Military Misfortunes

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Military Misfortunes Page 16

by Eliot A Cohen


  The “man in the dock” theory, although far from irrelevant to the surprise, cannot fully account for it either. Zeira was, no doubt, a very different man from his predecessor, Major General Aharon Yariv. One Israeli official who knew both men recalled that the more-cautious Yariv would always ask about a large-scale exercise (which, as all in AMAN realized, could cover preparation for war), “But are you sure? And what if it is not just an exercise?”68 And it must be noted that the Arabs viewed the 1972 retirement of Yariv—described by Mohamed Heikal as “an exceptionally astute officer”—with relief.69 On the other hand, Zeira had, and to this day retains, a reputation not only for bravery and leadership but intellectual brilliance as well. Furthermore, despite the Gedaliah episode and Zeira’s apparent failure to activate certain intelligence sources, it should be noted that the Israeli intelligence and security community tends to distribute information very rapidly. Any incident—a hostage taking, a raid, even a cross-border exchange of fire—immediately attracts the attention of senior leaders, and the same holds true, by and large, for raw intelligence reports as well.70 Bandman’s stubbornly obtuse paragraph forty, quoted above, followed thirty-nine paragraphs of detailed reporting of Egyptian deployments.

  What, then, of the Concept? Some have taken the Agranat Commission’s Report to criticize the very notion of having a concept, and not just that of 1973. The sheer existence of a theory of this kind, some believe, blinded intelligence officials to the reality suggested by the data flowing into AMAN. As many commentators have pointed out, however, it is impossible to conduct intelligence analysis without concepts or hypotheses: A stream of raw data will simply overwhelm decision makers, who will, in any event, apply their own hypotheses to such information.71 More important, however, the Concept was not the product of Israeli analysis of logical Egyptian options; the Israeli Concept was in fact the Egyptian Concept, up through the beginning of 1973.72 Based on good—indeed, superb-sources, the Israelis understood Egyptian thinking about the initiation of war very well indeed. It was, for example, very largely because Muhammed Sadek adhered to the Concept that Sadat dismissed him as minister of war in late 1972, choosing as his replacement a man who would be willing to launch a war without long-range air power. Thus, it is incorrect to suggest that the Israelis had a priori hypothesis which they then tested against the evidence. Rather, AMAN started with information and then confirmed it with the analysis of operational experts in the various branches of the IDF, whose analyses confirmed the military soundness of the Egyptian views.73

  Deception, Noise, and the Inevitability of Failure

  Critics of the Agranat Commission generally offer two alternative assessments of the intelligence failure of 1973. First, they suggest that Arab deception efforts successfully masked the Egyptian and Syrian buildup, a view strongly supported by Arab sources who take considerable pride in those efforts.74 The deception efforts actually took three forms—concealment, the hiding of preparatory moves; deception proper, an attempt to mislead the Israelis about the purpose of such activities as were observed, and about Arab capabilities in general; and misdirection, an attempt to direct Israeli attention to misleading or irrelevant data. The maneuvers along the canal, the ostentatious release of 20,000 Egyptian reservists on October 4 and the dispatch of soldiers on the pilgrimage to Mecca on October 5, the raid on the Austrian train, a studious refraining from bellicose rhetoric in Sadat’s prewar speeches—all, in this view, prevented the Israelis from foreseeing the onset of war.

  No former or current Israeli intelligence official interviews for this chapter attributed much importance to Arab deception efforts, however. Even those most critical of AMAN’s activities in September and October 1973, and most impressed by Arab military performance, rejected the notion that deception played an important role in the intelligence failure. One should not accept these arguments without looking at the evidence, for capable members of a competent intelligence service are hardly likely to admit that their opponent has fooled them. In most respects, however, the evidence bears them out. Consider for example the news stories that appeared shortly before the war concerning the breakdown of Egyptian equipment following the departure of thousands of Soviet military advisers in 1972; Israeli officials warned American journalists that such reports were “a very big exaggeration.”75

  Nor is it true that the changed borders after 1967 allowed the Arabs to station large units on the border, thereby depriving the Israelis of warning time. A great deal of forward deployment of men and materiel occurred, and the Israelis noticed it. By September 30 it was quite clear that the Syrians had massed forces in unprecedented quantity along the Golan Heights; and as soon as the aerial photography of the canal became available late on October 4, there too it was obvious that a buildup inexplicable by maneuvers alone had taken place. Poor weather and malfunctioning cameras had prevented aerial photography from the first through the fourth, yet even on the first enough evidence existed to lead Lieutenant Siman-Tov to draft his first warning report and to make Major General Tal wary that war might break out. When the war did break out, the Israelis knew the nature and location of all units, as well as the plan for the initial crossing, although their understanding of subsequent stages in the planned operation were hazier.76 By way of contrast, Allied deception operations against German forces in France before the Normandy landings successfully misled the Germans about the Allied order of battle, the concept of operations, and above all, the location of the main landings.

