translated from Hebrew

A Military That Has a State

Israel’s national-security failures stem not only from mistaken assumptions, but from a structural imbalance in which a weak political echelon relies on the military to define strategy, intelligence, and policy itself.

הכשל המבני בביטחון ישראל

/ Hashiloach · By עמרי גושן · 7 July 2025 · read the original in Hebrew →

I stood on the border of the Gaza Strip before the ground entry. I looked, a young infantry officer, at the frightened yet highly motivated soldiers, and thought of the wounded home front, pained but ready for sacrifice. Everyone around me projected strength and resilience, prepared to sacrifice everything for absolute victory. What would absolute victory look like? We did not ask. We trusted the state to know.

This description is not taken from the Swords of Iron War, but from the period before the ground entry into Gaza as part of Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. I remember well how that motivation shattered into static sitting on the outskirts of the Strip, and into a sense of lost purpose in the face of what is now understood as the absence of defined political objectives for that operation. It may be that the feelings of combat soldiers in the present war are different, under the shadow of the terrible circumstances in which it broke out; but it seems that the lack of policy is not very different.

The Simchat Torah disaster is built layer upon layer, and each layer has its own failure: from the illusion that the border of the Gaza Strip was impenetrable, to the assumption that “Hamas is deterred.” From the intelligence failure to the failure of cultural analysis. The “conception” devoured everything, planted itself in every fertile plot in the minds of many Israelis, and yielded countless failures.

In this essay I wish to address a different failure, one not necessarily bound up with the conception itself, but rather a fertile ground for its growth. It is a grave structural failure that is rarely discussed, since it is a kind of sensitive Pandora’s box that is convenient to ignore. I mean the relations between the military echelon and the political echelon in the processes by which national-security policy is shaped.

When people think of decision-making on matters of national security, they usually imagine decisions made with gravity, with something like sacred awe, while taking all considerations into account and with the finest minds present. The sorry truth is far from that. The structural flaws in the processes of decision-making and policy-setting in this field are many and great. To return to the example of Protective Edge, the facts show that the first attempt to set political goals took place only after Israel had already launched the operation itself, and had already been for several weeks in Operation Brother’s Keeper.

In the Swords of Iron War, too, we find similar features: the absence of clear political objectives set by the cabinet, operational military plans that replace them, cabinet members exposed to only partial information, offhand decision-making, and more.

In the first months after October 7, the hard feelings were joined by a spirit of unity, strength, and optimism. Over time that spirit was replaced by a sober view of the magnitude of the challenges before us. But we will not be able to meet the challenges of this time without a painful examination of the deep failures in our national security. The subject is composed of several layers, and here I will deal with two of them. The first is the structural weakness of the political echelon, opposite which the army stands as a super-player at the institutional level and at the social-political level, a matter that leads to a shaky decision-making process in the short term. The second is the absence of a long-term national-security policy, a matter that intensifies the weakness of the political echelon but also stands as a grave problem in its own right. The solution, then, lies in necessary structural changes, and also in changing the public discourse on the subject and bringing its importance to the surface.

The Structure of the Policy-Making Mechanismמבנה המנגנון לקביעת מדיניות

In Israel, the central body entrusted with making decisions on issues related to national security, and in particular matters of war, is the Ministerial Committee on National Security, that is, the political-security cabinet.[1] The committee is supposed to be nourished by the information presented to it by the staff and the professional bodies. Who are those professional bodies, and what are the relations between them and the decision-makers? To answer this, we must first look at the decision-making body.

The cabinet is the government’s formal arm for decision-making, for reasons of maintaining secrecy on issues that require narrowing the circle of those involved, and out of fear of leaks of sensitive information. Yet membership in the cabinet has over the years become a “prize” in coalition agreements, and therefore the cabinet often contains more ministers than necessary. The real discussions usually take place in alternative forums, and are merely brought for “signature” in the cabinet meetings themselves. A familiar example is the “Forum of Seven Ministers,” which was authorized during the Second Lebanon War to make decisions in the course of the war.

The use of informal decision-making bodies has been common among Israeli governments since the state’s earliest years, the “kitchen cabinet,” the “six,” the “seven,” and it contains within it a central and built-in tension in national-security mechanisms. On the one hand, the vital need for the mechanism to be orderly, transparent, and open to discussion and criticism; on the other, the need for a flexible mechanism that allows decision-makers to move among decisions and policy types according to changing reality.[2] The attraction of decision-makers to informal forums and processes is also the backdrop to governments’ avoidance, over the years, of regulating this matter, as we shall see below.

Who are the staff bodies and professional bodies that collect and process information for the political echelon?

At the head of the Israeli defense establishment stands the defense minister, appointed by the government over the army, and responsible for knowing its plans and ensuring that they correspond to the policy of the political echelon. But the Ministry of Defense is not an independent body at the level of planning or intelligence; these are in the hands of the army. Therefore the defense minister’s ability to lead policy depends on the quality of his relations with the heads of the IDF. The minister is indeed the state’s direct authority over the army, but he lacks the appropriate tools to mediate between policy set by the political echelon and the army’s actions. The Ministry of Defense has planning bodies, such as the Political-Military Bureau, but most of the planning work is done by the IDF Planning Directorate, hereafter the Planning Directorate, a military body and not a political one. Another factor in the defense minister’s dependence on the heads of the army is mental. Traditionally, many defense ministers are former senior military figures. They arrive in office with the inheritance of military doctrines in their kitbag, and at times fail in their role as policy leaders.

