Israel's Long War With Hezbollah: Military Innovation and Adaptation Under Fire by Raphael D. Marcus

Author:Raphael D. Marcus [Marcus, Raphael D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Israel & Palestine, General, Military, Middle Eastern, Political Science, World, Middle East, Wars & Conflicts (Other), History, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781626166110
Google: 1_t0DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 43399354
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2018-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Overall, the diffusion of ideas came by finding key people who took on the mode of thinking and who acted as “early adopters.” It was about finding entrepreneurs within the system that would take that on rather than managing the implementation process. When you have those kind of people, they take on the ideas, then they run with it, so they might change it, give it their own interpretation, and may not understand it the way it was intended. There is an evolutionary process throughout the diffusion process. But you have mutations.56

SOD’s success can be attributed to the fact that Naveh “championed his product” and protected his disciples; however, this was coupled with the claim that “those who did not buy into the Naveh intellectual revolution were challenged and sometimes marginalized.”57 As SOD spread throughout the IDF, a subtle division emerged between SOD “insiders” and “outsiders,” and the outsiders felt marginalized and left out.58 According to a former researcher at the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies, OTRI’s successor organization, “OTRI were accused of being totalitarian, that if you don’t agree with their approach regarding the operational level and their whole organizational structure they created, you were criticized as stupid and not part of the system.”59

Supporting OTRI’s concepts became a means for promotion and an accepted way to think, whether or not officers understood or devoted any of the required intellectual attention to actually learning SOD. For example, despite receiving support from COS Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, Naveh lambasted him: “[Mofaz] realized that this thing, which he never bothered to learn about, provides him with an intellectual façade . . . so in the end he became our strongest supporter. We reached the peak of our strength thanks to him. I know him. He stinks, he is an idiot but a terrifying bastard, a paratrooper but absolutely from the garbage.”60

Central Command is often viewed as the turf of the Paratrooper Brigade, and the associated prestige made it a model for imitation by other IDF commands.61 The paratroopers acted as the main proponents of the innovation, as the most supportive chiefs of staff as identified by Naveh—Lipkin-Shahak, who established OTRI; Mofaz, who institutionalized OTRI; and Yaalon, a “patron of OTRI”—were all products of the Paratrooper Brigade. Two of the respective deputy chiefs of staff during the same time period, Matan Vilnai and Uzi Dayan, also “supported the operational transformation trend and protected OTRI,” and both were paratroopers.62

After General Dayan’s success with SOD, his successor as head of Central Command, Maj. Gen. Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, studied SOD and nurtured the innovative process. In Naveh’s words, Yaalon would act as “the advocate of OTRI but also as the command agent who led the process of operational learning throughout the entire IDF” through his career, as head of Central Command (1998–2000), deputy COS (2000–2002), and eventually as COS (2002–5).63 Central Command would act as the main incubator for the innovation and where SOD matured. When Yaalon became COS, he brought SOD to the very pinnacle of the IDF.

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