Angry Planet - Can You Fight a Moral War in a Tight Space?

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Retired Colonel John Spencer, who is a combat veteran who now teaches at West Point, joins Matthew and Jason for a second time. This time we're not talking about how to carry out urban warfare, but we're looking at how you fight morally under impossible circumstances. John recently wrote a piece for Newsweek (Jason's day job), making the controversial case that the Israelis are doing more than any other modern military to limit civilian casualties. You can see if he's persuasive for yourself.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. We've actually gotten some really nice feedback, which, you know, whoever is used to that on the internet, actual nice feedback. Yeah, I'm not. That's just sure. I don't know if you saw my most recent posts. The prime minister mentioned me in a speech, and there's 400 comments to that post, and not all of them are good. No, I would imagine that you're probably not having a great time on the internet right now. You're telling people things that maybe they don't want to hear. Well, hold on.

Okay, let's just do the formalities, if you will. This is Angry Planet. I'm pretending to be Jason Fields. I'm Matthew. And John Spencer, explain who you are to the lovely people. I'm John Spencer. I'm the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, which is a research center at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

And you wrote a very, very interesting piece for Newsweek, where my day job apparently still lies. And, yeah, I thought it was really good. It's not what people want to hear. So can you sort of summarize what it's about and what you've discovered? Sure. So based on my actual visit to the war last month and studying it day to day, of course, the narratives are out there, but I've found them surprisingly counterfactual. Everything from the war being the most destructive, the most deadliest, to Gaza being the most densest place on the earth.

And then about this, really what Israel has done to prevent civilian casualties because there is no such thing as a bloodless war. So I wrote this piece basically explaining not only did I think the IDF had implemented every measure I've ever seen in urban combat, like major urban battles, but also had implemented ones that no military has ever done in the history of war to include the United States military or even myself in wars that I participated in. But in studying every major urban battle to include ones of the last 10 years, Israel has done things to prevent civilian casualties that no military has ever tried. But, of course, the news is that everything from being indiscriminate to purposely trying to harm civilians, which is not true from my own research and observation. So what did you see of Gaza? What does Gaza actually look like? I mean, you said it's not as dense as people make it out to be. So I'd love to get sure.

Yeah. So I'd been to the Gaza envelope, right, many times studying. I've actually studied the Israel, you know, the IDF's way to urban warfare and underground warfare for years in multiple visits. And I was there last month and I actually, for the first time, you know, the wording is important, crossed into Gaza because I was taken to a very large tunnel that was discovered 400 meters outside the wall. So I was in a tunnel that Hamas built in Gaza, but only 400 meters into the Gaza area. I've never been into the urban areas of Gaza, like Gaza City. But if you've ever been to the Gaza envelope, even in southern Israel, you can see Gaza. I mean, it's only a few kilometers.

So you can see all the urban areas, the high rises, everything from multiple points just driving along southern Israel, which made watching the videos of October 7th really. hard because I had been to most of those locations. I'd had lunch in the cities. I'd been to many of those outposts. But interestingly, when the war started off, unfortunately, the world, and to include journalists, were Googling Gaza. And they were coming up with an article that says it's the most densest place on Earth, which is pretty crazy if you've ever traveled the world and been to places like Mumbai, India, or Cairo, or, like, how is Gaza a city? a area, not even a city that only, I say only, it still, it is dense, of course, but only

contains about 2.2 million. I mean, Baghdad, where I was stationed, you know, it has 4 million plus, depending on what statistic you. I fought a battle in the Battle of Sauter City in 2008 that had that, that neighborhood of Baghdad has 2.2 million plus people. And it's a, it's like a, really like a mile square kilometer area. But people want to use, we're Googling it and like that's crazy. Even by metrics that us urban geeks use, like density is determined by how many people live in a single square kilometer.

So if you're over 7,000 residents per square kilometer, we consider it dense. I mean, you can go to literally a slum in Mumbai called Davari has a million people in a single square kilometer. Like, even Gaza City is like 60 second on the world's most densest. Gaza itself, which is the myth, right? So if you've never been to Gaza, you think that Gaza, as in the entire area of Gaza, is one giant urban area, and it's not.

So even in Gaza City, it doesn't rank even in the top 50, top 60 of the most densest places. So it was kind of like nails on a chalkboard when I was hearing it, especially in the beginning. And I still hear like CNN will say one of the most densest places on earth. Like, no, it's not. It's just not. Can I ask a, can I get an origin story real quick? You called yourself an urban geek. Yes.

How does one become an urban geek? Yeah, that's a great question. As I've, I'm called an urbanista, urban mafia, urban studies, really. So the fact that I started academically studying urban when I was assigned to like a think tank for the top four star for the Army in 2014. It's called the Chief of Staff of the Army Strategic Studies Group. And for a year, we looked at mega cities. So cities of over 10 million people, there's over 30 plus of them around the world.

You think New York City to DACA. And for a year, we studied could a military operate in a megacity, despite that density of 10 million plus people? And there are some areas like in the Pearl, or in Asia where mega cities are are growing into other megacities. So you have megalopuses that are, you know, tens of millions of people.

But in 2014, I started studying it academically. I moved to West Point. I was teaching strategy and military tactics. I helped stand up a research center that I now work for. I still work more called a Modern War Institute. And we started that in 2015, actually. And I wrote one article about the use of concrete walls. in Iraq and it went viral.