The two fields in the activity of the defense establishment that we will now survey are shared by the political echelon, the decision-makers, and the professional echelons, the executors: planning and intelligence.

Planningתכנון

The Planning Directorate is a military body in the General Staff entrusted, among other things, with military strategic planning and force build-up, but it also deals with planning on security issues at the political level.[3] The IDF website states that part of its role is to conduct “planning for the Ministry of Defense in fields to be defined between the chief of staff and the defense minister.”[4] Recently the directorate was split into two sub-directorates: the Planning and Multi-Arm Force Build-Up Directorate, alongside the “Strategy and Third-Circle Directorate,” intended to deal with the strategic layer and “formulate IDF policy on issues of national security.”[5] Already in 2001, the state comptroller noted that the Planning Directorate was dealing more and more with preparing the response required by the political echelon for the purposes of the political process, and that “the dual role of the Planning Directorate may create a doubleness arising from the fact that a General Staff strategic-analysis body, staffed by military personnel whose point of view is primarily military, is supposed to perform strategic analysis on political and civilian issues for the political level.” According to the comptroller, “in Israel there is no body in addition to the IDF capable of providing analysis that includes the full implications of a given reality, from the systemic, operational level, through the military-strategic level, and up to its political level,” and the Planning Directorate has “a unique ability to combine all the fields into a series of insights that connect questions of employing force and building it with political implications.”[6]

Indeed, one of the lessons raised in the 2007 Winograd Commission report was the need to strengthen the level of political planning. Accordingly, the policy-planning division in the Foreign Ministry was expanded, and it was decided to reinforce it with personnel and resources. Nevertheless, the 2012 state comptroller’s report pointed to a lack of cooperation between this division and the Planning Directorate.[7]

Earlier still, in 2004, another body was established in an attempt to improve political planning: the Political-Military Bureau in the Ministry of Defense. This bureau is responsible for strategic planning in the regional and international arenas, and for formulating policy recommendations on strategic security issues.[8] Yet even after its establishment, this bureau remains secondary to the Planning Directorate in its importance and contribution to political planning; evidence of this is the very structural change made in the Planning Directorate, as noted, in 2020, when the “Strategy and Third-Circle” Directorate was established.[9]

Another example is the deficient working mechanism between the Planning Directorate and DDR&D, the Directorate of Defense Research and Development, a budget-rich body shared by the Ministry of Defense and the IDF and responsible for the technological infrastructure of the defense establishment as a whole. In 2018, the state comptroller pointed to large gaps between the bodies regarding a comprehensive defense-development plan, to defects in managing the research-and-development budget, for example: there was no central body of knowledge regarding all the money invested in research and development throughout the defense establishment, and budget increases were determined without staff work on the matter, and above all to the fact that there is no defined reciprocal relationship between DDR&D and the Planning Directorate. The IDF body responsible, among other things, for force build-up, that is, DDR&D, manages its programs without the cooperation of the Planning Directorate, the body responsible for force build-up; and the latter, for its part, does not implement DDR&D’s determinations and recommendations.[10] Intelligence

The Israeli intelligence community is varied and capable, but its great structural deficiency is that it is dispersed under many stakeholders, without a central body that synchronizes its efforts and the bodies within it.[11] The central and most influential body is Military Intelligence, the IDF Intelligence Directorate. Military Intelligence is considered the national assessor and is responsible for assessing the enemy’s intentions and capabilities. It also stands at the head of political intelligence, including national assessment: an assessment dealing with Israel’s strategic environment, and with risks and opportunities concerning states in the Middle East in near and distant circles.[12] Military Intelligence is subordinate to the defense minister through the IDF, but it has direct influence on the government and the prime minister, and at times receives its direction directly from the prime minister.[13] The presence of the head of Military Intelligence in the cabinet, as representative of intelligence and assessment work, is common, and he often operates above his formal subordination to the defense minister.

Apart from Military Intelligence, there are the Shin Bet and the Mossad, which are directly subordinate to the prime minister. Their purpose is much more specific. The Mossad is responsible for collecting information and conducting research outside the borders of the state, while the Shin Bet is responsible for preserving state security within its borders, including the areas of Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and as a result also conducts intelligence efforts.

The current structure creates great dependence by the prime minister on the three main bodies, Military Intelligence, the Mossad, and the Shin Bet, and leads to a lack of synchronization among these bodies, as emerged from the reports of the Yadin-Sherf Committee, which examined the division of responsibility and subordination of the intelligence services in 1963, and the Agranat Commission, which examined the failure of the Yom Kippur War in 1974. One of the central lessons raised by these committees was the need to appoint an intelligence adviser to the prime minister. This position was filled for several years, but already in the 1970s it remained vacant, and so it remains to this day, despite repeated recommendations such as that of the Steinitz Committee, which investigated the intelligence system following the war in Iraq in 2003. That committee recommended appointing an intelligence adviser who would integrate the intelligence bodies in order to clarify disagreements, and would direct the various intelligence bodies toward intelligence-collection goals set by the political echelon. The Winograd Commission recommended maintaining “a national assessment team whose role will be to integrate the assessments of the various intelligence bodies.”[14]

