The IDF's Decisive Victory Doctrine III

Another operational level failure

I’ve written before about the surprising failure of the IDF’s decisive victory doctrine evident since Hamas’ attack on 7 October, here and here. A recent article at New Lines Magazine is full of even more information on what exactly went wrong.

Under this system, every inch of the Gaza Strip was routinely surveilled by drones, satellites and spy balloons known as aerostats. All communications were forcibly routed through Israel and monitored. In case Palestinian militant groups thought to fire rockets over the fence, even the sky was guarded by the U.S.-funded missile defense system known as Iron Dome. Nothing, it was thought, could happen in Gaza without Israel knowing.

Yet on Oct. 7 this seemingly invincible system of control failed catastrophically. The details by now are familiar: On that day, 50 years after the start of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, thousands of Hamas-affiliated fighters streamed deep into Israeli territory in a combined land, air and sea attack. The attackers took over 200 people hostage, while killing an estimated 376 members of local Israeli security forces and the military, along with 767 civilians. Despite their oversight of Gaza, the Israeli military — the Israeli Defense Forces or IDF — failed to detect the incursion as it happened, in some cases learning of it alongside the general public through social media posts and frantic phone calls from the front.

The Israeli chain of command buckled under pressure, taking until late in the day to organize a counterattack. The IDF scrambled to get forces to the south yet found it had no troop transports. Soldiers had to take carpools, rideshares and commandeered school buses to the front, only to wait hours at designated meeting spots like gas stations and parking lots for someone to issue orders, despite sometimes being only minutes from active combat zones.

This is nothing short of a complete breakdown of the IDF as it was supposed to work, and they did not take time to recover and reconstitute their command structure after the attack. This is surprising for a force focused on the operational level. In fact, it was probably Israelis who invented the idea of an operational level as frequent American claims that it was the Soviets turned out to be false. In the US the operational level has led to strategic ineptitude even while the military is extremely good, even dominant, when it comes to tactics and especially logistics. In the IDF, they could not even execute tactics.

Severing the link between tactics and strategy with an operational level wasn’t so bad before the information age really took off. Most tactical actions had a negligible strategic effect, even when they were victories. It was only when tactical actions go wrong that the connection was clear. Take the My Lai massacre in 1968 for instance. A tactical event gone very wrong had major strategic effects on the domestic and international support for the US war effort. But now every tactical event potentially has massive, even global, strategic effect because nearly every tactical event is digitally captured and spread around the world through the internet. All the world’s a stage, and that means the connection between tactics and strategy is tighter, the flash-to-bang between tactical event and strategic effect shorter. The operational level is now just a cognitive barrier preventing militaries from understanding the reality of the operational environment they exist in.

I could excerpt even more from this article, from IDF units hanging around in parking lots lacking any commander willing to take charge of them to intelligence analysts being rewarded with extra days off in exchange for not looking too deeply at intelligence information because it might invalidate it, the signs of IDF military collapse into little more than a brute-force focused mob were internally obvious before October 7th, but whistleblowers were ignored. Now it’s obvious to everyone.

The point of this isn’t to dump on the IDF, something I’m certainly not interested in doing. It’s definitely not to glorify Hamas, an illegitimate terrorist organization as brutal to the Palestinians as it is to its enemies. But rather to suss out what went wrong. It’s also an indicator why the IDF is not being, let’s say more subtle in their operations in Gaza itself: their decisive victory doctrine and focus on technological solutions to non-technical problems has completely failed and they haven’t stopped to fix them. They’re simply not capable of anything but sheer astrategic destruction until they do.

The IDF’s operations in Gaza are very armor-centric and artillery-centric. Armor and artillery are, inherently, blunt instruments. Another way to go after guerilla style fighters in an urban environment is with good ol’ fashioned infantry-centric operations. Ironically, the IDF used to be the infantry-centric force par excellence. But since adopting its decisive victory doctrine, predicated on technological overmatch, it hasn’t been. The IDF’s operations in Gaza have been prosecuted with a blatant disregard for humanity and empathy for the vulnerable position they’ve been placed in by Hamas because they’re simply not capable of executing anything more complex than rote destruction. (This is not to absolve Netanyahu, by the way. His appointments did this to the IDF, and he could stop the damage being done to Israel at literally any time.)

Unfortunately, my look at Hamas’ strategy was wrong. Very wrong. I don’t even think Hamas thought their attacks would yield them this much strategic effect. Anger over Israel’s actions in Gaza is boiling over around the world, and the IDF has been exposed as more of a cumbersome police force than a competent military. It’s hard to see how Israel recovers from this, especially as Hamas continues to exploit their strategic effects through diplomacy: sham negotiations paired with continued strikes against Israeli population centers to induce Israel to invade Gaza further. Bait and switch, bait and switch until Israel just runs out of political support. That’s how they win, and the IDF is doing their work for them.

There are two main critiques of the operational level of war, both of which I extended and fleshed out in On Operations. The first is that the operational level severs a military from strategy, leaving it capable of executing tactics but totally incapable of achieving anything in so doing. The second is that it takes a military organization’s focus away from tactics, leading to the atrophy of basic tactical skills and leadership.

Unfortunately it looks like it’s done both to the IDF.