← Ask Haviv Anything
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Foreign.
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Welcome to episode three of Ask Believe Anything. I'm on the road and I had the unbelievable honor and privilege of running into Professor John Spencer. And we're going to talk today about the war in Gaza, and we're going to dive deep. We're going to talk about history and strategy and what it looks like in Gaza. A lot of questions have been asked to me, to many people, I, you know, to the discourse, to the general, sort of as a journalist. People have been asking me, what's the war like? Can you beat Hamas? Is the Israeli army unnecessarily cruel? What's the future look like? Are the Israelis winning? What do they need to do to win? Was it wise for Netanyahu to start talking about absolute victory? We're going to dive into all of that. Before we do that, A Cartfell thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode and a series of episodes that we are dedicating, that they have asked to dedicate to people who fell on October 7th. I want today to remember we, we've, we've all felt the tragedy over the past week of the be bus boys. And I want today to remember the other infant who died on October 7th. Mila Cohen was nine months old in Kibbutz Be'. Eri. She was shot by Hamas terrorists in the arms of her mother, Sandra, when they stormed the kibbutz on October 7. Her father, Oad Cohen, 43, and grandma Yona, 73, were also killed in her home. All three family members were laid to rest at the Ilkhon Cemetery in Petahtikva together. Mother Sandra survived. She was seriously wounded. Mila's brothers Liam and Dylan also survive. It's hard to go from that moment to just suddenly having an upfront, you know, happy conversation about these very terrible and sad things. But that's the moment we live in, and that's what the war ultimately is about. So Professor John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and studied. You've studied war for over a decade as a scholar, including going to battle zones. You have yourself served in the United States military. And so, you know, and you have written prolifically on, frankly, Israeli wars in ways that I have learned from. And so thank you very much for joining me. I want to just open up with the question of tunnel warfare. We're engaged now in a kind of war in Gaza in which it looks like, right, we've seen all these hostage release ceremonies that have been underway that Hamas used to humiliate the hostages to taunt the Israelis. I've seen more than a few Palestinian voices saying, Hamas, what are you doing right? You're driving the next stage of the war. Your own bravado and machismo is going to hurt Gaza going forward. You're radicalizing the Israelis. But the fact remains, and it's a simple fact that some of Hamas is still standing. And it's enough of Hamas after 17 months of war that whether it's only 20% or 30% of the organization that they can hunt down and kill in the streets of Gaza all of their dissidents who had the temerity and courage to stand up and speak against them over the course of the war. And that's the story of tunnels. They hid in those tunnels and they came out and survived. So I want to dive into that. But first you're here, you've written about this extensively. Was the Gaza war unprecedentedly or just overly problematic? People talk, activists talk about a genocide a lot. We've heard of, you know, just terrible images that have of, of dead children from the battlefield coming to people's phones through TikTok, through other channels of information. Do you understand the Gaza war as a war that has been far too brutal and cruel by the Israelis to be legitimate? How do you see that war fighting from the perspective of someone who studied war itself?
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Yeah, it's a, it's a really big question. I definitely do do not understand it as something that is excessive, disproportionate, backed by revenge, anything actually the framework of understanding war to include the laws of war, what puts limits on the really the limits of brutality, on war, which is violence, war is killing. And when Hamas invaded Israel on October 7th and did those awful things, Israel declared war in accordance with all the frameworks of international law against Hamas because they had been attacked in accordance with even the United Nations Charter, Article 51, the Self Defense war, and then has executed that actually very constrained and through. And I'm sure we'll talk about through the process. But I not only study war, I'm also a war researcher. So I had to go to Israel. I had to want to understand what happened on October 7th and then embed with the idea four times into Gaza to see how they were executing the war both from the strategic level. What were the goals? Were the goals just and legitimate based on what had happened on October 7 and was it being pursued within the matrix? I mean, you talk about the tunnels. So the really good question, because everybody wanted something to compare Gaza to, because as analysts Researchers, voices, people like frameworks to understand. So there is no comparison to what the IDF faced in Gaza for many reasons. One, just the proximity of the threat. Right, an existential threat. So it makes it really hard to compare to wars such as the ones that the United States have fought or others where you are expeditionary and you're thousands of miles from home. If you've never been to Israel, which a lot of commentators haven't, and understand the proximity of this and how the range to the enemy force that attacked to Israel, to the civilians and the threat that, that really factors into the framework. But really the.
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Can you give us a sense of that? In other words, the Viet Cong had tunnels, quite a bit of tunnels.
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Absolutely. The Viet Cong had tunnels.
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First of all, it's far away. Second of all, what's the kind of gap in scale between the Viet Cong and, for example, Hamas?