I mean, like National Geographic carried it. It was crazy that people didn't know that that's how we controlled the violence in Baghdad for years, was putting up concrete walls, making safe cities or making safe neighborhoods, basically, and then putting guards on the outside of those cities, which actually applies to what could happen in Gaza. But once that article went viral, I'm like, hey, nobody's writing about this. And since 2015, I've been writing and studying it. When I retired from the Army in 2018, though, the modern wars is like, hey, do you want to keep doing this?

And so I became the urban studies guy. And unfortunately, which is pretty mind-blowing, there's nobody in the world who is paid and allowed or to only study urban combat. There's not a single office in the entire million-person military that we have. There's not a single office in the Pentagon who is allowed to only focus on urban warfare. So I kind of fit a niche and I became the urban guy. That's really interesting. But you actually thought, I mean, like you said, I mean, you helped put up walls or you did put up wall. I mean, this is such a terrible civilian question, okay?

I know it is. but if you could talk a little bit about your experiences, what you saw, and sort of maybe the advice or solutions you've come up with. Sure. So, yeah, I don't try to rely on my own experience, but I did. So I was a part of the 2003 invasion into Iraq. I jumped into northern Iraq and we moved quickly south to areas in Krukuk and other areas. And I saw a lot of urban combat in those areas.

And in 2008, I returned as a company commander of an infantry company into Baghdad at the height of the, really the violence near civil war to include a major battle of the Battle of Slaughter City. And I felt the challenges firsthand of urban combat. When you have a three-dimensional terrain, you can't see no matter what technology you had, you can't see around the block. it's really hard to identify where your forces are. Usually when you fight in wars, the enemies to your front because you're approaching them. In the urban environment, they're literally 360 degrees around you. They can be in any window. They can be underneath you.

The complexities of the urban terrain are unlike any other environment. And that's, again, why I have job security is the fact that all the trends of warfare are that it's moving into urban areas for multiple reasons to include non-state actors who can gain immense military capability from just embedding themselves into urban terrain but the fact that it's also where the world is watching right uh like we've seen in Gaza and Ukraine everybody has the cell phone and everybody can upload what the war is happening because there's millions and millions of sensors in the urban environment which you're not going to find like in the jungle or in the Arctic you're just not a lot of people hanging out with cell.

phones. Well, so how do you do this morally? I mean, that you're in an urban environment. That means that the people around you are by definition, some of them are going to be civilians and you're going to have babies and, I mean, you know, civilians are civilians. How do you do this morally? I mean, it must be a challenge and a half, right? Yeah, I mean, it's the worst situation you could ever put a military force who doesn't

want to harm civilians. And I face this firsthand where I had soldiers who accidentally, like say, they were breaching a door and there was a civilian intermixed with the enemy. And it is heartbreaking at the personal level to see that. But I mean, what we're seeing today, like in the war against Hamas and Gaza is that it's the greatest test of a Western way of warfare, which is to follow the law of armed conflicts. You ask what's the, how do you do it morally? I mean, first you got ask how you do it legally. Because there are, once you enter the urban environment, more restrictions on the use of force, like things you can't use, all the protected sites like hospitals, mosques, schools.

So there's already a restriction on use of force, but you're right, there's a moral element as in what are the values of the military who are fighting the war in the urban environment where there are so many innocent civilians because there's always civilians, no matter what you do to evacuate them. It's really challenging. But the number one way you do it is that you have a moral principle that you do not kill or target really important that you don't target civilians or non-combatants. Really in the military world, you say, of course, you use the term innocent civilians, but it's really a combatant or non-combatten. Because you can have civilians who within their own selves to decide to turn themselves into combatants, even though they're not part of the military.

If they pick up a weapon or if they pick up a cell phone and they are starting to be a part of the hostilities, then their combatants and unfortunately can be targeted. So you start by training your military into morally into what their values are, is that we don't target non-combatants. We don't attack civilians. And that gets drilled into you from the day you enter a military. if you're a military who follows a moral ethical code. So there are things you put in place to kind of control violence, right? The law of armed conflict is literally meant to just control the brutality of war. It isn't to say that war isn't about killing because war is about killing.

War is destruction. But you put limits on the brutality of war, especially post-war II when we said never again, not only meant never again a Holocaust. and genocides, but never again that when we target civilians like we did in World War II trying to convince the military or the political people that we're facing to give up. So that gets incorporated in the law of armed conflict, but also in the rules of engagements in the military it follows, which are additional to the laws. So that gets incorporated into this moral ethical code.

It's like we don't, we don't shoot, we don't target, we don't attack. civilians. We don't shoot, we don't target an enemy who have given up. So like on ones who are basically you have to give quarter. It really gets incorporated into the moral fiber of your military. And I've seen that in not just the United States military, but I've visited Ukraine four times since the war started. I've visited the idea of multiple times. It's really unique actually when you evaluate whether a military is being moral, ethical, where you have have a complete opposites and in some times people like to talk opposites like the syrian military like the russian military who morally ethically have been grained into the fiber as long as they're

not us we can kill them and russia has done crazy um law of war violations and just things as a soldier you would say like even if it wasn't a rule this is just not moral it's not it's not human to you know tie civilians hands behind their back kill them to rape to all those things that is a part of your your value system like we don't do that and that's something that we talk about in the military a lot is like that's not who we are that's not what we do i i just wondered how many militaries are actually signed on to this um and uh you know prominent examples and then prominent examples on the other side you mentioned russia yeah they they don't even try. They don't teach about the law of war at all.

