The Gates of Gaza
Israel must abandon the failed idea that technological wizardry will guarantee its security
by Michael Doran and Can Kasapoglu
On April 29, 1956, two assassins, an Egyptian and a
Palestinian, ambushed Ro’i Rothberg, the security officer
of kibbutz Nahal Oz. Luring him into the fields, they shot
him off his horse, beat him, and shot him again, ending his
life. They then dragged his lifeless body as a gruesome
trophy back to Gaza, where it was desecrated. Unlike Iran
and its proxies today, however, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who
ruled Gaza at the time, did not ransom Israeli corpses. The
day after Rothberg’s murder, the Egyptian authorities
transferred his mutilated remains to United Nations
mediators who, in turn, passed them back to Israel for
burial.
Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan delivered the eulogy at the
funeral. Steely-eyed and unsentimental, Dayan attributed
Rothberg’s death to the victim’s own lack of vigilance,
which, he suggested, was symptomatic of a laxness in the
whole society. Craving peace and normalcy, the Israelis
were allowing themselves to imagine that their neighbors
shared the same aspirations. “Let us not cast blame on his
murderers today,” Dayan said. “It is pointless to mention
their deep-seated hatred for us.” There was nothing the
Israelis could do to make the Gazans willingly accept the
establishment of the Jewish State. “Ro’i [Rothberg]—the
light in his heart blinded him to the gleam of the knife.
The longing for peace deafened him to the sound of the
murders lying in wait.”
The residents of Nahal Oz, Dayan said, carry “the heavy
gates of Gaza on their shoulders, gates behind which
hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands pray that we will
weaken so that they may tear us to pieces—have we
forgotten that?”
On October 7, when Hamas paragliders sailed over Israel’s
40-mile “smart fence” with its state-of-the-art radar
systems, remote control machine guns, and underground
sensors, they encountered on the other side no meaningful
forms of military resistance from what is often accounted
to be the fourth most powerful military force on earth.
Instead of being greeted by tanks, helicopters, and heavily
armed brigades, the Hamas invaders found themselves
among young revelers at the Nova music festival, whom
they slaughtered like lambs.
Following the attack, both friends and foes of Israel
greeted the absence of any organized military response,
which lasted for many hours, with incredulity. As news
spread of lightly-armed Hamas forces penetrating beyond
the immediate border areas to major Israeli population
centers like Ashkelon, everyone wondered: What happened
to the IDF?
The answer is that, over the prior two decades, Israel’s
military had deliberately remade itself by stripping away
exactly the kinds of conventional force assets—large
combat formations, overwhelming firepower, and heavy
armor—that could be expected to repel a large-scale
cross-border attack. Israel had replaced its old army with a
new one, based on new theories of warfighting that had
become current in the West since 9/11. In place of its
former doctrines and force structure, Israel had adopted a
more modern military approach favoring a “small and smart”
force reliant on precision airpower, special forces, and
technology-centric intelligence. As a result, almost without
exception, Israel’s leaders failed to foresee not only
October 7, but also the kind of war the military is now
fighting: Not quick, surgical strikes lasting for several days
at most, but a multi-front conflict requiring the taking and
holding of contested land positions over the course of
months and possibly years.
For seven months now, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
have been fighting simultaneously on seven fronts (in Gaza,
the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen). In
Gaza they have deployed large, mechanized formations
into urban areas. With respect to the conflict with Hezbollah
in Lebanon, they have readied themselves to do the same
should circumstances demand it. No one planned for this
kind of war. As a result of this lack of vision and forward
planning, Israel does not have the right force structure,
defense technological industrial base, or alliances to ensure
a longer-term victory.
Some part of the debate inside Israel around these realities
surfaced in early April when Finance Minister Bezalel
Smotrich wrote a letter to the prime minister withholding
his support for a $9.5 billion purchase of a squadron of
F-35 aircraft and a squadron of F-15 aircraft. Smotrich
refused to approve the purchase until the government
convened the finance committee to examine the security
budget. “The war challenges many basic assumptions in
the security budgets and requires renewed thought.
Following the war, the defense establishment requires
huge budget additions and the Finance Ministry’s position
is that fundamental assumptions and priorities need to be
revised accordingly,” Smotrich wrote.
Unfortunately for Israel, weapons systems, force structures,
and established alliances cannot be remade in a day. In
that respect, the military paradigm resembles a network of
railway tracks with a limited array of switches. The tracks
assist the IDF in moving forward, but they also constrain it,
sending it down predetermined lines regardless of whether
those lines lead to the destination that is most desirable
strategically. Laying new tracks will cost Israel time,
measured in years; money, measured in untold billions of
dollars; but also lives, measured in the thousands.
