INTRODUCTION
“Pass me the binoculars,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, said to the officer next to him. He lifted the lenses to his eyes. Images from miles away came into sharp focus as he squinted under the winter sun.
Gantz was standing high atop Mount Kabir, doing something he loved: assessing his domain and exploring every inch of the country he was tasked with protecting.
He turned north and captured a clear view of the snowcapped peak of Mount Hermon along Israel’s border with Syria. A quarter-pivot around to the east and he could scope out Jordan. Just below, a mere nod down with his binoculars, he was able to peer into the city of Nablus, home to about 130,000 Palestinians.
Those views provided a quick reminder of how small Israel really is. There is no such thing as strategic depth, Gantz stood there thinking. The enemy simply sits right up alongside us.
“What’s that, over there?” Gantz asked Colonel Nimrod Aloni, the regional brigade commander who, like the chief of staff, had begun his military career in the paratroopers. “That,” Gantz said, pointing, “the big white building with all the windows?”
Pushing aside his firearm, Aloni adjusted his own pair of binoculars. “Oh,” he said. “That’s the shopping mall.”
Nablus is not just any Palestinian city. During the Palestinian unrest of 2000, known as the Second Intifada, Nablus had become the home for Israel’s most wanted. At the time, Gantz had been the commander of the IDF division responsible for the West Bank. Terrorists from Islamic Jihad and Hamas set up bomb labs and headquarters throughout the twisty stone maze of Nablus’s Casbah, or old city. Founded by the Romans and then built up by the Mamluks and the Turks, the Casbah was infamous for its network of tunnels and hiding places, convenient for a terrorist on the run.
IDF troops were frequently sent to raid the city and hunt down the terrorists. But in recent years, Nablus had been thriving. Terrorism was at an all-time low, and the IDF had significantly scaled back its incursions into the city.
Following the end of the Intifada, subsequent Israeli governments had tried to negotiate a peace deal with the Palestinians. Ehud Olmert had made a historic offer to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, only to have it rejected. In 2009, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to freeze settlement construction in an effort to restart peace talks. That was an unprecedented move, but while talks ultimately restarted, they had once again failed to produce a deal.
At the time of Gantz’s visit in 2012, the Palestinian Stock Exchange, based in Nablus, was hitting record highs as markets across the Arab world were stuck in the red. A new round of peace talks was expected soon, and hope was in the air.
But Gantz’s West Bank tour had another purpose.
A couple of years earlier, what had begun as street protests in Tunisia had spread like wildfire and given birth to what became known as the Arab Spring. Muammar Gaddafi was captured and executed in Libya, Hosni Mubarak was dramatically overthrown in Egypt and Bashar al-Assad was continuing to fight rebels in Syria, in a deadly, bloody and controversial war that would see the rise of ISIS and Global Jihad. In Lebanon, Hezbollah was continuing to amass sophisticated and advanced weapons, threatening Israel no longer as a guerilla organization but as a full-fledged military.
In Israeli defense circles, fears were mounting that the instability would spread, and Gantz wanted to make sure quiet would prevail in the West Bank and that, if it didn’t, the IDF would be prepared.
Gantz had not originally been chosen to become the chief of staff but had attained the post quite arbitrarily, after the first candidate was deemed ineligible.
So Gantz, summoned back to duty from retirement, had donned his uniform and assumed the lofty position.
“What I love most,” he would tell people, “is being out in the field, with my soldiers.”
After a few intelligence briefings, the tour came to an end. Gantz slid into the backseat of his armored jeep for the drive to a nearby helipad. His aide was already jittery. As usual on days like this, Gantz was running way behind schedule. The jeep left the base and turned onto a bumpy side road that wound around a nearby Jewish settlement, its stucco white homes and red roofs perched on the hill above.
“Stop the car,” Gantz suddenly told the driver.
“What?” the driver asked, looking at the barren road in front of him, smack in the middle of the West Bank.
“I said, stop the car,” the chief of staff repeated a bit more firmly. “Just pull over here.”
The driver slammed the brakes and stopped next to an overpass.
“Get me Nimrod on the phone,” the chief of staff told his aide, referring to the regional brigade commander who had accompanied him on the tour. Gantz took the phone.
