The Fit Between A Military Force And Its Missions In Israel

Analysis

Accomplishments

Israel has a world class military that has had an immense amount of combat experience, and an advanced domestic defense industry that arose due to international sanctions. It has had many stunning military victories and few defeats. Only North Korea has mobilized a comparably large share of its population including many female soldiers, into military service. Israel also has a national system of air raid shelters. It has faced and defeated multiple developing nation military forces in the region over the years and mostly Iranian backed paramilitary forces and insurgents with similar grade weapons.

It's air/anti-missile defense system (the "Iron Dome") and armored vehicle active defenses (the "Trophy" system) are the most advanced in the world and have been proven repeatedly. 

Israel's 63 ton tracked Namer armored personnel carrier (with combat engineering variants) has very heavy armor and advanced active defenses, making it the most heavily armored and protected armored vehicle in the world. It also has well-regarded 65 ton Merkava main battle tanks of its own design.

Its modern Air Force has carried out more air to air kills and produced more fighter aces than pretty much any other Air Force in the world. It carries out air strikes, pretty much with impunity, in the region from Syria, to Iran, to Yemen. Its small navy has advanced offensive capabilities but has seen little action.

Israel's intelligence agency and special forces have conducted some stunning operations, although they suffered a major defeat on October 7, 2023 when it failed to prevent a Hamas attack from Gaza that killed more than a thousand Israelis despite having some intelligence hints that it was coming. The quality of its commercial air travel security is also unparalleled and is far more than "security theater".

Caveats

On the other hand, Israel's forces are tailored to its needs. 

Aside from some regional airstrikes and rare commando and assassination missions all involving small numbers of personnel at the "tip of the arrow", almost all of its operations have taken place in or near Israeli territory, and predominantly in one of several anticipated hot spots within it (the northern border with Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza and regions adjacent to it). So, Israel's ground forces haven't had to worry about logistic supply chains, rapid deployment over great distances, or speed. Even at the slow speed of tracked vehicles (ca. 40-45 mph on roads), Israel's heavy armored forces are rarely more than an hour or two away from where they are needed. 

Similarly, because of Israel's geography, the IDF doesn't have to worry about steep mountains with narrow passes, cliffs, thinner air at high altitudes, landslides, bridges that can't carry heavy vehicles, jungles, thick forests of stout trees, sustained seasonal endless rain and oceans of mud, major swamps near battlefields, major river crossings, moving forces between islands, major roads too narrow for its military vehicles to use, tornados, hurricanes, deep sustained fog, or ice, snow, and cold.

Because it has been constantly at war, Israel has been able to design its infrastructure and regulate land use to accommodate its heavy armored forces, facilitate military logistics, and provide safe spaces for its people. Palestinian insurgent forces have lacked access to most regions not subject to Palestinian control since the West Bank and Gaza were walled, making it difficult or impossible to place land mines that could impair the travel of Israeli military supplies and military vehicles, or make those areas treacherous for soldiers and civilians alike. This has facilitated easy and safe logistics for IDF troops for all but the last few miles, and has allowed the IDF to pick its battles.

Its counterinsurgency (mostly from the Palestine Liberation Organization and then Hamas) and Hezbollah adversaries have had small arms, tanks, lighter anti-tank weapons (like rocket propelled grenades and IEDs), artillery rockets and shells, and suicide bombs. But the IDF's opponents in greater Israel, have not had advanced guided anti-tank weapons, air to ground missiles, opposition naval ships and submarines, or until very recently, armed drones. The Palestinian insurgents also haven't been able to train openly in large formations and at large bases, and has had to resort to building tunnel systems to hide its movements and provide bunker-like safe havens for them.

As highlighted in the fighting in Gaza since October 7, 2023, Israel has nearly total control over the Palestinians' access to water, food, medicine, fuel, and any other form of international trade, and has had a highly effective, although not perfect, capacity to limit the Palestinians' access to military grade arms and ammunition.

Even Hezbollah, in Lebanon, which is organized and outfitted more like a traditional national army, has had very limited access to the advanced guided missiles, and no access to armed manned aircraft.

Palestinian insurgents have not had tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, howitzers (mobile or towed), armored personnel carriers, fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, advanced radar systems, or anti-aircraft weapons more sophisticated than man-carried anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADS) and small arms. The Palestinian insurgents have little or no ability to conduct signals or electronic intelligence or obtain satellite or high altitude aerial surveillance. The insurgent's most advanced military vehicles have been "technicals" (i.e. pickup trucks mounted with small arms) and motorcycles. The insurgent's most potent weapons have mostly been rocket propelled grenade launchers, recoilless rifles, unguided Katusha rockets, and a small number of more powerful surface to surface missiles and suicide drones. Almost all of their arms and ammunition have had to be smuggled in through tightly controlled borders.

