School of War - Ep 232: Ran Baratz on the Gaza War and Israel’s ‘Postmodern’ Military

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Ran Baratz, military historian and former senior Israeli official, and author of What's Wrong with the Postmodern Military?, joins the show to discuss operations in Gaza and problems with how the IDF officer corps thinks about war. ▪️ Times     •      01:37 Introduction     •      02:27 Gaza     •      06:23 Diplomatic obstacles             •      12:27 Worse than you think     •      15:28 Paradigm shift              •      30:23 Real wars              •      38:49 Art of the general            •      43:51 War as policy             •      50:00 Netanyahu Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

I assume most listeners will be familiar with critiques of Israel's war in Gaza from the left, critiques that emphasize humanitarian considerations, among other similar factors. But today we are going to take up a criticism of Israel's war from the right, from the Israeli right. We're going to be joined by Ron Barat, a military historian and former senior Israeli government official, who's going to make his case that Israel's struggles to defeat Hamas stem from what he calls his country's, quote, post-modern military. Let's get into it. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Ron Baratz. He's the founding editor of the Hebrew language news site Mita. He teaches philosophy, history, Zionist thought at a number of Israeli institutions. He has a doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Today we're going to talk about the war, the fighting in Gaza, and also a very interesting article that Ron wrote earlier this year in Mosaic magazine called What's Wrong with the Postmodern Military? Ron Baratts, thank you. Thank you so much for joining the show.

It's a real pleasure. Happy to be here. I think if you had told me on October the 8th, 2023, that it would be recording this on September the 18th, 2025, we would still be engaged in large-scale ground combat operations in Gaza, almost two years on. I would have not believed you. I would have said there's no way.

And I would have had all sorts of reasons to deploy to defend that point. I may even have said something like that at the time. Why are there still large-scale ground combat operations 23 or so months on? And maybe just for listeners who know that Israel has gone back in in a major way in Gaza in the last few days, but maybe aren't following the details. Give us a bit of a sense of what's actually happening on the ground. So what's happening right now is that forces are joining the battle of, let's call it, the city of Gaza, which is the biggest remaining outpost of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip is not that big, and the city takes a large part of it. And it was mostly left unharmed. I mean, there were some operations. There were, of course, some targeted bombing, but we didn't go into the city of Gaza in order to conquer it at any stage. So this is like one of the two major remaining parts of Gaza, where the IDF didn't really clear the area. So right now, forces are gathering, and they started encircling it.

according to the IDF, you know, a top echelon, it will take a few months. It's a very serious slow-going operation. They're doing it carefully. We suffered many casualties in the war, and so we are very reluctant to lose more. Today was very bad day in Gaza. We have four soldiers died from a charge. So we're taking our time. We're using the advantage of asymmetry, but taking it slow.

Now, that's good on the battleground, but of course in the international arena, Being slow doesn't help Israel because we are getting near the boycott stage from Europe, from example. The European Union is discussing boycotting Israel, which is pretty crazy. So there's a real tension here between, you know, going slow in order to be effective with less casualties, but suffering in the international arena. I wouldn't have believed two years ago that we will be here. It should have been a much faster operation, and there are many reasons.

why it is going so slow and also so bizarrely because, you know, we bring in troops and, you know, armored vehicles and the Air Force is bombing. At the same time, we supply Hamas with everything he needs in order to keep surviving. So it's like this is a paradoxical war, the first paradoxical war in history where you are, you supply your enemy while you engage it. You know, I don't want to second guess the IDF at a great distance on the 10th. tactical reasons for the slow movement, you know, the tunnels, the need to clear explosive devices, just the nasty terrain in which you have to operate in Gaza. I'm willing to take all of that just as a take it out on faith from the IDF that they are going as fast as is responsible.

I am curious about the operational or maybe the strategic delays and the, you know, big picture, the start and stop nature of the fighting in Gaza. Obviously, the fact that there are still hostages and attempts to get a deal for the hostages plays into this. But, you know, my question for you, Ron, is the prime minister in this government, Prime Minister Netanyahu, articulated very early on that the defeat of Hamas and the end of Hamas's rule in Gaza was a war aim, was a war objective. And I, you know, again, at the time I understood but was concerned. I was concerned about the feasibility of that. but I assumed that, okay, if that's the war aim, then Gaza is going to be seized. And there will presumably be some sort of ongoing counterinsurgency after that.

But you'll seize Gaza, you the Israelis will seize Gaza. And then, you know, there's some very difficult questions have to be answered about governance of Gaza after that. But sort of before you get to the insurgency and the governance and all that stuff, you have to seize the place. I took that as sort of an obvious implicit point in the ending Hamas's rule in Gaza. The IDF, the cabinet, they don't seem to have actually executed, according to what I would have taken to be a fairly commonsensical implication. Why do you think that is? Can you explain a bit what's going on there? So, you know, of course, it's multifaceted, right?

