The IDF’s Cult of Technology: The Roots of the October 7 Security Disaster - American Affairs Journal

Given Israel’s prominence as a developer and exporter of weapons and military technologies, the collapse of its defense systems on October 7, 2023, has raised concerns among security services in Europe and the United States. Central to this discussion is whether the operational success of Hamas’s attack was due to structural weaknesses in the technological systems themselves, or to poor decisions by specific offi­cials.

Some experts claim that Israel’s defenses along the Gaza border failed because they constituted a “complex system”—a network of interconnected and mutually dependent components. Complex systems are vul­nerable to a phenomenon known as a “cascading failure,” by which a single hit causes a domino effect leading to a system-wide collapse. For example, the destruction of the control towers by Hamas drones dis­rupted communication between various command centers and outposts, severely damaging the IDF’s ability to launch a coordinated defensive response. In such moments, advanced technology’s networked structure becomes its greatest weakness: it amplifies the effects of specific vulner­abilities, allowing them to spread to other sites.

Other experts believe that Israel’s vulnerability reflected an inappropriate use of otherwise effective technologies, rather than a technological failure per se. They agree that Israel has developed an overreliance on technological solutions, but attribute this mistake to human judgment. According to them, the root of the problem was Israel’s underestimation of its rivals. The IDF assumed that Hamas’s military capabilities could be contained by Israel’s automated and remote-controlled weapons sys­tems; senior leaders, therefore, reduced the presence of human forces along the border. Hamas, however, overwhelmed these systems’ capaci­ties with the sheer scale of its offensive. A more realistic evaluation of the balance between Israel’s technological capabilities and Hamas’s military might would have dissuaded the IDF from repositioning units away from Gaza—thus enabling its advanced technologies to fulfill their original function: supporting rather than replacing the boots on the ground. Had Israeli leadership developed a clearer appreciation of its own technologies, they argue, it could have dramatically decreased the magnitude of the October 7 disaster.

Despite their differences, both approaches assume that the discussion essentially concerns the same question: what can technology do, and what can it not do? This article offers a different angle. I maintain that understanding the IDF’s relationship to technology requires us to think of technology as a social and political phenomenon, rather than a collec­tion of software and devices. The question I will try to answer is not why the technological tools functioned or malfunctioned as they did, but why technology became such a dominant factor in the IDF’s force structure in the first place. More specifically, I will examine the broad historical processes that led to what critics often call the IDF’s “cult of technology”—a tendency to view the implementation of technological tools as an end in itself, at the expense of larger strategic purposes—and the flaws of this mentality that were so catastrophically exposed on October 7.

Qualitative Superiority, Past and Present

In 1997, Major General Isaac Ben-Israel, who shortly afterward became the head of mafat, the Israeli agency in charge of defense R&D and advanced technology, penned a seminal essay entitled “The Relativity Theory of Force Construction.”¹ Ben-Israel, a prominent advocate of making cyberwarfare and defense AI the cornerstone of Israel’s security structure, proposed a departure from the traditional logic of force con­struction in favor of a new and provocative approach. Instead of allocat­ing budgetary and strategic re­sources based on the classic principle of closing gaps—that is, investing in domains where the IDF was inferior to Arab armies to level the playing field—Israel should invest precisely in those domains where the IDF already had the upper hand: “We must look for those areas where we have a relative advantage (and the enemy a disadvantage) and try to drag the war into these areas. . . . We must focus especially on those forces whose relative advantage over the enemy is the greatest.” Ben-Israel pre­sented this suggestion as part of a cunning stratagem: assuming that Israel’s enemies were constructing their mili­tary forces according to the conventional principle of closing gaps, they would invest in areas where Israel is stronger. By focusing on those same areas, the IDF would be able to lure its enemies onto its home turf, thus setting the terms and conditions of future conflicts.

And what exactly were those areas of Israeli superiority? Ben-Israel specified, “The answer to this question should not be sought on the quantitative level, but on the level of quality.” To win the next campaign, he continued, Israel should avoid conflicts determined by quanti­tative metrics, like the infantry and the armored corps, and rely instead on technologically intensive outfits, e.g., intelligence organizations and the air force. “The more the war between us and the Arabs is conducted at a higher technological level,” he wrote, “the better our relative situa­tion will be; and vice versa, the poorer the war is in technology and richer in manpower, the worse our situation will become.” In 2019, Ben-Israel reiterated this position, adding, “From an Israeli perspective, the preferred scenario is a ‘high-tech war.’”²

Ben-Israel drew on a long legacy of Israeli military theorists who focused on the qualitative aspects of Israel’s security doctrine. As early as 1948, David Ben-Gurion claimed that only a commitment to qualita­tive measures like strategic sophistication and adherence to war ethics would allow Israel to compensate for the quantitative edge of the Arab armies: “For what is the basis of our present and future endurance? Nothing save our qualitative advantage, our intellectual and moral superiority.”³ Over the years, the concept of the qualitative advantage—rooted in the “few against the many” mythology of the Maccabean Revolt in the second century BCE—has become the founding ethos of Israeli military thought, a cross-generational leitmotif running through the history of IDF strategic planning.

But in the 1990s, as Brigadier General Meir Finkel has demonstrated in his scholarship, the meaning of the term “quality” in Israeli military discourse underwent an important change.⁴ Army officials began to associate the notion of a qualitative edge with the IDF’s material and technological capabilities rather than its members’ intellectual or ethical superiority. Indeed, when Ben-Israel talks about the qualitative dimen­sion of the Israeli armed forces, he does not think, as Ben-Gurion did, of the educational and moral qualities of the Israeli soldier. For him, quality refers, first and foremost, to the IDF’s arsenal of technological tools and digital plat­forms. As he writes in his 2019 article, quality “has assumed various forms, and . . . modern cyber warfare constitutes its most relevant contemporary expression.”⁵

In recent years, there has been a second change in the conceptualization of qualitative superiority, in addition to the shift in emphasis from the quality of the “human material” to the quality of technological tools. As the focus on technology increased and the focus on the human element weakened, the concept began to lose its relational dimensions. Thus, the qualitative advantage ceased to function as a comparative criterion by which Israel measured its position relative to its rivals. In Ben-Israel’s famous 1997 article, the relative aspect was still central to the discussion—as the title clearly indicates. Over time, however, the comparative orientation of the technological quality discourse has disap­peared, and today technology functions as an essentialist, intrinsic value, rather than an aspect of external power relations. More simply put, the adoption of technology has turned into a central pillar of the IDF’s identity, a focal point of its organizational self-image, rather than an aspect of its relations with the outside world.

