Fundamental Surprises Zvi Lanir Decision Research 1201 Oak ...

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to sacrifice a lot for even a very small military achievement, which could then be used as leverage in the political negotiations that followed the war. Although far more comprehensive an account that any other signal-versusnoise explanations, the misconception explanation is still too narrow, and it leaves the essence of the surprise unexplained. The essence of Israel’s surprise in the Yom Kippur War was sudden discoveries about themselves, which came as a cascade, each one wider and with deeper meaning than its predecessor. The cascade of surprising self-revelations went on even after the war, to include subjects beyond the military and defense realms. The first revelation of Israel’s surprise in the war was that it could not conduct a decisive war. That meant a fundamental problem with its politicalmilitary doctrine. These revelations became evident immediately after the first hours of the fighting; they were astonishing and shocking. The very fact that Israel intelligence failed to adopt the misconception does not explain the intensity of Israel’s shock, nor the devastating military situation in which it found itself during the first days of the war. On October 7 th and in the following days when the news from the battles became public, Israelis were shaken by the collapse of faith in their leaders’ repeated assurances that the Six Day War victory had consolidated Israel’s security, transformed Israel into a regional power and assured a long-term perpetuation of its political strategic status. It took some more time before they realized that what they had conceived of as the IDF’s qualitative superiority might not be enough to defeat the Arabs’ quantitative superiority and that, in fact, their qualitative superiority was questionable. They were surprised when it emerged that the IDF lacked the power to decide a battle on two fronts simultaneously and had to come to terms— at least temporarily—with Arab military achievements on one front to tip the balance on the other. All these shockingly revealed the limits of Israel’s power. Although Israel finally won the war militarily, the realization that Israel’s limited strength constituted an insufficient response to Arab threats undermined Israel’s
self-image in the context of the Arab conflict, its past military achievements and future course. Only months after the war, Israel surprisingly discovered that they and their leaders misunderstood Egyptian war goals. Israelis’ images of themselves in relation to their adversary had been inseparable from their understanding of their adversaries’ aims. The problem lay in the Israel doctrine, which explicitly stated that the Arab’s objectives are and will be to destroy the state of Israel. In this context, information about the enemy, accurate as it was, had very little relevance in creating a more complex understanding of the national “self,” nor did it support an understanding of the “other” in relation to them. The shock of the Yom Kippur War, however, succeeded in raising questions. Ironically, it is these revelations—and those yet to appear—which became the cornerstone for the peace process. Chapter 3 Notes 1. Agranat Report 1974. Commission of Inquiry—the Yom Kippur War: Partial Report. Submitted April 2, 1974. English translation: Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 4, No. 1, 1979; 70-90. 2. In Israel, Military Intelligence is in charge of national evaluation. 3. Agranat Commission Report p. 19 Am Oved Tel Aviv 1975 (Hebrew). 4. An interview with Dov Goldstein (reporter) Maariv. November 2 nd , 1973. (Hebrew) 5. Roberta Wohlstetter: Pearl Harbor- Warning and <strong>Decision</strong> (1962). 6. A. Ben <strong>Zvi</strong> “About the surprise: A comparative analysis of four Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Surprise Attacks” World Politics, 28 (April 1976) pp. 381-395. M. I. Handel “Perception, Papers on Peace Problems No. 19. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1976. A. Shlaim “Failures in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Yom Kippur War” World Politics Vol. 28 (April 1976) pp. 348-380; “The Yom Kippur War and the Inevitability of Surprise,” International Studies Quarterly, 21(September 1977), 461-501; Janice Gross Stein, “’Intelligence’ and ‘Stupidity’
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Fundamental Surprises Zvi Lanir Dec
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surprises study their victims’ be
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According to the glossary of the Ch
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and noise. Understood either litera
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Therefore, despite her convincing a
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Page 17 and 18: many of the cultural misunderstandi
Page 19 and 20: 1. See the definition of the word
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Page 57 and 58: apidly learned the lessons of the s
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Sadat’s view on the Israel-Arab C
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Real stories are unfinished ones; a
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has a print gallery in which there
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wisdom that entropy always increase
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does not affect your freedom, but y
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Fundamental thinking, which means t
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kept, they are only partial and usu
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12. H. A. Simon. 13. J. Steinbruner
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