RUTHFULLY YOURS

FACING A “NEW MIDDLE EAST” A THEORY FOR ISRAEL’S STRATEGIC FUTURE: PROFESSOR LOUIS RENE BERES

Posted By Ruth King on March 9th, 2011

World and regional politics remain notably and unalterably complex. There is no good argument for examining threats to Israel’s survival (e.g., Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah strength in Lebanon, Hamas operations in Gaza) as if they were somehow singular and unrelated. On the contrary, there are foreseeable interactions between individual catastrophic harms, so-called synergies, that could make the potentially existential risks of both anarchy and chaos even more pressing.

For Israel,  the dangers of regional chaotic disintegration are both particular and unique. Facing not only a growing   nuclear threat from Iran, but also the more or less simultaneous appearance of “Palestine,” the Jewish State could quickly find itself engulfed in mass-casualty terrorism, and/or  in unconventional war. As to any long-promised security assistance from the United States, President Barack Obama could offer little more than compassionate American help in burying the myriad dead.

An enduring and growing threat to Israel remains the suicide bomber in macrocosm. In this connection, the probability of a genuine Middle East chaos could be massively enlarged by altogether conceivable instances of enemy irrationality.  If, for example,  Israel should begin to face a Jihadist adversary that would value certain presumed religious expectations even more highly than its own physical survival, Israel’s deterrent could then be immobilized. Such a paralysis of Israeli power could, at some point, imply a heightened threat of nuclear and/or biological war. It could also place Israel in the recognizable cross hairs of mass-destruction terrorism.

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” says the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, “and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”  Now, assembled in almost two hundred armed tribal camps, officially called nation-states, all peoples coexist uneasily and insecurely on a plainly fractured planet. The  jurisprudential and civilizational origins of this radically decentralized world lie plainly in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a foundational treaty that put a codified end to the Thirty Years War. But, now, anarchy is potentially more portentous than before, owing largely to the unprecedented fusion of  chaos with authentically apocalyptic weaponry.

In the worst case scenario, even with the United Nations and its associated “international community,”  there will be no safety in arms, no rescues from political authority, and no reassuring answers from science. New wars will rage until every flower of culture is trampled, and until all things human are leveled in a more or less primal disorder. “The worst,” once remarked Swiss playwright, Friedrich Durrenmatt, “does sometimes happen.”

In history and world politics, the “worst” is a very old story. So, too, is anarchy. Chaos, however, is not. There is a meaningful difference, especially for Israel in the “New” Middle East.

Sometimes, strategic truth may emerge through paradox. Chaos and anarchy may actually represent opposite end points of the same global continuum. Perversely, perhaps, mere anarchy, or  the absence of central world authority, is “normal.” Chaos, however,  is sui generis. It is, therefore, thoroughly “abnormal.”

Since the seventeenth century, our anarchic world can be described as a system. What happens in any one part of this world, therefore, necessarily affects what happens in some, or all, of the other parts.  When a particular deterioration is marked, and begins to spread from one nation to another, the corrosive effects can utterly undermine regional and/or international stability.  When this deterioration is rapid and catastrophic, as it would be following the start of any unconventional war and/or unconventional terrorism, the corollary effects would be correspondingly immediate and overwhelming. These effects would be chaotic.

Aware that even an incremental collapse of  remaining world authority structures will impact its few friends as well as its many enemies,  Israel’s leaders will need to heed Durrenmatt’s incontestable observation about the “worst.” This means they will need to advance certain precise and plausible premonitions of collapse in order to chart durable paths to survival. Such an indispensable awareness is likely not yet in place. Instead, the principal paths under serious diplomatic consideration in Jerusalem still seem to concern the misconceived and badly twisted cartographies of President Obama’s  “Road Map.”

