Who is to Blame for the Disaster of October 7?

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The usual tendency in analyzing problems—especially painful ones—is to end up in a witch hunt, determining who is to blame, who is responsible, in other words, attributing the source of the problem to specific individuals.

Why is this a global phenomenon? The easiest diagnosis is to choose someone who stands out due to their role in the system or their behavior at a certain point in time—someone who was responsible for preventing the problem. Easy. But understanding that it may be an entire set of factors that make the "responsible person" more of a victim than a culprit requires effort and discernment.

I remember diagnosing the Histadrut (Israeli trade union) for Israel Kessar. Before I even started, he gave me a crooked smile and said, "So, who are you going to hang the bell on?" He was referring to a herd of cows—one of them gets a bell so people will know which one led them astray.

When we take a deep look at problems or disasters, we discover a complex set of events, actions, and flawed processes that together create the disaster. And that is what needs to be fixed. Publicly "hanging the witch" produces nothing except a feeling of relief that "justice has been done." But if the system’s flaws are not corrected, the problem will repeat itself.

What were the flawed processes in the case of October 7, and why did they occur?

An organization is a system composed of subsystems. Each subsystem has its own subsystems, down to the nano-system level. These subsystems do not change uniformly or at the same rate. In the business world, marketing changes the fastest. Sales change more slowly, production even slower, and the human factor is the slowest to change. On a national level, technology changes the fastest. The economic system adapts more slowly, the legal system even slower, and the slowest to change is social culture. We have the technology to destroy the world, but our culture is still stuck in the Stone Age, fighting as if we are defending our caves.

Change creates disintegration. Disintegration manifests as what we call "problems." This also explains aging in humans—different parts of the body age at different rates. This loss of integration means that an increasing amount of available energy is dedicated to maintaining the disintegrating system, leaving less energy for handling non-routine tasks or surprises. This is why, as we age, we complain about lack of energy and constant fatigue. We are disintegrating, and our reaction time to changes slows down. This is also why elderly people are not allowed to drive—their response time to potential threats on the road is too slow.
In aging systems, information does not flow smoothly. Again, imagine an elderly person. They do not hear well, see well, or perceive their surroundings accurately. And this is exactly what happened to the IDF, Mossad, and Shin Bet.

The IDF, Mossad, and Shin Bet all exhibit signs of behavioral aging.

When Ehud Barak was Chief of Staff, at his request, I spent two days with the IDF General Staff diagnosing the military after the Tze’elim disaster.

My findings—which, to the best of my memory, were not disputed—were that the IDF was behaviorally aging. It was becoming bureaucratic. The number of people sitting behind desks was increasing relative to those in the field. The power structure in the organization was also shifting staff officers were gaining more power than field officers. Information was getting stuck and not being passed along, or the information was available, but no responsive actions were taken.

At Mossad, when Meir Amit was head of the organization, I suggested preventive measures to stop the aging process. Nothing was done. By the time Tamir Pardo took office, corrective measures were already necessary. On October 7, the situation had become critical.

The disaster of October 7 did not happen on October 7. The disaster is the result of an aging system that began to disintegrate many years ago.

Problems are a natural phenomenon because change is natural, and so is disintegration. The question is whether we do something to address them.

The IDF did not completely ignore the issue of aging, but in my opinion, the wrong remedy was applied. Instead of changing the culture and addressing the human factor, the organization was re-engineered—the command implemented the digitalization of the IDF. The result? In the Second Lebanon War, the IDF performed below expectations. And as expected, the wrong diagnosis was made: the media and government blamed Dan Halutz. I wouldn’t be surprised if the national inquiry committee investigating the events of October 7 repeats the same mistake—hanging the blame on a few people and thinking that will solve the problems of the future.

What needs to be done, among other interventions, is to change the power structure in the organization, return power from staff officers to field officers, change promotion criteria and recruitment systems to attract the highest leadership potential, and empower military leadership to push back against political solutions that not only fail to solve the problem but make it worse.

In the past, the best and brightest committed to extended service. The path to leadership in industry and politics passed through the military. With the rise of Unit 8200 and the increasing demand for leadership in industry, talented individuals, upon their release, quickly left the army to establish high-tech companies. This helped make Israel a "Startup Nation" and strengthened the economy—but weakened the IDF’s ability to recruit top leadership.

If the right organizational changes are not made, October 7 will repeat itself. No digitalization, artificial intelligence, or blaming individuals will prevent an aging system from producing further disasters in the future.