Beyond the Basics
Beyond the Basics:
Looking Beyond the Conventional Wisdom Surrounding the IDF Campaigns against Hizbullah and Hamas
by Lazar Berman
Download the Full Article: Beyond the Basics
The United States military devotes great resources and attention to understanding the Israeli campaigns against Hizbullah (2006) and Hamas (2008-9). The Pentagon has sent at least twelve teams to interview Israeli officers who fought in the 2006 Second Lebanon War. “I’ve organized five major games in the last two years,” notes Frank Hoffman of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, “and all of them have focused on Hizbullah.” Only months after the end of Operation Cast Lead in January 2009, the US Army Combined Arms Center’s Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth published “Back to Basics: A Study of the Second Lebanon War and Operation CAST LEAD”, an attempt to document the changes in the IDF over the two conflicts.
The conventional wisdom, especially in the US military, is that the IDF erred in several key areas during the Second Lebanon War. The IDF ceased training for high-intensity warfare. Perhaps more damagingly, the wisdom holds, the IDF adopted a new doctrine based on Effects-Based Operations (EBO), a doctrine that led IDF generals to abandon ground maneuver, and to believe they could defeat Hizbullah from the air. After the war, according to this approach, the IDF simply returned to previous understandings and doctrine, as shown in Operation Cast Lead in 2008/9.
Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom that has coalesced in America around the recent IDF operations, based largely on “Back to Basics” and other CSI studies, comes from a superficial understanding of the IDF and of its performance during the two conflicts. These accounts inaccurately portray the IDF in 2006, and miss the nuanced but profound change it went through after the war in Lebanon. The IDF that went to war in 2006 was heavily influenced by societal pressure against accepting casualties and by a prevalent low-intensity conflict (LIC) mindset. Caught without a fully developed doctrine, its performance, while not uniformly bad, was often muddled and indecisive. The experience of the war in Lebanon led to new IDF concepts of maneuver and victory, on display in Cast Lead. The dominant narrative in America attributes the products of the societal and LIC pressures to a doctrine never adopted by the IDF, and fails to recognize the new IDF concepts. Left uncorrected, this narrative puts the United States defense community at risk of learning the wrong lessons from Israel’s recent campaigns.
Download the Full Article: Beyond the Basics
Lazar Berman is the Program Manager for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He received an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, with a concentration in Military Operations. Lazar served in the Israel Defense Force as an infantry officer in the Gaza area. He also commanded a platoon in the Bedouin Scout Battalion. His work has appeared in Small Wars Journal, Huffington Post, and the reading list for the US Army COIN course in Taji, Iraq.
The author would like to thank Gen. Itai Brun, Dr. Eitan Shamir, and the staff at the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies for their support and insight while researching this issue.
