Victory Not Stalemate
Israel has not achieved a clear cut victory over its existential antagonist, the Palestinian Arabs. That’s right, NO EXISTENTIAL VICTORY yet. In fact, the last clear battlefield victory against the Palestinian Arabs was more than twenty years ago. Why existential? Because our enemy wants to erase the Jewish State from the globe and replace it with a Palestinian Arab terror state, such as we see today in Gaza. Israel’s government needs to instill this realistic fact into the mindset of our Western allies, plus those Israelis and other individuals who have yet to realize it.
The Israel Victory Project, from the Middle East Forum (MEF) seeks to resolve the “Israel-Arab conflict” [better: Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict] by convincing Palestinian Arabs that the Jewish state is tough, determined, and enduring, so that they give up their century-long war against it. First victory, then peace. Only when Palestinian Arabs end their rejectionism [refusal to compromise] can they build their own polity, economy, society, and culture. Thus, a Palestinian Arab defeat is for their benefit as well as Israel’s. The project focuses on decision-makers, opinion-shapers, and publics in Israel and the United States with an eye to reviving victory as a concept. (From the website: https://www.meforum.org/israel-victory-project/) This policy has gained credence in the IDF and hopefully we will see tangible results in the months and years ahead.
Reporter Lazar Berman of The Times of Israel recently wrote an extensive article about this subject on the Times of Israel site. My summary of the article follows:
Hamas and Hezbollah now possess capabilities associated with state militaries. They operate drones, carry out cyberattacks and conduct electronic warfare. Increasingly, their large but still relatively unsophisticated rocket arsenals include precision missiles that can target key Israeli infrastructure like power stations, government offices, bridges, as well as IDF bases and runways. The widespread availability of commercial technology that was once the domain of well-funded militaries is at the core of the problem, in Ortal’s telling.
Recently retired IDF chief of staff Aviv Kohavi recognized this need for transformation and initiated the process within the IDF to carry it out, but he recognizes that there is a long way to go. Ortal says that while Israel’s adversaries have continued to improve their considerable capabilities and increase the threat they pose to civilians and military forces, the IDF seems oddly and repeatedly insistent on carrying out a particular type of operation that leaves the public with the feeling that it is only a matter of time before it’s back in bomb shelters once again. This sentiment is widely felt, for good reason, in Israel’s southern border communities, such as the small city (population 28,000) of Sderot.
In 2019, upon assuming command of the IDF, Kohavi brought the top brass together for a “Victory Workshop” to lay the groundwork for the army’s next multi-year plan. Taking a significant part, Ortal spread his ideas about the need for fundamental change through courses, articles, and The Dado Center Journal. Before he retires, Ortal wants to make sure policymakers and commanders recognize the urgency of the situation and carry out the transformation process that began under Chief of Staff Kohavi. “Time is not on our side,” Ortal said.
At the outset of Israel’s independence in 1948, Prime Minister & Minister of Defense David Ben-Gurion developed a concept based on three pillars — deterrence, early warning and decisive battlefield victory. After decades of military dominance, the belief in the IDF and in Western militaries was that Israel’s overwhelming technological superiority would enable it to shut down enemy military systems by striking at key junctions while incurring minimal losses.
During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when IDF ground forces suffered many casualties and a resulting public outcry, a humiliating, rushed withdrawal from south Lebanon occurred. Capturing land was seen as too casualty-intensive and opened IDF forces up to being bled slowly by guerrilla fighters.
The IDF’s MO became a pattern of deterrence operations marked by an opening air attack, days or weeks of air and artillery strikes, and then a ceasefire accompanied by assurances from Israeli leaders that deterrence was restored. Decisive battlefield victories weren’t the objective, mainly because of the heightened casualties resulting from incursions into enemy territory by IDF ground forces. This policy is colloquially know as “mowing the lawn.” Result: Israel defends itself but doesn’t attempt to defeat the enemy, preferring to deter – until the next round.