A prominent example of this mindset is found in the article “On the Way to Digital Superiority, Stop at Delphi,” published in 2020 in the IDF’s Bein Haktavim journal⁶—the main intellectual organ of the tech­nology-focused current in Israeli military thought. The authors, Briga­dier General Omer Dagan and Major Lior Bar-Lev, claim that the strength of twenty-first-century armies is no longer determined by traditional criteria of military superi­ority—such as naval, air, or battlefield superiority—but by digital superiority. Unlike these classical forms of military dominance, they write, “digital superiority is not manifested against specific enemies at specific points in space and time, but rather enables a force buildup that maintains military superiority across all operational dimensions and against a variety of adversaries, even as these continue to evolve [emphasis added].” In other words, no matter who its enemies actually are—jihadist terrorists, state armies, or aliens from Mars—as long as the IDF remains digitally up to date, it will be able to defeat those who wish it harm. Since “digital superiority is measured in relation to ourselves,” the concrete nature of one’s rivals is of secondary importance. The technological advantage principle has thus become a solipsistic orientation, a kind of digital autism, insofar as the reference point of the force construction process has drifted from the outer reality to the inner world. Hence the mention of Delphi in the article’s title: according to the authors, the key to achieving military superiority today is not “Know your enemy,” the ancient commandment of the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu, but the motto “Know thyself,” which was inscribed on the Greek city’s temple wall.

Between Sparta and Athens

Israel’s drifting doctrines of qualitative superiority were not dreamed up out of the blue by intellectuals. The emergence of tech­nology as a central pillar of Israeli national security discourse in the 1990s reflected broad social and political developments.

First, the new emphasis on technology corresponded to a decline in the IDF’s social status, caused by the erosion of Israel’s collectivist ethos, during this period. As the logic of the market penetrated the pub­lic sector, the military’s almost unlimited access to the state’s financial resources, as well as its broader hold on social norms, loosened. As a result, security budgets were dramatically reduced, and a tendency to apply economic cost-benefit criteria to the army’s policies entered public and professional discourse. At the same time, the shift toward neoliberal and individualistic values transformed the question of con­scription from a national duty and a socially enforced obligation into a private matter, measured in terms of professional opportunities and personal interests. As expected, this led to a decline in conscription rates—particularly among the career-oriented upper-middle class—as well as a decline in the willingness of the remaining conscripts to serve in combat roles.

Second, the IDF’s occupation of southern Lebanon in 1985 and the outbreak of the First Intifada two years later marked the transition from an era of interstate warfare to the age of asymmetric conflict, characterized by policing civilian populations and fighting terrorist organizations. The increase in the suppressive, as opposed to the defensive, element of the IDF’s mission profile led to the emergence of a strong antiwar senti­ment within Israeli society—again, particularly among the educated and well-off. This sentiment then developed into dissident cultural and intel­lectual traditions, as well as influential peace movements like “Four Mothers” and “Peace Now.” These voices protested not only what they saw as Israel’s hawkish foreign policy and immoral military actions, but also the IDF’s involvement in Israel’s civic life and political system. As a result, during the 1980s and ’90s, Israelis became much more casualty-averse, much less respectful of the IDF’s normative prescriptions, and much less willing to send their sons and husbands to the front.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the IDF’s position as one of the most influential institutions in Israeli public life was thus undermined by two forces—the liberalization and individualization of Israel’s economy, on the one hand, and the demilitarization of its politi­cal culture on the other. Against this cluster of challenges, the era’s rapid developments in military technologies looked like a panacea.

First, advanced technologies could assist the IDF’s adjustment to the new economic landscape. Automating some of the military’s functions, it was believed, would enable a shift to a less manpower-intensive con­scription model. Not coincidentally, unmanned drones, boats, and land vehicles quickly became Israeli arms manufacturers’ flagship projects, with Rafael, Elbit, and Israel Aerospace Industries—Israel’s three big­gest defense firms—becoming world-leading experts in, and exporters of, these systems and products. Incorporating technological solutions not only enabled the IDF to save costs on long and expensive training and operational procedures, but also eased its reliance on high recruitment rates.

Second, a shift to a technology-focused army suited the changing political climate. Uniquely in the history of arms development, and probably contrary to the assumptions of most antiwar activists, contem­porary advancements in military technologies are often programmed to constrain rather than increase the level of destructiveness. The logic of many of these weapon systems reflects a shift from maximum damage to maximum accuracy, highlighting modern armies’ adoption of humanitarian standards. In the case of the IDF, implementing technological solutions also responded to the moral controversies surrounding Israeli control over the Palestinians and the desire to avoid public and international criticism. Thus, smart precision weapons promised to reduce harm to innocent lives and digitized and automated checkpoints were intended to alleviate volatile and degrading interactions between soldiers and civilians.⁷ Additionally, robotized weapons were intended to reduce IDF troops’ exposure to terrorism, thus addressing the Israeli public’s increased sensitivity to casualties. In short, in Israel and the wider world, the embrace of new military technologies at the turn of the twenty-first century must be understood as consistent with the age’s liberal-human­itarian credo.

Technologizing the IDF was therefore a way to soothe the tensions between the liberalizing trends in Israel’s economy and politics, on the one hand, and the bellicose nature of its geopolitical environment, on the other. By minimizing the contrast between militarism and liberalism, it enabled Israel to imagine itself as a synthesis of Athens and Sparta—a beacon of progress and openness and a military superpower. Yet, by allowing Israelis to avoid choosing between these contradictory goals, technology also deprived foreign and defense policy debates of ideological substance. As the shift to a technologically focused defense system insulated Israelis from their country’s hostile geopolitical envi­ron­ment—reducing casualties from terrorist violence and, as the next sec­tion discusses, linking Israel’s economy to the global high-tech market—the Palestinians were pushed to the bottom of the political agenda.