“Nimrod, my jeep has been hit by a roadside bomb. I am injured and one of the soldiers with me has been abducted,” he said, immediately hanging up. Aloni didn’t even have a chance to respond.
Gantz climbed out of the jeep, looked at his silver Breitling watch and sat on a nearby rock. He picked up a twig, brushed the dust off and twirled it in his hands. “Now, we wait,” he said.
Within minutes, the road was swarming with heavily armed soldiers, alerted to search for the “abducted” soldier. Armored Hummer jeeps, equipped with plasma computer screens showing the location of all nearby forces, took up positions on the hills above. A light buzz could be heard, coming from reconnaissance drones hovering in the skies above.
As the minutes ticked by, Gantz kept one eye on the soldiers and another on his watch. When Aloni finally showed up 10 minutes later, Gantz didn’t have much to say.
“Okay, thanks. See you again soon,” he said as he climbed back into his jeep, leaving behind a cloud of dust.
It was a regular workday for Gantz, but it presented an opportunity he seized to make a point. The Middle East was in the midst of great turmoil, and the IDF commander wanted to ensure his troops were prepared for a war that could erupt at a moment’s notice.
“With this level of uncertainty in the region, we likely won’t have the luxury of receiving a warning the next time war comes knocking,” Gantz said. “We will win though, because our soldiers will be prepared and will have the best technology to assist them.”
* * *
The equipment involved in what transpired that afternoon, during the surprise drill with Gantz, was just a microcosm of the military technology coming out of Israel and flooding the global arms market.
The plasma computer screens inside the Hummer jeeps that scrambled to the scene were part of Tzayad, the revolutionary command-and-control system used by the IDF. Tzayad, Hebrew for “hunter,” works something like a GPS navigation system in a car but in this case displays the exact location of all forces in the area, while differentiating between friendly and enemy forces. If a soldier detects an enemy position, all he has to do is tap the location on the digital map and it will appear, immediately, on the screens of all other Tzayad users.
This technology is changing the ways wars are fought, with obvious battlefield ramifications—shortening the time it takes to detect an enemy and lay down fire, otherwise known as the sensor-to-shooter cycle. Tzayad’s accuracy and successful use in the IDF have been noted. In 2010, Australia paid $300 million for the system, and in 2014, a Latin American country bought it for $100 million.
The soldiers who scrambled to the scene to secure the IDF chief of staff during the abduction drill were carrying the Tavor, a new assault rifle developed by Israel Weapons Industries (IWI). Due to its light weight, high accuracy and short size, the Tavor has replaced the American M-16 as the IDF’s weapon of choice. Since it entered service in Israel, the Tavor has reached every corner of the globe, from Colombia to Azerbaijan and Macedonia to Brazil.
Gantz’s jeep, which was attacked in the imaginary bombing, was protected with armor designed and produced by Plasan Sasa, an Israeli company located in a small kibbutz in the Upper Galilee, along Israel’s volatile border with Lebanon.
The company was founded in the 1980s among the kibbutz’s white stucco homes and kiwi groves. It quickly gained the attention of the IDF with its innovative armor, made of dense composite material that could protect vehicles from rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) without adding significant weight.
When the US went to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, IEDs soon became the greatest cause of fatalities. Orders at Plasan skyrocketed, and so did the company’s profits, jumping from $23 million in 2003 to over $500 million in 2011.
In the skies above Nablus, IDF drones were keeping a close eye on the Palestinian city and the Israeli troops stationed nearby. Earlier that year, the IDF had launched the Sky Rider Program, under which it equipped field battalions with the lightweight Skylark drone, made by Elbit Systems, a leading Israeli defense contractor. Launched like a football thrown by a quarterback, the Skylark provides key over-the-hill intelligence, critical for infantry operations. Its delivery to the IDF continued to solidify Israel’s standing as a world leader in the development of drones and unmanned systems.
* * *
From satellites to missile defense systems and drones to cyber warfare, Israel is at the forefront of new military technology being deployed on the modern battlefield. This book will tell the story of how Israel—a tiny nation of just eight million—has turned into one of the world’s most prominent military superpowers and is developing technology that is changing the way wars are being fought around the globe.
