Virtual Jointness: Why the IDF Was Never Joint, and Why It Matters

2026-09-16

This article argues that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), despite its unified command, never achieved deep inter-service integration, instead relying on 'virtual jointness' through technological networks. The October 7th surprise and subsequent Gaza campaign exposed the brittleness of this approach, highlighting the critical difference between technological connectivity and genuine structural integration. The piece contrasts this with the institutionalized jointness of the US military, emphasizing the need for deep organizational architecture over mere network layers.

Introduction: The Army That Was Joint Before It Began

On the morning of October 7, 2023, the most densely networked military on Earth failed to see the war that was already breaking over its border. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) possessed, at that moment, an arsenal of sensors, artificial-intelligence targeting engines, and a command-and-control fabric that the professional world regarded with something close to awe — a "Fire Factory" tuned to manufacture hundreds of aim points a day, a doctrine of "multidimensionality" marketed as the frontier of twenty-first-century war. And yet the network layer, for all its sophistication, delivered neither warning nor decision. In the months of ground campaigning that followed inside Gaza, that same superiority curdled in ways few had predicted: an electromagnetic spectrum so saturated with friendly drones that units shot down their own aircraft and reverted, for stretches of roughly forty-eight hours, to civilian communications. The paradox is stark enough to demand explanation. How could the army that appeared to have solved the problem of unity before any other be caught so flatly unintegrated at the decisive hour?

This article argues that the paradox dissolves once we recognize a distinction the IDF's own self-image has long obscured: the difference between unity of command and depth of integration. The central claim, stated plainly, is that the IDF — despite being an army "born joint," established from the outset under a single General Staff and a unified supreme chain of command — never built deep inter-service integration as a peer maneuver partnership. It solved the problem of who commands whom at the summit while leaving the planning and operational-execution layers beneath organizationally siloed. In place of the costly organizational architecture of integration, it substituted a technological network draped over services that continued to operate by their own separate logics. This substitution — connectivity standing in for structure — is what the argument here calls "virtual jointness": an "as-if" jointness that simulates integration without instituting it.

The corollary matters as much as the thesis. A widespread reading of contemporary war, including the drone-and-sensor revolution now reshaping every battlefield, holds that new technology is dissolving a jointness that established militaries once possessed. In the Israeli case the reverse is true. The technological revolution does not kill an inter-service integration the IDF had achieved; it exposes that the technological substitute was brittle from the beginning. October 7 and the spectrum saturation of Gaza are not the murder of Israeli jointness. They are the autopsy revealing that the thing was virtual all along.

A caveat must be entered at the outset and will be restated at the close, because intellectual honesty requires it. The sharp comparison drawn throughout this article — between Israeli "virtual jointness" and the institutionalized jointness the United States achieved through the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 — is an original interpretive synthesis. The primary and secondary sources support it only partially and in scattered form. None states the claim in full. Yet many of them — from critiques of ground-force underinvestment, through analyses of the "Momentum" concept, to the military commentary on the Swords of Iron war — supply the building blocks from which the argument is assembled. What follows should therefore be read as an interpretive argument that organizes dispersed evidence under a single conceptual frame, not as a report on an existing scholarly consensus. The IDF was, in a real and important sense, born joint at the top command; the argument concerns only what it never became beneath that summit.

"Born Joint": Formal Unity and Its Limits

Understanding the IDF's distinctive character requires attention to the conditions of its birth. Unlike the great Western militaries, whose services matured as autonomous bureaucracies and fought for decades over their independence, the IDF was established as the army of a small, threatened, resource-poor state, where command centralization was not a doctrinal preference but an existential necessity. There is no separate "Department of the Army" contesting a "Department of the Air Force" and a "Department of the Navy" over budgets and rival doctrine; one Chief of the General Staff commands all services. The single General Staff, the subordination of service commanders to that chief, and the absence of autonomous service bureaucracies together produced the appearance of built-in jointness. On this reading the IDF seems to have solved the problem of unity before it ever arose.

