inside the idf’s supersecret elite brain...

4/6/2016 Inside the IDF’s SuperSecret Elite Brain Trust The Tower

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Inside the IDF’s SuperSecret Elite Brain Trust

Over the past 40 years, members of one of the IDF’s most elite and secretive unitshave been behind many of Israel’s greatest military and scientific breakthroughs.

One of the most dangerous weapons aimed at Israel can’t fire a shot, but Israelis areterrified of it: Tunnels.

Before the 2014 Gaza war, the international community demanded that Israel allow concrete into Gaza,despite Israel’s objections. As Israel feared, Hamas then used that material for terrorist purposes, digging anetwork of underground passages, including many that crossed into Israeli territory. Israel knew the tunnelswere there, but did not know exactly how to deal with them.

When terrorists began to emerge on the Israeli side of the border during the war, however, it became veryclear very quickly that the tunnels were a major strategic problem and a public relations nightmare.

After the war ended, global leaders – desperate to stop the fighting for fear their own Arab populations wouldtake to the streets and accuse them of not doing enough to protect the people of Gaza – swore up and downthat if the world gave Hamas construction materials to rebuild the strip, they would not be used to dig suchtunnels again.

At the same time, a special Knesset committee began investigating why the threat had been ignored byIsrael for so long and what could be done about it now.

Scientists and engineers in the public sector and the IDF made various proposals: Flood the border withwater from the Mediterranean. Sink steel walls 100 feet underground. Create special monitoring sensors.Call in geologists to get their thoughts. Some joked that Israel should hire Hamas to build the Tel Avivsubway in order to keep them occupied.

If any official plan came out of those meetings, it’s still a closely guarded secret.

Two years later, the great underground fear that world leaders told Israel not to worry about began tointensify.

Israelis living in towns and villages near Gaza swear they can hear the sounds of digging beneath theirhomes. They live in fear that terrorists will emerge and kill them, a friend, or a family member; or worse,kidnap them and bring them back to Gaza.

Unfortunately, this fear is not unreasonable. Israeli intelligence officers report that, during the war, evidencewas found indicating that Hamas intended to use its tunnels to kidnap dozens of Israelis. Such evidenceincluded plastic handcuffs and tranquilizers at the end of a tunnel explored not long before the war came toan end.

Since the beginning of this year, however, something funny began to happen to the Hamas tunnels. Theterrorist group reported that five tunnels had collapsed in quick succession, killing several Hamas members.

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Did Israel do it? When asked, the IDF used the standard “no comment” it often uses when enemies suddenlydie.

The better question might be: Is Israel capable of collapsing the tunnels as Hamas builds them?

The answer is, probably.

And there is a strong possibility that this is because of a single and very special unit within the IDF. While theIsraeli army has no shortage of elite troops and elite thinkers, one unit has become known for being at thetop of the pyramid: Talpiot.

Talpiot’s mission isn’t to learn how to fight. It is to learn how to think. Its recruits, nowreferred to by many in the Ministry of Defense as the IDF’s top priority (even more thanfinding and training fighter pilots), must agree to stay in the army for at least ten years.This is substantially above the norm of three years for men and two years for women, andthere’s a good reason for it.

Fighting is of course a major component of the Talpiot program. Many graduates go on to command elitetroops in the field, command naval vessels, and even fly F16s in combat. But mission number one can bedescribed as intellectual.

This was the case from the moment the unit was founded. Talpiot was created by two professors who werehorrified at Israel’s setbacks in the opening days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After Israel’s stunning victoryin the 1967 SixDay War, Israel began to lose its military edge. France, Israel’s main weapons supplier, hadabandoned the country in the face of threats from Arab nations. Israel was left without a military sponsor,while the Soviet Union showered the Arab states, especially Egypt and Syria, with stateoftheart weaponsand military training. When the two countries launched a surprise attack on Judaism’s holiest day, the resultwas devastating. While Israel eventually turned the tide and won the war, it was a shrill wakeup call thatended Israel’s selfconfidence and sense of security.

The army had been torn apart in the war. Israel lost a fifth of its air force, more than a thousand tanks hadbeen destroyed, and the casualty rate was shocking, with almost 3,000 soldiers killed and 8,000 wounded.Israel could not survive as a nation if it was forced to go through a war like that every few years. A new pathwas needed.

