Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [100]
Regional organization of units gave added incentive in battle, as in the Northern Command, when men fighting the Syrians were defending or avenging their own frequently shelled villages. Wherever they came from, said one officer, “whether from the Galilee, Tel Aviv, or the Negev, each man fought as if everything depended on him.” In the general mobilization for the crisis, units often found themselves with twenty percent surplus. Men over-age or not called for some other reason appeared anyway, including a father in one brigade who joined his son, and were accepted as familiar faces by the company commander without too much question. He does not care who is surplus, General Chaim Barlev, Deputy Chief of Staff, explained: “Only the computer knows later.”
Units trained for years in terms of a particular terrain. All the relevant information that could be obtained before war was assembled and learned. The IDF allotted a higher percentage of ammunition—up to fifty percent of total training ammunition—to actual tactical problems with fire rather than to range marksmanship as in other countries.
The IDF does not believe in officers’ starting as officers, but selects candidates for officer training from the draftees who show promise, after they have learned how it feels to serve as a private. Candidates must survive rigorous testing and pass through NCO school and service first. Reserve officers of company level and up are required to take three-months courses every two or three years or else give up their commissions.
Because of stringent budgets, officers’ training in Israel is more condensed than in any other country, lasting no more than six months for the ground forces. When they leave, according to General Uzi Narkis, chief of the Central Command, “they feel the gap between what they have learned and what they ought to know and so they try to learn more on their own.” A small, compact, bright-eyed, serious man who established his headquarters in the Old City of Jerusalem after hostilities and drives there in his car unescorted, he talked sitting with one leg tucked under him, sipping the bottled orange drink on which the IDF fought the war. The Jews’ intellectual curiosity, he said, was an important military asset. “They want to know why: why this hill, not the other, why this way rather than that. They are skeptical and critical. Israelis are critical of everything, all the time, of the government, the army, of themselves. It is important for an officer to be self-critical—and obstinate. He must be obstinate about sticking to his mission until it is carried out.” The three essentials for an officer, he said, are a spirit of inquiry, execution of mission, and orientation—to the terrain and the task. “And of course leadership and audacity, that is understood.” An officer is one who leads, and to lead he has to be ahead, “ahead too of what occurs.” Evidence that officers led their units during the six days of June was a casualty rate of thirty percent compared with less than ten percent for the whole.
The officer class is young; youth is a fetish of the IDF. Yigael Yadin, now professor of archeology and director of the historic Massada dig, was thirty-three as Chief of Operations in the war of 1948. The present Chief of Staff, General Itzhaak Rabin, now forty-six, was appointed at forty-three, and his staff on average is probably the youngest in the world. This is deliberate policy reflecting the military leaders’ tense consciousness that on them may depend at any moment the country’s continued existence. They are determined to maintain the IDF primed to the last minute, never satisfied, constantly improving.
For the General Staff and virtually all higher-grade officers now over the age of forty, as well as many of the enlisted men,