Editor's Preface

“Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has a complex history with the concept of defense. The intensity of the debate over the relationship between defense and offense within Israel’s security concept and its military expression fluctuates. The IDF was born from the Haganah, the underground defense organization created in the 1920s, and its idea of the “Iron Wall.”[1] However, the IDF’s ethos was “going beyond the wire,” and its heroes were aggressive commanders like Yitzhak Sadeh, Yigal Allon and the legendary Unit 101, a IDF special forces unit created by Ariel Sharon in 1953. The Agranat Commission, which investigated the failures that led up to the 1973 war, described this ethos as “the cult of the offensive.”[2]

Today, the debate over the proper balance between IDF’s offensive capabilities and the growing dominance of its defensive forces has returned, turning into a stormy conceptual fight. As a matter of fact, the era of wars based on standoff firepower and the threat of terrorist incursions into Israel – the latest example being Operation Protective Edge - sharpens the tension between the importance of an effective defense that includes a layer of home front defense (against rockets and missiles and a border protection layer against raids via tunnels) and the vital importance of decisive military power that can attack the enemy with speed and force in its territory and shorten the duration of the conflict. The point of departure of this debate is the assumption that there exists a bitter fight over resources between these two types of military power and therefore the debate is concerned with the correct balance between the two.

This issue of the Dado Center Journal is dedicated to the subject of defense and its place within Israel’s new security concept and its military force design. As always, we will approach the debate in a systemic fashion in order to create the conditions for this deep conceptual debate.

And what are the conditions for a fruitful systemic debate?

In the systemic learning approach that the Dado Center is developing, one can identify principles and tools that create the conditions for a systemic debate, some of which we used in this issue. These include setting up diverse perspectives, in order to create a holistic systemic explanation for the phenomenon under investigation. Another tool is the exploration of the organizational legacy (the past), to identify existing gaps within the organizational doctrine in relation to changing reality, and to identify repetitive patterns of behavior and recurring obstacles to learning. An additional tool is studying the potential to identify available opportunities that allow us to develop a new concept and to change accordingly. The articles in this issue use these tools.

The legacy as a tool of critical introspection - By tracing the design of Air Force ground-to-air missile capabilities and building the Bar-Lev line, Mr. Saul Bronfeld demonstrates in his article how defensive concepts emerge in the IDF. While offensive components are born from a deep conceptual debate, defensive capabilities emerge from specific needs and are seen as components of a response to particular threats and are isolated from a broader concept. Traces of this phenomenon - IDF involvement in defensive capabilities as response to threats that endanger Israeli offensive capabilities - are found in other articles of this issue.

The potential - At least three of the articles of this issue discuss opportunities and potentials that are still in front of us. Ms. Dana Preisler-Swery deals with the potential for regional stability and a de-escalation in active defense systems. Brigadier General Shachar Shohat, commander of the Air Defense Command, and Mr. Yaniv Friedman raise the potential of missile interception technologies used for defense, even in contexts that break the conceptual dichotomy between “defensive” and “offensive” capabilities. Lieutenant Colonel Eli Michelson and the late Colonel Munir Amar, who passed away in March 2016, argued that there is a conceptual omission that limits the effectiveness of home front defense in times of crisis, an omission that stems from a misunderstanding of the operational realm in the IDF defense concept.

Looking at this question over time, this DCJ issue allows us to identify the IDF tendency to consecrate its offensive capabilities while suppressing the need for defense. It is possible that the roots of this suppression can be traced to the “beyond the wire” concept, which is perhaps the first defining conceptual idea that defined the modern Jewish armed forces. Occasionally this suppression results in a powerful counterreaction - the fortification line built along the Suez Canal in the 1970s, and the fast-growing air defense array today. The article by Brigadier General (res.) Meir Finkel, Dana Preisler-Swery and Yaniv Friedman emphasizes this point and argues that in the absence of proactive systemic thinking on this issue, Israel is forced to adopt a defensive approach that may be dominant, but is not part of a complete systemic concept.

The strength of a systemic debate lies in its ability to break out of the borders of existing concepts which sit in unresolvable tension with one another, and create from these tensions a new conceptual knowledge. The current tension between the IDF offensive tendencies on the one hand, and the enemy’s tangible threats on Israel’s home front on the other hand, constitutes a potential breakthrough for new conceptual realms. More than being a dichotomous choice prioritizing offense over defense, the “beyond the wire” principle of Yitzhak Sadeh, his field companies and Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads, was a new systemic interpretation of the term defense in the strategic context of the Arab Revolt in Palestine in the 1930s. Similarly, we may require a renewed interpretation of the concept of defense, taking into consideration today’s strategic context. Shachar Shohat points out in his article the potential of missile defense, outside the framework of the home front defense concept as we know it today. Another potential that arises from Preisler-Swery’s article and from Shohat and Friedman’s article, is the potential for strategic cooperation that could develop out of the joint defense needs of different states. As related in Lieutenant Colonel Roni Katzir’s article, the cyber world represents a realm where the dichotomy between defense and offense, our territory and theirs, is clearly irrelevant to the debate.

Is it possible that these conceptual frameworks represent an opportunity to change the decades old trend of increasingly intensive rounds of conflicts between us and our enemies without clear decision on the battlefield? Is it possible that the traditional separation between defense and offense - the idea of territory - is no longer sufficient and relevant to a discussion that takes place in a world in which missiles, tunnels and cyber technology bypass border demarcations and traditional military theaters to which we have become accustomed in military thinking? Has the IDF learning system improved itself enough compared to the past in the junction between operational planning, conceptual thought and military force design?

What is the appropriate way for the IDF to develop its knowledge in order to allow the creation of the military concept, that will provide both adequate defense for Israel and its citizens, as well as a quick and convincing response that will put an end to the exhausting rounds of conflicts? Who among us initiates this debate and who leads it?

We hope that this issue will facilitate and encourage the necessary debate.

With best wishes for fruitful and enjoyable reading,

Colonel Eran Ortal, Head of Think Tank.