Day 812 - Brig.-Gen. Eran Ortal on where does the IDF go after October 7?
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
Welcome to The Times of Israel's Lazar Focus. Each Friday, catch diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman for a deep dive into what's behind the news that spins the globe.
This week, we’re joined by Eran Ortal, a brigadier-general (res.) in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a leading military theorist. Ortal commanded The Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies, and wrote "The Battle Before the War: The Inside Story of the IDF's Transformation," which came in second place for the Institute for National Security Studies's 2025 Tshetshik Prize.
Months before the October 7 invasion of southern Israel by Hamas, Ortal warned in an interview with The Times of Israel that the country's "military situation is eroding, not improving," and that “time is not on our side."
Ortal explains what glaring problems he saw in the military in which he served for decades. He says that the IDF concept in its initial decades enabled it to win its famous victories over far more numerous foes.
He then lays out why the IDF's center of gravity moved from the armored corps to the Air Force and intelligence services.
Over time, says Ortal, Israel also moved away from its focus on decisive victory, and pursued a series of indecisive deterrence operations against non-state enemies like Hamas and Hezbollah.
While there were efforts underway in the IDF to implement a wide-ranging series of reforms in the years before October 7, the Hamas attack took place before they had the desired effect. Israel, he says, went to war with an army that had not been properly trained and resourced, which affected the course of the war in Gaza.
Looking forward, the IDF must go through another transformation, Ortal argues. Those who argue for continuing to prioritize airpower are mistaken, as are those who call for a return to a focus on mass ground maneuver.
Instead, there must not only be investment in AI, drones, and a network that brings them to the troops on the battlefield; Israel also needs a new strategy that employs cutting-edge technology to achieve decisive victory over its enemies.
Lazar Focus can be found on all podcast platforms. This episode was produced by Ari Schlacht.
IMAGE: Israeli soldiers are seen during an army raid in the West Bank town of Tubas, November 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Laser Focus. |
| 0:05.4 | I am Laser. |
| 0:06.7 | I am your host on this weekly Times of Israel podcast. |
| 0:10.9 | Now, here in this podcast, we like to dive deep, dive deeper than many of you are able to do from just listening to shorter podcasts, from reading, and really bring you inside a deep discussion |
| 0:22.9 | of some of the issues which have affected Israel until now and will really determine Israel's |
| 0:29.4 | security, prosperity, welfare moving forward. |
| 0:32.9 | Now, in all of these challenges, of course, no country, especially Israel, has an unlimited |
| 0:37.3 | budget. A shekel that |
| 0:39.0 | is spent on one place is not spent somewhere else. So a shekel that is spent on the military |
| 0:43.5 | is not spent on welfare, education, health. And in recent decades, I've written on this, others have as |
| 0:50.2 | well, there was a trend that money was taken out of the defense budget and put into other |
| 0:54.9 | social priorities. Now, that doesn't automatically mean that that is the only reason why we got |
| 1:01.6 | to the tragedy of the October 7th. Of course, you can think into Israel's and the IDF's early days |
| 1:07.8 | in which much less money was spent on a force that was able to attain |
| 1:12.5 | some very, very clear victories. But today, we have, as a result of lessons from the war and |
| 1:20.1 | what the public wants, we have the prime minister and defense minister and other leaders |
| 1:24.2 | saying that we're going to spend hundreds of billions of shekels more |
| 1:27.8 | on defense. |
| 1:29.0 | Of course, that does not automatically mean that we are going to get the force, the military |
| 1:34.5 | force that is going to be the best, the optimized force to meet the challenges that we are |
| 1:39.6 | facing in the future. |
| 1:41.2 | So, to discuss these very complex issues and these challenges, we are here with my |
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