Once again, especially if they should pay heed to the viscerally disingenuous  suggestions of certain prominent pundits and columnists, Israel’s leaders will waste still more precious time with  purely ritualistic considerations of  clichéd American “peace plans.” Instead, they should soon consider how Israel ought to respond to international life in a global state of nature. In this connection, the specific triggering mechanism of our disassembling world’s incremental descent into chaos could originate from a variety of different mass-casualty attacks against Israel, and/or from similar attacks against other western democracies.

Even the traditionally powerful United States, now suffering huge economic and infrastructure dislocations, would not be immune to this starkly remorseless vulnerability.

Any chaotic disintegration of the world system would fundamentally transform the Israeli system. Again recalling the Swiss playwright, such a transformation could ultimately involve total or near-total destruction. In anticipation, Israel will have to orient its strategic planning to an assortment of worst-case prospects, thus focusing much more deliberately on a wide range of primarily self-help security options.

The State of Nations remains the State of Nature. For Israel, certain prominent but time-dishonored processes of “peacemaking,” processes that are conveniently but erroneously premised on allegedly “scientific” assumptions of reason and rationality, will, finally, have to be renounced.

Israel’s persistently one-sided surrender of territories, its mistaken reluctance to accept certain critical preemption options (although, recently, Israeli preemptions may have taken new and uniquely non-explosive forms of cyber-defense and cyber-warfare), and its periodic releases of live terrorists in exchange for slain Jews may never bring about direct and total defeat. Taken together, however, these synergistic policy errors will have a cumulatively weakening and possibly “mortal” effect on Israel.  Whether the principal effect here will be one that “merely” impairs the Jewish State’s commitment to endure, or one that also opens it up, operationally to a devastating missile attack, and/or to major acts of terror, is not clear. Nonetheless, still-possible and meaningful clarifications do rest upon patient and capable examinations of the prevailing geometry of chaos.

For Israel, the fragmenting situations in North Africa and the Middle East are just the beginning. Wider  patterns of anarchy, chaos and disorder are likely. What might still be avoided, however, is mega-destruction.

This avoidance will require a primary and  antecedent awareness in Jerusalem that in current world politics, as in any other primordial State of Nature, survival demands resolute courage, openly intellectual imagination, and a thoroughly determined conviction that even huge short-term national losses are undoubtedly preferable to long-term national disappearance.

In the currently visible hierarchy of catastrophic threats to Israel, Iranian nuclearization looms largest, and certainly, most conspicuous. But there are also other critical hazards on the strategic horizon, and several with distinctly synergistic qualities. Oddly, because it is still unrecognized by so many well-meaning Israelis, the most serious such hazard is the parallel or coincident creation of a Palestinian state.

With Palestine, current Israeli requirements for “demilitarization” notwithstanding, the “worst” would happen. Israel’s senior operational planners, therefore, must look very closely at all of the country’s interpenetrating and interwoven security challenges.  Keeping especially Iran and Palestine  in mind,  particular attention will need to be directed toward what military thinkers have sometimes identified as the  “correlation of forces,”  but now with a substantially improved orientation to both (a) the prevailing “correlation,” and (b) the preferred “correlation.”

Since the Second Lebanon War (2006),[2] IDF strategists and tacticians have likely begun to use this operational planning concept in creative and non-traditional ways. Historically, a correlation of forces approach has generally been applied as a tangible measure of competitive armed forces, ranging from quantitative considerations at the subunit level, and extending all the way up to assessments of major formations. It has also been used to compare resources and capabilities at both the operational levels of day-to-day strategy, and at the much higher levels of “grand strategy.” At times, this particular application has been related to the similar, but less comprehensive military notion of force ratios.

