Even before State Comptroller Yosef Shapira's report on the 2014 military campaign in the Gaza Strip has been released to the public, the media has been hysterically quoting excerpts from leaked minutes of the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet's meetings, using them to lambaste Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and top military officials, including the IDF chief of staff and director of Military Intelligence. The voices leading public discourse in Israel this week resonated with doubt over Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's iconic statement: "May every Jewish mother know that she has placed her son's fate in the hands of commanders worthy of the task." Some have even alluded that we have placed our sons' fate in the hands of unworthy national leadership. Public interest in the state comptroller's report on Operation Protective Edge focuses on two core questions: The first seeks to understand how it was that the government led Israel to war with Hamas in the summer of 2014 -- was the military campaign in Gaza really necessary? The second wants an explanation to what seems like an affront to national pride: How did we find ourselves, as a nation and a military, ill-equipped to deal with the threat posed by Hamas' grid of terror tunnels? One must stress that the defense establishment focused on both questions as soon as the fighting concluded, and it did not attempt to shirk responsibility. The IDF, the Shin Bet security agency, and the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet were familiar with the tunnel threat long before the summer of 2014, and the comptroller's report notes as much. With this regard, the issue that needs to be reviewed in-depth is how the threat was perceived and understood, and what was done as a result of those understandings. This is a serious question, but the public discourse on it has been marred by leaked minutes from cabinet meetings, tailored to manipulate certain individuals' political image when the public comes to judge who foretold the situation, who wanted to fight, and who was dragging his feet. Any sensible person understands that cabinet discussions on fateful national issues must be held behind closed doors to maintain their integrity and keep them free of personal interests. Still, there is always doubt; the insinuation that someone among those privy to the issues would go on the record, either with aim of catering to public opinion or in an attempt to go down on the right side of history. If anything, such discussions are a test of the ultimate national responsibility. I have not read Shapira's report in full, and it is certainly far too early to judge its findings. I believe, however, that there is room to ask how the comptroller addressed systemic questions, such as whether the 50-day war could have been avoided. Many wars in history were avoidable, and the government may have been able to prevent Operation Protective Edge. The Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, for example, could have been avoided had the government not decided to mount a full-scale response to the abduction of IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev by Hezbollah. The decision to launch a military campaign is a fundamental one that, while often presents a leader with his greatest challenge and shows his true loneliness at a crucial juncture, at times is left unanswered As important as this question is -- it always remains in the background, even when the decision-making process is by the book -- it transcends the technical authority of the state comptroller or any commission of inquiry. Procedures over substance Reviewing the technical scope of a military campaign, such as weapons function or malfunction, inventories, the forces' competency, etc., follows certain methodology meant to identify the cause of the failure. When reviewing strategic decisions, however, an investigation cannot focus on the technical aspects. Past commissions of inquiry appointed by parliament, such as the Agranat commission that investigated the military's failures leading up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, or the Winograd commission that reviewed military actions during the Second Lebanon War, worked under the modern premise that if something went wrong, one of the individuals along the chain of command was negligent. Modern approaches to many issues expect us to control the events around us, even in war -- a naturally chaotic situation that involves embarking toward the unknown. This is why military intelligence surprises, as well as crisis management issues that appear during war, lead to audits -- only if we know who was negligent and replace them can we regain our peace of mind. So how do comptrollers make decisions on strategic issues? The real test is where the desired outcome lies. In a football game, for example, the end result -- the score -- is always clear. But wars are a different phenomenon, and their results can be examined only through whether their achievements stood the test of time. When it comes to wars, for the most part, their outcomes may remain far from clear-cut even years later. From a professional standpoint, audits seek to discern what the objectives of the war were and how many of them were achieved over time. This is a complex question that often depends on various criteria. Of this complexity, we tend to focus reviews on the standards of proper decision-making processes. This approach assumes that proper procedures necessarily yield the correct decisions. Unfortunately, this assumption does not stand the test of reality, but that does not dissuade the advocates of proper government from their demand to adhere to structured work procedures, especially when dealing with crucial questions such as launching a war. Commissions of inquiry or comptroller audits often choose to focus on the process: When did the cabinet meet, what information was presented to the ministers, what dynamics characterized the debate, whether the appropriate experts appeared before the forum and more. As in many cases, the public sector has committed itself to legal thinking patterns, even in matters concerning war, causing public discourse to focus, in turn, on procedures rather than on substance. The country's leadership and the military are not exempt from sparing no effort to prepare for and successfully meet fateful challenges -- on the contrary. But first we must explore ourselves as a society and review the exaggerated expectations we vest in set processes and procedures when it comes to managing affairs of state. By definition, war is an event that can spiral out of control. Those seeking investigations as an instrument by which a war could be turned into an event managed according to a predetermined, set process, as if it was a production line, are seemingly seeking to determine the nature of a baby before there is even a pregnancy. Even in modern times, man cannot control everything. To the best of my judgment, as a member of the IDF General Staff at the time and as someone who reviewed Operation Protective Edge in the weeks following its conclusion, the prudent and responsible way in which the campaign was waged by the political and military leadership deserves the full confidence of the public.