Some of the flaws in Israel’s “small and smart” paradigm
came emblazoned with a “Made in Israel” stamp, but just
as many were imported from the West, particularly from
the American war colleges where Israel has long sent its
professional officer corps for training. The Israelis have
borrowed liberally from the Americans and other members
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who,
for some two decades before the Ukraine war, endorsed
the belief that large-scale and prolonged wars between
states were a thing of the past.
The “War on Terror,” with its focus on substate actors
clearly influenced this thinking, which persisted even as
Russia intervened in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014,
in Syria, together with Iran, in 2015, and in Libya in 2017.
It persisted even as China engaged in the largest and fastest
military buildup in history. “We are working to build
deeper and more effective partnerships with other key
centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia,”
says the U.S. National Security Strategy, published by the
Obama administration in May 2010. “[W]e want to see a
true strategic partnership between NATO and Russia, and
we will act accordingly, with the expectation of reciprocity
from Russia,” stated NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept. This
document remained the authoritative statement of NATO
strategy until 2022, when the alliance began to depict
China, Russia, and Iran as more threatening.
So long as “partnership” was the watchword when
describing the West’s relations with China, Russia, and
Iran, then it seemed obvious that the scale of warfighting
would shrink. “State-on-state conflict will not disappear,
but its character is already changing,” stated an
authoritative British strategy document in 2010.
“Asymmetric tactics such as economic, cyber and proxy
actions instead of direct military confrontation will play
an increasing part, as both state and non-state adversaries
seek an edge over those who over-match them in
conventional military capability,” it continued. In other
words, warfare as we commonly imagine it—that is, as
two big armies facing off against each other for months or
years on the battlefield, like we see in Gaza and Ukraine
today—had all but disappeared. A series of running battles,
short and sharp, had replaced it.
Note the causal explanation in the quote above. Big wars
will not happen, so the thinking went, due to the
technological superiority of the Western countries.
The assessment rests on two key assumptions, namely, that
technological advantages deter states; and that
technological superiority itself can be the sole determinant
of victory in war.In recognition of this assumption, we
will name this military paradigm—the one that most
NATO powers and the Israelis adopted—“Star Wars.”
The Star Wars paradigm fosters the misguided belief that
the new renders the old obsolete. Emerging technologies,
such as algorithmic warfare, eclipse traditional warfighting
assets, like tanks and howitzers. Because it replaces
traditional combat formations, which are bulky and
expensive, with small, agile forces, bureaucrats, ever on
the search for ways to cut budgets, found the Star Wars
paradigm inherently attractive. Generals, for their part,
were drawn to the paradigm, because the new tools, in
addition to their inherent effectiveness, were also much
sexier than the traditional instruments of war. Generals
gravitated to conferences in Silicon Valley, where they
secured lucrative consulting careers, after retirement, with
high-tech companies. If given the choice, who wouldn’t
prefer to log their training hours in virtual reality
simulations rather than dragging howitzers through the mud in the freezing rain?
Indeed, the new Silicon Valley tools were supposedly
turning the howitzer into a weapon of yesteryear—in part
by enhancing deterrence through improved intelligence.
According to the Star Wars paradigm, technologically
inferior forces had no chance of winning against
technologically superior powers, because the great
electronic eye in the sky never sleeps; it sees all. On the
computer screens of high-tech militaries, enemy forces
would stand out like sharks in a well-lit aquarium:
fearsome in appearance but visible from all sides and at all
times. Technological advancements generated an
intelligence officer’s wet dream: total battlefield
transparency married to flawless information superiority
over the adversary.
Then came the paragliders over Israel’s smart fence. If one
designed a military paradigm specifically with the
intention of duping the Israelis, one could have done no
better than Star Wars. The paradigm played to their vanity.
It told them, subliminally, that the activities at which they
naturally excelled (special operations and clandestine
intelligence collection), the institutions that they most
revered (Mossad, the Air Force, and Special Forces), and
all the ventures that made them as rich as Europeans
(high-tech startups)—are precisely the elements that gave
them, like Samson, superhuman strength. The Air Force,
intelligence services, and special forces have long been
the glittering stars of the national security culture of the
Start-Up Nation. The Star Wars paradigm taught that it is
the stars who win the wars—and virtually no one else was
necessary.
The healthy alternative to the Star Wars paradigm, which
has so visibly and spectacularly failed to assure Israel’s
security, is “Mad Max.” This alternative paradigm states
that new and old weapon systems will merge, thanks to
innovative concepts of operations. Mad Max understands
that the twenty-first century battlefield is home to T-64
tanks, which fought their first battles in the early 1960s, as
well as state-of-the-art cyber-electronic warfare. Mini
drones that are commercially available across the globe
can spot for Cold War-era artillery.
