Surprise boils down to patience versus arrogance

The only really flexible part of war is when to start it.

Once hostilities are underway, they follow a basic reactionary pattern: Each side throws itself into battle until it has exhausted either resources or targets.

Israeli military doctrine has been firmly established since the early moments of the Six Day War, when waves of French-made Mirage aircraft destroyed nearly the entire Egyptian air force as pilots sat in the chow hall. The lesson: The fortunes of war, al pi derech hateva, flip on the success of the opening salvo.

And that success depends on the element of surprise. We’ve seen this in the Hezbollah pager operation, the 12-Day War, Midnight Hammer, and most recently on Shabbos Zachor.

The converse lesson —never to be caught by surprise — is not as easily learned. Israel’s most devastating losses, in 1973 and 2023, came when it let its guard down.

Thankfully, the Iranians haven’t learned the lesson either. They were caught napping in June, didn’t anticipate the B-2s during Midnight Hammer, and somehow, despite weeks of saber-rattling, just let their guard down again and put all their targets in one room.

Fool Me Once

In 1967, all that was necessary to achieve surprise was knowledge of the enemy’s habits, and flying low enough over the water to avoid radar. Egypt’s air force pilots predictably parked their planes in plain sight and went to breakfast at 8 a.m. every morning, while their commanders were stuck in traffic. Get your attack planes to show up at 8:15, and they’ll find sitting ducks in a row.

But how does one catch an adversary off-guard in the modern era, when satellite intelligence, open-source websites, and the media track every movement? When forces have been openly building up in the region? When talking heads have scrutinized every word, wink, and whisper for weeks, for any indication of strategy? How do you surprise an enemy you’ve been threatening for months?

Most importantly, how do you fool him at the same game for the third or fourth time?

Counterintuitively, it can actually be easier.

Surprise doesn’t mean keeping the other side in the dark; it means causing them to operate under false assumptions. It’s not about hiding information, it’s about communicating misinformation. When information is more easily fed, the diet can actually be simpler to manipulate.

All it really takes to achieve surprise is an arrogant adversary, and that seems to be the only kind we have.

Before the 12-Day War and US attack on Fordow, Iranians watched a show of dispute and strife between US president Donald Trump and Israeli premier Bibi Netanyahu. It fed right into their cocky narrative that Israel would never try any monkey business without US approval.

Israel furloughed many personnel just before the opening blows in June, and then Trump declared a vacation just before he ended Maduro’s.

Building off the pattern, I wrote an article in these pages describing potential indicators to an imminent attack on Iran, although I doubted the same trick would work yet again — surely Iran’s military planners had seen the pattern too.

Elaborate Deception

Surprise boils down to patience versus arrogance.

Netanyahu and Trump didn’t bother with the “daylight between them” narrative this time, or even really with the pretend drawdown and vacation. They took advantage of the full-court international coverage to create the impression of a president scared to pull the trigger.

How do you cast the most resolute president in recent memory as indecisive? How do you paint the man who snatched another country’s president from his bed, and sent B-2s down your chimney, as nervous Nelly? How do you appear scared while moving hundreds of assets to an attack posture?

Just let the media do its thing.

TACO or Act One?

Admit it: You were fooled, too.

Could it all have been an elaborate scam? Weeks of waffling. Public claims that “Iran really wants to make a deal,” which Iran knew wasn’t true. Blustery tweets that read like a bluffing man with no aces in his hand. Domestic pearl-clutching about how a military entanglement would play in the midterms.

The president’s closest Republican allies were certainly fooled. Conservative pundits like Mark Levin complained loudly about Trump’s willingness to negotiate and “give peace a chance,” arguing that there was no one to talk to, and nothing to talk about.

The president’s notorious reputation for bravado and thin skin added to the image of a man overmatched, outplayed, casting about frantically for a way down from a tree that looked much taller from the top.

We know the Iranians believed it, because they played on it. Their rhetoric focused not on winning, but on creating bad optics. Senior Iran analyst Dror Balazad reports that de facto Iranian leader Ali Larijani targeted American oil infrastructure and real estate holdings to create “economic disruption and internal pressure.”

Trump’s Board of Peace kickoff helped distract, coloring the illusion that he was loath to jeopardize his Nobel dreams by upsetting the regional Gaza apple cart.

Set the Lure

The Wall Street Journal and Israeli sources report that Trump and Netanyahu agreed weeks ago on a decapitation strike to eliminate Khamenei and IRGC leaders in the first blow of the war. Sure, Trump was willing to give peace a chance; but that likely wasn’t the only goal — he understood how miniscule that chance was.

The real gamble was for Khamenei and his achashdarpanim to get complacent. With complacency comes carelessness; careless people might just gather in a room like eggs in a concrete basket.

Trap laid, they waited.

Trump’s SOTU address may have been what did the trick. Conservatives crowed about every minute — except the weak words on Iran. “He failed to make the case against Iran,” Trump sycophant Sid Rosenberg lamented on his radio show.

Or was it an encore in the TACO act?

CIA and Israeli military intelligence had been tracking Khamenei’s movements for months. They picked up plans for a meeting of Khamenei and senior IRGC commanders days after the SOTU.

“Israel and US military intelligence agencies had long been monitoring and waiting for the rare opportunity when Iran’s senior political and military leaders would hold a meeting,” the WSJ wrote. “Intelligence authorities detected not one but three meetings involving Iran’s top leadership.”

Planners opted to add to the surprise factor by launching in broad daylight. The first of over 200 warplanes arrived in western Iran just before 10 a.m. Within an hour, Khamenei and forty of his top commanders were dead. The first blow knocked out IRGC Commander-in-Chief Mohammad Pakpour and chief security advisor Ali Shamkhani. Throughout the first day, Israel launched 1,200 sorties, while US forces carried out 900, including B-2 bombers carrying bunker-busters all the way from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Even former president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, waiting to install an even more hardline regime once the government fell, was eliminated.