  Nor did the IDF meet unanticipated Arab weapons. Israeli technical intelligence knew about the existence of anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles, and understood both their technical parameters and the quantities in which the Egyptians and Syrians had them—as even a cursory glance at the 1970–73 issues of the Israeli general staff journal, Ma’arachot, reveals. Finally, it is a cardinal principle of deception that the deceiver succeeds by reinforcing his opponent’s misconceptions. In this case, there is no evidence that the Arabs knew of the Israeli Concept, or that they structured their deception efforts to support it.

  Egyptian and Syrian operational and tactical deception efforts alone, therefore, do not account for the surprise. On the strategic level, however, they had slightly better success. Perhaps the raid on the Austrian train did distract the attention of senior decision-makers, who might otherwise have had more time to reflect on the stream of intelligence reports, and to quiz the producers of intelligence more closely. The use of an exercise to cover forward deployments, although a ruse foreseen by AMAN, did provide an excuse, however flimsy, for AMAN’s misreading of those moves. Yet even had Sadat announced on national radio and television that he intended to launch a war, he would not have been believed by the Israelis, because he had made similar declarations in the past. And even when Egyptian and Syrian security slipped—when, for example, Egyptair canceled all its flights early on October 4 and began dispersing its airplanes—the Israelis did not pay attention.77

  Following from this, a second school emerges, which argues that intelligence failures are inevitable by virtue of the sheer intractability of the intelligence task. The future is not predetermined, so intelligence cannot be the same as prophecy; although intelligence agencies can guess at capabilities—the product of “hard” information—they cannot read intentions, which follow from “soft” and often unobtainable sources. Moreover, it is argued, in this particular case oversensitivity to Arab military mobilizations would have exposed Israel to unacceptably high costs. Reserve mobilizations bring Israel’s economy and society to a standstill, and to respond to every Arab gesture of this kind would be to give Israel’s enemies extraordinary leverage over Israel’s daily life. Furthermore, in this view, the Arabs could have responded to counterpreparations by calling off a war; the result would be the discrediting of an intelligence agency that had always cried wolf. Finally, it should be noted, during a similar period of Arab mobilization in May 1973 AMAN’s skepticism about Arab intentions had proved correct: War did not br
eak out despite the concerns of Chief of Staff Elazar, who was criticized for the thirty-million dollar “Blue White” counterpreparations by the IDF. Thus, the surprise of Yom Kippur becomes a tragedy without villains and without faults.

  With reference to this particular case, however, the “no fault” school of intelligence is unconvincing. We find no direct evidence, for example, that IDF Chief of Staff Elazar refrained from soliciting a mobilization on October 5 merely because he feared a repeat of the May experience or subsequent criticism of taking unnecessary precautions. Indeed, the measures implemented on October 5 were, in some respects, similar to those that began April 10, 1973, and lasted through August 15, 1973, and were at their most intense in May.78 In May the IDF deployed nearly two hundred tanks on the Golan Heights and three hundred in Sinai; reserve training exercises took place in Sinai, but although the IDF recalled a few reservists it refrained from a general call-up, even a limited two-division reserve mobilization of the kind envisioned by Moshe Dayan on the morning of October 6. Rather, the Israelis (as on October 6) redeployed some active forces and put the rest on a higher state of readiness. In addition, they undertook construction projects which would facilitate rapid mobilization then or at any later point.79 And, in fact, many of these longer-term investments paid their dividends in October.

  Was the May alert a false alarm? Based on classified research in their own files, a number of prominent members of the Israeli intelligence community no longer think so.80 In their view, the May crisis involved an actual countdown for war, stopped by the Soviets, who did not want the June 1973 Brezhnev-Nixon summit aborted. Much collateral evidence supports this view: Brezhnev’s seemingly spontaneous and highly irregular late-night meeting with Nixon on June 25, after the summit had officially concluded, to insist on a Middle East settlement lest war break out, for example.81 Evidence from the Egyptian side—including the selection of May as one of three possible occasions in 1973 for a war, and the secret high-level meetings with the Syrians in April of that month—also point in this direction. Thus, in May 1973, AMAN may well have been right for the wrong reasons: The Arabs called off the war under Soviet pressure, not because they still adhered to the Concept. In October, according to this view, the Soviets, though unhappy about the onset of war, felt they could no longer defer it without provoking a complete rupture with Sadat. Nonetheless, according to some IDF officers, they deliberately launched the airlift of dependents from the region on October 4 to signal to the United States the onset of war, and their lack of involvement in it.82

  The no-fault theory relies, in part, on the assumption that statesmen ignore intelligence agencies that “cry wolf.” Yet here again, no evidence suggests that fear of crying wolf provoked Israeli analysts to be overly cautious in their assessments in September and early October 1973. Moreover, the costs of false alarms cut both ways. Preparations for real war have real costs, both physical and psychological, costs that would cut into the Egyptian budget and psyche every bit as much, and probably more, than the corresponding costs of Israeli preparedness. Sadat confided to Mohamed Heikal that he considered war in October to be his last chance; both his domestic and his international prestige rode on the war beginning then.83