Never underestimate technologically inferior adversaries,
the Mad Max paradigm counsels. High-tech tools and
weapons will never be the sole or even the primary factor
determining the winner of wars. This dictum is especially
true for the wars of the Middle East, where great powers
external to the region determine the balance of power on
the ground.
Because war remains today what it has always been, a
political activity, we cannot gauge the true advantage of any
weapon—be it new and technologically advanced or old and
rusty—without first considering the political-military strategy
that it serves. Victory comes not to him who
kills the most enemy soldiers or who fries the most
motherboards but to him who converts what transpires on the
battlefield into the most beneficial political arrangements.
Losers on the battlefield frequently win wars, by bleeding
giants until they are too exhausted to continue fighting. For
example, in Vietnam, the second Iraq War, and Afghanistan,
the U.S. repeatedly outmatched its adversaries militarily
but lost the wars, nevertheless.
The digital revolution has enhanced the powers of
technologically advanced countries in many ways, but it
has also exposed them to new risks while also delivering
surprising new tools to underdogs. Even the poorest of
powers, thanks to the internet and smartphones, now enjoy
a bonanza of open-source intelligence that just a few years
ago was not available to even the richest of states. Cheap
drones purchased off the shelf can offer startling
reconnaissance capabilities to Ukraine against Russia.
Cyber-enabled supply chains and GPS present an
otherwise ragtag group like the Houthis opportunities to
disrupt global commercial shipping. The list goes on.
The Star Wars paradigm also rests on the assumption,
often unstated, that taking and holding territory has
somehow become a secondary part of warfighting. While
it is certainly possible to name wars that have been won
without territorial conquest, they are few and far between.
Almost inevitably, the magnitude of such victories is
small, because victors who impose their will from over the
horizon—from the air, sea, or through economic
leverage—lack the physical presence on the ground that is
necessary to shape a new political order.
The Mad Max mentality cultivates a heightened sensitivity
to the phrase “on the ground.” With minor exceptions,
armies translate battlefield victories into lasting changes
either by seizing territory or threatening persuasively to do
so. In the brave new digital world, traditional warfighting
assets—large combat formations, replete with artillery,
rocket systems, engineering units, and heavy armor—will
not disappear, because only they can take and hold
territory decisively.
Under the influence of Star Wars, Israel neglected its role
by allowing its land forces to atrophy. In 2018, Brigadier
Roman Goffman, who was then the commander of the 7th
Armored Brigade, took the extraordinary step of airing his
concerns about this issue openly before the senior
leadership of the IDF at a command conference.
“Chief of Staff,” Goffman said, referring to his senior most
commander, General Gadi Eisenkot, “I first want to tell
you that we [in armored units] are ready to fight. There is
one problem. You don’t activate us… [T]here is a very
problematic pattern that is developing here, namely, the
avoidance of the use of ground forces.”
Eisenkot sat in the front row of the audience flanked by
the top leaders of the IDF. Behind them sat hundreds of
senior officers who greeted Goffman’s remarks with
smirks. But he continued undeterred. The non-deployment
of ground forces, he argued, “ultimately affects the will to
fight. What makes us into combat commanders over time is
friction with the other side.” Absent friction with the
enemy, he continued, the military enters a state of
“clinical death.”
On October 7, the Israelis tasted what Goffman meant by
“clinical death.” The Israeli military had at its disposal a
glittering arsenal of exquisite weapons, including a large
squadron of radar-proof F-35s, whose capacities previous
generations would have considered to be the stuff of
science-fiction. As it turned out, however, none of these
weapons were of the slightest use against terrorist bands,
armed mainly with Kalashnikovs, who were intent on
murdering, raping, and kidnapping civilians.
With its 2022 Strategic Concept, NATO began the arduous
and ongoing process of abandoning the faulty notions that
major conflict between states is over, that wars will be
short and asymmetrical, and that holding territory with
large, mechanized forces is no longer central to
warfighting. But the Strategic Concept still has some
surprising deficiencies, not least of which is its treatment
of Iran—or, more accurately, it’s telling non-treatment.
The document only briefly addresses Iran’s missiles in a
lone passage on weapons of mass destruction.It contains
no mention, for example, of Iran’s attack drones, which
had been upsetting the military balance in the Middle East
for years—and which in the months following the
document’s publication began striking targets in Ukraine
daily.
