Possible Lessons for the IDF

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,189, March 26, 2023

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The war in Ukraine is an example of modern high-intensity warfare. As such, it offers a number of lessons that can be learned about the capabilities, limitations, and requirements of armies conducting such warfare. New technology and methods have added capabilities, but have not rendered more traditional methods of warfare and technology obsolete. The IDF should learn to merge the new with the old by acquiring competence in new technology and tactics while maintaining technical and tactical competence in the veteran ”basics”.

This article will point out a few of the more important lessons the IDF can learn from the Russo-Ukraine War. Before discussing those lessons, however, a caveat must be stated. The political and military situations of Israel, Russia, and Ukraine are different, so not every lesson being taught by the warfare in Ukraine is relevant to Israel. Also, some lessons might be relevant “as is” while others might require adaptation.

A Shift in Expectations

There has been discussion for decades in Western armies and academia, as well as in Israel, on the changing characteristics of warfare. It has been proposed that these changes represent not merely an evolution but a revolution, in that changes are occurring not only in the characteristics of warfare but perhaps even in the nature of war itself. Some of this discussion is purely theoretical, while some is based on analysis of wars conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s. The year-long war in Ukraine has added much fuel to this debate.

Over the late 1990s and early 2000s, the IDF gradually adopted an extreme view of the transformation occurring in warfare and the adjustments it needed to make to its own composition and operational art. Future wars, its senior commanders believed, would no longer include major maneuvers of massed formations conducting high-intensity warfare (inaccurately dubbed “old”, “classic”, or “traditional” warfare), but would be purely low-intensity warfare with the enemy invariably employing methods of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Accordingly, it was argued, the IDF should be reorganized and…