Start-up Nation

The dust kicked up by the moving tanks would obscure the shooter’s line of sight to the missile’s deadly red light, and the return fire might also prevent the shooter from keeping his eye on the light.

This brand-new doctrine proved successful, and after the war it was eventually adopted by NATO forces. It had not been honed over years of gaming exercises in war colleges or prescribed out of an operations manual; it had been improvised by soldiers at the front.

As usual in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from the bottom up—from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real time, on the fly.

Yet what these soldiers were doing was strange. If they had been working in a multinational company or in any number of other armies, they might not have done such things, at least not on their own. As historian Michael Oren, who served in the IDF as a liaison to other militaries, put it, “The Israeli lieutenant probably has greater command decision latitude than his counterpart in any army in the world.”³

This latitude, evidenced in the corporate culture we examined in the previous chapter, is just as prevalent, if not more so, in the Israeli military. Normally, when one thinks of military culture, one thinks of strict hierarchies, unwavering obedience to superiors, and an acceptance of the fact that each soldier is but a small, uninformed cog in a big wheel. But the IDF doesn’t fit that description. And in Israel pretty much everyone serves in the military, where its culture is worked into Israel’s citizens over a compulsory two- to three-year service.

The IDF’s downward delegation of responsibility is both by necessity and by design. “All militaries claim to value improvisation: read what the Chinese, French, or British militaries say—they all talk about improvisation. But the words don’t tell you anything,” said Edward Luttwak, a military historian and strategist who wrote The Pentagon and the Art of War and co-wrote The Israeli Army. “You have to look at structure.”⁴

To make his point, Luttwak began rattling off the ratios of officers to enlisted personnel in militaries around the world, ending with Israel, whose military pyramid is exceptionally narrow at the top. “The IDF is deliberately understaffed at senior levels. It means that there are fewer senior officers to issue commands,” says Luttwak. “Fewer senior officials means more individual initiative at the lower ranks.”

Luttwak points out that the Israeli army has very few colonels and an abundance of lieutenants. The ratio of senior officers to combat troops in the U.S. Army is 1 to 5; in the IDF, it’s 1 to 9. The same is true in the Israeli Air Force (IAF), which, though larger than French and British air forces, has fewer senior officers. The IAF is headed by a two-star general, a lower rank than is typical in other Western militaries.

For the United States, the more top-heavy approach may well be necessary; after all, the U.S. military is much larger, fights its wars as far as eight thousand miles from home, and faces the unique logistical and command challenges of deploying over multiple continents.

Yet regardless of whether each force is the right size and structure for the tasks it faces, the fact that the IDF is lighter at the top has important consequences. The benefit was illuminated for us by Gilad Farhi, a thirty-year-old major in the IDF. His career path was fairly typical: from a soldier in a commando unit at age eighteen, to commanding an infantry platoon, then a company, he was next appointed a spokesman of the Southern Command. After that he became the deputy commander of Haruv, an infantry battalion. Now he is the commander of an incoming class of one of the IDF’s most recent infantry regiments.

We met him at a base on a barren edge of the Jordan Valley. As he strode toward us, neither his youth nor his attire (a rumpled standard-issue infantry uniform) would have pegged him as commander of the base. We interviewed him the day before his new class of recruits was to arrive. For the next seven months, Farhi would be in charge of basic training for 650 soldiers, most of them fresh out of high school, plus about 120 officers, squad commanders, sergeants, and administrative staff.⁵