The two professors, Shaul Yatziv and Felix Dothan, began a campaign to convince the IDF that it needed tocome up with a better way to supply itself with the research, development, and manufacture of newweapons. The country’s founding father David BenGurion had always said that Israel’s military abilities hadto be far ahead of its enemies’ in quality, as it would never be able to match them in quantity. Dothan andYatziv began applying that formula to weapons development. But the army wasn’t in the mood to listen.



Prof. Felix Dothan, a Hebrew University professor who cocreated the Talpiot program.

Things began to change in 1977. Menachem Begin was elected prime minister. For the first time in thehistory of modern Israel, the previously dominant Labor party was in the opposition, and the rightwing Likudwas now in charge. Change quickly spread to the army. In particular, Gen. Rafael “Raful” Eitan wasappointed IDF chief of staff.

More than his predecessors, Eitan saw tremendous value in education. To this day, an organization thathelps Israel’s underprivileged teenagers get an education and find a trade while serving in the army creditsEitan with its founding. And the chief of staff approved another educational program: After first hearing aboutTalpiot in a briefing, Eitan was sure that it was exactly what the army and the country needed.

Soon after taking office, he asked his secretary to call Col. Benji Machness, who had run an Air Force schoolfor pilots studying physics. Thirtyfour years later, Machness described the scene: “I opened the door andRaful was waiting with General Israel Tal, sitting there. Tal was our top tank general; he invented theMerkava [tank]. I said, ‘Hello, Gen. Eitan, I’m Benji Machness.’ Eitan replied, ‘Of course, I know you.’ He



didn’t even ask me to sit. He said, ‘Outside my door are two professors. I think they have a good idea. Goand do it. That’s all.’”

Dutifully, Machness left and found the two professors waiting anxiously. He told them, “Your project has beenaccepted, let’s get to work.” Yatziv and Dothan looked incredulous. “That’s it?” they asked. Machness saidyes, and the planning stages of Talpiot began right there.

The original idea was to model the Talpiot program – named for the strong turrets referenced in the biblicalSong of Songs – after the Palo Alto Research Center, commonly known as PARC. PARC was set up by Xeroxin 1970 to use advanced technology to solve problems and meet the challenges of the future. After a shortperiod, the professors came to the conclusion that Israel and the IDF did not have the kind of resourcesXerox had. They needed help.

Gen. Rafael “Raful” Eitan (center), the IDF Chief of Staff who approved the Talpiot program.

So Dothan and Yatziv took their idea to Israel’s universities. They asked the Technion, Tel Aviv University,and Hebrew University to host the program in cooperation with the army. Again, they hit a brick wall. Theuniversities had to be convinced that they would have some control of the program and not simply hand outdegrees to undeserving students.

After months of negotiations, Hebrew University was the first to agree. Deals were signed and cooperationbegan.



Dothan began to take the lead role in the program. But by his own admission, he wasn’tquite sure whom to recruit. He used IQ scores, high school grades, andrecommendations from high school principals. He focused on finding recruits from theIsrael’s academic centers in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.

In the early years of Talpiot, the curriculum was simple: Physics, math, and computer science. These remainthe program’s main priorities. The first several classes were made up of about 25 recruits. None of them hadever heard of the program before, as it was not only new but, at this point, top secret.

The opening years of the program were difficult for the founders, the army officers in charge, and the youngrecruits. The founders, and especially Machness, saw the students first and foremost as soldiers. They woreuniforms to their classes at Hebrew University and took shifts guarding Talpiot’s section of the HebrewUniversity campus.

At first, the administrators were overzealous. They gave the cadets too much to learn in too short a time,the expectations were too high, and the pressure was too great. The firstyear dropout rate hit 35 percent.

Then the program came under fire for not finding “team players.” Put simply, the highIQ recruits oftenlacked social skills.

One of the most famous Talpiot graduates is a man named Eli Mintz, who went on to found Compugen, acompany that did industrychanging work in the field of DNA sequencing and is still listed on the NASDAQstock exchange. Mintz characterizes the early Talpiot recruits as “very strange. It was twenty eccentric nerdsput together and then told by army officers – who often had no idea what we were working on or how wewere doing it – to ‘get along.’”



