Start-up Nation (7 page)

All this gave Israelis a sense of invincibility. Afterward, no one could imagine the Arab states risking another all-out attack.
Even in the military, the sense was that if the Arabs dared attack, Israel would vanquish their armies as quickly as it had
in 1967.

So on that October day in 1973, Israel was not prepared for war. The thin string of Israeli forts facing the Egyptians across
the Suez Canal was no match for the overwhelming Egyptian invasion. Behind the destroyed front line, three Israeli tank brigades
stood between the advancing Egyptian army and the Israeli heartland. Only one was stationed close to the front.

That brigade, which was supposed to defend a 120-mile front with just fifty-six tanks, was commanded by Colonel Amnon Reshef.
As he raced with his men to engage the invading Egyptians, Reshef saw his tanks getting hit one after another. But there were
no Egyptian enemy tanks or antitank guns in sight. What sort of device was obliterating his men?

At first he thought the tanks were being hit by rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), the classic handheld antitank weapon used
by infantry forces. Reshef and his men pulled back a bit, as they had been trained, so as to be out of the short range of
the RPGs. But the tanks kept exploding. The Israelis realized they were being hit by something else—something seemingly invisible.

As the battle raged, a clue emerged. The tank operators who survived a missile hit reported to the others that they’d seen
nothing, but those
next
to them mentioned having seen a red light moving toward the targeted tanks. Wires were found on the ground leading to stricken
Israeli tanks. The commanders had discovered Egypt’s secret weapon: the Sagger.

Designed by Sergei Pavlovich Nepobedimyi, whose last name literally means “undefeatable” in Russian, the Sagger was created
in 1960. The new weapon had initially been provided to Warsaw Pact countries, but it was first put to sustained use in combat
by the Egyptian and Syrian armies during the Yom Kippur War. The IDF’s account of its own losses on both the southern and
northern fronts was 400 tanks destroyed and 600 disabled but returned to battle after repairs. Of the Sinai division’s 290
tanks, 180 were knocked out the first day. The blow to the IDF’s aura of invincibility was substantial. About half of the
losses came from RPGs, the other half from the Sagger.

The Sagger was a wire-guided missile that could be fired by a single soldier lying on the ground. Its range—the distance from
which it could hit and destroy a tank—was 3,000 meters (or 1.86 miles), ten times that of an
RPG
. The Sagger was also far more powerful.
¹

Each shooter could work alone and did not even need a bush to hide behind—a shallow depression in the desert sand would do.
A shooter had only to fire in the direction of a tank and use a joystick to guide the red light at the back of the missile.
So long as the soldier could see the red light, the wire that remained connected to the missile would allow him to guide it
accurately and at great distance into the target.
²

Israeli intelligence knew about the Saggers before the war, and had even encountered them in Egyptian cross-border attacks
during the War of Attrition, which began just after the 1967 war. But the top brass thought the Saggers were merely another
antitank weapon, not qualitatively different from what they had successfully contended with in the 1967 war. Thus, in their
view, doctrines to oppose them already existed, and nothing was developed to specifically address the Sagger threat.

Reshef and his men had to discover for themselves what type of weapon was hitting them and how to cope with it, all in the
heat of battle.

Drawing on the men’s reports, Reshef’s remaining officers realized that the Saggers had some weaknesses: they flew relatively
slowly, and they depended on the shooter’s retaining eye contact with the Israeli tank. So the Israelis devised a new doctrine:
when any tank saw a red light, all would begin moving randomly while firing in the direction of the unseen shooter.

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

“The most interesting people here are the company commanders,” Farhi told us. “They are absolutely amazing people. These are
kids—the company commanders are twenty-three. Each of them is in charge of one hundred soldiers and twenty officers and sergeants,
three vehicles. Add it up and that means a hundred and twenty rifles, machine guns, bombs, grenades, mines, whatever. Everything.
Tremendous responsibility.”

Company commander is also the lowest rank that must take responsibility for a territory. As Farhi put it, “If a terrorist
infiltrates that area, there’s a company commander whose name is on it. Tell me how many twenty-three-year-olds elsewhere
in the world live with that kind of pressure.”