While the Israelis had a much deeper and more nuanced
appreciation of the Iranian threat, thanks to their Star
Wars assumptions they, too, failed to develop a military
paradigm that grappled successfully with it in all its
dimensions. As Iran now matches off against Israel
directly, it possesses four advantages that, each on its own,
surprised Israeli war planners. When merged into one,
they present a threat to Israel of a magnitude that the
country has not faced since the days of Egyptian leader
Gamal Abdel Nasser—an existential threat.
The first of these is an advantage in political warfare.
American elites, particularly young elites, have grown
increasingly hostile to Zionism. Traditional voices of
support for Israel (and for Jews) no longer receive a
sympathetic hearing in cultural and educational
institutions. Thoroughly steeped in progressivism, these
institutions catechize the young to regard Zionism as
racism. Iran clearly recognizes this development as an
opportunity. The digital revolution and the spread of smart
phones provide it, not to mention China and Russia, with new,
cheap, and highly effective means to disseminate propaganda
in real time to Western media and social media personalities
and institutions who enthusiastically spread it, often without
the slightest inkling of its origins, directly to an unsuspecting
public. For a significant segment of the
public, globally, the conflict in Gaza is war between the
Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian babies. Western
powers and Israel have been slow to recognize the threat,
let alone to combat it.
Second, Iran’s Resistance Axis, for the first time ever, is
now behaving as something close to a military coalition
working toward the united goal of saving Hamas and
weakening Israel. The IDF had long assumed that the
Resistance Axis would remain what it had always been: a
dis-aggregated network of actors each of which operated
according to the restraints dictated by its immediate
environment. The assumption of dis-aggregation allowed
the IDF to approach the Iran threat as four discrete
challenges: 1) Disrupting the Iranian and Iranian-backed
forces on the ground in Syria; 2) Delaying Iran’s nuclear
weapons program; 3) Deterring Lebanese Hezbollah; and
4) Deflecting Hamas from a resumption of terror attacks.
Missing entirely from this list are the Iran-backed militias
in Iraq and, especially the Houthis, the deterrence of which
Israel has no apparent solution. But most important of all,
what is Israel’s plan to fight the Resistance Axis as a unit?
It has none.
Third, Iran has created what military analysts call an
“offense-dominant” military regime, a balance of power
that favors offensive action.What, precisely, is “offense
dominance”? Imagine that you have a Kevlar vest, a
top-of-the-line product, which costs two thousand dollars.
And imagine that I, your enemy, have an old revolver that
shoots six bullets, at two dollars each. I empty the cylinder of
my revolver into your vest, which stops five of the six bullets.
With an 83.3% interception rate, your vest performed even
better than advertised by the manufacturer. This happy
fact would give you reason to celebrate, if you weren’t
dead, laid to rest by my sixth bullet.
Like a cheap revolver against an expensive vest, Iran’s
drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles give it an
offensive advantage. When combined in the same strike
packages, those weapons can overwhelm the finest missile
defenses in the world—a capability that Iran demonstrated
on April 13, when it launched over 300 warheads at Israel.
Many analysts presented the attack as a great failure by Iran
and a great success by Israel and its coalition partners. Some
of Iran’s weapons failed to
launch or went astray, so the argument goes. The
synchronization of drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise
missiles left much to be desired. Israel and its coalition
partners, therefore, shot down almost all the munitions that
were on track to hit their targets. The four Iranian ballistic
missiles that did manage to penetrate the net failed to do
significant damage. No one died. Then, with great
economy of force, Israel responded on April 19 by taking
out an Iranian air defense system protecting the Natanz
nuclear facility near Esfahan. The Israelis, the argument
continues, demonstrated to Iranian “Supreme Leader”
Ali Khamenei that his bullets cannot penetrate their vest,
and that they are armed with better guns. He, therefore, was
supposedly wowed and deterred.
To be sure, the Israelis and their coalition partners,
showcased impressive capabilities. And the poor
performance of Iran’s weaponry very likely disappointed
Khamenei. But before exaggerating the significance of his
disappointment, let’s observe that this entire line of
analysis is rooted in the dubious Star Wars assumption that
we can glean the power and effectiveness of a low-tech
adversary’s weaponry by comparing them to our high-tech
equivalents. To repeat: the Mad Max mindset reminds us
that the true power of a weapon can only be understood in
the context of a larger political-military strategy.
Khamenei is conducting an exhaustion strategy that seeks
to embroil Israel in a long war of attrition. At the same
time, he is driving a wedge between Jerusalem and
Washington. Whereas the Star Wars analysis invites us to
see the April exchange as a single boxing match to which
there will be no sequel, it is more helpful to understanding
to see it as but one bout in a lengthy series of bouts with
no obvious end in sight.
