Gideon Plan
In the summer of 2015, the Israeli army, led by then Chief of General Staff Benny Ganz, launched the Gideon Plan. The essence of the plan was to reduce, modernize and reform the Israeli armed forces, in order to confront unconventional forces. The army’s Gideon Plan, a five-year program meant to make the army both leaner and more effective. The overall plan will see a reduction in personnel across the board, specifically among career army soldiers. Under the plan, by January 2017 only 40,000 career soldiers will remain in the IDF, a military official said in November 2015.
But in 2019 the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Aviv Kochavi, developed a multi-year military action plan for the next five years, which would replace the previous “Gideon” plan. While the Gideon Plan, drawn up by former Israeli Army Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot in 2015, focused on reducing the number of army forces and reducing 11% of senior officers, by 2016 2 generals, 24 colonels, and 80 lieutenant colonels were removed. The plan focused on increasing The ability of the naval and air forces, with declining interest in ground forces, and abandoning sending ground forces in any upcoming battle.
The IDF official strategy published in 2015 by former Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot stated that defending the civilian and military home fronts from projectile fire, alongside the protection of Israel’s continuous offensive capability will form the objectives of air defenses – but not in that order.
The priorities of air defenses will instead be ordered as follows:
- Enabling the functionality of core military capabilities, including those in the home front (for example: air bases).
- Defending vital national infrastructure and state institutions to ensure continuous state function.
- Defending civilian population centers.
This order should also be communicated to the public, which was currently misled in its expectations by the high quality performance and protection afforded to it by Iron Dome during Gaza escalations.
Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot said in 2015 the Gideon PLan would completely change the shape of the army by 2020. One of the plan's provisions was based on the principle of reducing the number of soldiers used in ground combat by strengthening the multi-armed attack strategy with military aviation and naval forces, in addition to the armored forces and artillery.
The Israeli army began to reduce combat and non-combat units in active and reserve military formations. An order was also issued to reduce the number of military rank positions by 10%, and to reduce the number of non-commissioned officers from 45 to 40 thousand soldiers. At the same time, there was a decrease in the mobilized reserves, and the length of service of conscripts was also reduced by 4 months, and reserve forces were reduced by 30%, which meant the demobilization of 100,000 people out of 300,000 active reserve soldiers before the war.
This strategy requires the presence of a larger number of officers on the ground with each combat unit, to enable rapid decision-making and requesting the summoning and intervention of the Air Force and the Navy, to provide support and provide cover more quickly. Therefore, some believe that it may be one of the reasons contributing to the high death toll of officers in Gaza in 2023-2024.
In an organizational restructuring, the Israel Defense Forces merged its Ground Forces with the Technological and Logistics Directorate this month, in a move that was expected to save the army NIS 1 billion ($265 million) over the next five years, the head of the project, Brig. Gen. Ziv Avtalyon, told The Times of Israel 02 October 2016. That money will come, in part, from cutting the positions of some 1,000 positions, including “commissioned and non-commissioned officers — at every rank and every level — along with some civilian employees,” Avtalyon said.
During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the IDF noted serious issues in both the training of soldiers and the army’s supply lines. The former meant the soldiers were poorly prepared to fight an enemy like Hezbollah, while the latter meant troops lacked essential materiel, like food.
According to the new strategy, the brigades were considered independent combat groups, not structural units from which the divisions were composed, and the specializations of each brigade included the ability to plan and implement ground operations without the support of the division leadership.
The new brigade combat team consists of 6 battalions, including infantry, armored, artillery, and engineer units. According to the new strategy, each battalion can communicate directly individually with the air and naval forces for infiltration or fire support, without resorting to the known military hierarchy of the regiment’s leadership. Up the brigade and through the division, and to ensure better control and coordination between the battalions, each new brigade obtained its own headquarters.
These profound changes in the structure of the army, by transforming forces into small groups fighting on the ground, required the presence of many officers to lead combat formations not linked to the division, and most of these officers are field officers who lead battles directly from the ground and not from their distant military bases.
In 2019, the Israeli army developed the Gideon Strategy to make the combat units more impulsive and capable of ground combat, in a plan drawn up by Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, and called the Tnuva Plan. In light of these changes, and with the intensification of the battle in the Gaza Strip between the Israeli army and the Palestinian resistance factions, many officers were killed, due to their wide deployment on the contact lines during the Iron Swaords fighting during ground operations in the Strip, which explains the fall of such a large number of them.
The continued loss of military units of their leaders during battles and direct clashes gives the Palestinian fighters a great advantage, because the enemy forces will be disturbed and exposed to randomness during direct combat, especially since the Palestinian resistance adopts tactics similar to short, lightning battles, which require a rapid attack using a high intensity of fire and withdrawal. To prevent aviation from interfering. This type of battle destroys the psychology of the fighter, as Israeli soldiers find themselves in the midst of deadly battles, and without a leader.
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