The Sagger was a wire-guided missile that could be fired by a single soldier lying on the ground. Its range—the distance from which it could hit and destroy a tank—was 3,000 meters (or 1.86 miles), ten times that of an RPG. The Sagger was also far more powerful.[44]
Each shooter could work alone and did not even need a bush to hide behind—a shallow depression in the desert sand would do. A shooter had only to fire in the direction of a tank and use a joystick to guide the red light at the back of the missile. So long as the soldier could see the red light, the wire that remained connected to the missile would allow him to guide it accurately and at great distance into the target.[45]
Israeli intelligence knew about the Saggers before the war, and had even encountered them in Egyptian cross-border attacks during the War of Attrition, which began just after the 1967 war. But the top brass thought the Saggers were merely another antitank weapon, not qualitatively different from what they had successfully contended with in the 1967 war. Thus, in their view, doctrines to oppose them already existed, and nothing was developed to specifically address the Sagger threat.
Reshef and his men had to discover for themselves what type of weapon was hitting them and how to cope with it, all in the heat of battle.
Drawing on the men’s reports, Reshef’s remaining officers realized that the Saggers had some weaknesses: they flew relatively slowly, and they depended on the shooter’s retaining eye contact with the Israeli tank. So the Israelis devised a new doctrine: when any tank saw a red light, all would begin moving randomly while firing in the direction of the unseen shooter.
The dust kicked up by the moving tanks would obscure the shooter’s line of sight to the missile’s deadly red light, and the return fire might also prevent the shooter from keeping his eye on the light.
This brand-new doctrine proved successful, and after the war it was eventually adopted by NATO forces. It had not been honed over years of gaming exercises in war colleges or prescribed out of an operations manual; it had been improvised by soldiers at the front.
As usual in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from the bottom up—from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real time, on the fly.
Yet what these soldiers were doing was strange. If they had been working in a multinational company or in any number of other armies, they might not have done such things, at least not on their own. As historian Michael Oren, who served in the IDF as a liaison to other militaries, put it, “The Israeli lieutenant probably has greater command decision latitude than his counterpart in any army in the world.”[46]
This latitude, evidenced in the corporate culture we examined in the previous chapter, is just as prevalent, if not more so, in the Israeli military. Normally, when one thinks of military culture, one thinks of strict hierarchies, unwavering obedience to superiors, and an acceptance of the fact that each soldier is but a small, uninformed cog in a big wheel. But the IDF doesn’t fit that description. And in Israel pretty much everyone serves in the military, where its culture is worked into Israel’s citizens over a compulsory two- to three-year service.
The IDF’s downward delegation of responsibility is both by necessity and by design. “All militaries claim to value improvisation: read what the Chinese, French, or British militaries say—they all talk about improvisation. But the words don’t tell you anything,” said Edward Luttwak, a military historian and strategist who wrote The Pentagon and the Art of War and co-wrote The Israeli Army. “You have to look at structure.”[47]
To make his point, Luttwak began rattling off the ratios of officers to enlisted personnel in militaries around the world, ending with Israel, whose military pyramid is exceptionally narrow at the top. “The IDF is deliberately understaffed at senior levels. It means that there are fewer senior officers to issue commands,” says Luttwak. “Fewer senior officials means more individual initiative at the lower ranks.”
Luttwak points out that the Israeli army has very few colonels and an abundance of lieutenants. The ratio of senior officers to combat troops in the U.S. Army is 1 to 5; in the IDF, it’s 1 to 9. The same is true in the Israeli Air Force (IAF), which, though larger than French and British air forces, has fewer senior officers. The IAF is headed by a two-star general, a lower rank than is typical in other Western militaries.
For the United States, the more top-heavy approach may well be necessary; after all, the U.S. military is much larger, fights its wars as far as eight thousand miles from home, and faces the unique logistical and command challenges of deploying over multiple continents.
Yet regardless of whether each force is the right size and structure for the tasks it faces, the fact that the IDF is lighter at the top has important consequences. The benefit was illuminated for us by Gilad Farhi, a thirty-year-old major in the IDF. His career path was fairly typicaclass="underline" from a soldier in a commando unit at age eighteen, to commanding an infantry platoon, then a company, he was next appointed a spokesman of the Southern Command. After that he became the deputy commander of Haruv, an infantry battalion. Now he is the commander of an incoming class of one of the IDF’s most recent infantry regiments.
We met him at a base on a barren edge of the Jordan Valley. As he strode toward us, neither his youth nor his attire (a rumpled standard-issue infantry uniform) would have pegged him as commander of the base. We interviewed him the day before his new class of recruits was to arrive. For the next seven months, Farhi would be in charge of basic training for 650 soldiers, most of them fresh out of high school, plus about 120 officers, squad commanders, sergeants, and administrative staff.[48]
“The most interesting people here are the company commanders,” Farhi told us. “They are absolutely amazing people. These are kids—the company commanders are twenty-three. Each of them is in charge of one hundred soldiers and twenty officers and sergeants, three vehicles. Add it up and that means a hundred and twenty rifles, machine guns, bombs, grenades, mines, whatever. Everything. Tremendous responsibility.”
Company commander is also the lowest rank that must take responsibility for a territory. As Farhi put it, “If a terrorist infiltrates that area, there’s a company commander whose name is on it. Tell me how many twenty-three-year-olds elsewhere in the world live with that kind of pressure.”
Farhi illustrated a fairly typical challenge facing these twenty-three-year-olds. During an operation in the West Bank city of Nablus, one of Farhi’s companies had an injured soldier trapped in a house held by a terrorist. The company commander had three tools at his disposaclass="underline" an attack dog, his soldiers, and a bulldozer.
If he sent the soldiers in, there was a high risk of additional casualties. And if he sent the bulldozer to destroy the house, this would risk harming the injured soldier.
To further complicate matters, the house shared a wall with a Palestinian school, and children and teachers were still inside. From the roof of the school, journalists were documenting the whole scene. The terrorist, meanwhile, was shooting at both the Israeli forces and the journalists.
Throughout much of the standoff, the company commander was on his own. Farhi could have tried to take charge from afar, but he knew he had to give his subordinate latitude: “There were an infinite number of dilemmas there for the commander. And there wasn’t a textbook solution.” The soldiers managed to rescue the injured soldier, but the terrorist remained inside. The commander knew that the school staff was afraid to evacuate the school, despite the danger, because they did not want to be branded “collaborators” by the terrorists. And he knew that the journalists would not leave the roof of the school, because they didn’t want to miss breaking news. The commander’s solution: empty the school using smoke grenades.
45
Azriel Lorber,
47
Interview with Edward Luttwak, senior associate, Center for Strategic and International Studies, December 2008.
48
This section is based on an interview with Major Gilad Farhi, commander, Kfir infantry unit, IDF, November 2008.