The NYT tried but . . .

Some in depth reporting from The New York Times on the October 7th War in Israel.  All reporting of conflict is wrong in the beginning and gets clarified and corrected over time.  Such will surely be the case here as well.  But kudos for at least doing some original reporting for a change, right, wrong or indifferent.

From Where Was the Israeli Military? by Adam Goldman, Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti, Natan Odenheimer, Alexander Cardia, Ainara Tiefenthäler and Sheera Frenkel.  The subheading is A Times investigation found that troops were disorganized, out of position and relied on social media to choose targets. Behind the failure: Israel had no battle plan for a massive Hamas invasion.

The focus is very much on finding who in the Israeli military was to blame for the unpreparedness against the Hamas onslaught on October 7th.  

The reporting is frustrating to a degree because it lacks historical context, ignores fundamentals of war and normal military issues (including the fog of war), fails to acknowledge or take into account not dissimilar issues in Israel's own past, fails to acknowledge constraints on Israel and most critically fails to acknowledge what is always true for all militaries at all times - the need to make risk-adjusted trade-off decisions in an uncertain environment.

The NYT attempts to place the onus of failure on the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and in particular the NYT emphasizes that there was no pre-established defense plan for the scenario of a regiment sized invasion from Gaza.  

Maybe they are right.  We'll discover later.  The war is ongoing, the most senior people have not weighed in, access to deep information will still have been incomplete or restricted because - well, because there is a major war underway and that is the obvious priority.

This does seem to have been an intelligence coup for Hamas as it so far seems as if all parties were caught unawares.  Not only Israel and the US (those with the greatest intelligence capabilities in the region), but also Hamas' sponsors and allies.  Both Hezbollah and Iran seem to have been caught unawares of the timing and scope of the attack.

While acknowledging the NYT's investment in the reporting, I have grave concerns about the accuracy of some of their conclusions.  The NYT appears not to have much sourcing in the IDF and the government.  Which is not surprising given the war going on.

Every major surprise attack or battlefield surprise involves frontline people deriving their own conclusions about things they can't actually know about.  The tactical level view is always as limited as that of the strategic level view.  Both have insight and blindspots.  For a newspaper with only access to tactical level information, their view and interpretation are necessarily limited.

I am surprised that the NYT article has absolutely no reference to any of the earlier Middle East wars where surprise was an element, in particular the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which Israel was completely blindsided by Egypt and Syria.  The Six Day War in 1967 (involving Egypt, Syria and Jordan) is also instructive because of the intelligence aspect.  Israel launched with a surprise attack on the Egyptian Air Force in the Sinai, primarily owing to the repeated and escalating bellicose announcements and military movements principally of Egypt and Sinai.  Israel was overwhelmed with evidence of Egyptian and Syrian preparations for war but had not yet been attacked.  When is preemption justified?  That is usually the central issue for Israel, surrounded as it is both hostile governments and even more hostile non-state actors.

The other missing consideration from the NYT article are the analogs with Britains war with the IRA in the 1970s.  On October 12, 1984, the IRA exploded a bomb at the Brighton hotel where the Conservative Party conference was being held and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was speaking.  Five people were killed and 31 injured.  

After their failed assassination attempt, the IRA issued a statement which has always incapsulated the challenge of fanatic fringe terrorist groups to established states.

Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.

For Israel, with an always evolving list of perhaps a dozen state and non-state enemies at any given time, they have to be lucky always.  Especially given the topographical and geographical constraints of the country.  There is simply no margin of error as past wars have demonstrated.  Every attack on any front at any time is potentially an existential threat.

That leads to the third oversight of the article with its simplistic accusations of ill-preparedness.  There is an economic cost to civil defense that is consequential.  Anytime Israel mobilizes, the entire economy takes a hit.  All the soldiers moved to the front line are no longer working and producing.  Wars are not only matters of blood and lives but affordability.  Particularly when you are talking about a democracy in a sea of authoritarian states.  Authoritarian regimes, at least in the short term, have much greater latitude to inflict economic hardship on citizens than does a democracy.  

As Hamas has repeatedly demonstrated over the years.  

Finally, the NYT keeps suggesting plans and exercises which might have made a difference in terms of readiness.  They are probably not wrong in that simplistic calculation.

What they fail to take into account is the range of threats and risks the whole nation of Israel always faces.  This is where the tactical level reporting in absence of insight to the strategic command level so hobbles the usefulness of the NYT reporting.  Exercises and rehearsals are expensive.  On a given budget, if the exercise is done at the Gaza border, then the comparable necessary exercise is not done on the northern border.  Or in the Golan heights.  Or on the West Bank.  Or on the coast.  And so on.  

Israel simply cannot afford to invest the time and money in all the conceivable or possible threats which it faces.  No government can do so in the face of dedicated violent opponents.  The defending country always has to be lucky and the violent opponent only needs to be right once.

It is just like commercial enterprises covering their various operational and financial risks.  The population of truly conceivable risks is always far greater than the business's ability to afford to mitigate those risks.  You have to choose the most probable risks and spend time and money on that subset while keeping an eye on Black Swan events.  

The article is useful but is undermined in the following ways.  

It has a tactical bias and an absence of a strategic view.  

It fails to acknowledge the challenge of intelligence in the Middle East context as demonstrated in past conflicts.  

It fails to acknowledge the asymmetry between defense of a nation and the threats of a terrorist non-state group.

It fails to take into account the challenge of trade-off decision-making in an environment of extreme danger, uncertainty, and constraints (economic and manpower).

