| Summary/Abstract |
Early warning—together with deterrence and military decisionmaking, comprising Israel’s national security “triangle”—became a central element of Israeli strategy in the second half of the 1950s. Since then, providing early warning of an impending conflict has become a priority and considered as the ultimate test for the Israeli Intelligence Community (IC) in general, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Intelligence Directorate (AMAN) in particular. Yet, surprisingly, attempts to conceptualize and regulate early warning in Israel are relatively poor, especially when compared to the extensive conceptualization of early warning in other advanced Western countries. Indeed, the Israeli IC has attempted to differentiate between the types of early warning which its components are required to provide (understanding that early warning cannot be discussed as a monolith) that are intended to address a range of essentially different environments. At the same time, Israeli discourse on the subject continues to suffer from a lack of clarity and consistency, in the absence of a substantial theoretical foundation for the issue.
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