The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) this week began the rollout of its sweeping 5 year Momentum Plan which calls for the further modernisation of the IDF under a “multi-dimensional” framework, whereby the the military shifts to a “multi-force, multi-corps and joint” war fighting doctrine.
The main aspects of the plan was unveiled this week by IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who presented it to the military’s top officers.
The Momentum Plan came out of a year-long process undertaken by a dozen working groups within the IDF that identified the key strategic challenges facing Israel in the coming years.
The guiding principle of the plan is to take full advantage of the areas in which the IDF has superiority over its enemies — air power, intelligence and technology — in order to ensure the Israeli military maintains a constant and significant advantage over its enemies, notably Iran and Hezbollah.
The IDF plans to use this superiority to win any future war as quickly as possible, with the understanding that the longer a conflict drags on, the more the result will look like a loss regardless of who is victorious on the battlefield.
The IDF believes it must significantly improve its ability to identify enemy targets and strike a many as possible as quickly as possible, to “shorten” the time of combat. The military has therefore created intelligence working groups that bring together representatives from different fields — human intelligence, signal intelligence, analysis — to work together to rapidly find such targets.
Kohavi said this week: “Carrying out the multiyear Momentum Plan will allow the IDF to significantly increase its capabilities. The plan will increase the lethality of the IDF… [it] will create conditions to shorten the duration of a war”.
Under the plan, a “joint” war fighting concept will apply to all forces – ground, air, naval, intelligence, and cyber – so that no single mission will solely be handled by one branch.
The plan has been approved by Defence Minister Naftali Bennett and is believed to have the support of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It still requires official approval from the Security Cabinet and budgetary approval after a new Israeli government is in place.