Another recommendation raised by several committees is to shift the center of gravity of intelligence assessment from Military Intelligence to bodies outside the army: the Foreign Ministry or the Mossad. On this issue, certain changes have indeed been made over the years: intelligence in the IDF was broken down into intelligence bodies at the levels of branches and units, the Center for Political Research was established in the Foreign Ministry, and an assessment unit was established in the Mossad.[15] Despite this, the structural failures in the Israeli intelligence community remain as they were. Military Intelligence is still the intelligence body with the greatest capabilities, and because of the breadth of the fields it handles it is the only one capable of integrating different kinds of intelligence collection. Accordingly, Military Intelligence remains the only intelligence body that places in the hands of the political echelon a comprehensive national intelligence assessment. The other intelligence bodies do add their assessments, each in its own field, but Military Intelligence is the dominant one among them.[16] Beyond the problem of Military Intelligence operating under two hats, the military and the national, what stands out is the absence of a body that synchronizes all the organizations, generates interorganizational cooperation, integrates the information from Military Intelligence with that of the other organizations, and allocates boundaries of work among the various Israeli intelligence organizations.

By comparison, in the United States there is the ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which stands at the head of the intelligence community and serves as the president’s chief adviser on intelligence matters, through the National Security Council.[17] Another example is the JIC, the Joint Intelligence Committee in Britain. It stands at the head of the intelligence community and is responsible for providing a national intelligence assessment to the National Security Council. The staff responsible for building the national intelligence assessment in the JIC is composed of representatives from all the intelligence bodies. This could ostensibly create tension because of clashes of organizational interests, but in practice it carries considerable advantages, since its prestige and standing overcome such tensions. These integrative bodies in American and British intelligence create not only an integrated intelligence assessment, but also a direct connection between policy and intelligence work, from the top down and the bottom up.[18]

It is hard not to think about the meaning of these gaps in the Israeli intelligence community and their contribution to the October 7 failure: whether in the gap revealed in the connection between policymakers and policy itself, and the intelligence organizations; or in the lack of cooperation among organizations in a strategic environment characterized by “the convergence of arenas,” that is, supposedly distinct intelligence arenas that may connect at one critical point, for example the connection among Iran, Hamas, Judea and Samaria, and Gazans entering to work in the communities around Gaza.

Alongside those security and intelligence bodies, which suffer from excessive dispersion without a synchronizing actor, there are figures near the decision-makers whose authority is not anchored, and who are supposedly not part of the security bodies, yet who enjoy a position of influence sometimes greater than that of the security bodies themselves. Such is the figure of the military secretary to the government. Traditionally, the military secretary has been considered the figure who connects the defense establishment with the prime minister. This role has not been formally defined, and its influence changes according to the quality of the relationship between the secretary and the prime minister. The military secretary’s potential influence is enormous. He is exposed to sensitive information, his involvement in the prime minister’s security agenda is decisive, and his access to the prime minister is direct.[19] The military secretary does not replace the IDF’s official channel to the political echelon, which exists in parallel as detailed above.

When one examines the structure of the system, and this is of course only a partial survey of the central bodies, it is evident that in both planning and intelligence the political echelon is enormously dependent on the IDF, without the ability to seriously challenge the positions it presents. Synchronization with the other intelligence and planning bodies, which might have produced clarification and sharpening of different views, is not carried out systemically and depends on interpersonal relations among the heads of the systems.

Within this entire tangled system, the National Security Council was established, and it is supposed to bridge the gap. But as we shall see in the following paragraphs, it is far from capable of doing so.

The National Security Councilהמטה לביטחון לאומי

Already in the days of David Ben-Gurion, criticism was voiced of Israel’s deficient decision-making processes. At the end of the 1950s the “Avigur memorandum” was published, surveying the defects in these processes and arguing that the prime minister concentrated in himself not only decision-making authority, but also most of the staff and intelligence work. In the memorandum, Avigur recommended establishing a body that would concentrate staff and intelligence work, and would deal, among other things, with synchronization among the various security bodies.[20] In the 1960s, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol strengthened the Ministerial Committee on Security and used it as a central forum for decision-making. Eshkol even seriously considered establishing a national security council like that of the United States, but this idea was blocked, among others, by the chief of staff at the time, Yitzhak Rabin. During Golda Meir’s tenure, the main processes were managed in informal forums, and this period was characterized by disorder and a lack of orderly processes. Maj. Gen. Aharon Yariv said during the Yom Kippur War that there was appalling disorder: no thought, no serious discussion, no staff work to present alternatives.[21]

Following the lessons of the Agranat Commission after the Yom Kippur War, an intelligence adviser and a security affairs adviser to the government were appointed, but after they resigned the positions were not filled again. In the 1980s a national-security unit was established in the Ministry of Defense, but it was dismantled by the government that followed. At the end of that decade, a public-professional committee published a report on the quality of public bodies, in which the following was written:

One prominent weakness stands out: the system of policy-setting and the system of decision-making lack method, and they rely on only scant input of data, knowledge, policy analyses, and selection among alternatives... The government lacks a special staff of its own for the proper preparation of material needed for its decisions... As a result of this deficiency, its discussions lack an all-national and long-term view, the ministries’ proposals are not properly examined by an independent actor, and it lacks professionally analyzed alternatives as a basis for its decisions.[22]

Throughout the 1990s, and following the report of the professional committee, further attempts were made to establish such a staff body, until in 1999 the National Security Council was finally established by government decision. The conduct of the NSC from 1999 until the passage of the NSC Law in 2008 well reflects the main reason this body remained weak and uninfluential. Maj. Gen. (res.) Rafael Vardi, who created the NSC model chosen by the prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, created a lean model with few powers. The main reason for this was the desire to avoid objections from within the defense establishment itself;[23] the security organizations would certainly fear that a strong NSC would receive its power at the expense of their own power and their great ability to influence the government, and especially the prime minister. The NSC was therefore founded out of an attempt not to shake the system too much, and it adopted a meager mode of operation that remained its lot for a long time.

The heads of the NSC under the governments of Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and Olmert found it very difficult to derive benefit from the NSC’s work. In the absence of procedures that would anchor the NSC as part of the working process, all that remained was to hope that the heads of the NSC would become the prime minister’s men of confidence, and thereby leave their mark. But they had difficulty entering the prime ministers’ inner circles, and usually figures such as the bureau chief, the defense minister, or the head of the Mossad were stronger and pushed the NSC away from a position of influence. A clear example is Yoram Turbowicz, who was Ehud Olmert’s bureau chief and a key player of great influence. Turbowicz tried, and succeeded, in preventing the strengthening of the NSC in his time.[24] The state comptroller’s 2006 report on the implementation of the government decision and the functioning of the NSC determined that

there is an inherent and deliberate disability in the ability of the NSC as it was built, and as it was operated by the prime ministers, to answer the need and implement the decisions; hence, by implication, there is harm to the quality of optimal decision-making processes in this essential field of national security, a matter that emerges both from the NSC’s lack of involvement in some of the substantive fields of the objective function for its operation and from its internal organization for the purpose of fully performing this role.[25]

The central catalyst for institutionalizing the NSC’s activity was the Second Lebanon War, or more precisely, the Winograd Commission report published after it. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah kidnapped reserve soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser while they were patrolling along the fence on the Lebanese border. The abduction was a complete surprise, and constituted a severe strategic blow to Israel after a period of relative quiet on the northern border. For many Israelis, the abduction is associated with the ground maneuver in the war, but the sequence of events in real time was far from directly connected. Many days, too many days, passed for the State of Israel and for the cabinet from the moment of the abduction, through the decision not to contain the event, and up to the ground maneuver in southern Lebanon. When one dives into the details, indecision, lack of synchronization between the echelons, and frightening conduct by the decision-makers are revealed.

The IDF had no complete and updated contingency plan for the reference scenarios of the kind Hezbollah forced upon Israel. The only plan in force, “Shield of the Land,” was based on a reference scenario that did not include Hezbollah in its relevant form, and even that plan had been neglected and the forces had not practiced it for a year and a half before the war. This absence of a contingency plan damaged operational effectiveness at the start of the war, and in its absence the political and military echelons wrestled for a long time with the question of the response to the abduction. In both echelons, political and military, there was reluctance to undertake a broad ground move, and the majority inclination was toward the second option: a focused ground response to exact a price. In the end, a third option was chosen: six days of airstrikes, an offensive response, but one confined to the air force alone, which was the hope of those who did not want to be dragged into a ground maneuver, even a focused one.

Yet even after six days, no decision had been made regarding the nature of the response. Beginning on July 18, the IDF carried out focused operations with small forces, such as Operation Steel Webs and the battles in Maroun al-Ras and Bint Jbeil. The broad mobilization of reserves was approved only on July 27, again without a political decision on objectives and the nature of the response. On July 31, the army first presented operational plans for the two response options: a military entry into the areas adjacent to the border, “Change of Direction 8,” and full takeover of all of southern Lebanon, “Waters of the Heights.” In that meeting, the cabinet approved the “Change of Direction 8” plan in the understanding that a political agreement was rapidly approaching, and would in any case halt all military activity.

When the political agreement was delayed in coming, on August 9 the cabinet approved in principle the operational plan “Change of Direction 11,” which contained a deeper maneuver than that in “Change of Direction 8.” The activation of this plan was conditioned on another cabinet decision, in light of political developments. On August 11, one day less than a month after the soldiers’ abduction, the cabinet finally approved launching Operation Change of Direction 11. But the next day, August 12, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was already approved, establishing a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel that entered into force on August 14. Israel was left with no reasonable time to maneuver.

This tainted and illogical timetable stems largely from the absence of defined political objectives for the war, and from the absence of discussion of them. Into this absence stepped the army, which in practice influenced the entire Israeli response. A review of the military echelon’s internal discussions raises several considerations the army presented against a broad ground maneuver. Some were professional considerations, which by virtue of the army’s role it was proper for it to warn the political echelon about. For example, the belief that a broad military move would not bring a meaningful military achievement that would change the security reality on the northern border. But in addition to these professional considerations, the military discourse raised considerations that exceed the boundaries of the military profession and the limits of the army’s duty to report.