But unity at the apex does not guarantee integration across the breadth of the force. Genuine jointness, in the sense developed in Western military discourse, is not merely a question of who commands whom at the summit; it is a question of how operations are planned, rehearsed, and executed such that each service contributes its comparative advantage within one coherent plan, and no service serves merely as an enabler of another. Here lies the essential difference. In the Israeli case, the unified command hierarchy actually obviated much of the need to develop inter-service mechanisms for balancing and fusion. When the Chief of the General Staff decides, there is no felt need for a functional component command consolidating all aerial firepower under one commander who integrates it into the joint effort; no need for a joint-duty requirement as a condition of promotion; no need for a binding common doctrine imposed on autonomous services. Centralization, paradoxically, allowed each service to develop its culture, its language, and its technological systems separately, so long as all remained ultimately subordinate to the same apex. The result is an organization unified in appearance and at its summit, yet siloed in the planning and operational-execution layers beneath.

The distinction sharpens through the concept of depth of integration. Shallow inter-service integration operates at the level of coordination: different forces act in the same space, exchange information, and synchronize timelines, yet each remains loyal to the operating logic of its own service. Deep integration exists when operational planning is built from the start as multi-service planning, and when command structure, officer-development tracks, and doctrine all compel the services to think as one system. The distinction locates the IDF precisely on the spectrum. It sits not at the pole of non-coordination — the IDF coordinates well and even excels at it — but at an intermediate position of extensive coordination and rich technological connectivity, lacking the deep structural integration that makes services equal partners in shaping the campaign. This intermediate zone is precisely the space where virtual jointness flourishes.

The sources of the pattern are not only bureaucratic but historical and cultural. As a reserve army resting on mass mobilization and an ethos of improvisation and immediate problem-solving, the IDF developed an operational tradition prizing decentralized initiative and speed of response over institutionalized, long-horizon planning. This culture, which yielded impressive achievements in past wars, simultaneously bred a certain suspicion of heavy formal structures and bureaucratic planning processes — the very structures on which American institutionalized jointness rests. The preference for a flexible network over a rigid structure is thus not merely a budgetary choice but the expression of a deep organizational culture. This matters for the fairness of the argument: virtual jointness is not a failure of individuals but the product of a coherent institutional and cultural logic, one whose past successes only reinforced it.

Air Force and Intelligence Dominance, Ground-Force Underinvestment

The clearest expression of this siloing is the structural imbalance among the services — an imbalance that is not incidental but the product of an entrenched budgetary and conceptual logic. Scholars examining the IDF's internal balance of forces have stated plainly that "the ground forces lag technologically and conceptually behind the air force and intelligence" (Shelah, Hayman & Antebi, 2023). This is no passing gap but a deep, multi-decade pattern. By some estimates, roughly half of the IDF's procurement budget has flowed to the air force since the 1960s (Gat, 2024) — an allocation reflecting a strategic conception that made air superiority and intelligence the backbone of Israeli defense, and cast ground forces, increasingly, as a complementary force rather than a decisive arm in their own right.

This budgetary logic matured into concrete structural choices that eroded ground maneuver capability. In the previous decade, under budget-cut pressures, the IDF opted for what critics labeled a policy of "guns before socks" — preferring investment in platforms and fires over the basic infrastructure of ground-force readiness. Tangible expressions included the shelving of the Namer armored personnel carrier project, deferral of the Merkava 5 tank, and cuts to ground-force training days (Shamir & Hecht, 2013). Each decision, taken alone, is budgetarily defensible; cumulatively they depict a ground arm treated as a reservoir for savings while resources and conceptual attention flowed to aerial fires and intelligence. Readiness for large-scale ground maneuver — with the training, logistics, and mass it demands — eroded steadily.

