The IDF's Conventional Warfare Prospects

By Baruch Kogan

We’re two months into the war in Gaza. This is not likely to be the last war in the area in the near future. I’d like to look at some themes that have emerged so far and how they’re likely to play out in Middle Eastern conventional warfare over the next decade.

Population Density

Our neighboring states are all highly urbanized, with a supermajority of the population living in cities. Urban warfare is famously difficult, with advance rates of 300 meters a day considered good. In northern Gaza, the IDF was able to expel the civilian population and focus on the enemy, using its fire superiority to good effect. In southern Gaza, American pressure prevents the expulsion of civilians and prevents the proper use of fire support, resulting in slower rates of advance and more American pressure to wrap up the war with a ceasefire.

Wall Street Journal

Any Israeli offensive or counteroffensive in the region will run into this constraint: since we are an American client state, we will be prevented from expelling enemy civilians from the cities where most of them live to avoid casualties, using the necessary level of air and artillery strikes to quickly clear enemy cities, or taking the necessary time to clear them methodically while minimizing civilian casualties. This means that the IDF will have to leave large uncleared urban areas in its rear as it maneuvers forward, and deal with the enemy forces which will use them as bases of operations for attacking IDF logistics lines.

The Element of Surprise Is Alive And Well

The population being concentrated in the cities means that military staging areas are in the surrounding countryside, and it may be difficult to concentrate forces for an offensive without being discovered by modern technical means of surveillance: drones, satellites, signals intelligence. The Ukrainian war has involved a half dozen failed offensives which did not take the enemy by surprise.

Hamas drone strike on Israeli guard tower, October 7th 2023

On the other hand, we can see that it is still quite possible to achieve operational surprise by deceiving the enemy on the strategic level. Hamas achieved just this on October 7th (unless you entertain seriously crazy conspiracy theories about the highest echelons of the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus.) They allowed the Israeli leadership to lull itself with false narratives about Hamas’ primary concern being the governance of Gaza and the material needs of its leadership and subjects. The degree of disinformation was so great that Israeli generals and politicians bragged about the tens of thousands of Gazans allowed to cross the border into Israel to work daily; many of these later turned out to have been conducting surveillance of the kibbutzim which Hamas slaughtered on Simchat Torah. The lower level intelligence collectors who attempted to alert the IDF about extensive Hamas preparations for an attack happening in plain site were disciplined and forced to be silent.

Similarly, the Ukrainian war began with Russia achieving strategic surprise through deception. Though Russian preparations and mobilization, done under the guise of large scale maneuvers, were detected by US intelligence and decried by senior American leaders, this did not result in any steps which could have prevented the war or at least kept its beginning stages from being disastrous for the Ukraine. Specifically, the Ukraine did not mobilize its military and its Western allies did not deploy their conventional troops to defend its East. Even as the West was denouncing Russian preparations for war and warning Russia that an invasion would not be tolerated, it failed to take serious measures to spoil the invasion.

A Smaller, Smarter Army: One Out Of Two’s Not Bad

The IDF has spent the last several decades trading combat capacity for peacetime managerial efficiency and political correctness. The senior leadership seduced itself with the promise of a smaller, more technical military. This was justified on the grounds that the era of large wars was over; massive tank and artillery clashes, divisions and corps maneuvering over hundreds of kilometers, massive logistical trains, wars lasting for years were all a thing of the past. The future held more precision strikes from the air and special operations guided by precise intelligence, and shorter operations.

This narrative had tangible consequences. The manpower of the active and (much larger) reserve components of the IDF were stripped down. Training was severely cut. Females were introduced into ever more frontline roles. Combat troops were often tasked with policing duties in Judea and Samaria. Ammunition stockpiles were not built up. Domestic munitions production capabilities were not developed. Warehouses holding wartime equipment were severely neglected. Battlefield support and maintenance units were disbanded, and their functions moved to civilian contractors, many of them Arabs. Questionable loyalty aside, civilian contractors can not and will not maneuver on the battlefield with a task force like soldiers will.

Good luck getting contractors to drive one of these behind a tank and change engines and transmissions on the battlefield

An up-or-out policy ensured that officers who did not meet tight timelines for promotion were forced out; kicked out in their late 20s or early 30s and trying to start their civilian lives when their peers were already years ahead in their career trajectories. This created a careerist climate and an officer corps concerned primarily with punching tickets, polishing resumes and avoiding any black marks at all costs; in short, a zero defect client, and a loss of trust and initiative.