Israel’s success has led aerospace giants, weapons manufacturers and even countries to flock to the Jewish State to learn about this unique combination of innovation, drive and technology.
Large corporations in the US, France, the UK, India, Russia and Australia are regularly signing joint ventures with defense companies in Israel that are sometimes a fraction of the size of their foreign counterparts.
This story becomes even more compelling when one considers that just 60 years ago, Israel’s main exports were oranges and false teeth. Today they are electronics, software and advanced medical devices.
According to Jane’s, the British military trade publication, Israel is one of the world’s top six arms exporters. Weaponry alone constitutes about 10 percent of the country’s overall exports, and since 2007, Israel has exported about $6.5 billion annually in arms. In 2012, its 1,000 defense companies set a new record, exporting $7.5 billion worth of weaponry.1
Despite its small size, Israel invests more than any other country in Research and Development (R&D)—about 4.5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP)—and continually tops lists as the world’s most innovative country. While Israel’s investment in R&D is impressive on its own, about 30 percent goes to products of a military nature. By comparison, only 2 percent of German R&D and 17 percent of US R&D is for the military.2
As popular newspaper columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria wrote of Israel: “Its weapons are far more sophisticated, often a generation ahead of those used by its adversaries. Israel’s technology advantage has profound implications on the modern battlefield.”3
* * *
How did Israel do it?
This is the primary question this book will attempt to answer through stories of how Israel developed its unique weapons and tactics. Each weapon came of age in a different era and under different circumstances. The weapons’ inventors were driven by different inspirations and motivations and drew on the country’s different national characteristics, which together have created Israel’s unique culture of innovation. No characteristic stands alone. They succeed all together in contributing to Israel’s development as a military superpower.
Israel is often described as a culture of contradictions. It has tried making peace with the Palestinians for decades but has, until now, failed to repeat the success it had with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. It has compulsory military service for men and women, but instead of instituting social discipline, the military is believed to be the primary source of the country’s infamous casualness and informality.
Israel is a country of only eight million people and without natural resources, but is the country with the third-largest number of companies, after the US and China, listed on the NASDAQ. It has been engaged in a military conflict every decade since its establishment but nonetheless draws approximately three million tourists a year.
Part of the explanation for Israel’s economic and military success has to do with the threat matrix the country faces and its nonstop battle for survival since its very inception.
General Gantz’s mother, for example, was an inmate in the Bergen Belsen Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust and came to Israel after the war. She was one of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from postwar Europe searching for a new home. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews who were forced to leave their homes in surrounding Arab countries after statehood was declared.
The fight for survival was nonstop. Throughout the country, food was rationed, public transportation was nonexistent and medical services were unreliable. Israel’s existence was constantly in question.
When the War of Independence began in 1948, many of these Holocaust survivors were met at the docks, handed rifles and sent to fight on the front lines. They didn’t know a word of Hebrew, and many were killed on the battlefield. But soldiers who fought alongside them told stories of their bravery and eagerness to finally be able to defend their people and homeland.
And while conditions were tough, the adversity Israelis faced from the outset forced them to develop critical tools—like the ability to improvise and adapt to changing realities—which they needed to survive.
“In this newly born IDF, the initial deficiencies in numbers, weaponry and training were compensated for by dedication and motivation, intelligence and improvisation,” Reuven Gal, a former deputy Israeli national security advisor, explained. “These eventually came to personify the Israeli soldier.” 4
With barely any resources beyond the human capital that had immigrated to the new state, Israelis had to make the most of the little they had. Adversity and constant calls, beginning at the time of Israel’s founding, for its destruction—even today, from places like Iran—foster creativity. In other words, if Israel is not creative in its thinking, there is a chance it will not survive.
This equation is a simple one, and as Haim Eshed, the man who came up with the idea for an Israeli satellite program, told us: “The shadow of the guillotine sharpens the mind.”
But that can be only part of the answer. Israel is not the only country in the world that thrives in the face of adversity. South Korea, as an example, faces similar national security threats and has a fast-growing economy, but it lags behind in the development of advanced weaponry.
What makes Israel unique is the complete lack of structure. While this seems strange to cite as an advantage, it is exactly this breakdown in social hierarchy that helps spur innovation.
