The Wald Report

The Decline Of Israeli National Security Since 1967

Emanuel Wald

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367297114
• eBook ISBN: 9781000306941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique du Moyen-Orient

It took only fifteen years for an army once known for its agility and operational brilliance to turn into a clumsy bureaucratic labyrinth, according to Colonel Emanuel Wald's report to Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Levi. Not surprisingly, Wald's conclusions greatly embarrassed Israeli political and military leaders as news of the report circulated t

1
Introduction

A man was walking on the beach. He spied a lemming sunning itself on a rock. He asked the lemming, "I've devoted my whole life to studying lemmings, and there is only one thing I still do not understand—why is it that you drown yourselves in the sea?" The lemming answered, "That's strange. I myself am a student of the ways of man, and there is only one thing I still do not understand—why is it that you do not?"

In the decades since 1967 Israel's national security was eroding so quickly that in the second half of the 1980s, the country appeared to be living on borrowed time. The cumulative damage to security was caused, inter alia, by two weighty factors. The first is an astonishing military weakness that developed like a malignant growth during this period and found expression both in wartime and in actions of military deterrence between wars. The second is Israel's lack of a balanced political strategy, which contributed to its political helplessness.

Outcomes of wars are the first, and most striking, indicator of military weakness. In the period from 1967 to 1982, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) was involved in combat more than five times. It fought three regular wars (the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the Peace for Galilee War in 1982) and two wars of attrition (in 1968-1970 and 1974). It also initiated and carried out a military operation (the Litani Operation of 1978).

The results of the three main wars indicate that the IDF's capability to win has tended to decline over the period under review. Although a decisive military outcome was not achieved in any of the wars, the IDF did gain a tactical victory in the Six Day War. But the IDF ended the Yom Kippur War in stalemate (after having incurred tactical defeats in the opening stages), and it suffered a tactical failure on the ground in the Peace for Galilee War. The military record in these wars, in the two wars of attrition, and in the Litani Operation shows an erosion over time in the IDF's ability to achieve tactical success in wartime. The substantial tactical productivity shown on the ground in 1967 diminished from war to war, to the point where it was no longer possible to find any productivity at all in 1982. The IDF, by failing to achieve the military war aims in the Yom Kippur or Peace for Galilee wars, did not live up to the hopes placed in it in two successive wars. The demonstrated inability to defeat the Syrian Army in Lebanon in the spring of 1982—in circumstances so favorable to Israel that they should have implied overwhelming superiority for IDF ground forces—shows just how much the weakness had penetrated and spread through the ground forces and how malignant the erosion of military power had become.

The abortive effort to defeat the Syrian Army on the ground in Lebanon and the inability to achieve the military objectives constitute, as in previous wars, an unmitigated military failure. This failure cannot be explained in terms of political intervention (which did take place) or political constraints (which were imposed). Instead, the demonstrated military incapacity, which reached its peak in the Peace for Galilee War, was again and again produced by the following factors: defective or nonexistent command professionalism at all levels, but particularly with respect to generalship; a force structure that was incorrect from doctrinal and practical professional points of view and both inappropriate and ineffective in view of the assigned missions; naive combat doctrines; training methods that were primarily techno-tactical and unit level; and an inability to activate, manage, and control operational-level military campaigns.

In many respects, each war is a unique one-time-only phenomenon. On the one hand, its course is affected by many incidental episodes, momentary arbitrariness, and chance events. As a result, the outcomes of wars are often accidental. On the other hand, command professionalism, force structure, preparation for war, and the organization, operation, and control of forces are developed, built, and acquired in a conscious (not accidental) fashion. Such long-term, complex processes extend over many years. When weaknesses in generalship and command and in force structure, preparation for war, and wartime control recur in three successive wars, it becomes difficult to attribute the military results to chance. In such circumstances, an attempt to identify the reasons causing military failure to become a pattern is called for.