I mean, I, no, I have some horror stories of learning about their professional military education, like what they do, how they brutalize their soldiers as a way to indoctrinate them into their military, but no, nothing that I've seen, especially in the Ukraine war, but you can go back to people forget about the war in Chechnya, where Russia killed five percent of the entire population of Chechnya, in their, in their 20-month-long war. They killed, if you want to talk about civilian casualties, I mean, tens of thousands of a small population, 5%, it's crazy.

But nothing I've seen of the Russian military's history, if you want to go back to the Soviets as well, shows that they have any type of moral code that fits to the law of armed conflict. They actually do war violations as a way of war bear and things that have done in Ukraine. And again, because I have a unique job, I've traveled the world into recent war zones from Nagarna Karabakh to Ukraine to Israel, all around the India, all around the world, studying not just what happened. But like you said, are they even trying to follow the laws of war? And Russia, Syria, not so much.

Have you been to Syria? Did you visit? I did not. Don't think. That's when you skipped. Yeah, I skipped that one. It's, yeah. Because, you know, I study, I also want to study major urban battles.

So I don't want to go to Lepo. Just maybe, maybe one day. But the civil war is still going on. I mean, it's not over. I have a friend that's a war correspondent. And that was, that was early Syrian civil war was his last one. He was done after that. He'd been in Iraq, Afghanistan.

and lots of places in Southeast Asia, seen a lot of really unpleasant things. And Syria was the last, he was like, I'm not doing it anymore after this. Yeah, it's like Sebastian Younger, who's a famous war.

He's like, I'm done. After he taught his friend in journalist, he was with, died in Libya, I think. So walk me through the case that will probably make some listeners mad.

And I may have some pushbacks here and there. Walk me through the case for Israel being very careful with civilians. Sure. And I tried to do that. I tried to give, I backed up some of the things I were saying with the evidence, right? Because for some reason, you know, social media has instantly created millions and millions of war experts. But from the history of basically urban combat, there's some standard practices, which are what we call civilian harm mitigation. So,

you know, things you do to prevent civilian casualties based on. the mission and what the war. Again, Gaza's not a battle, it's a war, but even in an urban battle, let's say it a city attack, which is really a great example. And I've studied a lot of city attacks actually because they keep happening, whether it's from Kiev back to Stalingrad. If a military is attacking a city for different reasons, whether there's a military inside of it or it's the capital and the center of gravity for the government in which you're trying to overthrow, or convinced to stop fighting. So in a city attack, sometimes you give no warning.

So you basically enter the city, you attack, you try to take the political seat of government, you attack the military who's guarding the city. Like, for instance, when we attacked into Afghanistan in 2001, into Baghdad in 2003, we gave no warning. Of course, we had an air campaign, but we did not do the other alternative, which is if you have the capability, you surround the city and then you evacuate the civilians, which is the standard practice of a major city battle, but uniquely show in history, Russia didn't do that for the key battle, the United States didn't do it for multiple battles, like the first battle of Fallujah in 2004, but there have been other battles like the

second battle of Fallujah, the battle of Massul, where you, if you have the ability, and based on the conditions on the ground, you surround the city, if possible, although uniquely to a major urban area is not possible, but you still give the civilians warning and you tell them they evacuate. Like, that's the biggest civilian harm mitigation you could ever do, right? Telegraph to the enemy in the urban area that you're coming so you allow the civilians to leave. In conjunction with that, you also do things like set up a route for them. You tell the civilians, look, we're coming. And which, again, gives you a military disadvantage, right?

Because you tell the enemy in the city, hey, we're coming. Get ready. But that's what Israel did in Gaza, right? So we all know on October 7th to include 3,000 rockets with the attack on Israel and rockets every day since until there's been a few days without rockets. But Israel waited about three to four weeks. depending on the timeline or where you say where the engagement started, but dropped thousands of flyers, which is a standard practice.

We did the same thing in the, basically in the Battle of Missouille and Fallujah, everything. Everybody does this thing where they fly low flying airplanes and they drop millions of, it's like the worst case of littering you'd ever see in your life, but dropped millions of flyers over the area and telling the civilians, this is about to be a major combat area.

Please leave and move to these areas. usually is what the standard practice is. So Israel did that for Gaza City and for northern Gaza. Those are kind of like the standard practices. The other standard practices is, you know, always before you start a battle or war, a military will attack known military locations, bunkers, command and control centers, intelligence centers, air defense systems, things like that. You basically, with long range, whether they're missiles or bombs or artillery, you attack those sites.

And then there are standard practices that you do to ensure that you make the right assessment on if there's going to be civilian casualties. Not to say that you don't attack a site if there is civilians presence, but there are standard practices that you do to observe so that when you're making the decision because the laws of war require you to make a decision before you attack it. Like is it required, is it a military value? Are you striking a military site? Is it a military necessity? and then you make an assessment of portionality of like, okay, based on what I'm about to hit, like it's a missile launching site and there's a missile about to be launched, is it of enough value in what are the known civilians in the area that will become casualties

or injured because of the strike? That kind of targeting protocol, there are also standard practices that you use satellite imagery, cell phones that are in the area to make, so you know, what's there before you strike it. Again, Israel does that. And uniquely, and especially in the beginning of the war, Israel does things, okay, now we're starting to get into things that no other military in the world does. Is that if Israel has like a, let's say a building, which the bottom floor is all enemy,

