Strategic Assessment

“Situation awareness” is the perception and understanding of the elements in a particular environment that allow us to interpret the reality we are in. Thus, it is perhaps the most influential and fundamental element affecting our actions, both for good and for bad. Situation awareness and efforts to influence it are a cornerstone of military thought and achievement, and bringing the other side to a state of cognitive defeat, and not necessarily through physical exhaustion, is the basic objective of military actions. Indeed, any defeat is always two-pronged, and occurs not only on the physical level. This is the reason that the IDF and the State of Israel, which do not enjoy the luxury of unlimited time and physical force, cannot allow a situation where a decisive outcome, no matter in which type of warfare, is based on the attrition of the enemy over time. Since its inception, the IDF has sought a quick decisive outcome using deep maneuvering: the goal is to break the enemy’s fighting spirit and command ability, to the point of the total collapse of the other side. Battle Doctrine, a study of the rules of ground forces use published in 1963, states that the individual fighter is the only fundamental element that can be toppled without physical destruction.