https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-09-24/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/fifty-years-after-the-yom-kippur-war-netanyahu-is-ignoring-the-new-writing-on-the-wall/0000018a-c48c-d3ca-a9ef-c5accd8c0000
Fifty Years After the Yom Kippur War, Netanyahu Is Ignoring the New Writing on the Wall - Israel News - Haaretz.com
As we mark the 50 year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War (1973), publishers are marking the occasion with books that commemorate the event. To my mind, the most interesting among them is not new, nor was it written about the Yom Kippur War. It's American scholar Roberta Wohlstetter’s “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision.”
The book attends to the Japanese surprise attack on Hawaii in December 1941, which shook the United States and pushed it to join the Second World War in full force. Wohlstetter published her study in 1962, on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, but it has only now been translated into Hebrew (published by Modan/Maarachot/Defense Ministry).
The translation feels completely relevant, both to the controversies resurfacing around the 1973 war jubilee and to analyses of the current defense climate, in which the Israel Defense Forces' intelligence corps warn that a multi-front war is growing more likely. IDF Information Technology and Cyber Commander Maj. Gen. Eran Niv initiated the translation of the book and added a preface, distributing the book to senior military leadership.
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Wohlstetter explicates, in the text, a classic intelligence theory which is often cited even today. It revolves around signals and noises, and was conceived to explain strategic surprise as a phenomenon. As Maj.Gen Niv writes in his preface, Pearl Harbor is indeed a fascinating case study. Three days before the Japanese attack, Navy Secretary Frank Knox declared that wherever the Japanese attack, “the Navy is ready … it is not going to be caught napping.”
Unbeknownst to Knox, a Japanese fleet of unprecedented numbers was already on its way to Hawaii as he was making this assured statement. The Japanese fleet included six aircraft carriers, 441 aircrafts, 28 submarines and many other vessels. It caught the Americans by surprise, and the USA lost 2,459 soldiers and suffered the destruction of 188 aircraft and 20 vessels.
The battleship USS Arizona belches smoke as it topples over into the sea during a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941.Credit: AP
Analyzing this American intelligence failure, Wohlstetter defined a signal as representing a clue or piece of evidence that tells of a unique danger or of a specific enemy’s intent or action. She argued that the information required to reach the correct conclusion is almost always within intelligence officers’ and leaders’ grasp, but are subsumed by distracting noises which render them unusable when they are most needed.
Though there were a large number of signs indicating an imminent attack before Pearl Harbor, they went unheeded. This didn't come down to bad luck, criminal negligence or unfit professionals, Wohlstetter claimed. Instead, Maj. Gen. Niv writes that she “points to a complex human phenomenon which blinds the entire system,” and which has cost many nations dearly on occasions before and after the Pearl Harbor attack.
The book gives a detailed account of a dramatic U.S. government failure in which a wealth of information was not translated into reading the enemy's next step in an emergency. The United States was not prepared to deal with a Japanese course of action that was perceived as impossible but was in practice only less likely. As the English-language prologue puts it, the surprise of Pearl Harbor was not only due to a neglect of responsibilities but to responsibilities that were vague and undefined in the first place; and it wasn't just a case of a guard dozing off on watch, but rather of a guard who senses that he'd be reprimanded for pulling his napping superiors out of bed.
Ship's Chief Petty Officers listen to the radio broadcast of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's address to the Congress requesting a declaration of War against the Axis powers, December 8, 1941.Credit: HANDOUT/ REUTERS
In the case of Pearl Harbor, two U.S. privates who were training on the radar detected an unusual movement toward the Hawaiian Islands shortly before the attack began, but when they reported the suspicious activity, their commanders instructed them to ignore it. It should be said that even if the privates were heeded in time, it's highly doubtful that the Americans would have been able to stop the attack.
Army intelligence
Public debate about the Yom Kippur War contains multiple controversies. Did the IDF deploy properly following the initial surprise attack? What were the failures in the political echelons’ conduct during the war? Did Prime Minister Golda Meir’s refusal of the American-led peace process, following what she perceived as untenable Egyptian demands, bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to launch the offensive? All these are still hotly debated today. Recently, a fascinating Hollywood film, “Golda”, was released, depicting the former prime minister as a martyr in the spirit of political correctness.
And yet, at the center of controversy of the war and its failures stands the intelligence community. Intelligence received an early – if only just – warning about the forthcoming attack from informant Ashraf Marwan on Yom Kippur eve, 1973. (The Mossad published its own official story of the events this year, and more books are expected soon. Some of them negate the Mossad’s version and point an accusing finger at the organization's treatment of the informing agent and his warnings.)
