For a few decades, anyway. 

And as an avid reader of military history, I spent years watching how Israel manifested its learning of those lessons over the decades.  

And over the years, as the challenges to Israel morphed from a massive conventional attack to asymmetric terrorist incursions and rockets to a potential multi-front war, directly and via proxies, with Iran, I noted with concern that Israel seems to be letting some of its conventional warfare muscles atrophy.  

I was on vacation in the mountains of central Norway on October 7 - and my first thought as I watched the horror of the conventional but utterly, medievally brutal attack unfold on the Norwegian news was "how on earth did Israel let this happen?"

The answer, according to this long, thorough report in Commentary by Jonathan Foreman, is "through complacency, overreliance on technology, and forgetting not only history but some of the basic craft of fighting war.  

More chillingly?  It could have been worse.  

Much like the US in the winter of 1941, Israel's high command apparently didn't think Hamas really had an attack in them - to the point where they ignored fairly clear, present evidence to the contrary:

It was just one instance of the reflexive refusal by senior Israeli military, intelligence, and political leaders to engage with reports from their own observers and analysts that threatened to undermine their group shibboleth—the belief that Hamas was not and could not be an existential threat. From the very top of the political tree down to the relatively junior officers who commanded the observer units on the Gaza border, adherence to this shibboleth was so ingrained that it trumped all evidence that suggested Hamas might be preparing for an attack.

The fact is, Hamas wasn't even especially subtle about its preparations:

The fact is that Hamas hid its invasion preparations in plain sight. In Spring 2022, Hamas TV broadcast a series that dramatized a mass attack of the October 7 type in which invaders captured the Reim Military Base as well as civilian communities. The series was praised by Hamas’s Gazan leader Yahya Sinwar as “an inseparable part of what we are preparing.” In 2023, Hamas’s propaganda arm released several videos of uniformed, masked Nukhba commandos training to overrun mock-ups of nearby Israeli bases and practicing with the weapons and breaching materials they would use on October 7.

All Hamas really kept secret was the precise timing of its attack—a date that, in hindsight, looks like an obvious choice given the traditional Islamist obsession with anniversaries and the State of Israel’s 21st-century practice of essentially disarming itself on religious holidays. (It is now known that the date was decided in May 2023, Sinwar having previously considered launching the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack during Passover of that year.)

The complacence built on many, deeper failures in Israeli military and intelligence culture - along with the belief that technology would bridge any gaps:

Hamas was aided in this by at least two peculiar Israeli decisions, both redolent of excessive self-confidence. One was the Shin Bet’s 2010 abandonment of its human-intelligence program in Gaza. Essentially, it gave up recruiting new spies and sources. Another was the decision in the summer of 2022 by Unit 8200, the IDF’s famous signals-intelligence agency, to stop eavesdropping on the Hamas network of hand-held radios.

Of course, Hamas spent years gathering intelligence, not only on exactly how the Israeli virtual defenses worked, and the key nodes of information that would leave the whole system blind, but the soldiers manning the system themselves:

Hamas operatives knew the base [at Nahal Oz, where unarmed, unprotected and poorly trained IDF soldiers were massacred on Octtober 7] so well that, earlier in the year, one of them held up a poster at the fence wishing one of the female observers happy birthday—with her full name and age.

Israeli units had gotten into practices that would astound not only American veterans of the War on Terror, but Israeli veterans from even a decade ago; soldiers on bases along the Gaza front were unarmed; rocket attacks would send all base staff to the shelters, leaving no sentries to watch for trouble - which Hamas exploited to horrific effect on October 7.  And the IDF, dealing with the same budget constraints every other Western military faces, and preparing not so much for the last war but for a possible future one with Iran, had let much of its conventional deterrent and legendary readiness atrophy:

Successive Israeli defense ministers and chiefs of defense staff from 2002 onward cut expenditure on the IDF’s ground capabilities, underfunding training, maintenance, transport capacity, and combat logistics, in the belief that the country could rely on air force jets, intelligence agencies and special forces to keep its enemies at bay and protect its citizenry. In 2015, it gave an entire squadron of its helicopter gunships to Jordan. Close air support of ground troops was no longer viewed as a priority, now that the focus had shifted to Iran and cyberwarfare. The belief that substantial conventional ground forces were no longer that necessary underlay the cutting of compulsory national service from three years to just over two and a half and also a new policy of ending reservist duty at age 40 instead of 54, even though this deprived the IDF of a great many combat-experienced troops.

So Israeli troops were on the front lines, unarmed and often untrained.  Kibbutz's local militias were locked away from their guns; Hamas knew where the weapons rooms were, and many Kibbutznik defenders died trying to get to their weapons (something that at least some in Israel are trying to fix, as we noted earlier).  

And for all that, it could have been worse: 

It was fortunate that, unlike the army, the often maligned Israel Police Service not only had a contingency plan for a large-scale Hamas attack, but practiced dealing with one, holding one such exercise in September 2023. As a result, the Hamas attacks on the towns of Netivot and Sderot were contained by 8 a.m. Moreover, if the Israel Police had not prevailed in three little-known battles—at the Reim junction, the Black Arrow Monument, and the Yad Mordechai junction—then large convoys of Hamas pick-up trucks could have headed east and north. Nothing stood between them and the civilian populations of Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem.

And as dire as the consequences of October 7 were, the consequences had Hamas reached the heart of Israel could have been far worse:

 Had even a few pick-up trucks reached those cities and wrought just the limited slaughter achieved in Sderot and Ofakim, the impact would have been enormous. A senior commander I spoke to believes it would likely have inspired copycat attacks on Israeli communities in the West Bank, uprisings in Israel’s majority-Arab cities and neighborhoods along the lines of the upheaval in May 2021, and, deadliest of all, a massive ground invasion of the north by Hezbollah.

As much trouble as Israel had responding to October 7 - the weeks of delay before the IDF went into Gaza was to allow Israel to train enough troops to fight a conventional war on that scale - one can only imagine what a three-front hot war could have done.  

The whole thing is worth a sober, sobering read.