Eyal Zamir leads IDF into a new era: Rebuilding after its toughest test

MIDDLE ISRAEL: Zamir’s two civilian years in the Defense Ministry will also be useful in terms of his task’s most prickly dimension – personnel. 

By AMOTZ ASA-EL FEBRUARY 7, 2025 18:09

OUTGOING IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi (left) and his successor, Eyal Zamir, attend a ceremony in 2019. (photo credit: FLASH90)

Generals, said once David Ben-Gurion, should be old enough to bring professional experience, but also young enough to bring fresh thought.

The IDF complied. Yitzhak Rabin was only 42 when he was appointed Chief of General Staff, Moshe Dayan was 38, and Yigael Yadin was 32.

Israel’s generals are still relatively young, but in recent decades their age climbed, a process that next month will reach a new peak when Herzi Halevi, who was 55 when he became Chief of General Staff, will hand over his command to Eyal Zamir, who last month turned 59.

Just how, if at all, age will impact this appointment remains to be seen, but whatever his performance, Zamir’s term will mark the end of an era in the history of the IDF.

THE NEW IDF’s first task will be about its size.

IDF troops standing to attention at Maj.-Gen. Shlomi Binder's swearing in ceremony for head of military intelligence, August 21, 2024. (credit: IDF SPOKESMAN’S UNIT)

The departing era began 40 years ago, when Israel’s transition from socialism to capitalism inspired a gradual decline in military spending, from more than a quarter of gross domestic product to hardly 5%.

The previous “big is beautiful” era began when the IDF’s founders created the reserve duty system that allowed one of the world’s smallest populations to field one of its biggest armies.

That strategy seemed to have spent itself following the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan and the Iraqi army’s destruction in the Gulf wars. The new motto was thus “a small and smart army,” as Ehud Barak put it when he assumed command of the IDF in 1991 (at age 49).

That is how the IDF reportedly disbanded an aggregate 28 armored brigades over the past four decades. Financial resources, and military thought, now focused on a new type of enemy, Iran, which lacks a common border with Israel and seeks nuclear weapons, all of which creates a new type of war.

The imagined battlefield of the future inspired the marginalization of the previous era’s emblem, the tank, which was now seen as an anachronism, destined to be elbowed by missiles, choppers, and drones.

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Now all agree that size was eulogized prematurely. The kind of semi-conventional war that jihadist militias design demands large-scale formations, including new divisions opposite Jordan and Gaza, new armored units ready for urban combat, naval and aerial abilities to strike far and deep, and the entire system’s ability to fight simultaneously in multiple arenas.

Few warned against IDF size

Few Israeli generals warned against the IDF’s shrinkage over the decades. One was Gen. Zamir, who three years ago attacked the Defense Ministry’s new budgeting of technological development by downsizing armored units.

Zamir will therefore expand the military in general and the armored corps in particular. This transition will be helped by his personal background as a product of the Armored Corps.

The last time the IDF was led by a tank commander was more than 50 years ago, when David “Dado” Elazar led it through the Yom Kippur War. Since then, the IDF has been led by a succession of 13 infantrymen (and one pilot.) In this regard, Zamir’s background means he will bring the fresh thinking that Ben-Gurion hoped IDF commanders would display.

HAVING SAID this about the recent war’s strategic lessons, there are also tactical lessons to be learned from it as a new kind of warfare is theorized and new battle plans are engineered.

The continuous and intense fighting above and under a vast urbanity crowded with civilians has been a novelty for the IDF. Similarly, Hamas’s unleashing of thousands of gunmen on Israeli civilians was unprecedented, and will now demand new planning and training.

So will the recent war’s mass deployments of drones, both defensively and offensively; the missile attacks Israel endured and waged; and the new roles that these challenges assigned the air force. All these will demand new doctrines, procurement, and training.

These and other purely military dilemmas notwithstanding, Zamir will also be tested in his position’s civilian challenges, which will be even more daunting.

ONE OF the recent war’s most alarming revelations was the army’s dependence on imported ammunition. That dependency gave foreign suppliers diplomatic leverage that worked against Israel, and for no good industrial reason.

Israel knows how to manufacture most of the ammunition it needs, and in recent months indeed expanded local production. The know-how is here – Israel manufactured arms already in 1948 – and it’s all just a matter of resource allocation.

Previous position comes as a benefit

Zamir’s last position, as director-general of the Defense Ministry, will come in handy in this respect, as he earned there an intimate acquaintance with the military industry’s abilities. Before that, as an Armored Corps officer, Zamir spent decades on Merkava tanks and thus knows better than others how sophisticated and efficient Israeli-made arms can be.

Zamir’s two civilian years in the Defense Ministry will also be useful in terms of his task’s most prickly dimension – personnel.

As the civil servant charged with supplying the IDF’s resources, Zamir learned firsthand the size and depth of the military cavity that ultra-Orthodox men’s failure to enlist creates. He will thus have to confront the politicians who appointed him, as they try to resist the root canal treatment the cavity they created demands.

Zamir will also have to rehabilitate the reserve duty system, which the war stretched thin, and treat the discipline problems that the protracted fighting created, a task for which Armored Corps officers are better equipped than paratroopers and commandos.

Over and above all these, Zamir will have to shake and reboot the Intelligence Corps as it reels from its worst failure in 50 years.

If and when done with all these tasks, the grandson of immigrants from Yemen and Syria will be able to say the day he retires at age 63: Israelis’ trust in their military, shattered over 24 hours in the autumn 2023, has been restored.

 www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.