Still, as Niv writes, the framework of signals and noise is relevant beyond the memory of either WWII or 1973. One may look to the 2018 publication, following prolonged and excessive delays enforced by military censorship, of a detailed Israeli-sourced narrative of the attack on the Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007, an event that has been hailed as a triumph of Israeli intelligence forces. The publication, however, brought to light claims that Israel recognized the Syrian-North Korean plans to build the reactor very late in the game, and that if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had not acted decisively, Israel would have faced a strategic disaster. Even if these appear to have been rather weak signals of Syria’s striving for military nuclear capability, it seems that for several years the intelligence community hadn't been trying too hard to investigate them.
Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan speaking to troops in the Golan Heights during the Yomn Kippur War, in November 1973.Credit: Ron Frankel/Government Press Office
Wohlstetter’s paradigm is also useful when looking at the Hezbollah 2006 kidnapping of two reserves soldiers which led to the onset of the Second Lebanon War. When military investigations began, commander of the Galilee Brigade (Division 91) Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (res.) was astonished to find that, in the two weeks before the abduction, Military Intelligence received more than thirty alerts and fregments of information related to it.
Hirsch, who resigned from his position and the IDF after a committee headed by Maj. Gen. Doron Almog placed the lion’s share of responsibility for the abduction on him, claimed that having the information in time would have led him to maintain the high alert status he had declared in the division a few weeks earlier.
Without the information however, the Brigadier General (res.) ordered army patrols to return and move close to the border fence, where the abduction took place. Intelligence officials in the Northern Command claimed that the military investigation acted “as a clean-up crew for the intel collection system.” Maj. Gen. Almog replied that there was no intelligence failure in the abduction incident, and there is no reason to retrospectively attribute significance to the fragments of information received.
Black swan scenario
“No intelligence failure” is not how one would sum up Pearl Harbor or the other episodes that appear in Niv’s foreword, like the 9/11 attacks or even “the majority of global responses to the Covid 19 pandemic” in winter 2020. “My personal experience,” writes Niv, “is that while surprises cannot be circumvented, they can be reduced in number and, more importantly, diminished in quality. To this end, fostering an organizational culture that enables and encourages critical thinking is of utmost importance. Military organizations shouldn't feel too satisfied, which is dangerous for how it blocks learning and criticism. They must encourage vigilance, curiosity and courage to overcome the barriers of organizational conformity.”
Speaking with Haaretz, Niv connects Wohlstetter’s signal-and-noise paradigm to Lebanese-American economist Nassim Taleb’s black swan theory. As chief of the Officers Candidate Academy, Niv ran “black swan seminars” in which cadets were required to deal with rare and surprising scenarios. Taleb argues that the more common a phenomenon is, the more likely we are to assume that its next occurence be similar to the previous one. A sense of wonder and frustration will always accompany the appearance of a black swan, as it makes clear that the system has not used the information fed to it to predict the surprise.
“Lieutenants and captains can learn a lot from the book,” says Niv, “but it’s especially important that senior commanders everywhere learn from it. Pearl Harbor was a mad, extreme example, from which we should learn that if it happened to the most powerful military ever, to the U.S. army on the eve of World War II, and it didn’t happen only to them, then it could happen to anyone.
Israeli troops move along the Kuneitra-Damascus road on the Syrian front during the Yom Kippur War, in October 1973.Credit: Azuri Menashe / Government Press Office
"The IDF needs to study these scenarios and build response dossiers for them. That is my main motivation. The strategic surprise caused the Americans to construct a system that can survive and grow stronger. They didn’t backtrack after the Japanese attacked. In a way, they dealt with it by overcompensating [in the form of the immense national war mobilization effort]. My assumption is that surprises like these will continue to happen. Military surprises end up working, because human consciousness is fallible. There will always be times when we fall.”
These are weighty issues for a military system that is spread thin between hundreds of missions and is often too focused on them to stop and analyze the overall picture. Niv admits that “in most cases, our working assumption is that the decision-making paradigms work. But those in charge of sensitive systems – that includes me as commander of the IDF’s cyber and digital arenas – must also think in terms of strategic surprises and black swans. Forecasting is a tool we can't do without. But where systems are very volatile, and results can grow orders of magnitude in a short timeframe, there is a higher vulnerability to strategic surprises. Forecasts become very dangerous and should be taken as limited.
