Start-up Nation

Connected to this Apollo culture, certainly in Nava Swersky Sofer’s estimation, is a can-do, responsible attitude that Israelis refer to as rosh gadol. In the Israeli army, soldiers are divided into those who think with a rosh gadol—literally, a “big head”—and those who operate with a rosh katan, or “little head.” Rosh katan behavior, which is shunned, means interpreting orders as narrowly as possible to avoid taking on responsibility or extra work. Rosh gadol thinking means following orders but doing so in the best possible way, using judgment, and investing whatever effort is necessary. It emphasizes improvisation over discipline, and challenging the chief over respect for hierarchy. Indeed, “challenge the chief” is an injunction issued to junior Israeli soldiers, one that comes directly from a postwar military commission that we’ll look at later. But everything about Singapore runs counter to a rosh gadol mentality.

Spend time in Singapore and it’s immediately obvious that it is tidy. Extremely tidy. Perfectly manicured green lawns and lush trees are framed by a skyline of majestic new skyscrapers. Global financial institutions’ outposts can be found on nearly every corner. The streets are free of trash; even innocuous litter is hard to spot. Singaporeans are specifically instructed on how to be polite, how to be less contentious and noisy, and not to chew gum in public.

Tidiness extends to the government, too. Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party has basically been in uninterrupted power since Singaporean independence. This is just the way Lee wants it. He has always believed that a vibrant political opposition would undermine his vision for an orderly and efficient Singapore. Public dissent has been discouraged, if not suppressed outright. This attitude is taken for granted in Singapore, but in Israel it’s foreign.

Israeli air force pilot Yuval Dotan is also a graduate of Harvard Business School. When it comes to “Apollo vs. Columbia,” he believes that had NASA stuck to its exploratory roots, foam strikes would have been identified and seriously debated at the daily “debrief.” In Israel’s elite military units, each day is an experiment. And each day ends with a grueling session whereby everyone in the unit—of all ranks—sits down to deconstruct the day, no matter what else is happening on the battlefield or around the world. “The debrief is as important as the drill or live battle,” he told us. Each flight exercise, simulation, and real operation is treated like laboratory work “to be examined and reexamined, and reexamined again, open to new information, and subjected to rich—and heated—debate. That’s how we are trained.”¹²

In these group debriefs, emphasis is put not only on unrestrained candor but on self-criticism as a means of having everyone—peers, subordinates, and superiors—learn from every mistake. “It’s usually ninety minutes. It’s with everybody. It’s very personal. It’s a very tough experience,” Dotan said, recalling the most sweat-inducing debriefings of his military career. “The guys that got ‘killed’ [in the simulations], for them it’s very tough. But for those who survive a battle—even a daily training exercise—the next-toughest part is the debriefing.”

Dotan was an IAF formation commander flying F-16 fighter jets. “The way you communicate and deconstruct a disagreement between differing perspectives on an event or decision is a big part of our military culture. So much so that debriefing is an art that you get graded on. In flight school and all the way through the squadron . . . there are numerous questions regarding a person’s ability to debrief himself and to debrief others.”

Explaining away a bad decision is unacceptable. “Defending stuff that you’ve done is just not popular. If you screwed up, your job is to show the lessons you’ve learned. Nobody learns from someone who is being defensive.”

Nor is the purpose of debriefings simply to admit mistakes. Rather, the effect of the debriefing system is that pilots learn that mistakes are acceptable, provided they are used as opportunities to improve individual and group performance. This emphasis on useful, applicable lessons over creating new formal doctrines is typical of the IDF. The entire Israeli military tradition is to be traditionless. Commanders and soldiers are not to become wedded to any idea or solution just because it worked in the past.

The seeds of this feisty culture go back to the state’s founding generation. In 1948, the Israeli army did not have any traditions, protocols, or doctrines of its own; nor did it import institutions from the British, whose military was in Palestine before Israel’s independence. According to military historian Edward Luttwak, Israel’s was unlike all postcolonial armies in this way. “Created in the midst of war out of an underground militia, many of whose men had been trained in cellars with wooden pistols, the Israeli army has evolved very rapidly under the relentless pressure of bitter and protracted conflict. Instead of the quiet acceptance of doctrine and tradition, witnessed in the case of most other armies, the growth of the Israeli army has been marked by a turmoil of innovation, controversy, and debate.”

Furthermore, after each of its wars, the IDF engaged in far-reaching structural reforms based on the same process of rigorous debate.

While the army was still demobilizing after the 1948 War of Independence, Ben-Gurion appointed a British- trained officer named Haim Laskov to examine the structure of the IDF. Laskov was given a blank check to restructure the army from the ground up. “While such a total appraisal would not be surprising after a defeat,” Luttwak explained to us, “the Israelis were able to innovate even after victory. The new was not always better than the old, but the flow of fresh ideas at least prevented the ossification of the military mind, which is so often the ultimate penalty of victory and the cause of future defeat.”¹³

The victory in the 1967 Six-Day War was the most decisive one Israel has ever achieved. In the days before the