it will call everybody in that building to include the enemy saying, look, we're about to attack this building. I've never seen that in any war of the world where you call everybody in a building before you strike it. they also have this thing called roof knocking where they'll drop small explosives on the top of the building like they'll call everybody like look I'm serious in about 10 minutes we're going to attack this you have 10 minutes to get out and then it'll drop explosives now they didn't do that a lot but they did do it in the beginning of this war this practice called roof knocking but they did do the the targeting protocol

right so there's what a standard practices and then they're additional to what Israel does and nobody else does and then as the basically as for days and weeks as Israel is calling for the evacuation of northern Gaza, they have thousands of soldiers, which to me was, and I didn't believe until I went and visited, on phones, calling to people in the cities in which they know they're about to conduct operations, calling the imams, the local leaders, the business owners, and like trying to reach people on the phone and actually talk to them. Like, look, have you heard about the evacuations, we'd like you to delete.

So that's no military's ever done that in the history of war. And then they used an automated system to also launch robocalls. So basically prescripted messages. And like two million of those, two cell phones in the areas in which the operation is about to come. No military has ever done that. So that's what they did, a part of the evacuation, although evacuations are standard, creating a safe route, telling them where to go.

That's all standard. Well, lastly, as, again, we can talk about how Hamas' strategy is to create as many civilian casualties as possible. So that adds to the complexity of it to include shooting civilians who are trying to leave, to include ordering civilians back into areas that have already been cleared. Hamas was doing that. As the war continued, once Hamas intelligence were driving operations, especially in southern, you know, there's basically a river, it's a dry creek bed, actually, a river that bisects northern and southern Gaza.

When the IDF started to move on southern Gaza, they did something that I've never seen and actually really surprised me as an urban guy is that they started issuing out the IDF maps. So all militaries have these things called control measures to include we'll number every building in a city and we'll draw, we'll cut a urban area up into small pieces of pie. and then name those areas like, okay, this is Zone 21 through 1,000. And we'll create a map and we'll hand that map out to all of our forces so that we all can communicate, like, look, Alpha Team or, you know, whatever company's in Zone 20 today. Well, the IDF decided to give that map to all the civilians and Hamas.

So that way, on a daily basis, they could tell the civilians and the enemy they're fighting, look, today area 20 will be the focus of our operation. If you really should be out of this area, it's going to be a high combat area. And then lastly, I'm sorry, I'm going so long. There's just a lot of measures they've taken. Soon after the northern fight started, the IDF started doing daily pauses in the fighting. So four-hour pauses. As they saw a need to increase the civilian harm mitigation, as in to get more civilian,

who hadn't heeded the calls to evacuate from the flyers, from the text messages, from the phone calls. So they started telegraphing that they would do daily four-hour pauses to the enemy and to the civilians so that more civilians could get out of areas where the troops were already there. So that's you asking me as a company commander on the ground, like, hey, for the next four hours, no fighting. And there's going to be civilians walking towards you into your combat areas and, and And so the complexity of that is that Hamas does not wear a uniform. So that's the challenge of the guy on the ground is that at any moment,

somebody who's dressed in civilians could attack them. But they would do these four-hour pauses in which civilians were told that, hey, and again, through Texas and through phone calls, tomorrow, wait for a call, there'll be a four-hour pause and a fighting. We will not be fighting. And you can move along this route to the area. Again, that has not happened in recent. urban battles where in the Battle of Missou, there were a couple pauses, like two-week pauses,

because the IDF were losing thousands of soldiers. Because the IDF, not the IDF, the Iraqi security forces in the Battle of Missou were losing thousands of soldiers. So they did a couple two-week pauses because they were losing thousands of soldiers. But this daily pauses, there have been pauses in wars, again, that's kind of a standard practice. But I've never seen them do a daily pause, which is actually. would telegraph to your enemy like, hey, you know, tomorrow we're going to have a four-hour pause so we can reinforce and move around without anybody attacking us. So those are some of the things

that were the standard practices, but also more measures than any military in the history of war have taken to prevent civilian casualties, despite all the mass media headlines of most destructive, most intentional, all of this that aren't just factual. So I have two questions from that. Sure. First is there are days on their media reports that there are blackouts of communications in Gaza. So if that's happening, how do you get warnings to people? Are they still doing that or what?

Self service is notoriously awful in Gaza and was before the war started. Yep. No, it's been a great question. And I watched as the IDF spokesman would get that call. So in some areas, of course, they would target Internet outlet, which is standard practice too to cut the enemy off and be able to communicate to itself. It wasn't all areas. And they would implement.

So it's not like they would just use a single service. So they would increase the number of flyers being dropped. They would, again, once they had those maps out, they could target those blackouts. And yes, they would do multi-day blackouts, but it's not like they purposely cut all communication and then said they were signaling people to get out. It just wasn't how I was working on the ground.

But that's actually a standard of practice as well. But interesting, they had that ability to turn it off, turn it off. And they can tell you, again, like even when they went to the map area, they could tell you what cell phones were on and working in a very specific area. We had that, you know, classification. literally like power up the tower, call everyone inside, and then power the tower back down?

