Commentary | The New Chief of Staff’s Critical Tasks

On the Chief of Staff’s desk, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, thousands of pages of reports, tests, and IDF war inquiries will pile up. He will be too busy to delve into all these volumes, even if they contain the most critical information.

He must manage a multi-front campaign, care for the army, secure the borders, face enemies both near and far, equip with weaponry, build strength, transform intelligence, and of course, most importantly: change the IDF's management and operational culture, the army's organizational culture. The tasks are enormous.

Eyal Zamir commands, starting this week, an army that has failed, one that failed to protect the citizens of the country, one that did not understand or recognize what was happening beyond the Gaza Strip border. But he also commands an army that has shown resilience in recovering from a major failure and achieved operational successes.

Alertness and Preparedness

A basic lesson from the October 7th massacre and following war: The Chief of Staff and his staff officers must think 24/7 in terms of being ready for the enemy to launch a war. Alertness and preparedness for the worst-case scenario are a must. Such thinking does not rule out negotiations with the enemy over agreements. This is the proven way not to be surprised. Again.

It is not advisable for Intelligence Corps officers and their professional counterparts to invest efforts in the intriguing question of the enemy’s intentions, or the thoughts of a particular leader. The guessing game of enemy intentions has failed too many times with disastrous, embarrassing, and deadly results. Just look at October 1973 and October 2023.

The right approach is to constantly assume, day and night, that Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and any potential enemy are preparing for war. And act accordingly.

Hamas and Hezbollah were almost entirely destroyed in the current war, but the army must not tell itself or the public "Hamas is finished" (in the sense of 'Hamas is deterred'). Rather, it must assume that Hamas and Hezbollah will try to rebuild, recruit forces, smuggle and stockpile weaponry, and plan for the next October 7. Sinwar and Nasrallah are gone. Others will come.

The published war inquiries lead to the unsurprising conclusion that the country’s defense must be two-layered: technology and soldiers. But in reverse order: soldiers and technology. Technology complements the presence of ‘boots on the ground,’ fighters, helping them; technology alone will not suffice.

They taught in the NCO course that every obstacle, like a minefield, must be protected and backed by soldiers. An electronic fence, a 'see-shoot' system, a sophisticated metal-concrete barrier buried deep in the ground—if soldiers don’t patrol it, they are not worth the financial investment. Observation balloons, binoculars that can see kilometers deep into enemy territory are excellent tools, but they won’t succeed unless they are attached to soldiers. Infantry, armor, tanks, artillery, APCs, and engineering units that patrol the borders on foot or in vehicles, day and night, who know how to ‘open a path’ on foot—this is the solution.

The alert units in the surrounding settlements fought heroically on October 7th, and many fell in battle. The terminology must change: no longer alert units, but an alert company for each settlement and an alert battalion for a cluster of settlements. Their weapons must be readily available and not stored in a distant armory. It must be ensured that soldiers and support personnel in border areas are armed and connected to communication networks.

For residents of the surrounding settlements and the northern border to return to their homes with a sense of security, there must be a situation where the enemy across the border sees fighters, tanks, weapons, drones, helicopters overhead, and behind them military camps with brigades and battalions. Only then will there be hope that anyone with malicious thoughts will understand that in front of them lies a well-protected, impassable border, ready for war.

The Goal: Deterrence

An army that will one day defend the borders of the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in the north must ensure there are no more ‘trickling’ of weaponry from Gaza, no Hezbollah UAV flights from Lebanon to Israel, and no missiles from the Houthis in Yemen. Any violation must meet with a massive response, even disproportionate, to deter. True deterrence, without boasting or empty statements like "We will hit, destroy, and obliterate."

The Air Force and Navy must also approach the concepts of alertness and readiness differently. Shabbat, Jewish holidays, and Israel’s special occasions are not days off where bases close, squadrons are powered down, and most officers and soldiers go home for the holiday. The enemy noticed the failures in readiness on Yom Kippur and Simchat Torah and chose those days to strike.

The Air Force and Navy are not immune to thorough investigations: they "were not there." The Air Force planes were not over the Gaza Strip at the moment of the disaster, and the Navy ships were not in place when Hamas swimmers reached the Zikim shore.

All the steps outlined above, and many more, require a much larger army. Additional brigades and divisions. Not a small and smart army, but a large and smart one.

The debates about the recruitment laws for the ultra-Orthodox belong to the political arena, but they have a societal impact on the whole public in terms of the equality of the burden due to the urgent need to enlarge the army. Less is said about the fact that there are not small numbers of young secular candidates who do not enlist in the IDF for various, sometimes strange, reasons.

Out-of-the-box thinking is needed in the civilian sector and in IDF manpower to find and recruit these individuals, and they are not few. Given the lessons of October 7th, it may be possible to enlist many non-ultra-Orthodox individuals who are not enlisting. They are vital even if they are not suited for combat service, as they will free others for combat units.

Does the Chief of Staff automatically align with the political echelon?

The new Chief of Staff, like all his predecessors, is legally bound to follow the policies set by the political echelon. However, a senior officer who reached the position of military commander due to his experience and skills is not a deputy who blindly follows his superior’s orders.

In Israel, the Chief of Staff is the military advisor to the government and its head. It is unhealthy for the public to get the impression that the Chief of Staff automatically aligns with the opinions and assessments of the political echelon. The Chief of Staff has the right and the duty to stand by his views, think differently, and express independent opinions, based on professional knowledge and factual data.

Without professional integrity and the courageous expression of independent professional opinions, officers will quickly be dismissed as "clerks" in a dismissive tone. The Chief of Staff is an integral part of the group of decision-makers in the highest levels concerning military and national security matters.

The procurement of weaponry is an important item on the new Chief of Staff's priority list. We cannot produce F-35 planes or F-15 engines in Israel. But it is unfortunate that we had to wait for months until the new U.S. administration approved sending ships with bombs needed by the IDF.

European countries are shifting to domestic production of artillery munitions as a lesson learned from the Ukraine war. We can do the same. The defense industries in Israel have much more high-tech knowledge and expertise than the production of 155mm munitions or bombs. Steps are being taken in this direction, but it’s unfortunate that it is so late.