Since, you know, it is relevant all of a sudden, I dug into the Israeli Defense Force’s Decisive Victory Concept, or at least what I could find publicly available on it. I had not heard of this concept before this week but having been on a few concept writing teams and red teams, I thought I’d take a look.
The Dado Center is the IDF’s concept of operations and plans shop, the people who oversee the development of new concepts and doctrine. This is their description of the theoretical underpinnings of the Decisive Victory Concept, intended to increase the IDF’s ability to engage in short but decisive wars. It’s an official take on the concept, not all of which is public for obvious reasons. There are two main goals behind the concept.
Redefinition of threats like Hamas and Hezbollah as “terror armies” because of the advanced weaponry they now deploy.
Digitization of the IDF and the greater exploitation of precision-strike capabilities.
The redefinition of the threat is important because previously the IDF viewed them as insurgents or guerrillas characterized by military inferiority. Failure against them in the past was seen as a result not of the opponent but a result of the IDF’s self-imposed restrictions.
In this regard, the Operational Concept for Victory, and the term “rocket-based terror armies” are important guideposts in the Israeli understanding of the challenge. The IDF no longer speaks of “asymmetric warfare” against “inferior forces,” in which Israel’s main limits on the use of force are self-imposed. It no longer sees Hezbollah and Hamas as challenges rooted in “insurgency” or “guerrilla warfare.” Rather, the new IDF operational concept describes the enemy as an advanced networked adversary that has cracked the secret of Israel’s military power and presents Israel with an operational challenge that serves enemy strategy. These are organized, well-trained armies, well-equipped for their missions, with straightforward operational ideas and tactics, all of which support a clear and dangerous strategy and ideology.
As for the digitization of the IDF, it is banking on the ability of technology to simultaneously detect targets accurately and enable rapid precision fires faster than the target can fire or move.
Automation and advanced information processing enable the creation of battlefield sensing, processing, and rapid strikes complexes—a form of reconnaissance—as part of the maneuvering force. As opposed to the main elements of intelligence gathering and processing, which operate detached from the maneuvering force, the tactical reconnaissance complex will be based on networked unmanned aerial vehicles and radars receiving and deciphering the signatures emitted by the enemy during combat. Interconnected data and advanced information processing could break through the current glass ceiling blocking more effective results from the intelligence/air force attack system and could allow more information to be processed more rapidly, in turn enabling more targets to be attacked more quickly and accurately.
Lastly, the concept is built on three principles: 1) multidomain (which, yeah of course everything is); 2) “smart” responses (technology enabled); and 3) Negating enemy capabilities, which means suppressing or defeating enemy fires capabilities with better, faster, more precise fires and defensive systems like Iron Dome.
The concept has been exercised, at least at the higher headquarters level, involving a multi-front war. And that’s where some problems really start to emerge.
Describing the exercise, IDF Lieutenant Colonel Amir Fridman stated, of the headquarters commanders: “They know the quantity of targets; they have the means and the potential to destroy them. The rest is in the hands of the commanders,” he said.”
This is just the targeting process eating tactics, and any fight is about a lot more than targeting. It rests on a number of assumptions that are unlikely to be true: 1) the targeting data from intelligence sources is accurate; 2) the targeting data from intelligence sources is complete; and 3) high-level commanders in the rear surrounded by banks of monitors are the best informed. Certainly if all three of these assumptions are true, then the rest really is just in the hands of commanders given the authority to strike targets. But when are those three things ever true?
The targeting cycle devouring tactics is one thing, but another danger of operational concepts is operations devouring strategy. Well, it appears that has happened too. This is from a scholarly article that assessed the concept and its path to official adoption a few years after it became official but before the events of last week.
Still, Decisive Victory was eventually embraced by the successive governments of Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett, and Yair Lapid, as the claim of “victory” fit conveniently into their political rhetoric. When Kochavi and his staff unveiled their new operational concept, they repeatedly said that it aligned with the National Security Concept 2030, a document prepared by Netanyahu a year before. Kochavi was thus able to gather political support by employing rhetoric that resounds with the powers that be. A few months after revealing his plan, he claimed that the Israeli armed forces were “all about victory,” while Netanyahu similarly declared that the IDF was “ready for a single goal—victory in war.”
This is a clear case of an operational concept being conflated with a strategy and being adopted wholesale by desperate policymakers as a new silver bullet. Remember COIN? The Surges? Yeah it happens.
What may have happened here is that policymakers heard the name “decisive victory” and now will hold the IDF to it and expect them to deliver victory by themselves. This is a bad place for the IDF to be in since strategy and war termination are inherently political activities. “Victory” is a tactical outcome. Achieving an end state for the war a strategic one. The promise of a short war is also not likely to be met. Hamas abandoned its irregular nature in the pages of this concept alone. It didn’t abandon terror or guerilla tactics, it just added advanced weaponry. Proclaiming that it is now an army doesn’t mean it’s easier to defeat quickly. The added weaponry will only make it costlier.
The Middle East Policy article linked above also has some more details on what Decisive Victory looks like for IDF units.
One ambitious experiment at the operational level in the Tnufa plan called for setting up a new outfit called the “Ghost Unit.” This elite force combines military capabilities—including infantry, armor, artillery, combat engineers, the air force, UAVs, and cyber operatives—into a single unit “with the human capabilities of a battalion, but with the firepower of a division”—in other words, a leaner, more agile, and meaner force.
So the IDF is reducing manpower and replacing it with digital technology and increased firepower. Maybe the IDF should ask Russia how that worked out for its Battalion Tactical Groups.
They already seem to be executing this concept with strikes on Hamas leadership in Gaza. Importantly, this concept is predicated on an assumed multifront war where Israel would focus not on Hamas but on Hezbollah first as a more dangerous threat. Which means it’s not ideal nor tailored for a conflict against Hamas alone. If Hezbollah stays out of this conflict- and they might since they’re still involved in Syria- the assumptions underpinning the concept are already being falsified.
Additionally, replacing manpower with firepower in an operational environment like the Gaza Strip (an incredibly dense urban area) is a recipe for civilian casualties, unintentional and intentional. This is handing an important advantage to Hamas, doing their own work for them. Technology will do nothing to mitigate this, especially as Hamas employs human shields.
This kind of warfare also requires a high number of highly-trained professionals and a high number of interactions between them to complete the coordination necessary to be effective. The IDF, as a mostly conscript-based army, only has a limited number of personnel that can operate at the level required by this concept in real-world situation.
Unfortunately, it looks like the IDF is the latest victim of RMA thinking: that technology can banish the fog of war and replace tactical excellence, operational art, and strategic thinking. It can’t and it won’t.