In other words, the reliance on technology obscured the political essence of the military interaction between Israel and the Palestinians. Technology depoliticized the conflict, allowing it to be perceived as an issue that could be “managed” with the right technological tools, rather than a problem that must be resolved through policymaking and public contestation. In that sense, the shift toward technology in the realm of homeland security is fundamentally connected to the rise of technocracy in democratic governance. The more the IDF changed from a modern people’s army to a postmodern techno-army, the more the security of the state slipped from the control of the citizenry into the hands of military experts and weaponry technicians.

These trends led to a fundamental shift in the place technology occu­pies within the IDF’s force structure. As Avi Kober, an expert in Israeli military thought, puts it, “Israeli senior commanders held a balanced approach [until the 1990s], which reflected prudence regarding the impact of technology. On the one hand, they looked to acquire the best weapon systems to ensure the technological edge over the Arabs; on the other hand, they understood the danger of overreliance on technology at the expense of the human factor.”⁸ The previous generation’s balanced attitude did not stem from a technophobic mentality. As Kober points out, those senior commanders fully understood the importance of stay­ing current with the latest technological breakthroughs. At the same time, they knew how to integrate technology into the military without allowing it to overshadow basic insights and principles.

Colonel (res.) Moshe Sharvit, a senior Israeli operations researcher, identifies a similar transition. Traditionally, he explains, the direction of influence between the IDF’s doctrinal paradigms and technological developments was strictly one-way: “The [strategic] doctrine guides investments in technology but remains fundamentally unaffected by technological ad­vancements; technology enhances the ability to imple­ment the doctrine, but these implementations occur within the boundaries of the existing doctrinal framework.”⁹ In recent decades, this hier­archy has been upended, and the drive to implement technologies has begun to reshape the army’s strategic doctrines. Writing in 2019, Sharvit notes that this process had reached an extreme endpoint: “Today, it seems that the approach which views the implementation of new tech­nologies as a means to resolve painful operational problems is deeply ingrained in the IDF. It often appears as if this is the primary, if not the only, way to achieve this goal.”¹⁰

The Rise and Fall of Israel’s Defense Industries

Perhaps the most significant factor behind the rise of the IDF’s cult of technology is the ties between Israel’s high-tech industry and its defense sector. Similar to the history of Silicon Valley–U.S. Army relations, Israel’s tech ecosystem was born out of foundations built in the 1960s and 1970s by the defense sector. Following a traumatic French embargo on arms shipments to Israel on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, Israeli decision-makers decided to invest immense resources in local defense production, realizing that it was no longer possible to rely on importing equipment from abroad. The production volumes and workforces of Israel’s arms manufacturers expanded significantly, making the defense industry one of Israel’s largest economic sectors.

As part of the defense industry’s growth spurt, resources were directed toward technological R&D. This shift toward technological research was not driven by economic reasons. In fact, technological investments often resulted in losses. Nevertheless, since most of the companies operated under government ownership, they assumed that the state would bail them out of financial difficulties. This assumption allowed them to focus on innovation and research without constant attention to shareholder returns. Yaakov Lifshitz, former director gen­eral of the Ministry of Finance and chairman of the defense industry association, noted that the managers of these industries “adopted an approach that preferred growth and expansion over profitability, priori­tized technical and technological challenges, and did not sufficiently consider the business aspects.”¹¹

The military industries’ post-1967 growth period ended abruptly in 1985. On July 1 of that year, in response to a severe hyperinflation crisis, the government announced the implementation of the Economic Stabili­zation Plan—a comprehensive restructuring of Israel’s political econo­my centered on radical liberalization measures, the strengthening of business at the expense of organized labor, and the weakening of the state’s welfarist and corporatist institutions. Implemented in no small part under the pressure and supervision of representatives of the Reagan administration, the plan is seen as the moment Israel shifted from a developmentalist to a neoliberal economic regime. It involved drastic cutbacks in government spending and a broader reorientation of the public sector according to business dynamics and market principles. Due to their heavy reliance on public expenditures, their densely union­ized workforces, and their relaxed approach to profitability, the military industries became a prime target of these rapid neoliberalization efforts.

The concentration of resources in the defense sector undoubtedly had negative macroeconomic consequences that needed to be addressed. First, massive defense expenditures since 1967 contributed to rising inflationary pressures, culminating in a staggering 445 percent inflation rate by 1984.¹² Second, these technologically advanced and publicly funded defense firms absorbed most of the country’s technicians and engineers, preventing knowledge from spilling over into civilian spheres and impeding wider economic growth.¹³ At the same time, since 1967, defense planning functioned as a developmentalist, military-Keynesian policy instrument. The arms industry was a major contributor to high employment and was used by the government to promote geographically balanced industrial expansion by establishing production facilities in underdeveloped areas.

For the architects of the 1985 economic liberalization plan, however, the goal was not improving the defense sector’s managerial culture or creating conditions for better spillovers. The reformers sought to perma­nently restructure Israel’s industrial and technological landscape by weakening public industries and strengthening the private sector. By drastically reducing defense budgets, they triggered a flow of technologically intensive industrial activity from the public to the private sphere. A series of plant closures and workforce reductions during the latter half of the 1980s released tens of thousands of laid-off defense workers into the job market. Those who had obtained technological skills were quick­ly rehired by a nascent civilian high-tech cluster. These individuals brought with them the knowledge and expertise acquired in military industries, propelling Israel’s private tech sector to the global frontier. As economist Moshe Justman aptly puts it, “Israel’s high-tech revolution was in large measure a shift of economic resources from a technologically advanced but commercially unprofitable defense sector to civil­ian manufacturing based on similar technologies.”¹⁴

These changes were soon supplemented by another radical policy shift. In the early 1990s, the Israeli government sought to expand the country’s high-tech sector by giving private financial actors a larger role. This was achieved by creating a local venture capital market. Thus, in 1993, the state invested millions in ten budding VC firms, hoping that they would initiate the broader transformation of Israel’s tech system into a VC-based, start-up-intensive entrepreneurial hub. As Robyn Klingler-Vidra wrote in a 2018 American Affairs article, this was a globally unprecedented—and successful—attempt at imitating the Sili­con Valley model of a VC-based high-tech system; “by 2000, Israel had the second-largest venture capital market on an absolute basis, and the largest relative to population.”¹⁵ Of course, this imitation of Silicon Val­ley’s financial model produced similar regional divergences between a wealthy, urban high-tech elite and the peripheral “left-behind.” In this sense, the successful creation of Israel’s VC industry marks the final transition from an era when government investments in technological infrastructure served a developmentalist agenda to one where public interests were co-opted by or subordinated to financial incentives. As Erez Maggor has written, the growing power of VC investors eventually led to the abandonment of rules requiring production in Israel, and a shift away from manufacturing and “hard tech” in favor of pure soft­ware and internet companies.¹⁶

