What Israel can learn from Russia about thinking ahead in war - opinion

Since February 2022, Israel’s defense community has studied the war in Ukraine closely. It has studied Ukraine’s drones, its improvised command networks, and the citizen soldier who held a state together.

Israel has studied Russia mostly as a warning: centralized, rigid, slow. Israeli institutes have drawn many lessons from Kyiv’s side of the war, and few from Moscow’s.

That is a mistake. Not because Russia fights well, but because it thinks systematically about how it fights. The lesson Israel most needs from this war is not tactical. It is the way Moscow builds theory.

What Israel can learn from Russia's way of military thinking

Russia treats military thought as an institution. The General Staff Academy, the Academy of Military Sciences and the journal Military Thought form an ecosystem whose task is to forecast the character of the next war, write it down, argue about it and revise it.

When Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, published his famous 2013 article, its title was “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight.” The phrase captures the culture.

This is not new. As Russian strategy expert Dmitry Adamsky showed in The Culture of Military Innovation (2010), Soviet theorists in the 1970s and 1980s were the first to conceptualize what Americans later called the Revolution in Military Affairs. They understood that precision weapons and information technology would transform war before they possessed the technology to wage it.

Israel lacks war strategy

The Americans and the Israelis built the components first and the theory later. Adamsky’s diagnosis was cultural: Russians see the forest before the trees exist; Israelis build the trees and assume the forest will follow.

The war in Ukraine shows the advantage of this habit even in failure. Russia’s initial theory of the war collapsed in 2022. Nuclear threats did not deter Western support for Kyiv, and hybrid pressure did not break European resolve.

A less theoretical system would have improvised. Moscow has done something else; Russian strategic writing now redefines Europe, not the United States, as the main adversary, and is formulating a concept of non-nuclear strategic deterrence: precision conventional threats aimed at European infrastructure and decision-making centers.

The process is slow and incomplete, but it is a process. Russia lost the opening battle and is rewriting its theory accordingly.

Israel has learned differently. Since October 7, the IDF has adapted brilliantly in action: in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran. But adaptation is not theory.

Last month, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Tamir Hayman, a former head of military intelligence who now directs the Institute for National Security Studies, wrote that Israel’s new security concept “has not been formally articulated or presented to the public, nor is it bindingly defined within the defense establishment.” It is, in his words, “an unwritten concept revealed through practice.”

Days later, the Prime Minister’s Office published a national security document. Although it might have its merits, a political declaration is not the product of an institution that forecasts, argues and revises. Israel won most of its battles; its theory is still being written by events.

Some will object that Israel’s real thinking is classified. Perhaps. But here, too, Moscow offers a lesson: deterrence that lives in a safe deters no one.

In November 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an updated nuclear doctrine and published it, because publication is part of the threat. A concept that adversaries cannot read, citizens cannot debate, and junior officers are never taught is not a strategic culture. It is a filing cabinet.

What should Israel take from Russia? A standing forum, independent of the chain of command, charged with forecasting the next war; a national security concept owned by the cabinet and updated by law; and systematic study of how adversaries theorize, not only how they fight.

Israel has become the world’s laboratory of modern warfare. But a laboratory without theory produces findings, not knowledge.

Ori Biran is a final-year Dean’s List honors student at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University, specializing in strategy and decision-making. His current research, conducted in collaboration with Israeli defense bodies, focuses on maritime critical infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities.