The Issue
Israel’s historical strategy, crafted under the guidance of its founding leader David Ben-Gurion, hinged on three main pillars: deterrence, early warning, and achieving a decisive victory. However, recent events, pointing to strategic oversights and intelligence lapses, have urged a renewed examination of military policy frameworks.
Why it Matters
The inability to deter past threats convincingly, such as those from Hamas, underscores a critical vulnerability, as does the failure of intelligence to foresee attacks. These factors suggest the need for Israel to come up with practical adjustments in military strategies to sustain its sovereignty and security landscape.
Current Gaps and Challenges
The concept of deterrence, while psychologically significant, has occasionally fallen short against adversaries for whom the cost of retaliation isn’t a deterrent. Both in 1973 and more recently in 2023, precise expectations of deterrence failed, necessitating a meticulous understanding that it may not uniformly apply or deter empowered entities like Hamas, which are driven by ideologies surpassing mere rational calculations.
Coupled with this, the intelligence setbacks like confirmation bias and an over-reliance on technological assessments without supporting human intelligence have highlighted areas demanding improvement and recalibration, particularly given the strategic necessity of dynamic intelligence mechanisms.
The Proposed Shift in Doctrine
Responding to these gaps, redefining military protocols should include augmenting a more robust defense strategy while retaining the original doctrine’s essence. Central to this new strategy should be developing a larger, more agile standing army and reinvigorating reserve forces to bolster both personnel availability and front-line flexibility.
Rather than reevaluating national defense service terms to retract compulsory service, the focus shifts to expanding recruitment, even tapping into additional community resources such as those within the ultra-Orthodox sectors.
Strategic Invest and Adjustments
Beyond workforce amplification, reconsideration of expenditure to ensure competitive compensation and resources for service members is sustained. This reflects an imperative budgeting increase dedicated to defense demands to uphold operational integrity and produce outcome consistency in dynamic multifront theater actions.
Additionally, shifting from the constraining paradigms of restraint and containment, which dangerously present passive deference mistaken for weakness, towards proactive, potential preemptive actions is essential. Ensuring that potential attackers refrain from exertions against sovereignty is integral in concretizing deterrence landscapes despite complex geopolitical exchanges often tensing around these foundational trialed principles.
Concluding Reflections
Foresightedly, redefining responsiveness with prompt assertive recalibrated protocols, balancing containment with assertive tactical operations, projects multifaceted strategic power reservations establishing reputations conducive away from needing reiterations seen substantively detailing outlined crisis moments like October 7 moments.
This story was first published on jpost.com.