Thread by @MikeRStephens

I think I need to say what many in the strategic studies community is quietly thinking, and indeed saying to me.

Israel appears qualitatively far weaker than we had presupposed, and the dysfunction has bleed into many facets of their political and security apparatus (not all).

The lack of strategic planning for a range of eventualities in Gaza is staggering to me frankly. How can Israel not have a preferred end-state for a territory it considers hostile?

How can their be no plan for effective counterinsurgency in the Strip above the tactical?

Any half decent military usually has a shopping list of plans ready to go for its leaders. Perhaps those plans do exist...and maybe the issue is that civilian leadership just simply doesn't know what a military instrument can and cannot do, and where it aids the political debate.

But it is clear to me that there is no consensus on what to do, how to do it, or what the second order effects of that might mean.

Israel should have turned to Arab neighbours and brought them in to finally take down Hamas. Instead it drove them all away, and isolated itself.

Regardless of how you feel about this conflict or who you support, Israel has played its hand shambolically. At the macro level its regional policy is in tatters, at the micro level it has achieved none of its stated aims.

They're in a no man's land of sub-optimal choices.

I think back to past Israeli leaders, Dayan, Rabin, Sharon, Barak...they would be looking on aghast at the current crop of politicians and securocrats.

You may not have liked them, but they knew what they wanted to achieve and how to do it. This lot don't, it's that simple.