Israel’s army is falling apart. It must be rebuilt from scratch
An Israeli soldier sits on a tank, near the border with Gaza, 13 August 2025
Yitzhak Brik writes in Haaretz on 20 August 2025:
I shall begin by quoting Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, in leaked audio released by Channel 12 News Friday: “This is something much deeper, spanning many, many years.”
According to Haliva, the intelligence failure of October 7 “requires a much deeper correction. It’s not a matter of a personnel change – we’ll replace the [military] chief of staff and then everything will go back to being good again. I’m opposed to the notion of saying that it was an accident. There are those who say, ‘You were driving your car, you hit traffic spikes; we’ll come and replace all four tires and you can keep traveling.’ I’m saying that what happened to us is much more, and it requires dismantling and reassembly.”
Haliva later explained, “For everything that happens, you find an explanation for in your doctrine. There is a responsibility here for over the course of years for a total strategic understanding that says … our enemy is deterred, at the same time we will calm it Qatari money. I didn’t understand; those who came before me didn’t understand.”
I have long criticized harshly the state of Israel’s ground forces and their organizational culture. There has been no change since the beginning of the current war in Gaza. Noncompliance with orders, lack of oversight and failure to learn from mistakes are still common. The investigations are not credible and there is a culture of lying, low standards and lack of professionalism. There is no operational discipline and the senior command does not take responsibility. A conspiracy of silence and a fear of expressing a different opinion, out of fear of being harmed personally, prevail. The scandalous behavior is deeply ingrained in the DNA of the Israel Defense Forces and, as Maj. Gen. Haliva said, “It requires dismantling and reassembly.”
When we take a bird’s-eye view, two years after the start of the war, the following things emerge:
• A complete loss of trust by the combat soldiers and junior commanders in the senior command of the IDF. This is reflected, among other things, in very high percentages of reservists who are unwilling to serve and double-digit percentages of conscripts “fleeing” from the war due to serious mental health issues, burnout and a lack of trust in their commanding officers.
The land army is shattering in every way:
• Loss of professionalism due to lack of training and exercises.
• A desperate shortage of professionals to maintain armored vehicles and weapons as a result of the elimination of thousands of noncommissioned officer and professional officer positions before the war and the transfer of maintenance to civilian companies that are incapable of carrying out the task.
• A severe shortage of conscripts in the standing army as a result of thousands of casualties in the war and a failure to recruit others to replace them.
• A desperate shortage of reservists, who are voting with their feet and simply not responding to call-up orders.
• The land army has been cut to the bone over in the past 20 years, to about one-third of its size, and it is incapable of achieving a decisive victory in even a single sector.
• There is no long-term vision of the kind needed to prepare the military for the next multifront war.
• The military is not submitting to civilian weapons manufacturers its operational requirements for the future. As a result, within a few years the IDF will not have operational capabilities against new weapons that the enemy is obtaining and manufacturing.
• Privatizing logistics by outsourcing to civilian companies cannot meet the needs of a multifront war in supplying food, water, fuel, ammunition, spare parts and more to combat forces. Most professional drivers in Israel are not Jewish, and they might simply not report for work when the time comes. Additionally, as civilians they cannot cross borders into enemy territory, which would soon paralyze the army.
• The privatization of maintenance, so that there is no maintenance of any weapons or equipment, including tanks and armored personnel carriers, once they cross the border into an enemy state during combat. (Civilians are prohibited from entering enemy territory; the Gaza Strip is not an example.) Therefore any malfunction of or damage to this equipment in enemy territory renders it inoperable and useless.
• A severe personnel crisis in the reserves, conscript service and the career service, one of the worst in the history of the IDF. The best service members in the career army are leaving in droves, and young people are unwilling to sign up for it due to their severe disappointment with what has happened in recent years. It’s a tragedy that the IDF is losing all of its quality personnel at a dizzying pace; the implications are disastrous.
• The army is falling apart; building the military on a strong air force, intelligence and elite units is insufficient even in the current war, and certainly not in future wars. Only by dismantling the current structure and rebuilding the IDF with a different command can save the military and national security.
The writer commanded the IDF’s 36th Division, the Southern Corps (441) and the military colleges, and served for 10 years as the IDF’s ombudsman.
This article is reproduced in its entirety
