A Victory of Historic Proportions

 Fifty years from now, West Point cadets will be studying Israel's stunning military triumph

By Michael Oren

Critics of Israel’s conduct of the war, both left-wing and right, have pointed out its many failures. After nearly a year and a half of intense combat, Hamas continues to control significant parts of Gaza, Hezbollah is far from defeated, and pro-Iranian militias in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen remain unbowed. Iran, moreover, the widely-crowned head of the snake, though weakened, still threatens Israel on multiple fronts. As of this writing, dozens of hostages languish in terrorist captivity. Israel, these critics claim, has lost the war.

That war, however, is likely far from over. And, in purely military terms, Israel’s achievements are well beyond impressive. They are, in fact, being closely examined by commanders and policy makers worldwide. Generations of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and other war colleges will study them.

I know this because, during my tenure as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, I had the privilege of visiting West Point. I was greeted by an honor guard composed, perhaps strangely, of Jewish cadets, and was deeply moved when the entire student body, at lunch, stood and saluted my arrival. I visited the grave of Mickey Marcus, the IDF’s first general, and the beautiful Jewish Chapel. But the most memorable event of my tour was when several upperclassmen told me which of Israel’s wars they studied.

Not the 1967 Six-Day War, its stunning successes notwithstanding, but the Yom Kippur War—that is what is taught at West Point. I was shocked. Why would future U.S. officers be interested in a war that began with a surprise Egyptian and Syrian attack that claimed the lives of 2,700 Israeli soldiers in a mere three weeks? What might they find inspiring in a war that remains an enduring Israeli trauma? But for Americans who refuse to let the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 or Germany’s Ardennes offensive three years later tarnish their appreciation of the Allies’ ultimate victory, the fact that Israel was caught off-guard on October 6, 1973, meant little. The war, the cadets noted, ended with the Israeli artillery within range of both Cairo and Damascus. More crucially for them, the Israelis succeeded in achieving what few armies in history had even dared. Mid-combat, Israel changed its fundamental doctrine.

They called it the Mailed Fist. Based on its effectiveness in 1967, the IDF believed that tanks could break through enemy lines and create gaps for Israeli ground troops. In the intervening six years, though, Arab fighters had acquired advanced Soviet anti-tank weapons that penetrated the tanks’ armor—their chainmail—and devastated the fist. The situation necessitated an overnight inversion of Israel’s military doctrine. The infantry now led the charge, neutralizing those armed with shoulder-fired missiles, and enabling the tanks to advance. The change proved decisive. Israeli forces subsequently crossed the Suez Canal and surrounded the Egyptian army, recaptured the Golan Heights and penetrated deep into Syria. That is why the Yom Kippur War was studied at West Point.

I recalled my visit and that conversation this week, while thinking about the current Middle East war. Again, in purely military terms, Israel’s performance in this war has been arguably more impressive than any in our history. As in 1973, the surprise attack launched by Hamas fifty years and a day later against the communities of the south caught Israel completely off-guard. And yet, more swiftly and completely than in the Yom Kippur War, the IDF repelled the invaders and went on the counter-offensive. If, in 1973, the IDF prevailed on two fronts against odds at first deemed insurmountable and did so while altering its doctrines not once but dozens of times, in 2023-24 it did so on as many as seven fronts. Israel changed one doctrine during the Yom Kippur War, but, in this one, it altered dozens. In the future, I am sure, West Point cadets will be studying this war and how Israel accomplished the impossible.

The war, it must be stressed, began not only with a tactical surprise but with a doctrinal earthquake. For years, the Israel Defense Forces had undergone far-reaching transformations. Once designed to engage large conventional armies, to go swiftly onto the offensive, and to achieve a decisive outcome, the IDF had been streamlined into a leaner, tech-heavy corps prepared to defend Israel against asymmetrical threats. It was utterly unprepared for fighting terrorist organizations more powerful than many Middle Eastern states. Fighting in Gaza, alone, required the massed tank and infantry formations unlike any deployed in decades, and an instant revision of Israel’s combat doctrine. And even then, the IDF faced challenges never before encountered by a modern army.