When weakness in combat recurs and even worsens from one war to the next, it suggests that there are defects in the process of force construction between wars and that an outmoded military establishment has failed to prepare the army for war. Only enemies of Israel, who view the military power of the IDF as an evil that must be eliminated, will derive satisfaction from the way that the army operates between wars (and from its record in wartime). Tremendous resources and the efforts and sacrifice of many of Israel's best people were invested between wars (and especially after wars) in building, training, maintaining, and cultivating the military force. But all this resulted in disappointing wartime levels of performance—performance levels that became more and more mediocre and even led to failures. Between wars, the army demonstrated an ability to ensure current security and real expertise in impressive, high-quality operations (the attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor, the Entebbe Operation, and the interception of Libyan and other airplanes). In pursuing its main purpose in wartime, this same army suffered repeated failures. The military establishment failed again and again after 1967—in Sinai, on the Golan Heights, and in Lebanon—and did not even manage to create effective military power at a tolerable cost. After each war, there was a quantum leap in defense expenditures, but the link between inputs (which continually grow) and the output of the military force was lost. In periods of repeated economic crisis, claims of wasteful allocation of resources to defense and of mismanagement are frequently raised. But such claims are only a small part of the substantive problem. A military force that once had productivity, achievements, and glory has ceased to function and no longer provides a fitting response to changing needs. This problem and the problem of the other military forces needed today are ignored in Israel.

In the absence of a coherent, balanced military strategy, the priorities of the past perpetuate themselves; the mandatory preoccupation with the division of resources among the professional corps and the other interested factions leaves no room for dealing with the military productivity that is required or with the changes in force structure that would make this possible. The result is often completely absurd; at a time when budget cutbacks are being imposed, reverse logic leads to the disbanding of regular ground combat formations, the grounding of combat squadrons, and reductions in flying time and training. All these measures are taken before grandiose development projects (of dubious operational justification or need) are cancelled or noncombat overhead is seriously touched. In the present situation, the problem is not how much to spend on security, but rather how and on what to spend it. The question of how much to spend is not really important because there will be no reasonable return on this investment anyway as long as a bureaucratic deformity guarantees the recurrence of tactical failures in wartime.

There is one common denominator to all these failings. It is the obsolete military structure of a system that grew progressively more complicated over the years, until its ability to function in accordance with its purpose and its ability to correct its own mistakes were eliminated. It took only fifteen years for an army once known for its agility, flexibility, mobility, operational efficiency, and ability to respond quickly to turn into a heavy, coarse, and incredibly clumsy bureaucratic labyrinth. The bureaucratic deformity swallowed up all military ability. As a result, the tactical combat of 1967 was replaced in 1982 by "bureaucratic combat," ¹and the military system (because of the bureaucratic syndrome that spread throughout it) became a bloated, de generate, and weak body, whose main concerns were day-to-day routine and preservation of its own existence.

The military establishment's work is divided among commands, services, professional corps, duplicate levels of staffs, and other bodies— in a way that perpetuates segmentation, duplication, and overlapping. As a result, problems that should be solved in their entirety are fragmented to be dealt with by competing elements in the army (and in the security and civilian establishments), and the most elementary rules of unity of command and preservation of the necessary connection between responsibility and authority are violated. Thus, when the decision is made to fight, the war is waged by overblown Headquarters (HQs) interfering in the affairs of other HQs and by commanders (both those with assignments and those without) who interfere on the ground in the battles of small forces, thus bypassing—and neutralizing—the appointed command. All this goes on without effective direction or control by a single central focus of decision making. Thus, the operational command hierarchy at the territorial command or division level, which is charged with preparing the forces for war in its area of responsibility, shares control of the forces with the professional corps and with General Staff elements; the duality of responsibility is perpetuated in the channels of command and the duplicate, parallel reporting procedures. And thus, the construction of the ground order of battle is fragmented, because the process is directed by professional corps elements, who are motivated by structural considerations and narrow bureaucratic interests; even they operate on parallel tracks, without effective direction and control by one central decision-making focus.

The constant trend of General Staff enfeeblement gained momentum during the fifteen years from 1967 to 1982. This trend was nurtured by several processes: the dissolution and mutated segmentation of certain branches; the distortion, complication, and structural inflation of other branches; and the deterioration of the human infrastructure—including the self-image of General Staff officers and their image in the eyes of other elements in the IDF. These processes were compounded over time and assumed a self-reinforcing dynamic. Their cumulative impact was the weakened ability of the General Staff to function as a supreme military headquarters in wartime and as a supraservice staff in peacetime. Instead, it turned out that a ground HQ, which was neither General Staff (interservice) nor even a high staff, was intensely involved in bureaucratic management based on an improvisation that was developed and consolidated as an alternative to proper military professionalism and to correct high staff work as practiced in other armies.

