Military Misfortunes

by Eliot A Cohen

  Even a five- or six-hour delay in mobilization could have worsened the situation on the Golan Heights, where reinforcing reserve units arrived barely in time to contain the Syrian forces that had occupied the southern portion of the heights. Without this warning, and with only slightly more aggressive Syrian action, one can imagine the Israelis permanently losing a portion of the Golan Heights—conceivably even all of it. In this scenario, as in the real war, it is not hard to imagine the Syrians and Egyptians choosing to bring about a truce earlier than they did—on October 12, for example, rather than a week and a half later.

  Indeed, the more one reflects on the Yom Kippur War the luckier the Israelis appear to have been. Had the Soviets not evacuated their dependents from Egypt or Syria, or refrained from doing so in such a blatant manner, one wonders how much less the sense of threat on Friday, October 5, would have been. Israel might not have stood in danger of literal annihilation during the Yom Kippur War, as Dayan, for a moment at least, seems to have feared; but it most certainly stood in danger of losing many of the gains of the Six-Day War, and emerging even more badly battered at war’s end than it did. To look at the war only in light of better outcomes for the Israelis is, in fact, to misread the magnitude of the IDF’s calamity in 1973.

  A Failure of Intelligence Alone?

  There was a failure of intelligence in 1973. The culpable failure of AMAN’s leaders in September and October 1973 lay not in their belief that Egypt would not attack but in their supreme confidence, which dazzled decision makers, and the dogmatism with which they clung to the Concept. Rather than impress upon the prime minister, the chief of staff, and the minister of defense the ambiguity of the situation, they insisted—until the last day—that there would be no war, period. Even a partial mobilization, for example, a two-ugda call-up, would have foreclosed the possibilities of real disaster that opened up on October 6 and 7. But it would be unfair to lay exclusive blame on the stubbornness of a few intelligence officers. On the whole, Elazar, Dayan, and others had at their disposal—or could have demanded access to—the facts in the hands of AMAN, and although they relied on AMAN for analysis, they had shown themselves ready in the past (particularly in May) to make up their own minds. Intellectual docility is, among statesmen and generals, a grievous failing.

  The failure of intelligence went beyond a misreading of facts to a misunderstanding of the strategic conceptions of Israel’s chief antagonist, Anwar Sadat. On the whole, Israeli statesmen and commanders, even after the war, saw Arab war aims in territorial terms; the far more subtle purposes of Sadat have, until recently, been misunderstood.93 Very shortly before the war then Major General Ariel Sharon, who had recently completed a tour as commander of the southern front told American journalists: “Maybe the Canal is not a line of peace. But the Canal is a line on which you can avoid war. The only reason nations go to war is if you are attacked, or think you can win. On this line, Egypt has no chance to win.”94 A stark distinction between winning and losing makes sense in tactics, but not strategy: as we have seen, winning, for Egypt, meant achieving intangible, political goals through the use of force.

  Even if one discounts as excessive some of the Israeli self-criticism after the war it becomes clear that the failure of 1973 was, in some respects, greater than that of Pearl Harbor.95 In December 1941 the United States (including the Hawaii garrison) knew of the imminence of war with Japan more than a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The same could not be said of Israel and the IDF until eight hours before the onset of war in 1973. But the failure was not a failure of intelligence alone. The extreme and unwarranted self-confidence of the IDF, its reliance on an unbalanced “all-tank” doctrine, its failure to understand the enemy’s strategic purposes, and its own inability to rethink its strategy in the light of the new conditions of 1970–73 suggest a more complicated and interconnected kind of failure than that suggested by most accounts, which focus on the intelligence failure alone.

  THE MATRIX

  To deal with the problem of surprise attack, which it understood to be a real one, the Israeli security establishment had three central tasks in 1973: intelligence collection and reporting; effective net assessment, or weighing of relative strengths; appropriate levels of alert and preparedness. The resulting failure matrix looks as shown in Figure 5–1.

  The critical failures of the Israelis in 1973 lay at the heart of the Israeli military establishment, in the general staff, including AMAN, but above it there lay failures of political supervision. In Israel in 1973 the IDF, and in particular the general staff, had a monopoly on military advice—the minister of defense, for example, had no independent staff, but had to rely on the general staff. More important, however, was an aura of prestige gained in 1967 and indeed throughout twenty-five years of statehood, which made the breezy self-confidence of the IDF’s leaders at once contagious and beyond criticism. Moshe Dayan, himself a former chief of staff, partook of that confidence, and indeed fostered it. Golda Meir—who remarked, perhaps facetiously, that she had no idea what a division was—had little inclination to probe the professional judgments of her military advisers.

  Arrows indicate causal links. Solid lines indicate primary pathways; dashed lines, secondary pathways.

  FIGURE 5–1. Matrix of Failure

  At the same time, our matrix suggests as well a failure of communication by civil and military leadership. The cabinet, and in particular the prime minister, had no intention of allowing military leaders to make politically important decisions on such matters as mobilization or preemption, yet it appears that soldiers and civilians never harmonized their thinking about a future war, its strategic context, its purposes, and how it might break out. Israel began its fourth (or fifth, depending on how one counts) major war brimming with confidence in its operational plans and tactical doctrine, the effectiveness of its intelligence organizations, and the mettle of its fighting men. The first was misplaced, and the second excessive; luckily for Israel, the last was justified.

  TWO KINDS OF FAILURE

  Intelligence Addictions

  Two explanations help explain why Israel failed, in several ways, to anticipate the Yom Kippur War. One reason lies not in the analysis of intelligence but in its sources. Studies of intelligence failure often look exclusively at the analytical problem, at the products of intelligence analysis rather than its sources. Yet in many cases one cannot understand the former without reflecting on the latter.

  In two articles a retired IDF general, Aharon Levran, argues that AMAN was “struck . . . blind” in 1973 by the very excellence of its intelligence sources.96 The existence of the Concept itself is not surprising, Levran argues: What is remarkable is the stubbornness of AMAN and the decision makers in adhering to it. The explanation lies in the sources supporting this belief, which, in Levran’s words, was “material that any intelligence agency would long to get hold of”;

  The information depicted clearly the inability of the Arabs to consider war with Israel at that time. This information explained completely and clearly all developments in the area, and the false warnings during most of the time preceding the Yom Kippur War. This information struck analysts blind because it supported their conceptual estimates, and also because it passed various practical tests as well.97

  Confidence in their sources of intelligence misled the Israelis in two ways. First, AMAN had complete insight into Egyptian thinking about the timing of a future war until January 1973; it then lost that insight simply because its source did not continue to provide information about it. Secondly, the Israeli high command, with very few exceptions, believed that they would receive from another very special source two days’ warning (or better) of the onset of war: That source did come through, but later than expected.

  To be sure, AMAN, like any large, modern intelligence agency, collected intelligence data in many ways—we have already noted, for example, the importance of aerial photography and intercepted communications during the Soviet airlift. But some sources car
ry more weight than others, and one plausible explanation, at least, of the intelligence failure was that AMAN let itself be bewitched by sources that were indeed reliable and remarkably good, but incomplete in one case and tardy in another. One might note, in the same vein, that the surprise of the German Ardennes offensive in 1944 owed something to the comparable reliance of Anglo-American forces on signal intelligence. In that case ULTRA failed to provide detailed warning of the attack because of German use of land lines rather than radio transmissions. There, too, overreliance on an unimpeachable and copious source “struck analysts blind.”98

  Implicit Net Assessments

  The obsession with a particular source of intelligence explains, perhaps, the immediate failure of Israeli intelligence in 1973—the faith that war would not come, which remained unshakable until two days before war came and which crumbled only on the morning of October 6. But a deeper cause was also at work: a failure of net assessment. Net assessment, the formal and explicit weighing of opposing military forces in the context of political objectives and conditions, is a relatively recent addition to Western military thought. Where the Soviet military has long had the notion of the “correlation of forces”—a systematic and, indeed, quantifiable measurement of power—only in 1973 did the United States create an Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Similarly, Israel seems to have had no formal net assessment system in 1973; rather the general staff performed this task in its annual assessment of the situation in the Middle East. At other times decision makers or their staffs made judgments about the adequacy of Israeli forces to handle particular threats. But even when a separate machinery for weighing the two sides is lacking, net assessments occur; and herein lies another explanation for the Israeli debacle of the first part of the October War.

  Individuals and organizations perform net assessments all the time; the only issue is whether they do so explicitly or implicitly, on the basis of hunch and instinct or analysis. In the case of the Yom Kippur War one finds that the Israelis made a host of implicit net assessments that shaped their behavior in the weeks leading up to the conflict. A retired general in Israeli military intelligence recalls that

  At the end of 1973 I asked an important intelligence officer who had played a major role in the failure, “Didn’t you think for a moment what would happen if your optimistic estimates were incorrect’ He replied to me: “I thought—in fact, I knew—that we had a large and powerful air force, in terms of readiness and capabilities. We had 300 tanks in the Sinai. We had doubled our tank force in the Golan Heights, after we released to them the 7th Brigade. I knew that in any case no catastrophe could occur.’99

  Zeira made similar remarks to the Agranat Commission, and it is evident that such thinking pervaded the IDF, including AMAN, in 1973. The notion that the IDF refrained from an alert along the lines of May 1973 is false; by the evening of October 5, 1973, the Israelis had raised their forces to roughly the same level of readiness (or higher) that they had achieved six months earlier. The problem lay not in the absence of a decision to institute standard alert procedures so much as in an altogether too optimistic picture of what the balance of forces would look like should war break out. After the war Major General Gonen, the disgraced commander of the southern front, explained the essence of the failure by quoting from the prayer book of the Day of Atonement, a passage repeated frequently in synagogue services that day: “For the sin that we have sinned before You through lightheadedness. . . .”100 The IDF’s net assessment was, in fact, shaped by a reckless overconfidence. The mistakes included a brash faith in the capabilities of large all-tank formations to smash Arab armies, no matter what the odds, and in spite of the well-established importance of combined arms operations in modern warfare.

