Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century

Uri Bar-Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135280215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volumes discusses three principal issues: the Israeli army and the Revolution of Military Affairs (RMA); Israel's present and future answers to the threays of weapons of mass destruction (WMD); and the impact of societal, political, and technological changes on Israel's future war objectives.

1

Introduction

URI BAR-JOSEPH

‘Israeli military thinking since the 1950s’ argues one of its students ‘is merely a footnote to the military thinking that was crystallized then.’¹ Though there is more than a grain of truth in this statement, tracing the intellectual roots of Israel’s present national security concept will bring us to an era even earlier than that. In part it is the 1930s – the establishment of the first Jewish mobile units (‘Nodedet’) by the unorthodox Haganah commander, Yitzhak Sadeh, and of the Special Night Squads (SNS) by the legendary British Captain Orde Charles Wingate in response to the Arab rebellion of 1936–39. Their most prominent students were Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan. Both admit the impact of Sadeh and Wingate on their intellectual and military thinking and both influenced extensively Israeli approach to security problems. Allon, the 1948 War’s most important general, played a major role in shaping Israeli strategic thinking between the late 1940s and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Dayan – the Chief of Staff in the mid-1950s and Security Minister between 1967 to 1974 – was the chief architect of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) esprit de corps, and the most influential figure in security affairs in the aftermath of the Six Day War.²

Yet the founding father of Israel’s national security concept was no soldier but a civilian. Though he saw a military service in the First World War, David Ben-Gurion was never raised beyond the rank of corporal and had no combat experience. Moreover, until the British mandate of Palestine approached its end he had hardly occupied himself with security affairs. But since early 1947, when he realized, at the age of 60, that the birth of the Jewish state was likely to involve a war with its neighbor countries, his prime concern became Israel’s national security. It remained so until he left office in 1963.³

Ben-Gurion’s belief system was shaped in Tsarist Russia before the revolution, where struggle between Russian socialism and Zionism as a panacea to the Jewish problem was so common. As a grown man and already the leader of the Jewish Yishuv, he witnessed the Holocaust, which proved so vividly how real was the threat to the mere existence of the undefended Jewish people. And in 1948 he lead his country through a war in which its existence was put into question. Combined, these traumatic experiences facilitated a Weltanschauung in which Arab destruction of the new Jewish state was not only possible but also very real. No wonder, then, that Ben-Gurion’s approach to Israel’s security challenges can be best typified as ‘security bolshevism’. Since the early 1950s, when he concluded that Israel could not reach peace with the Arab world at a cost he deemed acceptable, he became the prominent carrier of the belief that all national resources should be mobilized for the sake of the state’s security. Consequently, not only immigration absorption, education, or buildup of settlements was security in his eyes, but also his famous ideal that Israel should become ‘a light unto the nations’ (‘or lagoyim’). As he explained it, besides its moralistic value, being a paragon to other nations has an important security function: without it Israel will lose the external support which is so essential to ensure her existence.⁴

Underlying Israel’s security conception that was born in the early 1950s were four elements which, to a large extent, remained dominant ever since:

• The massive disproportion between Israeli and Arab national resources, chiefly in terms of territory, manpower, and GNP, prevents Israel from ending the conflict by military means, while allowing the Arabs to do so. Consequently, Israel is a territorial and political status-quo power. Hence, the only goal of the IDF, as implied by its name, is to defend the country against a revisionist Arab world.

• The most fundamental and dangerous threat to Israeli existence is an all-out coordinated Arab surprise attack. Consequently, Israel should always maintain the ability to defend herself under the conditions of such a worst case scenario, known as mikreh hakol (‘the all-out case’).

• As derived from the above, Israeli national security doctrine rests on three pillars: deterrence (as implied by the defensive goals of its national security conception); strategic warning (on any development which might endanger its national existence); and decision (the military ability to win a decisive victory if deterrence fails).

• The operational implications of this doctrine are chiefly two: (a) the buildup of the capability needed to provide a high quality strategic warning and a quick response to external threats. This explains why the Defense Military Intelligence (DMI), the Air Force (IAF), and the Navy are regular forces while the ground forces are based on reserve manpower. (b) Attainability to maintain operational initiative in the initiation of wars and in the battlefield, in order to be able to win a decisive victory within a short time.

At the basis of this work stands a twofold argument:

First, that in spite of 50 years of military struggle which demanded the lives of close to 20,000 Israeli civilians and soldiers, despite major changes in the structure of the Israeli society, the structure of the Arab–Israeli conflict and the structure of the international system, and in defiance of a revolution in military affairs which has reshaped the face of modern battlefield, Israel’s national security conception has undergone no radical changes since the early 1950s.

Second, that this situation is about to change.

