Battle ready: Two years after Oct. 7, is the IDF more prepared to stop another invasion? - analysis

First of all, the answer depends on the front. Israel shares borders with Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, the West Bank, Jordan, and Egypt, and the danger of invasion probably corresponds to that order.

For now, Israel is unlikely to be invaded from any of these borders, because it is still on the attack and has security zones versus Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza which it did not have before October 7.

But it may not always have those security zones. There are already serious negotiations going on about IDF withdrawals from its five positions in Lebanon and its nine positions in Syria, even if it does not seem that either withdrawal would happen all that soon.

Likewise, it seems fantastical to talk about Hamas invading Israel at a time when over 130,000 reservists have been called up and five IDF divisions are invading Gaza City and other parts of Gaza.

But whether in three months, six months, or later, Israel’s longest war will eventually end, and then the real game will begin: will Israel stay ready or let its guard down again?

However, in some ways little has changed. And, paradoxically, in some ways Israel is arguably more vulnerable.

First, IDF mandatory service and reservist fighters – for at least the next five to 10 years – will be the most battle hardened, experienced, and ready-to-fight-on-short-notice soldiers Israel has ever had. Simply put: they have fought more and in more varied scenarios than Israel’s soldiers used to fight.

But most of the questions relate to IDF intelligence.

With IDF intelligence, there have been at least four major improvements based on lessons learned from October 7.

One of the most glaring failures of October 7 was that the IDF had zero human spies in Gaza. The Shin Bet had some, but also not many. It had been more than a decade since the Shin Bet took over full human spying responsibility in Gaza, and the military had disbanded its Unit 504 spy services in the south.

This left the IDF over-reliant on technological spying, which can sometimes be effective but cannot necessarily take the true “temperature” of an adversary’s actions and intentions, as much as it can pick up specific known objective electronic signs regarding an adversary.

One of the reasons that IDF intelligence ignored all of the warning signs about Hamas wanting to invade Israel was that no one in IDF intelligence had the specific role to insist on an “official” warning and that the warning be taken seriously by all top political and defense officials. This was on top of the general “conception” (normative framework) problem in which the whole Israeli political and defense establishment could not imagine Hamas invading, because it was convinced Hamas was deterred.

When a few lower-ranked intelligence officers tried to sound the warning, they were ignored by their mid-level supervisors, and the warning either never got to higher-up officials or was so diluted by the time it got to them that they did not take it seriously.

Binder concluded that it was insufficient to have even a small number of “warners” in IDF intelligence, and that only by having a full brigade of hundreds of officers focused on the mission, including a brigadier-general-level commander, would the warnings be taken seriously and make it through the IDF’s massive bureaucracy to the top.

Incidentally, Binder has also created a new mechanism for lower-ranked officers to anonymously send him information which their submanagers are ignoring.

Although Binder has said that at least one of these pieces of information led to a major change in approach which saved lives, it is doubtful that, in the long run, top IDF intelligence officials will take this format seriously. This is because, most of the time, lower-ranking officers are, in fact, less knowledgeable than their superiors.

In other words, just because, on one rare occasion, a lower-ranked officer saw a grave danger that everyone more experienced missed does not mean that a majority of lower-ranked officers’ warnings are useful.

Binder did elevate the red teams also to brigade level, meaning including hundreds of officers and a senior commander. But various top former Israeli intelligence officials have said that, culturally, this department will never be taken all that seriously.

Put simply, large institutions need paradigms to map out their work and plan their budgets, and they cannot second-guess those paradigms all that often.

Some of these officials believe this department will rarely amount to much in helping avoid major errors like an invasion, but they harbor higher hopes for the new IDF war-warning brigade.

One of the astonishing revelations of the probes into IDF intelligence’s October 7 failures was that it had, in recent years, started to reduce the number of Arabic-speakers and experts in Arab and Islamic religion.

Cyber-spying and cyberattacks were all the rage, and new artificial intelligence tools could be used to relatively quickly translate Arabic messages for non-Arabic-speakers. So why waste resources on old-fashioned intelligence when more resources could be poured into cutting-edge technologies which would bring greater value?