There are many reasons, like, for example, the pressure by the Biden administration, right? the outset of the war, at the beginning, the second day already, he told us that if we need to restock our munitions, we will have to bring in supplies to the Gazans. Now, all those things, I think are paradoxical. I mean, shorter wars are better for uninvolved population, right? So the shorter it is, the better it is for the uninvolved society around Hamas, as much as there is such a society. The longer it gets, the harder it is for them.

And so I think Biden was, it's like a logical fallacy. But anyway, from the beginning, we had such diplomatic obstacles, which translated very quickly to military obstacles, because if you don't have enough munitions, you're stuck operationally. But what I focus on, these are known things. And all Israelis know that, and of course, leaders of the world know that. We've developed a dependency on the US, which was a... you know, far beyond what is good and useful for Israel once it's in a military conflict. But beyond that, because I have a tendency to look inwards and look at Israel and ask,

what did we do wrong? Other than that of being dependent, what should we have done that would have prepared us better for October 7th? And there, most of my criticism is about the lack of professional thought and action by the military top Aeschelan in Israel and the deterioration in its professionalism, what I call military doctrine and operational art. We have lost the handle on military arts and professional art. And therefore, on October 7th, not only were we completely surprised,

we really had no army that was ready to go in and do what we both agree should have been done, which is sweep Gaza and sees it as fast as possible. And we didn't have intelligence, we didn't have the forces, we didn't have operational plans. And for me, the operational plan is the centerpiece. Because once you know what your plan is, then you go back and you engineer the army that you need in order to carry out that plan.

And since we had no plan, really what Israel had on October 7th are special forces who are very good in special operations, but no army ready and set and, you know, that could be mobilized for a war, which is very different than special operations. So Israel had a mindset of there will be no war.

We don't need to think about war. Operational art is something, you know, that died 40 years ago, 60 years ago. And everything, what we really need are, you know, select professional, elite soldiers that can pinpoint specific targets and carry out specific operations, which they do very successfully. Israel has, we really have great special forces, but no army, you know, the major part

of the army, the infantry, the armored corps, we didn't have, those were lacking, they lacked equipment, they lacked training and they had no plan. Nobody knew what to do with them. So that's why when the cabinet subpoenaed all the top military actually said, what can we do? Herzia Levi was then the chief of staff, said whatever we do, it will take us at least a year. Now, Gaza Strip is not a big place. And I agree, of course, it's very challenging because Hamas dug, you have upper Gaza and lower Gaza, right? The underground Gaza is really the difficult project.

And it does take a year. If you have no intelligence and you have no plans, then all you can do is walking slowly and do raids, which is what Elsie Lever did, and to no serious effect, I'm sorry to say. We, of course, you know, tactically we have many successes, but if you look at it operationally and strategically, they are transient successes, which is not what you want. Yeah. We had Yakov Katz on the show a few weeks ago. we talked mostly about October the 7th.

I know you guys won't agree about everything, but I think you do agree. And he talks about this in his book about the kind of de-emphasis within the IDF in recent decades of ground forces, of more traditional elements of military power like the infantry in favor of special operations, also in favor of, you know, the Air Force and the higher tech end of warfare, which, you know, to be fair, here we are sitting contemplating the enormous unsolved problem that is Gaza two years on. The fact is the IDF has performed spectacularly at various points in the last two years in other theaters of the broader regional conflict. So some of these investments certainly seem to have paid off for the IDF. And I suppose in defense of the ground forces, you know, the Lebanon operation in the fall of 24, 2024, which granted had its own whiz-bang technological aspects beginning with the supply chain attack and the beepers and the decapitation campaign. Nevertheless, there was a very traditional ground element to that. campaign, seizing terrain from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and reducing their, you know, various sort of entrenched camouflage facilities there.

And it seemed to me, I was able to go up along the line there in the middle of the fighting there, and it seemed to me like the IDF was acquitting itself fairly well. So I don't know if there's something unusually difficult about Gaza or how you, how you account for the relative success in Lebanon. No, in fact, I think Hezbollah militarily are admitted. But, you know, I want to argue against you that Israel is doing worse than you think. Okay. All right.

But I have to be truthful and say that I think that in Lebanon, too, we had a great opening strike that was not IDF. It was a different branch of security. Sure. And it gave us like a dream opening. This is like the utopian scenario for generals in history, right? You strike the leadership of the opposing force at the outset. They are all out of commission. The forces are confused.

