Rethinking Contemporary Warfare: A Sociological View of the Al-Aqsa Intifada

5. The IDF Reacts

39 5 The IDF Reacts Loose Coupling, In-between Organizations, and Organizational Adaptation During the first few months of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Israel’s top generals set a rather self-congratulatory tone in regard to how the conflict was waged. The tone was set, as Oren, a military analyst for Ha’aretz newspaper, observes, because the conflict was pursued without many Israeli casualties, without it transforming into a wider war, and without the intrusion of foreign forces into the region (HA October 5, 2001). Indeed, this initial period is considered by senior IDF officers one of the most successful cases in which forces were prepared for their mission. Before the conflict, the military initiated the large-scale forti fication of outposts, rewrote a manual for such warfare, and carried out a series of remarkably successful simulations in mock Palestinian villages specially built for this purpose (Harel and Isacharoff 2004, 57; Jerusalem Post July 13, 2001; YA August 10, 2001). Yet as Drucker and Shelach (2005, 50) observe, despite the admiring mood set by the army’s top commanders, the civil uprising in the occupied territories was always seen as a prologue to the real thing, a full-fledged clash along the country’s external borders and especially with Syria. The idea was that the uprising would take only a few days—the simulations took three days—during which it would be important to emerge clearly victorious. Thus training was based on assumptions, never fully stated, that the uprising would be brief, and that the real danger lay in a full-scale conventional war. In doing so, the IDF may have inadvertently contributed to the prolongation of the conflict, since during its first few days it used massive firepower in order to seek victory. 40 Rethinking Contemporary Warfare After a few months, however, it dawned upon Israel’s top commanders that the IDF was facing a new type of contest, one that would take a long time to resolve (if at all). In fact, the reactions of groundlevel troops reflected changed understandings of how the struggle should be waged. Let us begin a few not untypical examples. First, the words of a commander of a Nahal infantry company: You place a platoon commander and thirteen soldiers in some assignment in the city. While I try to visit every day, it’s very clear to me that my influence on how he will perform when they shoot at him at night . . . no, I don’t have any influence. It all depends on his personal ability and how much I prepared him beforehand. We understand that all of the actions will be wrapped up already at the level of the patrol commander or the commander of the ambush. The ones that will arrive later will be the extraction team, and how things will develop afterwards will depend on the specifics of the event. But the direct factor facing the terrorist in the ambush is the commander of the ambush and no one else. A commander of an armored company in the Gaza area said this: When we arrived in Netsarim [in the Gaza Strip], it was an intense day, especially the first day there was a shooting battle that I was called to; and I found that there was a lot to learn . . . but we see a learning curve all of the time. The first time we missed a team of terrorist[s] that we could have killed, and in the end we only made them run away; and then you see, last week we took down [horadnu] some three people. The company has gone through such changes that it has no real organizational memory; except for one of the tank commanders, no one has ever carried out a night-vision ambush, no one was ever shot at. A paratroop officer noted: There is no situation in which the platoon is together, meaning that the platoon cohesion, no matter how you try to conserve it, crumbles. The platoon leader who wants to gather everyone together for a talk, something taken for granted in routine times, he can’t. He never has all of the soldiers directly under him. . . . He himself goes 41 The IDF Reacts out on assignments and many times it’s not with his own soldiers. . . . And the soldiers as well, they need him [the platoon commander], and...