“Tehran may have misinterpreted whether Washington had the will, this time, to do what the Trump administration was clearly communicating for weeks,” says Major General Scott Benedict (USMC, ret.) of the Middle East Institute. “Iran should not have been under any such delusions.”

Cloak and Bomber

Sure, some old-school subterfuge was at play as well. A suspicious photo leak showing a squadron of F-22s at Uvda Airbase in Southern Israel drew a lot of attention away from the 200 fighters being assembled at other installations, from which the strikes would originate.

IDF commanders even manipulated the Israeli version of the Pentagon Pizza Index for counterintelligence and misinformation, having all staff at IDF HQ in Tel Aviv park offsite for a few days, advertising empty parking lots to watchful enemy eyes.

“Although Iran was preparing for war, Israel succeeded in a tactical surprise,” an Israeli Defense Ministry official told the New York Times. “The IDF prepared for this with an operational plan developed over months, centered on an intelligence effort to identify an operational opportunity the moment senior regime officials convened.”

“What a way to start a campaign,” retired general Jack Keane told Foxnews. “This is the third time Israel fooled them… That alone is enough to break their will… just as Hezbollah never recovered [from the pager attack].”

Learn It This Time!

The key, going forward, is to stay humble.

All too often, short-term victories bring deadly arrogance. When a reporter mentioned to Prime Minister Netanyahu that the attack was launched while much of Klal Yisrael was in shul listening to the reading of Parshas Zachor, he said something along the lines of, “This year, we’re not just remembering to destroy Amalek — we’re actually doing it.”

Let’s just continue to pray for the rest of the kriah; the moment “when Hashem will give you respite from all the enemies that surround you.”

Right to Fight: The Case for War

Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder

The recent strikes on Iranian terrorist infrastructure have predictably revived the familiar debates about “preemptive” self-defense under international law and the president’s power to use force without prior congressional authorization.

But those debates often miss the practical, fact-bound question that actually matters: Was the United States responding to a speculative future risk, or to an ongoing campaign of hostile action that had already crossed the line? That distinction is what drives the analysis under both international and domestic law.

First, the international frame. Article 51 of the UN Charter preserves a nation’s “inherent right” of self-defense if an armed attack occurs. In practice, where a state confronts a continuing pattern of force, it may treat the series as meeting the “armed attack” threshold and act to prevent the next strike, so long as its response is both necessary and proportionate.

Since 1979, Iran has waged a sustained campaign — often through proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis — against US personnel and interests. A 2019 Pentagon estimate attributed 603 US servicemember deaths in Iraq to Iran-backed forces. In 2020, Iran fired ballistic missiles at US bases, injuring more than 100 American troops. In 2023 and 2024, Iran-backed groups launched more than 170 attacks on US positions in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, killing and injuring Americans.

In addition, US authorities have disrupted multiple Iranian assassination plots targeting American officials, and Iran-linked actors have also been tied to several cyber operations targeting US institutions — including attacks on banks, hospitals, water systems, and other critical infrastructure.

Nor did this pattern end after last June’s confrontation. This past November, an Iran-linked strike on Iraq’s Khor Mor gas field hit a US-funded facility. In January, Iranian state television broadcast threats to kill the sitting US president. And in February, Iraqi forces foiled an attack on Camp Taji, a base hosting US troops. As it relates to immediacy and urgency, according to US officials, in the hours leading up to Operation Epic Fury, the US had indicators that Tehran was preparing to launch a strike against American assets in the region. The president decided he was going to act to prevent those launches from occurring.

Self-defense is not judged in a vacuum; public threats, operational patterns, and proxy architecture all inform the necessity, imminence, and proportionality analysis. This is why the current strikes fit within the logic of Article 51: when a state confronts an ongoing campaign of attacks, it may act in self-defense to protect its people and its interests.

That very same reality also explains the domestic legal authority. Article II of the Constitution makes the president commander in chief for a reason: When force must be used quickly and quietly, the Framers very practically vested operational control in a single executive. For decades, executive-branch lawyers in both parties have articulated a consistent principle: The president may use force when he reasonably determines it serves important national interests and does not rise to the level of a major, prolonged “war” in the constitutional sense.

This is neither novel nor partisan. After striking Iran-backed militia targets in Syria, President Biden cited Article II at home and Article 51 self-defense internationally, explaining the action was needed to protect US personnel and deter further attacks. President Obama made similar arguments in the campaign against ISIS, and President Clinton did so in operations such as Desert Fox and Kosovo.

The pattern reflects the constitutional design: the president acts to protect the nation in the moment; Congress decides whether — and on what terms — the United States stays in for the long haul. The Constitution does not require the president to pause mid-crisis so Washington can stage a procedural morality play.

And then there’s the line you hear all the time: “Okay, but why is this our problem? Isn’t this Israel’s fight?” The above-mentioned legal framework also answers the broader “why” question. This is our problem because the US interests at stake are direct. A nuclear-armed Iran would box in US options; embolden kinetic and proxy aggression (and coercive cyber activity) under a nuclear umbrella; accelerate regional proliferation; and raise the risk of economic shock through maritime coercion. Even a temporary disruption in the Strait of Hormuz would hit American markets and consumers.

So when critics inevitably call the operation unlawful, they should have to explain why this framework does not fit. And when pundits and podcasters ask, “But how does this benefit Americans?” they should be pushed to articulate why these concrete considerations should not count.

Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder is CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a law professor at Touro Law School.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1102)