Moreover, these efforts to downsize the defense sector’s production capacities coincided with global political developments: the end of the Cold War marked the conclusion of a four-decade-long global arms race, leading to sharp declines in international weapons purchases. In response, the Israeli government pursued a defense production policy known as conversion, which involved transferring products and tech­niques from the defense sector to the civilian market (for example, applying fighter aircraft technologies to commercial aviation). Gradually, the logic of conversion became integral to the R&D process, rather than being applied retroactively to existing products. Military industries were incentivized to develop dual-use products from the outset, catering to both military and civilian markets, and arms developers became sensi­tive to trends in private consumer demand. This shift introduced a new set of commercial interests into the defense production process and heightened the tension between the industries’ role as the IDF’s supplier and their role as business enterprises.

It must be noted, however, that Israel’s military industries were never fully privatized. Instead, they evolved into a hybrid of private sector interests and public sector structures. By the time the cult of technology penetrated the IDF, and established itself as the organizing principle of force construction, Israel’s defense industrial base had underwent a radi­cal change. Whereas, in the past, national arms manufacturers operated according to the state’s budgetary cycles, now these government-owned defense facilities danced to the rhythm of consumer electronics markets. The transition described by Avi Kober and others—from a situation where military doctrine directed technological investments to one in which technology investments shape IDF doctrine—corresponds to this shift from defense production driven by the state’s centralized policymaking to one oriented toward profits in the global market. The neo­liberalized, tech-oriented military industries began to function as a conveyor belt transmitting business-sector interests into the heart of the IDF’s strategic designs.

As IDF scholar Nissim Hania wrote in a much discussed 2016 study, “although R&D and local defense production are still presented as the basis of the IDF’s ‘qualitative edge,’ they are in fact increasingly deter­mined by business and economic considerations.” Today, he adds, “the General Staff has lost its ability to stand up to the economic interests of the industries in the name of the military interest.” As a result, “the IDF’s force buildup is actually shaped from outside.”¹⁷

Narrowing Gaps, Blurring Lines

Until the early 2000s, the commercial high-tech sector was the junior partner in its relationship with the defense apparatus. The military’s R&D and production capabilities were far more advanced than those in the private market, and cooperation between defense firms and tech companies involved adapting military technologies for secondary civil­ian applications. But in recent decades, this dynamic has reversed: today, the pace of innovation in the civilian market is much higher. Consequently, many technological innovations—from IT systems to drones and robotics—originate in the private sector and only later find their way to the army.

From a national security perspective, this situation is deeply prob­lematic. Technologies developed in the civilian market are necessarily “off-the-shelf” products that can easily be acquired by terrorist organ­izations. As Audrey Kurth Cronin recently argued, many technological advancements disproportionately benefit terrorist groups by narrowing the technological gap between them and regular armies.¹⁸ While non-state actors still struggle to obtain the most updated versions of ad­vanced technologies—IDF drones are far more sophisticated than Hamas’s, for instance—both types of actors now procure their equipment from an increasingly globalized and commercialized production system, resulting in narrower gaps in technological capabilities. The reason this situation benefits terrorists disproportionately has to do with their fundamentally modest strategic aims: their primary goal is to inflict damage on their enemies rather than overpower or defeat them. Ful­filling this end does not require technological superiority; it is enough to narrow the gap between their capabilities and those of their adversaries. These developments challenge Ben-Israel’s assertion that the IDF’s situation will improve as warfare becomes more technologically inten­sive, to say the least. The belief that the outcome of war is determined by technological disparities reveals itself as highly simplistic, overlooking crucial factors like differing strategic expectations and asymmetrical definitions of victory.

Furthermore, technological products are not the only assets flowing from the high-tech sector to the security system; they are accompanied by discursive patterns, organizational values, and career opportunities. In recent years, the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate (AMAN), particularly Unit 8200—its highly prestigious and classified cybersecurity and signal intelligence agency—has become the central nexus between the Israeli army and the high-tech industry. Indeed, the career pipeline from Unit 8200 to tech companies has become a cliché of Israeli entre­preneurship, with international business magazines frequently lauding 8200 as “the best tech school on earth”¹⁹ or “Israel’s start-up machine.”²⁰

Unit 8200 undoubtedly shapes the professional trajectories of its alumni. But is this relationship equally beneficial for the IDF? Hardly.

Transforming service in intelligence units into a career springboard did help the IDF address the declining willingness of the educated middle classes to serve in the army amid the rise of neoliberalism, as sociologist Yagil Levy demonstrated, but at the price of commodifying the army’s relationship to its soldiers.²¹ Future employment in tech became a key component of the “incentive package” that the IDF offered well-off prospective soldiers and their families. Service in Unit 8200 not only offsets the educational or occupational delay typically caused by obligatory military duty, but it actually accelerates career development, turning setbacks into stepping stones.

The problem is that armies are not economic enterprises; they must operate based on entirely different considerations.²² When security agencies adopt a business orientation, their professional standards will eventually be affected. Since October 7, multiple retired intelligence officers have argued that, in choosing to “operate like Israel’s largest high-tech company,” the security agencies severely compromised the quality of their intelligence gathering. In an article in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s second-largest daily newspaper, an anonymous former intelligence officer described “a crazy deterioration in the system regarding understanding the enemy’s innards, mastering Arabic, and comprehending Arab culture.” He further noted that today’s intelligence soldiers are “modern, Western individuals with an individualistic outlook, many of whom aspire to careers in high-tech . . . they struggle to grasp that the enemy thinks differently from us, projecting their own thinking patterns onto him.”²³

This is compelling criticism. Yet lambasting young soldiers aspiring to become tech entrepreneurs is too easy, and barely addresses the heart of the matter. The revolving door between the IDF and Israeli high-tech extends far into decision-making circles. Economist Daniel Maman revealed decades ago how IDF generals pursue lucrative “second careers” in the business sector after retirement.²⁴ The phenomenon of “Israel’s security network”²⁵—a web of informal connections through which IDF higher-ups influence public policymaking and gain access to positions of economic power, particularly in high-tech—has been well documented and analyzed. One can even sometimes hear members of this security-tech elite openly boast about their close relationships with tech companies.