David Kutasov, an early graduate of Talpiot who is now a physics professor at the University of Chicago.

“Getting along” proved to be a formidable challenge. “Like many others in the program, I had come fromenvironments where I thought I was always the smartest,” Mintz confessed. “So when you’re finally in a placewhere you think, ‘Wow, I’m not the smartest guy in the room,’ it was great. It was a new challenge.” Lookingback, he believes that learning to work with others who were smarter than him was the most important thingTalpiot taught him. “But not everyone was programmed to think like that,” he said, “and it led to personalityproblems.”

Those “personality problems” would soon be addressed. After a few years, Talpiot recruiters added a crucialnew phase to the process. They wanted to see which candidates could work well as a group underchallenging conditions. To this day, these tests are performed by Talpiot graduates. They consist, forexample, of working with team members to come up with as many ways as they can think of to use a bicycleor a shoe. Others include using children’s building blocks to construct something. All of this occurs undertight deadlines, sometimes in hot rooms. To add tension and pressure to the situation, former Talpiotgraduates are lurking behind, recording every move and every word – or at least the candidates are made tofeel like they are.

By Talpiot’s sixth or seventh year, recruiting became more formalized. Professors Yatziv and Dothan knewwho they were looking for and how to find them. And by then there were actual Talpiot graduates with abigger say in the program. That was valuable because their tangible experience led to practical revisions inthe selection process.

Then came the idea for “The Interview.”



The idea came about because, ten years into the program, the army’s needs werechanging. Talpiot’s officers had to make adjustments to their list of desirable qualities.Teamwork was becoming an even bigger part of the equation, because different kinds ofsystems had to be integrated into different units and the army needed young talent tomanage these projects. They needed natural leaders who were also booksmart andpatriotic.

Picking the right 20 or 25 people was becoming more and more important. “Suddenly, we had to start lookingfor a new combination of attributes,” said Avi Poleg, a Talpiot graduate who later became its leader. Inaddition to high cognitive scores and scientific thinking, they were looking for people who could lead: Officertesting and personality exams became crucial.

“I wanted to check motivation, moral value, and, of course, personality,” Poleg said.

We would run intense social simulations in which the candidate was put into a highpressure leadership position. How do you try to motivate your classmates who might befalling behind? How do you deal with those who refuse to take part in a certain project oractivity? My goal here was to see how candidates coped with social issues, leadershipissues, and paying attention to everyone. I needed to be confident that the candidates Ipicked would be creative, intelligent, and inventive with the ability to move from one areato another, and be able to take leadership in a group while being part of that group. It wasalso critical to get a sense of how cadets might act when having to deal with someoneabove them and below them. Finally, I also needed a sense of their moral values andwillingness to make a contribution to their country and society. I was always confident Icould move the right students forward.

The way to find such qualities was “The Interview.” The procedure itself was a trying 30 minutes to an hour inlength. After narrowing down a list of one year’s Talpiot candidates from 5,000 to about 100, the finalapplicants would be forced to sit in a cold university hallway for hours over several days, while one by one,they would be called in to a small room. When they entered, they saw they were surrounded by highrankingarmy officers, as well as professors from Hebrew University who helped teach courses and coordinated withthe army.

The officer leading the interview might say something to the nervous teenager like “tell me somethinginteresting that you saw last month that you didn’t know, what you learned about it, and how you increasedyour knowledge. Maybe an interesting instrument, an interesting science program you watched on television,an interesting article you read about science.” This was just the starting point. Poleg says he would use theanswer to evaluate the level of the candidate’s curiosity and how far he’d go to satisfy that curiosity. “I waslooking to see if the candidate made a real effort to investigate,” he says.

Poleg believed that an incisive committee interview gave him the best sense of the candidate. In onememorable instance, a candidate had not done particularly well on previous tests, but Poleg gave him asimulation.



He started to flourish….he was so enthusiastic and really animated. “I would do this and Iwould do that…” It was as if he were suddenly conducting an orchestra; as if he hadfound his voice right then and there in front of the committee. This was exactly theanswer I was looking for. He has it! I viewed the committee in part as a trainer to pullsomething out of a candidate, and I used similar methods as a commander and educatoronce those potential recruits were in the program.