The absence of hierarchy is evident everywhere in Israel—in the military, on the streets and even in government offices, where low-level staffers call ministers by their nicknames.
And Israel is a country of nicknames—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is publicly called “Bibi.” Former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon is referred to as “Bogie.” Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, is called “Ruvi,” and the head of the Opposition, Isaac Herzog, goes by “Buji.”
In everyday life, people in Israel look to cut social corners. Living in a small country with often just a single degree of separation from their leaders and other prominent individuals, Israelis excel in the use of protexia—the Polish word for “connections”—whether trying to get accepted into university or get an appointment with a well-known cardiologist.
As already mentioned, the mandatory service in the IDF is believed to be the primary source of this informality. In it, Israelis are imbued with a strong bias against hierarchy and a keen sense of chutzpah, the famous Yiddish word loosely translated as “audaciousness,” “nerve” and “gall.”
As new recruits, IDF soldiers are ordered to call their commanders “Sir.” But after a few months, the commanders initiate a process called “Breaking the Distance,” after which soldiers can call their commanders by their first names and are no longer obligated to salute them.
Think about this for a moment: the Israeli military, an entity expected to entrench structure and discipline in its soldiers, holds a ceremony to celebrate the demolition of hierarchies.
“This combination of informality and no hierarchy is the greatest advantage Israel has over other Western countries,” Martin Van Creveld, the renowned military historian, told us. “Israel is relatively small and everyone knows everyone and since almost everyone serves in the IDF it’s very easy to bridge the distance.”
A culture of informality that lacks hierarchy may appear on the surface to endanger a country’s or organization’s ability to engage in long-term strategic thinking. In Israel, though, it has the opposite effect. Breaking down barriers creates an atmosphere that encourages and enables the free exchange of ideas. When officers of various ranks can engage at the same level and speak freely with one another, new ideas are fostered.
Take, for example, what happens when the commander of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) flies on a training mission. You would expect him to fly with senior pilots like himself. Instead, he usually takes the backseat to a younger pilot, sometimes half his age.
“There are no ranks inside the cockpit,” Major General Ido Nehushtan, a former air force commander, told us after one such flight in an F-16 with a 25-year-old lieutenant.
The young learn from the old and vice versa. After these flights, the junior pilots can even criticize their superiors’ performance without risk of demotion, loss of a promotion or any other punishment. They are actually encouraged to do so.
“This is the type of culture we work really hard to create,” Nehushtan explained. “One of openness, professionalism and fairness.”
For foreign officers who visit Israel, this culture often comes as a major shock.
That’s exactly what happened when US Air Force lieutenant general Ron Kadish, a former director of the United States Missile Defense Agency, made his first trip to Israel, in 1992.
Kadish served at the time as the US Air Force’s F-16 program director. The number of F-16 aircraft crashing was on the rise, and Kadish had come to consult with the IAF, which possessed one of the largest F-16 fleets outside the US.
When he arrived at the base, his Israeli host took him on a tour of the different squadrons and showed off the aircraft, many of which had kill markings—small red circles with blue dots—from fighting in the First Lebanon War a decade earlier. One Israeli F-16 alone had shot down seven Syrian aircraft.
After the tour, Kadish was brought into the base commander’s office for a technical discussion about the aircraft. There were the usual refreshments on the table—crispy and warm cheese and potato bourekas alongside thick and bitter Turkish coffee. Both sides presented their mechanical and technical assessments of the plane.
Then one of the participants started arguing with the base commander about the plane’s drawbacks. Kadish asked the participant to identify himself. He was a noncommissioned officer, a lowly mechanic, who was arguing with a one-star general. Yet, he presented his case and was listened to, because ranks aside, he made sense.
“I sat there impressed,” Kadish recalled. “In the US it is much more structured and people there need to be encouraged to state their minds. I didn’t see that in the Israeli military in general and certainly not in the air force.”
Kadish had just experienced a classic case of Israeli chutzpah. In the US military, speaking out of turn is unheard of, especially when it means arguing with your commander in the presence of a visiting foreign officer. In Israel, though, no one thinks in those terms. What the mechanic was doing was exactly what he had been trained to do and what he thought was expected of him—to speak his mind.