None of this is a critique of the excellence of Israel's air force or intelligence, which stand among the world's most advanced. The claim is structural: when one arm so decisively dominates in budget, technology, and conceptual standing, an organizational asymmetry arises that precludes peer partnership. The ground arm is not an equal partner in designing the battle; in practice it is a customer of the fires and intelligence services that the dominant arms provide. This is the ground on which jointness-as-a-layer, rather than jointness-as-a-structure, would later grow.

The meaning of this imbalance for the question of jointness bears deepening. Where the ground arm depends so heavily on the fires and intelligence of the dominant arms, a dynamic of dependence rather than partnership emerges. In genuine jointness, each service brings an irreplaceable, unique capability to the campaign and thereby earns equal bargaining standing in shaping the plan. But when the ground arm is seen chiefly as a consumer of precision fires generated for it by others — and not as the bearer of a maneuver-and-decision capability the others lack — its bargaining power weakens, and with it its ability to shape the character of the campaign. The budgetary imbalance is thus not merely a matter of money; it translates into conceptual standing and, ultimately, into a relationship in which ground maneuver becomes the chronic supported force and almost never the supporting force around which the campaign is built. This inverts the classic logic of combined-arms warfare, in which the supporting and supported roles rotate according to the needs of the campaign rather than being fixed in advance by a permanent hierarchy of standing among the services.

The Momentum Concept and the "Smart Suit": Jointness as a Layer

If one piece of evidence embodies the argument from within the IDF itself, it is the way the Momentum (Tnufa) concept — the multi-year plan formulated under Chief of the General Staff Aviv Kochavi — defined the essence of jointness. According to an analysis from the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies, Momentum defined multidimensionality and jointness not as a change in force structure or inter-service relations, but as the addition of "a new layer — a communications and sensor network built atop the existing infrastructure" (Dado Center, 2020). This definition is the key: jointness is conceived not as a reorganization of how the services operate together, but as a technological stratum spread over a structure left intact.

The metaphor that accompanied the concept makes this still clearer. The idea was described as a "smart suit": the existing force — the siloed services, with their separate structures and cultures — is not changed in essence but "wears" a sensor-and-communications layer upgrading its ability to sense and to communicate (Dado Center, 2020). This is, plainly, an upgrade of the siloed force with sensors in place of structural change. The smart suit does not turn a soldier into something else; it wraps him in technology. Embedded in the analogy is the deepest conceptual admission of the argument: the IDF chose, knowingly and explicitly, connectivity as a layer over integration as a structure.

The concept deserves the scholarly fairness due it. From the vantage of Momentum's planners, the choice was rational and even sophisticated. Deep structural change is costly, slow, and provokes fierce bureaucratic resistance; adding a network layer captures much of jointness's benefit — real-time intelligence-sharing, shortened kill chains, battlespace transparency — at far lower cost and in far less time. The premise underlying the smart suit is that if sensors and shooters can be joined in one network, the urgency of restructuring diminishes. This is a legitimate conceptual wager. The claim here is not that the wager was foolish, but that it was a wager — and, as the Swords of Iron war would reveal, one with hard limits. Connectivity supplied a layer but not a structure; and when the force was called upon for large-scale joint ground maneuver, the layer proved no substitute for what had never been built beneath it.

Against the United States: The Institutionalized Jointness of Goldwater-Nichols

To sharpen the nature of virtual jointness, it must be set against its clearest counter-model: the institutionalized jointness of the American military as shaped by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. Let it be said at once that the comparison does not present the American model as a flawless ideal — it too suffers inter-service tensions, waste, and friction — but uses it as a structural reference point clarifying what jointness looks like as organizational architecture, as distinct from jointness as a network layer.

