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One IDF or Two? The "Two Clocks" Problem at the Heart of Israel's Security Doctrine

2026-10-07

This article argues that the October 7th failure stemmed from a structural flaw: Israel's security doctrine attempts to manage two fundamentally different threats—immediate border defense and long-term regional campaigns—with a single military structure. It proposes a dual separation into a Homeland Command and a Regional Campaign Command, forcing political-level decisions on resource allocation and strategic priorities.

One IDF or Two? The "Two Clocks" Problem at the Heart of Israel's Security Doctrine

Why October 7 was a failure of structure, and why the fix is two commands, not better coordination

Col. (Res.) Dr. Avraham (Avi) Cohen · October 2026

At 06:37 on October 7, 2023, the IDF's Gaza Division reported a "localized infiltration." More than 5,000 attackers were already breaking through in three waves, against an IDF assessment that Hamas could raid with, at most, two companies.

Three years and several inquiries later, Israel is still arguing over whether that morning was a failure of intelligence, of command, or of people. My argument is that it was a failure of structure, and that the structure has not changed.

Israel runs two fundamentally different security problems, on two different clocks, with one instrument and one commander. This article explains why that cannot work and what should replace it.

A 1953 doctrine for a world that no longer exists

Ben-Gurion's security doctrine rested on four assumptions: the threat has an address on the border; wars are short; one system faces one problem; and decisive victory comes from ground maneuver into enemy territory.

None of them still describes reality. The threat sits in Sanaa, Baghdad, and Tehran, not only beyond the fence. War no longer has a defined duration. Cyber, the electromagnetic spectrum, the low-altitude layer, and unmanned systems have become combat domains in their own right. A drone costing a few thousand dollars now has strategic effect, and technological superiority built over a decade can be erased in days. Against terror armies and proxies spread across the region, "decisive victory" is no longer a stable concept.

The assumptions haven't eroded. They are void. Yet the structure built on them (one General Staff, one budget, one Chief of Staff) has stayed exactly as it was.

Two clocks

Israel now faces two fundamentally different security problems:

  • The home space: borders, communities, Judea and Samaria, air defense. Here the enemy sets the timing, and the response is measured in minutes.
  • The regional campaign: Iran, Yemen, Iraq, the third circle. Here Israel can set the timing, and preparation is measured in weeks.

These are not two theaters. They are two theories of security that demand opposite qualities: mass and presence versus precision and range; a force that must survive the absence of intelligence versus one that depends on it entirely; investment that is invisible in peacetime versus investment that produces platforms, deterrence, and a story.

Put both under one commander, and three things happen.

The situational picture fails at the top

Whoever does not control time has no time to build a picture. The chain is constant: no control of timing, no picture at the senior level, a flawed situation assessment, and decisions that become gambles on gut feeling. Israeli command and control excels at the tactical level and fails exactly where an integrated picture is needed most.

The theaters form a queue

One headquarters facing seven or eight theaters handles them one after another. Each gets enough force to hurt and not enough to decide, while the enemy in the next theater gains time to reorganize. That is why real military superiority does not translate into decisive outcomes. The resource that runs out is not money. It is command attention, and attention is serial.

Prioritization moves from the state to the military

Someone has to decide whether to build against Iran or against a breach in the south. In Israel, that decision is not made in the Security Cabinet. It is made inside the General Staff, through a mechanism called the "reference threat."

The reference threat: how we built the wrong army

The reference threat defines the threats against which the IDF builds its forces. Among other things, it weighs the likelihood that each threat will materialize. In other words, the army is built against the expected case, not the extreme one.

When intelligence is wrong under capability-based force planning, you get a surprise. When it is wrong under threat-based force planning, you get the wrong army. A warning gap is measured in hours. A force-structure gap is measured in years.

That is precisely what the inquiries found. The IDF's expert team, headed by Maj. Gen. (Res.) Sami Turgeman, identified a substantial and persistent gap between the reference threat and the operational response, at every level of command, as a central cause of the failure. The Shin Bet, in a separate inquiry, found that it had held Hamas's "Jericho Walls" plan since 2018 and 2022 but never processed it into a reference threat. IDF inquiries documented the diversion of resources and attention to Judea and Samaria and to the north, at Gaza's expense.

The arithmetic on the ground followed. On the morning of the attack, about 600 combat troops held roughly 59 km of border, against a standard order of battle of about 1,500.

And the question "what if we're wrong?" was never seriously asked. Not out of negligence, but because a force built on a reference threat has nowhere to put the answer: asking the question undermines the very instrument that produced the force.

A capability divested without a decision

The same mechanism explains how Israel's ground forces were hollowed out without anyone deciding to hollow them out.

The Reserve Service Law requires the government to review the size of the reserve force at least once a year. According to the State Comptroller, between 2016 and 2022 the issue was not brought to the government even once. A multi-year plan approved by the Security Cabinet, "Gideon," was ended early by an incoming Chief of Staff and replaced with "Momentum," which closed tank brigades without political guidance or approval. When the war broke out, an export deal for decommissioned Merkava Mk 3 tanks was halted, and a reserve armored battalion was stood up on those very tanks.

Each decision was reasonable on its own. The sum was a national capability divested without a national decision. Under one budget and one commander, the marginal shekel drifts toward what is visible, year after year. And an error in force structure cannot be corrected inside the war that reveals it.