In the two largest battles in the Iraq War—Mosul and Fallujah—U.S. forces fought against some 5,000 rebels hiding in cities largely emptied of civilians and virtually free of tunnels. By contrast, the IDF confronted 30,000 terrorists shielded by 2.5 million civilians with limited ability to evacuate. Israeli troops had to fight not only in the labyrinthine streets of Gaza but, inconceivably, below them. As Col. John Spencer, an Iraq War veteran and chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, observed:

[N]o military had faced anything like it in the past —not even Israeli ground forces. The IDF faced a Hamas military organization that had spent over fifteen years engineering the infrastructure of an entire region—to include over twenty major cities—for war, with the group’s political-military strategy resting on a vast and expensively constructed subterranean network under Gaza’s population centers. The Hamas underground network, often called the “Gaza metro,” includes between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels and bunkers at depths ranging from just beneath apartment complexes, mosques, schools, hospitals, and other civilian structures to over two hundred feet underground. There are estimates of over five thousand separate shafts leading down into Hamas subsurface spaces. In past wars, where underground environments were used, the tunnel networks were subordinate to the surface and were not built solely under population centers mostly to be used as massive human shields.

And if those obstacles were not sufficiently daunting, the IDF also had to grapple with a U.S. administration that accused it of “bombing indiscriminately,” of “dehumanizing” and “killing too many” Palestinians. Such accusations, moreover, gave a fillip to international bodies that accused Israel of committing war crimes and even genocide. Arrest warrants were issued for Israeli leaders. The White House went on to delay or curtail the shipment of certain vital munitions to Israel, signaling other countries, among them Great Britain and Canada, to follow suit. Most constricting for the Israelis, though, was the presence of many dozens of hostages held in Hamas captivity. Fear of inadvertently harming them prevented the IDF from entering some of the terrorists’ most strategic strongholds.

Overcoming the sui generis battlefield of Gaza required constant revision of longstanding IDF doctrines and the swift invention of new ones. The tunnel shafts and systems that were initially ignored in favor of attacking aboveground structures were destroyed to deny the terrorists shelter and maneuverability. “They [the Israeli troops] really made a university out of it,” the commander of an elite unit recalled. They developed a doctrine of dealing with the underground, destroying it and cleansing it.” Boobytrapped buildings, women and children used as Hamas spotters, a scourge of friendly fire incidents, terrorists embedded among evacuating civilians—all required an almost instant altering of tactics. Learning that increased military pressure did not, as first thought, impel Hamas to release the hostages but rather to shoot them, Israel advanced far more cautiously.

Perhaps the most dramatic—and controversial—doctrinal change related to the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Since Palestinian civilians applauded and, in many cases, participated in the October 7 attack, Israel initially felt no moral responsibility to feed them. Withholding aid, moreover, was seen as Israel’s only leverage in compelling Hamas to release the hostages. Yet that policy, too, would change, as international and, especially, American pressure mounted on Israel to open humanitarian corridors into Gaza and vastly increase the aid entering it. After U.S. forces tried and failed to erect a supply pier into the Strip, Israel had to devise entirely new procedures for conveying aid to Palestinians displaced by the war while ensuring that the maximum amount did not fall into Hamas’s hands. Such actions, though still criticized by important sectors of Israeli society, provided the diplomatic time and space for the IDF to prosecute the war and the American munitions necessary to fight it.

Israel’s doctrine-altering ability would have been sufficiently unique if demonstrated solely in Gaza. But the war raged on as many as seven fronts, each with its own slew of challenges. To counter escalating terror attacks in Judea and Samaria, the IDF for the first time employed coordinated air and ground operations. Retaliating for drone and missile strikes from Iran and the Houthis in Yemen required an unprecedented blend of defensive and offensive capabilities.

While systems such as the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow 2 and Arrow 3, successfully intercepted hundreds of enemy projectiles, Israeli fighter jets, by refueling mid-air, struck strategic enemy targets thousands of kilometers away. Iran’s air defense was largely destroyed, along with factories for producing vital ballistic and nuclear components. Not a single Israeli aircraft was lost.

The most impressive display of Israel’s military prowess—and doctrinal versatility—took place on the northern front with Lebanon. There, according to both U.S. and Israeli intelligence estimates, Hezbollah fielded more than 100,000 deeply entrenched combatants and more than 150,000 rockets, many of them long-range and individually guided. In any full-scale war, Israel was expected to be struck by between 2,000 and 6,000 rockets daily, utterly overwhelming its missile defense umbrella. Thousands of Israelis were likely to die.