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So it's interesting, there's actually no known total kilometers or miles of the Viet Cong tunnel system. But I mean, there are tunnels around the world still today. North Korea, China has the great underground wall. There are military tunnels and Hezbollah tunnels. Thousands, you know, hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. But what is unique about Hamas's tunnels? Right, these 400 miles or 500 kilometers of tunnels underneath the Gaza Strip, which is a very small area, right? 25 miles long, 5 to 7 miles wide. You know, in Vietnam, there are locations where there are pervasive underground tunnels because it is an effective way to evade detection or even strike. So like in places like Cu Chi or even parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail were underground. But it wasn't the primary form or the center of gravity really, for the enemy to achieve their political goals, it's usually subordinate to whatever the political goal is and then the way they're trying to pursue it. For Hamas, digging of these tunnels, by my estimate, over a billion dollar investment with all the concrete, the steel, the actual manpower to do it over 20 years for the purpose of doing this, not for the purpose of, you know, military offensive and defensive purposes, but Hamas built all these tunnels underneath their own population. Really unique as well, even to modern times, because I've been in and out of Ukraine during the Russian illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the civilians sought refuge in, like the tunnels under, or the subway tunnels of Kyiv and Mariupol and other places, because that's normal in war as well. But these were built by Hamas for solely military purposes and for the sole purpose of hiding underneath their own population, which they don't allow into their tunnels. Most people don't understand that Again, there's so many differences here, but the tunnels, and I wrote about this is the first one that I've studied, where the tunnels are more important to the enemy than the surface, because usually you're trying to keep the attacking force from gaining your territory. But for Hamas, the tunnels are the primary way. That's where their fighters are, that's where the hostages are, and that's their primary way just to slow the IDF down and not allow the IDF to achieve their victory before the international community by sacrificing the civilians. Again, so many differences. As an urban warfare guy, though, one of the differences in Gaza compared to you, even battles in Vietnam, because there were urban battles in Vietnam, like the Battle Way, and the Tet offensive was really focused on urban areas. In Gaza, though Hamas invested billions of dollars and 20 years to preparing Gaza for war. That meant the IDF was facing something that most military or no military has ever faced. Most major urban battles of history, like Stalingrad, Aachen, Ortona, they're really meeting engagements of militaries in the urban area. And it's still a vicious, block by block destructive battle. But the enemy inside of the area, the enemy territory, hasn't had years and decades, even in this case, to prepare for that battle. I mean that this is probably the most militarized train terrain on the planet. Using the civilians as one of the primary mechanisms using the tunnels. All of these amounted to a challenge that the IDF would face. And I've been to Gaza and I think you have as well, where every step you take, there's more likely than not that there's a tunnel underneath you.
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There are estimates in that very tiny area that there are probably 500, excuse me, 5,000 shafts. And you talk about these billions. The entire GDP of the Palestinians is something like 10 billion a year, or, you know, at the very prosperous years it might rise to 15 or 18 billion. And so we're talking about a double digit percentage, and that includes the west bank, which is the bulk of the Palestinian economy. Hamas invested a double digit percentage of the entire economy of Gaza in building this thing. And as you said, not a single civilian has been allowed to step foot into it in 17 months of war. And so it's an extraordinary, it's an extraordinary thing. So I want to push forward the. Just really quickly your assessment, because I have to tell you, I talk with a lot of people and the activists who had screamed genocide on college campuses are uninteresting. These are the people who didn't scream genocide when a quarter million Yemenis were starved to death in a war six years ago. In other words, it's not really about the human suffering. It's about an ideological narrative running around in their heads. But I have met a lot of decent people. Most of the people talking about this stuff are decent, ordinary people who saw terrible images and just said, okay, great, fine, it's not genocide, but the Israelis are just cruel. In your assessment of this war, was there a less cruel way to do it? I ask as an Israeli who knows his country is going to live and survive just like Americans are very. If I tell Americans, you guys know, America did some things wrong, I've never met an American who then fell off their chair. Right. But just at a very clear level, I can take, I can take the abuse. Did Israel make mistakes morally in that battlefield? Not individual soldiers. Criminality. And Obviously you send 200,000 men cycling through a territory, there's going to be problems. I'm not. But was there a structural or systemic problem that you think we need to look into and seriously fix and seriously answer for?