Considerations such as a high number of casualties, the effect of a broad reserve mobilization on the economy, and the effect of occupying and administering territory on social cohesion arose in the army’s discussions. The most astonishing consideration raised was the belief that “the Israeli public is not ripe for a broad ground move.” And while this belief was also common in the political echelon, a basic understanding of relations between the political and military echelons is enough to understand that this consideration should not belong to the latter. The military echelon believed, then, that a broad reserve mobilization would push the political echelon toward a decision to launch a broad military operation, a decision the army opposed, as noted, out of the variety of considerations presented; therefore they decided to postpone the broad reserve mobilization and did not recommend it. When the cabinet decided on July 27 to undertake the broad reserve mobilization, it was out of the political echelon’s understanding that the lack of preparedness was narrowing the military options on the table. Indeed, in the postwar inquiries it was found that the delay in mobilizing the reserves harmed the operational preparedness of the reserve forces. The Winograd report shows that the absence of a political decision on the direction of the response, and the military echelon’s unwillingness to deal with the possibility of a broad operation, caused military planning to be “particular and local,” and certainly not connected to any political objectives.[26]

The commission also noted the failure of the professional echelons to meet their responsibility to surface upward all relevant implications, but above all the failure of the political echelon, whose responsibility it is to create decision-making processes that generate synergy among the echelons.[27] The commission’s recommendations emphasized the call to create a strong and meaningful staff body. The recommendations touched on changing the way discussions are conducted, strengthening security staff work, improving synchronization between the professional echelons and the political echelon, improving the quality of intelligence that reaches the political echelon, and setting a long-term strategy for Israel.[28]

At this stage it was no longer possible to ignore the calls, heard for decades, to institutionalize the work of the NSC. Olmert resolved to advance the legislation, but elements in the defense establishment that feared the weakening of their influence exerted heavy pressure to block it.[29] In the end, in 2008 the NSC Law was enacted, intended to institutionalize the NSC’s role “as the staff body for the prime minister and the government in matters of the foreign affairs and security of the State of Israel.”[30] The law determines that the NSC will coordinate the staff work of all bodies dealing with foreign affairs and security, prepare the discussions of the government and its committees, present alternatives regarding the subjects of discussion and their implications, follow up on the implementation of government decisions, propose to the prime minister an agenda on these subjects, including recommendations on discussions and their participants, and be responsible for interorganizational and interministerial synchronization activities. The law further tasked the NSC with preparing and submitting to the ministerial committee an annual and multiyear assessment of the political-security situation, and setting a discussion on the matter once a year; performing staff work on the defense budget; examining the security concept of the State of Israel and proposing updates; and more.[31]

In light of the many objections, the law passed under MK Hanegbi’s compromise formula. Section 8 of the law states that the prime minister will determine “procedures” for the manner of the NSC’s operation within the Prime Minister’s Office and its relations with officeholders there. This section in effect permits the prime minister to use the NSC as he sees fit, and thus a law remained that clearly defines the NSC’s roles but does not require the prime minister to use it.[32] Indeed, the law allowed each prime minister to work with the NSC differently, up to and including general nonuse.

Moreover, although the NSC Law defines the NSC’s roles and details the actions required for a proper decision-making process, the law does not ensure that these processes actually take place. For example, the law does state that one of the NSC’s roles is to coordinate “interorganizational and interministerial staff work,” but the law is directed only at the NSC itself, and does not create among the other bodies any commitment to the process.

As a result, the NSC did not fulfill its role as expected, nor even as written in the law. In May 2010, the ships of the Turkish flotilla reached Israel’s shores. This was a larger security and political event than previous flotillas, but nevertheless, and even though assessments in Israel correctly analyzed the scale, orderly decision-making processes were not conducted. Evidence of the flotilla’s size, the characteristics of its participants, and the extent of Turkish involvement in it had begun to accumulate already at the start of 2010. The political echelon and the military echelon did act on the matter immediately. The two main efforts were preventing the flotilla’s departure at the political level, and preparing to stop it at the military level. But these efforts were carried out in parallel and were not coordinated from above. Not even a single integrative discussion was held that gathered all the actors and knowledge around one table. The first convening of any forum on the subject took place at the end of May 2010, about half a year after an understanding of the developing event had formed, when the flotilla was already underway. The forum that convened was “the seven,” a forum of seven senior ministers, without legal authorization from the government. This convening, too, was done from one moment to the next, without staff work and without the presence of professional military actors. A situation of this kind is precisely the situation the NSC Law was meant to prevent.[33] About four years later, around Operation Protective Edge, claims were again raised in the NSC about a “lack of cooperation” from the other security bodies. Thus the NSC stood as a body with responsibility defined in law, but lacking real authority.

כתוצאה מכך לא מילא המל"ל את תפקידו כמצופה, ואף לא ככתוב בחוק. במאי 2010 הגיעו לחופי ישראל ספינות המשט הטורקי. היה זה אירוע ביטחוני ומדיני גדול ממשטים קודמים, אך למרות זאת, ואף שההערכות בישראל ניתחו נכון את סדר הגודל, לא התנהלו תהליכי קבלת החלטות סדורים. העדויות לגודלו של המשט, מאפייני משתתפיו והיקף המעורבות הטורקית בו החלו להצטבר כבר בתחילת שנת 2010. הדרג המדיני והדרג הצבאי פעלו אומנם בנושא באופן מיידי. שני המאמצים העיקריים היו מניעת יציאת המשט ברמה המדינית, וההיערכות לעצירתו ברמה הצבאית. אלא שמאמצים אלה היו נעשו במקביל ולא תואמו מלמעלה. לא בוצע אף לא דיון אינטגרטיבי אחד שקיבץ את כלל הגורמים והידע סביב שולחן אחד. ההתכנסות הראשונה של פורום כלשהו בנושא הייתה בסוף חודש מאי 2010, כחצי שנה לאחר התגבשות הבנת האירוע המתקשר, כאשר המשט יצא כבר לדרך. הפורום שהתכנס היה "השביעייה", פורום של שבעה שרים בכירים, ללא הסמכה חוקית מהממשלה. גם התכנסות זו נעשתה "מעכשיו לעכשיו", ללא עבודת מטה וללא נוכחות של גורמים מקצועיים מהצבא. מצב מעין זה הוא בדיוק המצב שחוק המל"ל נועד למנוע.[33] כעבור כארבע שנים, סביב מבצע צוק איתן, שוב הועלו במל"ל טענות על "חוסר בשיתוף פעולה" משאר גורמי הביטחון. כך ניצב המל"ל כגוף עם אחריות המוגדרת בחוק, אך עם חוסר בסמכות ממשית.