Presently, facing an even broader and more ominous variety of existential security threats than ever before, perils originating from both state and sub-state adversaries, Israel must undertake  broader and more complex correlation of forces assessments.  IDF planners must, in this new and wider search, seek more than a traditionally “objective” yardstick for the appropriate measurement of opposing forces. Although defense strategists in Tel Aviv already routinely compare all available data concerning both the numerical and qualitative characteristics of relevant units, including, inter alia, personnel, weaponry and equipment,  IDF field commanders will now also need to cultivate some newly subjective or “phenomenological” kinds of understanding. This unorthodox recommendation may appear to fly in the face of the usual military emphases on facts, but – in war as well as in peace – these “facts” are often the result of very personal and particular interpretations.

In exploiting a suitably improved concept of a correlation of forces, Israel’s senior planners will seemingly have to reject a basic axiom of geometry. They will need to recognize that some critical force measurements must not only remain imprecise, but that the unavoidable imprecision itself may include important forms of military understanding. For example, a particular enemy’s consuming dedication to certain presumed religious expectations, his utterly uncompromising strength of will, may resist more traditional sorts of measurement, but it may still be determinative.

In certain military assessments, as in human psychology, there are ascertainable variables that are stubbornly refractory to measurement, but, critically perhaps, may still be of considerable importance.[3]

Several emerging hazards to Israeli national security will be shaped by a distinctively “Westphalian”  geometry of chaos. In this delicately unbalanced and largely unprecedented set of imprecise calculations, the whole, paradoxically, may  turn out to be more (or less) than the sum of its parts. It follows that Israeli planners will need to bring a still more nuanced and intellectually unorthodox approach to their multi-disciplinary work. This means, especially, a counterintuitive awareness that proper planning must sometimes presume enemy irrationality, and that it must also be able distinguish between authentic enemy irrationality, and pretended enemy irrationality.

How can the IDF planner reliably recognize the difference between real and contrived irrationality? This is an urgent question;  it cannot be answered by any standard reference to more traditional correlation of forces modes of analysis.

These same issues of rational decision-making will also have to be looked at from the standpoint of optimizing Israel’s own capacity to project certain purposeful images of military policy. Reciprocally, therefore, IDF planners will have to decide when Israel would be better served in both its deterrence and war-fighting capabilities by the deliberate projection of an image of limited or partial irrationality. Earlier, Moshe Dayan had displayed a more visceral idea of this posture when he warned: “Israel must be seen as a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”

But Israeli planners must also be mindful here of pretended irrationality as a double-edged sword. Brandished too provocatively, any recognizable preparations for a so-called “Samson Option” could unexpectedly encourage certain enemy preemptions.

By its improved use of correlation of forces thinking, Israel will need to seize every available operational initiative, including certain appropriate intelligence and counterintelligence functions,  to best influence and control each enemy’s particular matrix of expectations. This is a tall policy order, especially as these multiple enemies will include both state and sub-state adversaries, often with substantial and subtle  interactions between them. Moreover, in an age of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, the consequences of certain  IDF planning failures could become literally intolerable.

Now, in greater detail, with new and particular uncertainties in Egypt, Lebanon and North Africa, what should be the more holistic IDF concept of correlation of forces?

First, this concept must take careful account of all enemy leaders’ intentions as well as capabilities. Such an accounting, oriented to both extant and prospective leaders, is necessarily more subjective than any more traditional assessments of personnel, weapons and basic logistic data.  But such an accounting will also need to be thoughtful and nuanced, despite relying less on tangible scientific modeling, than upon behaviorally informed profiles.

It will not be enough for IDF planners to judiciously gather and examine relevant hard data from all of the usual sources.  It will also be important to put Israeli planners directly into the “shoes” of each actual and prospective enemy leader, president, king or terrorist, thus determining, among other things, what relevant Israeli capacity and vulnerability looks like to them.

Second, expanding more precisely what has just been discussed, any properly refined IDF correlation of forces concept must take very close account of enemy leaders’ rationality.  Any adversary that does not conform to the presumed rules of rational behavior in world politics ( an increasingly probable scenario) might not be deterred by any Israeli threats, military or otherwise. This is the case even where Israel would actually possess both the capacity and resolve to make good on its pertinent deterrent threats.