In several areas, the trend lines are working against Israel,
starting with the rising lethality of Iranian drone and
missile capabilities. Two decades ago, the mere mention
Iran’s missile program elicited giggles from Western
analysts. Today, no one is laughing. In the last decade,
Iranian weapons systems have increased by leaps and
bounds, a trend that the military cooperation with Russia is
only accelerating.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is sharing technology
with Khamenei, including critical subsystems for drones
and missiles, that are elevating Iran’s weapons to a new
level. The data that Iran is gathering from the Russo–
Ukrainian War is also helping it to improve its Shahed
loitering munitions, which are already getting stealthier.
When they first appeared over the skies of Kyiv, the
Ukrainians had a near perfect interception rate. Today the
rate has dropped to eighty percent.Meanwhile, the
endurance of the Shaheds will soon increase, as will their
size and versatility.
In the April 13 attack on Israel, Khamenei did not make
use of at least two lethal assets. His next barrage that he
launches might include, for example, two missiles that the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unveiled last year:
the Khorramshahr-4 and the Fattah 1. The Khorramshahr
comes with a massive, almost 4,000-pound-weighted
warhead. The Fattah 1 has a design philosophy that enables
it to maneuver both in and out of the atmosphere, not to
mention other features that will likely stress Israel’s air and
missile defense system.
“Stress” is the key word. While the missile barrage that
Khamenei launched on April 13 may have killed no one, it
stressed his adversaries in several ways, including
economically. Informed observers estimate that on that
night Israel alone spent over a billion dollars—a hefty bill
for just a few hours work. We have no information about
the cost to the entire coalition, but Biden administration
officials have testified before Congress that the United
States Navy has spent nearly a billion dollars over the last
six months intercepting missiles and drones lunched by
the IRGC and its terrorist proxies.
The defense economics skew in favor of Iran. Its attack
drones cost $20,000 apiece. A David’s Sling Stunner
interceptor is estimated to cost $1 million, while a Patriot
MSE interceptor is at least $3 million. Iran’s weapons are
also plentiful. Its arsenal of drones, ballistic missiles, and
cruise missiles is massive, one of the largest in the world.
Playing catch with terrorists is a sucker’s game. To avoid
loss, the Israelis must intercept everything lobbed in their
direction. Iran risks nothing by attacking and needs only
one lucky shot—against, say, HaKirya, Israel’s Pentagon
in downtown Tel Aviv; or Dimona, its nuclear reactor in
the Negev—to inflict on Israel a national tragedy.
Therefore, Israel’s “success” on April 13 was misleading.
The circumstances were as optimized for high interception
rate as they will ever be. Seeking international legitimacy
for its planned attack, Iran telegraphed its intentions,
allowing the United States and Israel to prepare in
advance. In the future, Iran may seek the element of
surprise. In the meantime, it weapons will do nothing
except grow more lethal.
Because Iran depends on no outside power for its defense
industrial production, it has total freedom of action.
Autarky affords Iran what we will call “operational
sovereignty,” the ability to decide entirely on its own
which risks to incur. Thanks to his sovereign defense
industrial base, Khamenei, if he chose to do so, could
probably launch a massive barrage at Israel every night for
two weeks straight.
Israel, by contrast, suffers from diminished operational
sovereignty—because of its dependence on the United
States, which scrutinizes every step that Israel takes
toward Iran. The IDF cannot flawlessly defend the nation
against Iran’s “defective,” “unreliable,” “substandard,”
and “inaccurate” weapons without the help of
USCENTCOM, the combatant command that organized
the coalition defense of Israel. Moreover, Israel
co-manufactures the interceptors in its Iron Dome system
in the United States, giving Washington the option of
withholding resupply to influence Israeli policy.
Which brings us to the fourth surprising advantage that
Iran enjoys in its contest with Israel—namely, a beneficent
American policy. In some pro-Israeli and Israeli circles,
the word “beneficent” in this context will raise hackles. It
smacks of ingratitude and comes across as an unwarranted
polemical attack. Biden, so his supporters argue, has
backed Israel’s war against Hamas, Iran’s proxy. He has
dispatched aircraft carrier groups to the Middle East to
deter Iran and its surrogates. He has ordered the American
military to carry out punitive raids in Iraq and Yemen.
He is promoting Saudi-Israeli normalization, and on April
13 he presided over a major coalition effort to defend Israel
from an historically unprecedented barrage of missiles
and drones. Biden did all of this, moreover, while turning a
deaf ear to those in his party who have demanded that he
take a tougher line against Israel. How could any
fair-minded person look at this set of actions and see it as
beneficial to Iran?