By comparison, in the United States national-security policy is integrated by the National Security Council, the NSC. The council operates under two hats: the staff hat and the decision-making hat. This council is composed of three kinds of committees: the decision-making committee, the Principals Committee, headed by the president of the United States himself; the Deputies Committee, whose purpose is to oversee decisions and make interim decisions; and Interagency Working Groups. In each of these types of committees, staff members from all relevant cross-sections are present, and each convening of a committee fulfills a different function.[34] But what stands out in the composition of the American NSC is that it is a focal point of power that concentrates within itself all the resources and inputs in the mechanism of decision-making and policy-setting.[35] All the work is done under it, which makes coordination between staff work and the craft of decision-making easier.

That is, the NSC is at the center of the mechanism: information from the other security bodies flows to it simply by virtue of the fact that the president heads it, and therefore it enjoys formal authority. It does not join the relevant discussions; it manages them, and naturally all relevant information reaches it. It in effect defines the structure of the system. The influence of Israel’s NSC, by contrast, even after all the transformations it has undergone, remains dependent on the cooperation of the other actors, and on the degree of importance the prime minister attributes to it. It remains a side body, watching from the sidelines the mechanism of national-security policy-setting and decision-making, and does not constitute an integral part of it.

The Security Conceptתפיסת הביטחון

We mentioned briefly at the opening that in order to develop a national-security policy, clear political objectives must be set. These objectives are derived from a broader security concept. What is Israel’s security concept today? Can it be found in any document?

In Britain, for example, the SDSR, the Strategic Defence and Security Review, is published every few years. This document describes the security concept of an elected government and the resources it intends to invest in order to achieve the goals set out in the document.[36] In Israel there is no such document or practice, and the national-security concept, the aims and objectives and the resources invested in them, remains hidden from the public eye, and perhaps even from the eyes of the governments themselves.

When one nevertheless tries to extract some accepted security concept, one usually returns to the thought of two men: Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. Jabotinsky, in his essay “The Iron Wall,” written after the 1920 riots, did not create a detailed plan, but fixed several simple principles: in the Land of Israel there will forever be two peoples, and the Arabs will not voluntarily relinquish their aspirations to be the ruling majority in it. In light of this, the Jewish Yishuv must grow naturally and become a majority in the land; and it must bring the Arabs to a state in which they know they cannot destroy or cancel the Zionist idea, by creating an “iron wall.”[37]

Ben-Gurion, relying on these principles, created a more practical conception and broke it down into practical steps that shaped the structure of the army and the economy for years. First, the demographic disadvantage obligates Israel to maintain as large an army as possible, and hence as large a share of the population as possible is required to serve in the army, and many more in the reserves. Second, the fighting must be transferred to the enemy’s territory and the enemy defeated as quickly as possible. Third, there is a need for sufficiently good intelligence warning to give the reserve army, which, as noted, is a necessity, time to mobilize.[38]

Another important concept in the security doctrine was coined by Yigal Allon. This is the principle of cumulative deterrence, deterrence created by a great many clear victories in each of Israel’s rounds of fighting. It will cause Israel’s enemies to hesitate before attacking it again.[39]

What has changed in Israel’s security concept since those far-off days? Over the years many committees have been established to examine and validate Israel’s security concept, but none of them has been officially adopted.[40] An elected government in Israel has almost no security statement binding it to carry out any particular policy. And here there is room to note another matter: the political price of a security concept. What is called the audience cost is the price politicians pay when they do not keep their promises.[41] Israel’s vague national-security policy exempts decision-makers from commitments and from their price.

Thus decision-makers in Israel skip among policy types, with the main component influencing policy being public opinion and the political price. First they hear the people’s will, or more precisely, the will that succeeds in arousing the greatest public resonance, and understand the price; then they make decisions, or decide not to decide. The clear advantage is the public’s ability, or part of the public’s ability, to influence policy, something a rigid and binding mechanism cannot provide. The disadvantage is inconsistent and procrastinating policy, and vague, confusing aims from which subordinate objectives cannot be derived.

In 2006 a study day was held, whose lectures also appeared as a collection of essays, on the subject “Relations Between the Military Echelon and the Political Echelon in Israel Against the Background of Military Confrontations,” under the auspices of the INSS. One of the essays in the collection dealt with decision-making processes during the First Intifada, which broke out in December 1987, and was written by none other than Amram Mitzna, who was head of Central Command at the time. In his essay, Mitzna describes a reality in which not a single discussion took place regarding long-term security policy around the intifada. Mitzna further argued that there was no intelligence body dealing with the broad picture in relation to the Palestinian population. Mitzna testifies to the difficulty of deriving operational implications and explaining to soldiers in the field the objectives and the characteristics of the actions derived from them. For example, how much force should be used? What achievements were required on the ground?