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Not from a moral perspective, no. And I never got that. And I actually, I was accused of that as an American soldier after 911 deploying into Iraq and other places. This ideal that the soldiers and the governments have this ideal revenge, while that's human nature, actually in a professional force like the militaries of the United States and Israel, I've never gotten that from the soldiers executing their assigned missions. So the strategy inhumane? No. Strategy immoral? No, the strategy actually very clear. Here are the defined just goals. And then how do you pursue them? Justly within all the laws of war. And because the law of war is just really this framework. On top of that there are the ethical framework of the actual organization and the nation. You know, militaries of professional, you know, of democracies especially are a reflection of their society. So they follow not only the laws in the military laws, but their ethical codes within their people. And every time I've ever visited Israel in Gaza, that that ideal of, you know, revenge, dehumanization, all of these things wasn't there. And it's really hard to explain to people as they see the videos of wounded civilians or dead civilians that say, okay, Israel wanted this to happen. That's just a lack of information about how war works or how even any military. And I've gotten this Habib and I don't know if you've had him, but you know, the ideal, because people can't understand, they just already have a pre made conception of Israel. They already have A pre made conception of the IDF and say, okay, would somebody else do it differently? Right, so this is your question of, you know, could they have fixed or done something different? The United States had the United States and I don't even need to do change the numbers suffered intact like October 7th on our soil from an external enemy force that did all those horrible things and then started raining rockets down on our cities. You don't have to listen to me. Our four star general who is the advisor for two US Presidents, General Mark Milley said, can you imagine what the United States would have done? And I know even within what he's saying is we would have used overwhelming. People confuse overwhelming with disproportionate. Actually all militaries seek to use overwhelming force over the enemy to quickly remove the enemy's will to continue its goals. Because war is a contest of wills, but it's also the act of force to compel your enemy to do your will. The United States would have used overwhelmingly more force to achieve our goals. Same thing, stop the rockets, remove the enemy that just attacked us from power, bring our hostages home. And there are a couple historical examples, but no, but you want lessons. So from the inhumane, immoral or other things, I never saw that even from the false allegations of using starvation as a form of warfare, of targeting civilians, there's actually not been one actual case of the Israeli Defense Forces targeting civilians. Had there been civilians killed. Absolutely nobody can deny that. Just like other contested urban battles when the civilians are present in the urban area for number one thing there. So I have a lot of things that I think should have been gone differently. Some of these are outside of Israel's control. Some of these are hard lessons of basically complacency, changes in the idf, all of the culture and things like that that we'll talk about. But one of the other examples of no military has faced this is the situation where you have a civilian population and in my world that means non combatants, protected populations versus the actual combatants who are partaking in the hostilities, who can't leave the main combat areas because another country is saying no, refugees coming out and escaping. So this is the Egypt who I think has really hidden within its, what it's done in this war and what it's actually compounded the suffering of the Gazan people by saying, look, I know in every other situation you talked about the Yemeni war, you talked to Syrian civil war, the Ukrainian war, where countries take in temporarily refugees and you can talk about, you know, the status of those, but it's not normal for a neighboring country to go, look, I know you're really compacted in there and there your government started a war that it's not going to win, but you need to stay in there and, you know, basically be trapped in the combat areas. That is something that I think could have been changed. Is it? But it was outside of Israel's. This is. When you study wars, you have to understand, of course, the political construct, number one thing would have been, if any other nation would have done this, would have been to garner political power or political influence to say, look, Egypt, you need to allow civilians into the Sinai, into a displaced person's camp, so the United nations and everybody else can get access to them. Which is the whole thing about, you know, Israel's only legal, you know, not only, but one of the requirements in a situation like this is to allow free access of food to civilians, not to the enemy. And actually you can stop it if the enemy is taking it, the food. There are a lot of particulars here, and most people want to go back to October, November time frame when Israel is under attack by Hamas, but also by Hezbollah and there's rockets raining down and what's normal for a military to do and then get into proportionality and, you know, people like the New York Times who don't understand the laws of war and civilians, and civilians listen to them on Israel changed its rules according to New York Times from what it was doing before October 7th to after and anybody's ever studied any war. Of course, the amount of force and the way that the law to include proportionality works is in context of that operation. So this is the fallacy.
