Learning in the General Staff

"Learning" as a Controversial Term

What makes an intuitive term so complex?

The idea of "learning" has been associated with mankind since the dawn of recorded time. The first institutional identity taken in today's world is that of a student, or one who learns. We all remember being asked to learn, being too lazy to do so, yet using the familiar excuse for doing nothing, "I'm studying!" Then why is such a common term so controversial?

"How is it controversial?" you might ask. Allow me to answer with an episode I experienced several years ago. While I commanded the Training and Doctrine Division in the Operations Directorate (GS/J3), I initiated a symposium on the subject of planning in the General Staff. I thought it worthwhile to deal with this subject as I sensed the Chief of the General Staff's impatience and dissatisfaction stemming from the way it was being carried out. One of the lecturers I invited, after seeing the symposium's goals, responded that he would be happy to participate, but was very concerned that we were reintroducing confusing, unprofessional and post-modern terminology that has "already caused damage to the IDF in 2006." He directed my attention to the word "learning" that appeared in the symposium's goals: "Learning about the General Staff's planning process." In other words, the very use of the word "learning" evoked negative connotations for this respectable lecturer.

Another example of the term’s inherent complexity was an attempt to implement a tool called The General Staff's Learning Graph, which included the General Staff's learning events. When I presented the graph to the General Staff, I was surprised that it stirred up an argument, and that the graph received criticism. The main objection was, “How could such a complex subject, such as learning, be taken and plotted on a technical aid like a graph?” Another objection was, "This isn't learning. What is presented here is General Staff activity." Even though it was activity focused on learning, this was not the way the General Staff learned.

Another encounter I had with the complexity of the term was when I defined "learning" as the central function of Training and Doctrine Division. When I began my position as the commander of the division, I tried to better define its main function - What does the Training and Doctrine Division actually deal with? What is considered success? What is failure? What connects all of the division's various elements?
My conclusion was that the main process in the division was to promote learning in the IDF’s main headquarters, and this required me to define the term "learning". After reviewing several examples, I found the behaviorist approach as the most appropriate for the military: "Methodical change in execution capabilities that takes place following the acquisition of new knowledge."[2] I liked this definition because of its practical aspect - behavioral change.

Another reason was the understanding that change is caused by acquiring new knowledge through deeper comprehension and research. I was again surprised to find so much opposition to the definition. Some resisted because in their mind behavioral change received too much emphasis, which to them is less important than the change in situational awareness. Others claimed that my definition addressed aspects that were physical and technical in nature, and not fundamental.

In this paper, I will discuss the term "learning". I will present a short review of its development in the IDF and I will present a personal experience of the learning process and my conclusions from it.

Why is "learning" so hard to define and address? I propose two approaches for a solution:

The first is a general epistemological approach, while the second is more local and related to the evolution of the term in the IDF over the last several decades.

I will not go into details concerning the first approach, but I will say that there are basic terms in human behavior that have been widely interpreted, such as love, strategy, anger, thought, etc. These terms, that interpret human behavior, have been given different meanings over the years in a variety of languages. The more the research of these words and terms develops, human knowledge in this field becomes more sophisticated.

This is what happened with the term "learning". To illustrate my point, imagine an academic institution that deals with the training of teachers. Every year hundreds of students will be asked to define the term "learning". They will research study methods and try to understand how the human brain operates. This institution will contribute a multitude of definitions, innovative approaches, criticisms of contemporary thought, and more. Western societies' pre-occupation with the massive enterprise called formal education explains the ever-increasing complexity of the field.

The second approach is much more relevant to our discussion, and to better understand it, we will review the main stages that shaped it in the IDF.

Four Stages in the Genealogy of "Learning" in the IDF

The First Stage: 1947 to 1967 – The IDF Learns from Foreign Militaries

In 1948, with the founding of the IDF’s General Staff, Mahad — the IDF’s Instruction Department — was also founded (eventually it would become Ahad, the Instruction Branch). The department’s objective was to train IDF conscripts in military professions. The greatest challenges were the training of conscripts, many of them new immigrants, during ongoing combat and the rapidly increasing size of the military during the War of Independence. These two challenges necessitated the establishment of an institutionalized training system that provided the basic skills required for combat. The training mainly dealt with handling personal weapons and integration into a squad and platoon. Officer training was minimal at best, and based mainly on the Hagana's platoon commanders course.