* * *
In the Israeli reserves this attitude is emphasized even more. Officers who want to be promoted not only have to impress their superiors but also have to find favor in the eyes of their subordinates.
“If a reservist doesn’t get the answer he wants he will go straight to the commander of the commander,” retired brigadier general Shuki Ben-Anat, a former head of the IDF Reserves Corps, told us. “He doesn’t do this to undermine the system but to get what he wants. Hierarchy doesn’t mean anything to the reservist.”
Colonel Shlomi Cohen, commander of the Alexondroni Brigade—one of the IDF’s elite infantry reserves units—experienced this firsthand when he convened his soldiers for a debriefing after the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
When the war broke out, the Alexondroni reservists had enlisted in high numbers. Two soldiers had been abducted by Hezbollah, and rockets were falling throughout the home front. This was a war for survival.
But when the ceasefire kicked in and the reservists crossed back to Israel, their frustration and anger was too much to keep a lid on. They had been sent into Lebanon with outdated and defective equipment. They had to privately raise money to buy flak jackets and flashlights. They were also upset at the way Cohen had led them in battle. Orders were constantly changed and lacked decisiveness. Some days, they just sat inside southern Lebanese villages as if they were waiting for Hezbollah to attack. Resupplies never reached the reservists, forcing them to break into Lebanese grocery stores to scour for food. Some felt guilty and placed wads of cash on the counters as they left.
Two days after the war ended, Cohen convened his troops in an attempt to iron out some of the issues. They met in the pine tree forest just below the ancient city of Safed in the North, which had been struck repeatedly by Hezbollah rockets during the war. Cohen warned the reservists about the consequences of their complaining. At one point, he accused them of low motivation.
This was too much for the reservists. Some started yelling. Others began booing until Cohen finally got up and left. The reservists were infuriated, and several decided to take their protest to the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
The negative sentiment felt by Cohen’s soldiers made its way up the chain of command, and instead of being promoted, the once-promising officer was sent to wrap up his career as Israel’s military attaché in an Eastern European country.
Western militaries would recoil from the idea of booing a senior officer, but in Israel this was deemed acceptable. For the reservists, there was nothing strange about what they were doing. An officer had made mistakes, and they were upset. That he was their superior and they were still in uniform was a minor detail.
Ben-Anat recognized the reservists’ feeling of frustration and disappointment. He had that same feeling in 1973 after the Yom Kippur War, which a state commission of inquiry found to be fraught with systematic failures and mistakes. While he was still in his compulsory service at the time, the war and its failures—at one point, Ben-Anat’s company of just a handful of tanks was outnumbered 50 to 1—made him realize the importance of investing in the reserves corps and understand that Israel could not afford to be taken by surprise again.
After the war, he decided to continue serving, even though he had been officially discharged. While most reservists were called up for 14 to 21 days of service a year, Ben-Anat served 120 days, enabling him to climb the ranks even from the outside, and despite the fact that he worked for one of Israel’s intelligence agencies. In 2008, after 35 years of service, he was bestowed with the rank of brigadier general and appointed the IDF’s chief reserves officer.
Unlike some of its Western counterparts, the IDF relies heavily on reservists during times of war as well as for routine operations. This dependence dates back to the founding of the IDF as a “people’s army” with a mandatory enlistment. While the objective for establishing a reserves corps was to ensure that there would be enough soldiers in emergencies, Ben-Anat claims that the presence of reservists has had a positive effect on military bureaucracy.
“Reservists come for a set period of time, and the last thing you want to do is make them feel like they are wasting their time,” he explained. “This has an overall impact by making the entire system more effective.”
Having a military based on a reserves force means that even after soldiers are discharged, go to university and enter the workforce, they continue to serve in the military every year. Pilots usually continue flying one day a week, while combat soldiers are drafted for two- to three-week stints each year—half for training and the other half for routine patrols and border operations.
This means that engineers who work for defense companies meet soldiers not just in boardroom meetings to look over new weapons designs, but also during reserves stints, when they themselves put on uniforms and become soldiers again.
Israeli engineers’ experiences from the battlefield, as well as their continued training and combat in the reserves, help them better understand what the IDF requires for the next war as well as how to develop it. This means that any “operational requirement” the military issues for a new weapon system is concise, clear and defined to the smallest detail. These people were in war, saw battle and know exactly what they need.