None of these predictions proved true. Beginning with an ingeniously designed and executed operation to transform Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies into personal booby-traps, Israel eliminated or incapacitated most of the terrorists’ leadership. After precisely locating them, Israeli intelligence guided IAF jets in surgically coordinated sorties that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and other senior commanders, even under 60 feet of concrete. A similar blend of intelligence and air power enabled Israel to neutralize as much as 80% of the enemy’s rocket arsenal. Entering, finally, southern Lebanon, Israeli ground forces destroyed much of Hezbollah’s extensive tunnel and bunker infrastructure, captured massive amounts of armaments, and drove most of the terrorists north of the Litani River.

By the beginning of 2025, Israel’s military triumphs had severely degraded Hamas, humbled Hezbollah, and extensively weakened Iran. These achievements, in turn, led to the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the disappearance of a decades-long threat to Israel’s security. In purely military terms, the world had long seen nothing like it.

On the contrary, much of the world focuses on the civilian deaths caused by the IDF in both Gaza and Lebanon.

Collateral damage, as it is euphemistically called, is unavoidable in combat, especially in densely populated urban areas. So too are friendly fire incidents that can claim as much as 20% of an active army’s casualties. In the fog of battle, Israeli troops have mistakenly fired on their own, on aid workers, and even on escaped hostages. Exceptional, however, has been Israel’s ability to limit civilian casualties to a historic low. Though the media, quoting nebulous “Gaza Health Authorities,” often cite figures of 47,000 Palestinian fatalities, that figure includes the 20,000 terrorists killed by Israel, the 6,000 Gazans who, over the past 18 months, have died of natural causes, and the several thousand Palestinians killed by Hamas rockets falling short. Deducting those numbers from the 47,000 produces a nearly 1:1 combatant to civilian fatality ratio, a ratio unmatched by any modern army in war.

Such statistics nevertheless failed to impress those Israelis who claimed that by IDF’s over-caution in avoiding civilian casualties caused the deaths of many of our own troops. In fact, formerly National Security Advisor Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror has observed, “in Gaza, the forces advanced slowly, using extensive cover fire at the expense of speed, in a manner that reduced casualties among the IDF soldiers and civilians.” To date, after nearly a year and half of combat, 840 soldiers have been killed. This is an excruciating number, to be sure, but in pure military terms, it is far smaller than the 6,000 Israelis killed in a similar period during the War of Independence or the 2,650 who fell in the three weeks of the Yom Kippur War. Proportionally, the Six-Day War proved the costliest with as many as 900 Israeli dead. In all of these cases, Israel’s population was only a fraction of what it is today.

And yet, for all its astonishing successes, the critics are correct in pointing out that Israel cannot claim to have fulfilled its leaders’ pledge to achieve total victory over Hamas. The terrorists are still capable of killing Israeli soldiers, sometimes daily, and of rocketing Israeli communities. Hezbollah, too, though wounded, is far from defeated. Iran, having enriched enough uranium to produce several nuclear weapons, still threatens Israel strategically, while the Houthis remain undeterred. Much more military force, along with doctrinal dexterity, will be required to reach a truly decisive outcome.

Other factors may meanwhile inhibit Israel from building on its battlefield achievements or enjoying their long-term fruits. The internal unity shown by Israeli society in the initial phases of the war has largely frayed and may completely unravel if the government fails to find widely accepted solutions to the controversies surrounding judicial reform and Ultra-Orthodox service in the IDF. Effective day-after plans for Gaza must be finalized and implemented and ways to expand the Abraham Accords, especially with Saudi Arabia, and by reviving the peace process. Above all, Israel must secure freedom for all the hostages. No military victory will ever be complete—and Israeli society kept whole—as long as hostages remain in Gaza.

Generations of West Point cadets will study this war, I am sure, and marvel at Israel’s performance. They will wonder how a small country surrounded by such formidable foes would recover from so severe a setback and delivered such devastating blows. Perhaps, too, future U.S. commanders will recall the immense political and diplomatic pressures under which Israel fought, the constant charges of war crimes and genocide. I only hope that they will learn all this and not shake their heads after reading how Israel, unable to bridge its internal schisms, turned an historic victory into a Pyrrhic one.