Poor planning and exercises will probably be some element of the post-war analysis as the NYT focuses on.  I suspect, however, that the more full investigation will focus much more on the very real challenge of effective intelligence gathering among hostile and neutral state and non-state entities and how to appropriately respond to that intelligence in a complex systems environment which has to accommodate politics, diplomacy, economics, and military needs.  

The Times' own reporting actually points to a couple of issues that counter its own simplistic diagnosis.  

At 7:43 a.m., more than an hour after the rocket assault began and thousands of Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, The Pit issued its first deployment instructions of the day. It ordered all emergency forces to head south, along with all available units that could do so quickly.

But the nation’s military leaders did not yet recognize that an invasion of Israel was already well underway.

This points to military unpreparedness on the part of the IDF and that may be true.  But if neither Hezbollah nor Iran knew of the attack, which seems so far to be the case, then this more a testament to Hamas planning that it is necessarily an indictment of Shin Bet and Mossad.  Hamas seems to have moved the bar for secret planning far from what anyone thought was possible.

The NYT also has a certain inconsistency in their indictment of the IDF.  They invoke an early defense doctrine from Israel.

That lack of preparation is at odds with a founding principle of Israeli military doctrine. From the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, the goal was to always be on the offensive — to anticipate attacks and fight battles in enemy territory.

But the editorial board has long been critical of even minor Israeli and IDF offensive actions.  The NYT does not believe in or support the Ben-Gurion doctrine but they use it nonetheless to criticize the IDF.  Seems an inconsistent and illogical position for them and completely undermines their criticism.

Another contradiction:

Israeli security and military agencies produced repeated assessments that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of launching a massive invasion. The authorities clung to that optimistic view even when Israel obtained Hamas battle plans that revealed an invasion was precisely what Hamas was planning.

The decisions, in retrospect, are tinged with hubris. The notion that Hamas could execute an ambitious attack was seen as so unlikely that Israeli intelligence officials even reduced eavesdropping on Hamas radio traffic, concluding that it was a waste of time.

All that might be true.  But was the assessment well-founded.  Israel did not believe Hamas had the capability to conduct such an attack.  Were their reasons for that conclusion well-founded?

It seems like they were.  The Times reports

Hamas fighters poured into Israel with heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, land mines and more. They were prepared to fight for days. 

Ill-prepared as the IDF turned out to be, they still managed to suppress the invasion within 24-hours.  Clearly far sooner than Hamas anticipated (fighting for days).  Israel was wrong to assume that Hamas would be willing to make an attack but they seem to have been correct that a Hamas attack had little likelihood of success.  While most of the Hamas terrorists were killed or captured in the first 24 hours, a few hid out to conduct ambushes and the last invading terrorists in Israel were not killed until about October 14th.  But the heaviest fighting was all over within 24-48 hours.  

The misjudgment of Hamas's willingness to invade came at the expense of the 1,200 civilian lives lost but IDF was not wrong that Hamas did not represent a serious military threat.  It is a fine, and tragic, distinction, but important.

Good for the New York Times investing the time and money in some deep reporting.  I just wish it had been better informed and more informative.  As a counter example to the reporting from seven NYT journalist, there is this piece by a single author from a month ago that provides much more information and context and history and reaches more refined and likely more accurate conclusions.  From Hamas’s October 2023 Attack on Israel by Dr. Omer Dostri.  The subheading is The End of the Deterrence Strategy in Gaza.  

Dostri provides hard information most often missing in other accounts.

In the early hours of 7 October, Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel while many Israeli officers and soldiers were on leave due to a holiday and Shabbat occurring simultaneously. Hamas’s special forces (known as the Nukhba) deployed squadrons of drones equipped with explosive charges and drones equipped with grenades, which targeted guard posts and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) surveillance, control, communication, and weapons systems near the border. Following this, thousands of Hamas terrorists, divided into teams with specific attack plans, gathered near the Israeli border. They managed to breach the border at multiple locations using explosive devices, infiltrate Israeli territory, and open the way for thousands more terrorists on motorcycles and dozens of Islamic State (IS)-style vans loaded with various weaponry, including rifles, machine guns, antitank launchers with advanced technology, rockets, explosive devices, and a substantial number of hand grenades. In addition, some Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel by air, using parachutes for aerial insertion. In total, about three thousand terrorists infiltrated Israel that morning.

Three thousand men, roughly a regiment, invaded Israel.  I have not seen that number elsewhere but accords with other numbers I have seen indicating some 800-1000 Hamas invaders were killed and some hundreds taken prisoner.   

Dostri identifies intelligence as the central issue as opposed to preparedness and planning alone.  I agree.  But he also takes the evidence and logic to a conclusion which the NYT would not support.  

If the tragedy is just a matter of poor preparation by the IDF, then things can proceed as they were after some term of conflict.  

If, on the other hand, Dostri is correct and it is the impossibility of effective intelligence gathering in a complex environment, then the viability of the deterrence strategy is called into question and the viability of Netanyahu's commitment becomes much more salient - "Hamas must be destroyed."  For any number of reasons, including imagined humanitarianism, that is not the conclusion the NYT likely wants to reach.  Which is why their reporting improbably focuses on operational preparedness as the central issue rather than strategic information gathering and decision-making.

If your enemy is transparently dedicated to your destruction, and their actions cannot be effectively predicted (with material destruction to yourself as a consequence), and if they are determined not to negotiate, then the destruction of Hamas becomes increasingly the only viable strategy remaining.  Something I am certain the journalists and editorial board of the NYT do not want to support.  Hence the reporting they did rather than the better reporting from the expert.