Nathan Jennings
The 1973 Arab-Israeli War confronted Israel’s military with a sudden and existential crisis. Initiated by simultaneous Syrian and Egyptian offensives from the north and south, the bitter conflict demonstrated the value of operational endurance as each side sustained unexpected attrition. Within hours, Israeli assumptions about intelligence overmatch, maneuver superiority, and air dominance collapsed under the weight of the Arab assaults. Responding to significant losses in men and materiel, Israel subsequently initiated a painful process of battlefield regeneration to recreate combat power and establish conditions for large-scale counteroffensives that could end the war on favorable terms. While combatants on both sides demonstrated courage and commitment in the face of daunting challenges, the Israeli capacity to persevere ultimately paid the highest dividends and yielded a conditional strategic victory.
How did the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) achieve, albeit at a tremendous societal cost, this systemic regeneration across both ground and air services while continuously engaged on multiple active fronts? The Israelis’ desperate response to simultaneous crises in the Sinai and the Golan Heights—which derailed prewar plans for synchronized air-ground maneuver designed to achieve rapid decision—combined important aspects of veteran leadership, logistical resiliency, and strategic adaptation with critical functions of tactical recovery and tiered mobilization to achieve formation reconstitution at echelon. Characterized, as US Army General Donn Starry described it, by “enormous equipment losses in a relatively short time” and “lethality at extended ranges,” the conflict now underscores the enduring imperative for military institutions to avoid the quicksand of wishful thinking and instead prepare to fight, and win, in the bitter crucible of attritional combat.
Recovery, Regeneration, and Reconstitution
No comments:
Post a Comment