“We know what it means to sit in a military vehicle,” an employee from Plasan Sasa, the company that manufactures armor for IDF and US tanks, explained, “what it’s like to hit an explosive device or take a burst of gunfire.”5 Those experiences are engraved on one’s mind.
“This almost firsthand familiarity between Israel’s defense needs and what science and technology can deliver is unparalleled in other countries,” according to Dan Peled, a business professor at the University of Haifa.6
The US, for example, installs military officers in development teams at defense contractors, but they are often viewed as outsiders. In Israel, the outsiders are the insiders. Military experiences become lifelong experiences. This dual identity is a national asset.
Van Creveld put it more bluntly: “If 95 percent of your people never served in the military and were never in a military operation, how can you be expected to come up with innovative weapons?”
* * *
What also caught Lieutenant General Kadish’s eye during his 1992 visit to Israel was the youth of the pilots and soldiers he met at the air force base, who were doing the work of American and European officers sometimes twice their age.
In the US Armed Forces, the average age is 29. In the IDF, it’s slightly over 20.
What this means in practical terms is that junior Israeli officers and regular conscripts receive an immense amount of authority and responsibility at young ages. They also have fewer senior officers on top of them—the ratio of senior officers to combat troops in Israel is 1 to 9, while in the US it is 1 to 5—leaving the young soldiers with no choice but to make key decisions on their own.
In Israel, young intelligence analysts, after just a couple of years in the military, often have direct access to the defense minister and the prime minister. Twenty-three-year-old officers are made company commanders and given responsibility over sections of borders or parts of the West Bank. If terrorists infiltrate via their territories and carry out large-scale attacks, they are held responsible.
Giving responsibility to soldiers at such a young age contributes to their development as leaders, not just in the military but also later on in life. Since Israel is almost always in a state of conflict, its soldiers experience danger early on and are forced to make life-or-death decisions, sometimes on more than one occasion.
“Harvard graduates might get a first-class education and a doctorate but it is all theoretical,” David Ivry, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force and director general of the Defense Ministry, told us. “In the IDF, soldiers get a doctorate in life.”
Investing so much in soldiers has another result: they are viewed as priceless and as the children of all Israelis. Society acts accordingly. In 2011, Israel released more than 1,000 prisoners in exchange for a single soldier who had been held captive by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Prisoner exchanges like these have been carried out by Israeli governments since the 1980s.
This is incomparable, not just in the Middle East but even among other Western militaries. The value placed on a single soldier makes every soldier important not just to his family, but to the entire nation. When a soldier is abducted, every family feels the pain, knowing that it could have been their loved one.
Mandatory service does something else to Israeli society: it serves as a melting pot. That’s not the case in Western militaries, which are based on a system of volunteers. In the US, about a decade ago, 44 percent of soldiers were from rural areas, 41 percent were from the South, and nearly two-thirds were from counties where the average household income was below the national median.7
In Israel, almost everyone serves. Men are drafted for three years and women for two. A rich kid from Tel Aviv who is drafted into a combat unit will find himself or herself training alongside an Ethiopian Jew from a development town in the South, a Russian immigrant from the North and a religious soldier from a settlement in the West Bank. Service in the IDF doesn’t tolerate social barriers. Poor Israeli kids who never would have had an opportunity to operate sophisticated technology get that chance in the IDF. Kids who grew up without a smartphone at home are suddenly trained to become cyber operators. When citizens are in uniform, socioeconomic and racial labels are ripped away.
This melting pot is part of the recipe for fostering innovation. Creativity can happen only when people come together and exchange ideas. To do that, they need to know each other and share the same language and culture. In Israel, they do that in the army.
The IDF also encourages its officers to get a “multidisciplinary education.” This stems from the limited resources Israel has at its disposal, in terms of not just raw materials but also people. In foreign aerospace companies, Israelis like to joke, there are experts for a single bolt or fuse. In Israel, engineers cross over to other fields and specialize in more than one task.
That is why many senior officers and top executives in Israeli defense companies have different degrees in different fields. An IDF officer, for example, is encouraged to get a BA in electronics and then an MA in something else, like physics or public policy.
