terms. Sharon had a central role in this process.
The military matrix
Sharon’s view of the static linear fortification of the Bar Lev Line after the 1967 war was typically forthright. As he later wrote: ‘from the beginning I felt that such a line of fortifications would be a disastrous error … we would be committing ourselves to static defence. We would be making fixed targets of ourselves … our positions and movements would be under constant surveillance. Our procedures would become common knowledge. Our patrols and supply convoys would be vulnerable to ambushes, mining, and shelling.’ The IDF, Sharon claimed, ‘cannot win a defensive battle on an outer [canal] line …’ He proposed instead that it should ‘fight a defensive battle the way it should be fought – not on a forward line but in depth …’16 Sharon’s alternative military strategy had the advantage of providing weight to Dayan’s politically sensitive argument that the Suez Canal be abandoned; in developing it, Sharon was most likely encouraged by Dayan off the record – but officially, Dayan chose not to intervene.
‘Plan Sirius’, marking Israeli fortifications in the Suez Canal zone before October 1973. The strong-points, organized in depth, are marked as brown ‘eggs’.
Militarily speaking, Sharon’s system was a flexible adaptation of the traditional doctrine of defence in depth. It was based upon a series of strongpoints, which Sharon called Ta’ozim to differentiate them from Adan’s Ma’ozim (strongholds), spread out on a series of hilltops at tactically important locations, overlooking the canal from a distance of about a dozen kilometres. Between these strongpoints, Sharon proposed to run unscheduled and unpredictable mobile patrols. The rationale behind this arrangement was to deny the Egyptian army an obvious target, a fixed layout against which they could plan their attack. Unlike Bar Lev, Sharon believed an attack on the Israeli defensive line on the Suez Canal was unavoidable and inevitable; accordingly, he sought to disguise the IDF’s defensive organization.
Sharon’s defensive plan aimed to maximize visual synergy, lines of fire and movement across the terrain. The isolated, semi-autonomous strongpoints were to be located so that each could be seen from those adjacent to it, and spaced apart at the distance of artillery fire so that they could cover each other. The strongholds were essentially command and logistic centres from where what Sharon called ‘armoured fists’ – tank battalions – could be mobilized against the enemy’s main effort in crossing the canal. Moreover, equipped with command, control and long-range surveillance facilities, underground bunkers, anti-aircraft positions and emplacements for tanks and artillery, each strongpoint had a semi-independent battle capacity.17 An expanding network of roads and signal stations was to weave the strongpoints together. Towards the rear, the emplacements gave way to military training bases, airfields, camps, depots, maintenance facilities and headquarters.
While unable to convince the IDF General Staff of his plans for the Sinai, Sharon, in his role as director of training, dispersed the various training schools under his command throughout the depth of the West Bank. Moreover, Sharon saw military installations as a first stage in the domestication and naturalization of the vast Occupied Territories: the layout and infrastructure of the camps were to become the blueprint for their civilian colonization by settlements.18 Beyond that, it was an innovative geographical time/space arrangement with the system of defence in depth requiring a different form of military organization.19 Linear fortifications rely on the ability of central command to control all areas of the extended linear battlefield equally; in contrast, defence in depth seeks the relative dispersal of military authority and the increased autonomy of each semi-independent battle unit.20
Although nested in traditional military hierarchies, the system’s diffusion of the command structure allows independent units to develop what the military calls ‘flexible responsiveness’, according to which local commanders can act independently, on their own initiative, and in response to emergent necessities and opportunities without referring to central command. Diffused command has been a standard component part of a military response to the chaotic nature of battles in which chains of command and communication are often severed and the overall picture of battle is often blurred. Sharon’s command style was well suited to such a situation. It was encapsulated in his oft-repeated statement ‘tell me what to do but don’t tell me how to do it’. Although this was indicative of the command style of the IDF, Sharon took it further, seeking to break as much as possible with standard command structures and organizational forms. Equally, he often avoided – or pretended to avoid – intervening in his subordinates’ actions, providing them only with general guidelines and making them believe that they themselves had planned their own missions.
If the principle of linear defence is to prohibit (or inhibit) the enemy from gaining a foothold beyond it, when the line is breached at a single location – much like a leaking bucket of water – it is rendered useless. A network defence, on the other hand, is flexible. If one or more of its stongpoints are attacked and captured, the system can adapt itself by forming new connections across its depth. The category of ‘depth’ is thus not only spatial but conceptual, and is used to describe the level of synergy between various elements that compose a military system. The degree of a system’s depth lies in its distributed capacity to reorganize connections, and the degree to which these connections can permit, regulate and respond to information flow from strongpoints positioned in other areas in the battlefield. The relation between the system’s components is a relative figure defined by the speed and security of travel across its depth, between the different strongpoints.21
While the rationale of the Bar Lev Line was to stop the Egyptians from disturbing the geopolitical status quo that the line delineated, Sharon’s plan conversely encouraged an Egyptian attack; Israeli forces would then counterattack the moment the enemy’s supply lines became overextended:22 ‘If the Egyptians did try to cross [the canal], we could afford to let them get a mile or two inside the Sinai. Then we would be able to harass them and probe for their weak points at our convenience … [after which] we would be in a position to launch the kind of free-flowing mobile attack we were really good at.’23
Therefore, while the line is a military-geometrical instrument that seeks to separate two distinct hostile realms, the spatial–organizational model of the network creates a more diffused and dynamic geography. Following this logic, the system of defence in depth has the capacity to exchange space and time alternately. At the beginning of an attack it trades space for time – the attacker is allowed to gain space while the defender gains organizational time; later, it exchanges time for space as the trapping of the attacker within the web of the network enables the defender later to progress into and attack the latter’s unprotected rear.
The Israeli public was exposed to the classified disputes between Sharon, Bar Lev, and the other members of the General Staff that reached their peak in 1969. Sharon was leaking them to the press, which in turn used his anonymously delivered comments to portray the military and political elites as reactionary ‘slow thinkers’, a tactic that had particular impact on Bar Lev, whom the Israeli public loved to mock for his slow, ponderous manner of speaking. The disagreement was also presented as a conflict between the tank officers with their heavy-handed, technical way of thinking and the pioneering maverick frontiersman/commando-soldier embodied by Sharon.24
By the summer of 1969, when Bar Lev realized he could no longer contain Sharon’s ability to mobilize the media against the rest of the General Staff, he dismissed him from military service on a technicality: Sharon had forgotten to sign routine documents for the renewal of his military contract. Bar Lev’s action was supported by Prime Minister Golda Meir who, remembering the days of Unit 101 and Sharon’s rumoured threats to lock the entire Israeli government in a room and force it to order the start of the 1967 war, saw Sharon as a liar and a ‘threat to Israel’s democracy ’, a man ‘capable of surrounding the Knesset
