The army has embraced postmodern military doctrines, which have eroded its ability to win wars, says Ran Baratz, a teacher at the IDF’s war college.
(Jan. 20, 2025 / JNS)
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.
So Baratz says of a ceasefire, “whatever the government thinks best.” His focus is on bigger issues, such as how Israel can rebuild its once-vaunted military institutions.
The main problem in his view is postmodern military doctrine, which afflicts not just the IDF, but Western militaries in general. Postmodern doctrine replaced classical military doctrine as a result of two events.
The first was the advent of nuclear weapons.
Classical military doctrine targets the enemy’s capabilities. Destroy enough of them and the enemy yields. But winning decisive battles no longer seemed relevant when faced with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. The objective changed from victory to deterrence. Deterrence meant influencing the enemy’s consciousness.
Non-military “experts” came onto the scene to develop deterrence strategies by “manipulating the enemy’s state of mind. Social scientists, it was naively assumed, had the relevant tools for this purpose,” Baratz explains in his recent thought-provoking Mosaic article, “What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military?”
The second event propelling postmodern doctrine was the end of the Cold War.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western nations believed conventional wars were at an end. They cut their defense budgets dramatically. All that remained were “asymmetrical wars,” i.e. those waged by states against non-state actors.
Deterrence strategies that had been developed to avoid nuclear war were adapted to the asymmetrical battlefield, Baratz says. The stronger side would employ its superior technology. Terms such as “precision-guided munitions” and “shock and awe” became standard.
Israel was initially unaffected by postmodern military ideas, only to be overwhelmed by them in the 1990s with the onset of the Oslo Accords and the “peace process.” Ideas advanced by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, in which technology made territory obsolete, were embraced by the national-security establishment, he says.
The Second Lebanon War, or what Baratz calls “the worst military campaign Israel had ever waged,” saw postmodern ideas in action. Two formal commissions charged with examining the IDF’s failure in that war identified misguided military doctrine as the cause.
One of the commissions was headed by former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Shomron. Shomron, complaining of a military approach producing “effects” vs. targeting the enemy’s capabilities, groused, “We used to hit the enemy on the head with a club—and then he felt the effects.”
Notes Baratz, “The postmodern IDF’s approach was to try to reach the ‘effects’ stage without the intermediate clubbing phase, which, unsurprisingly, turned out not to work in the real world.”
Despite the commissions’ findings, nothing changed after the Second Lebanon War as the people responsible for the debacle were left in charge.
Baratz worries that the lessons of Oct. 7 also aren’t being absorbed. The recently released Nagel Commission report, which made recommendations for the IDF’s future budget and force buildup, has proven a disappointment.