Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 3: John Spencer on why Israel hasn't yet won the war in Gaza

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

In our first interview episode, Haviv Rettig Gur sits down (virtually) with Prof. John Spencer of West Point, one of the foremost experts in urban warfare who has made a special study of Israeli warfighting tactics and strategy.Many subscribers to this podcast have asked us why Israel doesn’t seem to have won this war, why Hamas is still standing after 17 months of fighting and why Israel must still negotiate for its hostages.For answers we turned to Prof. Spencer. We learned about the IDF’s astonishing successes, such as its groundbreaking tactical innovations in tunnel warfare. And we learned about the gaping lacuna at the heart of Israel’s strategy in Gaza — the reason it still hasn’t won the war.Thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode in honor of those we lost on October 7th.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnythingIf you would like to sponsor an episode please email [e-mail]

Hello, everybody. Welcome to episode three of Ask for Leave 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 word like, can you beat Hamas? Is, you. 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 cart fell.

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've all, felt the tragedy over the past week of the Bibas boys. And I want today to remember the other infant who died on October 7. Mila Cohen was nine months old in Kibbutz Beiri. She was shot by Hamas terrorists in the arms of her mother, Sandra, when they stormed the kibbutz on October 7. Her father, Oat Cohen 43 and Grandma Yonah 73 were also

killed in her home. All three family members relate to rest. at the Ilkone Cemetery in Ptachlika, were 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 up-front,

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 mother. War Institute at West Point, and 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've 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. It's 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. 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 just terrible images that have 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? Yeah, it's a really big question. I definitely 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 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, one, 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 7th, and was it being pursued in, within the, the, the major? I mean, you talk about the tunnels. So the really good question, because everybody wanted something to compare Gaza to, because as analysts, researchers, your voices, people like frameworks to understand. So there is no comparison to what the idea 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 bought

or others where you're expeditionary and your 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. Can you give us a sense of that? In other words, the Viet Cong had tunnels, quite a bit of tunnels. Absolutely, the Viet Cong had tunnels. So, actually... 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? So it's interesting. There's actually no known two 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 Hezboa tunnels, hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. but what was 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. In Vietnam, there are locations where they're pervasive underground tunnels because it is an effective way to evade detection or even strike.

So like in places like Kuchee or even parts of the Hocheman 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 military to all. 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 civilian sought refuge in like the tunnels under or the subway tunnels of Kiev and Maripal 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 the 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 even battles in Vietnam, because there were urban battles in Vietnam, like the battle away 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 IEDF was facing something that most military, no militaries ever face. Most major urban battles of history like Stalingrad, Akken, 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, this is probably the most militarized terrain on the planet using the civilians as one of the primary mechanisms, using the tunnels. All of these amounted to the 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. 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 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 under 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, You know, 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 the abuse. Did Israel make mistakes morally in that battlefield? Not individual soldiers' criminality. And obviously you sent 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? Not from a moral perspective, no. And I never got that.

And actually, I was accused of that as an American soldier after 9-11 deploying into Iraq in 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 men. missions. So the strategy inshumane, 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 flexion of their society.

So they follow not only the laws and the military laws, but their ethical codes within their people. And every time I've ever visited Israel in Gaza, 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. And that's just a lot of. lack of information about how war works or how even any military. And I've gotten this, Haviv, 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 change the numbers, suffered intact like October 7th, on our soil from an external enemy force that did all those forable 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 U.S. presidents, General Mark Millie 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 aren't present in the urban area.

For number one thing, 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 idea, all of, you know, culture and things like that we'll talk about. But one of the other examples of no militaries face 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 what it's done in this war and what it's, actually compounded the suffering of the Ghazan 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 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 your government started a war that it's not going to win, but you need to stay in there, and basically be trapped in the combat areas. That is something that I think could have been changed, but it was outside of Israel's. And 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 timeframe when Israel is underattacked 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, you know, Israel changed its rules according to New York Times from what it was doing before October 7th to after. And anybody's ever studying any war, like, 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, you know, the fallacy. So it's just not a serious debate. It's not a serious discussion. So let me ask you this. 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 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 Zerl not to go after them, and the only way to go after them was to cut through cities. And that was done. 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 Israeli 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, 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 old Greek phalanx, right? These are farmers. They got to 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 shocking. 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 Chisbella 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? So if victory is not available to Israel, then I think the cycle of violence in the Middle East only continues. This is 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 in Victor Hansen, and I would recommend also General McMaster, both writing from Stanford, about 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, you know, 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 the 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 lesson, 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. That's a war crime.

That's a defined classic war crime. And there has to be consequences. So, you know, the ideal that, you know, 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 the 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 the 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 has 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, 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, turn your question in 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 this is where people like the historians like Victor Hanson and McMaster or Sir Andrew Roberts are saying, look, people, this is a really a rot. This is a rot in liberal societies which believe that wars can be.

not one 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 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. Victory is available to us then. So I want to walk through two things. One, actually, a three-point plan. We're going to advise the Israeli generals right now. What did we do right?

Because we did quite a bit right. A huge percentage of Khamas 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. 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.