The beneficence derives not from Biden’s feelings and
intentions toward Israel or Iran, whatever they may be,
but how his policies objectively help Khamenei to
advance Iran’s exhaustion strategy—objectively, based on
the fundamentals of military science. The president
restrained Israeli and American responses to acts of
aggression by Iran’s Resistance Axis. By now, the press
has reported on these restraints so extensively as to leave
us with no doubt. A partial list of Biden’s red lines toward
Iran include the following:
- After Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 8, 2023, the
- Biden administration pressed Israel immediately to
- respond proportionately and not to escalate, and it has
- frequently repeated the message.
- The administration encouraged Israel not to attack the
- Houthis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen, in response to their
- attacks on Israel.
- In response to Houthi attacks on international
- commercial shipping and on American naval vessels,
- the administration refused to attack Iran directly, and
- avoided attacking Iranian liaison officers in Yemen.
- President Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister
- Netanyahu not to launch a preemptive strike on Iran as
- it readied its missiles to attack Israel on April 13.
- President Biden urged Israel not to launch a counterattack after the April 13 barrage.
- In response to hundreds of attacks by Iranian proxies
- from Iraq and Syria on American forces, including an
- attack that killed three Americans in Jordan, the
- administration refused to attack Iran directly and
- ensured that the punitive strikes that were carried out against Iran’s proxies did not target Iranians.
- The administration has, through lax enforcement,
- effectively lifted sanctions on Iranian oil sales to China
- and has refused to reverse course in response to Iranian aggression against Israel or American forces.
The scholar and strategic analyst Edward Luttwak quipped
that these seven red lines spell out a Biden Doctrine: Iran
is free to attack any country with missiles and drones but
no country, including the United States, is allowed to
attack it back.
Seen from Tehran, the Biden Doctrine announces with a
bullhorn that the U.S. steadfastly refuses to hold Iran
responsible for orchestrating a seven-theater war against
Israel, a war which has, among other things, killed three
American soldiers, wounded dozens more, and interdicted
shipping through the Suez Canal.
The Biden Doctrine has grave implications with respect to
military science. An axiom of deterrence teaches that it is
impossible to counter an offense-dominant capability
with purely defensive measures. Only offensive action
can redress the balance. Kevlar vests can shield you from
an attack, but to deter one you must wield a gun and
convince your would-be attacker that you won’t hesitate to
pull the trigger. To prevent Iran from shooting drones and
missiles—directly or indirectly through its proxies—
Netanyahu must convince Supreme Leader Khamenei that
Israel will attack back, and that Iran will lose things it
holds dear if its aggression continues. The restraint that
Biden places on Israel, however, renders Netanyahu’s
threats unconvincing.
“Take the win,” Biden reportedly told Netanyahu after the
successful interception of Iranian missiles and drones on
April 13. However, from Khamenei’s perspective, Israel
did not win the exchange. On April 13, Iran changed the
rules of engagement with Israel without suffering any
meaningful consequences whatsoever. Israel’s
“counterattack” was a mere gesture. Iran took the shot,
but Israel, despite its high-tech Kevlar vest and gleaming
guns, did not.
Over the last 68 years, Israel’s essential security challenges
have changed less than its miraculous economic and
technological advances would suggest. Deterring Israel’s
enemies and gaining great power support—or, to state it
another way, insulating the country from great power
pressure—remain the two essential tasks of national
security. The architects of Israel’s Star Wars paradigm
created a military that is technologically astounding but
that is not optimized for either of these tasks in a Mad
Max world.
The simple truth is that just eight years after winning its
independence, Israel, a fledgling state with a tiny
economy, enjoyed more operational sovereignty than it
does today. At the end of October and beginning of
November in 1956, the IDF conquered Gaza in just eight
days, while taking the entire Sinai Peninsula at the same
time. A few months later, President Eisenhower threatened
Israel with economic sanctions if it refused to withdraw.
Moshe Dayan, the IDF chief of staff, told David Ben
Gurion, the prime minister, that the Israeli military had
enough food, fuel, and ammunition to withstand an
international embargo for six months. Today, the IDF has
taken over seven months just to conquer Gaza, and the
job is still incomplete. Could today’s Israel, either the
military or the home front, survive for six months under
international embargo, let alone while fighting a war?
To be sure, comparing capabilities in 1956 and 2024 is a
case of apples and oranges. In the battlefield geometry of
Gaza in 1956, the Egyptians presented Israel with no
subterranean warfare capabilities. Even if today’s IDF had
been fully expecting a long ground war and had tailored
the force for that specific purpose, the tunnel dimension of
the contemporary conflict would make it impossible to
defeat Hamas in just eight days. Nevertheless, the Star
Wars paradigm has fostered an Israeli way of war that has
severely circumscribed the IDF’s operational sovereignty.
