While the question of what Israel will do next is up in the air, it would be worth looking at what went so horribly wrong that Israel suffered such a catastrophic attack on October 7. One theory is that the adage “go wore go broke” came into play. While this is certainly true up to a point, we need to look a bit deeper. To understand why this happened, we first need to understand what happened.
In analysing the failures of 7/10/23 we need to analyse three distinct sets of failure. First the failure of intelligence, second the failure of the Gaza border defences, and finally the delayed and clumsy response.
INTELLIGENCE GATHERING
There is a big difference between intelligence as it is collected and the final processed product that goes up to the leadership, based on which decisions are taken. Unfortunately unlike Bollywood-Hollywood movies where the villain says “boss lets go blow up Taj Mahal” this is not how terrorists communicate. As a simple analogy, this is the difference between what the cook sees and what the diner at the table sees. A cook is given raw ingredients – vegetables, spices, seasonings etc. He has a choice to make a thousand different dishes. For example I am given dal, rice, 5 vegetables. As the cook I can make a dal separately, a recipe separately, and 5 different vegetables, or I can make a khichri with all 5 vegetables and dal. The permutations and combinations are endless. You, however, sitting at the table have no idea what will be served up unless you have made specific requests.
Once we understand this, we need to understand how the gathering process works –roughly classified as SIGINT (signals intelligence), SATINT (satellite intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence – the most traditional form). Even within this, there are several sub divisions. Each of them work independently so that the biases of one do not contaminate the other. However, it also means they don’t talk to each other, because if one gets compromised the others should be protected. Yet on intel leading up to 7/10/23, all of them collectively failed.
This wasn’t an issue of collection of intel. Rather because the new generation doesn’t want to get down on the ground and get their hands dirty, too much focus remains on electronic means of spying. What’s worse, the institutional Left wing capture means that the three intelligence services Mossad (foreign intelligence), Shin Bet (domestic intelligence) and Aman (military intelligence) were more busy fighting against the governments proposed judicial reforms. The heads of these agencies were also more interested in leaks to the press, and fighting the government’s judicial reform plans and playing Left wing politics than they were in doing their jobs and ensuring the chef prepares the meal properly.
TECH OVERDRIVE
Again what we see is that due to an increasing reluctance of Israel to expose soldiers to danger, there is an unhealthy over-reliance on technology. Mind you, there is such a thing as technology being used to reduce the human workload so that the human can better focus on more important tasks like fighting. But that wasn’t the case here.
Gaza’s border fences have remote monitoring posts. They are not watch towers, but rather tall poles with an assortment of electronic equipment – motion sensors, thermal imaging cameras and the like. The fences themselves have a mild electrical charge which send out warnings to headquarters if they’re cut of damaged. The lethal part of this package are machine gun towers – again operated remotely by soldiers sitting far away. The problem is if the sensors are taken out, the machine gun operator not being present at the location cannot fire, because he cannot see what to fire at.
TACTICAL FAILURE
How Hamas exploited this was through drones – specifically the evolution of drones in the Ukraine war, using small hobby drones. They first took out the sensors and then the machine guns, which were blind by this point. This is where the Israelis send in lightly armed parts first which are also destroyed by light explosive drones and then when the tanks arrive, they are destroyed by similar drones carrying much heavier explosives. By this point, the southern division commanders should have been alerted, but it turns out that 47 per cent of the army was on leave, and all the southern commanders had been concentrated in one military garrison in the south, which was rapidly overrun by Hamas within the first hour of breaching the wall.
“Modi has called this a terrorist attack and declared his solidarity with Israel. Yet again the Modi government and the BJP has turned a blind eye to the occupation and crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians, and seek to instrumentalise this situation to fan hatred for Muslims ” — CPIML statement
It seems even though multiple warnings were picked up, nobody understood the sheer scale of the breach that had happened – the southern military response leadership had effectively been decapitated. Videos show that in garrison after garrison nobody took the threat seriously and the soldiers already lazy on the Sabbath, were all in their underwear and not prepared to respond in any real way. Compounding this was the acute manpower shortage with so many being on leave. As a result, for the first 12 hours, the leadership had no idea what was happening, and when they slowly started figuring out what was happening, they did not have the forces to send south, significantly delaying the response leading to several hundred more lives lost.
THE LESSONS
There are many lessons to be learnt here, but what those lessons are we will not really know till the inquiry commission comes out with a report. In Israel, the inquiries are ruthless, claiming the lives of senior leadership, unlike say Bharat, where the junior and middle officers are made sacrificial goats for both senior officers and the political and bureaucratic leadership. From what we know we can clearly identify three distinct reasons for what happened on October 7. First, hubris in leadership – political, intelligence and military, from the highest command levels to the lowest command levels. Second, an over reliance on technology, a lesson which Israel should have learnt from the 2006 Lebanon war, which even then had complained about too much focus on technology and too little focus on war fighting skills. Third and finally, the heavy Left wing indoctrination of institutions and the consequent bitter politicisation of national interest, where sabotaging each other became a greater priority than tackling the enemy.
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