Communication is dead. And we didn't do what, you know, the IDF would have done in 82. The operation in 82 without such an opening strike was much more successful, and much more military. What we did was, like, clean the areas that are near our border. Like we pushed the border a few kilometers, sometimes not even that. And of course, again, IDF soldiers are good soldiers. We have our best serving the army.

Everybody in Israel enlists. So we have a good army. And when they are tasked with something, they do it. But operationally, what we did was less than the minimum. First of all, because Chisbalah's main body does not sit in southern Lebanon. Some of it was in Beirut, which we did strike with the Air Force. But the large part of it, for example, is in the Baca. It's a very different area.

In ADU, we had influence over there because we brought in major forces and we got to Beirut so we could influence the entire region. What we did now is push Husbalah back. That's not enough. Especially if you have such an opening strike, you have to, it's militarily the concept is utilizing your success. You have to leverage your success operationally and just hitting such a meaningful strike and then doing actions close to the border and that's it, it leaves too much of

his bala intact. It's not enough. It's not enough to take out the leadership. It's not enough just to clean the border. You have to go deeper and you have to strike at their most important strongholds that were left, I'm sorry to say, were left pretty much unharmed and occasional you know, IAF operation, but not much more than that. So I want to ask you about your critique of the quote unquote postmodern military that you outlined in this mosaic piece and you've you've written about it elsewhere, too. You begin your story of what's gone wrong quite a ways ago, really, really in the middle of the 20th century.

And actually, you spent a fair amount of time talking about the United States in your argument. Why? Why do you begin in America and what happened around the middle of the 20th century that started all the problems in your view? So, yes, I'm a military historian, and I teach military history and military strategy in the idea, among the things that I do. And one of the things that kept bothering me was what I call a paradigm shift in, because I know the generals of my generation, and I know the current generals. I was also, I served at a high position in government and I sat in cabinet meetings and I met all the generals of 2016, 2017.

And I could see that there are a different type of generals. Something has changed. I call it a paradigm shift. So as an historian, you know, I went back. You go back to the drawing board of history, and you try to figure out what happened. So when Mosaic approached me after Tobassev, maybe you should write something, I said,

I want to write about the paradigm shift in military thinking, what I've got operational art, operational art and military doctrine, in the IDF, but I have to start, because the way I figured it out, I had to start the influences on Israel. We didn't invent it, so I had to go back and see where we got it from. And that's why I go to the U.S., which is the, of course, the U.S. has the strongest military and incredible investment in national security, definitely during the Cold War.

And so they took over the European part. You know, most of the military doctrine was once developed in Europe, but the shift has definitely changed and switched to the other side of the Atlantic. So I started to study that I begin. So Mosaic said, okay, you can write about that, although this is not their usual topic. But it turned out that, you know, they told me recently that this is one of the most read articles. So I think people are very interested in that. And they understand that something has changed and it's very useful to understand how.

So, you know, I will not go into a long lecture on the issue. But we had kind of what I call it, you know, the general. of the classical operational art that you could see in Europe and the US, that what they did, they took all the components of military action and they brought it together in a new way in order to have operations that will win the next war, right? So for, you know, Moldke the Elder, he fought two major wars, one small one, two major was one against Austria in 1866 and against France, of course, that's the war, the the first round out of three, the next one will be World War I and then World War

but the first Franco-Prussian war in 187071. And Moldke realized, for example, he had a Dreiser gun, which was the first bolt action gun, right? You could load it while lying down. It wasn't muzzle loaded that you had to stand up and forward everything from the top of the barrow. So this was a great advantage for the defense. You know, a defensive stance.

You lie down and you can aim and you can reload very quickly, but he wanted to attack. So what he did, he addressed the maneuver of the army, the way the army operated and he used trains, right? So he reinvented the operational art. Soldiers got to the battlefront very quickly, and then they could take a defensive position or fight in places like forests where they also had the advantage. This is like the classical operational thinking. The French on the other hand, to give you an example for how when it doesn't work, they had

the best first model of a machine gun, it's called the Mitterios. And you can see like in old Western movies where you suddenly have like this machine gun that you turn the wheel. Gatling gun on the French, yeah. So they had the first model. It could have been completely effective, but they thought of it as a cannon. So instead of supplying the front line of the infantry to shoot at the enemy storming them, they kept it back where the cannons were.

In France, they even called it the cannon, but the type of the cannon needed. So this is a mistake in operational art. And I could go on when they teach, this is, right, this is the love of, this is why I love, because this is the form of art and ingenuity like Armwood Warfare in 1940, France, Guddéryan and Manstein, coming together, deviant. devising a plan that utilizes all the advantages they could think of. And the French, again the French, they had tanks that were not wars, sometimes even better than the German tanks, but they just didn't have the operational conception that allowed

them to use them and fend off the attack. So this is the classical generalship, right? These are the generals that we want to study from and apply their creativity and ingenuity and intelligence to our modern, you know, but... challenges and advantages. This is classical, so this is the classical, what I call a classical military art. Sure.

