Israel and the United States by Freedman Robert O;

Author:Freedman, Robert O;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westview Press

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Ultimately the IDF’s poor performance in the Second Lebanon War of 2006 brought these debates to an abrupt halt. Sometime during the previous decade, it was thereafter generally agreed, Israeli military thought had taken a wrong turn and now had to get back to basics. As is always the case with retrospective investigations into the parentage of failures, fingers were pointed in numerous directions. The Winograd Commission, for instance, spread blame widely, citing false economics (reductions in reserve training), mismanaged organizational reform (which resulted in a top-heavy command structure), a misplaced trust in air power, and perhaps above all, a tendency on the part of field commanders to frame their orders in accordance with the intricate jargon associated with the American notion of “effects-based operations” rather than in plain speech intelligible to their subordinates.60 Other critics were even more specific, explicitly attributing the IDF’s hesitation to undertake ground operations during the early stages of the 2006 war to the ways in which the chief of staff, Major General Dan Halutz (not incidentally a former commanding officer of the Israeli air force), had misinterpreted the attainments of US air power in the Kosovo campaign.61

Perhaps, however, the root causes went even deeper. Several decades of intimate contact with US military forces, commanders, weapons, and thinking might, in the most profound of ways, have subverted the IDF’s independence of thought. Although still capable of displaying tactical ingenuity, at the strategic and doctrinal levels members of Israel’s security elite seem to have become overwhelmed by the American mind-set. American military concepts, even those discredited in the United States (such as “effects-based operations”),62 were imbibed with an innocence once reserved for biblical truths. Likewise, American operations were often analyzed with uncritical acclaim. Perhaps because they lacked any firm theoretical grounding in the fundamentals of strategic thought, Israeli commanders became intoxicated with faddish American terminology.63 Consequently, they seem not to have considered the possibility that—as one analyst very belatedly pointed out—the “American way of war,” if at all viable, might be appropriate only to the armed forces of the United States.64 This failing still persists. When in 2008 the Israeli government decided to draw up a plan for reorganizing the IDF and Ministry of Defense, the tender was awarded to a firm of American consultants.65

Given such developments, there are reasons for wondering whether the almost umbilical bonds that tie the IDF to US military sources perhaps have become too tight. Quite apart from making Israel dangerously dependent on supplies of American military hardware, the alliance might also have stifled independent Israeli military thought. In the long term, the latter threat may be no less insidious than the former. For several years now Israeli strategic planners have recognized the need to attain as large a degree of self-reliance as possible in the realm of weapons systems—most notably, since 1991, by developing autonomous satellite capabilities. Perhaps the time has come for the same incentive to motivate an effort to wean the IDF away from dependence on the “soft power” and intellectual dimension of the relationship.

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