The investigation of what went wrong in Israel’s army and government will start only after the war in Gaza is over, but it is already known that there was early warning.
Soldiers on the border who saw Hamas’s military exercises and its bulldozers coming toward the border in what was supposed to be “no-man’s land,” as well as people in nearby villages who heard noises of underground digging, all communicated repeatedly to the higher-ups.
It is not yet known whose desk dismissed the warnings or why. If they reached members of the government, it appears that they never reached the desk of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
Since that October event, grave mistakes have plagued Boeing in the US, where the CEO just resigned.
These events brought to my mind Chiles James’ book Inviting Disasters, which I read more than two decades ago. It documents a range of catastrophic events and summarizes lessons on how to mitigate or prevent them.
I shall refer only to those case studies in the book that are relevant the o events mentioned above, as most of the book examines how to better manage complex technological risks rather than overcoming human errors. The solutions the book lists are timeless. If they were known and implemented, chances are that some recent disasters could have been averted.
Here are two cases, one related to the government and the other to the military.
Welcome aboard
When instruments warning of bad weather did not yet exist, the US airmail service was losing pilots and planes at high rates. The pilots finally convinced their higher-ups that managers for the postal services at the airport were giving orders to fly even though the pilots worried about the bad weather.
The pilots, wanting a prompt solution, requested that the supervisors be required to be on board for any takeoff they ordered during bad weather. Chiles wryly notes that the rate of accidents fell. These days, in similar circumstances, the pilots’ association would likely go to Washington and request laws and regulations as well as R&D funding focused on inventing better bad-weather-detecting instruments.
Admiral Hyman Rickover, a son of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the US at the age of six and became the father of the US Navy’s nuclear submarine program, was intent upon preventing reactor accidents during the decades that their building was fully under his supervision, from the start of a project to the launching.
Rickover required not only that he or one of his close assistants be aboard during the test dives, but that top representatives of key maintenance contracting companies also would be aboard. Having one’s life at stake focused the mind – that was Rickover’s observation and among his principles. There were no reactor accidents throughout Rickover’s management.
Could this principle have been applied within the Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF) via a rule that rotating senior officers and members of government stay put in locations close to the Gaza border rather than debating and shuffling strategy papers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?
Should Boeing have required that suppliers’ and maintenance companies’ CEOs be on board when introducing technical changes or when turning over their technical staff?
And, what if the US government had enforced a similar rule about the Southern US border and required the secretary of homeland security and his top assistants to live and work at the border on a rotating basis, standing day and night with the National Guard observing first-hand what is going on?
Would such an arrangement have enabled effective protection of a border whose current holes evoke Swiss cheese?
It’s easy to call endlessly for accountability and greater responsibility from politicians and the administration. Alas, it is well-documented in all spheres of life that unless disaster occurs nothing happens. We could, modifying a popular aphorism, say that “disaster is the mother of innovation” in rules and organizations.
Reuven Brenner is the author of, among other books, Betting on Ideas: Wars, Inventions, Inflation and The Force of Finance.