This era of IDF intelligence managers had lost sight of the fact that technology can be fooled or outwitted systematically in ways that human foreign culture and language experts can see through and diagnose.

IDF intelligence is trying to fill the empty seats of Arabic-speakers and experts, a dearth left over from the pre-October 7 era. Training such people cannot be done overnight.

As long as there is no invasion in the next year or so, and as long as IDF intelligence sticks to restoring the old-fashioned Arabic-speakers and experts, this problem should now be properly addressed. But watch out for these experts to be cut back again in five or 10 years. It is harder sometimes to express in technical data the benefits their work reaps versus the more easily quantified benefits from technological tools.

There are huge question marks about whether the IDF has improved at all regarding taking its mostly female low-ranking border lookouts seriously.

In response, the IDF has provided some greater security to those female lookouts and has publicly said it will take them more seriously in the future.

However, when the Post approached the IDF to learn more about how these lookouts are being taken more seriously, the military seemed to promise a readiness to provide a briefing, and then declined to provide any information, despite repeated attempts.

This, along with the IDF’s documented history of ignoring lower-ranked soldiers in favor of higher-ranked ones and fancier technological tools, suggests that this may still remain a blind spot for the military.

If you visit almost any of Israel’s borders, you will notice a distinct lack of troops on the ground.

One of the largest lessons of October 7 was supposed to be that relying on technological sensors, drones, and periodic patrols is insufficient. If there are hundreds of meters or even a couple kilometers of the border which are guarded only by a fence and technology, a patient enemy could figure out ways to take out the sensors and avoid the patrols to easily penetrate through the wall.

In mid-August, around 15 Hamas fighters managed to penetrate an Israeli forward army base in Khan Yunis in Gaza, wounding soldiers and spending significant amounts of time inside the base before they were killed or forced out.

An investigation revealed that though there were a small number of IDF guards on rotating watch duty for parts of the base, there was at least one side of the base which was only protected by sensors, drones, and periodic patrols. Hamas took out the sensors, timed its moves to avoid the drones and patrols, and penetrated the base without firing a shot.

By some luck, the soldiers inside were only wounded and not killed.

Top officials still say that it is impossible to cover the whole border with soldiers.

Or even if the whole border cannot be covered with a soldier every 10 meters, maybe it can be covered with a soldier every 100 meters or 500 meters, so that there is no blind spot where there is not a human watching. And even once there are guards, if the guards see zero threats for weeks or months at a time, how awake and attentive will they really be on the one random day down the road when a real invasion comes out of nowhere?

This is a continued glaring systematic blind spot for the IDF, where the philosophical approach to border security remains unchanged in many ways from the past, and the main difference is forward security zones and having the various enemies on the run. But when the war ends – and it will end someday – and if and when Israel needs to give up portions of its security zones, or even if it does not, having insufficient soldiers on the border after October 7 is unconscionable.

One of the largest problems before October 7 was the IDF’s feeling of comparative supremacy toward Hamas.

October 7 cured that feeling – but, remarkably, only for a short time.

After the IDF clobbered Hamas in northern Gaza in fall 2023 and certainly by the time Hamas’s other strongest forces in Khan Yunis had been routed in early 2024, the military no longer took Hamas seriously.

Since August 2024, Hamas has not even had an ability to gather large forces to fight the IDF. In May of this year, the IDF celebrated one of its largest victories in about a year – beating a measly 30 Hamas fighters in Beit Hanun who had been fighting as a coordinated guerrilla force.

How and why should the IDF take Hamas seriously if 95% of its already much reduced remaining fighters basically spend all of their time hiding?

And so, paradoxically, the IDF now has an even greater superiority complex regarding Hamas than it did before October 7.

Once the war is over and Hamas bides its time quietly to allow Israel to get used to a new round of calm tranquility, this will leave the IDF more open than ever to groupthink that Hamas cannot present a threat – and to being surprised when it does again.

In all, Israel is in a much better place to defend itself from invasion than it was two years ago. But considering how traumatic Hamas’s October 7 massacre was, Israel may still be far less prepared than one would have expected.