Identifying and planning military potential and national power: the case of the Israeli civilian-military planning units

Research on the military potential/national power has focused on features such as numbers of soldiers, the military budget, population size, industrial production, technology, and others as underlying national power. The geopolitical situation of the State of Israel made the IDF General Staff the arbiter of any planning decision related to the development of the state economy, and responsible for planning and directing national security. Because the asymmetry between the military potential of the Arab countries and that of Israel was a reality on the ground that Israel’s national security concept had to take into consideration, and because modern warfare is between nations, their material forces and their mental capacities, the Israel Defence Forces [IDF] recommended setting up civil–military Planning Units based on military guidelines to identify, calculate and plan specific areas of national potential such as administration and regime, morale and education, static defence, the economy in wartime, and manpower.