Eviatar Matania

This article focuses on a particularly fateful day during the Yom Kippur War—the 1973 war between Israel to Egypt and Syria—Friday, October 12, 1973, the seventh day of the war, when some of the most important strategic dilemmas were deliberated. The article seeks to expand the existing literature about this particular day by analyzing the deliberations from a strategic perspective and through decision making theory, with an emphasis on three key issues. The first is the strategic confusion that existed among senior members of the Israeli defense establishment, once they understood that it was possible that the IDF would not be able to achieve its principal goal, namely, defeating the Egyptian army. Against this background, the article suggests that in retrospect, this singular moment in Israel’s military history, when the entire security doctrine was on the brink of collapse, accelerated and intensified the technological trajectory of the IDF force buildup after the war. Second, using tools taken from decision making theory, the article offers several reasons why one key proposal raised during discussions was ultimately rejected—the proposed alternative of waiting for the Egyptians to launch an offensive over the Sinai passes (the Mitla Pass and the Gidi Pass), which, in the end, is what happened. Third is an analysis of the decisions’ sensitivity—an important tool in the decision making process—to basic assumptions on which the decisions were based, such as the decreasing number of Air Force planes, or the intelligence report that arrived in the middle of the meeting of the war cabinet, which led to the immediate adjournment of that meeting. By highlighting these strategic angles, this article seeks to build a better understanding of the events of October 12, 1973, and to use it as a case study for the value of an analytical and strategic approach to understanding decision making in extreme conditions of war.