Now we come to the transition, the first paradigm change, which was very radical in its own way, was after the Second World War, with in 1945 the bombing of Iroshimai and Nagasaki, the entire military, national security, I should say, not military, national security mindset changed.

Before that, everybody, thought, how do you win a war? Once the A-bomb were dropped, the entire national security discussion became, how do you prevent war? How do you avert it? And then you start have concepts like deterrence. Deterence is the new concept, you know, the generals should think about victory, about winning, not about deterring. But now deterrence makes an appearance and it's a crucial appearance. Of course, it's understandable in the the article, you know, I explain it. But what happens is deterring is, it relates not to the physical arena of war, but to a mental

arena of the leadership of whoever is your enemy. You want to deter him, so it's a psychological thing, it's a mental thing. And that's when natural security has been, began to be dominated by political scientists or social scientists from all disciplines. very notable ones, very smart people. In terms of the strategy, you have Wall Stutter and people like that, the Rand Corporation, which I mentioned, which had an immense influence over the establishment of a new national security doctrine that is centered on prevention and deterrence. That's the Cold War phase. Now, you still had generals, you still had people

thinking militarily because it was a realistic scenario that, for example, rather than Russia would suddenly invade Western Europe. Nobody knew that it wouldn't happen, so, but really generals took a backseat in national security for the first time. Next, again, if someone wants to elaborate, I refer him to my article. Now we come to the last stage, and this is our stage now. And Israel, by the way, bypassed the second stage, the Cold War stage, the paradigm of the Cold War because we kept fighting conventional wars.

We fought them in 48, in 56, in 67, in 73, and in 82. So we couldn't think about deterrence. We kept thinking about conventional wars and winning wars. So that generation was doing pretty well militarily. Now we come to the next stage, which is December 25th, Christmas, 1991, where the Soviet Union collapses, and on the 26th they have a meeting and they dismantle formally. Gorbachev is out. Bush addresses the nation in his Christmas speech saying, our enemies are now our friends. And immediately, this is like a shock wave. This is a tsunami. All Western

powers start diminishing the national security expenditure. All armies shrink. All enlisting goes significantly down. I gave a few numbers in the article, including in the U.S. So now the military has to reinvent itself with budgets being cut immensely, much less manpower, and the most obvious advantage is the technological advantage. So now we come to what's known as RMA, revolution in military affairs, with many acronyms that people who engage in that military history know very well, like effects-based operations, network-centric warfare, this is N-TW, EBO, et cetera, et cetera, everything is system of systems and precision-guided munitions, et cetera.

So the idea is, okay, we don't have the manpower, we don't have the budgets, but we have a technological advantage, and of course we don't have big enemies anymore, right? Because Russia has collapsed and the conventional war is like outdated, so we can use a technological advantage in order to do what. And this is the important thing. And last quote, and then we can go to Israel. I leave that up to you. There is a very nice book by Ullman and Wade

that's called Shock and Oweigh, Achieving Rapid Dominance. That's the name. And what they claim there is if you use your technological advantage, skillfully, what you do, what you can do is affect the mind of your enemy. You can control what he perceives, what he knows, and what you think, what he thinks. And you can also prevent him from perceiving and knowing things. You can use all those effects by leveraging your technological advantage, basically to convince him that he lost. You don't have to win. You just have to persuade your enemy by using force but limited precision

symbolic strikes, you will be convinced that he already lost. So this is, of course, I think it's, I don't know, I don't want to ridicule it too much, but it's just fantasia land, right? That wars don't happen that way, and your enemies don't behave that way. And if you were the victim of such an attack, you wouldn't think you lost, you would keep on fighting. But they thought that they could do it. And of course, this was part of the RMA were, you know, heavily funded, this was the future, everyone believed that this is where things are going, and this were picked up in Israel.

