and quickly put them into the field, where they could very well wind up practicing various forms of technological warfare.

CLASS SYSTEM

IDF students tend to form lifelong friendships, which have helped many graduates become successful high-tech entrepreneurs. "A typical thing in the U.S. is that you get an M.B.A. and you work for Hewlett-Packard for a few years. Then you get a VC and start a company," says Martin Gerstel, who spent most of his career in Silicon Valley before moving to Israel and becoming chairman and chief financial officer of Compugen, a developer of genetics technologies. "In Israel, people typically starting high-tech companies are coming out of the military."

That's certainly the case at Compugen, whose technology is used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies to identify human genes. The company's three founders -- president Eli Mintz, chief technology officer Simchon Faigler, and vice president of software development Amir Natan -- became friends when they were in the army's elite Talpiot program. Talpiot is a special army training program that puts the best high school graduates through a rigorous curriculum of computer science, physics, and math, then places them in key assignments in, say, intelligence units. Compugen's CEO, Mor Amitai, is also a Talpiot graduate, as are roughly 10 percent of its 120 employees. In fact, Compugen's army connections run even deeper. "We brought in people from other parts of the army we worked in -- 25 out of the 60 mathematicians came from Compugen through army connections," says Talpiot alum Lior Ma'ayan, vice president and general manager of LabOnWeb.com, Compugen's Internet research tool.

The IDF is a citizens' army in the classic sense: at the age of 18, the great majority of Israelis are herded through basic training and assigned to tasks ranging from serving in an elite commando unit to serving coffee. In some ways the training program feels less like a fighting force than a huge and unusually well-armed summer camp, though one with a mission-critical program. "The difference between the U.S. and Israel is that in Israel the enemy is across the border. Here the threat is immediate, and you have to act fast," says Benny Levin, the chairman and CEO of Nice Systems, a $120-million-a-year developer of digital recording and logging systems that he founded in 1986 with colleagues who worked in military intelligence.

Mr. Levin's view of Israel's national defense is not exaggerated. The IDF is the army that turned the Egyptian air force into wreckage within the first few hours of the Six Day War, rescued hostages from Entebbe Airport, and knocked out Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactors. In a more creative sphere, the army and Israeli defense contractors developed the world's first pilotless plane, launched satellites into space, and created a host of other technologies likely never to be revealed.

The selection process for Israel's army-trained technology elite starts when teenagers apply to programs, usually in their last two years of high school. Only volunteers are eligible to be chosen for the army's training programs. The most selective program, Talpiot, accepts only 30 applicants, or 1 in 10, a year. Officers say the army doesn't look for fuzzy traits like creativity and leadership; it focuses on measurable qualities. Extremely high aptitude in math and science, along with success in rigorous exams, are the key qualifications.

REBOOT CAMP

Talpiot's M.O. is total immersion, whether the subject is software coding or the Arabic language. The programming course is just six months long, but classes run from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., five and a half days a week. Although many soldiers say that the program's immersion approach is an effective way to learn, Col. Tregar says it's simply the only way to cram a lot of information into a very short period of time. There's little time to spend on theory and skills that won't directly relate to the students' army postings later on. "In an academic setting, you'll learn about models for parallel processors and the structure of compilers -- those kinds of things," Col. Tregar says. "It's true it gives you a much broader understanding, but on a practical level, you won't have to deal with them in your first job. People with academic degrees that come to the IDF need to undergo considerable training before being put into practical assignments."

The tight schedule and emphasis on practicality mean that soldiers begin work on real-world assignments almost immediately. Before they've gotten much beyond cracking open a textbook, trainees are already helping to identify problems in the field and devise solutions, making do with limited time and resources. The best soldiers, by their early 20s, are overseeing important projects, often working with private-sector defense contractors. This is where the chief attributes of the Israeli startup are learned -- the cowboy attitude, the dedication to one's team members, and the pursuit of perfection. "I wouldn't say anyone is teaching you how to launch a company," says Amnon Yacoby, who has founded two companies since he left military intelligence. Today he is president and CEO of Floware Wireless Systems, a maker of point-to-multipoint broadband wireless access systems. "What you do learn is how to turn an idea into a real product or real application or real solution."

Take the air force operational software and development center, known by its Hebrew acronym, MAMDAS. It designs some of the world's most sophisticated military software, and most of its personnel are in their early 20s. The key to its success, says Lieutenant Colonel Zafrir, an officer in the unit (the army censor prohibits publication of some officers' full names), lies in the close integration of development and operation and close coцperation between designers and people who use the technology in the field. Developers work on projects from start to finish. "Management is very tight and standards are very high," says Col. Zafrir's colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Zeev. "We demand creative, efficient solutions. Systems pass through very severe checks." By the time they've finished their stint of six years or so, their level of practical experience far outweighs that of most foreign managers their age.

