Eran Ortal, a reserve Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Brigadier General (Ret.) and military theorist, spoke to an April 8 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
The Gaza war against Hamas is Israel’s first “total war” in which the Jewish state is committed to not only defeating its enemy militarily, but also politically. October 7 proved Israel’s traditional defense strategy to be unrealistic, but correcting this “derailment” depends on “a really profound learning process to be made after this war.”
The aim of hostile Arab states that have waged war against Israel since its establishment has been to “make Israel disappear from the map.” As the biblical David to the Arab’s Goliath, for Israel’s first four decades through the 1980s, its force was built for short, decisive wars. Israel’s aim was to operationally, rather than strategically, defeat its enemies by “taking war to the other side outside our borders” and neutralizing the military threat.
By the 1990s, the Cold War had ended, Egypt was abiding by a peace treaty, and the IDF had gone through a “revolution in military affairs.” The IDF was confident it was “the most modern military force around with elite capabilities of targeting and directly and accurately striking many targets of the other side.” It now thought of itself as a “regional superpower” — the “Goliath of the neighborhood” — and no longer as vulnerable.
But it was also during the 1990s that Israel’s traditional defense strategy was charged with ousting Hezbollah from South Lebanon, where it threatened Israel’s northern border communities. This time, the IDF found it was fighting not a Lebanese army, but a Lebanese guerrilla force. The “sense of complete military supremacy” based on the IDF’s “modern air power to degrade and deter Lebanese Hezbollah and its state patterns” began to derail because of the difficulty in targeting stealth guerrilla forces.
A new strategy emerged to “restrain” the guerrillas by using the IDF’s air power to target the Syrian regime, which supported the weak Lebanese state. Relying on air power campaigns, however, is a flawed strategy because they are “really wars of attrition” that Israel learned early on a small state cannot sustain. Instead, conflicts necessitated “quick, decisive operations” to end them before they could devolve into wars of attrition.
Slow, strategic attrition wars developed every few years in Lebanon and Gaza. In 2007, after the IDF withdrew from Gaza and Hamas assumed control, some of Israel’s leaders and generals believed Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, would have to “adopt a logic of state responsibility.” The harsh reality is that neither did so, dispelling Israel’s groupthink that it could “deter and restrain Hamas by air power without the ongoing conflict and friction on the ground.”
Instead, Hezbollah and Hamas used their territories to build themselves into A2/AD stealth armies — anti-access and area denial entities. A2/AD entities can, with enough accurate fire deployed from multiple ranges, deter a superpower from accessing an operational area and restoring order after being provoked. After Israel’s exit from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, its enemies had decades to build their forces “under the cover of deterrence” by rockets. Now the IDF’s mettle is being tested as its boots on the ground degrade Hamas in Gaza through total war. “And this total war to defeat Hamas, really the situation right now is that it proves too much for Israel.”
So the need now is to “devise a way to defeat in the next war, at least Lebanese Hezbollah military, without resorting to the same tactics we are now engaged with in Gaza.”
Israel needs to “devise a way to defeat in the next war, at least Lebanese Hezbollah military, without resorting to the same tactics we are now engaged with in Gaza.”
Rethinking the IDF’s traditional approach requires first recognizing the three “disruptors” to Israel’s traditional defense strategy: (1) You cannot wage decisive campaigns against guerrilla forces; (2) rockets and missiles from Lebanon and Gaza make it impossible to disengage from them; and (3) Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which were considered isolated guerrilla forces, are now “just the paws of the huge Iranian tiger, and thus, we are now again the Davids of the neighborhood fighting the big tiger, ancient Persia.”
The main point is not “about ballistic and missile defense.” It is “taking ballistic and missile defense technologies into the offensive.”
“What we need to do in the militaries is change not only our weapons and technologies, but also our state of minds. We are addicted to standoff engagements. That means waging wars from far away. And what we are now experiencing in Gaza is a new thing for the last few decades. It’s a really hard, close range, boots on the ground fight. And we have crossed that Rubicon. So I think we are now ready to move one step further ahead, which is take the war with rockets and fires to the other side.” What does this mean? The IDF’s self-perception as a superpower bred a complacency that stymied new and emerging strategies nimble enough to adapt to changing circumstances. Militaries typically resist change, but “the real meta-disruptor is not the other side, but ourselves.” As Iran’s involvement increased and Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s capabilities were enhanced, the IDF’s previous strategy of attrition no longer degraded its adversaries. Rather, it was Iran “degrading and fatiguing and ‘attritioning’ us.”
What we are now experiencing in Gaza is a new thing for the last few decades. It’s a really hard, close range, boots on the ground fight.
The way ahead is to “re-adapt our capabilities in order to preserve what was clearly [a] more realistic and valid defense strategy.” The main takeaway from the three disruptors is a “tactical one.” The use of technology to rethink Israel’s approach to war offers solutions that address the Iranian strategy. Defeating the adversary’s deterrence of rockets and missiles involves two points currently to its advantage: (1) The adversary’s “durability” to avoid being targeted; and (2) the adversary’s standoff launching of “rockets, missiles, and UAV’s (unmanned aerial vehicles)” while hiding at a distance.
The development of laser systems, such as the Iron Beam, although currently limited by weather conditions and the quantity of interceptions at a given time, make interception much cheaper. New technologies, such as sensors, can saturate the combat environment within close range of a battlefield to target and even intercept enemy launching points and outgoing fire in their own terrain.
Israel must habitually take “ballistic and missile defense technologies into the offensive.” If large salvos can be kept from Israel’s borders, then Israel’s overall defense system becomes more resilient and effective against other incoming threats. Ultimately, the IDF’s state of mind needs to change from waging wars from afar, to “tak[ing] the war with rockets and fires to the other side.”
