force multipliers at all military levels of war, including the operational level. The
establishment of the OTRI created the false impression that the IDF finally started
taking operational art seriously, an idea that soon proved to be an illusion.
With LICs becoming the only type of war Israel has been engaged in since the
1980s, the importance of the operational level of war has decreased and experi-
ence in HICs, which has traditionally been the central source of inspiration for
IDF commanders and their operational art, has almost disappeared.
Given the close linkage between operational art and manoeuvre, the ascendancy
of firepower over manoeuvre has been detrimental to Israeli operational art. One
of its by-products has been a greater tendency to think linearly at the expense of
the non-linear, paradoxical thinking on which operational art has traditionally
fed. The post-heroic state of mind that has characterized Israeli political and
military echelons since the late 1970s has also taken the sting out of manoeuvre,
as manoeuvre has been considered more likely to entail casualties than firepower.
The poor professionalism of IDF commanders—for reasons I have explained at
length elsewhere—has not allowed commanders to become acquainted with the
best theoretical materials on classical and modern military theory in general, and
operational art in particular. 88 It has prevented them from criticizing imported,
valued, and sometimes inadequate ideas that have been preached by a handful of
charlatans who have taken advantage of IDF commanders’ poor professional
education, which failed to equip them with the necessary tools for challenging
these ideas intellectually. The IDF’s operational art is not a lost cause, however. It
only takes military leadership that understands the value of a higher standard of
professional education and training.
NOTES- ‘Why the Israeli Army Loves Deleuze’,http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2006/09/
why_the_israeli.html; Eyal Weizman, ‘Israeli Military Using Post-Structuralism as
Operational Theory’,Infoshop News, 1 August 2006,http://www.infoshop.org/inews/
article.php?story=20060801170800738. - The Winograd Commission’s final report,<http://www.vaadatwino.org.il/pdf/ יפוס %
20 חוד .pdf>, 318, 322. - Ibid., 274–5, 321.
- Shimon Naveh,Operational Art and the IDF: A Critical Study of a Command Culture
(Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2007). - Ibid., 52.
- Ibid., 3, 35.
- Eliot A. Cohen et al.,Knives, Tanks, and Missiles: Israel’s Security Revolution(Wa-
shington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998), 74–6; Avi Kober,
‘Israeli Military Thinking as Reflected inMaarachotArticles, 1948–2000’,Armed Forces
and Society, vol. 30, no. 1 (Fall 2003), 141–60; Avi Kober, ‘What Happened to Israeli
Military Thinking?’,Journal of Strategic Studies(forthcoming). - Avi Kober,Coalition Defection: The Dissolution of Arab Anti-Israeli Coalitions in War
and Peace(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 60–3.
190 The Evolution of Operational Art