Groupthink and unchallenged false assumptions about enemy capabilities and decision-making led to the disasters of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 2023 Hamas-led terrorist invasion of Israel. The lessons of these failures demand that Israel’s political and military leadership and their American counterparts immediately reconsider their assumptions about the Iranian nuclear threat to avoid an even costlier miscalculation.
Background
On November 21, 1973, the Israeli government established the Agranat Commission to investigate the failures in intelligence and decision-making leading up to the Yom Kippur War. Among the commission’s most important findings was that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Intelligence Directorate had mistakenly convinced itself that Egypt and Syria would not go to war unless certain military conditions were met.
Rigid adherence to this distorted belief, which was based on intelligence and flawed but deeply held assumptions, led to the delayed call-up and deployment of IDF reserve forces, almost unchecked Egyptian and Syrian advances in the early hours of the war, and many Israeli casualties. The Agranat Commission famously labeled this misapprehension “The Concept” (hakonsepziah in Hebrew).
The Concept was the analytical basis for the IDF’s underestimation of the threat it faced and its failure to take appropriate and timely action. After the war, it cost the IDF chief of staff, the commanding officer of Southern Command, the head of the Intelligence Directorate, and his deputy for research and analysis their jobs. It also led to the fall of Golda Meir’s government in the spring of 1974.
Since 1973, in modern Israeli Hebrew, concept (konsepziyah) has come to mean any potentially blinding mix of faulty assumptions and groupthink. The failures of 1973 so scarred IDF intelligence that it adopted a series of organizational and procedural measures to prevent the development of future concepts, including the establishment of a devil’s advocate unit to challenge the conventional wisdom prevailing at any given time.
On October 7, 2023, 50 years and a day after the opening shots of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas exposed just how poorly and temporarily Israel had learned and implemented the lessons of 1973. The terrorist invasion of Israel resulted in some 1,200 Israelis dead, thousands wounded, and around 250 held hostage in Gaza, and it launched an ongoing, destructive, and costly war. Though the Israeli government has yet to establish a commission of inquiry, the assault was obviously possible because of a lethal combination of Israeli intelligence, operational, and decision-making failures.
As in 1973, analysts and decision-makers embraced a specific concept so tightly that they ignored or dismissed clear evidence of enemy war preparations from numerous and diverse sources, or they interpreted the evidence as consistent with concept-based expectations. The prevailing idea that allowing the transfer of funds into Gaza and otherwise improving the quality of life for Gazans would dissuade Hamas from launching attacks on Israel proved to be disastrously wrong.
In light of the catastrophic failures of 1973 and 2023, policymakers urgently need to consider another strategic concept that has plagued much of Israel’s defense establishment—with the consent of the government—in recent years. This less-discussed concept concerns Israel’s presumed ability to detect and prevent Iran’s progress toward producing nuclear weapons. To make matters worse, it seems that the United States, Israel’s most important ally, has also adopted this dubious, dangerous concept, which is reflected in Israel’s, America’s, and other countries’ ineffectual policies toward Iran.
The unasked—or at least under-asked—questions from 1973 and 2023 appear at least as relevant to today’s Iran Concept: What if the long-held assumptions regarding Iran’s nuclear program are wrong? What if this concept has also led to an underestimation of the threat and a failure to take appropriate and timely action?
Given the contributing factors and outcomes of the two previous failures, the growing violations of Iran’s international nuclear obligations, and the gravity of the threat that a nuclear Iran would pose, this discussion is long overdue. While Israel fights the war in Gaza and exchanges fire with Hezbollah, Iran’s nuclear program continues uninterrupted. The centrifuges are still spinning.
Iran Races Ahead While the World Shrugs
Before assessing the origins and impact of the Iran Concept, it is necessary to understand where it fits relative to Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts overall and to the international and Israeli policy responses to them.
Three components are essential for a fully functional nuclear weapons program: nuclear fuel (enriched uranium or plutonium), the means of delivery (a missile or aerial bomb), and a nuclear explosive device (a bomb or missile warhead). Iran is openly pursuing the first two of these three components. In part because of its relatively small footprint, the third component, weaponization, is the most difficult to observe. Nevertheless, Western intelligence agencies confidently and consistently assess Iran’s weaponization efforts as dormant, or nearly so.
With respect to nuclear fuel, Iran has no civilian need to enrich uranium. The greatest flaw of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) was allowing Iran to enrich uranium and to keep and expand its illegally built enrichment infrastructure, ultimately (by 2031) without limitation. Since April 2021, Iran has used that infrastructure to enrich uranium to 60 percent purity and now has a stockpile large enough to produce the fuel for a first nuclear weapon within around 12 days, according to a 2023 US assessment, or even faster, according to more recent unofficial calculations. That is, Iran is violating the terms of the JCPOA using the nuclear capabilities that the agreement itself decriminalized and guaranteed. The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), while being characteristically careful to avoid accusing Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons, noted in 2022 that “no country that does not have warlike projects enriches at that level, at 60 percent.”
Iran also continues to develop, produce, test, and export ballistic and cruise missiles, some of which could carry nuclear payloads, while also targeting its neighbors—including Israel—with these delivery systems. The regime did so even before the October 2023 expiration of the United Nations Security Council’s prohibition on Iran’s engagement in “any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”
The IAEA and the governments in Israel, the United States, Europe, Russia, and China are fully aware of Iran’s ongoing pursuit of highly enriched nuclear fuel and the means of delivery as well as the Islamic Republic’s extensive violations of its international nuclear obligations, including those under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Yet the international response to these and other alarming developments in Iran since the American withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 has been primarily declarative. Notably missing are a sense of urgency and any real demonstration of resolve.
The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decision-makers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the US refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.
The member states of the IAEA Board of Governors, in turn, have pointedly avoided referring Iran to the UN Security Council regarding its mounting nuclear violations. They know that Russia and China would almost certainly veto any meaningful punitive action against Tehran, and they fear further Iranian escalation. Iran’s nuclear policymakers undoubtedly understand that the United States and its allies have ceded the upper hand in deterrence, because while Iran’s transgressions have grown, the costs of their commission have diminished.
Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.
Since Iran resumed enriching uranium to 20 percent, then jumping to 60 percent in 2021, it has reached and crossed the “red line” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew before the UN General Assembly in 2012, with no evident Israeli response—not from the governments Netanyahu has led and not from those that his political rivals headed. Even some Israeli references to the possible use of force, which presumably are intended to have a deterrent effect, have broadcast a lack of urgency. For example, at a December 2022 graduation ceremony of Israel Air Force (IAF) cadets, then Defense Minister (and former IDF Chief of Staff) Benny Gantz told the newly minted pilots, “In two or three years, you may be traversing the skies eastward and taking part in an attack on nuclear sites in Iran.” If Israel might attack, but not for another two or three years, the message is that neither the Iranian threat nor the possibility of an Israeli strike is imminent.
In terms of capabilities, despite Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi’s 2023 announcement that the IDF is “ready to act [with force] against Iran,”[17] as detailed below, Israel was slow to prepare a military option to strike the Iranian nuclear program—even after the United States withdrew from the JCPOA and Iran gradually increased and expanded its uranium enrichment beyond the limits set by the agreement.[18]
The Iran Concept
Thus, while for years Iran has been carrying out nuclear activities that have no civilian justification, Israeli, American, and international reactions have been consistently limited, remarkably patient, and largely rhetorical. What can account for the apparent discord between the severity of Iran’s nuclear behavior and the lethargic response to it? Israel and the United States (and possibly others) appear to believe that there is still time to address the Iranian nuclear threat despite the obvious advances the Islamic Republic has made in recent years toward becoming a nuclear weapons state.
This belief—manifested in the restrained policy responses detailed above—suggests an underlying Iran Concept that appears to derive from a short list of assumptions reflecting intelligence producers’ perceptions of Iran and of themselves:
- Iran’s leadership (and specifically Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) has not yet decided to pursue the third component described above—the development and production of a nuclear weapon.
- Israeli, American, or other allied intelligence services will be able to identify such a decision.
- The identification of the weaponization decision will leave Israel, the United States, or both with sufficient time to act militarily to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold. (Implicit in this assumption is that they possess a viable capability to do so.)
Put more simply, Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran Concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.
According to various assessments the IDF has shared with the public and interviews with senior Israeli officials, the Israeli defense establishment continues to believe that Iran would need a year or two to develop a nuclear bomb once Tehran decides to do so. Meanwhile, in the United States, the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified before Congress that Iranian weaponization would take several months. In 2023, he, the Central Intelligence Agency director, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) all publicly referred to Iran as not yet having decided to produce nuclear weapons. The ODNI reaffirmed this assessment in February 2024.
The Message from Israel: There’s Time, and Other Matters Are More Pressing
An examination of Israel’s statements and actions since 2015 sheds light on what appears to be the Iran Concept’s considerable influence on Israeli national security priorities and policy, including force planning. It reveals a series of decisions to direct attention, effort, and resources to matters other than Iran’s nuclear program. These decisions have likely provided justification—or, at the very least, an excuse—for the laggard international response to Iran’s ongoing nuclear crimes. They also raise important questions about the state of civil-military relations in Israel today.
Until July 2015, Israel’s government lobbied both publicly and behind closed doors against the far-reaching nuclear concessions that became the basis of the JCPOA. After the election of Donald Trump, Israel pushed for the US either to improve the agreement or to withdraw from it completely, and the administration did the latter in May 2018. Despite the occasional publication of some unelected Israeli security officials’ dissenting policy opinions, all of Israel’s governments since 2015 have opposed the JCPOA, sharing the view that it would ultimately make the Iranian nuclear problem worse.
Yet in the years after the conclusion of the JCPOA, a significant gap opened between Israel’s stated policy and the Israeli military’s budgetary and operational priorities. Jerusalem’s official line was that Israel would not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, with the expectation that the IDF would use the relatively brief period of nuclear restrictions that the JCPOA imposed to prepare and maintain a contingency plan to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
In August 2015, however, the IDF released a strategy document that prioritized other issues the army arguably found more pressing, easier, or cheaper to address (or perhaps all of the above). The strategy emphasized fighting Iran indirectly and with intermittent intensity in the Mabam, a Hebrew acronym meaning “the campaign between the wars.” The campaign is a sustained effort to counter Iran’s subversive and terrorist activity across the region, which accelerated in the wake of the nuclear deal. Most prominently, the Mabam has included hundreds of air strikes to frustrate Iran’s effort to establish a permanent forward military position in Syria and to supply its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, with advanced weapons systems.
The strategy—which the IDF made public before the government approved the five-year plan on which it was based—conspicuously made no mention of the Iran nuclear threat but did call for preparing a preemptive strike capability against countries with which Israel “shares no border.” The document makes clear that from the perspective of the IDF, the path of least Iranian resistance runs through Damascus, not Qom.
In recent years, a series of covert tactical operations against the Iranian nuclear program have been attributed to Israel. Nevertheless, serving and former Israeli defense officials have suggested that the IDF neglected the force planning required for a more expansive, strategic attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities until January 2021, when Iran resumed enriching uranium to 20 percent purity and undertook work on uranium metallurgy. Shortly after this Iranian escalation, and during Joe Biden’s first week in the White House, then IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi announced that he had ordered the preparation of new operational plans to strike Iran’s nuclear program.
In an August 2023 interview, Major General (res.) Amikam Norkin, who retired from his position as IAF commander in 2022, described the IDF’s strategy between 2015 and 2021 and how it was (and was not) put into practice:
The multiyear plan that [then Chief of Staff Gadi] Eisenkot put through in 2015 stipulated a clear order of priorities for the army and was approved by the government. The nuclear agreement that was signed with Iran in that year was termed a strategic turning point, and occupation with Iran’s nuclear project became a lower priority. In the face of the country’s challenges in those years, that was definitely a worthwhile move. I think that the supplementary move that should have come into being was to build a plan of a decade forward, to accumulate [long-range strike] capabilities for the long term. There was an intention to develop a plan like that, but it wasn’t implemented.
Norkin’s remarks reflect the complex back-and-forth of Israeli defense decision-making. To be clear, the Israeli government bears ultimate responsibility for national security policy and approves plans and budgets. Though the military is subordinate to the government, in practice the IDF heavily influences the national security agenda. This power derives from the diverse, weighty, and constant national security challenges facing the State of Israel from its earliest days, the IDF’s extensive roles and responsibilities in addressing those challenges, and the head of IDF Intelligence’s specific role as “the national [intelligence] assessor.”[30]
Accordingly, just as the IDF pushed to downgrade the Iranian nuclear threat to focus on other concerns in 2015, Norkin attributed the 2021 decision to renew the preparation of a military option against Iran to Kochavi, who succeeded Eisenkot in 2019:
The force-building process suffered from delays and differences of opinion. The order of priorities didn’t change even when Aviv Kochavi became chief of staff, until it was revised in 2021, at his recommendation. It was then that the air force received an official directive to return to training and to building a capability for Iran, and that is what was done. Today it is being led by the IAF commander as top-priority.
The 2021 decision to resume planning and preparing for an attack suggests four things:
- From 2015 to 2021, the Israeli government did not explicitly (or explicitly enough) direct the IDF to prepare for a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Or Jerusalem did not exercise sufficient oversight over the IDF to ensure that the army had met its own declared strategic goals on this issue.
- For three years after the United States withdrew from the JCPOA, the IDF did not see the Iran nuclear threat as urgent enough to re-prioritize (and re-publicize) the preparation of a strike.
- Both the government and the IDF believe—or want others to believe—that such an operation remains both possible and within Israel’s operational capabilities.
- This record of action and inaction is consistent with the Iran Concept, namely the assumption that the Iranian weaponization decision is pending, will be identified in a timely manner, and can be stopped by force.
The defense establishment and the elected government share responsibility for this troubling state of affairs: the IDF—with the publicly unknowable input of its international and domestic intelligence partners—created and planned according to the Iran Concept, while the government adopted the concept’s assumptions and, whether by commission or omission, acquiesced to the army’s concept-driven priorities.
Since October 7, Israeli government and military statements have focused on the multi-front war playing out in Gaza, in the skies of Israel, across the border with Lebanon, in the cities of Judea and Samaria / the West Bank, and in the Red Sea. Until the April 14, 2024, Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel, Iran’s nuclear program and threats to destroy it had become noticeably absent from Israeli public discourse.
From open-source materials, it is impossible to know whether this silence reflects resource limitations (e.g., the time and attention of elected and military officials, aircraft, pilots and crew, intelligence collection and analysis) and a diminished ability to conduct a strike while the war is going on. It is also unclear whether there is more going on behind the scenes, or whether the Iran Concept continues to convince decision-makers that there will still be time to deal with Iran after Israel has completed the bulk of the fighting with Hamas—and potentially with Hezbollah as well.
Defensive Maneuvers
It is important to note the ongoing debate about the impact of the US withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 on Iranian nuclear escalation and the resultant implications for Israeli security. The assumptions underlying the Iran Concept pre-date, and are independent of, that fateful American decision. If anything, the Iran Concept appears to have further entrenched itself among the Israeli and American defense establishments, while Iran’s provocations have made the regime’s intentions regarding nuclear weapons even harder to deny.
Former IDF officials have tried to defend the army’s record by arguing that the US withdrawal caught them by surprise or that the US carried it out at Israel’s urging without an Israeli backup plan in place. The former is an implausible claim given President Trump’s repeated declarations, well in advance, of his intentions and the Israeli government’s years-long, vocal efforts to change or cancel the deal. Worse, this assertion reflects an attempt to blur the line between unaware and unprepared and to turn Israeli civil-military relations on their head by holding the government responsible for providing the IDF with early warning, instead of the other way around. Both arguments only confirm that the army was not as prepared as it should have been for years after both the implementation of the JCPOA and its effective termination.
Finally, it is worth considering two other explanations for the IDF’s approach to the Iranian nuclear program after 2015 that are at least theoretically possible, though mutually exclusive and rather absurd. The first is that the IDF assessed that the United States or the “international community” would solve the problem because they would never allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. The second is that the IDF saw the eventual nuclearization of Iran as inevitable. In either case, prioritizing the prevention of a nuclear-armed Iran would waste resources that Israel could better invest elsewhere.
The first explanation requires a near-total ignorance of or disregard for international nuclear history and a willingness to outsource Israel’s security regarding an unprecedented threat of mass destruction. It is also consistent with the Iran Concept’s assumption that there is still time to act, even while expecting that others will do the acting. The second represents an abandonment of Israel’s longstanding commitment to preventing its enemies from acquiring nuclear weapons (the Begin Doctrine) and is at odds with the policies of the government and the military. Neither accords with the IDF’s own re-prioritization of developing strike options in Iran.
Questioning the Assumptions
The Iran Concept presents analysts with one of the most difficult intelligence challenges: proving that something—in this case, an Iranian decision to pursue weaponization—does not yet exist or has not happened and understanding why not. Far from mere philosophical musings, these are potentially unanswerable questions with life-and-death implications regarding the absence of evidence and the evidence of absence.
Regardless, the lessons of the Yom Kippur War and the October 7 massacre mandate vigorous and regular testing of the assumptions behind the Iran Concept. What if, unbeknownst to Western intelligence, Iran has already decided to pursue weaponization? What if the Iranian weaponization effort is well underway and effectively concealed? What if the timelines are much shorter than currently believed?
These questions are not hypothetical. The nuclear archive materials that Israeli intelligence retrieved from a Tehran warehouse in 2018 revealed an Iranian nuclear weapons program that was more advanced and comprehensive than previously understood, especially in the realm of weaponization, the very activities that lie at the heart of the Iran Concept. In addition, Israel and the United States were able to glean these insights only after a 15 year delay and thanks to what has been described as “perhaps the largest physical heist of intelligence materials from an enemy capital in the history of espionage.”
The assumption that Israel or the United States will identify an Iranian nuclear weapons decision in near-real-time seems oddly smug given their own hard experience with the lagging speed of intelligence about clandestine nuclear activities in Iran in general and about the regime’s secret weaponization efforts in particular.
Moving Forward—Countering and Preventing Future Concepts
If Israel has fallen victim to an Iran Concept, the implications for Israeli security, deterrence, and diplomacy are likely to be grave. After two catastrophic concept-driven failures, Israeli civilian and military decision-makers need to act now to free themselves from the Iran Concept, to mitigate its effects, and to prevent the creation of dangerous new concepts in the future.
Some of the October 7 failures are obviously general and systemic, requiring constant rather than episodic follow-up. It should be clear at this point that the Israeli defense establishment is either incapable or unwilling to oversee itself and that the existing civilian oversight mechanisms—in both the executive and legislative branches of government—have been disastrously inadequate.
The Knesset should consider legislation creating a more muscular oversight body that has the expertise, access to classified information, and monitoring tools required to carry out its essential functions. Because one of these functions is ensuring accountability, the body’s work should be as transparent as possible. At the same time, its operations should feature extraordinary means to ensure that it is as leakproof as possible regarding classified subjects and materials (as opposed to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which is notoriously disdainful of confidentiality).
Among this body’s first tasks should be to revisit the prescriptions of the Agranat Commission to assess their continued relevance and the history, completeness, and durability of their implementation. The body should identify gaps in the prescriptions and in their adoption, make concrete proposals for closing them, and ensure compliance.
Regarding Iran, this body or a diverse, multidisciplinary task force it appoints—including members from outside the defense establishment—should comprehensively review and challenge the intelligence and assumptions about Iran and about Israel’s own capabilities that underlie the Iran Concept. The team should present its findings and any proposed revisions to the Security Cabinet, the IDF General Staff, and the heads of the security services. It is essential that the IDF does not dominate either the deliberations or the decision-making process.
The task force should also review the Iran Concept’s impact on budgetary, training, and operational priorities, on force planning, and on strategic messaging and propose alternatives based on the findings and proposals that emerge from the review of intelligence and assumptions. The task force should pay particular attention to the impact of competing policies on each other.
A Final Word on the Use of Force
The terms of the JCPOA, codified in Security Council Resolution 2231, allow snapping back the Security Council resolutions that imposed on Iran international sanctions, arms and missile embargoes, and a total prohibition on uranium enrichment. The snapback mechanism of Resolution 2231 is scheduled to expire in 2025. At that point, given the warming in Iran-Russia-China relations so clearly evident in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Iran will be largely exempt from coercive diplomatic pressure, and many of the arrangements for applying international economic pressure will be nearly impossible to reconstitute. If Iran has not crossed the nuclear threshold by then, the primary if not the only tool left to influence its decision-making will be the threat or use of military force, and the Iran Concept’s margin of error will have disappeared almost entirely.
Even if all the assumptions informing Israeli policy on Iran’s nuclear program are well founded and correct, Israel cannot waste additional time. The October 7 attack tragically illustrated the dangers of complacency and deference to international indifference and inaction in the face of an enemy with explicitly genocidal intent and lethal capabilities. The Hezbollah threat from Lebanon, estimated to be many times greater than that Hamas posed from Gaza, raises difficult questions for Israeli decision-makers. And the implications are even more obvious regarding Iran, which has repeatedly threatened Israel with annihilation and is pursuing nuclear means for carrying out its goals of mass destruction while the world sits on its hands.
Israel needs to not only prepare its military options but also ensure that the world knows—especially in the wake of October 7—that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities is intolerable and urgent and, if not reined in, will be met with force. Failure to do so will make it exceedingly difficult to prevent a nuclear Iran, an outcome that would roll back the achievements of the Mabam and could make the grievous losses of the Yom Kippur War and the October 7 massacre seem trivial by comparison.
Fifty years after 1973 and while Israel is still assessing and addressing the consequences of another national catastrophe, the time has come for Israeli military and civilian decision-makers and their American counterparts to review, if not re-learn, one of the Yom Kippur War’s most important lessons. Avoiding future concepts demands relentless vigilance and both the humility and the confidence to ask, What if we’re wrong?