By SETH J. FRANTZMAN

I’m not sure there is any reading that would provide an insight into how the IDF ground forces changed or shifted focus because I think if people knew about it then maybe the disaster wouldn’t have happened.

However, what is clear is that Israel has gone through a technological revolution in the ground forces in the last decade. This has included a plan called Momentum that has seen the forces become supposedly more digital and use more sensors and tech to be able to move faster and close “sensor to shooter” loops faster. However, this is all contingent on having the sensors and the shooters in the same place. Having the UAVs on station and having the tanks with their APS actually on.

Israel also got used having the time to react. Because of Iron Dome Israel knows it can wait when it comes to fighting, it can chose a time and place to react, and it can dictate the tempo or “shaping” the battlefield. This jargon is great when one has all the power and the adversary is a few terrorists. But what happens when there is an active threat of 3,000 attackers striking at 29 parts of a security fence? Israel’s air force thus become slaved to a target banks and data sets and having the time to decide how to react. The general policy over the last decade was that “if Hamas shoots 100 rockets then we strike X number of empty Hamas posts and everyone is fine and each side wins.” This managing of the conflict and also “mowing the grass” led to complacency.

Israel also invested in a billion dollar “smart fence” at the border over the last decade. This was supposed to have sensors below and above ground. However, a fence is only as good as the people willing to guard it and in the end if you don’t have any guards, the sensors don’t help.

Hamas has learned how to deal with this. They tested Israel’s reactions via riots at the fence in 2018; and via massive salvos of rockets in 2021…and then apparently planed a massive attack that would overwhelm Israel’s defenses.

Unfortunately for the border communities there was no second line of defense. All Hamas had to do was attack a few military posts, blind a few towers that have sensors and they were inside the line and there was not quick reaction force or second line of defense. Unfortunately for the 60,000 civilians subjected to two days of massacre, they had few defenses; in some cases police rushed into battle with just sidearms against terrorists with rifles and RPGs.

It took up to 6 hours to even get to some locations; in many places terrorists had 4 hours to round up people, systematically murder them, and take some hostage.

Israel’s air force and helicopters were not dispatched to the border to cut off the terrorists, and it appears no UAVs were overhead to keep track of the developing attack and interdict terrorists carting off hostages using motorcycles or even golf carts. Literally, F-35s couldn’t stop golf carts. Israel’s Hannibal Directive, designed to stop kidnappings by overwhelming force (like a Broken Arrow order) after the Shalit kidnapping in 2006, was not used.

It appears the defenses around Gaza were stripped, forces sent home for the holidays and sent to the north and the West Bank.

On top of all that there was no intelligence of the attack. Air defenses didn’t detect or shoot down paragliders. It doesn’t appear that in even one location the attack was prevented. Most bases were overrun, soldiers caught sleeping in some places, expensive main battle tanks destroyed with RPGs when they supposedly have the best active protection. Numerous members of elite units were killed as well as high level commanders.

Unfortunately Israel’s military leadership failed, intelligence community and its politicians failed to predict this on October 7. This is far worse than 1973 when some failures resulted in a week-long setback. Very sadly, the people of southern Israel were left almost as defenseless as Yazidis were to ISIS in Iraq in 2014 and the results are more than 1,000 murdered in a state that is supposed to be the most hi-tech and well defended in the world.

I’ve covered every war on the Gaza frontier since 2005. I can say that in past years the army would not have been so thin, with so few forces, and so few ways to reinforce the frontier.