The present work aims at describing and analyzing some of the theoretical and empirical aspects of the coming changes. In order to set them in a theoretical framework, it first addresses two issues: the meaning of the concept of security in the aftermath of the Cold War, and the sources of change in national security doctrine. It, then, moves to discuss the Israeli context of national security by addressing three major issues:

• the way the IDF may adapt itself to recent changes in warfare known as the revolution in military affairs (RMA);

• possible strategies by which Israel can deal with the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which replaced, since the early 1990s, the all-out conventional offensive as the main danger to its national existence;

• and the impact of societal, political, and technological changes on Israel’s future war objectives.

Since this work focuses on existential threats and the way Israel meets them, the issue of Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) is not discussed here. Certainly, the Fedayeen of the 1950s, the Palestinian guerrillas of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the Hizballah during the 1990s, the Intifada of 1987–93 and its current wave – all constituted, and still do, a permanent threat to lives of Israeli citizens. But none of these ever presented an actual challenge to the existence of the Jewish state. For this reason, we decided to exclude the analysis of this subject from this collection.

As Benjamin Miller of the Hebrew University maintains in his essay about the meaning of the concept of security in the aftermath of the Cold War, the last decade witnessed many calls for adopting a new conception of security and for extending the traditional concept. Confronting this approach, is a more traditional school, which persisted in defining the field of security studies exclusively in terms of ‘the study of the threat, use, and control of military force’. Miller asks two questions:

First, are the new conceptions and extensions necessary or is the traditional concept the right way to address the security issue?

Second, are the re-definitions useful or do they carry heavy costs which will bring more damage than benefit to our understanding of the security concept?

In addressing the debate on the expansion of the concept of security Miller argues that the ‘expanders’ of the concept beyond the focus on threats of organized violence and armed conflicts are wrong because of the resultant loss of intellectual coherence of the concept and of the security field, and also because of the remaining importance of the question of war and violence under international anarchy. On the other hand, while the ‘minimalists’ (mostly realists who can also be called traditionalists), avoid these two potential problems, they are nevertheless wrong by deemphasizing both peace as a central component of the security field and nonmilitary causes or means affecting national as well as regional and international security.

Miller’s argument is based on a distinction between the phenomenon to be explained (or dependent variable), which defines the scope of the field and the substantive issues it addresses, and the explanations (or independent variables), which include all the relevant competing causal factors affecting the explained phenomenon. The subject matter that the security field addresses is the threat of organized inter-group violence (including inter-state and low-intensity conflict) and the ways to manage and to prevent it. Here a somewhat broadened version of the traditionalist security concept – which should treat peace as a central element of the field alongside war – is in order. At the same time, however, the door should be kept wide open to a greater variety of causal factors, theories and explanations of war and peace on the condition that they logically and empirically affect these issues.

Miller’s contribution starts with a brief discussion of the relations between international anarchy and national and international security. After presenting the traditional approach to the concept of security in international relations, the essay introduces the major challenges which have emerged to the traditional conception, and which have grown immensely since the end of the Cold War. The study then discusses the limitations to these challenges and suggests an approach that will help maintain conceptual coherence through a focus on the substantive issues of war and peace. The author illustrates the discussion with aspects of the national security of Israel. The main implication of the proposed approach for Israel is that its national security debate should continue to focus on threats of organized violence (by states and non-state guerrilla and terrorist organizations) to national core values, but the complex relations between peace and such threats should be a major focus of inquiry in both the academic and policy communities.

In ‘New Threats, New Identities, and New Ways of War: The Sources of Change in National Security Doctrine’, Emily O. Goldman of the University of California, Davis examines the conditions under which national security doctrines change. She argues that dramatic shifts in national security doctrine are often the product of major discontinuities such as regime change, defeat in war, disappearance of a major threat, or revolutionary technological breakthroughs that alter the foundations of national power. Dramatic discontinuities in the strategic, technological, and domestic environments that render traditional planning assumptions and standard procedures obsolete frequently produce a crisis in national security identity. This requires political leaders to create a new theme, or national purpose orientation, around which domestic society can be mobilized.

Goldman uses the concept of ‘national security uncertainty’ to capture the strategic dilemma facing national security establishments today. She develops a typology of uncertainties orchestrated around six key categories: one’s own goals, the goals of potential allies, and those of potential adversaries; one’s own capabilities, the capabilities of potential allies, and those of potential adversaries. This typology deftly captures the complexities of operating in the post-Cold War, information age security environment.

Goldman then proceeds to examine the drivers of national security uncertainty, chief among them being changes in the nature of the threat, shifts in the domestic social and political milieux due to economic and demographic shifts, rapid and discontinuous technological change, and changing norms both nationally and internationally.

The question then becomes how one would expect national security doctrines to adjust to these discontinuities. While there is little well-developed theory on national security adjustment under uncertainty, Goldman mines the relevant theoretical literature – structural, domestic political, organizational, and ideational – to tease out hypotheses about how we should expect national security doctrines to adapt.

