Militaries must return to the ancient confidence that it is better to kill more of the aggressors’ population than to have lost some of its own.

Ran Baratz’s sharp critique of Israeli retaliatory action following October 7, coupled with incisive and constructive correctives, is a shared worry outside of Israel. Why, he asks, was the IDF surprised by the attack, why was it shocked that it was so medieval in nature, and why did it take so long to take the war home to Gaza?

More to the point, why have not the Israeli Defense Forces thus far after October 7 been able to translate their brilliant operational and tactical victories into favorable strategic resolutions that might have led to more or less permanent victory and an ensuing sustained peace? A short answer is that neither the war nor Israel’s desire to further weaken its enemies is yet over.

Otherwise, those responsible for disconnecting tactical from strategic victory, Baratz argues, are not the spirited and heroic Israeli troops in the fields. Rather, he faults the current generation of military and civilian analysts and strategists. Swept up in the trends of the moment, and amnesiac about the historically unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a tiny Israel surrounded by nations comprising some 500 million Muslims, they became unthinking captives of old cliches and new orthodoxies, many of which are stale carry-overs from the cold war.

Such conventional groupthink, Baratz further insists, so far has blocked the normally risk-taking IDF from achieving the complete defeat of its wavering enemies.

Again, these bridles are not unique to Israel. They are even more endemic within the U.S. military as evident in its recent misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Baratz cites some familiar symptoms that explain why the Western tradition of decisive battle to achieve unconditional surrender has become self-limiting—despite its traditional hallmarks of superior firepower, technology, discipline, and organization. The causes of this confusion and indeed often malaise are well known to Western militaries—the diversion of the armed forces to achieve internal social agendas, the preference for media-savvy, political generals over those with distinguished battle records, and the substitution of new technology for the ancient arts of killing the enemy. Yet, such misapprehensions can prove especially fatal to the IDF given the power and number of its potential enemies and Israel’s far smaller margin of error.

In the some 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a few years later after the end of the American nuclear monopoly, strategists assumed that any major conventional war in a strategically important locale by definition had to remain limited as a “police action,” often with an aim at “nation-building” and to be ended by a “peace process.”

Ancient aims like unconditional surrender, occupation, and the defeated coerced to embrace the conditions of the victor were supposedly now impossible. To repeat a World War II-like annihilative end of the war, in the era from the Korean to the first Gulf War, might spark the intervention of a nuclear patron to save its tottering client. Soon perhaps a 1914-like, guns-of-August uncontrollable nuclear bellum omnium contra omnes would follow.

So Western nations informally sought to fight limited wars even when the danger of nuclear escalation was remote, while the odds of stalemate or defeat thereby increased.

After the end of the cold war, it was felt that self-restraint had somehow contributed to victory over the Soviet Union. Thus, limited warfare would have a renewed life even after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the United States was alone militarily preeminent.

There were also internal pressures to mitigate the use of force necessary to ensure the surrender of a defeated enemy. The more affluent and leisured Western capitalist consensual societies grew, the more fertility rates fell, and the more radically egalitarian they became, the more in the post-cold-war era the traditional aims of war to defeat, humiliate, and win concessions from the defeated became constructed not just as unnatural, but anachronistic and pre-civilizational.

So, Westerners live in an age where they have fewer children (and thus cannot imagine losing an only child), expect to live until our late eighties (and thus feel robbed if some extraneous event deprives anyone of our 21st-century birthright), and rarely see any more the once daily violence of killing animals (much less preparing their meat). If there is an innate curiosity to understand violence firsthand, we slake our thirst vicariously through movies, television, and video games.

In lieu of something like Appomattox or Potsdam, perhaps enemies could instead be won over by propaganda, nation-building, or reeducation rather than through humiliating defeat. The ultimate trajectory of this thinking was the victorious Taliban in 2021 inheriting $50 billion in sophisticated abandoned American arms, while U.S. troops skedaddled—leaving behind a vacant $1 billion new American embassy, a $300 million-refitted defensible airbase, George Floyd murals on the streets, a pride-flag on the embassy website and flying occasionally at U.S. bases, and a gender-studies department at Kabul university.

Globalism and its instant worldwide communications supposedly also convinced the public that it was almost preferable to lose nobly than to win ugly, given the instinct to therapeutic identification with the underdog and the defeated. Once tiny Israel beat back its many aggressors in 1947 and became a regional power in 1967 and 1973, so too Westerners now considered it a fellow bully and in particular an illegitimate “settler-colonialist” state.

Millions of censors the world over, including the International Criminal Court, will judge Western soldiers from their televisions’ live feeds. In a Western world where half our youth expect to go to college and be trained by PhDs, and not to enter the military, the operating ethos of that half of the population is to contextualize those supposedly misguided enough to attack Westerners. We saw just that on American elite campuses all through 2024, after the October 7 attacks on Israelis. Protests championed Hamas, used rhetorical gymnastics to explain away the barbaric attacks on Israelis, and sought to pressure elected officials to cut off aid to Israel on “humanitarian grounds.”

In an age of scarifying accusations of “imperialism” and “colonialism,” the use of military force in the West itself became somewhat suspect. But far worse still would be the transparent admission of waging war to annihilate an enemy force and thus strip a bellicose opponent of its power of resistance—as the only way to preclude the need to refight the war or descend into what we in the United States now call “endless” or “forever” wars.