For instance, Itamar Yaar, former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, explained to a Foreign Policy magazine reporter last December that “there’s a sort of ping-pong between a tech company and the IDF. . . . Long before there’s a marketable product, the tech compa­nies offer it to the IDF, the police, or the intelligence agencies, and they try it out, sometimes in ongoing operations, to test and to improve it.”²⁶ Yaar added that compared to the rest of the world, in Israel “informal connections [between tech companies and the Ministry of Defense] are much closer.” Yiftach Kleinmann of the drone developer SpearUAV was quoted in the business daily The Marker stating that the Ministry of Defense “carries out many projects with start-up companies, helps develop the products and adapt them to the needs of the army, and sometimes even places small scale orders for the defense system for pilot purposes. In this way, the IDF becomes a kind of ‘beta site’ for start-up companies.”²⁷ It is worth emphasizing that the concept of informality, frequently used by members of the security-technology network to describe their collaborative dynamics, does not refer merely to the famous Israeli spirit of casualness and disregard for social etiquette. It also refers to the lack of regulatory constraints that typically structure transactions between the military and public defense firms, along with the flexible nature of the IDF’s dealings with private tech companies.

This habit of security agencies and tech companies to use the volatile regional reality as a testing ground for experimental technology is not just morally and politically questionable. It can also seriously compromise the IDF’s operational standards. After all, tech entrepreneurs pitch­ing their products to the military are no more reliable than typical salespeople. As technology reporter Israel Wellman notes, they too tend to “exaggerate the qualities of their innovations. Even large companies can get carried away, cutting corners and glossing over their product’s weaknesses.”²⁸ Military officials, for their part, are also incentivized to find shortcuts, as securing deals with tech companies has become a primary driver of career advancement. In The Privatization of Israeli Security, economist Shir Hever describes how military generals nearing retirement sometimes engineer contracts between their organizations and companies they hope to join in the future, effectively buying favors they can later cash out. Thus, when senior defense officials decide to cooperate with high-tech companies, their motivations are not always purely professional. These interactions do not have to be consciously cynical or criminally corrupt; they often reflect a routine one-hand-washes-the-other dynamic, resulting from increasingly porous boundaries between public sectors and private markets.

These trends ultimately contributed to the failure of Unit 8200, re­nowned as one of the world’s most technologically advanced intelligence organizations, to foresee the October 7 assault. The magni­tude of this operational failure underscores systemic blind spots rather than mere oversights. Recent investigations into the origins of this debacle have highlighted the unit’s increasing reliance on speech-to-text technologies instead of Arabic-speaking analysts in recent years. The evident defi­ciencies in these programs, starkly exposed on October 7, suggest that their enthusiastic adoption may have been influenced by factors beyond strict national security considerations.

Most details about the development and deployment of these tech­nologies remain classified, but even the limited information available is scandalous. Translation programs were introduced to the unit in 2014 to automate parts of the signal intelligence gathering process. Their initial purpose was to reduce the workload of the agency’s audio-lingual ana­lysts, who were working around the clock translating each and every intercepted phone call, email, or text message. At this stage, the idea was that STT technologies could translate large quantities of relatively unimportant enemy communications, enabling human analysts to focus on smaller amounts of weighty material.

In the following years, integrating these programs into the unit’s daily operations became an end in itself. Senior 8200 officials began to view technology as a substitute for human analysts rather than a supple­mental instrument. The technology, however, was simply not there yet. It struggled to comprehend muffled audio—precisely the kind of materi­al intelligence agencies often intercept—and its translation capabilities were crudely literal, indifferent to idiomatic subtleties and cultural refer­ences. In a Yedioth Ahronoth article published in May, an 8200 officer remarked that the system’s success rate was “50-50 on a good day, and I’m being generous.”²⁹ Another 8200 veteran said that “it’s basically Google Translate.”³⁰ Despite this, the push for technologization contin­ued. In 2021, the unit conducted a pilot test for yet another AI-based STT product, assessing its ability to transform difficult raw input into high-quality military intelligence. Once again, the results were lacking, yet the program was green-lit. Sources within the unit allege that the pilot was doctored, with human analysts refining the results before passing it on for final approval.³¹

Such steadfast insistence on adopting new technologies, despite serious concerns about their operational efficacy, cannot be attributed to occasional shortcuts or isolated tradeoffs. Rather, it signifies a profound shift in the core ethos of Unit 8200, whereby traditional military values centered around national duty and personal sacrifice have been displaced by a contradictory emphasis on market-related principles and interests. The unit’s commitment to maintaining its reputation as Israel’s premier technological workshop has become deeply ingrained in its organizational culture, overshadowing its primary mission of gathering high-quality intelligence and providing early warnings of imminent attacks. The once secondary function of imbuing its members with what soci­ologists Ori Swed and John Sibley Butler call “military capital”³²—a set of skills, social connections, and behavioral codes convertible to posi­tions in high-tech—has become the unit’s primary focus, incentivizing its officials to implement as much technology as possible. The prospect of a future career in tech has become the unit’s center of gravity, affecting every layer of its structure, from the lowest-ranking recruit to the highest-ranking officer.

Data, Data, Data

Data is, in many ways, the lifeblood of digital corporations. A significant portion of internet companies’ revenue comes from selling users’ browsing data to advertisers, who use this information to design more finely tailored and targeted ads. Based on detailed user personality profiles—encompassing not only broad identity categories like ethnicity, religion, and sex, but also intimate psychological traits like addictiveness, loyalty, and capriciousness—advertisers enhance the effectiveness of their marketing tactics, predicting more accurately which consumers will respond positively to specific purchasing offers. Advertisers, nat­urally, pay enormous sums for these predictive capabilities. The more intrusive the information, the more targeted the ad. Data-based predic­tive models are thus central to the digital culture’s economic system. As claimed in a 2017 Economist article: “Data is to our century what oil was to the previous one”—not only the growth engine of the modern econo­my but also “the world’s most profitable resource.”³³

Following the September 11 attacks, the data frenzy penetrated the American intelligence community. In the context of the war on terror, the U.S. government expanded its authority to collect information about citizens’ private lives. Identifying the internet as an inexhaustible source of such information, intelligence agencies forged numerous collaborations with Silicon Valley companies. Supported by an annual budget of tens of billions of dollars, these agencies and tech firms established hun­dreds of joint data-mining projects.

