The Gates of Gaza

Peloni:  This is an important analysis which describes a major strategic failing adopted by the IDF as it pursued what the authors describe as “the ‘small and smart’ force reliant on precision airpower, special forces, and technology-centric intelligence”.  The consequence to this is that “Israel does not have the right force structure, defense technological industrial base, or alliances to ensure a longer-term victory”.

Israel must abandon the failed idea that technological wizardry will guarantee its security

by Michael Doran & Can Kasapo?lu | Tablet | May 13, 2024

“Infantry soldiers from the Givati brigade are put through their paces with new, high-tech weapons and computers at the army’s urban warfare training base,” in this IDF photo from 2005.   Yael Bar Hillal/IDF via Getty Images

On April 29, 1956, two assassins, an Egyptian and a Palestinian, ambushed Ro’i Rothberg, the security officer of kibbutz Nahal Oz. Luring him into the fields, they shot him off his horse, beat him, and shot him again, ending his life. They then dragged his lifeless body as a gruesome trophy back to Gaza, where it was desecrated. Unlike Iran and its proxies today, however, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Gaza at the time, did not ransom Israeli corpses. The day after Rothberg’s murder, the Egyptian authorities transferred his mutilated remains to United Nations mediators who, in turn, passed them back to Israel for burial.

Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan delivered the eulogy at the funeral. Steely-eyed and unsentimental, Dayan attributed Rothberg’s death to the victim’s own lack of vigilance, which, he suggested, was symptomatic of a laxness in the whole society. Craving peace and normalcy, the Israelis were allowing themselves to imagine that their neighbors shared the same aspirations. “Let us not cast blame on his murderers today,” Dayan said. “It is pointless to mention their deep-seated hatred for us.” There was nothing the Israelis could do to make the Gazans willingly accept the establishment of the Jewish State. “Ro’i [Rothberg]—the light in his heart blinded him to the gleam of the knife. The longing for peace deafened him to the sound of the murders lying in wait.”

The residents of Nahal Oz, Dayan said, carry “the heavy gates of Gaza on their shoulders, gates behind which hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands pray that we will weaken so that they may tear us to pieces—have we forgotten that?”

On October 7, when Hamas paragliders sailed over Israel’s 40-mile “smart fence” with its state-of-the-art radar systems, remote control machine guns, and underground sensors, they encountered on the other side no meaningful forms of military resistance from what is often accounted to be the fourth most powerful military force on earth. Instead of being greeted by tanks, helicopters, and heavily armed brigades, the Hamas invaders found themselves among young revelers at the Nova music festival, whom they slaughtered like lambs.

Following the attack, both friends and foes of Israel greeted the absence of any organized military response, which lasted for many hours, with incredulity. As news spread of lightly-armed Hamas forces penetrating beyond the immediate border areas to major Israeli population centers like Ashkelon, everyone wondered: What happened to the IDF?

The answer is that, over the prior two decades, Israel’s military had deliberately remade itself by stripping away exactly the kinds of conventional force assets—large combat formations, overwhelming firepower, and heavy armor—that could be expected to repel a large-scale cross-border attack. Israel had replaced its old army with a new one, based on new theories of warfighting that had become current in the West since 9/11. In place of its former doctrines and force structure, Israel had adopted a more modern military approach favoring a “small and smart” force reliant on precision airpower, special forces, and technology-centric intelligence. As a result, almost without exception, Israel’s leaders failed to foresee not only October 7, but also the kind of war the military is now fighting: Not quick, surgical strikes lasting for several days at most, but a multi-front conflict requiring the taking and holding of contested land positions over the course of months and possibly years.

For seven months now, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been fighting simultaneously on seven fronts (in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen). In Gaza they have deployed large, mechanized formations into urban areas. With respect to the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, they have readied themselves to do the same should circumstances demand it. No one planned for this kind of war. As a result of this lack of vision and forward planning, Israel does not have the right force structure, defense technological industrial base, or alliances to ensure a longer-term victory.

Some part of the debate inside Israel around these realities surfaced in early April when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote a letter to the prime minister withholding his support for a $9.5 billion purchase of a squadron of F-35 aircraft and a squadron of F-15 aircraft. Smotrich refused to approve the purchase until the government convened the finance committee to examine the security budget. “The war challenges many basic assumptions in the security budgets and requires renewed thought. Following the war, the defense establishment requires huge budget additions and the Finance Ministry’s position is that fundamental assumptions and priorities need to be revised accordingly,” Smotrich wrote.