Goldwater-Nichols was born of recurring operational failures — foremost the botched hostage-rescue attempt in Iran in 1980 and the invasion of Grenada in 1983 — which revealed that the American services, for all their power, could not operate together. The reform the act effected was structural at its root, along three planes. First, it created a clear operational chain of command that bypasses the services: operational command flows from the President and the Secretary of Defense directly to the geographic and functional combatant commanders, while the services themselves are charged only with force generation — to organize, train, and equip — and not with force employment. This separation of force generation from force employment is the very heart of institutionalized jointness. Second, the act made joint-duty experience a precondition for promotion to senior rank; an officer who does not pass through the joint world cannot reach the top. Jointness was thereby imposed on the career track itself rather than left to goodwill. Third, the act established functional component commands that consolidate under one commander the full weight of a given cross-service function.

The paradigmatic example of a functional component command is the JFACC — the Joint Force Air Component Commander — as embodied by General Charles Horner in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. As JFACC, Horner fused under a single command the entire air power of all services — air force aircraft, carrier-based naval aircraft, army helicopters, and Marine aircraft — into one integrated air campaign serving the joint commander's overall plan. This is integration in its deep sense: not a network linking separate assets, but a command structure subordinating them to one effort. The American professional literature captured the distinction well as one between jointness institutionalized in career, command, and doctrine, and networked jointness resting on technological connectivity (JFQ, 2017).

The significance of the JFACC role exceeds the technical detail. The very existence of a role consolidating all cross-service fires under one commander embodies a deep principle: jointness is not satisfied that assets "talk to one another" over a network but demands a single authority responsible for integrating them, prioritizing among them, and weaving them into the campaign plan. This is precisely the mechanism the IDF lacks. As the evidence from Gaza will show, the absence of an equivalent role — and in particular the absence of a joint terminal attack controller (JTAC) linking air and ground at the point of contact — left the IDF with rich connectivity but no institutionalized integrator to consolidate it. The difference lies not in the volume of information flowing through the network, but in the presence or absence of an authority structure that translates information into coordinated joint action.

The American model also deserves its fair share of criticism, lest the comparison collapse into idealization. Goldwater-Nichols did not abolish inter-service tensions; the services continue to fight over budgets, roles, and platforms, and institutionalized jointness also produced heavy bureaucratic layers, slow planning processes, and at times lowest-common-denominator compromises among the services. Moreover, some argue that the model's success in symmetric confrontations did not always translate into effectiveness in the asymmetric conflicts and long wars of the century's opening. The American model is therefore no perfect solution but a structural counter-model, clarifying the meaning of investing in an architecture of integration — an investment with its own costs, which the IDF, at the operational level, largely chose not to pay.

Set side by side, the difference between the two models stands out. In the United States, jointness is embedded across three structural planes at once — the officer's career track, the operational chain of command, and binding doctrine. In Israel, jointness in the Momentum mold is embedded chiefly in one plane: the technological network layer. The Israeli officer is not required to follow a structured joint track as a condition of promotion in the same way; the IDF has no functional component command consolidating all cross-service fires under a dedicated joint commander in the manner of the JFACC; and joint doctrine is relatively weak against the strength of the network. Here again the caveat must be restated: the sharp opposition between "virtual" and "institutionalized" is an interpretive construction. The sources document its components — the weakness of ground investment, the layer concept, the Goldwater-Nichols structure — but casting them as two poles of a single axis is the argument, not the finding.

The Multi-Year Plans and the Multidimensional Unit: Integration or Faster Fires?

The history of the IDF's multi-year plans over the past decade supplies further evidence of the character of Israeli jointness. The Gideon plan of 2016, under Chief of the General Staff Gadi Eisenkot, and after it Momentum in 2020, under Aviv Kochavi, both sought to advance the IDF toward multidimensional, networked warfare. The central question is whether these plans produced deep inter-service integration or chiefly an acceleration of the fires-and-intelligence cycle.