What is astonishing is that Mitzna describes how he acted in this vacuum in order to advance goals that seemed right to him: to preserve relative quiet, to enable orderly administration in Judea and Samaria, and to act to calm tempers on the Jewish side as well. Mitzna, who is indeed known for his views since leaving the army, expressed the distress of an undirected military echelon. In a reality lacking political objectives and nonmilitary intelligence, he had no choice but to navigate according to his own private worldview.[42]

Over the years, this dynamic would become the leading method.

The IDF as the Main Actorצה"ל כשחקן הראשי

Already in 1988, the state comptroller noted that the army was the exclusive professional actor, and that the political echelon had insufficient tools for examining the positions presented by the army and for discussing alternatives. The army, and in fact the entire defense establishment, are orderly bodies built in a way that enables them to perform extensive staff work on security aspects. But this staff work cannot under any circumstances replace political staff work. National-security policy is much broader than military strategy. Clausewitz phrased it better than anyone when he said that “war is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means.” That is, military strategy is only one of the factors that must be taken into account in national-security policy. There are also political, economic, and other factors.

Let us return for a moment to the Winograd Commission report, in which the commission members formulated well the failures that emerge from an unbalanced relationship between the “institutional power” of the political echelon and that of the military echelon. In the partial report, the commission detailed four central failures. First, when the military echelon is institutionally stronger than the political echelon, an assumption may take shape that the military echelon has the ability to see all political considerations. Second, because this assumption is not correct, many political considerations are simply neglected. Third, the political echelon over time removes from itself responsibility for analysis, for setting political objectives, and in practice for shaping policy. It understands its entire role as approving military plans, and in effect it is very passive. Finally, the commission notes, the role of the military echelon also becomes blurred. It becomes accustomed to working in fog, does not demand clarifications from the political echelon, and lets its focus slide into fields beyond the military sphere.[43]

One might have expected that after the NSC Law was enacted, as part of the lessons of the Winograd Commission, the vacuum would be filled and the army’s influence reduced. But the NSC’s built-in weakness led to matters being conducted similarly afterward as well, in Operation Protective Edge.

In the period before the operation, the NSC did not present full alternatives to the situation assessments provided by the army and did not convene the required discussions, for example on the gaps in the military target bank in the Gaza Strip and on preparedness for the tunnel threat. Moreover, for a full year, from the formation of the thirty-third government until the outbreak of the operation, not a single cabinet discussion was held on the Gaza Strip. The threats posed by the Strip, among them the tunnel threat, which had been known to the defense establishment already since 2006, and the intelligence gap in the Strip, were not properly presented to the cabinet, and no situation assessment including the relevant ministers was conducted. It is no wonder that during the operation as well, the political-security cabinet suffered from a lack of information. “The operational plans for the Gaza Strip were presented to the cabinet ministers before the cabinet had set the strategic objectives regarding the Gaza Strip. As a result, the military echelon was forced to outline the strategic objectives itself, in order to plan the military activity in light of them.[44] The IDF as the “National Strategist”

A clear example of the political echelon’s failure to deal with national-security policy is the “IDF Strategy” document published in 2015 by the chief of staff at the time, Gadi Eisenkot. The document was meant to serve as a planning foundation and to lay down principles for military force build-up and employment, an important and necessary thing. But the political foundation on which Eisenkot relied as a planning basis was only one: the report of the Committee for the Formulation of Israel’s Security Concept, the Meridor Committee. This document did indeed lay out national objectives and a national strategy, but it was written in 2006, and although it received a positive response from the government in those days, the Olmert government, it was not officially adopted.

One of the central security-policy concepts that developed in exactly this way is the campaign between wars, the CBW. In 2012, Col. Shay Shabtai, then head of the Strategic Planning Department in the Operations Directorate, published an article titled “The Concept of the Campaign Between Wars.” In this article, Shabtai laid out the development of Israel’s security concept as he understood it, from Ben-Gurion’s days to his own. Shabtai notes additions to the original principles of decision, deterrence, and warning, which in his view were added over the years: reprisal actions, preventive wars, counterterrorism, prevention operations, operations to thwart the enemy’s force build-up, the concept of limited confrontation, a state of prolonged fighting without reaching a climax, limited campaigns, defense, protection against high-trajectory weapons, and finally, intensified routine security activity, a kind of short escalation round. Shabtai argued that these many additions created, over time, a traditional confusion in the IDF regarding the various states of warfare, and contributed, among other things, to the army’s failure to understand the state of war in Lebanon in 2006.[45]

Shabtai proposed a new concept, called “the campaign between wars,” CBW. In Shabtai’s view, defining an orderly strategic concept for routine states would help the army be clearer in the way it builds and employs force. He lays out basic principles for this concept, and among other things speaks of the fact that in the campaign between wars one cannot achieve a clear-cut decision, but only a cumulative decision by points, in effect the complete opposite of Ben-Gurion’s concept of decision. This situation, Shabtai argues, allows Israel “to absorb blows from adversaries without responding to them immediately in a way that might disrupt the logic of our campaign, and with the understanding that the State of Israel and the IDF will know how to move the point of equilibrium in the desired direction through long-term activity.”[46] Continuing from this, Shabtai argues that in the CBW concept there will be no clear endpoint, but rather continuity from campaign to campaign.[47]