In Israel, data-based prediction models gained traction during the 2015–16 “Knives Intifada”—a wave of spontaneous attacks carried out by untrained and unaffiliated Palestinian youth against Israeli soldiers and civilians, usually involving stabbings with kitchen knives or ram­ming pedestrians with family vehicles. This impulsive and uncoordinated terrorism posed a serious challenge to Israeli intelligence agencies. Since most attackers were radicalized online, traditional surveillance methods—monitoring or infiltrating terrorist groups, studying their ideology, tactics, and institutional structures—suddenly seemed ineffec­tive. The preventive logic of classical counterterrorism, which involves thwarting an imminent assault by disrupting the transition from decision to action, also became futile. Unlike conventional terrorism, these attacks did not have a plot structure based on a temporal gap between conception and execution. Rather, they appeared as sudden, desperate outbursts of violence.

To address this unfamiliar situation, the Israelis developed a new approach. Instead of studying the political and institutional structures of organized terrorism, they investigated the social and psychological condi­tions that could lead someone to become a “lone wolf.” They soon saw patterns of societal backgrounds and personality structures. Rather than political activism or religious conviction, these individuals shared traits like social alienation and a history of mental problems. Additionally, it was discovered that in the days and hours leading up to an attack, they exhibited similar social media behavior, atypically posting aggres­sive anti-Israeli content or Quranic verses. Some even replaced their profile pictures with a new self-portrait, ensuring that media coverage and posthumous ceremonies would include a flattering photo. By synthesizing these bits of information and clues, Israel’s intelligence agencies produced a definitive profile of a potential lone wolf.

To operationalize this profile, they needed a pool of suspects onto whom it could be applied. Since terrorists of the new generation were organizationally unaffiliated and had no prior record, the intelligence community’s existing knowledge sources—amassed through decades-long surveillance of professional terrorist networks—suddenly became impractical. What was needed were large databases of personal details through which intelligence officers could screen entire populations. Thus, they built extensive databases containing, for instance, biometric information, cellular geolocations, and online activity patterns. Next, AI‑based predictive models scanned these datasets, producing security alerts by matching the lone-wolf profile to statistically anomalous be­haviors.

From a military intelligence perspective, the crowning achievement of this approach was its ability to replace traditional counterterrorism logic—disrupting the chain between decision and execution—with a radically new temporal orientation. By uncovering the deep patterns undergirding people’s everyday behavior, IDF officials could target po­tential assailants not only before they set out to attack, but often before they even consciously considered it. As an officer involved in these activities remarked, “unlike terrorists from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, if you arrive at a kid’s house a week before the attack, he still does not know that he is a terrorist.”³⁴ In sum, the IDF revolutionized its counterterrorism doctrine by importing methods from the digital realm, with data-based threat predictions mimicking the data-based predictions of target­ed advertising.

Senior officials in the intelligence community were well aware of this parallel. The deputy director of the Shin Bet Intelligence School noted that intelligence organizations “operate with methods similar to those used in the business-civilian world for commercial and marketing needs. Just as businesses monitor network activity and discourse to gauge inter­est in a product or identify a need for targeted marketing, intelligence organizations do the same to identify potential threats.” He emphasized that the primary difference is that “while a corporation focuses on the product they produce, an intelligence organization focuses on the ideo­logical, religious, or mental motives that can lead to terrorist activity.”³⁵

According to Israeli security services, this approach was a resounding success. Within months of deploying the system, the violence subsided. IDF officials argue that, despite the dystopian nature of a system that sanctions people for actions they have not yet committed, its true value lies not in its repressive efficiency but in its ability to contain the 2015–16 wave of violence by isolating hostile individuals, thus avoiding com­prehensive restrictions on innocent Palestinians’ daily lives. More im­portantly, they contend, this approach successfully prevented haphazard violence from escalating into a full-blown third intifada, which would have resulted in far greater casualties, especially among Palestinians. This experience increased the security state’s appetite for digital methods, strengthening the influence of the cult of technology on the IDF’s strategic culture.

Few voices openly opposed this trend. One was Michael Milstein. An expert on Palestinian politics and a former intelligence officer, in 2017 he described the adoption of digital methods as the symptom of a severe intellectual crisis, reflecting a “significant devaluation of intelligence agencies’ ability to gain deep understanding of their targets and develop familiarity with their language, history, and culture.” Milstein argued that senior intelli­gence commanders “are unaware of the crisis, do not discuss it, and sometimes even deny its existence.” Consequently, traditions of in-depth research are “on the brink of extinction in the intelligence com­munity,” being replaced by “the study of social media and big data.” According to Milstein, these tools give intelligence re­searchers “the illusion that they understand reality while sitting in their offices, clicking on their keyboards. . . . They think the graphs and algorithmic findings popping up on their screens authentically reflect the reality they investi­gate,” while in fact their reliance on technology “does not enhance, but probably diminishes, their grasp on reality.” Anticipating the October 7 intelligence disaster, Milstein warned that the growing “alienation be­tween intelligence researchers and their targets” could lead to “a mighty crash against reality.”³⁶

Digitizing the General Staff

Milstein’s critique should be extended further. The data craze not only fostered an illusion among soldiers that the graphs and tables on their screens “authentically reflect” reality, but also led senior defense offi­cials to perceive digital data as more real than reality itself. In essence, they didn’t just overestimate the reliability of their information, blend­ing high-quality sources with less credible ones. More troublingly, they struggled to grasp the epiphenomenal or representational relationship between material reality and digital data, sometimes suggesting that the former derives from the latter, rather than vice versa.