Unfortunately for Israel, weapons systems, force structures, and established alliances cannot be remade in a day. In that respect, the military paradigm resembles a network of railway tracks with a limited array of switches. The tracks assist the IDF in moving forward, but they also constrain it, sending it down predetermined lines regardless of whether those lines lead to the destination that is most desirable strategically. Laying new tracks will cost Israel time, measured in years; money, measured in untold billions of dollars; but also lives, measured in the thousands.

Some of the flaws in Israel’s “small and smart” paradigm came emblazoned with a “Made in Israel” stamp, but just as many were imported from the West, particularly from the American war colleges where Israel has long sent its professional officer corps for training. The Israelis have borrowed liberally from the Americans and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who, for some two decades before the Ukraine war, endorsed the belief that large-scale and prolonged wars between states were a thing of the past.

The “War on Terror,” with its focus on substate actors clearly influenced this thinking, which persisted even as Russia intervened in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014, in Syria, together with Iran, in 2015, and in Libya in 2017. It persisted even as China engaged in the largest and fastest military buildup in history. “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia,” says the U.S. National Security Strategy, published by the Obama administration in May 2010. “[W]e want to see a true strategic partnership between NATO and Russia, and we will act accordingly, with the expectation of reciprocity from Russia,” stated NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept. This document remained the authoritative statement of NATO strategy until 2022, when the alliance began to depict China, Russia, and Iran as more threatening.

So long as “partnership” was the watchword when describing the West’s relations with China, Russia, and Iran, then it seemed obvious that the scale of warfighting would shrink. “State-on-state conflict will not disappear, but its character is already changing,” stated an authoritative British strategy document in 2010. “Asymmetric tactics such as economic, cyber and proxy actions instead of direct military confrontation will play an increasing part, as both state and non-state adversaries seek an edge over those who overmatch them in conventional military capability,” it continued. In other words, warfare as we commonly imagine it—that is, as two big armies facing off against each other for months or years on the battlefield, like we see in Gaza and Ukraine today—had all but disappeared. A series of running battles, short and sharp, had replaced it.

Note the causal explanation in the quote above. Big wars will not happen, so the thinking went, due to the technological superiority of the Western countries. The assessment rests on two key assumptions, namely, that technological advantages deter states; and that technological superiority itself can be the sole determinant of victory in war.In recognition of this assumption, we will name this military paradigm—the one that most NATO powers and the Israelis adopted—“Star Wars.”

The Star Wars paradigm fosters the misguided belief that the new renders the old obsolete. Emerging technologies, such as algorithmic warfare, eclipse traditional warfighting assets, like tanks and howitzers. Because it replaces traditional combat formations, which are bulky and expensive, with small, agile forces, bureaucrats, ever on the search for ways to cut budgets, found the Star Wars paradigm inherently attractive. Generals, for their part, were drawn to the paradigm, because the new tools, in addition to their inherent effectiveness, were also much sexier than the traditional instruments of war. Generals gravitated to conferences in Silicon Valley, where they secured lucrative consulting careers, after retirement, with high-tech companies. If given the choice, who wouldn’t prefer to log their training hours in virtual reality simulations rather than dragging howitzers through the mud in the freezing rain?

Indeed, the new Silicon Valley tools were supposedly turning the howitzer into a weapon of yesteryear—in part by enhancing deterrence through improved intelligence. According to the Star Wars paradigm, technologically inferior forces had no chance of winning against technologically superior powers, because the great electronic eye in the sky never sleeps; it sees all. On the computer screens of high-tech militaries, enemy forces would stand out like sharks in a well-lit aquarium: fearsome in appearance but visible from all sides and at all times. Technological advancements generated an intelligence officer’s wet dream: total battlefield transparency married to flawless information superiority over the adversary.

Then came the paragliders over Israel’s smart fence. If one designed a military paradigm specifically with the intention of duping the Israelis, one could have done no better than Star Wars. The paradigm played to their vanity. It told them, subliminally, that the activities at which they naturally excelled (special operations and clandestine intelligence collection), the institutions that they most revered (Mossad, the Air Force, and Special Forces), and all the ventures that made them as rich as Europeans (high-tech startups)—are precisely the elements that gave them, like Samson, superhuman strength. The Air Force, intelligence services, and special forces have long been the glittering stars of the national security culture of the Start-Up Nation. The Star Wars paradigm taught that it is the stars who win the wars—and virtually no one else was necessary.

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