Where  an  enemy state or sub-state would not value its own continued survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences, the standard  logic of deterrence would be immobilized. Here, all bets would be off concerning probable enemy reactions to Israeli retaliatory threats.

This sobering point now refers especially to prospective nuclear security threats from a potentially unstable Iran. In this widely recognized theatre of possible future war, especially if President Ahmadinejad, his clerical handlers and/or his successors  should subscribe to faith-based expectations of a Shiite apocalypse, Israel could find itself confronting what amounts to a suicide bomber in macrocosm. This radically unfavorable scenario, of course, would be contingent upon a prior willingness by both Jerusalem/Tel Aviv and Washington to forego any remaining preemption options.

Insofar as assassination/targeted killing may be considered as a particular form of preemption (“anticipatory self-defense” under international law),[4] however, it is plausible that the United States and Israel could abandon any operational plans for the more standard and recognizable military forms of defensive first-strike, but still remain more or less willing to selectively kill Iranian leaders and/or nuclear scientists. In essence, viewed from the standpoint of an expanded and improved IDF correlation of forces orientation, this would mean the formal inclusion of assassination[5] and sabotage within the country’s strategic doctrine.[6]

Third,  IDF planning assessments will assuredly need to consider the organization of changing enemy state units; their training standards; their morale; their reconnaissance capabilities; their battle experience;  and their suitability and adaptability to the prospective battlefield.  Traditionally, these sorts of assessment are quite ordinary, and not exceedingly difficult to make or innovate on an individual or piecemeal basis.  But now, creative IDF planners will be those who are able to conceptualize such ordinarily diverse factors together, in their entirety.  Recalling Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War, one vital purpose of this new strategic holism should be to avoid protracted warfare. Indeed, the ancient Chinese strategist’s observation that “No country has ever profited from protracted warfare….” is always meaningful to Israel.

Fourth, and closely related to number 3 (above), IDF assessments must consider the cumulative capabilities and intentions of Israel’s nonstate enemies;  that is, the entire configuration of anti‑Israel terrorist groups.  In the future, such assessments must offer more than a simple group by group consideration.  Rather, the groups in question should also be considered in their entirety, collectively, as they may interrelate with one another vis-à-vis Israel.  These several hostile groups will also need to be considered in their particularly interactive relationship with core enemy states.  This last point might best be characterized as an essential IDF correlation of forces search for vital synergies between its assorted state and sub-state adversaries.

There is nothing really new about the concept of “asymmetric warfare,” but today, especially in the “New” Middle East, the really crucial asymmetry lies not in particular force structures or ratios, but rather in determination and strength of will. In a similar vein, Clausewitz, in his Principles of War (1812), spoke  of a genuine need for “audacity.” This quality represents yet another crucial variable for IDF planners; it must inevitably elude any kind of precise or tangible measurement.

Fifth, and once again recalling Sun Tzu – this time his spatial injunction that “If there is no place to go, it is fatal terrain” –  IDF strategic planning judgments should take suitable note of the still-ongoing metamorphosis of a fragmented nonstate adversary (Fatah/Hamas) into a sovereign state adversary (“Palestine”).  As has been well-known since 1967, with such a significantly injurious metamorphosis, Israel’s “strategic depth” would shrink to  decisively less manageable levels. Further, any expanding enemy momentum to fold Israel itself into the new Arab state would be further energized. After all, the official maps of “Palestine” drawn by both the Palestine Authority, and Hamas, already include all of Israel.

If, perhaps because of still- insistent “peace” pressures coming from President Obama’s Washington,  Palestinian statehood cannot be avoided, how should Israel learn to “live with Palestine?”  In one respect, any codified institutionalization of disparate Arab enemies into “Palestine” could possibly offer at least some geostrategic benefit to Israel.  For example, now certain forms of Israeli reprisal and retaliation would likely be easier and thus more purposeful.  Yet, there would also be a corresponding and incontestably serious loss of “strategic depth” through its loss of vital territories. And this is to say nothing of the obvious historical, religious and legal grounds that exist for maintaining a full Israeli possession of Judea and Samaria (West Bank).

