force ratios and cope with other strategic and operational constraints. The IDF’s
command system and its commanders’ generalship were reflective of the above
conditions and served as a facilitating or debilitating factor affecting the employ-
ment of the force multipliers.
The choice to focus here on force multipliers and the IDF’s command system
and its commanders’ generalship stems from the fact that the concept of opera-
tional art has broadened so much that it has almost lost its coherence. By
discussing it from a force multiplier point of view, one can relate, in a more
concise and tangible way, to many of the issues often considered parts of opera-
tional art, such as the tension between strategic, operational, and tactical logic,
objectives, and constraints; the tension between disrupting the enemy’s effort and
destroying its force; the tension between top-down and bottom-up effects;
dilemmas concerning the preferred centres of gravity; the dilemma between
decentralized and centralized command systems; inter-arm and inter-corps
cooperation and jointness; the dynamic relationship between firepower and
manoeuvre; and so on. As force multipliers have probably been the most typical
Israeli way of compensating for its strategic vulnerabilities, they also seem to be
tailor-made for the analysis of the unique characteristics of Israeli operational art.
THERISEOFISRAELIOPERATIONALARTThe period up to the early 1970s was Israeli operational art’s golden age. The
principal security threat then was clearly and simply defined as one emanating
from a ‘conventional’ attack by a coalition of Arab armies. The likelihood of
quantitative inferiority in case of war against a coalition of enemies was great,
creating the ‘few-against-the-many’ logic and ethos (which did not always match
reality, as will be shown below) that propelled Israeli operational art to adopt and
develop a series of force multipliers that would compensate for it. As the lack of
strategic depth made the absorption of Arab attacks on Israeli territory intolera-
ble, Israeli operational art opted for offence and first strike not only as force
multipliers, but also as a means of creating artificial depth. Although Arab–Israeli
inter-state military confrontations only rarely involved Israeli society directly, the
belief that Israeli society and economy could not withstand protracted conflicts of
an attritional nature moved towards blitzkrieg. Other reasons for blitzkrieg were
the need to pre-empt superpower involvement or intervention during the war
and the arrival of Arab expeditionary forces at the battlefronts. Israeli HICs were
waged across the entire spectrum of the levels of war, with the operational level
playing a central role. LICs were considered minor challenges, located on the
geographical periphery; that is, the frontier areas.
Operational art demonstrated by the IDF during Israel’s early wars would not
have been imaginable without the existence of battlefield conditions favourable
for manoeuvre. IDF commanders acted upon good intuition and rich experience
gained throughout a number of HICs. Operations, particularly those carried out
168 The Evolution of Operational Art