I'm not saying that's what they do. I'm saying they had that possibility. I'm saying they were using everything from, you know, social media to telegrams, all these different ways to do everything they could to reach as many civilians as possible, while also moving forward on the military operation. And so if I'm the commander on the ground,

I would want, even for IED, threat defeat, you know, because some IEDs, improvised, focused on devices are, you know, are activated by cell service. So you want to cut, depending on where you're at and what you're doing, you do want to cut all communication off. One thing that hopefully we talk about is the, again, the news media line of the number of precision guided munitions versus

unguided or dumb bombs. Hopefully we could talk about that. But one of the measures in that, with somebody criticized me for putting it in my article in Newsweek, is about dive bombing. So dive bombing is something if you have air supremacy, which not just air superiority, but air supremacy, like there is no air defense in the environment, there's no threat to the air, you have the ability to drop a bomb going straight down.

The plane is actually literally diving down and increasing the accuracy of the bomb, which are normally accurate anyways, if it's not precision guided by GPS or anything. and the IDF implemented dive bombing because they have complete air supremacy over Gaza, if you did not have air supremacy, you would not have that capability. You would have to drop at a much higher level of flight path and not diving down because of threat of air defenses. So I forgot to mention that. That's another kind of practice, if available to you, that you do to increase your accuracy, decrease civilian harm.

Yeah, that leads also to the whole question about presenting. decision guided munitions and yes you know what that even means in some cases yes but but but if I just don't want to forget this one does this actually by doing all these

warnings and whatever does it prolong the war and if you prolong the war is that not worse for civilians yes absolutely so that's a great question as again people want to criticize rather than analyze the war in Gaza the amount

the pace that the IDF have cleared dense urban contested terrain is actually historic as well. But absolutely, it increases the time. Like I said, even the practice of waiting for civilians to evacuate versus rushing into an urban area, which is not atypical or a historical either, depending on what the military objective is. And so there's this question legally, like, what are you required to do and what should you do, which gets you into that moral aspect of it? and all the steps you're taking in addition to the requirements of law of war. So, yes, it does.

But you also can't talk about Gaza without actually not only talking about the time it takes you to do the operation will increase potentially the civilian harm and the destruction. The enemy gets a vote, right? Really, the amount of time it takes, the amount of destruction it takes, the amount of bombs it takes is dependent on the enemy situation. on whether the enemy is resisting at all. Because there are historical battles where you just signal that you're coming and ask the enemy to leave. It's all the way back to Sun Tzu.

It's called the Golden Gate. You give them an opening. Or if you psychologically tell them to give up anyways. But you can't talk about all the things that the IDF have done in Gaza without discussing the time variable to the hostages since there's 200 plus hostages and usually the more time that hostages are held,

the less likelihood that you're not. You're going to get them back alive? Yeah, I think they're down to 100 now as what I was reading most recently. Right. As we're talking. The rockets, so the fact that the rockets never stopped, even during that three-week period of time when the IDF were giving time for civilians to move out of the main initial combat areas, thousands of rockets from Hamas, which 10% of them land inside of Gaza, by the way, being launched at Israel's civilian area. So I've never seen a military. again, I can give you some analogies of like the fact that have hostages in the environment.

So like in the Battle of Manila, there were thousands of American prisoners in the environment as you were trying to liberate Manila. But where you have the hostages and you have rockets over your head of your military doing the acidity attack launched at their civilian site, which like you said, all this gets into how long is it going to take? The longer it takes, the more destruction, the more risk are involved. Risk to hostages, risk to the civilians, as you get into like the humanitarian concerns as well. All of this is unique to this war that is people are failing to recognize. But to include the steps that the idea have taken despite the media. All right, angry, independent listeners want to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this.

All right. Welcome back. Angry Planet listeners. There's Jason, precision guided munitions. Yes. Yeah. God, there are too many good questions, actually. Yeah.

All right. I'll move on to that because I was going to ask, like, if you let people, like civilians go through, how do you know who's a civilian and who isn't? Well, I think let's answer. I mean, people aren't always uniform. I think the answer that one, right? And then we'll do precision guided munitions. So absolutely.

It's a great question. And in the initial phase, there's no way to tell. And this is what happened, right? So you had, you telegraphed where you're going and you had Hamas say, okay, I'm going to move my battalions because you can't, again, compare this war to other wars. If you don't even start by saying, okay, how many enemy are in the environment? Like the Battle of Massul, the U.S. Army said there were 3,000 to 5,000 ISIS fighters in that city that took nine months to clear of just that three to five thousand of fighters. In Gaza, there are 30,000 Hamas fighters. 30 battalions. And yes, when the IDF signaled that where they're going to start, Northern Gaza,

I can guarantee you, because it's the fact that 10, let's say 10,000, Hamas said, oh, okay, you 10 battalions, you got the Northern Gaza, I'm going to move. And the leadership and everybody else moved out of the areas which the IDF are telegraphing to prevent civilian harm. We're going to start. I mean, they still did a couple of surprises that even surprised me on how they had approached the environment or the areas. But yes, they leave. That was the question, right? How do you?

Oh, later, you can do things by establishing checkpoints and searching the people that are leaving, which is also standard practice as well. And I think it's pretty much open source too, but you can even implement like facial recognition and it's not like the IDF don't know who many of the Hamas are, not all of them. And in the urban environment, one of those, really the strongest way, even when, everybody's wearing civilians to determine who the enemy is is when they start shooting at you. All right. Fair. Should we get to precision guided munitions?

All right. I'm curious about a number of things, but just to describe what they are right now, I just want to say that I was listening to NPR this morning. And they were talking about a militia, a militia leader who was behind some of the attacks against U.S. troops, maybe I think in Jordan. they used a hellfire missile to kill this guy in a car, and it didn't even have a warhead on it. It's a kinetic missile. Yep. So that there was the knife missile?

