HMM: Why Hamas still stands: Failed military doctrine drives IDF thinking.

Ran Baratz, who teaches military doctrine at the IDF’s National Defense College and founded Mida, an online Hebrew-language Commentary-like magazine, raises no objections to the ceasefire deal with Hamas—but not for the reasons one would expect. It’s because the IDF can’t win. At least, not with a General Staff marinated in postmodern military doctrine.

Baratz notes that the army’s rank-and-file is second to none, but the General Staff’s lack of strategy results in endless targeted raids, where the IDF goes in, kills some terrorists, retreats, then reenters the same area to cope with more terrorists—and lose more of its valiant young soldiers.

“When generals don’t have a strategy, they come up with an overarching strategy of attrition, which doctrinally, is achieved by raids,” Baratz told JNS on Jan. 15.

“They have different names for raids. In Vietnam, it was called ‘search and destroy.’ But it was the same idea. You raid a place, you kill the enemy combatants, with some collateral damage, and you pull back. You could see that in the Second Lebanon War [in 2006], and you can see that today. If they had a good operational plan, they wouldn’t be speaking about raids,” he says.

The General Staff didn’t even have a plan in place to invade the Gaza Strip, Baratz says. They thought it wasn’t needed as Hamas was “deterred.” That’s why it took so long for the IDF to go into Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion.

It seems almost impossible to believe there was no contingency plan for Hamas/Gaza but hubris is one of humanity’s most common failings.

There will be a next time and the IDF has until then to correct its ways.