The primary weaknesses of the current Israeli way of war
include, first, an overreliance on air and missile defense,
high-end precision strike capabilities in surgical attack
roles, and an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
capacity that is chiefly technology-centric.
Overconfidence in this suite of assets lulled the IDF into
accepting as normal the routine launching of rockets into
Israel by Hamas and the expansion of the Lebanese
Hezbollah’s arsenal without either of these developments
triggering a ground incursion by Israel. More generally,
the IDF failed to take the full measure of the
offense-dominant regime that Iran has developed thanks
to its disruptive military capabilities. Iran has grown
especially adept at building mixed strike packages that, by
combining missile warfare assets together with drone
warfare assets, saturate and overwhelm the sensors and
interceptors of air warfare systems.
As a result of these and other disruptive capabilities, Iran
and its Arab minions have garnered an achievement
unmatched by any of Israel’s earlier enemies: they have
imperiled the normal life of civilian communities inside
Israel—in the north along the Lebanon border and in the
south in the Gaza periphery. Despite Israel’s high-tech
military capacity (or perhaps because of it), the IDF failed
to disrupt this threat until it was too late. This failure to
appreciate the gathering storm led the IDF to content itself
for years with punishing Hamas and Iran’s Syrian proxies
almost exclusively from the air, while avoiding direct
conflict with Hezbollah and Iran itself.
Iran will gleefully battle Israel to the last Palestinian or
Syrian fighter. The only way to deter the Islamic Republic
is to take the fight to Iran itself and to its most treasured
asset, Hezbollah. But Israel’s principal ally and great
power patron, the United States, strongly opposes any such
approach. Therefore, an additional deficiency in the
existing Israeli military paradigm is the over-dependence
on the United States. Israeli combat plans and doctrines
take for granted Washington’s near-unconditional
support—a commodity that, as any newspaper reader can
plainly see, does not exist. Since the start of the conflict,
Biden prioritized restraining the Israeli military operations
directed at Iran and its proxies over deterring Iranian
aggression.
For months, rumors circulated in Jerusalem that the Biden
team, aiming to restrain Israeli military operations, was
withholding, or threatening to withhold ammunition.
Whether those rumors were true in the past, we now know
that they true in the present, having been verified by the
president himself. “I made it clear that if [the Israelis] go
into Rafah—they haven’t gone in Rafah yet—if they go
into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been
used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the
cities—that deal with that problem,” Biden said on May 8
in an interview with CNN.
Rafah is the final stronghold of Hamas that has not fallen
to the Israelis, and it guards the passages, official and
unofficial, to Egypt, the main arteries of the Gazan
economy. Unless Israel takes Rafah, it cannot decapitate
Hamas, destroy it as a military organization, or lay the
basis for an economy that is not entirely under the control
of Hamas. It cannot, in a word, win. Biden’s policy,
therefore, is laying the groundwork for the survival of
Hamas, and with it, of Iranian influence.
Given Biden’s use of military aid as a straight jacket, the
Israeli reliance on the American defense sector as its
principal supplier of war-fighting equipment and
ammunition is fast becoming a liability. Can any Israeli
leader honestly affirm to the Israeli voters that the United
States would never withhold, say, critical air and missile
defense interceptors, to force Israel to stand down against
Iran– a bit less gently than it did on April 13, 2024?
The Star Wars paradigm told us that technologically
advanced powers will ride roughshod over their
technologically disadvantaged enemies. The Ukraine war
and the fighting in Gaza are crystal balls that belie this
view. Future wars will resemble the First World War more
than anything we have seen in the last century. They will
be long, costly, and bulky: long, because defenses like
Hamas’s tunnels and Russia’s trenches are hard to
overcome by attackers who are visible to cheap,
commercially available drones; costly, because the tempo
of warfighting will be intense, consuming tons upon tons
of munitions; and they will be bulky, because they will
require traditional warfighting capacities such as artillery
firepower, heavy armor, and large combat formations that
can seize territory.
Disruptive military technologies, like man portable air
defense systems and anti-tank guided munitions—to say
nothing of the drone, rocket, and missile warfare assets of
the kind that Iran deploys and transfers to its proxies—are
becoming widely available and ever more lethal. These
technologies deny territorial control to small and
moderately-sized combat formations. Because the
complete suppression of them is very challenging, nearly
impossible, they allow disadvantaged belligerents to
bleed larger powers asymmetrically.