In the matter of synergies, the IDF will also need to consider and look for critical new “force multipliers.”  A force multiplier is a collection of related characteristics, other than weapons and force size, that may make any military organization more effective in combat.  A force multiplier may be generalship; tactical surprise; tactical mobility; or certain command and control system enhancements. It could  include such imaginative and less costly forms of preemption  as assassination[7] and sabotage. It will now also include well-integrated components of cyber-warfare, and a reciprocal capacity to prevent and blunt any incoming cyber-attacks. For Israel, worms must now have their special place.

Today, this “boring” force multiplier could even prove to be more decisive than any of the others. Although, of course, nonexistent in the times of Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz, “cyber-audacity” could already represent a core component of Israel’s necessarily broadened approach to correlation of forces.

The presence of any force multiplier may create synergy.  Again, in the matter of Israel, we must acknowledge the antecedent geometry of chaos. Understanding this more fully, IDF fighting units could conceivably become  more effective than the mere sum of their respective parts.

Before this can happen, however, senior planners must ensure that their analyses and consequent recommendations are detached from any sort of false hopes. Here, the ancient advice of Thucydides (416 BCE), writing on the ultimatum of the Athenians to the Melians during the Peloponnesian War, will be instructive: “But hope is by nature an expensive commodity, and those who are risking their all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined….”

The overriding objective of IDF correlation of forces war planning must  be to inform leadership decisions about two always complementary matters: (1) perceived vulnerabilities of Israel;  and (2) perceived vulnerabilities of enemy states and non-states. For the IDF Intelligence Branch (Aman) in particular, this means gathering and assessing crucial information;  for example, information concerning the expected persuasiveness of the country’s still-undisclosed nuclear deterrence posture. To endure well into the uncertain future, such information, and not a series of unfounded hopes, must be at the core of its structured orientation to a regional correlation of forces.

All this information,  especially whatever concerns Israel’s “opaque” or undeclared nuclear deterrent, must flow reliably and quickly to key “consumers” within the broader IDF sphere, and then to the country’s political leadership in Jerusalem. Once it is received and digested by this leadership, including, of course, the other security services, and the General Staff, selected information must also flow as needed to the national warning centers; to operating force commanders; to contingency operations planners; to research directors;  to combat/training developers; and  to national resource allocators. Above all, IDF planners doing this sensitive work must firmly resist all pressures that might be imposed by divergent political interests in order to support certain preconceived hopes.

Conceptually, in a world of growing international anarchy,[8] this means that IDF correlation of forces planning responsibility should  include (1) recognizing enemy force multipliers;  (2) challenging and undermining enemy force multipliers; and (3) developing and refining its own force multipliers.  Regarding number (3), this means a particularly heavy IDF emphasis on air superiority; communications; intelligence; and surprise.  Once again, recalling Moshe Dayan’s canine metaphor, it may also mean a heightened and calculated awareness of the possible benefits of sometimes appearing less than completely rational to one’s enemies.

It is routinely assumed that Israel’s security from an enemy missile attack is ensured by nuclear deterrence, however  opaque or “ambiguous.” But such a strategy of dissuasion depends upon many complex and interpenetrating conditions and perceptions. Taken by itself, Israel’s mere possession of nuclear weapons, even if it should be fully or partially disclosed, can never bestow real safety.

By definition, a rational state enemy of Israel will always accept or reject a first-strike option by comparing the costs and benefits of each available alternative. Where the expected costs of striking first are taken to exceed expected gains, this enemy will be deterred. But where these expected costs are believed to be exceeded by expected gains, deterrence will fail. Here, Israel would be faced with an enemy attack, whether as a “bolt from the blue,” or as an outcome of anticipated or unanticipated crisis-escalation.

