Military and Strategic Affairs]7PMVNF]/P]/PWFNCFS
Force Deployment Planning
in the IDF General Sta
Gabi Siboni
Introduction
IDF General Staff planning processes relate to two primary areas: force
buildup and force deployment. The fundamentals of military doctrine
of any army, and particularly the IDF, necessitate full synchronization
between the two, and the element that underlies all planning processes is
what is needed for force deployment. Upon the establishment of the IDF,
these processes were assigned to a single framework: the General Staff
Branch.
1
However, more than sixty years later, planning in the General
Staff today has been decentralized among various bodies in a way that
complicates effective processes.
Of the significant difficulties posed by this situation, three should be
singled out. The first is the weakness of planning for force deployment,
which ostensibly is the responsibility of the IDF Operations Branch.
2
However, such planning concerns itself with operational aspects of
operations planning. The strategic component of planning, on the other
hand, is under the authority of the Planning Branch. This situation
occasionally results in the lack of a common language as well as built-in
difficulties and friction in preliminary planning processes for operational
plans, both in times of routine and in real time war situations.
The second difficulty concerns weak planning for force buildup,
which must be based on force deployment needs. In practice, the body
responsible for force buildup planning in the IDF is the Planning Branch;
the Operations Branch has less influence on the process. This separation
Dr. Col. (ret.) Gabi Siboni is head of the Military and Strategic Aairs Program at
INSS and head of the Neubauer Cyber Warfare Program at INSS.