Yeah, Sinsu, right? Like a Shinju knife? Yeah, it strikes and then the blades pop off of it. Correct. Yeah. It's the same one we used on Solemani, same one that we believe was used even in Damascus to eliminate a Hamas leader. So that is sort of in a way the ultimate in precision guided munition.

You're not you're not even creating an explosion around the vehicle. You are really just getting the people around you. Sure. Okay. But this seems like the whole thing is weird, honestly, because as in everything in war, you're trying to kill people. It's really a matter of who you're trying to kill. I mean, you're trying to meet military objectives, actually, rather than you're not trying to kill people. But in order to get to where you need to go, that's the whole point.

It's called war. So do you have any idea about when this concept came to be and how they're used now? Does my question make sense? Yeah, it does. I mean, so I'm not a weapons expert, although I've studied the use of weapons in urban combat extensively. the use of precision guided munitions, which people usually use, they don't even know what they're talking about,

is when the bomb, the missile, whatever has a technology on it that is usually GPS and it can guide the munition onto the target to a very high probability of where it's hitting. So there's this thing called

circular probability of error, right? So basically when you drop a missile or a bomb or something like that, there's kind of rings around it in which, okay, I know it'll land in this ring of, and then as you go out there, the probability of error based on weather, based on the flight path,

on thousands of variables. But once the use of these things called GPS, whether it's something on the cone of the missile, the bomb, or a kit you put on top of it, it can be, it increases the likelihood that it'll hit, like within one to five meters,

which is just insane, right? that level of accuracy, dropping something from 50,000 feet, and it's going to hit something within three meters, five meters of the ground. That started really in a popular, let's say open source, in the Persian Gulf War, right?

And our attack of Saddam Hussein's, we dropped 250,000 missiles and bombs, and of those 250,000, really about 2% of those were precision-guided, as in they had this technology on them. The rest would be considered non-guided. I don't like to call them dumb, but some people want to go there and call them dumb munitions because they don't have that. But they're actually, whether it's a mortar round, an artillery round, or a missile, if you know anything about the military, they actually hit what they're shooting at is just a sort of a higher probability that it may be five meters to 50 meters off.

A standard artillery round is usually around 50 meters of accuracy. If you want to talk about the use of artillery in urban warfare, it's, I mean, it's a vital. it's tens of thousands of rounds usually per day of artillery and it has a high, but everybody got focused on in the news because the U.S. intelligence source quoted the number of bombs dropped in Gaza and said over 50% of them are dumb, which means 50% of, let's say, 20,000 bombs were unguided, as they didn't have that precision-guided technology on them. And for some reason, because people are just ignorant to war, they're like, that's massive. That's a huge number of unguided. That means there's just,

there's just carpet bombing Gaza, right? No, actually, it doesn't mean that at all. It just means that of the, all the bombs and missiles, that percentage didn't have that guided system. So it didn't hit within five meters. It might have, but there's a probability. It might have. That's such a great line. Yeah, it might have. But again, because this circular probable error means that when you drop a bomb or missile, you are hitting what you you're shooting at, which makes it discriminant, not indiscriminate, because we actually have corporate bombed cities in history, right? Yeah.

And I think it was, I don't know, Senator Sanders who said that, you know, it's like Dresden in Gaza. Like, well, that's ignorant because in Dresden, it was unguided. It was literally carpet bombing where you just fly over the city and hit anything. And there were 25,000. But he also fell as I mentioned, the U.S. firebombing in a Tokyo. Well, we literally just firebomb the city. we killed 80 to 100,000 in a single night.

We killed 300,000 bombing Tokyo more than Nakasaki, Hiroshima, and Dresden put together. But separate. Unguided does not mean indiscriminate and not hitting what is shooting at. It just means there's there's, there's, it could hit anywhere from 10 to 50 meters off of that target. But it could not. It could actually hit one meter on it as well. So that's where the news ran with this. So the ideal here, though, is that, like, so fine, I took you back to the Persian Gulf, which is 30 years ago.

And in some operations like the Bosnia War, based on the context of the enemy, the targets, and the available munitions, we had like an 80 to 90 percent precision guided munitions. But there's never been an urban war where it's been the idea that you're only going to fight the war with precision guided munitions is also inaccurate. It's ignorant. in the Battle of Missou, like you mentioned, health fires that was used in this counterterror operation, which is very typical as well. And he's on the street. In the Battle of Massul, the U.S. military fired so many precision-guided munitions,

so many health fires that we ran out of our strategic stockpile. Like the factory could not produce more. Because if you're going to criticize the military's use of precision-guided munition versus non, well, you have to have an awareness of what they have, right? because no military has enough munitions to fight an urban battle with only. And here's the, oh, by the way, is yes, I can use a non-explosive, really a knife flying in through the air to attack a guy in a car. But if I'm firing at something that's 20 meters underground in a tunnel, then a hellfire

is not going to do anything for me. And actually, even if you have a hellfire and you're talking about somebody's inside of a concrete building, this is what happened in the, Masul is all I have to do is I just move from one building to the next and I call what's called the precision paradox. So you believe that you have precision guiding munitions and that's the only thing you're going to attack the enemy with and you're going to cause less damage. Not true. It's actually the reverse. So you're going to enter close combat and yes, you're going to be able to attack every building within one meter of precision, but he's just

going to move to the next building. So you're going to attack and destroy every building on that block with your precise munitions, even though we're not even going to talk about artillery and mortars, it's just a fallacy to believe that you could fight an urban battle with only precision-guided munitions. Now, you also want to talk about the news that's reporting of 2,000-pound bombs, right? Because somebody's gone and taking all the number of 2,000-pound bombs. Like, look, they could have used something other than a 2,000-pound bomb. They could have used a 500-pound bomb and caused less damage. Okay. What was the target they were shooting at?

