Commentary Magazine had a great piece on how Israel failed its people on October 7. It is long and thorough so I'm going to do something a little bit different and cover different points in several posts as I think it will be more convenient for y'all.

What is amazing is how overrated, yes, overrated, the IDF was. Actually, poorly trained. It relied on a technological wall that will eerily remind you of the Maginot line. A nice excerpt.

Commentary Magazine

quote:
The holiday absence of more than half the standing force on October 7 was not unique to the Gaza border region. It turns out to have been standard procedure for the military throughout Israel, with the air force stripped down by an even greater proportion....

The same complacency, along with what many older former IDF officers see as general decline in professionalism, can be seen in the way that almost all of the IDF installations in the Gaza envelope had abandoned the standard Western military practice of holding a “stand-to” before sunrise. During the daily stand-to at a military base or camp, soldiers take up defensive positions as if expecting an enemy attack.... The procedure is theoretically required at dawn on all IDF bases, and had it been followed on October 7, the day might have gone very differently. It would have made a particular difference at bases such as Nahal Oz, which had had no sentries on gate duty that morning, and whose complement of 90 combat soldiers did not have time to get their machine guns out of a locked armory when Hamas attacked...

Another shocking dereliction at Nahal Oz, at least for anyone used to American military practice, was that the young female soldiers monitoring the surveillance systems were unarmed and had no combat training. During the War on Terror, I visited or stayed at dozens of U.S. and allied military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in all those installations, even those deep within the “Green Zones” of Baghdad and Kabul, almost everyone, male or female, from generals to radio repairmen, carried a sidearm.

When I asked a young Israeli who had recently served as an intelligence officer at a nearby base about the presence of unarmed soldiers on a post so close to Gaza, he told me that during his year on the border he had never worn the pistol he had been issued, adding that “it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.” He then explained that he didn’t really know how to use it, having had only a few hours on the range during his training: “Some [conscripts] don’t get any training on weapons, if you’re ill that day, then you can be deployed without ever having fired a weapon.”

apparently in the 21st-century IDF, the great majority of citizen soldiers receive minimal training in weapons handling or other basic combat skills. It is the very opposite of the approach taken by the U.S. Marine Corps, with its doctrine of “every Marine a rifleman”... The potential cost of not bothering to train noncombat troops was made all too clear on October 7.2

Successive Israeli defense ministers and chiefs of defense staff from 2002 onward cut expenditure on the IDF’s ground capabilities, underfunding training, maintenance, transport capacity, and combat logistics, in the belief that the country could rely on air force jets, intelligence agencies and special forces to keep its enemies at bay and protect its citizenry. In 2015, it gave an entire squadron of its helicopter gunships to Jordan... The belief that substantial conventional ground forces were no longer that necessary underlay the cutting of compulsory national service from three years to just over two and a half and also a new policy of ending reservist duty at age 40 instead of 54, even though this deprived the IDF of a great many combat-experienced troops.

The Kibbutz civilian-security teams, supervised by the IDF, were also allowed to deteriorate in the years before October 7. Many had minimal training. It did not help that the IDF, more concerned about weapons thefts than readiness, ruled that the squads had to keep all their rifles and ammunition in locked armories. This meant that on October 7, many of the security squads were not able to get their weapons in time to confront Hamas attackers—who knew not just the armories’ locations but which residents held keys for them. (Fortunately, at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, but only there, the security coordinator not only disregarded the IDF’s order to store all weapons centrally but had drilled his team, for whom he had purchased modern helmets, body armor, and gunsights for their rifles. They were able to drive the attackers off and save their fellow residents.)

The neglect of ground forces combined with complacency about the Hamas threat had many dire consequences on October 7. Some of the tanks that should have protected the attacked army bases had had their .50 caliber machine guns removed for maintenance or because of fear that they might be stolen. Armored vehicles were not kept fully fueled: The tank that stopped at the Nova festival and provided shelter for some of the partygoers did so because it had run out of gas. A shortage of working jeeps meant that some IDF outposts could only send out foot patrols. Several of the cameras on the aerostat balloons that were a key part of Gaza border surveillance had been out of order for some time.

A retired reservist colonel told me that, after 2003, his infantry battalion engaged in just one whole-unit exercise in the next decade.... Even regular army combat battalions no longer train sufficiently to be combat-ready.

However, one group did have its act together: The police who completely ignored IDF.

quote:
As awful as things were, they could have been worse. It was fortunate that, unlike the army, the often maligned Israel Police Service not only had a contingency plan for a large-scale Hamas attack, but practiced dealing with one, holding one such exercise in September 2023. As a result, the Hamas attacks on the towns of Netivot and Sderot were contained by 8 a.m. Moreover, if the Israel Police had not prevailed in three little-known battles—at the Reim junction, the Black Arrow Monument, and the Yad Mordechai junction—then large convoys of Hamas pick-up trucks could have headed east and north. Nothing stood between them and the civilian populations of Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Had even a few pick-up trucks reached those cities and wrought just the limited slaughter achieved in Sderot and Ofakim, the impact would have been enormous. A senior commander I spoke to believes it would likely have inspired copycat attacks on Israeli communities in the West Bank, uprisings in Israel’s majority-Arab cities and neighborhoods along the lines of the upheaval in May 2021, and, deadliest of all, a massive ground invasion of the north by Hezbollah.