The October War: A Retrospective, Edited by Richard B. Parker
Shofar, 2003
Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 396pp. $55.00.The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 is the ... more Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 396pp. $55.00.The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 is the most traumatic event in Israeli history and one of the most significant causes for pride in Arab modern history. Towards its end the Cold War's last major superpower crisis took place, and, the fighting also triggered the Arab oil embargo, which had a major impact on world economy during the 1970s.Despite its significance, the volume of academic and non-academic body of literature on the War of Yom Kippur, as it is remembered in Israel, or the Ramadan War, as the Arabs term it, is rather small. Most of it was written during the 1970s, when many details concerning various aspects of the conflict were still unclear. A number of memoirs of Israeli and Egyptian key figures (e.g., the Director of Israel's Military Intelligence, or the Chief of the General Staff-Branch of the Egyptian Army), were published in the early 1990s. They provide new, sometimes misleading, information and interpretation, primarily about Arab war preparations and the sources of Israel's intelligence failure, and they present these from a rather limited and biased angle.Given these deficiencies, The October War: A Retrospective, could fill a wide gap in our knowledge. This is especially so, since it is the summary of a conference on the war which took place in Washington D.C., on October 9 and 10, 1998. Most of the participants in this conference, who came from the USA, ex USSR, Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, took active part in various diplomatic, intelligence, and military roles in the war. Others were academic experts. Such a combination of expertise, implies high expectations. Unfortunately, the final product does not meet them.The book's main weakness is that it hardly provides new information or fresh perspective about the war. The practitioners seem to have come unprepared, bringing into the conference whatever they recollect from the war, without trying to refresh their memory. And the academicians -- some of whom are more familiar than others with the events of 1973 -- could not get out of the discussants the information the practitioners either forgot, or deny, or (still) refuse to tell.Perhaps the best examples, which are also of prime interest to the readers of Shofar, involve the failures to reach a diplomatic solution prior to the war, and Israel's strategic surprise at its beginning. Thus, two of the Israeli representatives in the conference, Mordechai Gazit (the director-general of the prime minister's office in 1973) and Simcha Dinitz (then ambassador in Washington), hardly related to Sadat's attempt, in February 1973, to use Kissinger's back-door channel in order to promote a comprehensive Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement. This was, certainly, the most daring Egyptian proposal throughout the 1967-1973 period. From Israel's perspective it was, however, a non-starter. In April 1973 Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and Yisrael Galilee assessed that war with Egypt was highly likely. Though they mentioned Sadat's initiative as an alternative to it, their main concern was how to explain their preference for a non-diplomatic solution to their colleagues in the government. …
The October War: A Retrospective, Edited by Richard B. Parker
Shofar, 2003
Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 396pp. $55.00.The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 is the ... more Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 396pp. $55.00.The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 is the most traumatic event in Israeli history and one of the most significant causes for pride in Arab modern history. Towards its end the Cold War's last major superpower crisis took place, and, the fighting also triggered the Arab oil embargo, which had a major impact on world economy during the 1970s.Despite its significance, the volume of academic and non-academic body of literature on the War of Yom Kippur, as it is remembered in Israel, or the Ramadan War, as the Arabs term it, is rather small. Most of it was written during the 1970s, when many details concerning various aspects of the conflict were still unclear. A number of memoirs of Israeli and Egyptian key figures (e.g., the Director of Israel's Military Intelligence, or the Chief of the General Staff-Branch of the Egyptian Army), were published in the early 1990s. They provide new, sometimes misleading, information and interpretation, primarily about Arab war preparations and the sources of Israel's intelligence failure, and they present these from a rather limited and biased angle.Given these deficiencies, The October War: A Retrospective, could fill a wide gap in our knowledge. This is especially so, since it is the summary of a conference on the war which took place in Washington D.C., on October 9 and 10, 1998. Most of the participants in this conference, who came from the USA, ex USSR, Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, took active part in various diplomatic, intelligence, and military roles in the war. Others were academic experts. Such a combination of expertise, implies high expectations. Unfortunately, the final product does not meet them.The book's main weakness is that it hardly provides new information or fresh perspective about the war. The practitioners seem to have come unprepared, bringing into the conference whatever they recollect from the war, without trying to refresh their memory. And the academicians -- some of whom are more familiar than others with the events of 1973 -- could not get out of the discussants the information the practitioners either forgot, or deny, or (still) refuse to tell.Perhaps the best examples, which are also of prime interest to the readers of Shofar, involve the failures to reach a diplomatic solution prior to the war, and Israel's strategic surprise at its beginning. Thus, two of the Israeli representatives in the conference, Mordechai Gazit (the director-general of the prime minister's office in 1973) and Simcha Dinitz (then ambassador in Washington), hardly related to Sadat's attempt, in February 1973, to use Kissinger's back-door channel in order to promote a comprehensive Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement. This was, certainly, the most daring Egyptian proposal throughout the 1967-1973 period. From Israel's perspective it was, however, a non-starter. In April 1973 Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and Yisrael Galilee assessed that war with Egypt was highly likely. Though they mentioned Sadat's initiative as an alternative to it, their main concern was how to explain their preference for a non-diplomatic solution to their colleagues in the government. …
During the decade after the 1973 War of Yom Kippur, the consensus was that Israel's military defe... more During the decade after the 1973 War of Yom Kippur, the consensus was that Israel's military defeat in the war's first stage was caused by the failure of intelligence to provide a warning prior to the Arab attack, but many experts maintained later that it reflected improper preparations for war. Using recently released evidence, this article analyzes Israel's inadequate war deployment when firing commenced and its impact on the failure to repel the attack. It concludes that since this deficient deployment resulted from the absence of a sufficient intelligence warning, the intelligence failure was at the root of the Israeli failure at the war's start.
Intelligence Success and Failure: The Human Factor
The study of strategic surprise has long concentrated on important failures that resulted in cata... more The study of strategic surprise has long concentrated on important failures that resulted in catastrophes such as Pearl Harbor and the September 11th attacks, and the majority of previously published research in the field determines that such large-scale military failures often stem from defective information-processing systems. Intelligence Success and Failure challenges this common assertion that catastrophic surprise attacks are the unmistakable products of warning failure alone. Further, Uri Bar-Joseph and Rose McDermott approach this topic uniquely by highlighting the successful cases of strategic surprise, as well as the failures, from a psychological perspective. This book delineates the critical role of individual psychopathologies in precipitating failure by investigating important historical cases. Bar-Joseph and McDermott use six particular military attacks as examples for their analysis, including: "Barbarossa," the June 1941 German invasion of the USSR (failure); the fall-winter 1941 battle for Moscow (success); the Arab attack on Israel on Yom Kippur 1973 (failure); and the second Egyptian offensive in the war six days later (success). From these specific cases and others, they analyze the psychological mechanisms through which leaders assess their own fatal mistakes and use the intelligence available to them. Their research examines the factors that contribute to failure and success in responding to strategic surprise and identify the learning process that central decision makers use to facilitate subsequent successes. Intelligence Success and Failure presents a new theory in the study of strategic surprise that claims the key explanation for warning failure is not unintentional action, but rather, motivated biases in key intelligence and central leaders that null any sense of doubt prior to surprise attacks.
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