Lessons from the schoolyard

When I was about 12 years old, I got into one of those schoolyard fistfights. Surrounded by a circle of boys cheering us on and hoping for as much blood as possible before a teacher noticed, we threw relatively ineffective punches at each other. I don’t recall many details but I do recall my strategic cowardice: I was afraid to punch the other boy in the face. I fought defensively and punched at his body. Even 60 years later, I’m embarrassed: I was thinking I don’t want to make him really mad.

My opponent was a bully and there would be other fights. The correct strategy would have been to teach him a lesson he would not forget. What was I afraid of? I was already fighting.

Israel’s situation is not exactly parallel, but it’s close. We aren’t afraid of our enemies, but we hold back because we don’t want to make our allies mad.

In the very early morning hours of October 6, 1973 when, after a disastrous string of intelligence failures, it became clear that war with Egypt and Syria was about to break out, Golda Meir finally authorized calling up the reserves. She considered a preemptive strike as well, but decided against it:

In recounting the events of the morning of October 6, Meir told the [Agranat] commission that her “heart was very much drawn to” a preemptive strike, “but I am scared.” In both the cabinet meeting on the morning of Yom Kippur and in previous meetings with Dayan and chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. David Elazar, she testified to having said: “1973 is not 1967, and this time we will not be forgiven, and we will not receive assistance when we have the need for it.”

Had Israel fired the first shot of the war, Meir testified, the US would have claimed “you started” and, based on her knowledge of the Pentagon, she continued, “I can say with 100 percent (certainty)” that the airlift of arms and supplies would not have been delivered.

Meir was deterred by Kissinger’s warnings not to preempt. But in any event, the US did not begin to airlift supplies to Israel until she placed Israel’s nuclear-capable Jericho missiles on alert.

Today we have allowed Hezbollah to create a massive missile array, embedded in civilian areas, with more long-range and accurate missiles than it had before the war of 2006. We have allowed Hamas to reconstruct  the tunnels that posed such a threat in 2014, and replenish their stock of rockets (and Hezbollah is digging tunnels too). While the IDF has operated on numerous occasions to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining “game-changing” weapons from Iran via Syria, it has nevertheless upgraded its offensive and defensive capabilities greatly since 2006.

Israel has been deterred from preemptively attacking, first by US diplomatic pressure and later by the amount of damage to our home front that Hezbollah and Hamas could do at this point.

Israel is preparing itself to absorb the blow that it expects will characterize the beginning of the next war. This week there will be an exercise of the Home Front Command (what they used to call “Civil Defense” in the US) to simulate the evacuation of 25,000 people from the North and South which will be under rocket attack (and possibly tunnel-borne ground attack) from Hezbollah and Hamas.

The IDF is also procuring more Iron Dome short-range antimissile systems, as well as the longer-range Arrow and David’s Sling systems.

What’s wrong with this picture? Of course we need to do these things in order to protect our citizens. But it would be wrong if we come to depend on defensive weapons instead of offensive strategy.

Israel’s traditional strategic doctrine, determined by its lack of strategic depth and small population, has been to deter aggressors with the ability to quickly deploy massive firepower, to attack preemptively if necessary, and to protect its population by fighting short wars on enemy territory.

Recently the IDF has publicly adopted a new strategy, presented in a detailed document released last year, called IDF Strategy. The intention is to deal better with asymmetric warfare, terrorism, cyber-threats, and to keep international pressure at bay. I am not sure how all this will play out, but it does not change the need for a strong deterrent posture.

Maintaining deterrence requires action. Threats not backed by actions lose their potency (as Barack Obama has found out). Allowing enemies to build up their capabilities with only minimal interference makes the ultimate confrontation both more likely and more costly.

Systems like Iron Dome may be quite effective under some circumstances, but they also have a downside: their ability to protect us allows us to ignore the enemy’s increasing capability. Preemptive actions to destroy those capabilities are postponed because we are safe under the dome.

Iron Dome works well – until it doesn’t. The systems are extremely expensive and there can only be a limited number of them. In the event of war, they will need to be deployed to protect military installations as well as civilian areas. They can be overwhelmed by a large number of accurately targeted missiles fired at once. I don’t believe that this has happened yet, but Hamas and Hezbollah are increasing both the number and accuracy of their projectiles all the time.

