There follows my response to comments made here about my post on the Yom Kippur War.

“The military and political leadership of Israel was taken by surprise because over the preceding years they had convinced themselves that the Arab states had no viable military option open to them to recover the territory lost in the Six Day War.”

This is only partly true. Not everyone was in agreement with this evaluation. Some knew that the front lines were vulnerable. Others believed that the Egyptians and Syrians were planning to attack.

1.

Of course not everybody was in agreement with the evaluation that the Egyptians would not attack and nor was there any lack of intelligence information suggesting that they were going to do so. The point is that those who thought the Egyptians were going to attack weren’t listened to and the intelligence that suggested they were about to do so was explained away by those with the power to make decisions. There were both more  acceptable and  less acceptable reasons for this; the less acceptable ones were related  to cockiness arising from the sweeping victory of 1967 while the  more acceptable ones related  to an unwillingness to face up to the imminence of war and all the horrors that go with it.

2.

Clausewitz in “On War” ( Book Three, Chapter Nine) speaks of speed and secrecy being the key factors in achieving surprise; to these he might have added a third; the unwillingness of humans to give credit to evidence that  something they would very much prefer  to avoid  is about to happen.  Surprise in warfare is rarely achieved solely by one side disguising its intentions from the other. It’s achieved by a combination of this with unwillingness by the other party to believe that something they really don’t want to happen is about to.

3.

With the benefit of hindsight, there is always loads of evidence that what in fact happened was about to, and there is never any shortage of people willing to say “I told you so”.  Predicting the past is much easier than predicting the future.

Israel had on several occasions in the preceding year declared a state of high military alert, and had called up reservists when it seemed the Egyptians might attack. One day we will know whether these preventative measures stopped any planned attacks.

It’s true that there were a number of previous alerts and partial mobilizations. I don’t see any reason to think that they had any effect on Egyptian  grand strategy.

The outcome of the earlier War of Attrition was that Egyptian anti-aircraft missile batteries controlled the airspace of a wide belt on the East side of the Suez canal, and severely restricted the ability of IAF operations in that area. As a consequence the garrison forts along the canal became a military millstone rather than a strategic defence line. The two Ariks, Sharon and Tal, both understood the implications of this outcome of the War of Attrition, even if others did not, and knew that the Egyptians did have a military option as long as Israel did not utilize the strategic depth of the Sinai properly.

1.

The Bar-Lev Line, whatever its inadequacies, at least obliged the Egyptians to  fight  in order to cross the Suez Canal, with all the concomitant expenditure of time, training and materiel involved in preparing to do so. This also gave Israel a clear casus belli, something it might otherwise have lacked.

2.

Had Sharon’s advice been listened to, they would have been able to cross the Canal unmolested and, had Israel failed to hold them at the Sinai passes, threaten Israel proper. Israel could never have maintained standing armored forces large enough to allow itself this kind of luxury.

3.

Sharon, as GOC Southern Command until the 1st of July 1973, had an important degree of responsibility for the state of neglect and abandonment into which parts of the Bar-Lev Line had fallen, as well as the laxity that prevailed among some of those manning it.

On the Golan front, the small size of the tank forces that were assigned to the task of holding that line was deeply dispiriting to the young conscripts who were deployed there. In the months preceding the war they expressed, in remarkably restrained but a deeply affecting manner, their knowledge that in any attack they would be overwhelmed and overrun, and that this outcome was the understood and accepted strategy of the high command and Government. When war arrived, they were almost all killed, as they had predicted. A bigger force there would have effectively held off the Syrians.

In Israel, fortunately, young conscripts don’t get to decide on what forces levels are necessary to carry out particular tasks or achieve particular objectives. That is the responsibility of the General Staff and, in the last analysis, the elected civilian leadership. Of course it’s true to say that if Israel had been able to maintain  a large standing army it might have saved itself from being attacked in 1973 but the costs, both in the economic and broader sense, of maintaining  such a large standing army have been judged to be prohibitively high by successive generations of Israelis and their governments. And, in any case, what force level on the Golan Heights would have deterred the Syrians from attacking, if such a level existed, can never be known and there can be no certainty that the level of casualties suffered by Israel would have been lower if the Syrian attack had  met a larger Israeli force.