The IDF's Role Can't Simply Be to 'Manage' Threats 

"Why have the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struggled to achieve decisive victories over our regional enemies?"

It's one question I have repeatedly been asked by American and European defense reporters.

A portion of my answer is that, for many years, the IDF's senior leadership adopted an incremental approach to warfare — what Israelis often refer to as "mowing the grass" or "kicking the can down the road."

Rather than seeking to eliminate threats decisively, the objective frequently became managing them.

In this writer's view, however, this reflects a deeper problem: an institutional reluctance to think and act decisively.

Many outside observers still imagine the IDF as the embodiment of rapid, maneuver-based warfare, but that image no longer reflects the reality of recent decades.

For many Israelis, the recurring question is painfully familiar:

• "Why do we continue fighting the same enemies generation after generation?"
• "Why does every round of conflict end with the expectation that another one is only a matter of time?"

Much of the criticism has focused on strategic decisions made over many years by successive military and political leaders.

During this period, the IDF reduced portions of its armored and maneuver forces while placing greater emphasis on elite special operations, intelligence capabilities, precision air power, and technological superiority.

Those capabilities remain essential, but many critics argue that they came at the expense of the large-scale ground forces needed to achieve decisive military objectives.

The events of Oct. 7, 2023, have led many Israelis to question whether that balance had shifted too far.

The IDF also embraced a doctrine that emphasized minimizing civilian casualties and exercising restraint whenever possible.

These principles reflect both Israel's democratic values and its obligations under the laws of armed conflict.

Nevertheless, many Israelis believe that, in practice, these policies sometimes limited operational effectiveness.

Measures such as warning civilians before airstrikes were intended to reduce civilian harm, but critics argue that they also gave terrorists opportunities to escape, regroup, or relocate military assets.

Likewise, operations that relied heavily on dangerous ground raids rather than overwhelming firepower often exposed Israeli soldiers to greater risks.

Whether those trade-offs were justified remains the subject of intense debate.

Another policy that has come under heavy criticism is the strategy often described as "quiet for quiet" — maintaining relative calm as long as Hamas and Hezbollah refrained from major attacks.

While intended to preserve stability and avoid unnecessary escalation, critics contend that this approach allowed Hamas to expand its tunnel network, improve its military infrastructure, and prepare extensively for future conflict, while Hezbollah continued building one of the world's largest rocket arsenals. In hindsight, many now believe that deterrence proved far weaker than policymakers assumed.

There was no greater example of this than the catastrophic attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which exposed profound failures in intelligence, preparedness, and strategic assessment.

Many Israelis believe these failures were rooted in what has become known as the "misconception" — the belief that Hamas had been effectively deterred and was no longer interested in launching a large-scale assault.

The consequences of that assumption were devastating.

Although the IDF has assured everybody that it has learned from its mistakes, this writer has reason to doubt this.

First of all, the IDF’s campaign against Hezbollah has lacked the kind of offensive ground maneuvers designed to surround and annihilate the terrorist organization.

The dangerously shallow "security zone" concept that the IDF has embraced, instead, has repeatedly failed in the past to defeat Hezbollah.

Thus, there is no reason to believe it will succeed this time around.

Israeli combat officers with whom I've discussed the situation in Lebanon are unanimously of the opinion that both our political and military echelons are basically slow walking the campaign either out of fear of angering the Trump administration or simply because our general staff has forgotten how to conduct maneuver warfare.

More worryingly, reports now indicate that Hezbollah is being rearmed with Iranian weapons and is rotating fresh troops into frontline positions.

Then, there is the IDF's new "concept" for border defense. It involves a combination of frontier "buffers" backed up by heavily armed mobile units designed to preemptively crush an enemy force before it can cross the border. Nobody, however, seems to like it.

Critics of this new doctrine have pointed out that it is essentially defensive in nature, yields the initiative to the enemy, still assumes accurate and timely intelligence will be available to cue a preemptive response and, most importantly, it fails to accept the need to decisively destroy an enemy, rather than simply "manage" the threat it poses.

So, how is this new doctrine playing out along our border with Gaza?

Recently, I read about Magen 48, an organization established in memory of the 48 first responders who lost their lives on Oct. 7, 2023.

Its mission is to train and equip local emergency response teams so that frontline communities can defend themselves until the army arrives.

This is an admirable and necessary initiative, and those involved deserve enormous respect.

At the same time, I find it troubling that such organizations have become necessary at all. To me, their existence reflects an expectation that communities may once again face attacks before the military can respond.

In my view, Israel should aspire to a strategy that prevents such scenarios rather than merely preparing for them. That does not mean abandoning moral principles or acting recklessly. It means developing policies that aim to remove existential threats decisively instead of managing them indefinitely.

Reasonable people will disagree about how that objective should be achieved.

Some advocate diplomatic solutions alongside military pressure; others favor more aggressive military action and long-term changes to Israel's security policy.

Whatever one's preferred approach, the lessons of Oct. 7, 2023, can't be ignored.

Israel's citizens deserve a strategy that restores security, rebuilds public confidence, and ensures that future generations are not condemned to fight the same battles repeatedly.

Jonathan Pollard is an Israeli citizen, co-president of the Israeli First Movement, and adviser to several technology start-up businesses.