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So it's not a serious debate. It's not a serious discussion. So let me ask you this. Let me, let me sort of challenge Israeli leaders on this point. So you have a battlefield that is the most intensively concentrated. Well, frankly, it's. I mean, it's the single biggest, most intense use of civilians as a fundamental aspect of war. Maybe we would call it a force multiplier of the enemy or the enemy's strategy for survival. The destruction of Gaza was carefully planned in the simple sense that Hamas made it impossible for Israel not to go after them. And the only way to go after them was to cut through cities. And that was. That was done. Other. Others have done similar things in the past. No one has ever done it this intensively. And you seem to have a kind of vast conspiracy of. I don't mean literally a secret conspiracy, but everybody coming to rush to aid that Hamas strategy, the Egyptians not letting civilians out of harm's way. What are the Israelis supposed to do? Let Hamas walk away with this? Because the alternative is dead civilians. Hamas will kill our civilians and then survive it because they kill their own civilians or they're willing to have them die. So you have that situation. It is unprecedented in scale, in intensity. And you then have Israeli leaders who got up and set up certain expectations. They talked about absolute victory. They talked about a decisive win. I'm talking specifically about Benjamin Netanyahu. But other politicians and defense ministers and people have said this. And there's a clash here between a culture, an Israeli culture of war that many of us have served. I was in the infantry a lot. A lot of Israelis have some sense of how this works. When I got to basic training on the building at my basic training base were the words, which means translating is hard when you're in the middle of English. Speed, flexibility, and striving for contact. The Israeli army strives to be an army of maneuver, an army of direct. Of constant striving for contact with the enemy. An army of sort of shock engagements. And I've read Victor Davis Hansen's histories of Greek war, and it strikes me that that's the. That's the old Greek phalanx, right? These are farmers. They gotta get back to the farm, and there's a war. So what do you do? The phalanx meets the other phalanx and they have a shock engagement. A few die, one wins, one loses. Everybody goes back to the farm. War is the aberration. It should be quick, it should be shock. It should have a decisive victor. War hasn't been that. Arguably, World War II was essentially that. War hasn't been that for a very long time. War is now long. Grinding the baseline when you're talking about insurgencies. And it's not clear that the west has a culture of war that's able to respond to it. And the west is a big word. So let me just focus on Israelis. Israelis expect to win. Israelis expect from that long tradition of what war is and the Israeli experience of 67 and 73. And even the Lebanon War. There was then a long insurgency, but the actual war was fast and decisive. What the Mossad and the army did against Hezbollah in the north with the pagers and the ground operations in South Lebanon, Hamas are still standing, and there isn't that ability to reach victory. So have the Israeli politicians set up unwise expectations or. I guess what I'm asking is both to comment on that question of Leadership in wartime, but also is decisive victory available to us in Gaza? A lot of people say to me, you can't beat Hamas. And I tell them, no, no, there's a degradation war. The Americans did it in northern Iraq. Is victory available to us in Gaza?
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So if victory is not available to Israel, then I think the cycle of violence in the Middle east only continues. This is the, you know, the Islamic regime backed, you know, ring of fire terrorist organization from this area being able to attack Israel but not suffer the consequences. You mentioned Victor Hanson and I would recommend also General McMaster, both writing from Stanford about this. A lot of this is. So there's some very Israeli way of war culture issues here, but it's also a Western way of warfare over the last basically 40, 50 years on people's ideals of how wars can be fought, how they can be tiered and how they can be won. Absolutely. I believe that the right call was under this attack of October 7th by Hamas as an organization from the Gaza Strip and what all those contexts that that is the absolute victory is the only path to actually ending the cycle of violence from Hamas. This is even recent pieces by Victor Hansen, like if you start a war of aggression, which is really one of the biggest lessons of World War II and one of the biggest rules of the multinational, basically a world that has created this global international order is don't start wars of aggression, that's a war crime.
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That's a war crime defined, classic war crime.
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And there has to be consequences. So the ideal that Hamas could do this and that Israel doesn't have the right to achieve victory against the people that attacked Israel. Right. The power. So these goals that Israel set, returning the hostages and not negotiating for the return, returning the hostages, destroying Hamas as both a military and political organization governing the Gaza Strip, and then even the ideals of ensuring that this area never threatens Israel again. Absolutely, that's achievable. And it is actually, and this is a problem where people that are anti war believe that if you just, you know, give them, which is not even what they're asking in the west, we believe that Hamas is asked for certain things like a two state solution. And Hamas has never actually asked for that or you know, prosperity for his people, all these things. Absolutely, Israel has the right to achieve victory. And it is the actual, the history of war that that's the solution to being attacked. If you start a war, you lose a war, you pay consequences or other people will see the benefits of taking hostages, attacking Israel and violent war crime attacks. And then you get benefits out of it. No, you, you, there are consequences. So that this global international order is don't start a war, but you can also lose a war. So it's almost like you turn your question reverse. Can Israel achieve victory? Absolutely, 100%. Lots of frameworks on how to do that. Some of them unavailable to Israel because of the international political context. And there's a thinking problem. But if it's not possible, then people really just want these cycles of violence to continue. And, and this is where people like the historians like Victor Hansen and McMaster or Sir Andrew Roberts are saying, look people, this is a really a rot. This is a rot in liberal democrats societies which believe that wars can be not won and that there are these other ways to win wars. This is lastly, and I know I go along with my answers, is that the fallacy that you can't defeat an ideal like this, like Hamas is an ideal? No. Hamas was a governing authority of an autonomous region which Israel left by representation of what it Hamas was able to build. Israel left. That's not an ideal. That's a political organization with power and a military. I can absolutely defeat that. You worry about defeating the ideologies like Nazism, isis, Imperial Japan, after victory.
