Israel on the Way to a Magnificent Defeat

The consensus is that in mid-September, with the “beeper operation” and the massive aerial attack upon Hizbullah’s missile arsenal, Israel turned the war around.  Despite Israel’s impressive achievements, this would be too hasty a conclusion.  The war will be decided not by fancy intelligence operations or by the air force but by the outcome of combat on the ground.  If Israel continues to conduct ground combat the way it has since the beginning of the war, it will lose.

True, we’re not talking about a defeat of the kind Hizbullah and Hamas hoped to inflict on Israel – with many thousands of civilian dead, tens of thousands of hostages, thousands of missiles raining daily on Israel’s vital infrastructure, and a serious threat to the very survival of Israel.  The fighting so far has, for the time being, taken these horror scenarios off the table, and that of course represents a significant achievement.  But Israel is no closer today than it was 13 months ago to achieving the stated objectives of the war:  Destroying Hamas and enabling the refugees evacuated from its northern border to return safely home.

The Failure in the North

The IDF is confining its attacks to within five kilometers of the international border.  It has yet to confront the main forces remain to Hizbullah, which are is entrenched north of where the IDF is fighting.  The IDF has seized and destroyed the armaments and positions from which Hizbullah intended to launch its offensive into the Galil, and that of course is a good thing.  But fighting of this sort will not eliminate the threat Hizbullah poses to Israel’s north.  Hizbullah will continue to launch antitank missiles and RPVs at Israel over the heads of Israel’s ground forces.

The problem that the IDF has no plans to actually defeat Hizbullah’s remaining ground forces.  It doesn’t intend to, and that is in part because to all appearance it doesn’t actually know how to go about it if it did intend to.

As far as the IDF is concerned the object of the war is not to physically eliminate Hizbullah’s capability to attack Israeli territory but to convince Hizbullah, or to convince the Lebanese government to convince Hizbullah, or to get someone, anyone else to convince Hizbullah to give up its weapons, retreat north of the Litani river, and implement UN Resolution 1701.  The idea that Hizbullah will actually do any of this as long as it has fighter standing up and holding arms south of the Litani is absurd.  No matter what Hizbullah or the Lebanese government may agree to on paper, as long as Hizbullah retains most of its weapons and positions south of the Litani we will be back to October 6^th 2023 in no time.

The way to make Hizbullah stop shooting at Israel is to seize the territory from which it does so.  Most of the missiles Hizbullah fires at Israel have relatively short range, less than 60 kilometers.  Within this range Hizbullah has two main defensive lines, one south of the Litani and one to its north.  Israel needs to capture this area and eliminate Hizbullah’s forces within it, to wit, take prisoner those willing to surrender and kill the rest.  In addition, Israel needs to go after and destroy what remains of Hizbullah’s longer-range missiles arsenal wherever in Lebanon these targets can be found, using precise intelligence, air force attacks, and ground operations where necessary.

The IDF has yet to define these as its objectives and appears not to be properly prepared to attain them.  Right now the IDF is conquering Hizbullah’s defensive positions and tunnels one by one.  It has displayed impressive tactical superiority over Hizbullah, but is paying a high price in casualties.  It would be the height of foolishness to attempt to carry out attacks of this sort throughout the territory between the border and the Litani (not to mention further north), with the main force of the enemy awaiting assault in prepared positions and able to observe the IDF’s every move.

The IDF terms the kind of fighting it is doing “ground maneuver,” but what it is doing does not actually amount to strategic maneuver in the original sense of the term.  Strategic maneuver does not mean maneuvering around any particular enemy position – that’s tactics – but placing one’s forces where they undermine the entirety of the enemy’s forces and render his position untenable.  In the past few weeks the IDF has warned residents of southern Lebanon to evacuate north of the Awali river, about 30 kilometers north of the Litani and about 50-60 kilometers north of the border.  That’s where the IDF ought to be, trapping Hizbullah’s main forces between the line of the Awali and the border and eliminating them.  There is more than one way the IDF can get there, and this is not the place to elaborate.  Of course, getting there would have been much easier right after the blows Israel administered to Hizbullah in September, decapitating the organization, killing or crippling its tactical commanders, and wiping out most of its missiles.  Hizbullah was then off-balance and demoralized and a strike for the Awali would have been much easier.  Still, if Israel wants to win this war that’s where its army needs to be.  To empty this territory of enemy forces means also emptying it of the Shiite civilian population, which sustains Hizbullah – in Mao Tse-tung’s terms, the civilian “sea” in which Hizbullah’s terrorists “swim.”

Things are no Better in the South

The IDF isn’t doing much better in Gaza.  Here again, the soldiers in the field have demonstrated complete tactical superiority over their enemy, which the high command has wasted. The IDF’s high command has shown itself hesitant, unimaginative, and incapable of translating tactical successes into strategic victory.  It took the high command months to nerve itself it take over the Philadelphi corridor along the border with Egypt.  Taking over Philadelphi ought to have cut off Hamas from its sources of supply, but relief aid to Gaza has become Hizbullah’s airpipe, which it steals in order to sustain itself.  What Israel needs to do is to isolate the civilian population in a fenced-in area in which no buildings or infrastructure exists and take exclusive responsibility for the distribution of relief aid.  The rest of Gaza should be declared a zone of military operations, in which not one structure, not one tunnel, and none of the civilian infrastructure should remain intact.  Any area the IDF conquers should remain “sterile” – civilians not allowed to return, and certainly not Hamas terrorists.  Instead, the IDF is permitting the civilian population and the Hamas operatives who prey in them move about relatively freely.  The army thus needs to conquer the same neighborhoods, the same buildings, again and again and again, shedding precious blood with each iteration.

How the IDF’s mode of operation needs to change.

The IDF’s failures on both fronts reveal systemic flaws in the IDF’s military thinking and conduct.  Three changes are necessary if Israel is to win this war:

• The IDF must capture and keep hold of the territory where the enemy operates against Israel
• This territory must be kept empty of both enemy forces and the enemy’s civilian population
• The IDF must relearn what it once knew: How to use deep maneuver to surround and undermine the enemy’s entire strategic and geographic deployment, as it did in the Six-Day War and the latter half of the Yom Kippur War.

Changing the objectives set for the IDF’s ground forces requires the approval of Israel’s civilian government, but the government in turn is dependent of the IDF’s capacities and the objectives it is prepared to attain.  Israel cannot win a war against enemy ground forces deployed on its perimeter unless its ground forces knows how to destroy the ground forces of the enemy.  In the past year the commanders of companies, battalions, regiments and divisions have show that they can act with initiative and defeat their enemies wherever they meet them.  The problem lies at the top.  The high command of the IDF ought to have been fired in the first week of the war, simply out of principle.  Today a change in high command is critical if Israel is not to lose this war.  The decision to make this crucial change is the real political decision that confronts Israel’s civilian government.  If the country’s political leadership is not prepared to do so, then the time has come to change it as well.

The author wishes to acknowledge colleagues at the Misgav Institute of National Security and elsewhere, who have shaped his understanding of the strategic issues discussed herein, especially Prof. Gabi Siboni, Dr Hanan Shai, Dr Yair Ansbacher, and Brigadier (Res.) Gai Hazut’s book, “The High-Tech Army and the Cavalry” (Heb.).  Any errors in the use made of these colleagues’ ideas are solely the author’s responsibility.