Brigadier General Danny Gold, the mastermind behind the development of the revolutionary Iron Dome rocket defense system, is a good example. He took a sabbatical in the middle of his air force career and received two doctorates—one in business management and the other in electrical engineering. As we will show, he needed both to get the revolutionary Iron Dome off the ground.
* * *
If there is one unit that best represents the IDF’s investment in manpower and the focus it puts on multidisciplinary education, it is Talpiot, the place where Israel’s best and brightest serve.
Talpiot—the word comes from a verse in the Song of Songs and refers to a castle fortification—is Israel’s premier technological unit. Every year, thousands try out but only about 30 get accepted, a privilege that entails signing on for nine years of service, three times the usual length.
These soldiers usually have skill sets that make them suitable to be pilots or operators in elite commando units. But Talpiot trumps everyone and takes whoever it wants. It is that important.
The unit was born out of a disaster, the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel was caught unprepared when Syria and Egypt attacked on the holy Jewish fast day. More than 2,000 soldiers were killed, and countless aircraft and tanks were destroyed. If until then Israel thought it had a superior military, it now had a sense of vulnerability not felt since the country was founded a quarter of a century earlier.
While Israel ultimately held on to its territory, the traumatic war was a stark reminder that innovative tactics were not enough to retain military superiority. Israel needed a technological edge. The question was how to get it.
Shortly after the war, Colonel Aharon Beth-Halachmi, head of the air force’s Technology Department at the time, received a phone call from Shaul Yatziv, a physicist at Hebrew University he had met earlier that year when visiting the university to see a high-powered laser Yatziv was developing. The Soviets and Americans were working on lasers as well, and Beth-Halachmi thought the IDF should invest in a similar capability. Military applications could be figured out later.
Yatziv said he had something important to discuss and that he would be bringing along a friend. A few days later, he showed up at Beth-Halachmi’s office with Felix Dothan, another physicist. Beth-Halachmi felt like he was meeting a modern-day version of the biblical Moses and Aaron—like Moses, Dothan had difficulty speaking. Yatziv served as his spokesman.
Dothan, Yatziv said, had written a paper proposing the establishment of an institute he called “Talpiot.” The program, they said, would be strictly for Israel’s geniuses. These soldiers would go through a 40-month training program—the longest in the IDF—and each would receive a degree in physics, mathematics or computer science while completing combat training with the elite paratroopers.
The graduates would then spend time in each of the military’s different branches. At the end of the 40 months, they would be posted to a single unit, with an emphasis on the air force or the Intelligence Corps.
Beth-Halachmi was intrigued. He, too, was distressed by Israel’s performance in the war and was looking for ways to improve the IDF’s technological capabilities. He agreed to take the proposal to his superiors.
What made Talpiot unique was its focus. Instead of being taught one skill, participants would receive a multidisciplinary education and become familiar with the entire spectrum of the IDF’s technological capabilities. The idea was to provide them with skills needed to come up with solutions that cross bureaucratic borders and technological limits.
But not everyone was thrilled by the idea. Officers in the air force and military intelligence opposed the program. They wanted the best recruits to serve as pilots and field commanders. “It would be a waste to send them somewhere else,” was the typical reaction Beth-Halachmi heard throughout the General Staff. There was little he could do from his position in the air force. He would have to wait.
A couple of years later, Beth-Halachmi was promoted head of the IDF’s Research and Development Authority and got his own seat around the General Staff table. This meant that he had open access to Chief of Staff Raful Eitan. At one of their weekly meetings, Beth-Halachmi presented the Talpiot idea, and Raful was sold. He didn’t even bother convening a meeting. Within three months, a pilot phase was launched.
It didn’t take long for Beth-Halachmi to notice that the program was a success. A few years after its establishment, the prime minister convened a special meeting of the Israeli Security Cabinet to discuss the program. A few generals were complaining that the graduates were not being distributed fairly throughout the military’s different branches. Everyone, including Israel’s spy agencies, wanted a “Talpion,” as the graduates are called. It was a tough meeting, following which the prime minister ruled that Talpions needed to be assigned to all of the country’s different security agencies, including the police. Nowadays, there is an average of five units competing for a single Talpion.
“What we showed was that you don’t need a lot of people for breakthroughs,” Beth-Halachmi told us. “All we needed were the right people with the right training.”
