I only reached the rank of lance corporal in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire light infantry and my British army combat experience was limited to the trivial North Borneo campaign. In Israel I only had a local-defense Mauser 98 rifle in the finger of Galilee in 1967, was a mere passenger in a captured Soviet BTR armored personal carrier that crossed the Suez Canal in 1973, and in 1982 was a mere tourist with Generals Avigdor Ben-Gal and Yossi Ben-Hanan and Major Meir Dagan (the future head of the Mossad) in the 1982 jaunt to Byblos/Jbeil 40 kilometers north of Beirut and beyond to the Syrian line (Ben-Hanan was furious when I called it a raid). Thus I lack the credentials to contest Ran Baratz’s all-out condemnation of the past several IDF chiefs of staff. I want only to note that instead of the usual accusation that these generals have tried to refight the last war, Baratz condemns them for wanting to fight a future post-modern war.

Nor do I have any documents to disprove his contentions, having gathered none in my three visits to Israel since October 7, during which I only chit-chatted with staff officers and saw only one very minor combat action involving just three M109 self-propelled howitzers supporting infantry combat—as well as a single F-16 strike, and that too only coincidentally.

But of course I do know that the IDF entered the war with fewer reserve brigades than in the past, and too few for concurrent all-out action in both Gaza and Lebanon, because the generals he mentions failed to resist the force reductions by threatening to resign in public protest, let alone actually resigning. But I do challenge the accusation that they failed to resign because they were hypnotized by postmodern fantasies as Ran Baratz would have it. There was another motive: they wanted to acquire some other capabilities for the IDF.

In fact, the money saved by cutting the training and modernization budgets needed to preserve the reserve brigades was not just left with the Ministry of Finance. Thousands of Hamas rockets did not kill hundreds or even tens of Israeli civilians, because they were selectively intercepted by a made-in-Israel system funded with the approval of the same chiefs of staff Baratz condemns. Likewise, when some 320 Iranian ballistic missiles arrived they did not kill thousands as they might have done, because they were intercepted by two layers of the Arrow ballistic-missile defenses and one high-altitude anti-aircraft missile system—capabilities that no other country has, not China, not Russia, not the U.S. Those countries do not have such systems not only because of their adherence to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, but also because of their tremendous development costs (in 1969 I worked on the U.S. Safeguard anti-missile program and saw this up close) as well as their tremendous testing costs—no use intercepting a single missile, hundreds are needed for a proper test. But the Arrow developers agreed with their mothers that they were geniuses and went ahead with a hit-to-kill system (hitting an arrow with an arrow) without even one full-scale test.

Another thing that was bought with the money saved by cutting the reserve brigades was the Namer armored personnel carrier I experienced in a Gaza joy ride. At 65 tons, it  weighs more than twice as much as its closest U.S. equivalent, the M2 Bradley, but it has more than three times as much armor (because it has no turret) and big screens to show what is happening outside, instead of narrow slits. The Namer is one reason why IDF casualties in Gaza’s urban combat remained far below American estimates, which were based on U.S. Marine infantry data collected in Fallujah (the Talmud’s Pumbedita) and Ramadi, where the Marines did not have to contend with tunnels.

Another destination of the money saved by sacrificing the number of reserve brigades was the funding of the locally made high-precision tactical air-launched missiles that enabled the Israeli air force to attack the distant Parchin target near Tehran with its shortest-range fighter bomber, the F-16, not to mention the funding of capabilities outside the IDF which were also employed to good effect, but for the further blow given to the ever-shrinking beeper industry. Money, as they keep telling us, is fungible.

But because I really know nothing of overall IDF decision-making, which Baratz has so closely studied, it is possible that Generals Moshe Ya’alon, Dan Halutz, Gabi Ashkenazi, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, Aviv Kohavi, and Herzi Halevi had nothing to do with the extraordinary achievements that greatly limited damage to Israel while its enemies as far away as Tehran suffered ruinous losses, and were only responsible for the mistakes—except of course for October 7, the least mysterious of blunders in military history: if you allow an armed enemy to exist right outside your front door, you shall be surprised.

So Baratz should simply have condemned Generals Ya’alon, Halutz, Asheknazi, Gantz, Eisenkot, Kohavi, and Halevi for their failure to confront the cabinet to obtain permission for all-out offensives against Hamas and Hizballah timed to achieve surprise in a moment of unusual tranquility, regardless of world reactions. There is always a next time.