Publications

Operation Change of Direction, the code name given to Israel’s war against Hizbollah in Lebanon in 2006 by the Operations Directorate of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was the most inconclusive performance by far in the IDF’s many trials by fire since 1948, in that it represented the first time that a major regional confrontation ended without a clear cut victory on Israel’s part. The campaign’s uneven course and outcome resulted from a more overarching deficiency in strategy choice, whose most flawed elements were inconsistency between avowed goals and the available means and will to pursue them, and the Israeli government’s initial placement of friendly casualty avoidance above mission accomplishment in its ranking of campaign priorities. Consistent with the more upbeat early official judgments, the campaign experience has gradually come to be seen differently in Israel today than it was when the smoke of battle was cleared in August 2006.