and Meir Zorea, was decided in favour of the latter. The armour became the
dominant weapon system, constituting the backbone of Israeli manoeuvre,
offence, and battlefield decision, although it needed the support of other arms
and corps, particularly air power.
The 1967 Six Day War found the infantry’s relative share in the ground forces’
structure in considerable decline. The diminishing importance of the infantry
was reflected in the infantry/armour quantitative ratio, which, by 1956, changed
from 10:1 in the infantry’s favour to 3:1, and, by 1967, was only 2:1. 13 During the
1967 war, spearhead tank battalions advanced continuously in the enemy’s
territory, sustained by the supply units that followed in their wake as part of
what Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz called a ‘linear integration’ system,
which was both crucial for and typical of blitzkrieg. 14
Manoeuvre-enabled operational art
Quantitative inferiority—real or perceived, actual or potential—has always ex-
isted in the back of Israeli war planners’ minds, dictating operational art that
focused on compensating for such inferiority via a series of force multipliers. The
most important force multiplier was offence, which constituted a form of war,
campaign, or battle that was crucial for achieving a battlefield decision.
Offence
Despite their admiration for Clausewitz’s teachings in general and his preference
for defence, which he saw as the stronger form of war, in particular Moltke and
Schlieffen became advocates of offence and indirect approach after having intel-
lectually analysed the changes that took place on the battlefield as a result of
the military-technological developments that followed the Industrial Revolution,
as well as Germany’s strategic circumstances. By contrast, IDF commanders have
been completely unaware of the spectrum of opinions presented by military thin-
kers on the question of which form of war was stronger: offence or defence. 15
Their common sense and good intuition, however, guided them to prefer offence,
based on the belief that it was perfectly suited to compensating for Israeli
quantitative inferiority, because of the attacker’s ability to choose the time and
place where the confrontation would take place and concentrate forces at that
point. Thanks to offence, Israel could also transfer the war to the enemy’s
territory so as to avoid the need to absorb an enemy attack on Israeli soil. As a
battlefield decision could only be achieved via offence, manoeuvrability, which
was a condition for a ground offence, served as an enabling factor. And, indeed,
although, in principle, operational art is not confined to offence but is equally
relevant to defence, since the War of Independence’s first truce in the summer of
1948 Israel has opted for offence as its preferred form of war and campaign, not
only in HICs, but also in low-intensity operations—a tradition that started with
the pre-1956 reprisals carried out by Unit 101 and the paratroopers.
The Rise and Fall of Israeli Operational Art, 1948–2008 171