Since we know there are 450 miles of tunnels in Gaza, ranging from 15 feet to 300 plus feet. And at that level, at 300 feet, you really get below the level of a modern munition could reach. There are ways you get deeper, but most even, we dropped a 30,000 pound bomb in the invasion of Iraq on a bunker in Taji airport base, a 30,000 pound bomb. to get to it. But to say that you could use a 500-pound bomb instead of a 2,000-pound bomb, like, well, what was he shooting at? Was he shooting at an underground tunnel? Because we know there's lots of them.

But it's crazy when somebody will report, they've dropped a historic level of 2,000-pound bombs. Oh, okay. But well, maybe because they're fighting in a war that has more tunnels than any military has ever faced in a battle. Because even if you talk about the Vietnam War, there was only about six. miles of tunnels to include in Coochee and other places where the Americans face a lot of tunnels, or maybe

130 miles, but not 450 miles. I've got some listener questions about tunnels, actually. Let's do it. Jason, unless you've got something else you want to jump on. I was just going to point out that precision guided munitions probably were created

so that you'd hit things more accurately rather than save civilians. But it's nice that they do. Exactly. But it is a standard practice. But again, you have to talk about availability of munitions as well, right? So people also talk about Gaza without talking about northern Israel, right? The fact that Hezbollah has attacked Israel since October 7th, and it's a total different military threat. But somebody said, well, you should use all your precise, every round that you fire into Gaza should

be precision guided munitions. Like, what about the threat to my north where there's 100,000 civilians that had to get evacuated because there's tens of thousands of Hezbollah is about to invade. Yeah, yeah, but we'll get you precision guided munitions from somewhere else. Do you know what the number, the first request from Israel to the United States was on October 8th? No. It was, it was a military request for Iron Dome interceptor missiles that we have and J-dam kits. On October 8th, they asked it for J-Dam kits, which are the kits you put on top of unguided munitions to make them precision guided munitions, like 500-pound bombs or 2,000-pound bombs,

so that you hit exactly where you're aiming at. Listener questions. I think you're going to like this. What are the most important factors that make tunnel and urban warfare different from other forms of warfare? How does this change the decisions made by senior leaders? So it really gets to, so on that question, what makes tunnels different in urban environments than, let's say tunnels and other environments, right?

If you even talk about like the historic battle of Iwo Jima, I mean, they were in bunkers and tunnels, but they, Hamas built their tunnels unique, again, to Hamas because, you know, North Korea has thousands of miles of tunnels. China, thousands of miles of tunnels. But in the urban environment, again, because once you enter the urban environment, there's already restrictions on the use of force. So I can't drop a 300,000 pound bomb or a 30,000 pound bomb or the Moab, the mother of all bombs that we dropped in Afghanistan on a tunnel complex, which was the biggest drop of basically munitions since the nuclear bomb. But in an urban environment, you have to do the proportionality assessment saying, okay, you're targeting this enemy tunnel, but it's underneath all this civilian infrastructure and civilian areas. So that makes it extensively harder to hit the enemy that you're shooting at. And this is why even I recommend to somebody if you're defending an urban train, you better start digging because tunnels do keep you protected, keep you from being able to be seen because all militaries want to attack the enemy

they're fighting as far away as possible. And that's why people go in there, you know, a weaker enemy goes into an urban area. It's because they immediately can hide themselves, immediately can stay protected. And if there's tunnels, then you can go. go into the tunnel and it's really hard for the other side to hit you. But unique to Hamas, Hamas's tunnels are only under civilian areas and are under even protected sites like hospitals, mosques, schools, which they hoped it's illegal. It's called lawfare where you want to use the rules of war against the person who is

attacking you. So you cause the protections of all the civilians and their places to be lost. because you're putting your military infrastructure underneath them. I mean, there's a whole list of challenges of fighting tunnels, or especially in urban areas, where, like I said, there's 360 degree threats all around you in an urban environment, but you have to look down as well. I mean, there's tunnel bombs in warfare where they actually just pack explosives underneath you,

and as soon as you walk on top of it, they explode it. So many threats. but these tunnels, I think people are trying to discount. They're so unique to this war and the challenge that it causes you to try to. So the question you asked, though, really has to beg more questions. Like, okay, what's the mission? Is the mission to kill the enemy? Is the mission to take the city?

Is the mission even to just contain the enemy in that environment? And the tunnels will factor into that. I tried to show people, like, even in the Ukraine war, the tunnels were the subways of like Kiev. were never meant to be used for military purposes, but of the 3 million population that was surprised that the Russians were attacking their city, they immediately all went into the metro tunnels to stay protected, and it protected them.

And most people discount that as well, is that of the hundreds of miles of tunnels in Gaza, it would fit every single civilian in Gaza. 2.2 million people could fit underground if Hamas wanted them to, but Hamas doesn't let a, single civilian into their tunnels because they stated that that's somebody else's responsibility. How do the laws of armed conflict factor into tunnel warfare, especially around the use of gas?