This ground HQ covers up for its lack of substance and content by sterile imitation of the external manifestations of substance and content. This ritual is grounded in a convening of interested parties, which pretends to be a discussion (though it really is not) during which these parties wage struggles for power and honor and deal with symptoms and minor issues, rather than with the main issue; in private meetings between senior decision makers, during which decisions made in the discussions are torpedoed; and in prearranged summaries at all levels, which are generally not implemented and are often not even intended to be implemented. This external wrapping, which is based on superficial rules of the game and is influenced by the personal caprices of commanders, is preserved and maintained with great piety, because it covers up for the nontreatment of what is substantial and important. Thus, war studies of the National Defense College, which have never been discussed, showed that "the high command post (in an emergency, the General Staff) acted during the Peace for Galilee War as a technical system lacking any importance or real influence on the management of the war." Thus, the General Staff has for years carried on "preparatory meetings,"² during which sporadic and contradictory ad hoc decisions on weapons procurement and development are made. Meanwhile, the overall view and integrative, multiyear planning of force construction are neglected to the point where they do not exist at all. (For over eight years, the IDF has had no written, comprehensive, and approved multiyear plan.)

The weakness of the General Staff stems, to a large extent, from the fact that it actually serves elements of professional corps and other bodies in the IDF, because promotion of those who work in General Headquarters (GHQ) depends on the structural elements and corps cliques who send them there. The interests of the professional corps elements therefore get preferential treatment, violating the most basic and fundamental military principle of simplicity. In a reality the essence of which is bureaucratic bargaining among different factions, the outcome is expensive compromises; these compromises lack operationalprofessional meaning, but they accord with the insatiable appetites of the various factions. Worn away are tactics, the art of war, and the sharpness of strategic choices.

In the decade from 1973 to 1982, especially in its second half, the IDF was demonstrably preoccupied with overheads. During this period, there was uncontrolled growth in the overheads of HQs, directorates, staffs, logistical services, and regular and other noncombat bodies. These administrative and command overheads naturally found work for themselves in a systematic fashion. This distorted every aspect of peacetime and wartime military activity by complicating the required coordination between all factions to the point where they became one unmanageable mess.

Naturally enough, the combat force was not spared these distortions; they left their mark on it as well. The rise in the number of reserve formations after the Yom Kippur War was made possible, in part, by deficit financing—existing combat frameworks were split, their regulation Tables of Equipment (TOEs) were reduced (and milked for HQs and overheads), they were undermanned, and their organizational structure underwent an endless series of unprofessional and improvised renovations. Thus, the ground combat echelon today is based, to a large extent, on a mixture of types of divisions and on anachronistic concepts. In the Israeli division, there is a structural separation between infantry and armor, and between infantry and mechanized infantry; a comparison with western, eastern, and Arab divisions shows, inter alia, that the IDF's divisions are characterized by a relatively limited number of maneuver and support bodies, by a shortage of antitank weaponry, and by an imbalance between armor and infantry (and a preference for the former). The concept of building different types of divisions—heavy, armored, light, and territorial—is based on structural improvisation that contradicts the accepted professional standards in foreign armies and the requirements of the integrated battlefield. These structural improvisations that make possible an airborne division, which is neither airborne nor a division, as well as a frivolous amalgamation of forces pretending to be a corps (though it is not), reduce the ability and the chances to defeat, in an integrated battle, enemy armies and divisions built with reasonable professionalism. All this implies that exploitation of the potential implicit in the existing order of battle will be far from satisfactory.

In addition, the IDF's ground combat battle order, which is built on divisions, does its training in battalions. The typical training method in the years between the Yom Kippur War and the Peace for Galilee War (and afterward) was, to a large extent, limited to the professional corps' narrow angle of vision; this produced and entrenched a distorted emphasis on unit training at the techno-tactical level rather than on formation training at the tactical level. Illusions about the operational ability and readiness of the ground formations (which derived from skeletal and telephone exercises), current security activity, and the unrepresentative performance levels of small, elite units in high-quality operations, collapsed in wartime when the true price of incorrect and insufficient training over time became clear.

The inability to accomplish military missions in wartime (and the relatively high number of casualties) stems, to a large extent, from defects in the structure of the battle order and from its, and the command's, failure to function operationally. These defects are unavoidable when strategy is nonexistent, when the unprofessional orientation of the high command (which is demonstrably anti-intellectual) prevents the slightest development of military thinking, and when the bureaucratic syndrome leads to the deformity of military ability in wartime and perversely neutralizes every attempt to learn and apply lessons in the aftermath.

At the core of Israel's security concept is an inherent obsession with survival, which derives from memories of the recent past (before the establishment of the state) and from the experience of the War of Independence in which the few had to stand against the many. Driven by the need to ensure the state's very existence, David Ben-Gurion and his assistants interpreted the notion of "security" in the most basic, military sense of "protection of national existence," i.e., preventing the enemy from damaging lives, property, and territory.

From the 1950s on, the basis of the national security concept was a declared aspiration to "peace." In practice, however, "security" was understood by the state's leaders to be the truer and more important objective. Actually, the security concept merely expressed the traumatic drive to defend, with military force, the state's physical existence. This push did not diminish even after the immediate threat to physical existence declined and the political (and social-internal) threats became more serious and pressing than the military threat. After the War of Independence, Ben-Gurion designed a military security concept intended, in the operational sphere, to deal with the dilemma of self-defense against an existential threat in unpromising conditions—lack of defensive space (territorial depth), quantitative inferiority in force ratios, and military "shortness of breath" relative to that of Arab armies. Ben-Gurion's solution to this dilemma was based on a mechanism to exploit to the fullest extent all the military (and national) resources for a tremendous strike force in a short period of time and on principles for using this force intelligently in wartime. Ben-Gurion's security concept was founded on a situation assessment that was correct in its time, that is, on a realistic reading of the basic geopolitical and strategic constraints to which he applied an appropriate and effective military solution. The point of departure for this security concept was Israel's inability to achieve a military decision over the Arab states or to achieve total victory—because of the striking asymmetry in the relation of forces between Israel and the Arabs. Ben-Gurion understood that (from Israel's point of view) no "final battle" was possible, because Israel could not inflict such an overwhelming blow on the enemy that no subsequent armed clash would be necessary (Le., that danger of war would disappear). The Arabs, for their part, could pursue the option of the final battle, meaning a decisive military blow at Israel that would result in its destruction. And if they did not achieve this in their first attempt, they could repeat the effort again and again. Ben-Gurion therefore concluded that Israel had to be able to sustain a defensive approach that would frustrate every effort by Arab states to invade Israel, tear away parts of its territory, seriously impair the safety and security of its inhabitants, or disrupt the normal course of daily life.

On the one hand, the experience of the War of Independence suggested that any attempt to apply the defensive approach in wartime through a defensive combat doctrine would be difficult, dangerous, prolonged, and rife with casualties. On the other hand, an offensive combat doctrine, based on rapid movement of strike forces, would permit tactical victories within a short time. It would also be more economical in terms of human lives, and if it was carried out on enemy territory it might cause the Arabs such hardship that they would be forced to accept some sort of arrangement. In keeping with these lessons, Ben-Gurion developed the principle of transferring the war to the enemy's territory: He built on a rapid transition (by exploiting the advantage of short, internal lines) from a blocking deployment inside Israel to combat on the enemy's territory; this involved activating a military strike force in a war of active, offensive movement, which would force the enemy to pay a high price in personnel and equipment and would endanger the integrity of its country. In this way, BenGurion hoped that the war would be brought to a rapid conclusion.

Israel's population was too small to long sustain a regular army of the size needed to implement this concept. The annual intake of conscripts would not be large enough, and the cost to the economy would be intolerable. It was therefore determined that the military force would comprise a reserve army, including the bulk of the ground combat formations, and a regular army, which would include the infrastructure needed for education, training, maintenance, mobilization, and control of the reserve formations, as well as air and naval forces built around career service personnel. In an emergency, the expectation was that the regular forces (supported by reserve forces then mobilized to hold the frontiers and carry out current security missions) would deploy to block and delay the attacker, and that the reserve army, with short warning, would simultaneously be mobilized, moved to the front, and deployed in staging grounds according to prearranged plans. After the reserve formations were deployed, the IDF, exploiting the advantage of short, internal lines, would transfer the war to the enemy's territory. The tremendous strike force, utilizing an offensive combat doctrine, would launch a blow, achieve a military decision within a short time, and bring the war to a rapid conclusion. Of course, if it was clear that the enemy was planning to attack, it would be better to preempt and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• 1 Introduction
• Part One The Peace for Galilee War: Anatomy of a Military Failure
• Part Two The Military Outcome of Previous Wars: Why Were the Lessons not Learned?
• Part Three The Twilight of Military Power: IDF Force Construction Between the Wars (1973-1982)
• Part Four The Moloch of "Absolute Security" Catch: Why the Security Establishment and the IDF Are "Drowning Themselves in the Sea"
• Notes
• List of Acronyms
• About the Book and Author
• Index