In 2013, Israel’s first strike in Syria attributed to the CBW was carried out. From then until October 7, Israel acted mainly to prevent the force build-up of its enemies to the north.[48] In the early years the CBW served mainly to prevent the transfer of high-quality weapons to Hezbollah through Syria. From 2015 the CBW began to establish itself as a central strategy. That year, the CBW concept received expansion in Eisenkot’s IDF Strategy document, and was mentioned as a full-fledged IDF strategic concept.[49] In 2017 the CBW shifted to focusing on preventing Iranian entrenchment on Israel’s northern border. That year, management of the CBW moved from the air force to Military Intelligence.[50]

In 2018 an update to the IDF Strategy document was published, and in it the CBW was given a central place as a strategic pillar.[51] Thus the CBW turned from an attempt to introduce conceptual order into routine states into a strategy around which dramatic changes in the IDF were woven. In July 2023, an article by Ofer Shelah and Carmit Valensi was published, surveying the CBW and its influence on the IDF. It stated:

CBW operations intensified trends that had become increasingly apparent in the activity of the IDF as a whole, including in the campaigns in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip in the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on air action, intelligence, covert action, and an unwillingness to employ ground forces; the conception that Israel has no interest in a high-intensity campaign, including avoidance of defining defeat of the enemy as a combat objective, and therefore such a campaign should be avoided at almost any price; and the bias in favor of technological solutions. All these were expressed in CBW operations.[52]

Alongside the CBW’s successes, much criticism has been voiced of this concept. The central criticism is that once the CBW became a strategic operating concept and not a point-specific mode of action, enormous resources were invested in empowering the actors participating in it, chiefly the abilities of Military Intelligence and the air force to act quickly and precisely. The empowerment of the CBW came at the expense of readiness for comprehensive war, which remained the IDF’s central reference scenario. Moreover, the CBW created a narrow prism for coping with the Iranian threat, which is a major security threat and dealing with it requires not only intelligence-military involvement, but also political, economic, diplomatic, and other involvement.[53]

Valensi and Shelah further argued that the CBW as a strategy instilled habits of absolute intelligence control for the purpose of carrying out a mission, something that is unlikely to be possible during a major war; a culture of failing to meet the mission and of excessive reliance on technology; and a commandment that took root among IDF commanders to avoid war as much as possible. All this was done while “attributing strategic meaning, and even conceptual innovation, to what is essentially an accumulation of tactical actions, and granting mistaken strategic importance to a campaign against capabilities,” and “subordinating strategic considerations and broader political interests to maintaining the CBW, despite its limited achievements and the high cost involved in operating it.”[54] These words were published three months before October 7.

Thus, the IDF Strategy document and the CBW concept are two examples, interwoven with one another, of the IDF’s rise, in the absence of a political alternative, to the level of political strategic planning. These processes take place over many long years and with broad public support, even if without awareness of the details and of the dangers implied by them. How did we reach this situation?

An Army That Has a Stateצבא שיש לו מדינה

Since the 1990s, researchers of military-society relations have widely agreed that the boundaries between the civilian and the military are blurred.[55] The Israeli example of this is probably among the clearest in democratic states.

During the period of independence, the boundaries scarcely existed. The senior figures of the army being built had a clear and overt political affiliation, and only the dismantling of the undergrounds on the right and of the Palmach on the left by Ben-Gurion helped create this separation, whether Ben-Gurion’s intentions were statesmanlike, or political as well. Nevertheless, although the hierarchical separation between the military and the political gradually took shape, the boundaries remained hazy between the public and the army, between the political echelon and the military echelon, between national security and the definition of a military threat, and between political thinking and military thinking. The army became the exclusive authority for analyzing the whole of Israel’s security reality, and it is almost impossible to dispute it or decide contrary to its recommendation.

The scholar Kobi Michael argues that the superiority of military thinking over political thinking, which I noted in the previous section, has existed since the waiting period in 1967, and has accompanied Israel at central security junctures such as the Oslo process and the Second Lebanon War. In his view, a prominent reason for this, beyond the structural weakness of the political echelon, is the positive place the army occupies in public discourse. In this sense, the relations between the army and society in Israel are unique. The military ethos has accompanied the Israeli public from its earliest years. It is a symbol of stateliness, and to a large extent of Israeliness itself. This bond is so strong that there is a two-way passage of culture: language, values, norms, and more. It is hard to say where Israeli culture ends and military culture begins. Those who carry this culture between the sides are, of course, the people. As the well-known saying has it, “a people builds an army builds a people”; the fusion between the military and the social is evident.

The centrality of the army in public discourse also carries the risk of using the army as a tool in social conflicts. The familiar call to “take politics out of the army” stems from a perception that politicians may impose their worldview on the army’s internal conduct. But the influence can run the other way. In the days of the judicial reform, one of the first banners raised by the heads of the protest against the reform was the banner of service and the army: level of contribution, roles, and ranks. Thus was born the reverse call to “take the army out of politics.”

The public’s deep sense of identification with the army also grants the latter a certain immunity. Service in the IDF involves risk to life, heavy costs, bereavement. Therefore its status is almost sacred in the eyes of large parts of the public. Thus the army finds itself in a situation in which it is very difficult to criticize it in a way that will not be perceived as coming from a political position. As a result, the army also serves as a tool for political attack between the two sides.

The army, then, is a tool in the hands of the public. It influences the public, and through it, the politicians. Senior military figures routinely move from the army into key positions in the political echelon and in civil society. The scholars Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak described this phenomenon with the words “the security network.” Senior military figures go out into the civilian world carrying with them the worldviews, culture, and interests built into their belonging to a professional guild. They implement all these at the decision-makers’ table.[56]

…the essay continues at the source.