The IDF's speed-learning approach naturally has its shortcomings -- shortcomings that are often evident in Israeli startups: the programs generally turn out graduates with insufficient managerial and marketing skills for developing a company, especially when faced with the challenges of penetrating the big, distant, and unfamiliar U.S. market. And although Mr. Gerstel admires Israelis' army-developed focus on technical perfection, there are drawbacks to it. As a Silicon Valley alum, his role at Compugen has been to help its Israeli army-vet managers to overcome those problems. "In Israel if something is 90 percent done, it's not done. A parachute that's 90 percent okay isn't okay. The net result is a company with extremely good technology, but sometimes the planning, the market assessment, and the financial aspects are not focal points."

Not everyone is convinced that army training gives future high-tech executives any special skills or insights. Shlomo Kalish, founder and chairman of Jerusalem Global and the technology incubator Yazam, says the army has the benefits of an elite university in that, because of the draft, its applicant pool is virtually the country's entire high school population, which is then rigorously screened. "Why are people who go through Harvard University so successful?" Mr. Kalish asks. "Is it because of Harvard? Or is it because they were highly screened? Pilots are screened in the same way."

And of course many of Israel's technology elite never served in high-tech units. Mr. Kalish was a fighter pilot and went on to get a doctorate in marketing. Air force pilots, along with soldiers from elite units like the paratroopers, may not learn much about computer code, but they do know something about leadership, planning, and teamwork. Those qualities are the main reasons that Dellet, a new U.S.-based seed investor, is taking stakes in Israeli startups. All the companies Dellet has invested in to date have recruited managers from elite army units in intelligence and the air force, says Michael Gartenberg, a Dellet managing director and a former research and development director at the Gartner Group, an IT research firm. "The elite fighting units breed tremendous commanders," he says. "They have the same qualities as a high-tech entrepreneur: boundless dedication and the philosophy that the only acceptable path is success."

A lifetime of tight contacts is another benefit of the Israeli army for potential entrepreneurs. The networking, which sometimes occurs as early as basic training, extends through coursework and grows intense once a rookie is assigned to a permanent unit. Startup founders are typically not just a pick-up team of army veterans, but friends who worked together in the same unit. The day the fledgling company opens its garage doors to business, the top managers already know each other well, both personally and professionally. Those networks remain intact not only because of the closeness of Israeli society, but also because most men continue reserve duty into their 40s.

The partnership between Elad Baron, Daniel Steiner, Moshe Livne, and Yossi Moriel, for example, begun in the army, spawned nothing less than a small business empire. "Moshe and I were kind of 'gray hat' programmers. We were not intended to be real programmers; we were chosen by the commander of the base, who was very oriented toward high tech and wanted to cut the red tape in software development at his own base. He pulled me out and used me as a programmer instead of as a communications operator," Mr. Baron says, recalling how the four met. "Daniel and Yossi were from MAMRAM, the army computer center, and were official programmers and officers. When we had to design a system to contact the army's mainframe, we started to know each other." Mr. Baron is CEO of Whale Communications, which provides network security solutions for e-commerce clients; Mr. Steiner is Whale's president. Mr. Moriel runs RepliWeb, a developer of Web-site replication technology. Mr. Livne heads their first startup, SoftLink, which develops technology for mission-critical file-transfer applications.

GENERATION WHY

Moving forward, the army's role in the high-tech world could be decreasing due to one felicitous factor: peace. Army service has always been seen as a rite of passage into Israeli adulthood, but as Israel gradually reaches peace agreements with its neighbors, observers have detected less motivation to serve. Add to that the impatience of many teenagers to get rich quick. As part of his job, Col. Zafrir visits high schools to recruit for MAMDAS. Recently, he says, students have begun to wonder why they should spend seven or more years in an army programming assignment when they could be out after three years of regular service and starting a first business.

While it does make sense, officers claim that interest in the technology units is as strong as ever, although that interest is due more to career concerns than to patriotism. Those same officers say that if high school graduates seem less motivated at times than the previous generation, they compensate by having stronger computer skills than ever. It seems that old soldiers never die, especially when they have an IPO in their future.

David Rosenberg is a former Jerusalem Post editor; he is writing a book about global technology. Write to letters@redherring.com.