Moshe Dayan: The Making of a Strategist, the very impressive book by Eitan Shamir, director of Israel’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, is a coherent and industrious academic study of a singularly important Israeli military figure. The lessons of Moshe Dayan’s special history as a strategist can shed analytic light on Israel’s current and future military challenges.
Though broad historical backgrounds usually deserve pride of place, it was Dayan’s specific involvement with nuclear issues that should ultimately matter most.
Following his commendable integrations of Carl von Clausewitz and B.H. Liddell Hart, Prof. Shamir builds purposefully on the latter’s idea of “grand strategy” – i.e., the “intellectual architecture” integral to a state’s foreign policy. For Israel, this means, among other things, recalling the former’s notion of “friction” and focusing this notion at the conceptual core of national strategy.
As an idea that was more or less well understood by Dayan, friction can underscore the critical differences between “war on paper” and “war as it actually is.”
The author deals admirably with this Clausewitzian difference and its connections to the controversial career of Moshe Dayan.
To this reviewer, who is especially concerned about Israel’s presumptive nuclear doctrine and strategy, it is these intimate connections that are potentially the most valuable part of The Making of a Strategist. Shamir correctly acknowledges that what we can currently understand and make a part of Israeli security doctrine is shrouded in “ambiguity,” but it is still essential that decision-makers in Jerusalem question the longer-term strategic benefits of amimut (opacity – i.e., the “bomb in the basement”).
What would Moshe Dayan recommend? How would he have conceptualized currently intersecting configurations and reconfigurations of adversarial state strategies? Would he have factored in prospective and potentially coinciding risks of sub-state aggressions? Regarding these terrorist aggressions, would Dayan have worried more about “softening” Israel on behalf of larger state enemies or jihadist foes “going nuclear” themselves? And if the latter, what might he have recommended to thwart plausibly accessible radiation dispersal weapons or non-nuclear rocket attacks on Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor?
Extrapolating what Moshe Dayan would do
All answers, of course, must be extrapolations. Nonetheless, as we may learn from Shamir, Dayan “advocated for transparency” after the Six Day War. A similar advocacy, hints Shamir, “could resurface if Iran becomes a nuclear state.” This view, coincidentally, mirrors the conclusion of this reviewer’s own Project Daniel (Iranian nuclear weapons; prime minister Arik Sharon) back in 2004.
Moreover, drawing speculatively on Shamir’s Dayan, it is arguable that Israel should replace “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” with “selective nuclear disclosure” before Iran becomes operationally nuclear and before either North Korea or Pakistan becomes a witting nuclear surrogate of Iran.
In this connection, there will be wider hazards. At some point, Pyongyang or Islamabad could act against Israel on behalf of a Sunni Arab adversary such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Egypt. In this scenario, the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords and the more recent 20-point Hamas ceasefire agreement would prove altogether irrelevant.
Toward the end of his book, Shamir asks the famous question: “Did Dayan collapse on October 7 (1973)?” This query is less important as a historical or biographical query than as a generic question for future wars. Accordingly, if the reader and scholar were to extract generalized strategic insight from this particular event of the Yom Kippur War, he/she should broaden the inquiry as follows: “What can be done to ensure command/control reliability in the nuclear age?”
This broadened question should pertain not just to Israel itself but also to a variety of foreseeable nuclear adversaries, state and sub-state. To be sure, this is a tall order, but it could underscore the conceptual issues raised by Shamir’s comprehensive assessment of Moshe Dayan. In essence, generalizing strategic insights from this historical particular could contribute to various gainful forms of strategic theory.
For Israel, as for all other beleaguered states, carefully fashioned theory is a “net.” Only those who “cast” can “catch.”
Moshe Dayan: The Making of a Strategist is an outstanding book on multiple levels, offering valuable historical assessments and useful derivative opportunities to learn from Israel’s past. Ipso facto, it deserves a wide reading by students of Israeli history and by makers of Israeli strategy.
The reviewer is professor emeritus of International Law at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.
- MOSHE DAYAN: THE MAKING OF A STRATEGIST
- By Eitan Shamir
- Cambridge University Press
- 447 pages; $35