One IDF officer’s quest to teach his tanks how to turn on a dime
Col. Nir Ben-David says he wants his troops to become ‘experts in switching between different situations,’ and warns Palestinians not to ‘wake the lion’
Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's religions and Diaspora affairs correspondent.
The new head of the IDF’s 188th Armored Brigade talks about tanks like they are articles of clothing that you slip into, each with its own feel and personality that eventually become natural extensions of your body.
With over 20 years experience fighting in and commanding from them, Col. Nir Ben-David knows about tanks. The recently appointed brigade commander sees them not only as tools capable of carrying out fierce and deadly strikes against Israel’s enemies, but as precise instruments, exact enough to avoid unnecessarily injuring innocent civilians.
Ben-David, a bespectacled 42-year-old who has served in multiple command positions in the IDF’s various tank brigades in his 24 years of service, laid out his plans for the 188th “Barak” Brigade, his expectations for its officers and his understanding of the events unfolding on Israel’s many military fronts — from the civil war in nearby Syria to the current violence in the West Bank — in an interview with The Times of Israel at his base on the Golan Heights.
Ben-David — or Benda, as he’s also known — took over the historic brigade, which was formed during Israel’s War for Independence, earlier this summer. The tank unit is one of just eight regular, as opposed to reserve, brigades in the IDF — five infantry units and three tank brigades. Before taking over the 188th, Ben-David helped create the 210th Regional Division along the Syrian border last year.
Now as head of the 188th “Barak” Brigade, Ben-David must move away from a focus on one border, with its well-known and clearly defined challenges and advantages, to a more fluid manner of thinking that sees him training his soldiers to be prepared for fighting on any number of fronts.
He defines this manner of thinking as zamish, a portmanteau of the Hebrew words for quick (zariz) and flexible (gamish). For Benda that means not being surprised or overwhelmed by deviations from the plan. To train his officers and soldiers to be zamish he keeps them on their toes constantly, changing plans and giving new orders at every turn.
“For example, we finished our brigade-wide exercise at 2:00 a.m. and the next day I can tell my commanders, ‘Tomorrow by 6:00 p.m. you’re going to be in the West Bank,'” Ben-David related.
“And they’ll say, ‘OK, no problem, we’ll go to the West Bank,’” he said, adding, “They wouldn’t even be late.”
This was no mere braggadocio. At the tail end of his first brigade-wide exercise in the Golan Heights last week, two of his battalions were actually called up to reinforce the West Bank in light of the growing unrest there.
His soldiers were only called in to give additional support to the troops already there, but Ben-David is also prepared for a large-scale tank operation in the West Bank should the need arise.
Waking the lion
Ben-David, who began his army service in 1991 and served through the Second Intifada, recalled his role in 2002’s Operation Defensive Shield, in which the IDF sent troops into six major West Bank cities in response to a wave of terror attacks. Ben-David as a young deputy battalion commander in the now defunct 500th Armored Brigade led troops into Ramallah where he “met up with Abu Mazen,” he said, using the nickname of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
While the stabbings and car-ramming attacks of the past month have been far less deadly than the suicide bombings of the early 2000s, it might take just one particularly bad or shocking incident to prompt a similar operation, Ben-David said.
“In 2002, there had been a wave of terror attacks, but then one day there was a bombing, and we said, ‘This we cannot abide. This crossed a line,’” Ben-David said, referring to the March 2002 bombing of the Park Hotel in Netanya during a Passover seder in which 30 civilians were killed and 140 others were injured.
“That woke the lion and now there’s nothing we can do but devour you,” he said.
“I absolutely believe that with this sequence of stabbings and shootings and rock throwing and firebombings, in the end there will be some incident that will make the country say, ‘Hey, up until now we’ve put up with it, but now you’ve pissed us off,'” Ben-David said.
He paints a hypothetical situation in which an infant or many people die in an attack. Something like that will touch a nerve and will again “wake up the lion — and now that lion will eat you,” he said.
‘That woke the lion and now there’s nothing we can do but devour you’
“I don’t have a plan for Operation Defensive Shield 2. But do I have the tools necessary for Operation Defensive Shield 2? Absolutely. Right now I can go with my brigade and within 12 hours I will be in Hebron and take care of it. I will go to Jenin and take care of it. And when I finish there, Hebron and Jenin won’t be the same as when I came,” he warned.