The answer inclines clearly toward the latter. The center of gravity of innovation in these plans was the acceleration of the "Fire Factory": a system fusing sensors, intelligence, and artificial intelligence to generate targets at unprecedented tempo. Where the IDF could once produce on the order of fifty targets a year, the new systems were geared to hundreds of targets a day — a figure cited in this context is roughly 400 targets daily. Systems such as Fire Weaver, which shortens the sensor-to-shooter loop on the battlefield, and the AI-based target-generation system dubbed "the Gospel" (Habsora) are the technological incarnation of this conception. All are impressive feats of fires-and-intelligence engineering — yet in essence they refine the fires-intelligence paradigm rather than build an inter-service maneuver partnership.

The Multidimensional Unit — also known as the Ghost Unit (Refaim, Unit 888) — is the most interesting test case. It was designed to embody the vision of multidimensionality: a small ground force networked to the full weight of the IDF's fires and intelligence, so as to achieve an effect far exceeding its size. Its slogan — "the human capability of a battalion, the firepower of a division" — captures the idea precisely: not an increase in ground mass, but a multiplication of a small force's effect through connectivity. This is, once more, a clear expression of the smart-suit conception: the small force does not alter its structure but is wrapped in a network linking it to external firepower. The open question, to which the analysis of Swords of Iron returns, is whether this model truly substitutes for ground mass and joint maneuver, or is a point solution of limited advantage.

Notably, even the organizational reform accompanying these plans effected no deep structural change in inter-service relations. Analysis of the General Staff reform shows it amounted chiefly to splitting the Operations Directorate rather than creating a new joint command with authority to integrate the services in a Goldwater-Nichols-like fashion (Orion & Dekel, 2020). That is, even when the IDF approached structural reform, it did so within the bounds of the existing architecture, without creating the mechanism that would have established genuine organizational jointness. The change was managerial and staff-level, not structural and command-level.

Comparing the Israeli and American reform paths illuminates the gap. Where the American reform of 1986 effected change across three planes at once — command, career, and doctrine — the Israeli reforms concentrated on the procedural-managerial plane of staff reorganization and the technological plane of building the network and the Fire Factory, while avoiding the deep command-structural plane. No one seriously proposed creating in the IDF a joint fires component commander with independent authority to integrate all cross-service fires, or mandating a joint career track as a structured condition of promotion. The reason is not lack of awareness but an organizational culture that prefers flexibility and network over structure and rigidity. The result is that the enormous effort of Gideon and Momentum was ultimately channeled into strengthening the existing fires-intelligence paradigm with new technological means — not into building a new organizational jointness.

There is also an aspect of organizational political economy here. Any reform seeking to create a joint command with cross-service integrating authority threatens, by its nature, the standing and resource autonomy of the existing services — foremost the strongest among them. In the United States it took an act of Congress, imposed on the military from without after a string of resounding failures, to overcome this resistance. In Israel, absent a comparable external authority and given the centralization already existing at the apex, no structural pressure arose to force the system to pay the price of deep reform. And so, paradoxically, precisely the formal unity at the apex — the ostensible advantage — acted as a barrier to deep integration: because the services were "already unified," they were never required to truly unify.

The Loitering-Munition Legacy: Roots of the Fires-at-Range Conception

The long-term legacy of the Israeli fires conception provides historical background for the dominance of the fires-at-range paradigm. Israel was a pioneer of the loitering munition: Israel Aerospace Industries' (IAI) Harpy system, developed as early as the late 1980s, around 1989, and its successor the Harop, embodied the idea of a weapon fusing sensor and warhead, loitering over the battlefield and destroying targets on its own. This conception — of precise, intelligence-guided fires at range — is embedded deep in the Israeli military-technological DNA. It expresses an enduring cultural inclination to prefer fire-and-sensor solutions over ground mass and maneuver, an inclination that would peak in the multidimensional concepts of the past decade. The roots of virtual jointness, then, are not only budgetary or organizational but cultural and conceptual: an entrenched faith in technology's capacity to deliver decision at range. The drone-and-loitering-munition revolution now sweeping the world's battlefields did not, in the Israeli case, arrive as a foreign disruption; it arrived as the maturation of a conception the IDF had nurtured for decades — which is exactly why its limits, when they surfaced, cut so close to the bone.