Unlike the armies contending in the Ukraine War, the IDF has conducted its ground operations with air superiority and air support. Its troops haven't had to worry about being attacked by enemy aircraft, and have been able to call in close air support when needed. The last time it faced a serious attack by manned fighter aircraft, or a strike on its navy, was half a century ago, although it has faced attacked from outside its borders from missiles, rockets, drones, and shells on a regular basis with a particularly intense bout in the last year.

The U.S. Compared

In contrast, the U.S. military has very different missions that demand very different resources. 

Almost all modern U.S. military operations have been expeditionary and conducted far from its territory. Logistics supply lines are a critical concern for U.S. forces on expeditionary missions and forward operating bases have to be established from scratch while armed opponents are nearby. It can take the U.S. weeks to deploy heavy armored military equipment in large quantities which must be done by ship, train, and road convoy, if this equipment has not been pre-placed at foreign military bases or supply caches. The U.S. has more foreign military bases on a larger scale than any other country and a considerable capacity for sea basing of forces as well, but these resources are more abundant in some areas than other.

Once they arrive in theater, their area of operations is usually larger than that of the Israel Defense Force and thus requires more maneuver for longer distances making speed more critical.

To gain air superiority, the U.S. often has to create it, in an preliminary air campaign, like the ones seen in the Gulf War and Iraq War, that can take weeks, before other forces can move in knowing that the air is secure.

In a near peer conflict, the U.S. has to count on its opponents having access to sophisticated air defense missiles, guided anti-tank missiles with ranges greater than a tank's main gun that are pretty much one-shot, one-kill in the absence of active defenses, heavy artillery, and modern medium range anti-ship missiles (possibly hypersonic), naval mines, and torpedo equipped submarines.

In many or most conflicts to which U.S. forces deploy they also lack the "home field advantage", even if they are supporting allies in territory that those allies control. Only a tiny share of their troops speak the local language or can read local road signs. They aren't familiar with the territory. They aren't familiar with local hazards from wildlife to poisonous plants, which are threats to which locals have adapted. They have a hard time distinguishing friends from foes, or just different groups of friends with different sensibilities, among the local populations. R&R time is infrequent and requires epic travel. Even in guarded bases, they are never far from the front lines and are never really in secure safe havens. U.S. military forces need to have everything necessary to sustain the day-to-day physical needs of their troops in addition to maintain and supporting their military equipment.

The U.S. has more money to spend on military systems than any other country in the world, and does so, so its can afford to spend more to have systems better suited to expeditionary warfare. And, with 45 times more people who likely to side with it rather than opponents to its forces, the U.S. military has about seven times as many active duty forces despite being far less mobilized than Israel, although perhaps only a couple times as many reserve forces, in addition to its much large budget, than Israel does. So, the U.S. can effectively have multiple separate military sub-forces designed to carry out radically different missions from each other, instead of having to focus on one or two main missions.

The bottom line of all of this analysis is to recognize Israel's military successes, while also cautioning against over learning from the IDF's experience because that IDF has very different missions, very different opponents, and very different constraints and circumstances under which its missions must be carried out, than U.S. forces. 

So, the IDF can make wise choices that are tailored to its particular specific favorable circumstances and set of opponent capabilities, which would not be wise for U.S. forces. Nowhere is this more the case, than the IDF's utilization of heavily armored ground forces, where the IDF does not face constraints and concerns that loom heavy for U.S. forces.

Geography

Israel is not a particularly big country. 

It is about 60 miles across at its widest, and about 240 miles from north to south. The total area under Israeli control, including the Golan Heights and West Bank, is 10,733 square miles. There are six small islands in shallow waters less than a half a mile off Israelis far northern Mediterranean coast which are a nature preserve.

About 8.5% of its land is forest and the rest of desert and shrub desert, although it is fertile enough to grow crops on the coast and in the Jordan River Valley. Its highest point, Mount Meron is 3,963 feet, and its highlands, which are described as hills rather than mountains, average about 2,000 feet. It rarely gets below freezing, although short lived snow can fall in the highlands, and even the parts of the country that get rain get it in thunderstorm bursts in the winter and are dry most of the year. 