The major change began with the third "seminar" held by the former Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, in 1953, who had taken leave from political life to learn in depth about Israel’s national security issues. Ben- Gurion interviewed experts, visited various institutions and read reports. In an inspirational act of personal learning and out of deep appreciation for the veterans of the Jewish Brigade, Ben-Gurion shaped Israel’s security concept. The 1953 seminar still serves as a quintessential example of a leader’s learning.

One of Ben-Gurion’s fundamental insights was that the military is a profession that needs to be learned and one of his central conclusions was the importance of the formal training of officers. The training included a combination of courses, the establishment of the National Defense College, the founding of pre-military high-schools for teenagers, and sending officers to study in other military institutions abroad.

Over the years, officers' training has undergone improvements, among them the recognition of some of the content as academic, the establishment of new training courses, and more. But the paradigm continues to exist to this day.

The Second Stage: 1967 to 2006 – The IDF Gains Confidence and Learns from Itself

This stage is the most important for our discussion. During this stage, the world became enchanted with the IDF. Delegations from Western militaries were eager to learn from the IDF's experience in the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars. IDF doctrine, on which the officers had been nurtured since they were new recruits, was thrown by the wayside and replaced with complex procedures of staff work. The armor-centric concept of mass dominated the lessons-learned process following the Yom Kippur War. The IDF rebuilt itself to win a second Yom Kippur War. Even after the disappointment of The First Lebanon War, Israeli voices warning that the IDF was facing a serious problem were few and far between (although one of these voices was heard in the Wald Report[3]).

This development should be viewed in the context of a revolution that had started at the beginning of the 1980s in the United States and was causing havoc in the world of strategic thought - the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Today it is widely accepted that the Yom Kippur War was one of the catalysts of this awakening. The conclusion of Western militaries from this war was that the doctrine of armored masses was not effective. It was proven that even with the optimal conditions of complete surprise and advantage, it was not possible to decisively defeat the enemy. The war’s mutual battles of attrition, along with new technological developments, resulted in the rise of new doctrine. This concept sought to reduce direct attrition through the prudent use of precise fires, better intelligence and improved command and control systems. The IDF was also quite affected by this new concept, and it was expressed in the evolution of an original and advanced IDF version of this revolution.

To summarize: This period featured two processes within the Israeli strategic establishment – flawed learning of the lessons from the Yom Kippur War, while neglecting universal doctrine, on one hand; and the implementation of the concept of precise fire strikes, on the other. These two processes were not congruent and they lacked mutual coherency. Non-complementary tension began to build between adherents of fires and those of maneuver. This tension, which still exists in the IDF, has been one of the main inhibitors of learning in the IDF. This impasse remained in place until 1988 when it was broken with a conceptual-instructional development that appears to solve the contradiction and confusion: the establishment of the Barak Command and Staff Course.

Barak introduced two new ideas. The first was the return to the old IDF doctrine from the early 1960s, and the second was the introduction of a developing field at the time, operational doctrine, to the program’s syllabus. Doctrine experts, such as Benjamin Amidror, and operational theorists, such as BG (res.) Shimon Naveh, came together for this common goal. The addition of operational doctrine into institutional learning and its connection to universal doctrine created an affiliation that, at the time, seemed completely natural (as opposed to the way it is perceived today).

This enabled the practical application of the concept: on one hand, deep battle doctrine that includes intelligence, fires deep in enemy territory, and armored ground maneuver; and on the other hand, the use of general system theory to organize and design this kind of operation.

The implementation of this concept requires learning. In order to design an operation that allows for the manifestation of all the new concept’s capabilities, the military leader needs better situational awareness. This process necessitates familiarity in various disciplines, such as cybernetics, general system theory, philosophy and military history. In a later stage, a more thorough approach was developed in the IDF Institute for Operational Doctrine Research (MALTAM.).

Slowly, MALTAM’s theories and concepts pervaded throughout the IDF. They were officially adopted by the Chief of the General Staff and the entire chain of command, where they were considered a sign of excellence and being on the cutting edge. At its peak of success, this concept became a significant element in the IDF's official operational doctrine. Those who knew how to speak the correct language were perceived as more professional. However, some of those speaking, and some of the ideas concerning MALTAM's doctrine were subject to shallow interpretation and unprofessional implementation. The most notorious was the subject of terminology and definitions. Ambiguous terms, overloaded with imagination and inspiration, were invented widely by commanding officers and misunderstood by the troops.