Farhi illustrated a fairly typical challenge facing these twenty-three-year-olds. During an operation in the West Bank city
of Nablus, one of Farhi’s companies had an injured soldier trapped in a house held by a terrorist. The company commander had
three tools at his disposal: an attack dog, his soldiers, and a bulldozer.

If he sent the soldiers in, there was a high risk of additional casualties. And if he sent the bulldozer to destroy the house,
this would risk harming the injured soldier.

To further complicate matters, the house shared a wall with a Palestinian school, and children and teachers were still inside.
From the roof of the school, journalists were documenting the whole scene. The terrorist, meanwhile, was shooting at both
the Israeli forces and the journalists.

Throughout much of the standoff, the company commander was on his own. Farhi could have tried to take charge from afar, but
he knew he had to give his subordinate latitude: “There were an infinite number of dilemmas there for the commander. And there
wasn’t a textbook solution.” The soldiers managed to rescue the injured soldier, but the terrorist remained inside. The commander
knew that the school staff was afraid to evacuate the school, despite the danger, because they did not want to be branded
“collaborators” by the terrorists. And he knew that the journalists would not leave the roof of the school, because they didn’t
want to miss breaking news. The commander’s solution: empty the school using smoke grenades.

Once the students, teachers, and journalists had been safely evacuated, the commander decided it was safe to send in the bulldozer
to drive the terrorist out of the adjacent building. Once the bulldozer began biting into the house, the commander unleashed
the dog to neutralize the terrorist. But while the bulldozer was knocking down the house, another terrorist the Israelis didn’t
know about came out of the school next door. The soldiers outside shot and killed this second terrorist. The entire operation
took four hours. “This twenty-three-year-old commander was alone for most of the four hours until I got there,” Farhi told
us.

“After an event like that, the company commander goes back to the base and his soldiers look at him differently,” Farhi continued.
“And he himself is different. He is on the line—responsible for the lives of a lot of people: his soldiers, Palestinian schoolchildren,
journalists. Look, he didn’t conquer Eastern Europe, but he had to come up with a creative solution to a very complex situation.
And he is only twenty-three years old.”

We then heard from a brigadier general about Yossi Klein, a twenty-year-old helicopter pilot in the 2006 Lebanon war. He was
ordered to evacuate a wounded soldier from deep in southern Lebanon. When he piloted his chopper to the battlefield, the wounded
soldier lay on a stretcher surrounded by a dense overgrowth of bushes that prevented the helicopter from landing or hovering
close enough to the ground to pull the stretcher on board.
⁶

There were no manuals on how to deal with such a situation, but if there had been, they would not have recommended what Klein
did. He used the tail rotor of his helicopter like a flying lawn mower to chop down the foliage. At any point, the rotor could
have broken off, sending the helicopter crashing into the ground. But Klein succeeded in trimming the bushes enough so that,
by hovering close to the ground, he could pick up the wounded soldier. The soldier was rushed to the hospital in Israel and
his life was saved.

Speaking of the company commanders who served under him, Farhi asked, “How many of their peers in their junior year in colleges
have been tested in such a way? . . . How do you train and mature a twenty-year-old to shoulder such responsibility?”

The degree to which authority devolves to some of the most junior members of the military has at times surprised even Israeli
leaders. In 1974, during the first premiership of Yitzhak Rabin, a young female soldier from the IDF’s Unit 8200—the same
unit in which the founders of Fraud Sciences later served—was kidnapped by terrorists. Major General Aharon Zeevi-Farkash
(known as Farkash), who headed the unit—Israel’s parallel to the U.S. National Security Agency—recalled Rabin’s disbelief:
“The kidnapped girl was a sergeant. Rabin asked us to provide him an itemization of what she knew. He was worried about the
depth of classified information that could be forced out of her. When he saw the briefing paper, Rabin told us we needed an
immediate investigation; it’s impossible that a sergeant would know so many secrets that are critical to Israel’s security.
How did this happen?”