The Problem With Managing: Why Wartime Governance Is Its Own Crisis

A former Israeli defense official has crystallised a tension that wartime leaders routinely sidestep: the assumption that managing through a conflict is the same as governing through one. It is not, and the distinction matters enormously for what comes after the shooting stops.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanamiddle-east5-minute read25 Apr 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On 25 April 2026, Brigadier General (Reserve) Ram Aminach, who previously headed the budget division at Israel's Ministry of Defence, delivered a warning that cuts through the routine language of wartime governance. The government's posture toward ongoing conflict — the phrase he cited was "we'll manage during the war" — does not constitute a workable strategy, he argued. It constitutes a category error.

The distinction matters more than it might appear. Managing implies containment: keeping systems functional, avoiding catastrophic failure, maintaining the appearance of normalcy within constrained parameters. Governing implies direction: allocating resources toward defined outcomes, building institutional capacity for the world that emerges when the guns fall silent. The two approaches can coexist in the short term. Over months or years, they diverge sharply — and the divergence carries costs that often go unexamined until the crisis subsides.

The Arithmetic of Extended Operations

Wartime budgets are, by definition, emergency instruments. They redirect capital from civilian infrastructure, social services, and long-term investment toward immediate security requirements. When that reallocation becomes the default rather than the exception, the civilian base that ultimately funds the military effort erodes beneath it. A defence force sustained by a contracting economy eventually faces the same resource constraints it sought to resolve through force.

Aminach's background in defence finance gives his warning a specific weight. Budget offices are institutions calibrated to track exactly this kind of drift — the slow migration of resources from structural investment to operational maintenance, the accumulation of deferred maintenance costs, the gap between what budgets actually fund and what institutional capacity requires to sustain itself. That he frames the "manage during the war" posture as insufficient rather than merely costly suggests the structural damage is already underway.

The Telegram channel Witness Force reported Aminach's remarks on 25 April 2026, framing them around the intersection of Israeli and Iranian strategic positioning. But the underlying problem is not specific to any single conflict theatre. It is a pattern visible across every extended military engagement of the modern era: the moment when managing the war begins to hollow out the state that is waging it.

What Managing Looks Like in Practice

Emergency governance typically proceeds through a series of accretions. New authorities are granted to executive institutions; oversight mechanisms are streamlined or suspended; procurement processes are expedited; civilian regulations are relaxed. Each individual measure may be justified on its own terms. Taken together, they restructure the relationship between state and citizen in ways that do not automatically reverse when the emergency ends.

This is not a hypothetical concern. Scholars of comparative governance have documented how extended conflicts reshape state institutions in ways that outlast the fighting. Ministries designed to manage short-term crises develop bureaucratic reflexes optimised for their own perpetuation. Personnel with wartime experience advance faster than those with reconstruction expertise. Planning documents, procurement contracts, and interagency committees normalise around the conflict's continuation. The state's own machinery becomes invested in the status quo.

What distinguishes Aminach's warning from the usual grumbling of defence bureaucrats is the specificity of his target: not the decisions made within the war, but the decision not to plan beyond it. "We'll manage during the war" is not a strategy at all. It is an absence of strategy, dressed in the language of pragmatism. And pragmatism that refuses to grapple with structural consequences tends to produce those consequences anyway, just without the institutional tools to address them.

The Reconstruction Deficit

Every modern conflict produces a reconstruction gap — the distance between the institutional state that existed before hostilities began and the institutional state required to sustain peace afterward. The gap is inevitable; the scale of it is not. States that enter reconstruction planning early, even while fighting continues, consistently outperform those that treat reconstruction as a post-war problem to be addressed from scratch.

The reasons are straightforward. Infrastructure investment requires lead time. Civilian industrial capacity cannot be stood up immediately; supply chains that atrophy during conflict do not restore themselves automatically. Human capital disperses under sustained pressure — educated populations emigrate, vocational training pipelines collapse, institutional knowledge walks out the door when workers retire or are displaced. Addressing these deficits after the fact means beginning reconstruction from a lower baseline, which compounds the difficulty of maintaining domestic consensus for the peace settlement itself.

Israeli governance operates within a particularly compressed version of this dynamic. The country's small population, high per-capita defence expenditure, and the existential framing of security threats all concentrate pressure on the civilian economy. Managing through an extended conflict is not merely administratively inconvenient; it directly constrains the resources available for the deterrence architecture that prevents the next conflict. A state that cannot govern effectively during war will struggle to prevent the conditions that produce the next one.

The Stakes of Refusing to Plan

Aminach's warning is, at its core, a warning about compounding costs — the kind that do not register in daily headlines but accumulate in balance sheets, institutional capacities, and demographic trajectories until they produce sudden, sharp crises that appear, misleadingly, to have no obvious cause.

The "manage during the war" posture treats the conflict as a parenthesis: a bounded interval during which normal governance rules are suspended, to be resumed intact when circumstances permit. What the historical record suggests is that the parenthesis tends to expand. Conflicts that were expected to be brief become protracted; protracted conflicts become generational; generational conflicts reshape the institutions and populations involved in ways that make the old framework of normalcy permanently unavailable.

The alternative — governing through the war, rather than merely managing it — requires acknowledging that the conflict will have consequences that extend beyond its immediate military logic. It requires investment in civilian resilience alongside military capacity. It requires planning for reconstruction while hostilities continue. It requires treating the state itself as an asset to be preserved, not an instrument to be used until it breaks.

That is a demanding standard, and it is one that wartime political incentives systematically discourage. The political logic of conflict favours the short term: present costs are visible and attributable, while future deficits are diffuse and deniable. "Managing" is the path of least resistance. The fact that it is also the path toward long-term institutional deterioration is a cost that typically surfaces only after the crisis has passed — when the reconstruction bill arrives, and the institutions left to pay it have been hollowed out by the years of merely getting by.

This publication noted the Aminach framing as a corrective to the more common emphasis on battlefield developments and ceasefire negotiations, which tend to treat governance capacity as a backdrop rather than a variable with independent causal weight.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/wfwitness/4823