To Face New and Old Threats to Its Security, Israel Can’t Rely on Air Power Alone

In 2019, Ofer Shelah, then-head of the Knesset’s subcommittee on defense doctrine and military buildup, coauthored a classified report on the state of the IDF’s ground forces, and how resources ought to be distributed in the coming years. Due to political deadlock, many of the key questions of budgeting and allocation of resources—not to mention the strategic questions on which they rest—remain unresolved. Shelah, who no longer holds office, presents here an unclassified version of the report. At issue is the key problem of whether Israel should focus finite resources on the “stand-off” capabilities of air power, missiles, and rockets or instead on tanks, infantry, and other ground forces:

The achievement required in any campaign is a situation in which the answer to “who won?” is not in doubt. Even if the enemy does not have a clear point of defeat, and even if the campaign does not end with its waving a white flag, the gap between the physical, political, and cognitive damage that it suffered and what was suffered by Israel must be unequivocal. In the last few campaigns, the security establishment has taken pride in the fact that most of Hamas’s offensive intentions were thwarted. But this is insufficient.

In any campaign, the necessary defensive achievement alone is not enough. Operation Guardian of the Walls, [i.e., the May 2021 Gaza war], evolved into an extreme and bizarre situation: Israel waged a campaign in the physical realm, and struck Hamas’s military capabilities and damaged its assets; while Hamas’s campaign was waged almost entirely in the political-cognitive realm, where it reached unprecedented achievements—it positioned itself as the defender of Jerusalem, and for the first time succeeded in igniting the street and garnering identification with its cause both in the West Bank and, especially, within Israel. The IDF’s use of firepower did not detract from Hamas’s strategic achievements at all, and even amplified them.

At its best, the IDF is a surprising, cunning, and proactive army. The aversion to maneuver warfare [involving ground forces] has created a situation in which the enemy knows well what we intend or do not intend to do. . . .

By its nature, the IDF is an army that aspires to offense . . . and undisputed victory. This [fact] stems both from its history and from its character as a people’s army that wages campaigns on Israel’s borders and doesn’t operate as a professional expeditionary force overseas. Values such as assault, the [goal of] decisive victory, commanders leading from the front, and other cornerstones of the IDF’s basic culture fit the type of fighting that is suitable for it—fast, powerful action that leads to a clear, unequivocal achievement.

Read more at Institute for National Security Studies

More about: IDF, Israeli Security, Strategy

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF