Eisenkot Doctrine
Chief of General Staff Gadi Eisenkot, since assuming his position on February 16, 2015, sought to paint an image of himself before the Israeli public. He has emerged as an exceptional leader who wants to make historic changes in the organization of the army, its performance, and its combat doctrine, commensurate with the security threats in the Middle East region and the world. After the July 2006 war and the report of the Winograd Committee, organizational changes took place, most notably the establishment of the Home Front Command, which was the focus of attention through internal maneuvers that were called a “turning point.” Eisenkot was trying to go beyond the established Israeli tradition, so he prepared a new strategy to confront the dangers facing Israel in light of the new threats, and published it in the media. This was the first time that Israeli public opinion has become aware of the strategy of the Israeli armed forces and may discuss it in political and party circles.
The policy was first mentioned by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a think-tank with close ties to the Israeli political and military establishment. INSS published it in a policy paper "Disproportionate Force: Israel's Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War." The policy stresses that in a conflict with Hamas, the Israeli army should use "force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses." Israeli actions in Gaza strongly indicated that the policy, which would fly in the face of international law, was being pursued with gusto by Israeli forces. That's not an accident but a feature of Israel's strategy, which aims to instil fear in civilians who stand up to the Zionist state.
It was stated in the strategy that the Chief of Staff was the highest military commander and commands the armed forces and was responsible for managing military operations. Thus, it was a wink from the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense, who participated with the Chief of Staff in leading the operations in the July 2006 war and the three subsequent Gaza wars in the years 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014, and a clear message that they have no right to interfere in the military decisions that the Chief of Staff will take in the next war.
The strategy also stated that countries that have borders with Israel no longer pose a danger, and that the danger comes from “Hezbollah” and “Hamas.” The strategy called for carrying out a “Campaign Between Wars” (CBW), that is, carrying out all the work of monitoring and following up on the activities of the “enemy” (Hezbollah) and Hamas, and monitoring nearby countries, i.e. Iran. This campaign was not new, but has been continuing since the establishment of Israel. The Mossad has pursued Palestinian resistance leaders around the world and Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon and Syria, in addition to intercepting resistance weapons ships and monitoring them with human and technical espionage (eavesdropping and satellites).
The United Nations commissioned a fact-finding mission known as the Goldstone Report, which concluded that the Israeli strategy was "designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population." The international law professor Richard Falk has described Israel's Dahiya Doctrine "not only an overt violation of the most elementary norms of the law of war and of universal morality, but an avowal of a doctrine of violence that needs to be called by its proper name: state terrorism."
The strategy considered air forces to be indecisive to wars, based on the experience of the July 2006 war and the war of the international coalition against ISIS, led by the United States since September 2014, which did not achieve decisive results. On the contrary, air strikes did not prevent ISIS from Advance to Ramadi in Iraq and to Palmyra and Al-Qaryatayn in Syria. On the other hand, the strategy states that it has identified tens of thousands of targets in Lebanon and thousands of targets in Gaza, and this requires tens of thousands of air sorties, that is, the extensive use of aviation, which meant that the use of ground forces was inevitable and obligatory in any war without diminishing the role of the air force. In other words, the restriction of operations to the air forces ended with the July War.
Eizenkot warns of ground action immediately after any future confrontation with “Hamas” and “Hezbollah.” The strategy says that Israel will not begin to attack, but if it was attacked, it will not be satisfied with defense, but rather will launch an attack immediately instead of defensive operations. This idea seems to be the new decisive element in this strategy. To be able to launch an immediate attack in response to any attack, Israeli ground forces must remain at the highest level of readiness. This applies to “Hamas” in Gaza, which the new strategy warns of storming immediately after any attack on the nearby Israeli settlements and sites. As for the Lebanon front, the matter was complicated, as international forces are deployed on the Lebanese side of the border, and they limit the freedom of movement of forces.
The strategy also indicates that the army will supervise the evacuation of civilians from the conflict areas in the south and north, and that the unorganized and confusing displacement that occurred. What happened in the Lebanon war and the Gaza wars will not be repeated. The strategy does not talk about the expansion of the conflict and Iran’s participation in the war. It mentions the Golan Front without taking into account the Syrian army, which was engaged in internal wars, and it does not mention whether there was a possibility for this army to participate in the field of air or naval defense.
Despite the Israeli qualitative superiority over the Arab armies and the imbalance in the air, sea, land and electronics in favor of Israel, the threat of asymmetric warfare posed by Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the rest of the factions in Gaza continues, and with it the obsession with the experiences of the Syrian and Iraqi wars.
Over the past decade, the IDF has made significant changes to its structure and combat priorities, and has undergone fundamental changes aimed at improving the effectiveness of its units in expected future conflicts against Hamas and Hezbollah. The air and naval forces expanded their conventional and unconventional warfare capabilities, Israel allocated enormous resources to strengthening its defense infrastructure, intelligence units were given high priority, and cyber units were formed and deployed.
The structural and doctrinal changes introduced by the IDF were generally a response to the gradual transformation of Hamas and Hezbollah from local resistance movements into powerful armed organizations. During the past twenty-five years, the Hamas movement has transformed from a mass social-religious movement into a political regime with a military wing that possesses a number of fighters estimated at more than 30,000 armed men, and its arsenal includes nearly 20,000 missiles capable of hitting targets at a range of up to 200 kilometers.
As for Hezbollah, it has undergone greater organizational changes, and has evolved from a popular movement into what many experts consider to be the strongest non-governmental military force in the world, with the number of its forces estimated at 50-60 thousand fighters, and its ability to strike more than 100,000 missiles. Hezbollah's tactical capabilities have changed dramatically and it was now capable of carrying out offensive operations outside the borders of Lebanon and behind Israeli lines.
The combat experience, firepower and confidence of Hamas and Hezbollah have raised their standing in the eyes of the Israeli military leadership, which now considers them among the main military threats to the state's security, which was why these changes occurred.
These changes are considered a natural matter in light of the absence of the traditional military threat from the Arab armies, as the 1973 war was considered the last war that the Israeli army fought against regular military forces, before most of the encirclement countries turned to peace or truce. In such cases, and with the military changes that have taken place since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the shift towards asymmetric warfare (irregular warfare), it becomes understandable that Israel would tend toward pivotal changes in the structure of its army in response to these new dangers. Israel's wars over the past 40 years were mostly against armed organizations, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and the Lebanese Hezbollah.
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