Being ‘zamish’
Israeli ground forces fall into two main types of units: regional units, which are responsible for a specific section of territory but lack troops to stand guard in those areas, and infantry or armored units, which are the ones to actually operate within those regional units.
The 210th Division, for example, which guards the Golan Heights along Israel’s northern border with Syria, has its own commanders, communications infrastructure and medical teams, but lacks soldiers who actually guard the territory. Hypothetically, the 188th Brigade could come to serve in the Golan Heights, then leave the 210th Division a few months later and go on, perhaps, to serve in the Gaza or West Bank Division.
Therefore, as head of the tank brigade, Ben-David must ensure that his soldiers are capable of operating in a variety of settings — from urban fighting in the cities of Gaza and the West Bank to open fields in the Syrian Golan Heights and everything in between.
The problem, however, is that brigade-wide exercises include thousands of soldiers with the participation of other units, including combat engineers and helicopters, all of which make them notoriously expensive and difficult to organize. As a result they occur perhaps twice a year, meaning Ben-David cannot hold one exercise dedicated to simulating a fight in Syria and another dedicated to Lebanon and a third dedicated to Gaza.
They instead need to train to become “experts in switching between different situations,” Ben-David explained.
“We are a giant ship that needs to be able to move like a speedboat,” he added.
That ability to adapt and react quickly is key to avoiding one of the most prevalent mistakes militaries make — training not for future, but for past battles, Ben-David said.
‘What’s the response? What’s the solution? What tools do you have? You have to act quickly’
In order to make his soldiers zamish, both quick and flexible, Ben-David strives to constantly surprise his officers, in order to prepare them for the uncertainty of the battlefield.
For example, he will deliberately misinform his battalion commanders, instructing them to prepare for a specific kind of exercise, but then change it at the last minute.
“He thought his exercise would be here, but then — surprise! — the exercise is over there. You thought you would be doing a platoon exercise, but then here comes this crazy brigade commander and tells you, no, you’re doing a full battalion exercise,” he related.
And Ben-David has no tolerance for officers incapable of thinking on their feet. “What’s the response? What’s the solution? What tools do you have? You have to act quickly. If you are delayed, then you are not in the right profession in the 188th Brigade,” he said.
A deadly toolbox
This was only the second brigade-wide exercise Ben-David had ever run. The first was when he was the commander of the 91st Reserve Armored Brigade. He saw the exercise as a resounding success, though he admitted there were some kinks in the command structure and ability to effectively communicate between the ranks that still needed to be addressed.
“Don’t be in your office. Don’t speak with your soldiers on the phone,” Ben-David told his subordinate officers. “Command them eye-to-eye. Be with them in the field.”
The exercise was “an experience in vastness,” he said.
“Before the ‘battle,’ there were a couple thousand people out in the field for the introductory briefing. From there we got in our tanks and trained in a huge expanse of the Golan Heights. We used infantry and tanks and combat engineering and explosions and gunfire. It was just a very high level of intensity,” he said.
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot visited the four-day exercise and, according to Ben-David, they were impressed by the sheer magnitude of what they saw.
“This is the toolbox that I am giving you to have at your disposal. It is a large toolbox, a diverse toolbox and a lethal toolbox,” he told them.
How not to kill
While Ben-David speaks proudly of the awesome power his Merkava III tanks possess, he also says they offer a better, nonlethal alternative for many military situations.
“There was just a US Air Force bombing strike on a hospital in Afghanistan. They took the risks into consideration, but in the end made a decision, and it killed civilians,” Ben-David said.
“That is the disadvantage of an aerial force. A ground-based force also knows how not to kill. They know how to do nonlethal maneuvers to isolate the problem and take it out, while moving all the other things away,” he said.
Other armies in the world may not have a problem with collateral damage, Ben-David said, “But the values of the 188th Brigade, of the Israel Defense Forces and of the State of Israel, demand that we know how to carry out nonlethal missions. And I don’t think that is an inconsequential task; it is a serious undertaking.”
