Introduction: On the Limitations of Military Doctrine (original) (raw)

ONE OF THE MANY REASONS for the humbling of the mighty Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 2006 Lebanon War was an Israeli combat doctrine named Systemic Operational Design, better known by its perhaps aptly abbreviated acronym SOD. The brainchild of a group of military intellectuals clustered around the IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI), SOD was first mooted in 1995. It was an operational doctrine that drew on U.S. studies and postmodern French philosophical and textual analysis to develop an integrative critical and creative approach to the battlefield and generate new means of addressing old problems. The basic paper outlining SOD was signed by then incoming Chief of Staff Dan Halutz and formally adopted as the IDF's operational doctrine in April 2006. 1 Put to almost immediate test in southern Lebanon, the IDF's experience with SOD in July 2006 was disastrous. Not only did its intellectual content challenge senior officers' understanding, but its somewhat rarified Foucauldian precepts sowed confusion rather than clarity on the battlefield, with the consequence that orders were misunderstood, misinterpreted, or altogether ignored. Rather than help to "integrate" operations, SOD played a significant part in the tactical disorder that marked the IDF's performance over the thirty-three days of the war. 2 The results were predictable. SOD was rapidly dropped, as the Israeli high command grappled with its shortcomings and failures as revealed by the war, and Halutz's successive replacements (Gabriel "Gabi" Ashkenazi and Benjamin "Benny" Gantz) launched a long process of organizational and doctrinal reevaluation that passed through the 2007 Meridor Commission, the 2008 Winograd Commission, and finally culminated in the 2015 IDF Strategy of Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot (hereafter ED, short for Eisenkot Document), made available in English for the first time here, by the Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS).