The Modern War Institute recently began to publish relevant content related to significant geopolitical events throughout the world. In regards to an amphibious landing on the Crimean peninsula, Ben Hodges’ primary object of pro-NATO advocacy, Nathan A Jenning’s published a report entitled, “Penetrate, Disintegrate, and Exploit: The Israeli Counteroffensive at the Suez Canal, 1973.”

Detailing the exploration of Ariel Sharon’s counterattack against the Egyptian 2nd and 3rd Armies on the Sinai peninsula during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Jennings successfully demonstrates how its implementation “featured mechanized penetration, contested river crossings, disintegration of air defense networks, reduction of anti-armor systems, and deep exploitation in rear areas.” These are essentially the elements required for an amphibious landing on the Crimean peninsula to be successful.

The problem with Jennings’ analysis is not any one of these elements. It is the Modern War Institute’s preoccupation with FM 3-0, a manual on operations with four key terms that supposedly provides an ‘analytic’ framework for the history of warfare and events like the Yom Kippur War.

None of the Army’s doctrinal tenets of operations—agility, convergence, endurance, and depth—appear in the course of his analysis of Ariel Sharon’s decisive counterattack. Despite none of these precepts relating to penetration, disintegration or exploitation, the central thesis, these terms are hardly relevant. If you take, for instance, the term ‘endurance,’ the author mostly means what he discusses around the term. Jennings provides two examples. The first is reconstitution. He explains how Israel’s 252nd, 162nd, 143rd rapidly reconstituted. The second is resupply. He explains how Israel’s IDF accelerated resupply prior to the assault on Sina. Neither of these–reconstitution or supply– have anything to do with ‘endurance,’ per say. The concept of ‘endurance’ is a fitness concept related to athletics. Armies are not athletes so therefore an army cannot exhibit ‘endurance.’ These examples have less to do with ‘endurance’ than with the actual term for their descriptions (i.e., reconstitution or resupply respectively).

A contrapositive to these terms can be an excluded precept. An excluded precept can be the idea of prioritization. Rather than rather than agility, convergence, endurance, and depth, one can easily argue on the basis of the author’s statements how Sharon’s prioritization of the Sinai front over the West Bank or the Golan Heights, two extremely important sectors of the Yom Kippur war, led with equal responsibility for his success to his plan’s strategic objective. Sharon did not immediately transfer troops from the Golan Heights to Sinai; he waited four days until the IDF established fire control over the entryways to Damascus on October 14th; thus Sharon’s ability to time his prioritization of Sinai over Golan appropriately reduced his concerns from a two to a one front. You can even re-write the author’s own sentences: “The IDF’s ability to employ prioritization across multiple domains was the key to its success.”

The same could be said about stubbornness, although in contrast with the other precepts, which appear to be ‘qualities’ of an army (phenomenologically speaking), this precept is a part of Ariel Sharon’s personality. The author, for instance, mentions how “the crossing of the canal took several days longer than planned and was undermined by acrimonious bickering between Sharon and his superiors in both the Southern Command and the General Staff headquarters.” (pg. 22) Had it not been for Sharon’s stubbornness arguendo, none of the-called precepts could have been realized, including ‘stubborness,’ ‘prioritization’ or any of the tenets. Despite these hypotheticals, there are serious ontological, phenomenological, or category specific problems with this type of analysis, since the operative presupposition is that an army displays qualities like categories of being (i.e., agility, convergence, endurance, and depth). To make the idea clear, FM 3-0 requires one to state: “This army is agile.” This is nonsense; and thinking about armies as though they are bodies with attributes has absolutely no place in the analysis of modern warfare and is just probable as attributing qualities like ‘stubborness’ to an army’s general.

The attempt to relate Ariel Sharon’s plan back to the Army’s doctrinal tenets of operations is an imposition designed with more ambition for the legitimization of these meaningless precepts than a thoroughly hardened exposition of their appearance at particular points of time and place during the execution of Sharon’s plan. The primary reason is that the Army’s ‘doctrinal tenets of operations’ are neither useful nor an analytical framework; they emphatically lack the preconditions for an extraction of insights in a system, the fruits of which a ‘doctrinarian’ might like to witness after the process of its application to phenomena. In the military arts, there cannot nor should there be a ‘framework,’ since there is no scientific method or methodology for military combat. There are only observations. To make the point clearly, Electrolysis of water is the decomposition of water (H₂O) into oxygen (O₂) and hydrogen (H₂). Dissimilarly, there is no process for isolating agility or that from convergence, endurance, and depth in an given army or one of its operations. This is simply madness.

Really the problem with the Army’s doctrine is the doctrine itself. This problem is so pervasive as to be almost fully embedded in the language that its members employ for speech. In multiple instances throughout the essay there are calcified terms such as ‘standoff lethality,’ ‘restrictive terrain,’ ‘operational art,’ ‘multi-domain solutions,’ ‘order of battle.’ These are essentially referenced to uncited doctrines. Whereas the discussion of agility, convergence, endurance, and depth proceeds by way of reference to a doctrinal manual (i.e., , FM 3-0, Operations), these other terms constitute a hodgepodge of assumptions, whose commitment to its original doctrine may or may not be explicit. On an even lower level, these terms do not refer to anything but abstract generalizations whose actuality the reader must imagine without reference to the facts of Sharon’s plan. Sharon, for instance, never imagined his river crossing to be the manifestation of a ‘multi-domain operation’ but rather a solution, whose reward outweighed its risky implementation.

It is unclear what is being accomplished with FM-03 Operations but neither its primary tenets nor its perceived purpose deepen Jenning’s point about how Sharon’s successful implementation of his plan “featured mechanized penetration, contested river crossings, disintegration of air defense networks, reduction of anti-armor systems, and deep exploitation in rear areas.” A plan with these elements does not depend, rely, or require any of these precepts for success; there is no evidence that Sharon conditioned the success of his plan on ideas equivalent, close, or approximate to any one of these four precepts. The elements of Sharon’s plan are entirely separate from the precepts of agility, convergence, endurance, and depth. Neither do these terms, whose underlying meaning is completely ambiguous, provide anything even remotely similar to a ‘framework.’ A framework depends upon a method but none of these terms have anything to do with a method.