Battlefields are increasingly urbanized, making the
suppression of disruptive military technologies ever more
complicated. Engineering units, therefore, will play
major roles, in building and destroying subterranean
warfare complexes and in hardening and breaching lines
of defense.
All of this is unwelcome news for Israel. The structure of
Israel’s society and economy predisposed the IDF to build
a “small and smart” army. Israel’s expenditure on research
and development as a proportion of GDP is one of the
highest in the world, amounting to some five percent
annually. Between 1999 and 2014, some 10,000 start-ups
mushroomed. In 2021, investments in Israeli startups rose
to $26 billion. The most basic instincts of a tech-savvy
society militated in favor of thinking that Star Wars would
work—by using Israel’s high-tech complex as a massive
force-multiplier.
Sound economic thinking based on demographic realities
also pushed the Israelis in the direction of the “small and
smart” military. The IDF war-fighting doctrine calls for a
blitz strategy implemented with air assets and special
forces. The Israeli way of war calls for delivering
maximum firepower by the smallest number of people.
The diminutive country cannot field large combat
formations without mobilizing reserves. But mobilizations
deliver two blows to the economy: they burn public
monies at a very high rate while simultaneously removing
the most productive members of the economy from the
workplace.
There is no magic bullet solution to Israel’s predicaments,
which are structural in nature. Nonetheless, the contours
of a viable strategy are available. In the coming years,
Israel by necessity will switch to a hybrid model that
maintains the most lethal elements of the Star Wars
military while conducting Mad Max reforms, which will
prioritize a partial return to large combat formations
capable of taking and holding territory, particularly in
southern Lebanon.
“Operational sovereignty” will form the basis for testing
the usefulness of any reform. Will a proposed new
program or asset enhance Israel’s capacity to fight under
conditions of embargo or will it increase Israel’s
vulnerability to outside political pressure, including,
especially, from the United States?
Israel will therefore diversify its defense technological
and industrial base, allocating and funding to expendable
and cheap weapons that best serve long-war situations.
For example, to keep the upper hand over the rising Iran
threat, Israel will produce, on its own and in huge
numbers, the interceptors for its air and missile defense
systems that are currently co-produced with the United
States. At the same time, it will devote more attention to
developing—again, on its own—offensive assets,
including missiles designed to give Iran and its proxies a
taste of their own medicine.
Israel will also boost its defense industrial production of
principal war-fighting equipment, such as 120-mm class
main battle tank rounds, 155-mm class artillery shells,
heavy mortars, and anti-tank guided missiles. Moreover,
these munitions, and the defense industrial base to produce
them, will prioritize cheap and plentiful solutions over
expensive and exquisite state-of-the-art weapons. These
reforms will come at a cost to the Start-Up Nation. Money
and man hours that currently fuel the high-tech economy
will be transferred to defense industries that will drain the
public purse while producing no indirect benefits to the
export economy.
In addition to being long, costly, and bulky, wars will also
be broadcast instantaneously. In a digitalized information
environment, political warfare, which accompanies actual
conventional war-fighting, now has many more images to
work with and many more agents to manipulate those
images. This, too, is unwelcome news for Israel, which
has a very large number of enemies who seek to drive a
wedge between it and the United States. Israel and its
friends, therefore, will begin fighting the information war
as if it were a real war, devoting large assets to not just
explaining and justifying Israel’s actions but also to
delegitimating and neutering its detractors.
When Moshe Dayan delivered his eulogy for
Ro’i Rothberg, Israel had already fought the War of
Independence against Egypt, not to mention the other
Arab states. Before making peace, Egypt would fight four
more major wars against Israel, including the 1973
Yom Kippur War. That conflict opened with a major and
devastating surprise attack. Then, too, Israel failed to see
the Egyptians coming, because it believed that its military
advantages made it impervious to attack by a
technologically inferior foe.
Properly understood, this war is the second major
Israel-Iran war—the 2006 Lebanon war being the first.
It is also in a sense a second War of Independence.
Israel’s wars with Iran, like the wars with Egypt, will be
many in number. Preparation for the long contest with
Iran will force the Israelis to undergo a self-transformation
more than a little reminiscent of 1948.
On October 7, the residents of Nahal Oz and the rest of
Israeli society paid a price far beyond their imagining for
abandoning the kind of vigilance that Dayan sought to
summon at Ro’i Rothberg’s funeral. In the years to come,
Israelis will rediscover the steely-eyed and unsentimental
attitudes that Dayan displayed in his eulogy—or else they
will die. “This is the fate of our generation,” Dayan said.
“This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed,
strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from
our fist and our lives cut down.”
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