An example of this confusion can be found in the 2018 article “Intelligence Supremacy in the Digital Age,”³⁷ authored by Herzi Halevi, then head of the Military Intelligence Directorate and now the chief of the General Staff, along with two other intelligence officers. Halevi and his coauthors argue that the collapse of the distinction be­tween reality and data, “the blurring of the boundaries between the physical and digital dimensions,” is the defining principle of our time. In this environment, the outcomes of wars will be “determined by the ability of the stronger party to achieve digital superiority,” and in the coming years, “a digital strike on the enemy’s center of gravity” could bring a hostile power to its knees “without a single bullet leaving the muzzle of a gun.” Consequently, in a tone that echoes the missionary tendencies of early internet culture, the authors urge the Israeli intelligence community to “devote itself to the digital era.” Describing how digital technologies are transforming society’s structures, they assert that “from a collection of isolated individuals, we are slowly becoming a unified, networked body of knowledge.” Soon, they write, “the digital dimension will be deeply wired into the core of our being. In parallel to the physical dimension in which we have lived so far, humans will live in this second, man-made dimension, being constantly fed with information and feeding it in return.”

When information becomes a metabolic process, questions about reliability and meaning recede into the background. Information is something the digital man consumes and produces, digests and excretes—not to enhance his understanding of reality, but simply to par­take in an incessant flow of content creation, a vast circulation of indistinct images and messages drifting into a massive vortex of data.³⁸ For Halevi et al., the important thing is not the meaning of the information they possess, but how they can “connect to this massive body of knowledge.” Gradually, the terms “information” and “knowledge” lose their referential quality—their connection to external objects. It is not information in the sense of graspable facts and ideas or, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “knowledge obtained through investigation or study.” Instead, it is information as an energy source, a force of nature, a cosmic power. In the coming years, the authors predict, “he who would know how to generate relevant information and use it more quickly will control the decisive processes . . . in an era where the digital world is an inseparable part of physical reality, it is no longer possible to separate the act of intelligence gathering, of ascertaining reality, from the act of exercising power.” When information is regarded as a mythical force rather than a cognitive phenomenon, the idea of “intelligence supremacy” begins to resemble a God complex, a form of megalomania: “dealing with information is tantamount to changing reality,” they write.

A God Complex

An even stranger manifestation of the information obsession is The Human-Machine Team,³⁹ a book by Brigadier General Yossi Sariel, the current commander of Unit 8200, published in English in 2021. Origi­nally released under a pseudonym because the identity of Unit 8200’s commander is supposed to be classified, the book became the center of an international media scandal earlier this year when the Guardian uncovered Sariel’s identity, causing major embarrassment for the Israeli army.⁴⁰ The manner in which this information was discovered was no less embarrassing than the discovery itself. Sariel left a digital trail on the book’s Amazon webpage leading directly to his private Google account: a classic shoemaker goes barefoot situation, if there ever was one. Regular 8200 soldiers, needless to say, can face harsh punitive measures, including time in military prison, for far less foolish security lapses.

This incident has stirred uproar among the Israeli public. While October 7 already dealt a serious blow to the revered status of Unit 8200, Sariel’s clumsy mistake added another dimension to the story, one that Israelis struggled to digest because it contradicts the country’s habit of lionizing technological elites, especially the 8200 veterans. Far from being the nation’s best and brightest, the incident revealed that some of these people are simply not very smart. It hinted at how, as Milstein pointed out, technology hype often masks a deep intellectual crisis.

The few who have actually read the book, however, would not have been surprised. From the opening sentence to the closing line, it exudes an insufferable blend of pretentious jargon and shallow thought. If the text holds any value, it is solely as a testament to how profoundly IDF thinking has been stupefied by high-tech culture. Alongside pompous rhetoric (“We are at the threshold of the acceleration of the Digital Era Revolution”) and half-baked insights (“From time immemorial, people have attempted to shape reality”), the author bombards his readers with trite techno-optimism, regurgitating the worst clichés of Silicon Valley marketing. The data frenzy here reaches fetishistic levels—“Data is the basis and foundation for the Digital Era”; “Data is the key to success”; “The basis of everything is data”; “It’s all about the data”—and on and on at a hysterical pace.

The rise of digital technologies, according to Sariel, has profoundly revolutionized the basic logic of intelligence collection. In the past, an intelligence officer’s ultimate goal was to access the most intimate secrets of his targets, to be a proverbial fly on the enemy’s wall. Sariel contends that this is an anachronistic approach. In the information age, the key to achieving high-quality military intelligence is not extracting clandestine information from the enemy’s internal networks but tapping into the largest possible number of online sources: “Whoever wins this competition to leverage the existing information on the Internet on behalf of their own organization’s intelligence challenges will be a step and a half ahead of other organizations. One of the secrets of success in the coming years will be precisely the ability to use the power of the Internet to the benefit of the security intelligence agencies.” This is technological reduc­tionism run amok. Even die-heard defense technology enthusiasts would be reluctant to recommend that armies should replace traditional intelli­gence gathering with blind faith in “the power of the internet.”

Sariel’s book shows symptoms of an aggressive mind virus that Evgeny Morozov has dubbed internet-centrism: “a seductive and excit­ing ideology—perhaps today’s über-ideology,” premised on “a propen­sity to view ‘The Internet’ as a source of wisdom and policy advice.”⁴¹ As Morozov emphasizes, internet-centrism often displays quasi-reli­gious overtones. To believers, the internet is a coherent and purposeful system. Organized around “an inherent nature, a logic, a teleology,”⁴² it is “fixed and unified, meaningful and didactic, powerful and unconquerable,” a “precious gift from the gods.”⁴³

Sariel, who adorns his text with references to Talmudic fables and Jewish folklore, exhibits this techno-religiosity in full force. At one point, he juxtaposes the Jewish tradition’s “encouragement to ask ques­tions,” exemplified by “the Four Questions . . . at the beginning of the Passover Seder,”⁴⁴ with the modern practice of typing questions into Google Search. It seems, however, that what unites Judaism and Google, in his mind, is not a spirit of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Rather, it is the way that both Google users and observant Jews address queries to an all-knowing authoritative source, believing that it possesses a priori the truths that they are searching for. “When I ask Google a specific ques­tion,” he unironically writes, “I expect Google to provide me with the answer on the first page. . . . If I don’t get an answer, I don’t despair, and certainly don’t say to myself ‘Okay, Google doesn’t know.’ Instead, I say to myself, ‘Google knows everything, but I didn’t ask Google the right question.’” Sariel the Google user thus maintains that “the answers can already be found in the existing information,” just as Sariel the practicing Jew believes that the universe’s secrets are already encapsulated in the Torah or the Talmud. The believer’s confidence in the totality of God’s wisdom thus translates into an inability to fathom the idea that there are indeed things that “Google doesn’t know.” Furthermore, be­cause the answers already reside in fixed systems, the investigative activity is strictly hermeneutic: it involves probing anew existing bodies of knowledge, and reorienting one’s position vis-à-vis the same source material, but not producing fresh insights by directly interacting with the actual world.