Emphasis on defensive strategies is also bad from a psychological standpoint. Hamas’ genocidal intent to murder every Jew it can is no less evil than the Nazi extermination program. But when most of Hamas’ rockets are intercepted and few Jews are killed thanks to our massive investments in Iron Dome and construction of shelters, it becomes possible to talk about Israel’s “disproportionate response” to Hamas’ “toy rockets.”

Indeed, the idea that it’s acceptable to shoot at Jews – indeed, also to try to stab them, burn them with firebombs and blow them up on buses – is encouraged when we hunker down and defend ourselves while not seriously striking back. Israel has responded to Hamas rocket attacks by bombing empty buildings. We jail terrorists instead of executing them. These are punches to the shoulder instead of the jaw.

The way to deter terrorism, whether it takes the form of asymmetric rocket warfare or decentralized murder incited by the enemy’s leadership and media, is to show them – by means of deliberately disproportionate response – that we won’t take it.

Let me relate another childhood incident. A different bully teased me unmercifully for months. Finally, my anger overwhelmed my cowardice, and I picked up a wooden beam and tried to bash his brains out. Luckily for both of us I didn’t succeed, but that bully left me alone from then on.

What worked in the schoolyard can also work in the Middle East.

Update [1951 IDT]: A previous version of this article said that Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons and that this pushed Nixon to begin the airlift of weapons and supplies in October 1973. I haven’t been able to document this assertion, so I have removed it.

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3 Responses to Lessons from the schoolyard

  1. Nancy B says:

    I think you were correct about the consideration of nuclear weapons.
    “During the night of October 8-9, Moshe Dayan, the one eyed hero of the ’67 war, deeply alarmed, told Prime Minister Golda Meir, “this is the end of the third temple.” Golda reputedly, but never confirmed or acknowledged, gave permission for the ultimate response when faced with the Second Holocaust – the assembly and preparation of nuclear weapons.”
    http://www.jewishmag.com/167mag/kissinger-nixon-war-watergate/kissinger-nixon-war-watergate.htm
    This article you can read online for free: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2538692?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents It’s titled: The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: The 1973 Middle East Crisis by MIT Press
    Wonderful article!

  2. Nancy B says:

    http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB98/
    “While Golda Meir had rejected military advice for nuclear weapons use, she had ordered the arming and alerting of Jericho missiles–their principal nuclear delivery system–at least to influence Washington. (Note 30) Kissinger has never gone on record on this issue and no U.S. documentation on the U.S. Israeli nuclear posture during the war has been declassified.” This portion is located directly below Document 21B.
    “On October 8, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen 20-kiloton nuclear warheads on Jericho missiles and F-4s, which were prepared for action against Syrian and Egyptian targets;[4] their preparation was made easily detectable, likely as a signal to the United States.[5] Kissinger learned of this threatening nuclear escalation on the morning of 9 October. On that same day, Meir issued a personal appeal for military assistance, which European nations declined. U.S. President Richard Nixon, however, ordered the commencement of Operation Nickel Grass, to replace all of Israel’s materiel losses.[6] Anecdotal evidence suggests that Kissinger had told Anwar El Sadat that the reason for the U.S. airlift was that the Israelis were close to “going nuclear.”[4] However, subsequent interviews with Kissinger, James Schlesinger, and William Quandt suggested that the nuclear aspect was not a major factor in the decision to re-supply. These officials cited the ongoing Soviet re-supply effort and Sadat’s early rejection of a ceasefire as the primary motivators.[8]”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Nickel_Grass
    And here’s something else I had never known – “Finally, senior American echelons began to suspect that the Soviet Union had stationed nuclear weapons in Egypt (71).”
    http://carterscott.com/Yom%20Kippur%20W/Blanga%20-%20The%20Russians%20Are%20Coming.pdf
    Again, your article is another wonderful one as were the previous two.

  3. Lise says:

    Sometimes you just have to risk making your enemy mad. But you can never appease him.

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