Yeah. This approach was picked up, and our generalship since then has been an RMA kind of generalship. So there's a lot there, and I want to unpack and focus it on a few things. You know, in the article, you attribute America's struggles in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, in part to the collection of phenomena that you just described. And I guess I find myself, it's a really interesting. interesting piece. And I commend it to listeners. It was thought-provoking and provocative in a good way. It's got something in there to kind of provoke everyone as you read through it. And I find myself

sympathetic to all the parts and skeptical on some level of the whole, I guess, is how I would characterize my response. So, you know, I'm skeptical of political scientists in general. And so obviously as, you know, the Revolution Military Affairs, which has this core aspect, which is a very straightforward just adoption of technology, you know, is the digital revolution coming to war fighting, which is unavoidable and has to be harnessed and sort of natural and being fast with it gives you a real advantage. I don't think you would disagree with any of that. But then it bleeds out into all this other stuff, this jargony sort of doctrines like effects-based operations is the one. I remember that played a big role in Israel's shortcomings in 2006, if I recall correctly, this notion that you

can create this sort of spectacle of dominance and that somehow is going to make the other guy give up. I remember being even as a relatively young guy, pretty skeptical of that at the time. But here's, I want to, I want to get to my, I guess, confusion. And I'll use Afghanistan as an example. Obviously, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan after many, many years of fighting. Did we lose it because of what you're describing? I've always had a different account. And I want to, I'll just share it with you and see if you agree or disagree or if it actually matches which you're arguing, but just in different words. I wouldn't have said it's because, you know, the revolution in military affairs

and a military that's too focused on deterrence and limited wars and a sort of forgotten victory. That wouldn't have been my account. My account would be that actually to the extent that we could use technology tactically, it was extremely helpful and very bad for the Taliban and very good for us. But we never had a compelling, realistic political strategy at the highest level. We never really understood what Afghanistan could tolerate and what would what would be required to actually govern Afghanistan. It was always fanciful.

And then you add to that the sort of very traditional sort of staring you right in the face, counterinsurgents mistake of not dealing with the Pakistani sanctuary. And those two things in combination are the things I would put in the dock as the real the ones that done it. And that's bipartisan, George Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are all in their different ways at fault for various pieces of that. that puzzle, the fact that the U.S. military was this high-tech military that, you know, was, you know, steeped in theories of deterrence and all the other elements of war fighting that you talk about, I don't know if that's what I would blame it on. What do you say to that? So, first of all, I don't mention Afghanistan in the article. And for an obvious reason, it's a small-kill war. This is the kind of war that you can do, actually, with special forces,

highly skilled, highly trained, very targeted objectives, etc. But my question is, what would the U.S. do and are your generals intellectually equipped to deal with a real war, a real-scale kind of war that would start, let's say Russia would have swept, Russia, of course, also deteriorated military? Let's say they would have swept Ukraine and then start furthering the West. And now the U.S. has to involve in a real ground war with a major power. and not insurgency and counterinsurgency. Because for those things, really, you know, precision

and the digital real material force, they give you a huge advantage. But if you look at NATO and what they can do really militarily, if faced with the real army, the answer is it sticks and stones. And Israel also, I'm translating it all back to Israel. It might work for the United States in some respect.

By the way, after a pilot ship, many people, you know, a few friends said to me who are more knowledgeable than I about what happened in the second Iraq War, and they said, actually, many generals rejected RMA conceptions and pushed for a more classical approach to the ground war. And they had their way. I mean, they had a lot of command power to do that. But going back, I'm worried as an Israeli, I don't have to fight a distance. war with a counterinsurgency problem in Afghanistan, I have real armies around me. They are very close to me. There is an army being built in Syria right now. There is a small army in Jordan. We have peace with Jordan. We have peace with Egypt. Egypt has been fortifying its military. They've been building like crazies. They have no money. They prevent food from their people in order

to invest vast amounts in, you know, armored vehicles and their Air Force and their Navy and digging huge deposits in Sinai. This is what I'm worried about. And generals who can deal with the insurgency are not equipped to deal with that kind of threat. This is what we lost. And about, you know, social sciences, I emphasize in the article, and maybe the, that's the most important part to understand, the difference in paradigm.

Because what happened during the phase of the Cold War is the social sciences transition the debate from the physical realm, which is what militaries usually do, to the psychological, mental, even spiritual realm. You win by influence operations because you manipulate your enemy's consciousness. This is, now when it comes to your enemy leader, that you want to avert from pushing the right button, okay, we need to speak about it. But what happened during the Wade and Ulman, shock, and all phase

is that they started applying those theories to military affairs. I mean, strict military, we can defeat the enemy's military by manipulating its consciousness. Now, that's a new level of craziness, if you ask me. And this is what we saw in Lebanon. And this is, and now the people, I give you another example, Israeli top echelon officers, that they're obsessed with speaking about on deterrence and influence operations, right? This is what occupies, they think that this is what militaries do.

You manipulate your enemy's consciousness. They've been indoctrinated into that paradigm, right? So this is what, deterrence is not a military concept. Deterance is an outcome of a very efficient and scary army, but the army does not think about itself as deterring. It thinks about itself as winning. So when your enemy knows that you will win, then on the second level, political level, you can say it's deterred.

