If the country wants a full blueprint for what to fix and change about the IDF after the disaster on October 7, 2023, it will have to wait.
Former national security council chief Jacob Nagel did a valuable service for the country on Monday when he submitted his thoughtful report on how to improve the IDF going forward for the next five to ten years.
However, he was simply not given a full enough mandate to get to the heart of all of the issues that Israel must confront to fully avoid such future disasters.
Many of his statements about how to make a better future for the IDF and defense establishment are important.
His concept that Israel must be more proactive to prevent threats from building up near its borders – as opposed to focusing on deterrence and defense – is crucial, and that Israel must fund and train itself in this new direction.
When he highlights how much work Israel has to do in space, cyber, artificial intelligence, and general technological warfare, he is sounding the right alarms.
And when he highlights the imperative need for Israel to be more independent in manufacturing its weaponry, Nagel’s report will hopefully move forward a much-needed paradigm shift.
But how can Israel be ready to defend itself in the future when no one knows what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his top ministers knew and did not know that could have impacted October 7?
How can Israel be secure if there are no new parameters in place to make sure that top Israeli political officials do not get sucked in by groupthink like the IDF did (and which has led to the huge growth and empowering of a division to better second guess conventional thinking) and their preconceived political notions?
A new national security strategy, funding, and force buildup cannot be completely divorced from Israel’s long-term diplomatic goals.
Where does Israel want to be with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and with the different groups in Lebanon and Syria, in five or 10 years from now?
Nagel said that the Prime Minister’s Office must have better control of the defense establishment’s budgeting process, but what good will that do if the prime minister himself is above reproach?
It may be that the IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Service) are more to blame for October 7, or that the prime minister and the government are more to blame – or they may be equally at fault – but it is not possible to fully understand what the future must look like without fully understanding what happened the past.
And besides all that, can any of the top officials in politics or defense who were in charge on October 7 truly be the right figures to frame the country’s defense for the next 10 years, even if they have had significant successes during this war?
Haredim integration into the IDF
Nagel also pressed for full haredi (ultra-Orthodox) integration into the IDF but said that it should be done gradually. If gradually means seven years, as suggested by Defense Minister Israel Katz – and clearly supported by Netanyahu – most experts doubt that the integration will ever happen. It seems Nagel thinks that getting too deep into such a timeline might also be beyond his mandate.
Earlier in the war, Netanyahu said he would have a probe as soon as the war is over. But, at some point, he took on the mantra that the war will not end at any point in the foreseeable future. That seems to mean he will also never be probed, or at least not while he is in power. In contrast, the IDF probes, however unreasonably delayed, are expected to be issued in the near future.
Nagel’s report will help on a variety of tactical issues and even some strategic issues, but the missing diplomatic, political and personality pieces could come back to haunt the country someday if they are not addressed soon.