From 1985 on, women were also recruited for the program. Since then, scores of young women havesuccessfully graduated. When a young woman being tested told the committee she spoke Italian, they wereimpressed, because unlike English or Arabic, Italian is not a language most Israelis learn to speak. Uponhearing this, one member of the committee asked her, “How many people have seen Michelangelo’s statue‘David’ in the Galleria dell’Academia in Florence?”

Another candidate who was ultimately accepted says, “I was told, ‘Give me the name of a scientist that youlook up to and would like to emulate.’ I thought to myself, don’t pick Einstein, don’t pick Einstein, don’t pickEinstein…but I panicked and Einstein it was. I then proceeded to pretty much make up an answer, but thekey was to sound confident and competent. They all probably laughed at me after I left the room.”

Once the candidates have been accepted, they go to basic training for a few weeks, then hit the books forthree years. There are no vacations from the intense training. But there are times when the cadets leave theclassroom.

They visit dozens of army, air force, and naval units throughout the IDF in order to see the challenges facedby soldiers in the field. As Talpiot cadets go from unit to unit, they see what soldiers in the artillery units aredoing and learn how heavy a shell is. They learn how a fighter pilot completes his mission and about theweapons attached to the plane. They hit the sea with the Israeli Navy and train with paratroopers.

One Talpiot graduate remembers going back to his small town in Northern Israel and telling his friends, “I didyour training and your training and yours….” The goal is to create soldiers who have a unique understandingof both academic and field training, so they can take what they learned from both sides of the equation.

But while all Talpiot recruits do the mandatory physics, mathematics, and computer science coursescombined with mandatory unitbyunit military training, a few dozen Talpiot recruits go further than that.

For many young Israelis, defending their country and the Jewish people is part of thepassage to adulthood. Joining an elite army unit or the Air Force is a goal they set forthemselves and fantasize about for years. As a result, some of the 17yearolds havemisgivings about joining Talpiot. They think it means giving up their dreams of going intoelite combat units. But the Ministry of Defense and Talpiot’s recruiters assure them theynot only don’t have to give up on those dreams. In fact, they’re encouraged to pursuethem.

One example is a young man named Arik Czerniak. He has had enormous success in civilian life sinceleaving Talpiot. But while he was going through the approval process, he was wracked with doubts, becausehe had always wanted to be a fighter pilot.



As the day of his induction approached, he was invited to come to Talpiot for early testing. When he gotthere, the officers asked him what he wanted to do. Czerniak was forthright: “‘I want to be a fighter pilot.”

“No problem,” they laughed, “you can do both.”

After each testing session and interview, Czerniak would ask, “Can I still be a pilot?” He wanted to make surethe answer would always be yes, and it was. “They were true to their word,” Czerniak recalled.

While he was waiting to hear back from Talpiot, he accepted an invitation to try out for flight school. “In theair force, the training was seven days, with 600 people,” he said.

They put you in uniform. You spend the day running around, following orders. There’s noEnglish word for what we had to do, but it translates to “advancement by the legs.” Yousee that tree? You have twenty seconds to run there and back: GO! You didn’t make it. Doit again! There were a lot of group activities and tests like digging holes, solving puzzles,hanging from monkey bars; everyone hangs and you see who falls first and last. There’sreally no sleeping – they woke us up after a twohour rest.

Czerniak made it past all the hurdles and was accepted into the Air Force program. But then he thought tohimself, “Thanks, guys, this is a good failsafe, but now I’m really hoping to get into Talpiot.” As he graduatedhigh school, he still didn’t have an answer. One day in the early summer, he was playing on his computerwhen the call came in. “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to Talpiot’s fifteenth class.” His first questionwas, “Can I still be a pilot?”

After completing his first three years in Talpiot and a degree from Hebrew University, Czerniak was expectedto do six months of research and development on radar systems for the F16. But the people running theflight school at that point said, “Enough is enough. If you want to be a pilot, you have to come now.” Thebureaucratic barriers were crossed, the documents were signed, and Arik Czerniak was off to start armyservice again from square one. (The Ministry of Defense later considered this a bad decision. In the yearsafterward, with few exceptions, Talpiot graduates would have to do some work in research and developmentbefore moving on to combat units.)