But when the military person thinks that what he needs to do is deter and not win, then And they start making shortcuts. There is a former IDF chief of staff that I quote, Dan Shomron. He was in the committee that studied the Second Lebanon War in 2006. And he said, it used to be, in my time, Dan Shumon, that you hit your enemy with a club on the head, and then it had effects, right? The effects-based operations. Now they just want to have the effects with the clubbing phase.

The clubbing phase is redundant. I can manipulate your consciousness to thinking that you've been hit. So my whole argument is that this is a completely misguided indoctrination and it's so prevalent and so, you know, everybody goes through it unless they have some conservative, more classical, military training and education that keeps a core of that profession the way it used to be. And if you do that, then you can add another layer of a,

counterinsurgency and you can add a layer of manipulating consciousness. You can think about all those things as auxiliary, but you can make them the profession. So I don't know how bad things are in the US. I think during Obama's phase, it probably deteriorated in that respect as well. The intellectual training of officers. A lot of military, classical stuff was pushed out. We know that in the economy it doesn't exist, almost doesn't exist anymore. So you have nowhere to learn unless you have like a classical, more conservative military academy.

In Israel, we don't have a military academy. And that's why all those generals, they're very influenced by fashion. They don't have that core of their profession, that intellectual basis, pillar of understanding of their profession that you can add layers on top of. So all they have is those top layers of RMA. And they turn their IDF into an RMA army. And this I lament. So just let me repeat back to you what I think I understand about how this works in Israel in plain language.

And you tell me if I'm understanding it correctly. So basically the Israeli senior officer corps, a lot of them get education in the United States and have good relations with the United States military. And also fashion crosses the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. And so the same fashions that reign in the United States rain. reign in the academy in Israel as well. And so you have all these officers, I'm just repeating what I take your argument to be. You have all these officers learning together, training together. And as they start their strategic education, whenever in their career that occurs, they're immersed in all these political science ideas and sort of complicated debates about deterrence and about grand strategy and theories of security, which like any conversation, I mean, parts of it can be valuable and parts of it can be nonsense.

But your sort of core point is actually that's sort of the wrong conversation for them to be having. They should be reminding learning, figuring out how to win battles and how to string a series of battles together to win campaigns so as to win a war and achieve victory. And all of these more complicated questions of limited war versus unlimited war versus how that nests into a total theory of security. They may be legitimate conversations, but they're the wrong conversation. That's not the art of the general. Is that sort of fair? Yeah, it's fair. And what they do in the U.S. usually,

the training, the intellectual training parts of the IDF's officer career are mostly for relaxing. They don't really, it's a vacation in a year in the States. Of course, they have many friends there and the connection and they study something. But it's much more social sciences. The IDF generals have degrees in social science. They don't have degrees in military studies. So they lack the basic understanding of their profession. And I know it sounds strange, but really the lack of intellectual training was never, it was

always absent in the IDF, but since we fought wars, we had a lot of experience. So people like Arik Sharon, for example, Ariel Sharon was a great general. And he was a smart guy. He read a lot and he was an autodidact in military affairs. But he had, I mean, he fought several real wars, conventional wars, so his ingenuity and expertise could develop on top of experience. When you don't have that, all that's left is your intellectual training and your training, your physical training. And you could see, you could just see if you, you know, those statistics are a secret. But after the second Lebanon war, some of it was revealed.

The IDF stopped training. Why do you train? if you believe there will be no more wars, why do you train? What you need are your, you know, the elite forces that can do those special operations. And now what I'm saying is they don't, when they will hear this conversation, they will not understand it. Because they didn't read to see this and they didn't read even, you know, the Klausovitz, there is a joke by military sterns to speak with generals. The first one who says Klausovitz, never read it. This is like the buzzword.

If you want you, you know that you lost the argument and he said, and he doesn't, he never read it. He doesn't really know what he said. So they didn't read Closwitz. They didn't read Guderian, they didn't read Munchstein, didn't read David Chandler on Napoleon campaign, a great work of art. They didn't read JFC Fuller and they didn't even read Litherhart, which is like, you know, more basic.

