Winograd: Will Israel’s politicans learn?
Jan 30th, 2008 by MESH
From Andrew Exum
Today, as Eliyahu Winograd presented his final report in Jerusalem on Israel’s performance during the 2006 war with Hezbollah, I sat in London, having coffee with one of the U.S. Army’s smartest counterinsurgency experts. The two of us were discussing what lessons we, as American military professionals and analysts, should draw from those 33 days of war. To be sure, there are many. As I have written previously for this blog, both sides—Israel and Hezbollah—deserve careful study.
But in the end, one of the lessons of the 2006 war was that tactics—and correcting tactical mistakes—only get you so far. The 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel started with a disastrous strategic miscalculation by Hasan Nasrallah—that Israel would respond in a measured, limited fashion to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers across the Blue Line—and was followed up by a series of catastrophic failures of leadership in Israel that led to so much suffering for both the Israeli and Lebanese populations.
Military exertions, as the Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz recognized, are only means employed toward political ends. Sometimes the military’s organization and performance can be solid, but if the policy toward which it is being employed is flawed, the result will be disastrous nonetheless. In the aftermath of Napoleon’s victories, Clausewitz asked: “But is it true that the real shock was military rather than political?… Was the disaster due to the effect of policy on war, or was the policy itself at fault?”
In the 2006 war, the IDF was asked to accomplish strategic aims that were unrealistic and hastily considered by decision-makers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Watching the war unfold from Cairo in 2006, I knew the minute Israeli strategic decision-makers assured a nervous Israeli populace that the IDF would destroy Hezbollah, rescue the hostages, and end rocket attacks on northern Israel, the job of the IDF had become next to impossible. Hezbollah had only to deny Israel one of its goals to be considered a victor in some circles. In the end, they denied the IDF all three.
To be sure, the IDF was not well prepared for this most recent war. Between 2000 and 2006, the IDF had grown complacent in its operations in the West Bank and Gaza and was unprepared for combat in southern Lebanon. But I wonder whether even the U.S. Army’s XVIIIth Airborne Corps would have been able to destroy Hezbollah within the month-long period given to the IDF.
The failures of the IDF in the 2006 war are known, and new IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi has already corrected most of them. The unrealistic objectives civilian policymakers set for the IDF in the first few days of the war, however, are less recognized. From statements issued today, the final Winograd report seems to have gone easier on Ehud Olmert and Gen. Dan Halutz than had previous drafts. It seems more likely, in fact, that Hasan Nasrallah and Hezbollah—already crowing about the report from Beirut—have learned the lesson from their strategic error better than the Israeli political establishment has learned theirs.
The IDF will learn its lessons, as it always seems to do. I wonder, though, whether the political leadership in Jerusalem will be able to resist getting mired in such a disastrous conflict again.
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I read Andrew Exum’s post with great interest. I agree with much of it, although I think he may be too forgiving of the IDF’s failures. Some additional points also deserve emphasis.
Exum is certainly right that Nasrallah misjudged Israel’s response, but I believe the error went far beyond one of miscalculated proportions. Hezbollah and Iran had spent the better part of a decade building up a vast rocket arsenal in Lebanon, estimated by Israel at the time to have been 13,000 rockets. (Nasrallah later claimed 20,000.) The arsenal, which could blanket all of Israel with rockets right from her border, was apparently intended as a retaliatory deterrent force in the event that Israel (or the United States) attacked Iran’s nuclear program. While this capability was not taken out entirely (and has been fully rebuilt since), the war compelled Hezbollah to use it under the wrong circumstances. The war thus gave Israel a badly needed wake-up call to get its act together, rethink its priorities and strategy, and prepare for the “big one.”
No less important, the war taught Israel that it “can take it,” and that you don’t have to be a stoic Brit to absorb bombardment. I’ve never fully understood why Israel continually needs to be reassured of this. The people of Israel have shown remarkable resilience and steadfastness over the years, and the tests administered by the Scud shower of 1991 and the Intifada suicide bombers should have been enough to convince the skeptics. But the fact remains that Israel periodically does need to reassure itself.
I fully agree that the decision-making process at the cabinet level—marred by what Exum calls “catastrophic failures of leadership”—was indeed catastrophic. Never before had Israel engaged in a war of its own choice and timing from such a propitious starting point—and bungled things so disastrously. Not only were the strategic aims unrealistic and hastily formulated. In fact, the government never set out clear objectives at any time, from the beginning of the war to its end. As a consequence, the IDF never knew what it was supposed to achieve. The failure to formulate clear policy objectives and priorities, and to elucidate options for achieving them, reflects a structural flaw in Israeli decision-making, which the Winograd Commission and others have criticized repeatedly.
As I said, my only disagreement with Exum is that he merely reprimands the IDF for unpreparedness and complacency. The failings were far worse and inexcusable. Hezbollah is undoubtedly very well trained and armed. It is highly motivated through religious fanaticism, and it benefits from the best Iranian thinking regarding asymmetric warfare. Nevertheless, nothing excuses the IDF’s inability to overcome a force of a few thousand fighters. Israel was not taken by surprise, and there were no major intelligence surprises. The IDF knew perfectly well that this battle was coming, and ostensibly prepared for it during six years of self-restraint.
If the cabinet’s decision-making process was catastrophic, the IDF’s was no less so. It engaged in four weeks of very limited lateral movements a few kilometers inside southern Lebanon, going village to village and house to house—precisely the type of warfare the IDF does not know how to wage. The IDF knows how to stage lightning blitzes and wars of rapid maneuver, not steady wars of attrition. The IDF should have reached the Litani immediately and worked its way south on the ground. No one in the national security establishment thought that this war could be won from the air. Halutz himself did not believe this, although he seems to have become blinded during the fighting. Everyone knew the reserves were not sufficiently trained or armed. Some tankists had not seen a tank for five years. On what grounds did the Chief of Staff still advise the government that he could finish the job without difficulty, and why did he stick to his recommendations when his war plan faltered? Where were all of the other independent-minded officers who are supposedly the pride of the IDF?
The good news is that the deployment of the expanded UNIFIL and Lebanese army in south Lebanon has improved Israel’s situation—until Hezbollah finds a way and pretext for sparking the next round. The IDF is undergoing a major transformation and hopefully will be ready next time, having learned the necessary lessons. But none of this absolves the civilian or military leadership of the failures, as Winograd correctly points out.
I link to an analysis of Israel’s failures I wrote during the last days of the fighting. I believe that analysis is still fundamentally valid.
Chuck Freilich, former Israeli deputy national security adviser, is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. —MESH