Its primary water features are the Mediterranean coast, the freshwater sea of Galilee, the salt water Dead Sea, and the Jordan River that flows through both of them for 199 miles and makes up most of the eastern border with the Kingdom of Jordan (which isn't actively hostile to it). The northern tributaries to the Jordan River are the Dan, Banias, and Hasbani. Only the Dan is within undisputed Israel; the Hasbani flows from Lebanon and the Banias from territory captured from Syria in the Six-Day War (in 1967). The Sea of Galilee a.k.a. the Kinneret) is about 14 miles (north to south) by 8 miles (east to west) for a total of about 64 square miles that is 679 feet below sea level and 151 feet deep. It has an area known as the Hula marshes to the north. The salt water Dead Sea (which is also part of the Israel-Jordan border) is 42 miles from north to south and 10 miles wide and is 1,371 feet below sea level (the lowest water surface on Earth). It has a maximum depth of 978 feet, an average depth of 618 feet, and  south of the peninsula that juts into it from the eastern shore, it is less than 20 feet deep. Israel also has about ten other small lakes. The Great Rift Valley, with the mostly uninhabited Negev desert to the west and Jordan's arid highlands to the east, continues another 110 miles or so from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Eilat where Israel has about half a mile of a coast.

Israel has a major earthquake roughly every 400 years (with four in known history, in 31 BCE, 363 CE, 749 CE, and 1033 CE), and is overdue for another of magnitude 7.4 or so. An earthquake of a magnitude sufficient to cause loss of life every 80 years or so. Not quite half of its buildings are built to modern building code standards that could survive a major earthquake, while the rest,  including 50,000 residences are expected to collapse in the event of a 400 year earthquake.

Gaza and the West Bank (outside the seam zone) are walled off.

The Seam Zone is in blue-green and separated from the rest of the West Bank with a wall.

Israel is home to about 11.7 million people, of whom about 7.5 million are Israelis and 4.2 million are Palestinians.

The area west of the "Green Line" that was Israel's 1948 boundary (controlled for 76 years), has about 6,674,000 Israelis and 110,000 Palestinians. 

Israel has controlled the rest of its territory, which is home to 742,000 Israelis and 4.1 million Palestinians since 1967 (controlled for 57 years). There are about 42,000 Israelis in the Golan Heights. East Jerusalem and an area known as the the seam zone are east of a West Bank barrier wall, but west of the "Green Line": East Jerusalem has about 455,000 Israelis and 225,000 Palestinians, while the remainder of the seam zone has about 188,000 Israelis, and 35,000 Palestinians who live in walled off village enclaves. Israeli settlements and military zones in the West Bank beyond the barrier have about 57,000 Israelis and 115,000 Palestinians. The Palestinian controlled part of the West Bank has about 2,085,000 million Palestinians. Gaza has about 1,510,000 Palestinians. 

The Israeli Defense Force

History and Overview

The main mission of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), which has had an exceptionally great number of actual military engagements since 1948 (about 76 years ago) when the country was founded, it to protect Israel from attacks from outside its borders and from predominantly Palestinian insurgents within it. In the 1967 Six-Day War (57 years ago), Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Golan Heights from the surrounding Arab states. It was preceded by paramilitary organizations of Jews in Palestine.

The IDF has fought ten international wars, as I count them, against other nation-states or foreign Iranian proxy forces: (1) the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which saw neighbouring Arab states attack; (2) the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the IDF captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, which was later returned; (3) the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Golan Heights from the surrounding Arab states, (4) the Yom Kippur War, (5) the War of Attrition against Egypt in the Sinai, (6) a border war against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jordan culminating in the Battle of Karameh, (7) the Lebanese Civil War, initiating Operation Litani and later the 1982 Lebanon War, where the IDF ousted Palestinian guerrilla organizations from Lebanon, (8)  Hezbollah has also been a growing threat, against which the IDF fought an asymmetric conflict wiht Hezbollah in Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, (9) a full-scale war with Hezbollah in 2006, and (10) a multi-front war with Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen starting with the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

The IDF has fought an almost uninterrupted Palestinian insurgency against Israel from 1948 onward, which has included relatively hot and relatively cool periods. The hot periods have included two Intifadas (i.e. uprisings) in both the West Bank and Gaza (1987-1993 and 2000-2005), and five periods of more intense conflict in Gaza since then in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and 2023-2024.

The IDF has also been engaged in a small number of isolated military actions involving small numbers of personnel outside its territories and the immediate vicinity of its borders (especially a security zone in South Lebanon), including the 1976 Operation Entebbe commando raid to free hijacked airline passengers being held captive in Uganda, air strikes and missile attacks in Syria, in Iraq (to destroy its nuclear reactor), in Iran, and in Southern Yemen, and some assassinations in places including Lebanon and Iran.

The IDF has 169,500 active duty military personnel and 465,000 reservists, and the lion's share of adult Israelis (men and women alike) are military veterans who served for a significant period of time. Israelis with military experience in the IDF, armed with assault rifles, are ubiquitous in every town, village, and urban neighborhood. The quality of Israeli military training, despite Israel's high level of mobilization, rivals that of any other country in the world. A common ethnicity, adopted language, and a lifetime of constant threats, also unites Israelis as a community.

