In the midst of a week marked by the communication devices attack, attributed to Israel, a dear friend asked me the question on everyone's mind: How is this possible? How can such brilliant intelligence services, capable of executing operations beyond imagination, have failed so miserably just a year ago in providing warning about the Simchat Torah attack? Is Israeli intelligence among the best in the world or among the worst?
This is not the first time such a question has arisen. It emerged with full force during the Yom Kippur War 51 years ago. Even then, Israeli intelligence was known for its impressive capabilities, but did not serve it well on the day of reckoning, or at least came too late when it was no longer possible to thwart the Egyptian-Syrian plot.
So what does Israeli intelligence deserve – a commendation or a reprimand? The answer to this issue lies in a slightly deeper understanding of what is called "intelligence." It is commonly said that the role of intelligence is to collect information about the enemy, along with analysis and assessment of this information for the operational and political echelons, but this definition includes very different types of intelligence.
One type of intelligence, which occupies a central part of the work of various bodies, is target intelligence. This involves focused information gathering on high-value targets so that significant and painful damage can be inflicted on the enemy when the day comes. A high-value target can be a senior commander, a military facility, critical civilian infrastructure, and so on. Even a hypothetical operation such as the explosion of beepers and communication devices attributed to Israel is ultimately part of the world of target intelligence, as its purpose is to enable simultaneous strikes on as many quality targets as possible.
Another very different type is warning intelligence. This intelligence aims to provide relevant factors with information about the main threats facing the country, assess the chances of war breaking out in the short and medium term, and provide real-time warning of an enemy attack. This intelligence is very necessary, and sometimes significant achievements can be reached in it, but at the moment of truth, it is mainly prone to failure. Why? Unlike target intelligence, warning intelligence requires a high level of information analysis and the ability to constantly separate significant relevant information from meaningless or even misleading "junk" information.
Any quality intelligence system is flooded with a huge amount of information, large parts of which are meaningless. Absurdly, the higher the quality of the intelligence system, the more it is flooded with a larger amount of information, which makes it difficult to separate. Retroactive analysis of past intelligence failures, both in Israel and around the world, shows that almost always, the collection agencies had information about the enemy's plans, but those in charge of research and assessment found it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. The person responsible for providing the intelligence assessment did not understand what part of the information at their disposal was that "golden piece of intelligence" that everyone was looking for, and therefore did not issue the required warning in time.
The cry-wolf syndrome often joins this inevitable failure. Let's say intelligence does its job and manages to bring the golden piece of information about an attack that the enemy wants to carry out. The warning is issued on time, and our forces prepare and raise readiness. However, the other side, which is also not composed of incompetents, noticed the preparation and postponed its plans to another date. What will policymakers conclude in such a case? They may conclude that intelligence has done its job and thwarted the enemy's plans, but the more likely possibility is that they will suspect that the warning given to them was exaggerated or erroneous. After the third time that raising readiness ends with nothing, no one will take intelligence warnings seriously. Indeed, it is a classic case of the boy who cried wolf; only here, all the warnings were correct and accurate. The chilling effect may also apply to the intelligence personnel, who will be afraid to warn of an attack next time, fearing that they will be proven wrong again.
Any warning intelligence system inevitably suffers from these failures and additional structural problems. Therefore, decision-makers must not assume that intelligence will be able to provide warning of any significant attack. Even a top-quality intelligence array, in which huge resources are invested and which achieves extraordinary achievements in the world of target intelligence, will fail one day in the face of the warning challenge. Since the price of this failure is very high, the defense policy must be based on the assumption that we will not know in advance about an impending attack.
The intelligence failure that led to last year's disaster must be thoroughly investigated. The security leadership should have received a warning before the Hamas attack, and it did not arrive. However, those who look at this event as just an intelligence failure miss a significant part of the picture. Decision-makers at the political and military levels also failed when they did not understand the limitations of intelligence and did not order significant readiness for an attack even without a warning. True, there is a price to constant readiness with significant forces on the borders. There is an economic price, a morale price (it's hard to resist the temptation to release as many soldiers as possible to celebrate the holiday with their families), and sometimes an operational price (given the difficulty of maintaining high alertness over time). But the price of the alternative, full reliance on intelligence warning that will arrive in time and allow thwarting the enemy's plans, is many times higher.
Therefore, one of the central conceptions that must be uprooted as part of learning the lessons of the current war is the excessive trust in the power of intelligence. The fact that this lesson was not learned after the Yom Kippur War brought us to the terrible disaster of Simchat Torah.
