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7 Casualty Sensitivity and Political-Military Relations
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>> 181 7 Casualty Sensitivity and Political-Military Relations Casualty aversion may affect the balance of power between generals and policymakers and therefore affect civilian control over the armed forces. As democracies suffer fewer military casualties in their wars than do other regimes (Valentino et al. 2010), this inevitably extends to the way democracies control their militaries. In the end, the willingness to pay the costs of war is one of the central mechanisms through which public opinion and collective actors may affect foreign policy choices, inspired by the impacts of the variables of politics of war as sketched in the previous chapters. Aldrich et al. (2006, 494– 495) noted that in the United States, the public acts as a constraint on elites that are more willing to use force. In this way, the willingness to sacrifice has an impact on the elites’ desire to undertake overseas military missions but at the same time to minimize losses (Mandel 2004) and therefore also to monitor the military. Casualty sensitivity is thus germane to the study of civilian control, with civilian institutions mediating between the public and the military. Feaver and Kohn (2001, 467) recognized that the casualty-aversion approach is not merely an expression of the military’s self-preservation but 182 > 183 prestate Jewish institutions. These funded the paramilitary organizations and recruited the human resources (volunteers) needed, thereby establishing the material dependency of the organizations on the political institutions. Central to this process of state building was the middle-class-based Labor Party (and its previous forms), which established itself in the prestate period as the dominant party; it held this position for about fifty years, showing impressive institution-building ability (Shapiro 1984). Within the framework of this structure, the young state could realize its monopolist control of the means of violence in 1948 by establishing the IDF while smoothly dismantling prestate underground organizations. In spite of this, however, friction between politicians and generals did develop in the state’s first years, when the IDF carried out reprisal raids against neighboring Arab countries and often acted independently and in defiance of Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon and Prime Minister Moshe Sharett (both successors to the first prime minister and defense minister, David Ben-Gurion). In some cases, the IDF virtually imposed a series of operations or exceeded what the politicians approved or did not even report its cross-border activity to the prime minister (for examples, see Dayan 1976, 150–152; Morris 1993, 300–303; Sharett 1978, 34–41, 446–447, 514–526, 670– 680). The most notorious case was the telling “mishap” in 1954 that involved intelligence activity in Egypt, including planting bombs in several facilities, without clear or at least formal approval from the political level (Eshed 1979). Subsequently, because of the military’s dependence on state institutions, the politicians effectively resolidified their supremacy. To some extent, exchange relations were in force: the army accepted politicians’ unquestioned authority in exchange for huge material and human resources that allowed it to maintain a massive, long-term buildup, beyond the direct needs of the early 1950s. At the same time, politicians internalized the military way to deal with the perceived Arab threat (Ben-Eliezer 1997; Levy 1997a). In practical terms, the civilian leadership upgraded political supervision over the army by formalizing a procedure for approval of military operations. At the same time, the IDF formed relations of partnership, rather than instrumental obedience, with politicians. These relationships resulted in attenuated motivation among the generals for overt intervention in politics (Peri 1983). In 1967, this partnership was called into question. Following the mass entrance of Egyptian troops into the Sinai Peninsula on Israel’s border and Egypt’s closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in May 1967, senior IDF officers exerted pressure on Prime Minister and Defense Minister Levi Eshkol to launch a preemptive war against Egypt. Eshkol attempted to exhaust diplomatic means to resolve the crisis, but the generals perceived 184 > 185 new political space opened to collective actors from left and right alike, challenging previously agreed-upon military policies (see Lebel 2007). Later, more extra-institutional actors entered the scene, among them parents and reservists who targeted the human price of war, from the Beaufort Family to the bereaved parents of the Second Lebanon War, as detailed in previous chapters. As Stuart Cohen (2006) argued, a syndrome of “over-subordination ” of the military to the civilian echelon gradually evolved, signified by the erosion of the military’s professional autonomy...