Ground Forces

Israel's ground forces, apart from a few missions with small numbers of commandos and assassins, rarely venture further than into the southern tip of Lebanon or a few miles beyond its border with Egypt, and very rarely goes to the east of the Great Rift Valley through which the Jordan River flows. Israeli ground forces have 126,000 active duty soldiers and 400,000 reservists, organized into six infantry brigades (including one brigade of paratroopers), four armored brigades, an artillery corps, a combat engineering corps, and a military intelligence corps.

Air Force

The Israeli Air Force has 34,000 active duty airmen, 55,000 reservists, and 613 aircraft spread over at least ten major air force bases in the small country. It has 280 modern capable fighter jets (39 with stealth), 48 modern helicopter gunships, 25 surveillance, intelligence and control planes and many surveillance drones, 14 tanker aircraft (7 long range and 7 smaller and short range), 4 VIP transports, 10 C-130 transports (3 of which have SAR features), 53 utility helicopters, 22 heavy lift helicopters, 4 SAR helicopters, and 159 trainer aircraft. 

No Air Force has shot down more planes and produced more fighter aces since WWII than Israel. 

Israel has no long range or heavy bombers, and no long range transport or reconnaissance aircraft, although its 7 long range tanker aircraft that can extend the range of its fighters and C-130 transports. It has no carrier based fixed wing aircraft and no VTOL fixed wing aircraft.

Armed Combat Aircraft

• 66 F-15E
• 175 F-16C
• 39 F-35I (an Israeli variant of the F-35A)
• 48 Apache AH-64A/D attack helicopters

Intelligence, Surveillance, and Control

• 2 Boeing 707 based early warning and control aircraft
• 2 Gulfstream G550 based early warning and control aircraft
• 18 Super King general aviation aircraft signals and electronic intelligence aircraft
• 3 Gulfstream G550 based signals and surveillance aircraft
• An unspecified number of at least five kinds of surveillance drones

Tankers

• 7 Boeing 707 based tankers
• 7 KC-130J based tankers (for fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, and ground vehicles)

Transport/Utility

• 4 Super King general aviation transports (2 of which are also used for training)
• 3 C-130E/H transport and search and rescue
• 7 C-130J tactical airlift
• 4 Bell 206 utility helicopters
• 49 UH-60 utility helicopters
• 22 CH-53 heavy lift helicopters
• 4 Eurocopters AS565 search and rescue

Trainers

• 30 M-346 Lavi
• 20 F-15B/D
• 49 F-16D
• 20 T-6 Texan II
• 16 Grob G-120
• 18 Bell OH-58 helicopter trainers

Navy

The IDF Navy has 9,500 active duty sailors and 10,000 reservists who operate 69 vessels out of four main naval bases on its Mediterranean coast, and some other shipyards, a training school, and some headquarters facilities. They primarily guard Israel's coast. 

Its most significant engagements were in the 1973 Yom Kippur War where it sunk 5 Syrian naval ships (the first naval battle between naval ships with surface to surface missiles) which kept the Syrian navy in port for the rest of the war, and 3 Egyptian missile boats without suffering casualties. In 2006, a IDF Navy corvette was struck in a surprise missile attack by Hezbollah from Lebanon that killed four Israeli sailors. It appears that the IDF Navy has never left the Mediterranean sea (some of its ships have a range of up to about 4,000 nautical miles) or even "shown the flag" far from Israeli waters. Given its narrow area of operations, along roughly 120 miles of coastal plain with several naval bases along the way, a sustained high cruising speed for its ships and boats is not a priority for Israel's Navy.

They operate:

• 7 corvettes: Sa'ar 5 class (1275 tons), Sa'ar 6 class (1900 tons) with missiles
• 8 missile boats: Sa'ar 4.5 class (498 tons) with missiles
• 5 submarines: Dolphin class (1900 - 2050 tons) armed with torpedos
• 45 patrol boats (8.5 - 85 tons) armed with cannons up to 30mm, machine guns and on 13 of them 4 Hellfire missiles
• 4 support ships (2 are 500 ton supply ships and 2 are 4,199 ton transport ships with 816 tons of cargo capacity)

Israel hasn't had to content with hostile naval forces for fifty years, despite one minor stray attack from land on one of its ships. But the Mediterranean sea is full of nations with modern naval forces and air forces that could attack naval ships. And, Ukraine's very successful campaign against the Russian Black Sea fleet in the Ukraine war without having a real navy of its own, has also demonstrated the potential threat to its navy from land based attacks like the 2006 attack from Hezbollah.

Israel's navy is very powerful for a small navy without even a true frigate class ship, and its submarine force is also impressive for this small country. It could probably resist a significant sea based attack on Israel and its navy. But it also isn't an expeditionary force designed to serve for extended periods of time far from its navy's home ports.