There is a popular notion that war efforts fail because generals fight as if the next war will be like the last war that they fought. WW1 is often cited as the turning point. As that story goes, machine guns and semi-automatic rifles made the 19th century style of massed charges against fixed positions obsolete. However, there are elements of leadership, both military and political, that tell a more complicated and nuanced story than that. Lessons from both ancient and recent wars resonate with what is happening today in Israel. In what follows, note the similarity between how the Axis powers started WW2 and how Iran and their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah operate today.
The carnage of trench warfare in France was more the exception than the rule in WW1. The early stages were characterized by what would later develop into the blitzkrieg, or lightning war. The German generals exploited an opportunity to quickly defeat France by overrunning Belgium and Luxembourg. It nearly worked. The French generals, far from fighting the last war, analyzed, adapted, and stopped the German advance. The German Army never made it to Paris. WW1 was deadlier than earlier wars because new technology made the changing conditions less forgiving than ever before.
Twenty-five years later, the Germans had both learned from WW1 and followed the same strategy that they used against France in the last war. This time they were successful in taking on both the French and British Allied forces. While the Allies focused on a political solution and old-style reliance on fixed fortifications to protect the French border with Germany, the Germans ran circles around them diplomatically and militarily, took Paris, and made it all the way to the English Channel.
The difference between opposing sides in WW2 is telling. Long before the war, German planners and spies assessed the military and political terrain and saw opportunity and political weakness. They invested years and precious resources arming themselves in secret and developing a multi-faceted, multi-front sneak attack. They put all they had into achieving a quick, decisive victory that would shock their enemies into submission. When the French and British assessed the threat of another ‘great war’ they saw only as far as mass casualties, economic hardship, and military stalemates. They spent years demobilizing and sending the message that they would seek a negotiated peace at all costs.
If the reality of the new technology accelerated the costs and benefits of armed combat, then why did Germany ultimately lose after such a stunning victory in the first two years of the war? The German war plan relied on three key strategies:
· Exploiting those who called for appeasement in the buildup to war;
· Quick victories in the field to kill the enemy’s will to fight back or resist; and
· Faith in the will of their soldiers and civilians to persevere in the lean times after the early victories had depleted the nation’s resources. It would take years to rebuild what they had destroyed to make the newly expanded empire sustainable. The German leaders believed that the racial and moral superiority of their people would triumph over any efforts the allies could make to regain their lands.
However, the allies had vastly greater resources; they had more factories, more material, and more people. They had only to stay committed to victory and to fully develop their industrial base. All the technology that fuelled the cost of modern warfare also fuelled the Allied economy. In the last two years of WW2 the Allies achieved the highest levels of prosperity since before WW1, while the Axis powers collapsed in a military, economic, social, and moral death spiral. One lesson from this is that when assessing military strategy, planners cannot have tunnel-vision. The German planners had miscalculated the political and military costs of war.
The issues of leadership and technological change prevailed in ancient times as much as they do today. The technologies may have advanced, and our enemies may fly different flags from what they did in ancient times, but the lessons are the same. As developments in artificial intelligence technology – the basis for cyber-warfare – and in weapons technology advance, the speed of change and lethality of war make it all the more crucial that we keep in mind the military, economic, social, and moral realities of war itself.
We see this in how the Book of Bamidbar begins; it teaches us a similar lesson to what the world learned about how to stop the Axis powers from their quest for world domination. The first chapters describe Israel’s strong military formation, a phalanx of three tribes serving as the military wall surrounding the Mishkan [Tabernacle]. Each tribe marched in formation according to its flag. This army was huge; it was four times the size of the Assyrian megaforce that conquered the Middle East and four times the size of the Allied army at Normandy on D-Day. This impressive army of 600,000 soldiers marched behind the princes of each tribe, exalting their leadership. In the wilderness, there was a coherence of moral leadership, military strategy, social organization, and mission.
However, when challenged with a new mission to inhabit the land of Israel, things began to fall apart. The first military encounter of the land of Israel was the episode of the spies, in which the same leaders of the tribes set out to assess the land. This should have been a military planning exercise, not a political decision-making point. They could have seen the opportunity and the strategic advantage of their moral strength. Instead, they miscalculated, seeing themselves as weak. The mission crumbled at the outset due to psychological or spiritual weakness, not for lack of military strength. It was the crying in the tents, and the spies seeing themselves as grasshoppers that proved the undoing of the conquest of Canaan. The military structure was meant to protect Israel from external threats. In pursuing appeasement and looking for strength in the will of the individual rather than in the covenant between Gd and Israel, the generation of the Exodus was doomed to a kind of moral trench warfare. Their real weakness was internal.
The lesson here is that the job of leadership must be equally focused on preserving the cohesiveness of the nation and its social and moral fabric. The individual – soldier or civilian – is not the source of the nation’s moral standing. The countries that we most care about are experiencing intense moral tension. The protests on the streets and the vilification spewed by leaders on the right and the left at their centrist counterparts are dividing democratic nations against themselves at alarming levels.
Perhaps the greatest failure of leadership was the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The rabbis were clear that it was due to Sinat Chinam, senseless hatred, which is best understood as the internal fighting amongst the Jews. The great sage Jochanan Ben Zakai had to fake his own death to be able to leave Jerusalem. Even Josephus cites a well-known proverb at the time, that Jerusalem would never fall but for the fighting between the Jews.
Leadership needs to give its nation a moral mission to believe in itself as a nation. For religious Zionists this is the Torah of Israel in the land of Israel. For secular Zionists it is the ability to create a secularly righteous society in their historic homeland. While these are not identical, they are mutually supportive.
The uniting moral mission of the United States, Canada, and the UK is harder to pinpoint, but it has historically included the themes of liberty, democracy, and the realization of personal aspirations. Those aspirations carried the Allied forces to victory in World War II. Germany failed because the hatred that their leaders used to unify that society did not inspire them to fight beyond their human limits. The unifying German belief in an Ubermensch could only go so far.
Bamidbar is a subtle but powerful lesson about leadership. Leading is about more than making decisions. Leaders must inspire, they must unify, and they must provide the enduring moral vision that motivates a people for the preservation of their nation.
How prepared are we to rely on our leaders to manage the most significant changes in technology since the transistor? In particular, how prepared are our leaders to cope with the fragmentation of society as a result of AI and social media? Nothing we say here is going to have much impact on the Prime Ministers, generals, and ‘influencers’ of today. The only aspect of this situation that is within our sphere of influence is how we choose to live our lives and which leaders we choose to support. The Torah teaches us to apply ourselves to strengthening our bonds to the nation of Israel as much as strengthening the steel of our weapons, if not more.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rosenblatt and Dr. Terry Neiman
