The Elusive Presence of Technology in Israel’s Strategic Security Thinking

Israel’s scientific and technological posture and its military-technological advantage are a result of strategy and force concentration over years. The continuance and maintenance of this advantage depend on correct strategy and decisions. Technological capability and technological edge are commonly assessed by budget allocations or by academic research ranking, industrial R&D, and investments in human capital. This essay addresses the subject from a different perspective, ands examine the place of technology as reflected in Israel’s official security strategies published over the past two decades. This perspective reveals to what degree the role of technology in future-oriented national strategic planning is understood. Analyzing three central Israeli security strategies, the essay looks at the place of technology in a normative understanding of how complete technological strategies should be written; compares these strategies to one another in the context of the technology component; and then compares them to the national security strategies of the US and UK. Israel’s scientific-technological standing and its military-technological edge are an outgrowth of many years of strategic effort. Nonetheless, while the strategies explicitly discuss the technological edge as an objective (ends), they lack a comprehensive analysis of how to achieve it (ways) and what tools are needed to build technological strength (means). The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the lapse in these strategies.