6
The Rise and Fall of Israeli
Operational Art, 1948–2008
Avi Kober
INTRODUCTIONAlthough the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) demonstrated operational-art skills as early
as the state’s War of Independence, it took its first steps towards formal operational-
art thinking only in the mid-1990s, when the Operational Theory Research Institute
(OTRI) was established. Israeli commanders educated at the OTRI started referring
to themselves as ‘operators’, or ‘shapers’ of operations, internalizing imported con-
cepts, such as ‘extended battlefield’, ‘deep operations’, ‘synchronization’, and so on.
The OTRI team believed that, alongside the adoption of a relatively solid, though
imitated, ready, off-the-shelf,Soviet-inspired Americanoperationalthinking,delving
into non-military, postmodern philosophy would equip senior officers with the tools
necessary for dealing with the complex and changing realities of war. Classical
military thinkers became no more than names whose sayings were occasionally
cited but whose writings were not read or studied in depth. 1
Throughout its lifetime, from its establishment in 1995 to its closure in 2005,
the institute failed to offer written materials on operational art in general and
Israeli operational art in particular. Given the neglect of classical military theory
by the IDF’s education system and the OTRI’s focus on the writings of postmod-
ern architects and philosophers, only a handful of IDF commanders were intel-
lectually and professionally competent to criticize the OTRI’s ideas, whereas
many others just adopted its pompous language. The Winograd Commission
called the OTRI’s language a ‘tower of Babel’, pointing to it as an impediment to
the creation of a common language and mutual understanding between com-
manders at the operational and tactical level during the Second Lebanon War. 2
This language was considered by many IDF commanders obscure, unclear,
confusing, and empty, and the combination of problematic operational concepts
and an unclear language for orders had a detrimental effect. 3
In a paper published in 2007 for the US Department of Defense’s director of
the Net Assessment Office, titled ‘Operational Art and the IDF: A Critical Study of
a Command Culture’, 4 author Shimon Naveh attributed the IDF’s poor opera-
tional art to a combination of addiction to tactics and its failure to become a