After a plane crash, the black box is opened. No one defends the feelings of the black box, the airplane, or the people who might be offended by the conclusions of opening the black box. When there's an air accident, you open everything. Aviation personnel, investigators, civil authorities and aircraft manufacturers cooperate, the flow of information is free and all investigative reports are public.
Aviation investigations also have an air of doubt. Everything can be taken into account, from a few lines of code in the software to human error. Although aviation investigation is not free of ego battles, in the end we reach the truth.
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA recruited Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, to investigate the explosion. Feynman understood the gap between NASA officials, who wanted "industrial quiet" (i.e., smearing the investigation), and the engineers, who wanted to uncover the truth and prevent future tragedies, but feared for their jobs.
Feynman eventually published the investigation's conclusions that the explosion was caused by a faulty design of a tiny rubber ring. When asked how he discovered the glitch, his answer was that he was simply asking people questions. Despite the rigidity of NASA's bureaucratic establishment, the culture of transparency and truth-telling has prevailed. Feynman asked—the engineers answered.
The IDF is a black box, but here no one is allowed to open the box and understand what happened. Too much power within the security establishment is in the hands of too few, and they too are publicly protected by their former comrades in key positions. The gap begins, as in NASA, with the gap between the engineers (or in our case, the observers, analysts and fighters) and the senior bureaucrats. The pressure not to understand and not to investigate is very strong. People want to maintain their power and control over the information questionnaire.
The information that is stored is not just "intelligence information" that does not always reach decision makers. The blackened information that is no less important is the budgetary one. A forecast published by the Bank of Israel last week said that the direct costs of the war would reach NIS 107 billion. How did the Bank of Israel reach this number? Apparently, that's what they told him in the army. In consultation with several economists, we made a calculation "on the back of an envelope," which brings the cost to about NIS 30 billion. Where else is 67 billion? Secret. Maybe economists are wrong, but we have no way of knowing.
The people in the budget department who have access to the economic data of the defense establishment can be counted on one hand. In the Accountant General's Division, the gatekeeper of budgetary execution, there is one authorized person; One person outside the military who is authorized to check invoices worth tens of billions. Nothing has stopped the defense establishment from inflating itself year after year, and nothing to stop it from swelling now, even though the failure on 7 October was no shortage of planes or tanks or pensions.
It is necessary not only to increase the number of opinions on intelligence issues voiced to the political echelon and break the monopoly of Military Intelligence, but also to expand budgetary control. It took a decade to discover the lost billions plus the chief of staff and bridging pensions. These are billions that could have gone to equipment, intelligence, training
It is necessary not only to increase the number of opinions on intelligence issues voiced to the political echelon and break the monopoly of Military Intelligence, but also to expand budgetary control. It took a decade to discover the lost billions plus the chief of staff and bridging pensions. These are billions that could have gone to equipment, intelligence, training.
In order to break concepts, you need quality people to challenge them, and you need to give them the opportunity to challenge them and ask questions. We need Richard Feynmans in every IDF unit, because we have forgotten how to ask annoying but important questions.
25 years before the ferry bombing, in his farewell speech at the White House, President Eisenhower warned of the rise of the military-industrial complex, and of the danger of a clique of officers and politicians who control unregulated budgets and information taps. His warnings are also true for Israel today.
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