Israel has always had unfavorable relations with its neighbors. Right from the Biblical time of Exodus to their exile in Babylon, from the Suez crisis of late 1950s to the Six day war in 1967, Israelites have been on tenterhooks with their neighbors. They were happy that they got their bite off Egyptian pride in the occupation of Sinai. But the Yom Kippur war was going to change all that. That was the war which forced Israel to think not in terms of preset narratives but in a counterintuitive way.

When hostilities ended, Agranat commission was set up. Its primary motive was to find out the reasons of failure of IDF and Mossad to predict the attacks of the Syrian forces and Egyptian army on Golan Heights and the Bar Lev line respectively. The commission examined the causes of the unpredictability of the War. It also suggested certain protocols and SOPs for correct prediction of the future threats to the national security. The idea of the Tenth Man was born out of this commission. The war technically concluded with the Camp David Accords but the lessons from the commission were being incorporated in silence by Israel away from global attention. Golda Meir, the then PM of Israel, having recently steered the country out of the Munich tragedy, was determined to put a national security system in place which would be flawless.

Hence, a contrarian notion of Security was placed in the paradigm of IDF and Israeli Intelligence services especially in matters related to threat perception, detection and counterintelligence. If nine people came to the same conclusion about a scenario, then it became the duty of the tenth man to dig into the contrary opinions.

The tenth man must investigate based on the assumption that the other nine are wrong. If the nine have different but inherently same notional idea of any situation, then the tenth man will examine a totally different possibility. This approach itself filters out any scope of miscalculation in terms of threats to National security.

This provides a perfect learning outcome for India. For this a strong political will for the right necessary action and acceptance of past failures are required. But, we still have not made public the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report of the 1962 war. (This report was prepared by Lt. Gen. Henderson Brooks and Brigadier General Premindra Singh Bhagat.) It is still dubious at best to guess, whether we have been able to fill the security gaps exposed in 26/11 or Gurdaspur, Pathankot or Uri attacks.

It becomes all the more relevant in the context of the current global pandemic. What no other adversary could do since WWII, a virus did that to an Aircraft carrier strike group of the Superpower-leader of the free world. This proves that pandemic scenarios can never be put on the losing side of a zero-sum game in the national security equation. The tenth man principle can help countries to anticipate the course of action in such scenarios with unpredictable outcomes.

It behooves anyone in the security structure of India to consider the depth and reach of the fifth column planted by hostile states, given the recent expositions of the links in the 2001 parliament attack. To identify the intentions of such hostile elements, tenth man principle can be of great help. An important criterion for success of the Tenth man idea is to promote different points of view of any issue or problem. A major setback with the current situation in India is that multiple opinions are discouraged at best. It makes examining an issue through a diametrically opposite assumption and opinion farfetched and impossible.

Friendship with countries like Israel should not be wasted over rabble-rousing or one-man showmanship; instead, it should be used for learning, internalizing, and implementing some principles like “Tenth man” for the benefit of India.