Hamas and Hezbollah and their patrons in Tehran have become convinced that their approach – rocket threats on Israel’s civilians combined with anti-tank capabilities to keep the IDF from capturing launch sites – is a successful one. Their ability to threaten Israel has grown and they don’t seem especially deterred. The introduction of the Iron Dome anti-rocket system, despite its tactical success, has done nothing to convince Israel’s adversaries otherwise.
[The use of the Iron Dome is a defensive strategy which inhibits offensive maneuvers, making Israel into a metaphorical turtle hiding inside its shell.] Ortal and Tamir Yadai, then a general in charge of the IDF Doctrine and Training Division, were the first to publicly argue that deterrence operations had reached a dead end.
“Deterrence operations have not only exhausted themselves, but in hindsight, they have accelerated the scope and strength of threats against Israel,” they wrote. Enlisting like-minded generals, Ortal began orienting the IDF toward recognizing the need for fundamental change. The climax of that process was the 2019 Victory Workshop led by Kohavi, who shared Ortal’s discomfort.
The Workshop produced the Operational Concept for Victory, which identified Hamas and Hezbollah as full-fledged “rocket-based terror armies.” These adversaries pose a threat to Israeli civilians with their rocket arsenals, concealing their forces and weapons in urban areas behind human shields. If IDF forces do move to fight the enemy on its own territory, the terrorists have developed a range of defensive tactics to hamper Israel’s advance while attacking Israeli soldiers. [Perhaps the strongest weapon of the Iranian proxies is the mass media bashing of Israel for defending itself, and simultaneously ignoring the terrorists’ war crimes.]
The Victory concept, and the Momentum plan supporting it, was meant to give the IDF the tools to defeat these terror armies on the battlefield, as it did against state adversaries (armies) decades ago. The first thing that needs to happen, said Ortal, was to make ground maneuver relevant again. To stop rocket launches into Israel, the IDF will need to move into enemy territory and capture the launch sites. It will be facing forces that hide in buildings and tunnels, emerge for a few seconds to fire, then disappear.
Ortal called for flooding the battlefield with sensors — as the Allies did with radar and sonar — linked to IDF ground forces to enable them to find Hamas and Hezbollah crews first and destroy them within seconds. He also wants to see infantry officers at the tactical levels operating their own extensive UAV fleet, helping them locate the enemy much as the aircraft carriers did in the Atlantic. Ortal stressed that though its enemies make use of new technologies, Israel’s potential to take advantage of civilian innovations – big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning – and implement them on the battlefield is far greater.
The current Mabam – or campaign between wars – approach, in which the IAF destroys weapons shipments and forces in Lebanon and Syria, is helpful but is no substitute for victory in war, he argued. “Mabam could have an effect of strategic blinding on the IDF’s real mission precisely because of its success, but we must recognize that it is only a delaying action, not a solution.” Meanwhile, Iran is very much the major enemy to deal with.
While the air force is the IDF’s long arm tasked with preparing to strike Iran’s nuclear program, a potential raid is not sufficient, said Ortal. Israel needs forces that can threaten Iran on its doorstep, as Tehran has done to Israel. “You have to create a presence, even if it’s not continuous,” Ortal said. “Israel will never have aircraft carriers, but it will have to be a naval presence that is less overt. It might not always port at home. It might not always have an Israeli flag.” Israel’s very potent submarine fleet may play a prominent role in defeating Iran.
Eventually, Ortal envisions Iran’s investment in proxies across the Middle East will prove an unsustainable overstretch, similar to what led to the fall of the Soviet Union. Israel’s new relationship with Abraham Accord countries and closer military cooperation with Egypt presage a much different offensive for Israel, now no longer isolated in the region. The US is also paying attention to the Middle East, realizing that Israel is a deputy that can project American, and its own, power in the region.
The IDF and Israel’s government will hopefully step up and implement the required new strategy to defeat Israel’s enemies, including the many Palestinian Arabs (but not all) who are fighting Israelis in our homeland. The MEF Victory Project is a useful tool to do the groundwork for the cataclysmic victory that must occur to insure Israel’s existence. You can do your part by educating yourself and dismissing the phony 2 state solution.