The reason for this lies in the correct idea that situational awareness is expressed through words and interpreted terms, and when the understanding of the situation deepens, it needs its own new formal terminology. Of course, the invention of a new term itself is not learning; at times the phenomenon was manifested as clever and hollow expressions that were nothing more than a misrepresentation of deeper understanding.

Since, according to this concept, the most important thing is understanding reality and arranging an organizing theory for the campaign, this process would be expected to change reality. The entire process was described in various terms that included the word "learning" - "learning system", "evolving learning", "learning organization" and "continuous learning." Right at the peak of this concept's dominance and its dissemination, along with the term "learning" that accompanied it, it shattered in an instant in the Second Lebanon War (2006).

The Third Stage: 2006 to 2012 - The Great Crisis and the Loss of Self-Confidence

The Second Lebanon War ended with a sense of crisis in the military. The battlefield achievements were unsatisfactory and disappointing. The IDF, which only three years earlier had succeeded in defeating a campaign of Palestinian terrorism, was unable to accomplish the missions it was given. One of the most prominent commanding officers in the war, an unwavering supporter of operational art, an officer with a developed imagination and rich oratory skills, often invented terms to describe reality and what his forces needed to achieve. The terms were widely quoted after the war as an example of the IDF's loss of professional direction.

Following the war, the incoming Chief of the General Staff, LTG Gabi Ashkenazi, began the process of rehabilitating the military. The process included going back to basics, canceling the operational concept, eliminating any mention of operational art in the IDF and placing extra emphasis on the use of terms taken from the tactical world of combat doctrine.

This rehabilitation process, which was justified and necessary for the time, restored self-confidence in the IDF and created stability and clarity between the various command echelons. But it also caused collateral damage. The need to return to tactical discourse reduced and restricted learning to extremely technical learning on the operational level. This type of limited learning abstained from using learning processes like the need for situational awareness to better create the right strategy, the importance of defining a system in order to implement the campaign's operational concept. The structured process of critical thought - designing a dialectic process of "playing the devil's advocate", shaking up the process (brainstorming) and then organizing it – were all pushed out of professional military discourse.

This is how an innocent term that evokes childhood became a contentious term suffused with the odor of post-modernism. This is a term that addresses the acute tensions in military thinking at the operational- strategic echelon: Tensions between the need for simplicity and the complexity of strategic reality; the tension between simple language and the need to describe a unique reality and its unique context; the tension between brainstorming and critical thought, and order, organization and discipline of the processes. The term began to be used to discern between two populations of officers- the conservative and the revolutionary. This segregation, which is not a necessity, could result in the disappearance of military knowledge, research and curiosity.

The Fourth Stage: 2012 and Onwards

The stage we are currently experiencing is an attempt to return the theoretical principles of operational art in a supervised, controlled and more practical manner. Since we are in the midst of the process, history will judge the quality of this decision and its implications.

The New Fires Concept - An Anatomy of the Learning Process

The building of the new fires concept was a process of learning and planning that concerns force design in the IDF. The process was led by the Doctrine and Training Division from 2013 until the end of 2015. I will begin by saying that the presentation of the subject as a learning process is done in hindsight. The process had two stages: The first, prior to Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, was an attempt to carry out cross-service staff work led by the Operations Directorate (as opposed to staff work within a service). The second stage, following Operation Protective Edge, was different - it was more fruitful, significant and led by the Doctrine and Training Division.

Before continuing, it is best to define two basic terms: strategy and strategic planning; both are important when dealing with the General Staff.

Strategy

Strategy can generally be defined as the continuous modification of means to achieve long-term objectives. The complexity of the strategic environment lies in the fact that the objective needs to be defined. It is not provided by the higher echelon in a simple and technical manner. Therefore, a process of creating critical awareness of the situation within its context is required. In a strategic environment, solutions that were prepared in advance without making the required modifications should not be used, since every event is unique. The broad context of events is more important than discrete facts, and a long time is required to reach the achievement and understand the results. Another complexity of the strategic environment, the most important distinction, is the reality of continuous and constant change. Strategists are situated in a process of change: at any given moment, they make decisions based on facts and their interpretation, which come from the past, whether the distant past or recent past. The military leader is in a constant gap between reality and reality as he grasps it. The understanding of this gap and effective performance within it is strategy.

Strategic Planning (currently called "Design" in the Doctrine and Training Division)

The IDF's General Staff is the supreme headquarters, and as such, it is expected to deal with, among other things, strategic planning. This kind of planning is different from the technical planning process that characterizes the tactical level. The difference and the complexity stem from the traits of the strategic level, such as: