manoeuvre, which was supposed to apply to LIC too, 33 something that augurs
badly for operational art.
Years of policing missions in the territories have weakened the IDF’s opera-
tional skills against regular and semi-regular/hybrid challenges even further.
Many of the IDF’s weaknesses that were exposed during the Second Lebanon
War derived from the nature of the IDF’s activities in the territories. This should
not have come as a surprise. In the late 1980s, Martin van Creveld started talking
and writing about what policing missions would do to the IDF. In 1998, more
than a decade after the outbreak of the first intifada, he warned that ‘ten years of
trying to deal with the intifada have sapped the IDF’s strength by causing troops
and commanders to adapt to the enemy. The troops now look at mostly empty-
handed Palestinian men, women, and children as if they were in fact a serious
military threat’. 34 As if predicting the IDF’s poor performance during the Second
Lebanon War, van Creveld added: ‘Among the commanders, the great majority
can barely remember when they trained for and engaged in anything more
dangerous than police-type operation; in the entire IDF there is now hardly any
officer left who has commanded so much as a brigade in real war’. 35 Before the
war, at least two general staff members, Generals Yishai Boer and Yiftah Ron-Tal,
warned of the negative implications of the preoccupation with policing missions
in the territories, claiming that the IDF was losing its manoeuvrability and
conventional fighting capability. 36
If until May 2000 the IDF had gained some operational experience from
fighting against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, following its withdrawal to the
international border in mid-2000, fighting terrorists and suicide bombers became
the IDF’s almost sole source of combat experience. Israeli troops became used to
confronting a numerically inferior and poorly trained and equipped opponent,
enjoying excellent tactical and operational intelligence provided by military
intelligence and the General Security Service (GSS), massive logistical and tech-
nical support, and a familiarity with the combat zones in which they had been
fighting for many years.
None of these advantages that the IDF enjoyed in the territories were present
during the war in the summer of 2006. Hezbollah’s fighters were highly moti-
vated, and well trained and equipped. The tactical intelligence—if any—that was
provided to the ground troops by military intelligence was of low quality,
compared to the high-quality intelligence provided by the GSS on the territories
and on southern Lebanon prior to the 2000 withdrawal. Commanders lacked
experience in operating large formations in general and armoured formations in
particular. Logistical support was rather ineffective, and some of the fighting took
place in unfamiliar terrain.
The decline of the strategic and operational levels of war
Whereas ‘regular’ war is usually waged across the entire range of the levels-of-war
pyramid, in wars of attrition in general and LICs in particular military encounters
often take place at the tactical level, usually limited in terms of forces, time, or
The Rise and Fall of Israeli Operational Art, 1948–2008 179