On failures - Uri Bar-Joseph in Haaretz:

‘On September 28, nine days before the Hamas attack on the Israeli communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces website published a comprehensive article on the information-gathering units of Military Intelligence. The title says it all: “To mark the fall harvest festival: We have picked seven units that know everything about the enemy.” That headline echoes in its arrogance the less-than prophetic words of Frank Knox, the U.S. secretary of the navy, three days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, that the U.S. Navy “is not going be caught napping.” It also recalls the assessment of the director of the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, in a General Staff meeting held 24 hours before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, in October 1973. The probability of an all-out war, he said “is low – even lower than low.”’ (…)

‘We do not yet have a picture, even a partial one, of how Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security service arrived at their assessments about the feasibility of a sweeping attack from across the Gaza border. Still, basic logic and partial information that has come to light about Hamas’ preparations for the assault, and about signs that accumulated in Israel in the days preceding it, make it possible to begin to fathom the scale of the blunder.’

(…)

‘The Shin Bet is the central body engaged in the collection of information from human sources in the territories, and its agents are supposed to possess intimate knowledge of what is happening in Gaza, even though it has not had an official presence there since 2007. As the organization learned as long ago as the early 1980s, in Lebanon, cultivating sources in extremist Islamic organizations is a difficult mission – but that is not enough to explain why the Shin Bet did not have adequate warning sources.
Information collection via SIGINT (electronic eavesdropping) by MI and the Shin Bet was also unproductive, as far as we know. This was due to various hitches, including a failed operation of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit in the Strip in 2018, and the caution displayed by the Hamas leaders in light of Israel’s sophistication in the realm of telephony. It’s likely they also learned about this threat from the endless boasting in recent years about the achievements of IDF Unit 8200, which engages in signals intelligence. Compounding this was the incomprehensible decision about a year ago to stop tapping the unencrypted personal walkie-talkies that Hamas militants used regularly, including during the October 7 assault.’

(…)

‘Hamas, which is unwilling to recognize Israel and is committed to its destruction, also rejected the Arab League’s peace initiative. As long as Hamas rule continued in Gaza, Netanyahu was able to use it as an excuse for a lack of progress toward a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinian Authority, which is in charge in the West Bank. Thus, even though military opportunities arose, Netanyahu not only refrained from eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza, but actually strengthened the organization by allowing it to receive suitcases of money from Qatar.’

(…)

‘For example, the current director of MI, Aharon Haliva, noted last May, at the annual Herzliya Conference, that Hamas had an interest in maintaining quiet in Gaza since Operation Guardian of the Walls, in May 2021. Haliva added that his organization had emerged from that operation “with the perception that engaging in combat and clashing with Israel in the form of rocket fire into the south from the Gaza Strip does not really serve [its purposes].”’

(…)

‘Although there is much we still do not know, it is already clear that Hamas’ October 7 assault required extensive preparations. According to the Iranian news agency Tasnim, those efforts went on for four years, and within their framework a central operations room was established and four exercises, code-named “Firm Support,” were held, which simulated attacks on the Gaza Envelope via the security fence and from the sea.
The precise planning of the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, the preparations for the attack on the Yarkon Base of Unit 8200 near Kibbutz Urim, and documents left at the site during the attack on Kibbutz Mifalsim that Israel succeeding in repelling, attest to meticulous intelligence and operational planning, and a well-coordinated chain of command. All of these things must have been known to hundreds of members of Hamas. It’s hard to believe that nothing about these preparations was picked up by the high-grade collection assets of the Shin Bet and MI in the Gaza Strip; and if that was indeed the case, it was a collection failure of the first order. But it’s far more likely that the good information arrived and was assessed through the filter of the concept, which said there was nothing to it, because “Hamas has been deterred.” Hence the failure to draw the proper conclusions.’