They just don't study. So the only thing they have is their experiences as relatively junior commanders, right, as platoon leaders and such. And then they go off and start speaking about economics and international relations and, you know, the RMA and the technological advantage and asymmetrical warfare. But they didn't go through the operational stage. They don't have a grasp of what operational art is and discussions about military doctrines

as they were happening all the time in history and even in Israel, it's like a blind spot. So when you speak with them, they still don't see. So it's very frustrating. So I wonder, I just want to sort of draw this argument out a bit. Is it fair to put all the blame on the generals, as it were, and the officer corps, don't the politicians, and in Israel, you know, the cabinet in the United

States, it would be our presidents and their senior civilian advisors, national security advisors and secretaries of state and defense, if the generals in your account are sort of studying the wrong things and even worse as they try to understand matters of national security and affairs of state and international relations, they're also kind of prey to fashions that lead them into wholly headed thinking and they're not focused on what they should be focused on. The politicians should know, you know, it is the politician's job to think about whether a war should be limited or total. That is a very fair thing for a president of the United States or a prime minister of

Israel to be thinking about. I question in the American context how rigorous the grand strategic thinking of some of our presidents and cabinets have been over the years. You know, I just, is that something that you agree with that in addition to critiques we might offer about officer education and what general should know that our politicians also don't are political leaders at a senior level don't have a good grasp of war as a element of state policy making and how to fit it into a broader vision perhaps i don't know i'm making this up as i go so perhaps for similar reasons as the generals or perhaps for different reasons entirely i'm not

sure but you know again just sticking with the american example our failures in vietnam iraq afghanistan And there's a lot of blame to go around. I'm not sure it all belongs to the generals. I think the politicians deserve a fair amount of it. So it depends on the era and, of course, the location. So I think McNamara has, and the Whits kids, right, the McNamara basically, you know, he enlisted the entire Rand conception into the defense ministry.

And they had a historian's debate, how big with their influence numbered, then we could compute it. So this is how we approached war, and I think it did trickle down to a significant effect. So of course, you're right. In Israel, in terms of the education of military officers, and also what happened to the Israel media ground forces that really shrank tremendously. All those ideas, they have real-life outcomes, right?

The way you build your army is completely dependent on the kind of war you've found. foresee. Everything costs a lot of money and you make decisions. So the problem in Israel, and I'm not taking away one a yota of responsibility from the politicians, is that in Israel, the army has always been very autonomous. It's very easy for, you know, there is a, it's true about bureaucracy in general, because they control the information, they can guide you as the politician or they can guide you to get to the outcome that they want just by controlling the information that you have. So I sat in cabinet meetings and I sell, you know, they have kind of rhetorical tools that

they use and of course the information they show is always the information that promotes their idea. And so what I'm saying is you have to be incredibly well educated, know what you want, be realist and know where the generals are misguided in order to really make a change. And most politicians, I think, all over the West, they don't have that kind of background. And definitely, and if they do, they're not contrarian to it. They're part of it. Right.

I mean, we had guns. We had Yoavgala. These are former generals, former chiefs of staffs being security ministers, but they were part of the same paradigm. So what they were really doing is being the spokesman of the army. Instead of reforming it for the better, they really let it deteriorate even further. So this is a unique situation in Israel. We're trying to fix it.

I'm not saying all this. I have zero. I don't despair. I teach in the IDF war colleges. My students who are not so few by now, they go up the ranks. they have a better understanding. I work with NIST members and ministers. We have.

There are ways to fix this. The IDF used to be a great fighting force. It really was. I mean, we weren't perfect, and in every war you take casualties, but we really knew what we were doing 40 years ago. So it's possible, it's doable. It will take time, and it's hard because it's like,

you know, when I speak with generals, it's hard to explain to them what's missing because it's missing. And they don't think it's missing. For them, you know, everything, RMA is great. Well, what do you want? You have LTIA Levy thinking you can win in Gaza with a year of raids. You could ask him about Vietnam. You wouldn't know the first thing about it.

But can I just interject on this question of raids in Gaza? Because I want to understand this. To me, the notion that you're going to achieve the government's stated war aim of the defeat of Hamas and its replacement by another form of government, TBD, with this with this the ground strategy that was pursued up until now, which I'll just call it rating just to keep it simple. Well, those that that equation does not, it doesn't add up. Hamas will not simply surrender if you just punch it over and over again.

You have to actually defeat it in a more traditional sense. So to me, I don't, I don't think one needs to read. or Thucydides or make a study of the Napoleonic wars to figure that out. That's pretty, to me, that seems pretty obvious. So I wonder, and, you know, it's all a bit of a black box to me. I read what, you know, leaks out over the months. But, you know, it has seemed to me to be the case that there's tension between, here's what I understand. On one level, it seems it's clear there's tension between the government-stated war aim of the defeat and

replacement of Hamas and the IDF's actual desire to basically not do that, you know, and I've had conversations with senior IDF officers who say they wish that the government had said we're going to degrade Hamas. It's basically a different warring. So the operational concept is just not going, it's not going to lead to Hamas's defeat, and they kind of know that. And they figure that over time it will, you know, they'll come to some other settlement. So that's one possibility is Netanyahu says the goal is X and the military is knowingly pursuing not X. The military is knowingly pursuing Y. And I assume that that's part of it. But then the other thing I can't figure out, Ron, is Netanyahu himself, who, again, also, you know, you don't actually have to be a millicesteria historian to see

that the campaign of the last 23 months was not going to add up to Hamas's defeat in the form in which it was occurring. He has to know that. Does he actually believe his own war aim? And if so, why is he not pursuing it more aggressively? These are things I just don't understand. So, of course, I know Netanyahu pretty well. I worked with him.

