To make his point, Luttwak began rattling off the ratios of officers to enlisted personnel in militaries around the world, ending with Israel, whose military pyramid is exceptionally narrow at the top. “The IDF is deliberately understaffed at senior levels. It means that there are fewer senior officers to issue commands,” says Luttwak. “Fewer senior officials means more individual initiative at the lower ranks.”
Luttwak points out that the Israeli army has very few colonels and an abundance of lieutenants. The ratio of senior officers to combat troops in the U.S. Army is 1 to 5; in the IDF, it’s 1 to 9. The same is true in the Israeli Air Force (IAF), which, though larger than French and British air forces, has fewer senior officers. The IAF is headed by a two-star general, a lower rank than is typical in other Western militaries.
For the United States, the more top-heavy approach may well be necessary; after all, the U.S. military is much larger, fights its wars as far as eight thousand miles from home, and faces the unique logistical and command challenges of deploying over multiple continents.
Yet regardless of whether each force is the right size and structure for the tasks it faces, the fact that the IDF is lighter at the top has important consequences. The benefit was illuminated for us by Gilad Farhi, a thirty-year-old major in the IDF. His career path was fairly typicaclass="underline" from a soldier in a commando unit at age eighteen, to commanding an infantry platoon, then a company, he was next appointed a spokesman of the Southern Command. After that he became the deputy commander of Haruv, an infantry battalion. Now he is the commander of an incoming class of one of the IDF’s most recent infantry regiments.
We met him at a base on a barren edge of the Jordan Valley. As he strode toward us, neither his youth nor his attire (a rumpled standard-issue infantry uniform) would have pegged him as commander of the base. We interviewed him the day before his new class of recruits was to arrive. For the next seven months, Farhi would be in charge of basic training for 650 soldiers, most of them fresh out of high school, plus about 120 officers, squad commanders, sergeants, and administrative staff.5
“The most interesting people here are the company commanders,” Farhi told us. “They are absolutely amazing people. These are kids—the company commanders are twenty-three. Each of them is in charge of one hundred soldiers and twenty officers and sergeants, three vehicles. Add it up and that means a hundred and twenty rifles, machine guns, bombs, grenades, mines, whatever. Everything. Tremendous responsibility.”
Company commander is also the lowest rank that must take responsibility for a territory. As Farhi put it, “If a terrorist infiltrates that area, there’s a company commander whose name is on it. Tell me how many twenty-three-year-olds elsewhere in the world live with that kind of pressure.”
Farhi illustrated a fairly typical challenge facing these twenty-three-year-olds. During an operation in the West Bank city of Nablus, one of Farhi’s companies had an injured soldier trapped in a house held by a terrorist. The company commander had three tools at his disposaclass="underline" an attack dog, his soldiers, and a bulldozer.
If he sent the soldiers in, there was a high risk of additional casualties. And if he sent the bulldozer to destroy the house, this would risk harming the injured soldier.
To further complicate matters, the house shared a wall with a Palestinian school, and children and teachers were still inside. From the roof of the school, journalists were documenting the whole scene. The terrorist, meanwhile, was shooting at both the Israeli forces and the journalists.
Throughout much of the standoff, the company commander was on his own. Farhi could have tried to take charge from afar, but he knew he had to give his subordinate latitude: “There were an infinite number of dilemmas there for the commander. And there wasn’t a textbook solution.” The soldiers managed to rescue the injured soldier, but the terrorist remained inside. The commander knew that the school staff was afraid to evacuate the school, despite the danger, because they did not want to be branded “collaborators” by the terrorists. And he knew that the journalists would not leave the roof of the school, because they didn’t want to miss breaking news. The commander’s solution: empty the school using smoke grenades.
Once the students, teachers, and journalists had been safely evacuated, the commander decided it was safe to send in the bulldozer to drive the terrorist out of the adjacent building. Once the bulldozer began biting into the house, the commander unleashed the dog to neutralize the terrorist. But while the bulldozer was knocking down the house, another terrorist the Israelis didn’t know about came out of the school next door. The soldiers outside shot and killed this second terrorist. The entire operation took four hours. “This twenty-three-year-old commander was alone for most of the four hours until I got there,” Farhi told us.
“After an event like that, the company commander goes back to the base and his soldiers look at him differently,” Farhi continued. “And he himself is different. He is on the line—responsible for the lives of a lot of people: his soldiers, Palestinian schoolchildren, journalists. Look, he didn’t conquer Eastern Europe, but he had to come up with a creative solution to a very complex situation. And he is only twenty-three years old.”
We then heard from a brigadier general about Yossi Klein, a twenty-year-old helicopter pilot in the 2006 Lebanon war. He was ordered to evacuate a wounded soldier from deep in southern Lebanon. When he piloted his chopper to the battlefield, the wounded soldier lay on a stretcher surrounded by a dense overgrowth of bushes that prevented the helicopter from landing or hovering close enough to the ground to pull the stretcher on board.6
There were no manuals on how to deal with such a situation, but if there had been, they would not have recommended what Klein did. He used the tail rotor of his helicopter like a flying lawn mower to chop down the foliage. At any point, the rotor could have broken off, sending the helicopter crashing into the ground. But Klein succeeded in trimming the bushes enough so that, by hovering close to the ground, he could pick up the wounded soldier. The soldier was rushed to the hospital in Israel and his life was saved.
Speaking of the company commanders who served under him, Farhi asked, “How many of their peers in their junior year in colleges have been tested in such a way? . . . How do you train and mature a twenty-year-old to shoulder such responsibility?”
The degree to which authority devolves to some of the most junior members of the military has at times surprised even Israeli leaders. In 1974, during the first premiership of Yitzhak Rabin, a young female soldier from the IDF’s Unit 8200—the same unit in which the founders of Fraud Sciences later served—was kidnapped by terrorists. Major General Aharon Zeevi-Farkash (known as Farkash), who headed the unit—Israel’s parallel to the U.S. National Security Agency—recalled Rabin’s disbelief: “The kidnapped girl was a sergeant. Rabin asked us to provide him an itemization of what she knew. He was worried about the depth of classified information that could be forced out of her. When he saw the briefing paper, Rabin told us we needed an immediate investigation; it’s impossible that a sergeant would know so many secrets that are critical to Israel’s security. How did this happen?”