Start-up Nation

war, the Arab states were openly boasting that they would be triumphant, and the lack of international support for Israel convinced many that the Jewish state was doomed. Israel launched a preemptive attack, destroying the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. Though the war was called the Six-Day War, it was essentially won on that first day, in a matter of hours. By the end, the Arab states had been pushed back on all fronts.

And yet, even in victory, the same thing happened: self-examination followed by an overhaul of the IDF. Senior officials have actually been fired after a successful war.

It should not be surprising, then, that after more controversial wars—such as the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982 Lebanon war, and the 2006 Lebanon war, which most Israelis perceived as having been seriously botched—there were full- blown public commissions of inquiry that evaluated the country’s military and civilian leaders.

“The American military does after-action reports inside the military,” military historian and former top U.S. State Department official Eliot Cohen told us. “But they are classified. A completely internal, self-contained exercise. I’ve told senior officers in the U.S. military that they would well benefit from an Israeli-like national commission after each war, in which senior ranks are held accountable—and the entire country can access the debate.”¹⁴

But that’s not going to happen anytime soon, much to the frustration of U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling. “We’ve lost thousands of lives and spent hundreds of billions of dollars in the last seven years in efforts to bring stability to two medium-sized countries; we can’t afford to adapt this slowly in the future,”¹⁵ he said in a lecture at the marine base at Quantico, Virginia. The problem, he wrote in a controversial essay in 2007, is that “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”¹⁶

The Israelis, on the other hand, have been so dogmatic about their commissions that one was even set up in the midst of an existential war. In July 1948, in what Eliot Cohen described as “one of the truly astonishing episodes” of Israel’s War of Independence, the government established a commission staffed by leaders from across the political spectrum while the war was still going on. The commission stepped back for three days to hear testimony from angry army officers about the government and the military’s conduct during the war and what they believed to be Ben-Gurion’s micromanagement.¹⁷ Setting up a commission amid the fighting of a war was a questionable decision, given the distraction it would impose on the leadership. But, as Yuval Dotan told us earlier, in Israel the debrief is as important as the fighting itself.

This rigorous review and national debrief was in full public display as recently as the 2006 Lebanon war. Initially, there was almost unanimous public backing for the government’s decision to respond massively to the attack by Hezbollah from across Israel’s northern border on July 12, 2006. This public support continued even when civilians in northern Israel came under indiscriminate missile attack, forcing one out of seven Israelis to leave their homes during the war.

Support for continuing the offensive was even higher among those living under the missile barrage than in the rest of Israel. This support presumably came from an Israeli willingness to suffer in order to see Hezbollah destroyed for good.

But Israel failed to destroy Hezbollah in 2006, and was unable to weaken Hezbollah’s position in Lebanon and to force the return of kidnapped soldiers. The reaction against the political and military leadership was harsh, with calls for the defense minister, IDF chief of staff, and prime minister to step down. Six companies of troops (roughly six hundred soldiers) were able to kill some four hundred Hezbollah fighters in face-to-face combat while suffering only thirty casualties, but the war was considered a failure of Israeli strategy and training, and seemed to signal to the public a dangerous departure from the IDF’s core ethos.

Indeed, the 2006 Lebanon war was a case study in deviation from the Israeli entrepreneurial model that had succeeded in previous wars. According to retired general Giora Eiland, who has headed both the prestigious IDF Planning Branch and the National Security Council, the war underscored four principal IDF failures: “Poor performance by the combat units, particularly on land; weakness in the high command; poor command and control processes; and problematic norms, including traditional values.” In particular, Eiland said, “open-minded thought, necessary to reduce the risk of sticking to preconceived ideas and relying on unquestioned assumptions, was far too rare.”

In other words, Israel suffered from a lack of organization and a lack of improvisation. Eiland also noted that soldiers were not sufficiently instilled with “the sense that ‘the fate of the war is on our shoulders.’ ” Commanders “relied too much on technology, which created the impression that it was possible to wage a tactical land battle without actually being in the field.”

Finally, Eiland leveled a criticism that is perhaps quintessentially Israeli and hardly imaginable within any other military apparatus: “One of the problems of the Second Lebanon War was the exaggerated adherence of senior officers to the chief of staff’s decisions. There is no question that the final word rests with the chief of staff, and once decisions have been made, all must demonstrate complete commitment to their implementation. However, it is the senior officers’ job to argue with the chief of staff when they feel he is wrong, and this should be done assertively on the basis of professional truth as they see it” (emphasis added).