The nauseating events of October 7, 2023, unleashed a barrage of unpleasant emotions. Even if the whole population in Israel was not affected by these emotions, it is reasonable to assert that the overwhelming majority of the population was.
These emotions include fear concerning future possible attacks, sorrow at the loss of life, helplessness at the plight of the hostages, and anger at Hamas’s bestial behavior which included physical violence, murder, and rape.
But anger is also directed at the senior military commanders who ignored warnings that Hamas intended to invade Israel. There was also a gross underestimation of Hamas’s military abilities.
Some of the more junior intelligence officers who warned their seniors about the threat received hostile comments and humiliation. It must also be noted that some of these junior intelligence officers were women, which raises the question of male chauvinism.
Why did the IDF fail to stop October 7?
These observations require explanation, and that is the goal of a future commission of inquiry, which may attribute blame and even impose disciplinary action. However, it is possible that some important factors will be missed. These are discussed in a book that was written in 1976 titled On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Dr. Norman F. Dixon.
Its content is a serious analysis of major military disasters experienced by British soldiers due to their commanders’ bad decisions. Dixon was well qualified to make such an investigation. For 10 years he was an officer in the Royal Engineers, and then he left the army to study psychology. His postgraduate studies earned him a doctorate.
He dismissed stupidity as the cause of these disasters, as it requires intelligence to reach a senior position. He explained the decision process as the result of an individual’s personality.
Personality is not an illness requiring psychiatric aid. It is what one can describe, loosely, as the way an individual behaves. There are different types of personality. The authoritarian personality was the feature which identified the officers involved in the military catastrophes that Dixon studied.
People with an authoritarian personality are not exclusive to the military. There are authoritarian bank managers, teachers, editors, trade unionists, and any other group one can name. When an authoritarian individual in most occupations makes a bad decision, the worst that can happen is a shouting match and/or an apology or a court case. However, a recent investigation into Boeing’s air safety record could indicate that this assessment might be overly optimistic.
In the medical profession, this problem has been recognized for many years, which is why all working physicians and surgeons have malpractice insurance. The distinction between a bad medical decision and the disasters investigated by Dixon is that bad military decisions affect many thousands of otherwise healthy young men and, today, women. That is, society loses youngsters who could potentially have lived long and constructive lives.
The general result of a military authoritarian bad decision is not just an unfortunate incident on the battlefield, it is a major catastrophe.
Dixon used Freudian terminology and contended that an authoritarian has a weak ego. The ego is a mental mechanism which mediates between the id, which supplies our basic needs, and the superego which acts as our moral conscience.
The problem may originate in a dominating parent. Whatever the deep psychological mechanism, Dixon identified 14 mechanisms for bad military decisions. This does not imply that all 14 are required to generate a disaster. One alone can do that. October 7 was the result of two of the 14: failure to act on warnings that were contrary to accepted belief; and underestimating the enemy.
There is another element in the pattern. Dixon described authoritarians as misogynistic. Perhaps “male chauvinistic” is a better description for the local situation. Some of the intelligence officers who provided appropriate warning were women and probably the victims of bias. This puts the senior officers involved in the same group as the generals described by Dixon, which is worrying because writing in 1975, Dixon compared the IDF with the British army and considered the IDF to be the more efficient force, despite its unmilitaristic behavior. He argued that the IDF’s soldiers were more like the Boers in South Africa who had to defend their farms against the British.
He pointed out that the IDF was civilianized and had not developed historical traditions. There was an apparent absence of discipline. He noted that junior ranks in the IDF addressed their senior officers by their first names, unlike in the British army in which the most junior address their NCOs by rank up to sergeant major and after that, it is always “Sir.” He believed that there was no word for “sir” in Hebrew. About that, he was wrong, but one must admit that the monosyllabic “Sir!” has an effect that is absent in the trisyllabic Hebrew “adoni.”