Czerniak learned to fly. He was certified for the F4 Phantom shortly before the plane was phased out. But hethen learned to fly training planes and now teaches pilots how to dogfight. A few times a month, he goes upto do battle drills. While it is unlikely that an Israeli pilot will find himself in that kind of closein combat due tothe use of advanced long range airtoair missiles, it is a skill all Israeli pilots must learn and practice. “Iftomorrow two F16s – one from Egypt, one from Israel – would get in close range there would be a dogfight,”he says. “The dogfighting I teach is like teaching someone to dribble. You’re not firing bullets, of course. Yourgoal is to take a picture of the other guy in your gun sights. You’re behind him, three hundred meters, he’ssquiggling in your gun sight, and it’s all captured on video. When you go down, you debrief to find out whowon, who lost, and why.”

To Czerniak, training pilots how to dogfight is a job similar to any other. He admits, however, to being angryin the rare instances when he loses.



Another Talpiot graduate has never lost in the air. (For security reasons, I won’t use hisname) After graduating from Talpiot, his superiors at the Ministry of Defense encouragedhim to go to flight school. Again there were bureaucratic hurdles to cross, but this fighterpilot managed to do so. His mission assignments are still classified, but he was activewhile Israel fought in Gaza in the south and against Hezbollah in the north, so it’s nothard to imagine the kind of work he was doing.

Several Talpiot graduates have served in naval combat units; others have commanded Israel’s fastmoving,heavily armed naval ships. The Navy is a particularly good fit for a Talpiot graduate, since it requiressomeone who can multitask extremely well. This includes being able to outthink and outstrategize anenemy, and understand navigation, complicated missile systems, and, perhaps most importantly, theelectronic countermeasures that are a ship’s main form of protection.

A recent head of Talpiot, also a former cadet, shied away from research and development. Instead, hewanted to hit the field in order to sign up for a special Air Force unit called Shaldag. He took his physics,mathematics, and computer science knowledge along with his machine gun to places we’ll likely never know.It was his unit’s job to paint targets from the ground with a laser so that pilots can more easily find anddestroy their targets from above. This kind of weapon is especially critical, because Israel is particularlysensitive to civilian casualties. Anything that makes a bomb hit its correct target in order to save civilian life isvery important.

Yet another Talpiot graduate had always wanted to enter “the real green army.” So after his unittounittraining and advanced study at Hebrew University, he became what is known as a “tank killer.”



Talpiot cadets in tank school.

While most of his classmates did their research and development assignments, he hit the dirt, literally. Hewas trained to lead small teams deep into enemy territory, hide for several days, and then destroy tanks withextremely accurate shoulderfired missiles that can hit their targets from miles away. The main weapon usedby this unit is called “the Tammuz.” “The missile is guided by a television control,” the young man in questionsays. “You have a camera at the head of the missile and you just maneuver the missile to the target. For me,it was a great combination of stateoftheart technology and a fieldfocused unit.” He’s now a lieutenantcolonel in the reserves, in charge of up to 400 men.

These four graduates of the program are shining examples of success, say officials high up in the Ministry ofDefense. They took their academic training straight into the battlefield, where they used that knowledge.Then, in many cases, they brought it home to the lab, where they can develop the weapons of the futurebased on their knowledge of both theory and real combat. Nobody knows what a combat soldier needsbetter than a combat soldier. And nobody can make and design better tools of war than people who havepersonally been in combat.

While many Talpiot graduates do go into battlefield units, many others defend Israel inless highprofile ways. Missile defense, for example, has become a major area of focusfor them. MAFAT – a Hebrew acronym that stands for the Administration for theDevelopment of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure – is in charge of making theweapons of the future. Later this year, Ofir Shoham, an early graduate of Talpiot, will stepdown as its head after six extremely successful years.



