JERUSALEM — A battle-hardened army officer with a reputation for plain speaking has been picked to become Israel’s next army chief, the office of the prime minister confirmed last night following the resignation of Lieutenant General Dan Halutz last week.

The choice of Major General Gabi Ashkenazi, 53, who fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and took part in the 1976 Entebbe raid, suggests a desire among the Israeli military elite to return to the well-established formula of relying on army officers to run the country’s military establishment.

General Halutz was the first airman to be trusted with the task and was accused of relying too heavily on airpower during last year’s war with Hezbollah.

Israel’s poor performance in Lebanon has caused a major crisis of confidence in the state’s military establishment. General Ashkenazi will be expected to turn that around when his appointment is confirmed by the cabinet.

He will also face growing concern over how Israel should confront Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

At Israel’s leading foreign-policy conference yesterday, James Woolsey, who served as CIA director in the early 1990s, said if diplomatic sanctions on Iran fail then wide-scale military action will be needed, not just surgical strikes.

“If we need to use force, we should do it decisively, not some surgical [attack] on some single, or two or three facilities,” he said at the Herzliya Conference.

Mr. Woolsey drew a parallel between modern Iran and 1930s Germany under Hitler, arguing they both shared a fundamental reliance on anti-Semitism. “The destruction of Israel is not the policy of Iran, but its essence.”

More moderate speakers, like Shimon Peres, said it would be wrong to exaggerate the importance of the Iranian crisis.

“I have been through 60 years of Israeli history … There have been harder days,” Mr. Peres said.