Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi has turned the term “lethality” into a central theme of his tenure. Kochavi is investing great efforts in improving the military’s lethal combat abilities — its capacity to hit as many targets as possible in the shortest time by virtue of the IDF’s decisive technological superiority in terms of intelligence, air power and precise “counter fire.”
Kochavi’s goal is simple: inflicting maximum heavy damage and casualties on the other side by stretching the IDF’s military capacity to its limits in order to shorten the duration of the next war. The chief of staff believes that if the damage Hezbollah sustains in its next confrontation with the IDF is unsustainable from the start, its leader, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, would conclude that there was no point in dragging out the confrontation with Israel. In other words, the greater the lethality, the less time it will take to stop the fighting and Israel will save itself a protracted, costly and bloody war next time.
