Rising from the ruins of a generation of Israeli doctrine

“According to the report, the Defense Ministry is launching a crash program with Israel’s military industries and major industrialists to make Israel independent in everything related to ordnance. In the initial phase, Israel will begin producing bombs for its aircraft. Jerusalem also intends to expand its production of tank and artillery shells, as well as assault rifles and bullets. Separately, there is increased discussion regarding the establishment of a missile force as an independent arm of the IDF. The force would reduce reliance on the air force and develop more versatile, more easily defended missile launch platforms and massively expand Israel’s missile and drone arsenals.”

It will take years to correct the damage the generals wrought by reducing the size of the IDF and inducing its total dependence on the United States

Caroline B. Glick  (December 22, 2023 / JNS)

U.S.-made MIM-23 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles on display at a military parade in Tel Aviv in 1965. Credit: Avraham Amir via Wikimedia Commons.

Two underlying assumptions guided Israel’s security establishment for the past generation. The first asserted that with the end of the Cold War, the era of conventional wars had ended. In the present age, brains, rather than brawn, would rule the roost.

The primary author of the “small and smart IDF” doctrine was Ehud Barak, who served as Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces when the Berlin Wall crumbled. In later years, the slogan was finessed.

A generation of IDF Chiefs of General Staff organized around the vision of a “small, technological and lethal army.”

As Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick, (retired) who served as the IDF ombudsman for ten years, has documented, operating under the spell of Barak’s doctrine, the IDF shut down multiple reserve divisions. It cut its artillery forces by 50%. Armored brigades were shut down. The reserve force was reduced by 80% between 2003 and 2017. The non-commissioned officer corps was gutted. The bulk of the IDF budget and nearly all the U.S. military aid were diverted to the Air Force—the strategic arm of the “small, technological and lethal” IDF.

The doctrine was repeatedly exposed as a farce. But to no avail. The air force didn’t defeat the Palestinian terror factories in Judea and Samaria in 2002. The ground forces did. The air force never had a response to missiles from Hezbollah to the north and Hamas to the south. Without regional brigades defending the borders, Israel’s “peacetime” borders with Jordan on the east and Egypt at its west became highways for weapons smugglers.

Brick’s warnings fell on deaf ears until the “small, smart army” fallacy was obliterated by Hamas invaders on Oct. 7. Israel’s multi-billion shekel “smart fence” was felled by bulldozers. Its automatic response system was obliterated by RPGs. Hundreds of soldiers manning these worthless technological wonders were slaughtered or kidnapped. Everything failed.

A microcosm of all things oppressive

This brings us to the second underlying assumption that guided Israel’s security establishment for the past generation. This assumption, also championed by Barak, asserted that Israel’s most important strategic asset was the United States.

Leaving aside the obvious fact that a strategy of dependence on an outside actor effectively gutted Israel’s national independence, on the surface, Barak’s dependence concept seemed reasonable.

The Americans rescued Israel with its weapons airlift in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 1992, the United States was the sole global superpower. Because Israel was seen as Washington’s “mini-me,” countries worldwide lined up to be friends with Israel, which they perceived as the gateway to Washington. The vast majority of Americans supported Israel. U.S. military aid to Israel enjoyed wide bipartisan support.

Under the spell of Barak’s U.S. dependence doctrine, Israel gutted its domestic military production capabilities. Nearly everything that it had produced domestically—from uniforms to rifles to bullets, to artillery and tank shells—was shut down. Thousands of military industry workers lost their jobs. Knowledge was lost. The contracts moved to the United States. Even projects developed jointly by Israeli engineers financed by America were transferred to the United States for production. So it happened that Israel’s Iron Dome missiles are solely produced in the United States.

Along with Barak, the dependence doctrine’s biggest champions were the air force generals. Under their leadership, Israel’s air force effectively became a U.S. asset. The air force cannot operate without U.S. platforms, spare parts and bombs. All air force ordnance is made in America.

But even during the 1990s and 2000s, the writing was appearing on the walls telling us that things were changing in America. A generation after the United States emerged from the Cold War as the sole global superpower, it struggles to contend with the threat of China, which surpasses it in several key technologies.

Under the spell of globalization, the United States gutted its industrial base. Even if it wanted to, today it is hard-pressed to repeat the 1973 airlift in real time.

Even worse, the end of the Cold War initiated changes in American society that over the past 20 years have exploded in convulsive transformations.

Since the early 2000s, hard-core cultural Marxist progressives have seized control over the U.S. education system at all levels. As a result, young Americans are emerging from high schools and universities with values unlike anything we have ever seen.

The new American values are built around a division of humanity into two classes: oppressor and oppressed. “Oppressors,” young Americans now believe, are evil and must be punished. “Oppressed” are pure and must be empowered. The United States is the chief oppressor. Its social and economic orders must be radically transformed to expiate its sins.

Israel (America’s “mini-me”), and Jews generally, are presented as a microcosm of all things oppressive.

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