The October 7 Paradox: The Most Networked Army and the Surprise

Then came the morning of October 7, 2023. No event exposes the limits of virtual jointness more sharply than the tragic surprise of that day. The paradox is searing: the most networked army, armed with the world's most advanced sensor and AI systems, possessing a Fire Factory capable of generating hundreds of targets a day, failed to prevent — and even to detect in time — the attack. The network layer, for all its sophistication, did not deliver what had been promised.

The military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady located the root of the failure in structural-conceptual terms, not merely intelligence terms. At its base, he argued, stood a "tragically mistaken belief that mass in the field was unnecessary" — an assumption that connectivity, precision fires, and intelligence had rendered a large, deployed, rehearsed ground force superfluous. In parallel, Gady contended, the IDF's combined-arms warfighting skills had atrophied over the years in which resources and conceptual attention went to the network and to fires rather than to joint ground maneuver (Gady, 2023). These two — the belief that mass was unnecessary and the atrophy of combined-arms skills — are exactly the expected products of the smart-suit conception: if the network delivers the effect, why invest in mass and the costly joint training it demands?

Ofer Shelah, a central voice in Israeli security discourse, distilled the lesson in a phrase written before the war that acquired a prophetic dimension after it: "there are problems technology cannot solve" (Shelah, 2022). It captures the paradigm's boundary. Technological connectivity, however sophisticated, is no substitute for presence, mass, maneuver readiness, and the deep organizational integration that lets a ground force absorb surprise and maneuver under fire. October 7 was not merely a discrete intelligence failure; on this reading it was the failure of a paradigm that preferred the layer over the structure.

Fairness requires noting that tying the October 7 surprise directly to the virtual-jointness paradigm demands caution. The surprise was first and foremost a grave intelligence and assessment failure, with many complex causes — the "conception" of Hamas deterrence, failures in collection and warning, and mistaken policy assumptions. It cannot be claimed that the jointness structure caused the surprise. The more precise, and therefore more durable, claim is two-tiered. First, the belief that technology and fires render a deployed, rehearsed ground mass unnecessary — a belief inseparable from the layer paradigm — contributed to thinning the border force and eroding its readiness. Second, and more deeply, the surprise exposed the gap between the IDF's self-image as "the world's most advanced networked army" and its actual ability to convert technological superiority into operational security. October 7 is thus not causal proof of the failure of jointness, but a window through which the layer paradigm's founding assumptions were laid bare.

Lessons of Gaza 2023: When the Network Meets the Battlefield

The ground campaign in the Gaza Strip that followed the surprise provided a brutal laboratory for testing Israeli jointness in practice. The detailed analysis of the RUSI researchers Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds exposes a series of integrative failures illustrating how far the technological layer fell short of maturing into organizational jointness (Watling & Reynolds, 2024).

The researchers note, first, that "the IDF does not use JTACs" — joint terminal attack controllers, the standard role in Western militaries that integrates aerial fires on behalf of the maneuvering ground force. The absence of this institutionalized role is telling structural evidence: instead of a single integration mechanism linking air and ground at the point of contact, three parallel fires processes reportedly operated in Gaza — separate channels for delivering fires that were never integrated into one system. This is an almost perfect description of a silo: not an absence of fires, but an absence of integration of fires.

Second, and especially ironically given the IDF's image as the world's most advanced networked army, excess connectivity itself became an obstacle. The proliferation of unmanned aircraft in Gaza's skies saturated the electromagnetic spectrum and disrupted the digital command-and-control picture. Forces reported instances of shooting down their own drones, and in some cases were forced to revert to civilian communications for roughly forty-eight hours (Watling & Reynolds, 2024). Here a deep weakness of the layer paradigm surfaces: when