Failure to concentrate forces at the strategic and operational levels in 1973
In 1973, the IDF found itself, for the first time, unable to concentrate force at the
strategic level. The Arab coalition members took advantage of their quantitative
superiority and their strategic surprise’s effect in order to split the Israeli forces
strategically between the Egyptian and the Syrian Fronts. Once the Peled Division—
the ground forces’ only reserve force—was allocated to the Northern Front at the
early stages of the war, the IDF had no strategic reserves left. Given the longest
interior lines Israel had ever been operating on, which stretched from the Suez Canal
zone and the Golan Heights, reinforcing one of the fronts with a division engaged in
fighting on another front would have meant that a significant force would be missing
as a fighting force for no less than thirty-six hours—something that the IDF could
not afford under the circumstances. At the operational level, the 8 October simulta-
neous counter-attack on the Northern and Southern Fronts, as well as the dispersed
manner in which Israeli tanks were operating at the early stages of the war, were
reflective of the failure to concentrate forces at that level, too.
Concentration of fire replacing concentration of forces
The ability to concentrate rapidly or disperse long-range and precise fire without
any manoeuvre has made the dilemmas of concentration versus dispersion,
typical of manoeuvre-oriented operations, much easier to solve. It has already
caused the distinction between interior and exterior lines to lose much of its
relevance. On the other hand, as was proved during the Second Lebanon War, in
counter-insurgency operations a concentration of fire has a much smaller effect
than ground manoeuvres, both physically (capturing territory) and psychologi-
cally. Moreover, the enemy, too, can concentrate fire, and if it launches rockets
into the enemy’s land—in this case, Israel—as did the Palestinians and Hezbollah
from the early 1980s, then firepower may serve as a technological force multiplier
for the weak, which can balance the stronger side’s edge.
Prior to the Second Lebanon War, the notion of diffused warfare took hold of
the IDF. Diffused warfare is based on the assumption made by many RMA
thinkers that a fundamental shift has taken place from campaigns consisting of
horizontal clashes between rival forces, which entail breaking through the oppo-
nent’s layers of defence and proceeding along distinct lines with distinct start and
finish lines, to diffused confrontation that takes place simultaneously on the
entire battlespace, distributing the force’s mass to a multitude of separate pressure
points, rather than concentrating it on assumed centres of gravity. 75 Diffused
warfare constitutes a challenge to the notion of concentration, which was typical
of strategy at all levels, but failed to prove its effectiveness in 2006. It seems to
have taken strategy back to the times when the accumulation of numerous tactical
successes was supposed to be translated into operational or strategic success.
Other RMA-inspired notions adopted by the IDF were ‘effects-based operations’
(EBO) 76 and ‘swarming’. Not only is the idea of ‘effects’ elusive, 77 but, by adopting it,
senior IDF commanders distanced themselves from the old but simple notions, such
The Rise and Fall of Israeli Operational Art, 1948–2008 187