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Victory is available to us then. So I want to walk through two things. One actually a three point plan. We're gonna, we're gonna advise the Israeli generals right now. What did we do right? Because we did quite a bit right. A huge percentage of Hamas is destroyed and their leadership. And we've had all these signals of weakness all throughout. The Israelis said, you can't release three live hostages this week and three next week. You have to release six this week. And Hamas agreed every single time. The Israelis have actually made a demand of Hamas. They're desperate to hold the ceasefire. And that desperation to hold a ceasefire wasn't true back in November 2023 when they broke the ceasefire and went off to war and to hiding in their tunnels. So there is a desperate search by them and we see it in a hundred different signals for a lifeline. So there is a piece of this war that is quite successful. You wrote. I found it on the, through social media on the website of the Modern War Institute about how Israel revolutionized tunnel warfare. And I'd like you to explain that. And then I want to ask you. Nevertheless, the Israeli leadership set up an expectation of absolute victory. We're 17 months in. I have a friend who died in Gaza in the armored corps. I have dozens of friends who spent months and months and months in Gaza, a vast Israeli military deployment. We have revolutionized tunnel warfare. We have developed, you know, and we know that the intelligence gathering is much, much better. The very fact that the released hostages are being released from places Israel hasn't bombed is how we Israeli journalists are learning that Israel knows where the hostages are. The Israeli intelligence, which was a level of intelligence penetration that didn't exist, you know, 17 months ago, and therefore we had this terrible attack. So there is success. There isn't or doesn't appear to be that final success. What are the failures alongside those successes? Let's start with success, then move to failure, and then recommend what needs to happen going forward.
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And like you said, I wrote a piece now a few months ago about Israel is winning. That does not mean they're going to win. War is a contest of wills, not just between two militaries, but two political governments, their societies and the international context. It's always a contest of will. And the unfortunately, even beyond Israel's control, many organizations and international nations have sent Hamas, the political apparatus in Gaza, messages that you have the chance to winning because they're the enemy, actually tells you when you've won, when they no longer believe they have a path to victory. And in this case, the goals are complex, but also definable, measurable in the successes. So one of the largest success, and some people say I talk too much about tactics. And yes, there are some famous people that said strategy without taxes is just a noise before defeat, but there's actually a second part to that that basically
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it's true politics too.
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Yeah, yeah. But you know, basically strategy without tactics is also the path to defeat. So you have to have the political, the strategy, and then the in ways and means to achieve that. One of the successes for Israel in this war that many nations in many major wars were unable to do, which is isolate the enemy. So because of Israel's seizure, finally, even when it was told not to, of the border between Egypt and Gaza, Israel was able to do something that most militaries and wars can't do, which is completely cut the enemy off of resupply, reinforcement, any type of ability to continue to grow besides manpower. And we can talk about that. So Israel's seizure that border, I mean, think about it, in the Vietnam War, you know, with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Iraq war with escaping across the border into Pakistan or the Afghanistan War, and in the Iraq War, you know, fighters and supplies coming in from multiple locations, being able to seal an enemy off from resupply is really hard to do. Israel's also been very successful. And we can talk about the way they did that at dismantling Hamas's military capability. That's also measurable and it's not military. Combat power is not measured in number of fighters. So, yes, Hamas has a lot of new fighters. And I've heard statistics of the average age of Hamas fighters right now in the teenager range is dropping.
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Yeah, yeah.
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The combat power is measured in many factors of leadership. Combat formations that can do large scale assigned missions like attack and defend, equipment like a mission table of equipment, like large rocket supplies, all of that. Hamas doesn't have a military anymore. It's not an insurgency. And I really hate when people apply counterinsurgency to theory, to Hamas, when it's. It's the power, it's still the governing power. It doesn't have. It has a guerrilla force now because it's military. All of its brigades, its battalions. And, you know, these are the measurements that Israel tried to articulate because that's the right measurement of military combat power. It's not just a number of fighters. It's all of these things. Israel has been very successful. Israel turned the paradigm of underground warfare on its head throughout the war. Israel, who was, you know, had some of the most advanced tunnel warfare formations and equipment, still viewed tunnels, like every other military in modern history, has an obstacle to deal with when you find it slowing momentum throughout the war. Israel took that and created an innovation, but also a revolution in thinking towards tunnel warfare and started using Hamas's tunnels to do maneuver warfare on underground and on the surface at the same time.
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Explain that. This, this was a moment that we noticed as journalists in the war that changed everything. There's a unit called Yahalom. And, you know, I was in. I was an infantry grunt, so you will know more about it than I will. What is it? It is the largest unit of its kind, apparently in the militaries of the world. This I learned from something you wrote, and it has these capabilities and it revolutionized tons of tunnel warfare against Hamas. Can you walk us through that?