Interesting question. So I have actually written a tear gas, which is a gas, although it can, it's not ironic. I know why, but tear gas can be used against almost every civilian population of the world, right? A riot control agent, the police can use it at will, and they do, from pepper sprayed, but it can't be used in war as a form of warfare, as a method of warfare. And many of the reasons for that is because we used them in tunnels in Vietnam. We would pump tear gas in with generators. We would literally bring generators and tubing and pump it into the tunnel instead of going into it. But we also, it became a big debate in the Senate and everything.

And we signed this riot control agent prohibition. So basically saying that we won't unless the president authorized it, used tear gas, and war. The laws of war, again, are actually pretty clear on UK. You can't target civilians. You have to assess the military value, the necessity, the proportionality. And that applies in a tunnel as well. Like you have to assess the proportionality of attacking a tunnel to the military value you gain

in the foreseeable likely. damage it will cause to civilian populations or their infrastructure, and you have to take the precautions to prevent that. But when you have a tunnel system like this woven into the civilian environment, you can see how that complicates executing the use of force, but adhering to the law of armed conflict. And Israel, again, has done some really innovative things to clear tunnels. because there's this thing about destroying tunnels versus clearing tunnels. But on gas, although I've seen tear gas used even in recent wars, like in the Battle of Morari in 2017, it's a really effective way to clear a building without destroying it if the other side doesn't have gas masks.

But I know why we don't use it and why Israel would never use it because you can imagine the headline, Israel uses gas in tunnels and what that would do globally just from that title. So it has historically been very useful in clearing tunnels. We no longer do it. And I agree it's a good thing because it's a slippery slope. Well, if you use tear gas, what else you're going to use? And nobody wants that. Do we have any more listener questions?

I got one I feel like we could probably do an entire episode about. and then one that'll see us out. So the one I think we should do the whole episode later. Quality infrastructure is defensible infrastructure. How does build quality plan versus as built, and most importantly, maintenance figure into war planning, does it? So that's a good one as well. Yes, of course, the building construction of infrastructure.

And why in major urban battles, there's always a, a massive fight in the industrial areas of cities because they're built strong and there's long lines of sight where you can you can shoot your weapon systems that are normally, you know, constricted, as in, and we don't really have a lot of concrete penetrating direct fire munitions. And you see a lot of, in war, you see people bringing up artillery to direct fire artillery, which is unique to urban battles into buildings so they could eliminate the enemy in that very strong building. So absolutely building construction. factors into the way the character of the battle is going to happen.

If they're in really reinforced steel reinforced Ford concrete, that building is going to take a lot of damage, even like the Battle of Stalingrad, where most of the buildings were left standing, but the roofs were off. So it really factors into how, and how it's maintained as a building. But the question is unique because it says infrastructure, which a military will factor in in his, in its plans, especially targeting, where it will preserve infrastructure, everything from, like, even knocking out the power, which a standard practice is no longer attacking the power, as in just blowing it up, but maybe you can just use a different type of ammunition and cut the power lines, which was done like in the invasions of Iraq. So that infrastructure question factors into it because you are literally trying to protect

infrastructure, but if it's being used for military value, how do I achieve? the military mission with the least amount of damage. But if the city is made of ironclad buildings, you're going to see a much different fight, different types of munitions used, and a lot different destruction happening. Actually, we should also mention Azavstahl, which I'm not going to, you know. I have an article coming out really soon in Time magazine about the Azostal fight and how they flew helicopters in to reinforce it and hold how 3,000 fight. I mean, it's really like a story of like the 300 in Thermopyla or the Alamo where just a few, a few brave men and women hold off.

So in that case, in Adistol, in an industrial area, very heavily built with some underground, 3,000 fighters held off 20,000 Russians for weeks. And those, those Russians weren't able to go fight somewhere else. So it's just an amazing story. But that's another. episode as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll look forward to that reading it. I mean, definitely. And I got one more. You kind of answered at the beginning, but I think it's a good one to re-highlight and go out on. Given that they are the two most high-profile urban warfare actors of recent years, how does Israeli urban warfare doctrine compare to Russian urban warfare doctrine? Yeah. No, it's a good question. One follows law of war.

One does not. The Israel way of warfare is basically to follow the law of armed conflict, but also leave with very mechanized forces like bulldozers and tanks with active protection systems. Russian doctrine, there's a question on whether they follow it, is to lead with artillery rounds. And not just precision, again, to dumb round, like they do literally artillery barrages, which could be called carpet bombing, which is also just given to aerial. aerial bombardments, but the Russian military is an artillery-based military. They lead with a barrage of artillery to destroy everything in their path, and then they follow with armor and infantry. So it is literally an indiscriminate methodology of urban warfare, because they're leading

with bombs, no matter what's in front of them, to protect their forces. And what they did in one of the battles of Grosny was exactly that. They lost soldiers so that they decided, well, we're just going to level the whole thing, no matter what to military target or not. And that's what they did. And they killed tens of thousands of civilians and doing it. But that's the giant difference between the two is one follows the law of war. One doesn't. I think this is amazing.

You gave us a lot of your time. And I feel like I understand this better. Some, as Matthew said, of our listeners are going to say, this is bullshit. and the Israeli army is the worst in the world. We can't help that. We can only talk to the people who are in front of us, and this guy seems pretty smart, so we'll talk to him.

John Spencer, thank you so much for coming on with us. Thank you.