New Zionist : News and Discussion on the Future of Zionism, Israel, and the Jewish People

[The following is intended to be part of a series of posts about the IDF, with an emphasis on the changes it has undergone in the past two decades. The posts are primarily based upon the research and work of Prof. Stuart Cohen (PoliSci, Bar-Ilan University), my employer, who has been researching the subject for more than a decade. I would like to thank him for allowing me to present it in summarized form on this site. - A.W.]

It would be nice if we could answer the question, asked at the end of the first post, with a simple answer. Sadly, this is not the case. The ongoing changes currently occuring in the IDF are the result of a complex combination of various trends occuring in the Middle East arena, Israeli society and a number of global trends such as globalization. It is impossible to sum up these complex changes in an easy-to-understand soundbite or slogan. Instead, we will first examine the trends causing the changes, and then examine their effect on the IDF, first seperately, and then collectively.

We’ll start with the changes in the Middle East military enviornment. From 1948 until 1973, the Israeli defense establishment perceived the Arab-Israel conflict as a conflict between Israel and the Arab states, where the latter aimed to annihilate it with conventional armies in all out-assault, based on overwhelming numerical superiority. To prevent this, the country established its army as a conscript army where every able-bodied Jew would serve in the regular army and then become part of the reserve force. In the event of an all-out conflict, the regular army would “hold the line” until the reserve force counter-attacked and won the day. The IDF’s doctrine, summarized in the following link, still contains many of these assumptions (including the idea that the IDF can not afford to lose a single war - this assumes that every war will be all-out) Needless to say, other security issues such as inflitration or terrorism - and even air attack - were considered secondary.

This doctrine worked well enough up until 1967. During both 1956 and the Six-Day War, the IDF scored impressive victories. After 1967, however, things started to awry. For one thing, the IDF was now required to garrison and patrol the newly acquired territories, tying down whole brigades to routine patrol duty guarding the new borders instead of training for combat against armies. True, until 1987, the IDF did not have to tie dow too many troops to police the population in the territories, but nevertheless, the task of being an army of occupation was a new one for the IDF.

Second, the IDF did not change its security conception of “holding every inch” to a “defense in depth” approach, even though their proximity to Arab countries meant that they would not have enough time to assemble the reserves and get them to the front (even the most optimistic forecast before ‘73 was 48 hours; before the Six-Day War, they had three weeks to prep everyone). These weaknesses and others brought about the debacle of the Yom Kippur War. The IDF won in the end, but the heavy casualties and general ineptitude shocked the country.

The most sweeping changes took place in the decades following 1973, changes which lessened the possibility of a conventional threat, but brought about new ones. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, removing the strongest Arab conventional force from the picture (they’re starting to make a comeback nowadays, however). Iraq, the main conventional threat from the east became bogged down in the Iran-Iraq war, and the two Gulf Wars crippled and finally eliminated (for now) what is known in Israel as the “Eastern Front” - the threat of Iraqi armies crossing through Jordan and into Israel. The peace treaty with Jordan was another nail in the coffin for this threat. Syria, one of Israel’s most strident enemies, is now bereft of conventional arms supply due to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In place of these threats has arisen the specter of the Low-Intensity Conflict (LIC) and ballistic missiles armed with conventional or non-conventional warheads. Syria and Iran (and Iraq until at least 1991) focused on these building up their missile and non-conventional arsenal. They have also decided to shift from conventional war against Israel to fighting terrorist wars by proxy, via such organizations as Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad. The Middle East battlefield has thus been revolutionized.

The IDF was very slow to realise this. Its main emphasis after 1973 was on building up its conventional forces, rather than work on LICs. As a result, its performance during LICs such as the Lebanon War - both Operation Peace for Galilee and the Security Belt period - and the two intifadas, at least until Operation Defensive Shield, was lackluster at best. Neither did the IDF make any real effort to study the theoretical aspects of LICs until recently, when they came out with a study devoted to the subject. The danger of ballistic missiles, amplified by the Scuds that fell on israel during the 1991 Gulf War, has lead to an increasing need for defensive measures such as the Arrow Missile and the THEL system, a space-age platform that can shoot down projectiles with a high-powered lasers.

What’s important for our purposes is that Israel’s and the IDF’s security priorities have changed, as has the type and amount of manpower that is required to defend Israel. The emphasis now is on small, specialized units to man anti-missile batteries, air force squadrons, the growing computer network (more on that in the next post) and the increasingly consolidated ad-hoc units and special forces, that now do the fighting in LIC’s and against missile threats. The incredibly bulky and overgrown army, with its massive amount of tanks and conventional weapons, and overgrown units, has become a burden rather than an asset, a yoke to be shook off rather than a strategic necessity.

This has lead to an increasing amount of ’selective conscription’, wherby the army is much more careful who it accepts into its ranks and, even more so, who it keeps in service. All this, while not officialy abandoning the ‘People’s Army’ epithet. Indeed, the IDF itself is hardly enthusiastic about the calls to ‘draft everyone’, including Haredim, since they already have more men than they need. This is due not only to changing security priorities but also the surplus of manpower gained by the Aliya from teh former Soviet Union and the Post-Yom Kippur War baby boom.

Thus, the IDF has had to change and adapt to the changing strategic enviornment. In the next post we will examine the effect of various global trends such as privatization on the IDF.