This is an interesting, credible, and very readable rebuttal to the criticism aimed at the author by the initial report of the Winograd Commission, and the news coverage and leaks that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Second Lebanon War. Hirsch was blamed by Israel's post-war commission for problems in the war, and part of the reason for this book certainly is for him to make his own case, his personal Defensive Shield, as it were.
Hirsch comes across as very bright but you can imagine that he may have appeared arrogant to his peers and superiors with his novel new concepts and terminology. For example: "With all of my experience, I have yet to find a solution other than maintaining cyclic processes of learning-changing-learning, with increasing speed, in order to baffle the enemy," or "I truly believe that maneuvering without distinct vector patterns and a chaotic and Unpredictable manner could collapse almost any rival system." In fact, his "swarming" and bypassing of strong points is consistent with the shock troops/blitzkrieg tactics the Germans developed at the end of World War I.
The single longest part of the book is dedicated to the second Lebanon War, and the author's actions, decisions, and fights with military bureaucracy and superior officers. Assuming what he wrote is true, it certainly rebuts negative portrayals of Hirsch's role leading up to and in the war. He also makes clear that there was a lot more to the war, including IDF successes, then the battle at Bint Jbeil. Hirsch makes clear that it was the defense minister and chief of the general staff who ordered the conquest of Bint Jbeil for public relations reasons, which meant turning back from the planned advance, and even though the city had already been surrounded and the high ground around it taken.
Hirsch makes the very good point that the only way to get the international community involved enough to impose a cease-fire on Hizbollah, which was firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians every day, was for the IDF to invade Lebanon. The invasion, therefore, was actually a peacemaking move rather than an offensive action on Israel's part. He never makes this point, but implicit in his argument is that the better strategy for Israel would have been just a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, which only occurred in the last week or 10 days of the war, rather than to bomb Beirut and other Lebanese cities in an attempt to get the Lebanese government to pressure Hizbollah to stop firing its rockets at Israeli civilians.
It's interesting to read that in the late 1990s, the IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI) reinvented the "signaling by escalation" concept that the US had tried and failed with in Vietnam 30 years earlier. Israel found out the hard way that you can't negotiate with an enemy that wants your complete destruction or withdrawal.
It's also interesting that Hirsch's description of "shock and paralysis" efforts in 2002 during Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank presaged Donald Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" concept a year later in Iraq. Yet he does not draw the obvious conclusion that his eventual decision to destroy the Palestinian Authority's military and police infrastructure – destroying the enemy's forces – should've been done all along.
He does contradict himself on a fundamental matter. He says repeatedly that what matters are "missions", not "plans". And get several times he states that he wanted to implement "the original Magen Ha'aretz plan that I knew and valued." It's hard to tell from this whether Hirsch was as hide-bound by an existing plan as were his commanders.
Likewise, he criticizes higher command's tendency to break up organic units. Yet throughout his description of his division's actions in the Second Lebanon War, he frequently mentions his own detaching of battalions from brigades and companies from battalions, and assigning them to other units.
He makes a statement that I can't understand. He makes an aside about "those who believe that 'no day was better than yesterday." This seems to echo the motto at the US Navy SEALs' training center, "The only easy day was yesterday". I can't believe he would criticize fellow special forces operators," so his comment is lost on me.
My minor peeve: despite numerous mentions of the Nahal infantry brigade and it's 50th Battalion, for some reason the brigade does not appear in the book's index, even though the Givati brigade, which played a much lesser role in the narrative, does.
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