ABSTRACT
Undoubtedly, the most fundamental of the dilemmas that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has faced in recent years is how best to respond to ongoing transformations in Israel’s security landscape. Although much of the analysis of that conundrum has taken place behind closed doors, sensitivity to the need for force adaptations has occasionally seeped into wider national consciousness. Indeed, public discourse was deliberately initiated early in 1987, when Lieutenant General Dan Shomron, who had recently been appointed the thirteenth CoS, communicated to a non-military audience his conviction that the IDF ought to be, as he put it, ‘smaller and smarter’ (Haaretz March 17, 1987). At the time, self-censorship, reinforced by Shomron’s natural taciturnity, prevented the CoS from enlarging on that theme. But his remarks opened a public debate that progressively grew more intense. Indeed, much of the history of relations between Israelis and their army over the next two decades can be interpreted as a consequence of the reverberations caused by successive attempts to implement the fundamentals of Shomron’s program and attain its objectives.