Fifteen years of responsibility without command

The IDF saw the problem more than once. In 2011 it set up the Depth Command: responsible, but with no permanent command over the units it was meant to employ. In 2015 it decided to establish a cyber arm; in 2017 it reversed course. In 2020 it created the "Iran Command" (the Strategy and Third Circle Directorate) as a staff directorate rather than a command, and dismantled it in March 2025, hours after a change of Chief of Staff. In 2026 an arm for unmanned systems, robotics, and AI is being established in exactly the same structure.

Meanwhile, the Air Force commander, the de facto commander of the third circle, still decides alone between another stealth fighter for the deep mission and attack helicopters and flight hours for the border. These are two missions with no exchange rate between them, settled inside one service and invisible to the political echelon.

Every attempt added someone responsible without adding a commander. You cannot fix centralization by adding bodies that report to it.

What the Americans actually did

In Israel, the Goldwater-Nichols Act is routinely cited against splitting the IDF: "the Americans unified." That is a misreading. The Act took the services out of the operational chain of command, made the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs an adviser rather than a commander, and gave force employment to several separate combatant commands, each joint within itself and subordinate to the political leadership.

Two further American lessons matter here. First, an operational command without a building service is not enough: US Space Command was established in 1985, yet space remained under-prioritized until the Space Force was created in 2019. Second, when the US faced a physical threat close to its own homeland, the cartels, it created a dedicated joint interagency task force for it under Northern Command in January 2026.

The American model cited against splitting the IDF is, in practice, a model of dual separation.

The proposal: dual separation

First, force build-up. The services (ground, air and space, naval, cyber, and unmanned) leave the operational chain of command and become force-building bodies only. They organize, train, and equip. No service runs a campaign.

Second, force employment. It is divided between two joint commands, both subordinate to the political echelon:

  • Homeland Command: a standing interagency headquarters of the IDF, the Shin Bet, the Police and Border Police, and Home Front Command, required by charter to be built against zero warning.
  • Regional Campaign Command: responsible for stand-off destruction of capabilities, the third circle, and initiated campaigns.

The boundary between them is not geographic. It is set by the clock: whoever chose the timing owns the mission. An initiated raid into Lebanon belongs to the Campaign Command, even if it is carried out by ground forces ten kilometers from the border. Containing an infiltration across that same border belongs to Homeland Command, because the enemy chose the timing. When a campaign needs both, the Security Cabinet designates a supported and a supporting command in writing, with defined rules for the hand-over.

Intelligence, personnel, logistics, and the shared base remain national. There is no new army and no net addition of headquarters billets, the same constraint Congress imposed when it created the US Space Force. This is a redistribution of what already exists.

And the most important change of all: the Security Cabinet receives two competing force build-up proposals and is obliged to choose between them. Today it receives a single plan in which the trade-off has already been made, quietly, inside the military.

We've had this before

After Operation Defensive Shield, a standing forum chaired by the Minister of Defense met every Thursday morning. It was known as the "Territories Minister" forum. Around the table sat the Chief of Staff and his deputy, the regional commanders, the Police Commissioner, the head of the Shin Bet and his regional heads, and the deputy head of the Mossad. Intelligence, force, policing, and force build-up sat around one picture, on one clock, before a political echelon that decided. I attended dozens of its meetings.

It worked. But it rested on a minister's authority and on habit, not on law, and it could disappear without anyone deciding to abolish it. The lesson is not that something new must be invented. It is that what has already proven itself must be institutionalized.

The strongest objection

The most serious counterargument is empirical. In 2017–18, as INSS's Ofer Shelah has documented, the Prime Minister's "Security Concept 2030" and the IDF's "Gideon" plan pulled in opposite directions at the same time: stand-off strike on one side, restored ground maneuver on the other. The result was not decisive prioritization but two capabilities, neither of which reached critical mass.

That case supports the diagnosis and warns against a naive cure. Two champions without a forced decision produce two half-built forces. That is why, under this proposal, the two build-up proposals go to the Security Cabinet together, within the framework of the National Security Strategy Law, and the decision between them, including the budget split, is a statutory duty rather than an option.

A second objection holds that the doctrine was sound and only its implementation failed. But implementation failures that recur across arenas and decades are not accidents. They are what a structure produces when no actor's exclusive job is to defend the home space against the case nobody predicted.

The path

The separation would be carried out in five stages, in ascending order of irreversibility, each one a test for the next:

  • Put the National Security Strategy Law into real effect, with a published, comparable ranking between homeland defense and the regional campaign.
  • Anchor the homeland mission's build-up against zero warning in a charter, and ring-fence its budget line in law.
  • Remove the services from the operational chain of command.
  • Stand up a second operational command as a standing campaign headquarters, and measure for two years whether command attention has actually been split.
  • Only then, and only if the political echelon has shown that it does in fact choose, amend Basic Law: The Military and anchor the two-command structure.

Bottom line

The IDF of homeland defense and the IDF of the regional campaign run on two clocks. They cannot go on operating under a single commander. Israel must separate them, in force build-up and in force employment, and decide between them at the political level.

The question is no longer whether one headquarters can hold every clock at once. October 7 answered that. The question is whether the state is willing to own the choice.

Where do you think this proposal is weakest: the seam between the two commands, the civil-military risk, or the cost? I'd welcome the debate in the comments.