  Finally, the “intentions-capabilities” distinction neither excuses intelligence agencies from failure nor, indeed, serves a useful purpose in understanding the tasks they face. “Capabilities” are not necessarily the reflections of quantifiable, easily measured data: They include include such intangibles as morale, training, and the quality of leadership of an opposing force. Insofar as an intelligence agency looks (as it must) at tactical and operational doctrine, it must consider “intentions.” To catalogue only “capabilities”—including suicidal assaults, for example—would be to make the rendering of any informed decision by statesmen and generals impossible. Israeli intelligence did no small service to the IDF by understanding the Egyptian crossing plan—and what is a plan but an intention? Nor is the notion of a “hard” evidentiary base for capabilities and a “soft” one for “intentions” sustainable. Some data on capabilities will be very soft—“hard” information on the tactical skill of an untested commander is rare, and even data on technical matters (for example, the impact of masses of antitank missiles) can be unobtainable. At the same time, some hard data can depict intentions quite accurately—an intercepted order to begin an attack, for example. Thus, the distinction between capabilities and intentions separates what is in human affairs mixed, and inextricably so. In the words of William James, it is “an insane logic” that ignores the relationship between purpose and belief on the one hand, and physical capacity on the other.84

  HOW TO THINK ABOUT FAILURE TO ANTICIPATE

  Alternative Outcomes

  How, then, should we think through the problem of the Israeli failure to anticipate the Yom Kippur War? As mentioned in chapter 2, the essence of a failure to anticipate is not ignorance of the future, for that is inherently unknowable. It is, rather, the failure to take reasonable precautions against a known hazard. One might open the issue by asking what other kinds of outcomes were possible in 1973. What would have happened, for example, if the chief of staff and minister of defense had become convinced of the imminence of war earlier than the morning of October 6?85 This is, of course, the question that agitates Israelis to this day. Many would agree with the judgement of Chaim Bar Lev, the former chief of staff who became de facto commander of the southern front several days into the war, that the surprise attack accounts for virtually all of the setbacks suffered by the IDF.86 Bar Lev and others believe that had Israeli leaders received the expected forty-eight hours’ warning they would have authorized a reserve mobilization and perhaps a preemptive attack against the Egyptians and Syrians. Certainly, there would have been a démarche to the United States in the hopes of preventing war from breaking out.

  Whether a preemptive attack would actually have taken place, however, is quite another matter. The debates of the morning of October 6 suggest that in fact the Israeli government would not have permitted a preemptive attack unless they could expect American support, and it is hard to imagine that Washington would have gone along with such a move. Before the war the Israelis had become increasingly confident about their ability to avoid premature mobilization, which suggests that a full-scale call-up might also not have occurred, even with greater warning.87 More likely would have been a limited reserve mobilization of the kind authorized by Dayan early on the morning of October 6—that is, one ugda for each front and the implementation of the basic defensive plans. Whether or not such deployments would have sufficed is an interesting question. The force ratios in the south, in particular, would have remained against the Israelis, and the heavy use of antitank missiles would still have told against massed Israeli armor. The Egyptian crossing might have been beaten back in several areas and suffered far heavier losses, but it is quite conceivable that they might have held on to one or two bridgeheads and inflicted heavy losses on Israeli armor. In the north the story might have been different, since there the battle was much more a classic armor-on-armor clash; the presence of an additional ugda might have prevented the Syrians’ first-day gains and enabled an earlier counteroffensive, although again it is hard to see how casualties would have been light. An early mobilization might, however, have enabled the IDF to concentrate its forces against one front, rather than split them in a 3:4 ratio between north and south. Nor would a preemptive air strike have bought much more than psychological gains. In point of fact, on the morning of the sixth the IAF could prepare only for an air strike against Syria and, because of weather conditions, only against targets in the Syrian heartland.88

  In any case, though, the IDF should have understood that political considerations would probably prevent Israel from opening the war in its preferred fashion- that is, by preemption. There was a striking disjunction here between Israel’s strategic doctrine—the assumptions driving much, though not all, of the prewar planning—and political realit
y. On the whole, the IDF expected that it would begin any large war with a preemptive blow, and yet the combination of confidence in Israel’s armed forces, the distance of the new borders, and increased dependence on the United States made political authorization for such an a blow unlikely.89 This was but one respect in which IDF thought appears not to have adjusted to the strategic realities of the early 1970s.90

  Although Israelis have tended to look at favorable alternative outcomes—prompt warning leading to early mobilization—one should also consider less-favorable outcomes. Suppose, for example, that the special source of intelligence had not come through on the morning of October 6, for technical or other reasons? In that case at least one senior decision maker believes that Israel would not have mobilized until after the attack began at 2:00 P.M.91 Moshe Dayan’s account reinforces this view:

  The source of the intelligence was trustworthy. This was information on a decision for war, not information describing physical events along the fronts. We had received this intelligence in the past; afterwards, when the Arabs had not attacked, came the explanation that “at the last minute” Sadat had changed his mind. This time as well the source said that if it would be clear to Sadat that we understood the situation, and that hence he had lost the advantages of surprise, there was a chance that he would defer the time of attack. But this information and other information—particularly on the exodus of Russian families from Syria and Egypt—appeared firm. It was clear that we had to work with the assumption that Egypt and Syria were about to begin the war.92

 

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