(…)

‘What Gida and his friends heard just before the war was also picked up by the female soldiers who served as spotters on the Gaza border. Their reports, which echo almost exactly the reports of spotters from the IDF outposts along the Suez Canal on the eve of the 1973 war, should have made it clear that a concrete change had occurred in routine activity taking place in the area adjacent to the fence. One spotter, Yael Rothenberg, told the website Zman Emet that she had reported to her superior seeing Hamas men with maps, “counting steps, digging there.” Similarly, the reports of the spotters at the Suez Canal exactly 50 years earlier made reference to Egyptian officers who were standing on the other side of the canal with maps and planning the attack. At that time, MI dismissed the significance of the reports, claiming these were Egyptian exercises; this time they claimed the digging detected by the spotters was farmwork.’

(…)

‘The almost exclusive reliance on technology for purposes of deterrence, and the management of the war via “see-shoot” weapons systems, remotely controlled by spotters from their underground positions, came at the expense of the method by which the IDF had traditionally coped with significant threats across the border: orderly defensive procedures, well-trained combat forces and an “alert at dawn” routine against possible enemy attack – measures that were intended to head off an enemy even without concrete warnings.’

(…)

‘A major cause is the organizational culture of the Shin Bet and apparently also of MI. In the case of the former, we need to go back to slightly distant history. At the start of the first intifada, in 1987, when it emerged that the Israeli intelligence system did not have a unit whose role it was to provide a strategic warning about the development of significant threats in the occupied territories, a research department was created in the Shin Bet with the aim of addressing this lacuna. But because the culture of the Shin Bet is such that it sees its task as being to prevent point-specific terrorism, that department, which was the natural candidate to integrate, identify and warn about an existential threat, gradually atrophied. According to multiple sources, it also underwent processes of politicization, thus ruling out the possibility of assessments that were contrary to the dominant concept.’

(…)

‘An additional partial explanation for the absence of a warning is what the commission that investigated the events of September 11 in the United States termed a “lack of imagination.” In 2001, the failure lay in the fact that no one imagined a mega-attack carried out by means of passenger planes. In 2023, the “lack of imagination” lay in the fact that no one imagined the possibility of a murderous attack by Hamas across the entire region across from Gaza. But in the Israeli case the explanatory force of the “lack of imagination” is relatively limited, in part because of the large quantity of information that must have flowed to the intelligence bodies about Hamas’ preparations for a large-scale attack, and also because the significance of the threat of even one or two communities being overrun should have been sufficient to bring about a far higher level of preparedness at dawn on October 7.
The threat of one community being overrun had been on the agenda for some time, but there is no sign that it was considered sufficiently concrete or that it was weighed seriously in the hours before the attack – as evidenced by the response of the decision-makers and the unpreparedness of the IDF when the war started.
Ultimately, I believe, the root of the failure will be found, as it was in 1973, at the psychological level: the conventional tendency to believe that what has been, will be; the belief that a “black swan,” in the form of a coordinated, lethal attack by limited forces that lack defenses and are inferior in firepower, like those that Hamas built up in Gaza, is untenable; and the “groupthink” that led MI researchers and other officers to believe that they should rely on the wisdom of the group.’

(…)

‘I saw that tendency myself less than two months ago. On the 50th anniversary of the intelligence blunder in the Yom Kippur War, I presented to a forum of high-level MI personnel what my research had identified as the roots of the failure. First and foremost was the psychological tendency of a number of ranking MI personnel, who clung to the “concept” until the last minute, even though all the information they were receiving cried out that war was imminent. A second talk to that forum dealt with an experiment in which the data that was available on the eve of the war was fed into an artificial intelligence program, in order to examine whether AI could be used as a substitute for human thought. The major focus of interest in the discussion that developed after these talks was on various issues relating to the ability of the machine to identify threats. The psychology of the human failures to heed warnings was not of any special interest to MI.
Emerging from that discussion, I realized that the lessons of 1973 had not been learned. But I never thought for a moment that this would be exemplified so painfully, so shamefully and so soon.’

Read the article here.

In short, group think, the tendency to please politicians, the concept that becomes too powerful, too much reliance on technology. And arrogance of course.

Nothing is more dangerous than the belief that you are the best.

And the consequences of this failure are not yet clear. I’m afraid that more failures will follow. From all sides.