territory. After the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Desert in 1957, Israel enjoyed
the benefit of strategic or, at least, operational depth on the Egyptian Front for the
first time, as there was no significant Egyptian military presence in the Sinai
thanks to Egypt’s voluntary demilitarization of the peninsula. Had the Egyptians
decided to initiate an attack on Israel, they would have been forced to cross
hundreds of kilometres of desert on their way to the international border,
allowing fresh Israeli forces time to mobilize, deploy, and counter-attack, taking
advantage of the diminishing power of the Egyptian attack. The demilitarization
of the Sinai was eventually violated by the Egyptians in May 1967.
The 1967 war started exactly from the classical situation that was considered
casus bellifor Israel and created an intolerable situation for the absorption of the
enemy attack. The Egyptian and Israeli armies were both deployed along the
international border, Egypt had already blocked the Straits of Tiran and formed
an alliance with other Arab states, and Israel felt it had no choice but to make sure
that the war was not waged on its own territory or began with an Arab first strike.
Favourable conditions for manoeuvre
Israeli operational art during the early HICs owed much of its good performance
to the ascendancy of manoeuvre over firepower. The relatively convenient force-
to-space ratio, coupled with the dominance of weapon systems capable of
manoeuvring on the battlefield, particularly the tank, enabled the IDF to fight
short and relatively cheap wars in 1956 and 1967, in which it launched the first
strike and brought about the enemy’s quick collapse, psychologically and/or
physically.
In 1948–9, the number of Arab and Israeli brigades together deployed on the
battlefronts was between twenty-five during most stages of the war and thirty at
its final stage. Not only was that number far from creating density on the
battlefield, the adversaries’ forces were dispersed along four fronts. In 1956,
Egyptian and Israeli forces deployed in the Sinai Peninsula did not exceed twenty
brigades—again constituting a small number relative to the empty spaces of the
desert, although the dunes sometimes limited mobility and manoeuvrability.
In 1967, for the first time, the force-to-space ratio grew significantly—on the
Sinai Front alone the number of brigades almost tripled, reaching fifty-five
formations—but manoeuvrability was, nonetheless, retained.
Manoeuvrability depends, in part, on the nature of the dominant arm or the
‘dominant weapon system’, to use J. F. C. Fuller’s terminology. 12 In 1948–9,
infantry was still the dominant factor on the Arab–Israeli battlefield. The War
of Independence’s most important operations, such as Operation Danny on the
Jordanian Front, Operation Hiram on the Lebanese Front, or Operations Yoav
and Horev on the Egyptian Front, were all carried out primarily by infantry.
As a result of the huge psychological effect the Israeli armour had on the Arab
forces in the Sinai in 1956, thanks to its mobility, firepower, and protection, the
debate that took place prior to the war between the infantry school, headed by
Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, and the armour school, led by Generals Haim Laskov
170 The Evolution of Operational Art