It is this approach—this passive and naïve expectation that an answer to every question will appear on the first page of Google’s search results (“I am not prepared to go to page 2,” Sariel declares without the slightest hint of humor)—that intelligence officers should embrace as the key to studying their rivals. They must believe “that for (almost) every ques­tion, a possible answer can be found in the data . . . and understand that when an answer is not obtained, we must assume that we have not asked the right question.” The data, information, or the internet have thus transformed into modern-day scriptures, reversing the basic structure of the investigative procedure: we don’t start with a question and then search for answers by exploring new horizons. Rather, we assume that an answer already dwells in the data that we have, and then move on to beg the question.

Sariel, it must be emphasized, is more a symptom than a cause—a single, albeit extreme example, of the effects of the cult of technology on the IDF’s senior command. Still, when someone who thinks that the limits of the internet are coextensive with the limits of thought heads a major intelligence organization in one of the world’s most explosive regions, a security catastrophe is likely to ensue. Unit 8200 had closed itself off in an epistemological feedback loop, rationalizing its ignorance by proclaiming that STT programs and access to Google Search could substitute for fluency in Arabic and expertise in Muslim culture. Even in nonmilitary contexts, the idea that the internet is a satisfactory source of information about the world is likely to produce narrow-minded and socially awkward individuals. For an intelligence agency striving to comprehend the deep motivations of hostile groups and analyze com­plex geopolitical dynamics, this overreliance on technology leads to a dangerous detachment from reality.

The technological hubris on display here recalls an attitude that Jean Baudrillard described as “a kind of egocentric generosity or stupidity,” an insistence on imagining “an enemy in [my] own image,”⁴⁵ someone whose wants and style of reasoning are fundamentally similar to mine. The reduction of the enemy to statistical patterns of behavioral data, in other words, precludes the ability to perceive him as absolutely different, as radically autonomous. Thinking that top-notch technologies could render their enemies transparent and themselves omniscient, the Israelis have severely restricted their field of vision. As Baudrillard wrote, “the isolation of the enemy by all kinds of electronic interferences creates a sort of barricade behind which he becomes invisible.”⁴⁶ Under the aegis of this barricade, Hamas planned the October 7 attack for months, barely raising Israel’s suspicion.

What Now?

What lay ahead for the IDF’s cult of technology? I would not presume to offer a definitive answer to this question, but some preliminary observations can be made.

The IDF in general, and the intelligence organizations in particular, will have to undertake some internal reforms. A pushback against recent years’ overreliance on technology is likely, though its exact nature or scale remains uncertain. Additionally, there are forces both inside and outside the IDF that are already exerting pressure in the opposite direc­tion—seeking to minimize the narrative of technological failure and defend the view that unmanned platforms, cybersecurity, and AI ought to remain the army’s highest priorities. The latter position is bolstered by the international context. The incorporation of off-the-shelf, dual-use technologies into modern weapon systems and the increasingly close relations between defense sectors and civilian markets are global phenomena. In this environment, the Israeli security system has no incentive to weaken its ties with tech companies.

There is, however, a complicating human factor that will also have an impact: the religious Zionists. These motivated, organized, and ideologically disciplined communities, often residing in West Bank settlements, have seen a marked increase in both their conscription rates and ascent to senior command positions in recent decades. They have not only changed the sociological composition of the IDF but also its culture and ethos. Their growing presence in the army is not a natural reflection of their proportion in the population. Instead, it is driven by a concerted effort to politicize the IDF—which has historically been associated with secular Zionism—and reshape it in their image.

This process, which sociologist Yagil Levy describes as “the theo­cratization of the Israeli military,”⁴⁷ has reached unprecedented levels during the Gaza war. It can be seen in a growing tendency among battlefield commanders to frame their units’ missions in religious terms, incorporating concepts like Jewish honor, martyrdom, and holy war into their imagery and discourse. The phenomenon of IDF soldiers videoing themselves desecrating places of worship in Gaza and posting the videos online is another expression of this wider process.

Typically, members of these groups serve in dangerous combat roles, while the elite technological units are considered the bastions of secular liberals—with Yossi Sariel being a notable exception. In the coming years, we are likely to see a struggle within the IDF between these demographics, with each side attempting to imprint its values on the army’s organizational identity and cultural symbols. Religious nationalists can also be expected to try to gain a foothold in the technological units. There are already indications that this process is underway. The groups currently dominating these units will try to thwart this effort, thus furthering the exclusion of non-secular and non-liberal individuals from the army’s technological spaces and from the high-tech sector.

In this context, it is notable that a major aspect of Sariel’s agenda has been to counter the elitist and exclusivist image of Unit 8200 by strengthening the unit’s ties to the less well-off populations of the Israeli periphery. Due to his religious background and willingness to diversify 8200’s sociological composition, he represents a threat to the unit’s core demographics. It is not unlikely that representatives of the traditional 8200 establishment will capitalize on the fact that the unit’s most spec­tacular failure took place under his watch, using the October 7 disaster as an opportunity to reinforce the old cultural and class barriers.

While the specific ways in which these tensions will play out remain unknown, a more general pattern seems clear: the Israeli army will be shaped in the coming years by a struggle between two different social elites: the secular techies and the religious nationalists. The former will seek to hold on to their economic privileges while the latter march through the political institutions. If, as claimed throughout this text, the army is indeed a microcosmic reflection of the broader sociopolitical structure, then this antagonism—the conflict, if you will, between the Halachic State and the start-up nation—can be seen as one of the main axes around which contemporary Israel, including its military composition and strategy, pivots.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 3 (Fall 2024): 46–69.

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Notes