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Sure. The Yahalom, some listeners will know or not, but is the Israeli Combat Engineers, Special Forces Engineer Brigade. So a very large formation of thousands of soldiers who have for. For a very long time because Israel faced this threat in many wars. So Israel a long time ago created this unit of special forces engineers who train, man, equip, research, develop new technologies solely for the underground. Because most people don't understand that all the military equipment of the world that's meant for the surface doesn't work underground. What you need to see, what you need to communicate, navigate, shoot, breathe, all of it requires special equipment and special tactics from the the dogs, the drones to the breathing apparatuses. Israel had this large formation and one of the reasons why I, you know, October 7th wasn't my first research trip, like you said. I've written about the Second Intifada, the 1967 Battle of Jerusalem, the 73 Battle of Suez City. This formation is infamous as well as like units like the Yamam who who pioneered close quarters battle tactics that the rest of the world uses. But Yahalom underground warfare specialist, but a brigade, you know, thousands of soldiers still wasn't enough for the challenge of the Gaza tunnels. And Israel had a culture from its own experiences of do not enter a tunnel unless you have to. Like you're following a kidnapped soldier into a tunnel. Yes, go or bring up the specialist and it still stop. Momentum in warfare, momentum, speed, maneuver, which is actually firing and maneuvering requires movement. The tunnels slowed that down. And when Israel started the war, they had these specialists, they had a scale problem and they believe it's a special people problem when it actually becomes a general military problem. If there's a tunnel in every aspect of the environment. As the war began and Israel entered this contested urban environment, the enemy was using its tunnels the way it wanted to, right? And what Clausewitz actually says is don't. And other people in Sun Tzu, don't fight the way your enemy wants you to. And it was through Israeli generals and one of them, the 98th Division commander, General Goldfuss, who who is frustrated on the way the operations were going with how Hamas was using his tunnels, holding the tunnel as long as they could and then booby trapping the trunnel. Even Yalom lost soldiers, the IDF soldiers dealing with these booby trap tunnels because in some ways they were built to be booby trapped and used in this delaying tactic. When General Goldfuss, who had Special Forces, he's a Flotilla 13, a Navy SEAL, but also other ways of thinking about it, said I don't want this to happen. Developed the way through lots of learning and he assigned his unit. I want to be able to understand the tunnels differently to the point where they could enter a tunnel and know what type of tunnel it is, because not all the tunnels are the same in ways to detect where the tunnels are. And basically through coordination with him, some intelligence services, Yahalom specialists in underground warfare, they developed a way to identify the tunnels before even entering an area like Khan Yunus and which Tunnels were the most important, and then proposed a plan, a very risky plan of entering the tunnels before attacking into an area. So basically finding the tunnel entrances, entering them, attacking into them. So Hamas isn't booby trapping them if they don't know you're even in the area yet entering with, you know, commandos and other forces into the tunnels. But also, which is unique as well, maneuvering forces on the surface at the same time. And that's true maneuver warfare is where you're maneuvering on the enemy in a way that they don't want you to, to achieve this cognitive and physical overmatch and overwhelming them. So IDF soldiers were entering tunnels that Hamas didn't know they were in and attacking from multiple directions, while, you know, IDF infantry and others were attacking on the surface all at the same time, creating this multiple dilemma problem that nobody's ever attempted because of how risky it is. But what it took to understand that. And I wrote this big report because even I was, you know, it just never been heard of to treat the enemy's tunnels as an opportunity to maneuver against them on multiple surfaces.
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Well, I just, I'm, I'm sorry, I'm, I'm struggling to stay analytical and not just be proud of those guys. This is an army that is doing and in also many simple things above ground in the infantry that I do know, things that we never knew how to do 20 years ago. And, and it's a, it's an extraordinary generation in that sense. I want to now take a step into what's missing and just. We'll, you know, we'll keep it brief. People should read your stuff if you have a reading recommendation. Let's end with that. But what, what have we not accomplished? What have we. Obviously the defeat of Hamas, but what does it take to get there? What are the structural, cultural. Maybe it's a means question, maybe it's a technological question. What does the Israeli military need to do to deliver the promises that the Israeli politicians have already made?
- [38:38]
A
Yeah, this is the challenge again, where I can take a map and the problem and then develop solutions. There's one issue of capability just not available both politically and militarily, that some things were just not available to the idea. So about how long would this take? Would be a question I used to, used to get. But in this case, where your objective is the overthrow of the other territory's power, that means that in most historical cases you have to occupy it for a certain amount of time to remove the power and then in place any other power when Israel Entered the war, said we will not occupy Gaza. Then they were limiting their strategies that they could achieve the victory that everybody agrees to this day should happen, which is Hamas is not the governing power.
- [39:29]
B
I'm sorry, Israel, back up. You just said something very big and we have to understand what you just said. You are arguing that if you want to defeat Hamas, you have to actually physically, militarily occupy Gaza. The military has to be on the ground controlling Gaza totally. And then you have that opportunity to defeat Hamas. The Israelis announced they're not occupying Gaza in part because of the international arena, in part because of the Democratic administration that was very nervous about these kinds of things and in part because the Israeli public doesn't want to think that they're now sinking into the United States experience in Afghanistan. The Israelis had that experience in Lebanon 18 years. And then when we leave, the bad guys take over overnight. Why does it have to be an occupation? How do you read the Israeli inability to do that occupation and are we ultimately going to have to do it anyway?