MAFAT was developed in order to give Israel the qualitative military edge it needs to survive, particularly inthe area of missile defense. It has developed systems like Arrow, David’s Sling, and the famous Iron Dome.The Arrow antiballistic missile system was designed to stop longrange missiles from countries like Iran.David’s Sling is just now becoming operational. Its goal is to stop the threat of mediumrange missiles like thethousands Hezbollah has pledged to fire at Israel. Iron Dome was developed to knock out the kind of shortrange projectiles fired from Gaza that have caused so much hardship in southern Israel.

Since coming to MAFAT, Shoham guided all three of these missile defense projects, using other Talpiotgraduates in research and development labs, and in the field. On his watch, Arrow and David’s Sling mademajor strides.

Iron Dome, however, changed Israel’s strategic thinking in the south. Instead of constantly being on warfooting along the Gaza border, the IDF can rely on the nine operational batteries deployed during Shoham’stenure. Iron Dome now has a 95 percent success rate, and the Ministry of Defense believes this can beincreased to 100 percent. This saves lives and resources, and allows the Israeli government the luxury of nothaving to send ground troops into Gaza to fight Hamas and other terror groups after each and every rocketbarrage.

Cybersecurity is another area in which Talpiot graduates have made their mark. In Augustof 2011, Eviatar Matania, known as “the right hand of Talpiot,” was appointed the head ofthe newly created Israel National Cyber Bureau (INCB), reporting directly to PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The INCB was set up to provide the prime minister with advice on managing this new and crucial threat,against which both defensive and offensive strategies are needed. The INCB is also charged with coming upwith ways to make life “continue as normal” if Israel is hit with a massive and successful cyberattack, just asthe Home Front Command is expected to do if and when Israel comes under physical assault.

Another reason for the creation of the INCB was to expand Israel’s lead over its enemies in the field of cyberwarfare. As Israel’s enemies grow their own cyber capabilities, the INCB must maintain the qualitative edgeso critical to Israel’s survival.

Matania was invited to a meeting of the Israeli cabinet in November 2011, shortly after he became head ofthe INCB. He told members of the government that cyberattacks are “a broad threat to human society.While this is a challenge to the state, it is also an economic opportunity. The more we invest in academia andindustry, the greater the return we will receive, from both economic and security perspectives.” PrimeMinister Netanyahu agreed, saying,

Israel is a significant force in cyberspace.…Just as we developed the unprecedented IronDome system that successfully intercepts missiles, we are developing a kind of “digitalIron Dome” in order to defend the country against attacks on our computer systems. TheINCB is designed – first and foremost – to organize defensive capabilities based oncooperation between three elements: Security capability, the business community andthe academic world.



In 2012, Matania built a national cyber situation room to assess threats launched against Israel from foreigncomputers. Its goal is to have one central place where Israel’s political leaders see the full picture of what isthreatening the state and what is being done to protect it. It is also where highranking military officers,government officials, and business leaders can come to share information.

In addition, the INCB works closely with Israeli software companies to protect the nation from the growingthreat of hackers working for hostile governments and terrorist groups, as well as lone wolves trolling theInternet.

Another of Matania’s initial goals was to create clear and direct links between the bureau and computerscientists working in Israeli industry and at top Israeli universities. This multisystem, multiorganization kindof project management is an approach Matania developed in Talpiot, where cooperation and sharinginformation are highly prized.

Eviatar Matania has wisely used the bureau to help advertise Israel’s prowess in global cybersecurity,creating thousands of jobs and billions of shekels in revenue. It also serves as an arm that cooperates withfriendly foreign countries and shares information about threats and enemies, much like Israel’s intelligenceagencies. The INCB also serves as a gateway for foreign investment in Israeli’s technology sector.

Talpiot graduates have also been at the forefront of creating new weapons for the average soldier in thefield, from better helmets to more powerful explosives. They have had a hand in every minor and majorinnovation that helps the IDF and Israel’s intelligence services.

An Iron Dome battery in action, November 2012.

One graduate named Matan Arazi became very interested in the capability of computers while he was a boygrowing up in Japan (his father was in the diplomatic corps). When it was time to return home and preparefor the army, Arazi set his sights on Talpiot. Years after leaving the army he said, “The most amazing thing



about Talpiot is that the tools you learn to use can really help you make a one percent difference in thebattlefield. Think about that. A one percent difference. An infantryman can’t make a one percent difference.Maybe a pilot in a small engagement concerning a major target can make that kind of difference, but [Talpiotalums] are doing it constantly, day by day, on many different projects. In many ways, we can be thedifference between life and death for hundreds or even thousands of people.”

To make a contribution like that, you first have to be confident. You have to believe something is possible,even if certain tasks seem impossible. The idea that “you can do anything” is instilled in Talpiot recruits. “Andif you can’t do it,” chuckles Matan, “you know that another Talpiot graduate either has or is on the verge ofdoing it. Nothing is impossible.”

While many of the men and women that make it through Talpiot would have been asuccess in life without the program, everyone agrees Talpiot gave them a tremendousadvantage once they left the army. First off, the Talpiot alumni network is a powerfulweapon. Graduates say they are never more than one degree of separation from anyanswer they need if they can’t find it themselves, and two degrees of separation from thefinancing they need for a new corporate startup, a partner, or an appropriate jobapplicant or recommendation.

As a result, Talpiot graduates have gone on to create dozens of successful corporations. Among them isCheck Point Software Technologies, founded by Marius Nacht in the Tel Aviv apartment of a friend’sgrandmother. It became a $15 billion company that now keeps much of the world’s computer systems andmobile networks safe behind a firewall. Compugen helps drug companies create more effectivepharmaceuticals through its oneofakind DNA sequencing process. Another early corporate success wasthe XIV storage system, developed by members of Talpiot’s fourteenth class and sold to IBM for a reported$350 million. Apple is another company that took advantage of a Talpiot creation – buying memory companyAnobit from Talpiot graduate Ariel Maislos for almost $400 million. Listings on U.S. exchanges and ninefigure exits have become the norm for Talpiotcreated startups.

The success of Talpiot isn’t a fluke. It’s a proven formula that has worked over and overagain for successful graduate after successful graduate. While the program itself and thereason for it – Israel’s security – can’t be emulated, many other aspects of it probablycan.

But it requires a new way of thinking – an Israeli way of thinking. A way of thinking that doesn’t put so muchpressure on immediate accomplishment and success. It’s a model where a subject is given the room andpermission to fail, so long as the student or employee learns from that failure.

David Kutasov was an early graduate of the program who became a physics professor. After spending timeat Princeton, he moved to the University of Chicago, where, he says, “I have the same job as SheldonCooper in The Big Bang Theory, the weird skinny guy. My job is to find out how the universe came intobeing.”

He also has an easy way to explain why Talpiot is so successful compared to the American model of eliteeducation.



A lot of kids I see these days – even at top American universities – are too conventionaland not original. In Talpiot, they beat it out of you and push you toward originality. Nowlet’s look at the American system. My daughter was admitted to MIT for engineering. Butof her class, only she wants to be an engineer. The rest want to get their MBA, but theystayed with the herd and applied to MIT. Another example: In Manhattan you need theright preschool to get to Dalton, to get to Harvard, to get to the right law school. Thesystem breeds unoriginal professionals, and it only gets you so far. It seems the mostimportant tech leaders in the US didn’t finish college at all. Steve Jobs dropped out. BillGates dropped out. Look at all these MBAs betting on credit default swaps. Didn’t anyoneask “Is this a good idea?” The system breeds followers and not leaders. On the otherhand, Talpiot consistently breeds leaders. Talpiot emphasizes originality. They bring inpeople to tell you about what’s going on in some branch of the army, then ask you howyou would do it differently. They keep challenging you all the time. It’s in the genes of theprogram.

Talpiot’s doctrine of high standards, high achievement, originality, and innovation has affected both Israeland the world. It has influenced all aspects of Israel’s military, but also civilian areas like health care,technology, and the sciences. It has produced a new intellectual and technological elite that has risen purelyon merit. As such, it is a tribute to the Jewish state’s ability to foster talent and accomplishment that bothprotects its people and gives something back to the world at large.

There is only one area where Talpiot’s accomplishments have yet to have an impact: Politics. Giveneverything it has accomplished so far, however, people should keep an eye out. It’s probably coming soon.

Inside the IDF’s SuperSecret Elite Brain Trust / Jason Gewirtz

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