Two years on: How the Israel-Hamas War is a landmark in military thinking - opinion

It was an irony, and even more so, a tragedy.

The irony was that this thinking resembled the strategy with which the German army would soon overrun France. The tragedy was that France’s generals rejected de Gaulle’s vision.

The Blitzkrieg defied the conventional wisdom, which had armies spread their units along an entire frontline, aiming to collapse it with artillery spewed evenly along its fortification’s width, by mostly static forces.

The new thinking sought a weak point along the frontline, and aimed to concentrate massive firepower on that one point, break through it, and then lead a vast army into enemy territory while ignoring the rest of the frontline.

It worked wonders and thus made one war produce the contrarian idea that shaped the next war.

THE FIRST military lesson from this war is about size.

The IDF’s previous thinking – small is beautiful – is dead. Introduced in 1991, when then-chief of General Staff Ehud Barak said the IDF should be “small and smart,” this thinking was right for its time. Militarily, the previous four years’ First Intifada rendered the IDF’s size irrelevant in the face of its new challenge, the popular uprising.

Internationally, the Cold War had ended and military budgets were being slashed worldwide. Moscow slashed Syria’s military aid, Iraq’s military had been decimated in the First Gulf War, and Iran’s army was exhausted following its own war with Iraq.

Israel thus shrank its defense spending, from roughly 15% of GDP in 1987 to hardly 6% in 2020. Pursued by a succession of governments, this transition was prudent, despite what would befall Israel in 2023.

After nearly four decades of receding military spending, the economy leaped into the future, maturing at a pace no one had imagined – so much so that Israel’s per-capita product surpassed those of Britain, Germany, France, and Japan, and the shekel became one of the world’s strongest currencies.

Now, however, military spending will have to grow again.

Israel faced such a constraint in the past. Following the War of Independence, the IDF realized it must address the demographic gap between a Jewish state of barely 1 million citizens, and a hostile Arab world of some 35 million. The solution was the reserve corps, which supplied the IDF with hundreds of thousands of additional troops.

Now the challenge of size is back, not because of demographics, but because of the latest war’s scope and length. Two years’ simultaneous fighting in seven separate arenas has demanded vast resources. That is why the IDF will now need more troops, more commanders, more materiel, more ammunition, and more money. This is the biggest adjustment the Israeli military and economy will have to make once the current war ends.

The war’s other military impacts will be in the realms of weaponry and warfare.

THE RECENT war’s stars were the drone, the missile, the tank, and the fighter jet.

The fighter jet’s role in the war’s Iranian part was no surprise. It was planned and prepared over years, and it worked. The same goes for the missile and the drone. Their roles were expected.

The weapon that surprised was the tank.

Back when the IDF downsized, the tank was the main victim. While shedding the previous wars’ Centurions and Pattons for the Israeli-made Merkava, multiple armored brigades were dismantled. Massive tank battles of the sort the IDF fought last century in the Sinai Desert and the Golan Heights had become anachronistic, like World War II’s battles of El Alamein and Kursk.

Now the tank is back. The Merkava’s performance in Gaza’s urban thicket has proven surprisingly efficient in that part of the new battlefield. Then again, the war reinvented the battlefield itself, and in a way that demands new military formations and thinking.

THE NEW battlefield was unveiled on the war’s first day, when 6,000 gunmen entered 32 towns and stormed civilians in their living rooms and beds. There had never been such a thing in military history. That is why it caught the IDF unprepared. It was unimagined.

The first conclusion from this attack’s audacity is that Israel should never again allow a jihadist militia’s presence anywhere along its borders. Aside from this strategic dictum, there is a tactical imperative.

This means that all countries targeted by jihadism must create urban military units that will be retrievable at short notice from the bowels of any metropolis, and be instantaneously deployable anywhere between and above its rooftops and streets.

This is what all must now prepare for, even if it sounds to them as far-fetched as the Blitzkrieg once sounded to the generals of France.