Dysfunction

The whole process involved a hollowing out of the IDF’s capacity, with very drastic results such as a battalion’s worth of troops milling around outside Kibbutz Beeri as Hamas terrorists rampaged inside, waiting for orders, without anybody stepping up and taking control of the situation. In a large conventional war, this sort of performance is a recipe for catastrophic failure like that faced by the USSR in 1941. Unlike the USSR, Israel does not have enough land to make defense in depth an option.

Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority: A Cold Peace Can Turn Into A Hot War

It does not appear as if the IDF and civilian intelligence agencies have learned from the experience of the first day of the war. Even as the war in Gaza continues, Jordan is conducting unprecedentedly large combined forces maneuvers right across the Eastern border. Traditionally, maneuvers have been used as a cover for mobilization and deployment in preparation for surprise offensives, as discussed above. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority has been developing a force of armored vehicles with the compliance of the IDF. Finally, the Egyptian military has spent the last decade building up its military infrastructure in the Sinai and remilitarizing the peninsula, with the result that it now has massive armored forces equipped with the latest American tanks and other equipment on Israel’s Western border, allegedly on the pretext of fighting the Islamic State.

Egypt deploys armor to Rafah Border Crossing

The mainstream IDF narrative about Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority is exactly the same as the narrative about Hamas prior to October 7th: “of course, they hate us, but they are deterred by our superior military, and in any case their focus is domestic and economic.” It would be trivial for them to use that strategic vision to achieve operational surprise. It’s not clear that Israel would be able to survive such a surprise.

A White Pill

Despite the blackpilling nature of everything I’ve written above, I am optimistic about the future of Israeli conventional warfare. My optimism has two reasons. First, our enemies are far worse off than we are. Second, the current war is making all of our systemic deficiencies obvious to all involved, and provides an opportunity to start repairing them and finding workarounds.

The Arab Armies

In large part, our problems come from the fact that the IDF has not fought a military of comparable size since the first Lebanon war 40 years ago. This has allowed the military leadership to escape reality and focus on its personal advancement at the expense of the capabilities and competence of the IDF. But Jordan and Egypt have not fought a conventional conflict in 50 years. Given that corruption is endemic in both societies, it’s likely that their military forces have been deeply affected, with corresponding results on the competence of their conventional forces.

The Syrian army has extensive recent experience with full spectrum warfare, but its performance was such that the regime required first Iranian and then Russian large scale intervention to keep from being overthrown.

The Palestinian Authority has a tenuous grasp on power and rules over dozens of tribal conglomerates, each with its own armed groups and interests. While it may be able to launch a surprise attack into central Israel and cause a crisis, it can not sustain a protracted campaign without collapsing.

In short, as Ben Gurion apocryphally said after the War of Independence, “it’s not that we were good, it’s that the Arabs were even worse.”

The Shakeout Factor

One of the contributing factors to the success of the German military in the first half of the Second World War is the gradually increasing scope and difficulty of its campaigns, from the Anschluss through Poland, France and the Balkans. At every stage, serious deficiencies were identified and addressed. The US Army had a similar path, starting off fighting in Africa on a smaller scale, then invading Italy and only launching an invasion of France after having drawn and incorporated lessons from the previous two campaigns.

In general, the normal situation of an army at war is that of chaos and dysfunction, mitigated to some degree by personal experience and initiative on every level. Problems that were previously unimagined appear regularly. A functioning military is one which is constantly finding and implementing solutions to these emerging problems.

The IDF is fighting a war in Gaza, using combined arms, against a determined enemy. This is not an existential war in the short term; Hamas poses no serious threat to Israel’s core areas, and has not been able to inflict massive casualties on the IDF since the first day’s attack. Nonetheless, it is as serious a war as any fought by the West in the last 50 years. Despite the seeming determination of our leadership to avoid learning and implementing lessons, lessons are being learned at every level. One major encouraging sign is the recently announced initiative to reshore munitions production.

https://twitter.com/IsraelRadar_com/status/1737106206634991855

Assuming that the IDF has enough of a break before the next war for the lessons of Gaza to be internalized and their conclusions implemented, it’s quite possible that it will come to the next conventional war with a huge advantage in competence and functionality over its enemies.

Conclusion

The current war has exposed failures and deficiencies in the IDF at every level, from the strategic to the tactical. It has also indicated operational difficulties which the IDF is likely to encounter in future conventional wars. The course of those wars depends, in large part, on the degree to which all levels of the IDF are successful in learning the lessons of this war and making changes. There are some signs that the higher echelons are starting to understand that the war is not an anomaly but a sign of things to come.

Baruch Kogan can be found on Twitter, and on Substack