She concludes by providing a set of indicators for analyzing responses to national security uncertainty along four key dimensions: diplomatic posture, resource allocation priorities, military mission priorities, and domestic mobilization theme. Her rich analysis provides a useful starting point for debates about why and how national security conceptions are transformed.

Following Miller and Goldman’s theoretical setting, the focus of the rest of this collection is on three principal dimensions of Israel’s national security policy. Chris C. Demchak of the University of Arizona analyzes the difficulties involved in the adoption of Israel’s conventional forces to the Revolution in Military Affairs and a possible solution to these problems. Her piece, ‘Technology’s Knowledge Burden, the RMA, and the IDF: Organizing the Hypertext Organization for future “Wars of Disruption”?’ starts with an analysis of the manner in which the IDF modernizes for the twenty-first century. She shows how the IDF is adopting in an ad hoc fashion many of the short-term budget-reducing elements of the US-defined RMA model of a modern military, and concludes that by embracing such issues as focusing on reducing the costs of so many conscripts or minimizing reservists, the Israeli defense leaders are choosing a path of modernization highly problematical for the knowledge-conditions of their nation.

The knowledge burden of the highly integrated RMA model, Demchak maintains, is enormous and poses some daunting initial conditions to reach the organizational outcomes expected. This complexity requires carefully embedded tradeoffs in time, distance and money to provide slack in case of inevitable misjudgments when orchestrating finely tuned activities with large-scale technical systems. Even if adopted piecemeal in elements, the RMA model defined by the United States remains a socio-technical arrangement most appropriate for an expeditionary army of a relatively isolated and wealthy society.

Demchak asserts that the RMA in its emerging design is similar to the trends in the business world towards ‘business process reengineering’ (BPR) usually involving ‘enterprise resource planning’ (ERP) to produce an enterprise-wide highly integrated overall management system. The information technologies (IT)-enabled BPR and the associated ERP are integral to the RMA military being pursued by the US defense establishment and for much the same reasons: cheaper, faster, more productive (in marketplace or battle) and more control throughout the system. Like the RMA model, the ERP process engages in knowledge management (KM) intensely. It closely couples all processes, often using such processes as ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) logistics to keep inventory costs to a minimum.

Unfortunately for the RMA designers, the record of business experience is not encouraging. While there are some remarkably successful BPRs that integrated large corporate structures effectively, some 80 per cent of BPRs fail. This lack of success is often due to a failure to understand the firm’s initial conditions across all the elements of this socio-technical system right from the outset, especially the knowledge burden.

More discouraging for military planners is that these business failures occurred in organizations that, unlike militaries, are able to operate daily in their core competencies; they were most likely to have tested all their functions frequently. Most militaries rarely actually use all of their systems because battles are simply infrequent. Hence, a direct translation of the enterprise-wide system from the commercial world to the IT-enabled modernized military is highly problematical in any event. But, as Demchak so convincingly argues, these kinds of notions lie at the heart of the RMA image being promoted by the US and being accepted in rudimentary form all over the modernizing and modernized world, including Israel.

Underlying this piece is an understanding of the knowledge burdens inherent in constructing and operating large-scale technical systems such as the one embedded in the RMA and on the experiences already demonstrated by the corporate and computer business world to explore the implications of an RMA implementation in the IDF. Israel has resources and even has some exceptional characteristics that allow a modernization into a knowledge-enhanced military. But Israel’s initial conditions differ from other westernized nations in this kind of evolution. Success in orchestrating complex integrated militarized-knowledge systems is more likely if the IDF can break out along a different organizational path than the US/NATO RMA. In many respects, Demchak maintains, the IDF as an organization poised for an evolutionary leap is fortunate in the level of technical familiarity of its input population and by the social construction of both its mission and this emerging set of new tools.

Demchak’s study reviews the RMA model’s organizational knowledge requirements and the current knowledge conditions facing the IDF, both those that favor an RMA implementation and those that work against a successful adoption of that model. It includes a brief discussion of the RMA implications for Israel’s conventional deterrence; the role of surprise in future conflicts; crisis stability; and the possible transformation of the IDF.

Given the difficulties involved in implementation of a US/NATO RMA model in the Israeli case, Demchak proposes an alternative modernization model for the IDF, one that is tailored to the strengths of its wider society and points a path to modernizing to ensure slack through knowledge-creation/applications that are developing in any case in Israel’s vibrant computer startup community. Called the ‘Atrium’, this model is a non-RMA knowled...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Concept of Security: Should it be Redefined?
• 3. New Threats, New Identities, and New Ways of War: The Sources of Change in National Security Doctrine
• 4. Technology’s Knowledge Burden, the RMA, and the IDF: Organizing the Hypertext Organization for Future ‘Wars of Disruption’?
• 5. Non-Coventional Solutions for Non-Conventional Dilemmas?
• 6. Israeli War Objectives into an Era of Negativism
• Abstracts
• About the Contributors
• Index