In thinking about strategy, therefore, an immediate task for Israel will be to so strengthen its nuclear deterrent such that any enemy state will always calculate that a first-strike would be irrational. This means  taking  all proper steps to convince these enemy states that the costs of such a strike will always exceed the benefits. To accomplish this objective, Israel must convince prospective attackers that it maintains both the willingness and the capacity to retaliate with its nuclear weapons.

Should an enemy state considering an attack upon Israel  be unconvinced about either one or both of these essential components of nuclear deterrence, it might choose to strike first, depending upon the particular value or utility that it places on the expected consequences of such an attack. In part, it is precisely to prevent just such an “unconvincing” nuclear deterrence posture that Israel must now consider the expected benefits of ending deliberate ambiguity.

A major focus of IDF strategic planning will have to be the nuclear posture of deliberate ambiguity or the so-called “bomb in the basement.” Prime Minister Netanyahu surely understands that adequate nuclear deterrence of increasingly formidable enemies could soon require less nuclear secrecy. What will soon need to be determined by IDF planners concerned with an improved correlation of forces will be the precise extent and subtlety with which Israel should begin to communicate tangible elements of its nuclear positions, intentions and capabilities to these enemies.

The geo-strategic rationale for such carefully constructed forms of nuclear disclosure would not lie in exposing the obvious –  that is, that Israel simply “has” the bomb. Rather, among other things, it would be to persuade prospective attackers that Israel’s nuclear weapons are both usable and penetration-capable.

To protect itself against certain enemy strikes, particularly those attacks that could carry intolerable costs, IDF defense planners will need to prepare to exploit every relevant aspect and function of Israel’s own nuclear arsenal. The success of Israel’s effort here will depend not only upon its particular choice of targeting doctrine (“counterforce” or “counter value”), but also upon the extent to which this choice is made known in advance to certain enemy states,  and to their sub-state surrogates. Before such enemies can be suitably deterred from launching first strikes against Israel, and before they can be deterred from launching retaliatory attacks following any Israeli preemptions, it may not be enough for them to know only that Israel has the bomb. These enemies may also need to recognize that Israeli nuclear weapons are sufficiently invulnerable to such attacks, and that they are pointed directly at high-value population targets.

IDF planners working on an improved strategic paradigm will need to understand the following: Removing the bomb from Israel’s “basement” could enhance Israel’s nuclear deterrent to the extent that it would enlarge enemy perceptions of secure and capable Israeli nuclear forces. Such a calculated end to deliberate ambiguity could also underscore Israel’s willingness to use these nuclear forces in reprisal for certain enemy first-strike and retaliatory attacks.

From the standpoint of successful Israeli nuclear deterrence, IDF planners must proceed on the assumption that perceived willingness is always just as important as perceived capability. This, again, may bring to mind the counter intuitively presumed advantages for Israel of sometimes appearing less than fully rational.

There are certain circumstances in which a correlation of forces paradigm will necessarily lead IDF planners to consider certain preemption options. This is because there will surely be circumstances in which the existential risks to Israel of continuing to rely upon some combination of nuclear deterrence and active defenses (that is, primarily the “Arrow” system of ballistic missile defense) will simply be too great. In these circumstances, Israeli decision-makers will need to determine whether such essential defensive strikes, known jurisprudentially as expressions of “anticipatory self-defense,” would be cost-effective. [9]

Here, their judgments would depend upon a number of possibly interpenetrating factors, including:  (a) expected probability of enemy first-strikes; (b) expected cost (disutility) of enemy first-strikes; (c) expected schedule of enemy unconventional weapons deployments; (d) expected efficiency of enemy active defenses over time; (e) expected efficiency of Israeli active defenses over time; (f) expected efficiency of Israeli hard-target counterforce operations over time; (g) expected reactions of unaffected regional enemies; and (h) expected United States and world community reactions to Israeli preemptions.