- [40:21]
A
Yeah, one is it has to be an occupation because the definition is you have to remove that power and then there is always a vacuum of power. In this case, Israel never began that removing the governing power of Hamas part of the war goal. They focused on the destroy Hamas's military capabilities and its ability to regenerate military power. But political power again is the ability to govern the population. That requires being there to prevent them from governing the population. So this is where you can get into the history and I highly recommend General Petraeus and Sir Andrew Roberts book called Conflicts where they walk you from 1948 till now most wars and then in these cases of when you're invading to remove a territory, what does that look like? And one of the, you know, the famed now ideal of clear hold and build that has been talked about that the US Military after five years of struggling with it in Iraq develop decided to go towards this clear hold build strategy and post conflict operation. As in when you've already removed the other power and usually again with with the Israeli thing with Gaza is in other models sometimes you bring the other power with you like the people that you're going to like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, we brought expats or other people from that territory who said that I'll be the new ruler and I can, I can rule in Gaza. The IDF said we're not going to govern. Okay. And then they struggled with explaining okay, what's the day after plan. And everybody like General Petraeus and others said well you got to do this clear, hold and build thing. Well, Israel has cultural, even from the clearing of Gaza issues, right? Israel is a defensive force, like you said in the beginning, with this model of using speed to attack the attackers and then defend territory. It's not this force that goes in and clears territory and then holds it until they create a new power. So they're a raiding army. So in many parts of this war, if you want to talk about things that were done and could they have been done differently, the idf, in order to fracture in bits and pieces the Hamas military, it targeted Hamas's military strong points in raids. It's a raiding army. It would raid, attack military capabilities in the urban environments and then withdrawal. That's not even. That's not clearing. You know, a clearing operation is you attack into the urban area and then you hold it as you clear methodically. And there was limited clearing methodically and there were areas. But you know, this idea of one you have to clear and then you have to build, you have to hold the area. And the reason you hold it is because you have to bring the old powers, actual coercive power in that area down to where anything else can survive. So even if, you know, this is the idea like the Palestinian Authority could go into Gaza and be the new power if any other Arab force goes into Gaza right now, as we have seen and you mentioned, Hamas will just kill those individuals. They still have the power, because there's not a greater power that is there saying, I'm in power for now, especially a security framework until this new entity. I mean, there's so many historical examples of even bringing a police force with you to be the governing authority of an area while you move on to the ultimate goal of destroying the military.
- [44:04]
B
Everybody, is it fair to say that Hamas can't, that until Hamas is removed, nothing else can come in? This is something I've said a lot. So it's really great if you say the same thing. But not just that there's no rebuilding of Gaza until the Israelis actually do the hard thing. Go in, hold territory, clear, remove Hamas, you know, degrade them to the point where, frankly, you could send money and cement in that isn't just taken by Hamas like we've seen the aid taken by Hamas. So this is the necessary step, right? And if it takes the Israelis three years to come around to understanding it because of their own culture, because of international pressure, because of all these different factors, that's just the delay it'll take. In other words, there is no other path forward Is that what you're arguing, or is there a non occupy path forward to actually defeating Hamas and giving Gaza that new day?
- [44:54]
A
No, I mean, there's just different variations. You know, even these new plans, which actually are the more logical plans of moving the civilians out of harm's way. So you can target Hamas without its human shields, but it still involves like war does, the loss of territory, the loss of power over a population, that comes when you start a war. But no, from a strategic down to the tactics of how do you do it? There is no, you have to be the other power if you're going to remove it. But people. You said the remove Hamas from power part is where people get hung up on ideals. No, it's physical and political power. So this is the idea that you could go in, reduce Hamas, come out, and hope that something else generates. So in Israel's defense, as I've talked through, you know, these different ideals of like, even things that have been used in history, like what's called the inkblot strategy. Well, look, it's a very massive problem. It's a radicalized population. And that's not opinion, that's fact. We know this one way that's been successful is to chop the bigger problem up into smaller problems and do you know, different variations of hamlets and zones or you know, even smaller areas, safe neighborhoods that you put a, basically a circle around and then you hold security in that area and allow something even locally to pop up out of Hamas and say, I'll be the local leader, which we've seen in Gaza. They also get killed because Hamas is the power. Until something comes in, you have to take away their guns. And this is what General McMaster says, like, all this is impossible if you don't take the guns from the old power, which is it has both killing power, but it also has coercive power to take the food that gets sent in. No, no option works without occupying that ground and creating a new power to Hamas. Not even the Palestinian Authority could go in right now and survive. This is where people don't understand, like security and power, where there's some really famous statistics to say, you know, security may be one of your problems, but it's 99% of your problem until you address it. Nothing can survive in Gaza until Hamas is removed.