The success stories are innumerable and, for the most part, remain classified. One Talpion invented a way for projectiles to travel 10 times their regular speed, by propelling them with electric and not chemical energy.
Another Talpion, who turned down medical school to enlist in the unit, invented a new seat for helicopter pilots. During his military service in the late 1980s, the Talpion learned that a high number of pilots were suffering from back pain. So he designed a new seat, installed it in a helicopter simulator, cut a hole in its backrest and trained a pen on the pilot’s back. Then, using a high-speed camera, he recorded the effect the vibrations were having on the pilot’s back.8
Another Talpion played a key role in developing a system to detect cross-border terror tunnels being dug into Israel along its border with the Gaza Strip.
While Talpiot may be a small unit—it has produced only about 1,000 graduates in some four decades—its impact is felt throughout the entire IDF and beyond. Graduates have found their way into the upper echelons of Israeli academia and the country’s high-tech industry, founding and taking up top posts in dozens of companies, many listed on the NASDAQ.
“There is no other program like this in the world,” said Evyatar Matanya, a former Talpion who later became head of Israel’s National Cyber Bureau. “A Talpion often revolutionizes a unit singlehandedly. Two or three in one unit is already a different world.”9
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We believe the secret to Israel’s success is a combination of all of the above but also runs deeper, into the core of Israel’s national character.
Few other countries in the world, if any, have been embroiled in conflict for as long or as intensively as Israel. There is little margin for error when the enemy you are fighting is just a few minutes’ drive from your front door—when the terror groups along your borders regularly fire rockets at your homes and schools and send suicide bombers onto your buses.
In this reality, security is never taken for granted. Some Israelis get nervous after a long period of quiet. It can’t be real, they say. It must be the quiet before the storm.
Israel was the first Western country to fight against Soviet military machines in Egypt and Syria and the first modern state to face suicide terror on its streets, years before New York or London, Madrid and other capitals in Europe. From a possible military strike against Iran, to the occasional manhunt for a terror suspect in the West Bank, Israel faces more threats than most countries and is constantly developing state-of the-art military technology to deal with them.
“What works to our benefit is the combination of three elements,” Udi Shani, a former Defense Ministry director general, told us when we met in Tel Aviv. “We have: innovative people, combat experience to know what we need and immediate operational use for what we develop since we are almost always in a state of conflict.”
But while Israel’s development of weaponry is revolutionizing modern warfare, it has taken place not in a vacuum but, rather, in the Middle East, possibly the world’s most volatile region. Israel may view its need for cutting-edge weaponry as a reaction to external threats, but it is exactly this technological prowess that often fuels the exact arms race it is trying to prevent.
In 2010, for example, Israel launched Stuxnet—one of the first known military cyber attacks in the world. The Israeli computer virus was so effective that it destroyed around 1,000 centrifuges at Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility and set back the country’s illicit nuclear program by nearly two years, according to some estimates. Since then, though, Iran has set up its own cyber unit, investing over $1 billion annually in creating effective offensive capabilities. A full-fledged cyber war appears to now be only a matter of time.
As instability spreads throughout the Middle East, and more countries, particularly in Europe, face urban terror threats from ISIS and other terror groups, the tactics and technology perfected by Israel are in high demand.
The Iron Dome short-range rocket defense system, for example, has helped Israel turn a strategic threat—rocket fire from the Gaza Strip—into a manageable tactical problem. This allows Israeli leaders to stay focused on the larger challenges and threats their country faces.
The Trophy active protection system, installed on IDF Merkava tanks and capable of intercepting incoming RPGs and anti-tank missiles, enables these big steel fighting machines to remain relevant in an era of asymmetric and urban warfare. At a time when most countries are phasing out their armored corps, Israel is doing the exact opposite.
Israel as a story has always marveled the world. It is a tale of how a weak and ancient people returned to their homeland, established a state and, against all odds, not only survived but prospered.
This book will add a new layer to that story. It is not just about the technology that has brought Israel victory and success on the battlefield; it will also zoom in on the people and unique Israeli culture that made this possible.
In a world full of uncertainty and danger, this story is one we should all pay attention to.
Copyright © 2017 by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot