by Yaakov Lappin
Decisive victory the goal, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir says.
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IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir visits the
Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City on March 5, 2025. Photo by Yonatan
Sindel/Flash90. |
Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir took the helm as the
24th Chief of the Staff of the Israel Defense Forces on Wednesday,
succeeding Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi. With the IDF poised to return to
combat against Hamas in Gaza at any moment, and with the Iranian nuclear
program making alarming progress, Zamir steps into the role at a
pivotal time.
Zamir has stressed the need for military victory, stating on Wednesday, “Our actions will speak [for themselves].”
In his first address as IDF Chief of
Staff, Zamir set the tone for his tenure, declaring, “This is an
existential war. We will persist in our campaign to bring our hostages
home and to defeat our enemies. The mission placed upon me from this day
forward is clear: to lead the IDF to victory.”
Zamir’s career, spanning four decades,
includes service as the military secretary to Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu (2012-2015), head of the IDF Southern Command (2018-2021),
deputy chief of the General Staff (2023-2025), and most recently,
director general of the Ministry of Defense, where he led programs worth
billions of shekels to boost domestic arms production.
Col. (res.) Dr. Hanan Shai, a research
associate at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist
Strategy and a former investigator for the IDF’s commission evaluating
the 2006 Second Lebanon War, emphasized that Zamir’s appointment marks a
return to a generation of officers trained under Israel’s traditional
operational doctrines.
Shai, who taught Zamir at the Command and
Staff College, which trains senior IDF officers, told JNS on Thursday
that Zamir is a rare product of an officer training program established
after the 1982 First Lebanon War.
“Unlike others in recent decades, he is a
graduate of a command training program that was founded after “Operation
Peace for Galilee” [the First Lebanon War], under the sponsorship of
Dan Shomron [the 13th IDF chief of staff]. This program was created as a
response to the realization that the IDF’s level of command
professionalism was very low,” said Shai.
A rigorous six-year study, led by top
Israeli military historians and analysts, concluded that the IDF’s
existing training frameworks failed to equip officers with the necessary
tools for senior military leadership.
According to Shai, the IDF originally
adopted a command doctrine influenced by German and British military
philosophies, emphasizing leadership, initiative and battlefield
decision-making.
In 1994, however, these doctrines were
discarded in favor of deterrence-based strategies modeled on the U.S.
military’s post-Cold War approaches.
“All of the IDF’s invaluable doctrinal
knowledge was thrown away, and the consequences became evident in 2006,
2014, and now in 2023,” Shai stated, referring to the Second Lebanon
War, “Operation Protective Edge” and the current war.
Zamir, Shai explained, is “the last
officer who was trained under the original IDF doctrinal framework” and
therefore has the knowledge and ability to lead the military back to a
warfighting doctrine focused on the overarching goal of decisive
victory.
“This, therefore, is his big advantage. He
knows where the IDF needs to go, and more important, he knows how to
get it there,” Shai said.
Failure and recovery
The transition from Halevi to Zamir
represents a stark contrast in leadership styles and strategic visions.
In his farewell speech on Wednesday, Halevi acknowledged the IDF’s
failure on Oct. 7, 2023, adding later in his address, “For many years,
the IDF stood firm in its missions. On October 7, the IDF failed.
“This was under my watch, and what happened is my responsibility, and I bear and will bear it forever,” he said.
Halevi, who served for nearly 40 years in
the IDF, framed his tenure as one defined by both failure and by
recovery after Oct. 7. He recounted how the IDF, despite its initial
collapse, managed to regroup and mount a massive counteroffensive.
“From now on, every officer and commander
must see themselves as if they were personally present on October 7,” he
stated, emphasizing the need to internalize the lessons of the war to
prevent another catastrophe.
Halevi’s legacy will forever be marred by
the conceptual and operational failures that led to Oct. 7, but he is
also credited with leading the military recovery. Still, several
critical aspects of that recovery have come in for criticism as well,
such as Halevi’s reported adamant objection to setting up an Israeli
military administration in Gaza and taking over the humanitarian aid
process, leaving Hamas free to hijack the flow of goods and to continue
to exploit the aid to position itself as the terror regime of Gaza.
“During the 42-day Phase 1 [of the
ceasefire], 25,000 aid trucks entered Gaza—half of Hamas’s budget in
Gaza comes from these trucks,” Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Thursday, following London’s
objection to the cutting off of aid trucks. “Hamas is restoring its
military capabilities and recruiting new, young terrorists. This cannot
continue!” Sa’ar added.
Zamir’s appointment is part of a broader
restructuring of the IDF’s leadership. On Thursday, Defense Minister
Israel Katz congratulated Maj. Gen. Yaniv Asor and Brig. Gen. Itzik
Cohen on their appointment as Southern Command chief and head of the IDF
Operations Directorate, respectively.
“The State of Israel needs you and trusts
you to lead the generation of victory to decisive triumph in every
theater and against every enemy,” Katz told the generals.
Zamir addressed the heavy burden of
command in his first written order to IDF soldiers and commanders on
Thursday. “The IDF did not fulfill its mission on October 7. We will not
hide that, nor will we cover it up.”
However, he immediately pivoted to the
mission ahead: “From here, we turn our heads in one direction—to victory
and the decisive defeat of the enemy. This is our mission. This is our
goal.”
Zamir added, “To our enemies—those who
sought to annihilate us, who slaughtered and raped, who burned and
abducted—we will land a crushing blow.
“We will not turn back until they are
destroyed, and we will not rest until our brothers and sisters are
returned from the tunnels of captivity—this is our moral duty,” the IDF
chief said.
Yaakov Lappin is an Israel-based military affairs correspondent and analyst. He is
the in-house analyst at the Miryam Institute; a research associate at
the Alma Research and Education Center; and a research associate at the
Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He is a
frequent guest commentator on international television news networks,
including Sky News and i24 News. Lappin is the author of Virtual Caliphate: Exposing the Islamist State on the Internet. Follow him at: www.patreon.com/yaakovlappin.
Source: https://www.jns.org/new-army-chief-knows-where-the-idf-needs-to-go/
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