  Intelligence officials sometimes say that, precisely because of situations such as that of 1973, they should refrain from making any kind of net assessment. And indeed, there are sound bureaucratic reasons for having net assessment organizations separate from regular intelligence agencies. But implicit net assessments will always go on. One former Israeli intelligence officer observed, in an interview conducted for this chapter, that one could not help but be influenced by the tremendous confidence of commanders on the prewar fronts. Because of the intimacy with which Israeli intelligence officers knew their own forces’ dispositions, their knowledge of the commanders and of terrain preparation and fortification, they drifted into complacent readings of the enemy. The overweening optimism of the IDF contaminated its readings of Arab capabilities.

  The problem is an old one, and not likely to be resolved by isolating intelligence officers from commanders or from detailed knowledge of their own forces. This is, first and foremost, impractical, particularly in a small country like Israel, but even in a large one like the United States. Intelligence officers participate in planning and exercises, war games, and maneuvers, and cannot help but absorb the temper of their own forces and share some of the worldview of their commanders. Nor would it be a desirable thing to isolate intelligence from operations: Often intelligence officers need a knowledge of their own side’s activities and dispositions in order to make sense of how an opponent is reacting to it. In World War II the Royal Navy’s Operational Intelligence Centre gained access to current operational information concerning the movement of British convoys and the progress of antisubmarine warfare. Without such information it would have been unable to understand as thoroughly as it did the dispositions and tactics of the German U-boat force.

  In October 1973 AMAN possessed reliable order-of-battle information about the Arab armies and it monitored accurately the forward deployment of Syrian and Egyptian forces during the weeks leading up to the onset of war. Where it and the IDF more generally failed was in the area of comparative assessment of doctrine and effectiveness. In particular, the IDF’s implicit net assessment failed with respect to two tactical-operational judgments—the effectiveness of a dense SAM-antiaircraft artillery belt along the canal, and the impact of hand-held antitank missiles against tanks operating alone. But more important were the failures of the political and organizational dimensions of Israel’s net assessment. Israeli expectations of a relatively quick and relatively cheap victory might have been justified had Israel been able to launch a preemptive attack; political considerations forebade such an attack, and this could have been expected well before 1973. The failure to understand that in a future war the enemy was virtually certain to throw the first punch had many implications for operational planning, which appears to have slighted the problem of fighting containment battles, concentrating rather on the task of launching a prompt counteroffensive.

  Moreover, the IDF underestimated the import of substantial improvements in the quality of Arab (and above all, Egyptian) training and coordination since 1967. Because of intensive Soviet advice and, more important, their own efforts, the Egyptian and Syrian armed forces had improved considerably since that war, at virtually every level. To be sure, the IDF had also made tremendous strides in this period, and hence many IDF officers then and since have argued that the relative gap remained the same or had even opened slightly in Israel’s favor. The Israeli conception of relative advantage, however, oversimplified the changing relationship between the two sides. In particular, the higher quality of Egyptian junior officers and the vastly increased strategic sophistication of the Egyptian high command meant that no matter how great the disparity in, let us say, tank crew performance or the maneuver capacity of armored battalions, the Israelis faced a far more serious challenge in 1967. One Israeli officer described the problem with an educational metaphor:

  Before 1973 we thought they had gone from being in a poor elementary school [in 1967] to a good one. In fact, they had come much further—they were now at the university level. Now, there are good universities and bad universities and on the whole theirs was still a poor one. Intelligence agencies can identify revolutionary change when they see it; they can also monitor gradual change. What we d
id poorly was to understand the cumulative effects of evolutionary change; in fact, I doubt that we ever posed that sort of question to ourselves [before 1973].101

  In 1973, as in previous Arab-Israeli wars, the IDF clearly had the upper hand in terms of the skill of individual weapons crews and in the overall adaptability of its larger units. Yet this advantage—which may indeed have grown in the period 1967–73—could not compensate for changes at other levels of warfare. The tenacity of the individual Arab fighter had increased greatly and at the higher strategic level of war the opposing high command had improved beyond all recognition. There was not one gap between the Arab and Israeli defense forces but several, and comparisons needed to be drawn along all of them.

  In the end the surprise and operational failures of October 6–9, 1973, are best understood not as accidents created by an indecisive political leadership or as the result of unavoidable pathologies of intelligence. Rather, they were, at the deepest level, the products of a failure to think through the many dimensions of a changing strategic challenge. By confining their implicit net assessment to only one level of military effectiveness—essentially, the tactical dimension of warfare—and by failing to gauge the cumulative impact of change, the IDF set itself up for a calamity.102 The operational and the intelligence brains of the IDF had failed, and had done so together. It is a tribute to the IDF’s resilience and professional skill, and to the raw courage of its soldiers, that it redeemed that defeat and ended the Yom Kippur War with its forces in striking range of Cairo and Damascus. But that military achievement did not eliminate or even diminish the fact that, in strategic terms—that is, in terms of the political objectives for which it fought—Sadat’s Egypt emerged the victor from the Yom Kippur War. Ironically, both Israel and Egypt would eventually benefit from this—the most important measure of victory—for the Yom Kippur War paved the way for the peace that followed.