And like you said, I wrote a piece now a few months ago about Israel is winning, but it does not mean they're going to win. war is a contest of wills, not just between two militaries, but through political governments, their societies, and the international context. It's always a contest of will. And unfortunately, even beyond Israel's control, many organizations in international nations have sent Hamas, the political apparatus in Gaza, messages that you have the chance to win. because the enemy actually tells you when you 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 tactics is just a noise before defeat. But there's actually a second part to that, that basically... It's true in politics. too. 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 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 seizure that border. I mean, think about it in the Vietnam War, you know, with the Hoshman Trail, the Iraq War, with escaping across the border into Pakistan, or the Afghanistan.

or the Afghanistan War and in the Iraq War fighters and supplies coming in from multiple locations being able to seal an enemy off from resupply is really hard to do. Israel has 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 a 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.

It's dropping, yeah. Yeah, 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 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 battalians

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 had some of the most advanced tunnel warfare formations and equipment, still do tunnels like every other military in modern history, has an obstacle to deal with when you find it a 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. same time. Explain that. This was a moment that we noticed as journalists in the war that changed everything. There's a unit called Yajalom, 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 tunnel warfare against Hamas. Can you walk us through that? Sure. So, yeah, 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 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 dogs, the drones to the breathing

apparatus. 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 units like the Yamov, who pioneered close quarters battle tactics that the rest of the world

uses. But Yajalong underground warfare specialist, but a brigade, 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 stopped 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's 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 his tunnels the way it wanted to, right? And what Klausoros actually says is don't, in other people, in Sun Tzu, don't bite the way your enemy wants you to. And it was through Israeli generals, and one of them, the 98th Division commander, General Goldfuss, who was frustrated on the way the operations were going with how Hamas was using this tunnel.

holding the tunnel as long as they could and then booby trapping the tunnel. Even Yajalome lost soldiers, the IDF soldiers dealing with these booby-trapped tunnels because in some ways they were built to be booby-trapped and used in this delaying tactic. When General Goldfush, you know, who had, you know, special forces, you know, he's a fletella 13, a Navy seal, but also, you know, other ways of thinking about it said, I don't, want this to happen, develop 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, Yaha'alom Specialist in Underground Warfare, they developed a way to identify the tunnels before

even entering an area like Con Unis 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 interest is 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 of 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 in attacking from multiple directions while IDF infantry and others were attacking on the surface, all at the same time creating this multiple dilemma problem that nobody's ever tempted 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's just never been heard of to treat the enemy's tunnels as an opportunity to maneuver against them on multiple surfaces. Well, I just, I'm sorry, I'm struggling to stay analytical and not just be proud of those guys. This is an army that is doing. and also many simple things above ground

and the infantry that I do know, things that we never knew how to do 20 years ago. And it's an extraordinary generation in that sense. I want to now take a step into what's missing and just we'll keep it brief. People should read your stuff. If you have a reading recommendation, let's end with that. But what have we not accomplished?

Obviously the defeat of Hamas, but what does it take to get there? this 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? Yeah, and this is the challenge, again, where I can, you know, 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 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. And 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. I'm sorry, back up.

You just said saying 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,

you know, 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? 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 famed now ideal of clear, hold, and build, that has been talked about that the U.S. military, after five years of struggling with it in Iraq, decided to go towards this clear hold build strategy in post-conflict operation, as in when you've already removed the other power.

And usually, again, with the Israeli thing with Gaza, 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, saying 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 in Gaza the idea 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 motto 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 IDFs in order to fracture in bits and pieces, the Hamas, the Hamas, 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 clearing, that's not clearing. 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 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.

So is it fair to say that Hamas can't, that until Hamas has 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 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? No. I mean, there's just different variations.

And even these new plans, which actually are the more logical plans of moving the civilians out of harsh 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 ideas 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, you know, chop the bigger problem up into smaller problems

and do, you know, different variations of hamlets and zones or, you know, even smaller areas, saked 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 Master says 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, you know, 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. It's striking to me that the Israeli military, 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 so our extraordinary superpower is finding these amazingly innovative solutions to absolutely intractable problems. But then you come and say 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 the 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 at 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? 100%. But I put the caveats there that there are some unique standards that people try to attempt to hold Israel to say, well, that's for you, that's not an option. And that's the problem here with anybody who has a different ideal 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 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 in war too. Like I'm occupying part of their land, but I'm going to give them safe haven't over there to build backup power, and they're going to come back. Eventually my society decides that we no long 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 even if they want to self-rength. governed. It's just, it's illogical that people have ideals of how there is a different solution to this, even if Hamas wants to do the Hezboa 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 is 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 for Israel, you have to provide the security to that organization. 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 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 Force, 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 wish-casting 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 more. Palestinian civilians can't live in a rebuilt Gaza until these fundamental things are understood and this moves forward. 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 prosciate the war. The great example is don't go to Rafa 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. 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 Hezbo, 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 race. 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 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 a violent world if that's all the enemies of the world have to do is build this situation on which the cost for people that don't understand war is too high and you should just wait and you know yet 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 a historical 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 Millie and McMaster, all these have said, but for some reason it wasn't available to Israel. 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 down the road to talk about Iran, Khazbalah and missiles and what the options are there at a grand strategic level. I appreciate your time. Thanks.