(Sorry, this isn't sports related at all.  My bad.  It was just an interesting find that I thought people might enjoy learning about.  If anyone has a real problem with non-sports related Random Wikipedi-ness entries being included here, please let me know.)

Every so often, I will chime in here with a page found by using the "Random Article" function on the Wikipedia web site. The actual content of the page will vary: some will pertain to sports, others will be historical in nature, and a few entries might drift toward science, politics, or religion - whatever catches my eye on a given day - but they will all be interesting in some way.

So you're a recently formed country located in a part of the world that has known literally thousands of years of unrest. You want to protect your borders, of course, so every once in a while, you stage a drill to practice the procedures for the call-up of reserve troops. A good idea, yeah? Yeah - as long as you don't get tricky, neglect to tell everyone (including neighboring countries) that the drill is coming and nearly cause an international incident. (International incidents are, generally speaking, not good.)

This might sound like something out of a movie, but it actually happened on April 1, 1959 (the date and the title sounded a little fishy - ducks on April Fool's Day? - so I did a quick Google check. It's the real deal). Israel, still in its infancy as a nation, wasn't feeling the love from its neighbors, in particular Syria and Egypt, and decided to run a drill to test the readiness of reserves. Normally, the public would be notified in advance of the upcoming drill, allowing troops to be somewhat ready and preventing a national panic. In this case, however, the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) wanted to run the test unannounced as a way of measuring the response to genuine emergency conditions.

It was a good idea in theory, but in practice it created a panic both inside Israel, where citizens thought the country was under attack, and outside the country, where neighbors thought the IDF was planning a surprise attack. You can imagine the effort it took to convince both sides that it was simply a case of a situation that had not been thought out completely and had become FUBAR as a result.

According to this article, the backlash from the situation was so great that two generals lost their posts and Israel didn't mobilize its reserve forces until the day the Yom Kippur War began fourteen years later.