So, in the postmodern Western democracies, there arises a certain end-of-history utopianism, in which war is deemed anachronistic and the result of misunderstanding and miscommunication, rather than of innate evil or the desire to gain advantage once perceived deterrence is lost and the stronger can dictate to the weaker.

Classical tactical methods to achieve strategic resolution—preemptive attacks, continual offensive operations, and the use of constant, overwhelming, and disproportionate force—are increasingly deemed passé. Western militaries bowing to civilian or internal concerns about disproportionality, high casualties among the enemy, culpability for striking first, televised carnage, or nuclear brinkmanship insidiously seek instead ways to finesse wars.

How then did this generation of strategists attempt to resist aggression and fight opponents with far fewer self-imposed limits, whether nation-states like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, or terrorists like Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis, and Islamic State?

Apparently, they assumed the new revolution in military affairs might offer solutions. Sophisticated drones from on high could pinpoint those “responsible” for enemy aggression, kill them surgically, and thus free the people from their nihilist influence without a messy war. Cyberwarfare could paralyze infrastructure without drawing blood.

Or maybe new incarnations of the Maginot Line, updated with sophisticated surveillance cameras, acoustic devices, radars, and drones, and supported by artificial-intelligence and cyber weapons, could achieve deterrence without the old methods of robust preemptive attacks and periodic occupations.

Baratz quite astutely either articulates or implies a range of problems with such tactical thinking. Walls, to work, have to be at least successful in slowing down or attriting the enemy. But as General George S. Patton once wrote, the price of such passivity sometimes inculcates an insidious false sense of security that can be deracinating for a once-preemptive military.

Clearly the Gaza fence was hardly indomitable. Prior to October 7 it instead perhaps had helped spread a lethal sense that Gazans were mere neighbors on the other side of a deliberately unobtrusive fence rather than obdurate existential foes who would always interpret any trace of restraint or passivity not as magnanimity to be reciprocated but as weakness to be lethally exploited.

Generals and military planners also should not become psychologists who try to outthink enemy populations themselves, as if they alone know how to separate radical and bellicose leaders from their supposedly peace-loving and thus coerced followers. Instead, the ancient idea of overwhelming force and collective punishment remind civilians such as those in Germany in 1944 or Japan in 1945 the real consequences of triumphantly applauding their leaders when winning only to claiming their near innocence when losing.

For a nation-state to survive it must be educated that the only thing worse than war is defeat or a permanent enemy sword of Damocles hanging over its collective head. Militaries must return to the ancient confidence that it is better to kill more of the aggressors’ population than to have lost some of its own. Disproportionality, asymmetry, and a marked difference in material capability and morale alone lead to strategic resolution.

 

So, after heroic and costly efforts to decapitate much, but not all, of the leadership of Hamas and Hizballah, and to destroy much of terrorist infrastructure of Gaza and Hizballah, why cannot Israel forces tactically defeat enemies, force them to “surrender,” and then make them agree to Israeli demands to disarm, dissolve, and disappear?

Was the disconnect Israel’s fear that should it try to achieve complete strategic victory, the new axis of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran would intervene with existential threats to cease and desist—or else?

Was the problem worries, in and outside the military, that the Westernized world, especially Europe and the United States, would find such unlimited use of force barbaric and thus react by cutting off aid and munitions, and close their doors to Israelis in general?

Was the hesitation attributable to fear within Israel itself that it was transforming into something different, something worse than the once humanitarian vision of the founders (who, it must be said, were quite willing and able to seek strategic resolution to survive)?

Given the above, what exactly would Ran Baratz have had the IDF, and its overseers, do to ensure that their tactical victories resulted in final strategic resolution?

All of Israel’s current terrorist enemies are supplied and guided by Iran. After sending 500 projectiles into Israel, and after, in response, Israel had dismantled Iran’s supposedly formidable air defenses, what might have followed had Israel invested another week in destroying Iran’s nuclear capability, with threats to continue on with its military bases and energy sector? Would Iran have been able or willing to supply any further its diminished terrorist appendages?

What if 100 percent of Gaza has been entered, disarmed, occupied, and purged of Hamas terrorists, in the manner that much of it had already? Would Israel have eventually destroyed the entire Hamas leadership, dismantled the entire subterranean labyrinth, and taught the population that Hamas would be a longer politically viable?

Would neighboring so-called “moderate” Arab countries have been more or less willing to ally with a formidable, and unpredictable Israel? And would the United States, even under the sanctimonious and sermonizing Biden administration, privately have been more willing to aid Israelis under such vast geopolitical transformations?

Would hostile enclaves and nations, whether in Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, or Yemen, been more or less willing to negotiate with Israel in a post-Hizballah, post-Hamas, and even post-theocratic-Iran era?

I believe Baratz is right not because I wish him to be, but because I think he has a better understanding of human nature than do his opponents, in that he understands that the revolution in military affairs, new weaponry, artificial intelligence, cyberwar, and smart bombs and shells have changed not the rules of war, but merely the velocity and lethality of it.

The more sophisticated we become, the more difficult it becomes to remember that war is fought collectively by humans. Human nature stays constant across time and space. And thus, it remains predictable and subject to universal laws that, if only understood, can mitigate the violence of war—through strategic victory.