He referred to the absence of spit-and-polish in the IDF, while in the British and American armies it is a mechanism to maintain discipline. An explanation may be necessary for those unfamiliar with the term “spit-and-polish.” A good example is how soldiers are required to take care of their boots. In the British army, the soldiers are required to polish their boots so that the toecaps can reflect the wearer’s face. The aim is to render a shiny effect that allows the footwear to act as an accessory shaving mirror for men. This is achieved by wetting the leather by spitting on it and then vigorously applying the polish, hence the name for that activity. Obsessiveness is a feature of authoritarian personality, and that is consistent with spit-and-polish.
Dixon found the efficiency of the IDF puzzling but attributed it to the fact that it was in part the fight for survival, an appreciation of brain power and, above all, the democratic nature of an amateur organization. Perhaps the IDF has evolved in the 50 years since that was written to a different type of organization staffed by career soldiers, together with the type of problems that such organizations experience.
Dixon emphasized that the authoritarian differs from the rational autocrat who, despite being a strict disciplinarian, does not permit prejudice or preconceived ideas to interfere with rational decisions.
He did not mention that in the late 1930s when the infant Hagana had to fight Arab marauders, they were trained by Orde Wingate. Wingate was so successful that he was eventually banned from Palestine by the British Mandate authority after his tour of duty. It appears that he wanted to lead a Jewish army in a war of liberation.
Wingate was a master of unconventional warfare, which he demonstrated in Ethiopia and in WW II Burma (Myanmar) against the Japanese. He was killed when his aircraft crashed. Wingate was active in the 1930s, forty years before the Yom Kippur War. This would mean that those of his trainees in their 20s would be in their 50s at the time of the Six Day War and in their 60s at the time of the Yom Kippur War, so many of Wingate’s “graduates” might have still been active. Certainly, Moshe Dayan was. Or they may have trained the next generation of fighters. However, with the passage of time, a new generation with more conventional ideas, perhaps after studying in America, could have evolved.
There is another important element in this complex system. The chief of staff works with the defense minister to ensure the nation’s security. A defense minister, although a civilian, may have been a former general, but not all defense ministers have held such high command. This means that the government will be involved in the selection of a chief of staff and other senior officers. Government is under an obligation to avoid choosing officers who may be prone to the types of errors noted above. When a catastrophe results, the government, which means the politicians involved as well, has its share of responsibility.
When a member of the public criticizes a senior officer’s actions, a reasonable rebuttal is that the critic is unaware of all the factors involved in a complex situation. Politicians cannot make this claim. We live in a democracy.
The press in general describes senior politicians as our leaders. They are not. Modern leadership is a fascistic phenomenon. In a democracy, the people that we vote for are our representatives, and in Israel each person votes for a party whose policy best suits the way that voter thinks. This means that the country’s policies will be a compromise. For this reason, an investigation into the causes of October 7 should include an examination of the politicians involved in the events running up to the invasion, and the mechanisms in choosing those senior officers who ignored the warning.
Although there will be an inquiry, presumably non-partisan, it will investigate the rationality of the various decision-makers. It is unlikely that such an inquiry will identify the nature of the axioms on which the decisions were based. For example, if one considers that an impenetrable wall has been built, it is logical to assume that information suggesting that the wall is about to be penetrated is false. This is what happened. A legal inquiry cannot investigate the personality of the people involved.
There are tools for investigating personality that are used by psychologists, psychiatrists, and general (family) practitioners and these, given that context, provide a guide to therapy and statistical analysis. They are not sufficiently precise to be used to appoint people to senior office. One can use them to get a general idea of the type of person required for a given job but not to define an individual candidate.
Left, Center, and Right labels do not help, either because all political organizations have people with an authoritarian personality, even in high positions, because that is how human beings are.
These considerations mean that a similar disaster is a future possibility, perhaps probability.
One way to prevent that would be to make it a court-martial offense to fail to investigate any warning by an appointed observer. Such a warning should be investigated by specially trained and armed units. This could lead to expensive false alarms, but the cost of an October 7 event is far greater.■
The writer is a retired physician who lives in Beersheba.