- [47:18]
B
It's striking to me that the Israelis, the Israeli military, you, you have written, is the most prepared military in the world for tunnel warfare. And the Israeli military is probably the most prepared in the world, the most capable in the world for missile Warfare for missile defense. It has taken it to. Right. And, and so our extraordinary superpower is finding these amazingly innovative solutions to absolutely intractable problems. But then you come and say to, to Israelis because we're so excited that, you know, for all these compliments, but then you come and say to us, but actually war at its fundamental core is what it always was. And you have to make those hard decisions about occupying, about removing the enemy, about doing what it takes to actually see it through and destroy the very infrastructure, the organizational infrastructure that allows them to control a population or they're just coming back. And it doesn't matter how clever you are in tunnels and it doesn't matter if you build time machines and space portals, you're not in the end going to succeed without the old foundational principles of war. Is that a fair way to sort of characterize where the Israelis maybe need to be refocusing and thinking more clearly?
- [48:35]
A
100%. But I put the caveats there, that there are some unique standards that people try to attempt to hold Israel to and say, well, that's for you, that's not an option. You know, and that's the problem here with anybody who has a different idea of what would be the solution under all this context or trying to compare and you mentioned it like, why is it that, you know, with Hezbollah or southern, when they occupied southern Lebanon, because again, if the goal is to remove the power, if you don't remove it entirety, if you just give it safe haven somewhere else, which is historical war too. Like I'm, I'm occupying part of their land, but I'm going to give them a safe haven over there to build backup power and they're going to come back. I, I, eventually my society decides that we no longer want to sacrifice for this piece of the land. No, this region attacked you. If you want to remove that power, you have to be that power in even if they want to self govern. And it just, it's illogical that people have ideals of how there was a different solution to this. Even if Hamas wants to do the Hezbollah model right, which is arbitrarily give up political power, but keep their military in arms like Hezbollah, so they have a state within a state, although it's, you know, Gaza's not a state. It's just so illogical from a war or even international relations perspective. You started a war, you lose a war, you lose your territory, you lose your ability to govern the population. Something else has to be created and you have to, for Israel, you have to provide the security to that organization.
- [50:15]
B
Secretary Blinken, you pointed me to a Wall Street Journal op ed that he wrote in which he was trying to argue to the Israelis that you could. There's an air force and commando and in Hebrew, in the Israeli army. We call it the envelope. There's the major forces maneuvering on the ground and then there's the envelope which is the air forces, the commandos, the intelligence. You could do it with the envelope and you don't have to actually be in the cities and move into the population centers. And it was an op ed that he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that you found confusing because it's simply incorrect. It's simply untrue and unreasonable to even believe it. And it's wish casting, but a kind of wishcasting that was probably more born. This is me already commenting on you. I'm not blaming you for this. Born in the pressure that the Biden administration felt from some parts of the Democratic base to, you know, look like the people who don't want this war that they understood was actually necessary. And so there was this attempt to. There's so much of this kind of fantasy talk about the war. In the end, you have to get back to basics or people will suffer longer. And, and more Palestinian civilians can't live in a rebuilt Gaza until these fundamental things are understood and this moves forward.
- [51:33]
A
Absolutely. And these are, I call these fallacies of war and the one that Blinken was at the time, which again, Israel isn't the only decider on how it was going to prosecute the war. A great example is don't go to Rafah. And for months, although that being that greatest victory of cutting the enemy off from resupplies. But the ideal was the fallacy that people would come in a historically to anything that's ever worked in history of war and say you can still achieve your goals by this other way. So for returning the hostages and removing Hamas from political power, the idea that you could use strategic bombing or like the strikes that were used against Hezbollah, you could do that to Hamas eventually. We know it takes a lot of time to gain the intelligence to take out leadership, especially in a radicalized, homogeneous population different than Lebanon for Hezbollah. But you know, you can just gather the intelligence and take out the leadership and then use special forces to do raids. Both of those are fallacies born of the last 30 years that you can elevate these tactics, even capabilities to strategies of war, even though there's no history ever of showing that that would achieve your goal in any amount of time. Which is also the thing that the world tried to say, like, look, you know, I know war is, you know, destructive, and Hamas has built this environment. So really, you can't. You can't go get your hostages. You can't defend yourself. That's a really violent world. If that's all the enemies of the world have to do is build this situation in which the cost for people that don't understand war is too high and you should just wait and, you know, yeah, let the hostages stay in captivity and let this force that. That did this attack to you and emboldened everybody else to attack you. It's so ahistorical that the United States was administration, single individual was recommending. There's another way. Absolutely, there's another way, which is overwhelming force, speed and surprise to attack the enemy, not as civilians, and end the war quickly, just like the military leaders like General Milley and McMaster and all these have said. But for some reason, it wasn't available to Israel.
- [53:55]
B
Thank you so much, John, for your time and for shedding so much light. I have learned a lot and maybe we can have you on down the road to talk about Iran, Hezbollah and missiles and what the options are there at a grand strategic level. I appreciate your time.
- [54:11]
A
Next Sat.