I was the head of director of communications for a year, which was, you know, this is. when I got to see all the cabinet meetings and government meetings and a lot of security stuff. Actually, I wrote a very big report on the tunnels in Gaza. Back then, which was a major issue. It was two years after 2014 when we went into Gaza, right, Tzu Kitan, Protective Hedra, I think it was called, because of the funnel problem. So everybody are, first of all, I agree. I mean, obviously the IDF is reluctant. And the way I see it, you know, I don't think we need to.

to go into it, right? They have some good reasons for being reluctant. One of them, I'll give you, I'll give you one good reason. Because of the international pressure and politically, and because of legal advisors and issues like that, we keep supplying Hamas and we keep having those safe spaces in Gaza. And the terrorists, they just hide there. First of all, they take over the supply. They make money. They control the population. And they hide in those safe spaces. that we created in Gaza. So it's like a balloon, right? You press one side,

but the air goes the other way and then you press there. So they think we don't have a winning target because of non-military kind of obstacles, the constraints that we have. So we need to do something else, which is it always goes back to pressure Hamas leadership to make another hostage deal. This is the real name.

So this is on that. Netanyahu, on the other hand, he brings, he also is like in an unfair position. On the one hand, he has to bring in all those major obstacles that he puts on the IDF while asking them to win as if there are no obstacles. So this is also a very unforgiving kind of position to be. And you can see that it's very hard to find the middle ground that will, on the one hand, yield enough pressure on Hamas, and on the other hand, not blow up the entire relationships with the world, including the Trump administration, right? I mean, Trump is not happy with the war.

It's obvious that it wants it to end, quickly, et cetera. And also, it's obvious that for Trump, the hostages are a major issue. I mean, for him, I think, this is my interpretation. If Hamas would come up with releasing the hostages, then Trump will ask us to stay. I agree with that. For any, this would be the end. Yeah, that's right. And that's, that's, and by the way, I, you know, the fact that that led the most recent round of talk up until the strike in Doha, to me it was quite clear that that was the American position. And I thought it was clarifying, actually, to put it up front. And the fact that Hamas would just never consider it.

It tells you everything you need to know about Hamas. I try to make that point with Americans who don't. Listen, just rationally speaking, right, for Hamas, their biggest strategic achievement were the hostages. I mean, this is, so they would give that up only for, you know, Jupiter. This will be very hard to achieve. Yeah. So what we are trying to do, we're trying to find a middle ground that goes with, takes on all

these constraints. And where they landed now is the city of Gaza, which is, of course, the Hamas most important stronghold and their major assets. And I don't know how long it will take, but obviously this will be a major blow, a bigger blow than previously. And if you look, you know, there are many discussions about the ruins. of Gaza, the city of Gaza is pretty much, it's not intact, but it's tense. It wasn't hit as hard as other places in Gaza.

So this is the middle ground. Now, you are completely right. You don't see any clear end. This is not, it doesn't give you the win that you want, and it doesn't stop. Israel can't pull out of Gaza. This will be insane. So I don't know. Everybody hopes that Trump and Whitkoff will bring some magical deal, and otherwise we kept

there, I think if the world would have if we were prepared on our side on October 7th because we had good generals and an army that's ready for the challenge and enough intelligence to go in wisely, you know, not blindly. Because we were pretty blind in October

7th. We didn't know about underground Gaza, almost anything. This was like a shock. It's still shocks. If you speak with generals today, next time you're in Israel, they will still say in amazement what they've built there That's insane.

They still don't grasp the level of underground gun. So if we were prepared and the world would have given us three months of a real kind of operation without constraints, I agree with you. We could have taken over the guddle strip, Hamas leadership would have been out. There would be insurgency, but the discussion of what's next would be feasible. You could think about what's... And Israel could come to terrorism even with Biden. If we could achieve that, if we ruled over Gaza militarily and had to discuss with Biden what

comes next, we would have found mutual grounds. There would be a solution that Israel could live with in Gaza. But militarily we weren't ready. And still the constraints are there from the beginning and up until now. It's like a paradox. Like I said, like I started, the most paradoxical war ever. Ron Barat's, the essay is called What's Wrong with the Postmodern Military? It appeared earlier this year in Mosaic.

Fascinating conversation. We could go on for another hour or two, but I know it's late where you are. Thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.