IDF planners will no doubt note that Israel’s rational inclinations to strike preemptively in certain circumstances will be affected by the particular steps taken by prospective target states (e.g., Iran) to guard against any Israeli preemption. Should Israel refrain too long, for any reason,  from striking first defensively, certain enemy states could begin to implement protective measures that would pose substantial additional obstacles and hazards for Israel. These measures could include the attachment of certain automated launch mechanisms to certain nuclear weapons, and/or the adoption of launch-on-warning policies.

IDF planners must presume that such policies might call for the retaliatory launch of bombers and/or missiles upon receipt of warning that an Israeli attack is underway. By requiring launch before the attacking Israeli warheads actually reached their intended targets, any enemy reliance of launch-on-warning could carry very grave risks of error.

The single most important factor in IDF correlation of forces planning judgments on the preemption option will be the expected rationality of certain enemy decision-makers. If, after all, these leaders could be expected to strike at Israel with unconventional forces irrespective of anticipated Israeli counterstrikes, deterrence would cease to work. This means that certain enemy strikes could be expected even if the enemy leaders fully understood that Israel had “successfully” deployed its own nuclear weapons in completely survivable modes;  that Israel’s nuclear weapons were believed to be entirely capable of penetrating the enemy’s active defenses; and that Israel’s leaders were altogether willing to retaliate.

Now, possibly facing new forms of regional chaotic disintegration, it is time for Israel to go beyond even its already-expanded paradigm of numerical military assessments to certain additional and “softer” considerations. Within this wider and more self-consciously qualitative  strategic paradigm, IDF planners should focus, among other areas,  upon the cumulative and synergistic importance of unconventional weapons, and low-intensity warfare in the region.

In certain circumstances, vital strategies and tactics will be both indispensable and infeasible. For the Jewish State, this will have the apparent makings of an unbearable and irremediable dilemma. Yet, as truth can emerge through paradox, a suitably improved correlation of forces focus could soon uncover unforeseen, but fully purposeful, strategic options.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. The “New” Middle East is characterized by very specific and consequential changes in power and threat-dynamics, but the underlying forces of anarchy and chaos still retain a discernible and possibly instructive form. It follows that Israel’s strategic thinkers and planners should now stay focused on identifying critical recurrent core patterns within this ascertainable geometry. Then, they will be able to deduce appropriately precise and promising policy recommendations from this discipline’s always-unchanging axioms and postulates.

Theory is a net. Only those who cast, can catch.

—————–

LOUIS RENÉ BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). He has lectured and published widely on Israeli security issues. Born in Zürich, Switzerland on August 31, 1945, Dr. Beres is the author of ten books and several hundred journal articles and monographs  in the field.  Some of his pertinent published writings have appeared in The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs;  Parameters: The Official Journal of the US Army War College; International Security (Harvard);  Special Warfare (JFK Special Warfare Center, U.S., Army); International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Strategic Review; Israel Affairs; World Politics (Princeton);  Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Armed Forces and Society; Comparative Strategy; Journal of Counter Terrorism and Security International; NATIV (Israel); The Hudson Review; Policy Studies Review; The Jerusalem Journal of International Relations; Political Science Quarterly; International Journal; Philosophy and Social Criticism; The Journal of Value Inquiry; Cambridge Review of International Affairs (Cambridge University); Dissent; The Review of Politics; The American Political Science Review; Policy Sciences; and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Professor Beres has also published articles on pertinent strategic matters in several dozen law journals and reviews, and in various monographs published by the Ariel Center For Policy Research (Israel); The Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (University of Notre Dame); The World Order Models Project (World Policy Institute, New York and Princeton); The Monograph Series in World Affairs (University of Denver); and The Graduate Institute of International Studies (Programme For Strategic and International Security Studies, Geneva, Switzerland).

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