“Wohlstetter and Taleb both say that we have to assume we’re going to get got, but with the right preparation work we can achieve three things: we can reduce the number of surprises, we can significantly reduce their severity and we can create plans to recover from such situations and even come out the other end better than when it started. Essential surprises shake you out of your paradigm – it's a good time to create new paradigms. Some organizations that are hit hard disappear, but some of them recover and actually improve”, says Niv.
“Let me say a simple thing”, Niv says: “If the IDF’s digital capacity crashes, the military can’t function. Almost no human activity today can be realized without a digital function, and the military is no different. Digital systems can be physically attacked, cyber-hijacked or broken down as a result of a malfunction on our end, a server that crashes or even a tractor damaging a cable. Cyber is a sphere of combat that man has built, unlike the other spheres of warfare on land, in the sea and in the air, which are natural domains.”
IDF Information Technology and Cyber Commander Maj. Gen. Eran Niv in 2021.Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit
Niv declares that as such, “this is a system that must be defined as a delicate weak spot that can be overcome by a black swan. In order to protect it, we can’t make do with the usual protocols. In defense, what you build is first of all basic resilience. The more advanced systems also have a defensive dimension of adaptation and improvement. But these two won't provide the answer to a black swan scenario. What we need to take into account in cyberspace is an attack where some rare and extreme thing happens and even though you could have imagined it, you chose not to engage with it. In the face of such threats, we can’t rely on just one paradigm, we must decentralize our abilities, generate redundancy, prepare a non-standard overreaction to big surprises and also make sure to constantly be rubbing up against reality. That’s why we are building a series of difficult and complex exercises, in cyber and digital, that will challenge us at the highest levels, so that we can stand up to these challenges.”
Peace without Palestinians
During the Yom Kippur War, Maj. Gen. (res.) Ami Ayalon, who penned one of the essays in “Yom Pkuda” (“Judgement Day”), a new book about the war edited by historian Gideon Avital-Eppstein, commanded a unit of Dabur-class patrol boats in the Red Sea and Suez Canal. The former head of the Shin Bet and commander-in-chief of the Navy writes that the strategic surprise, together with the war’s heavy toll, created the first cracks in Israel’s perception that an “iron curtain” would keep it safe from invasion. At the same time, however neighboring Arab countries were sobering up too.
The war, Ayalon claims, undermined the cohesion of the Arab nations’ positions and had some Arab leaders gradually recognize that Israel could not be defeated on the battlefield. Four years after the war, Sadat visited Jerusalem and two years later, Israel and Egypt signed a peace agreement.
Ayalon highlights another historical milestone in a Saudi peace initiative approved by the Arab League in 2002. The initiative explicitly calls for an end to the conflict and to recognition of Israel on the basis of the 1967 borders. It has not been implemented, largely due to procrastination and evasion by Israeli governments.
Ayalon’s essay was written before Jerusalem and Riyadh officially stated that negotiations are underway for a normalization agreement between the two countries. On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a rather impressive speech at the annual UN General Assembly. Had we not been so accustomed to lies and deception, it would have been easy to be swept away by Netanyahu’s regional vision, which for once used the world stage to spread the word of peace with Saudi Arabia instead of his usual war mongering.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves the stage after addressing the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters on Friday.Credit: Mary Altaffer /AP
But the Achilles heel of the speech lies in what it evades: the neglect to mention the fierce demonstrations against the judicial coup, and the blatant attempt to minimize the importance of the Palestinian problem.
The future of the normalization attempt is uncertain as it depends on Netanyahu’s success in convincing his extremist partners to restrain their legislative initiatives and to acquiesce to the limited gestures that Saudi Arabia will demand to appease the Palestinians. What Netanyahu has made clear is that he has no plans to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace (he claims he has tried but was rejected by the Palestinian leadership). His plans are meant to be a path that will bypass the Palestinians entirely.
The war of 1973 broke out because Egypt and Syria attempted to reclaim land that they had lost, in their arrogance, in the Six Day War of 1967. The Palestinian conflict was only marginal, even if the Meir government was as hawkish on this issue as it was about the withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula.
Fifty years after that war, the Palestinian conflict is the main issue – no matter how many bypasses and go-arounds Netanyahu constructs to avoid the problem. Those who insist on ignoring it may find themselves once again cleaning up the remains of bombed-out buses. This time, the horrors might be the result of standard issue explosive devices rather than the improvised ones manufactured in amateur laboratories in Nablus and Jenin.
That is precisely Tehran’s latest move. According to recent reports, Iran is behind smuggling networks of weapons and explosive devices to the West Bank and to Arab criminal organizations inside the Green Line.