Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Understanding Israel's battlefields (& U.S. involvement) - with Dr. Fred Kagan

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Next week we will release the new book by Saul Singer and me: "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World", which you can order now at: www.amazon.com/Genius-Israel-Small-Nation-Teach/dp/1982115769/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3LKV3ZLWLBOL1&keywords=dan+senor&qid=1694402205&sprefix=dan+senor%2Caps%2C87&sr=8-1 OR www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-genius-of-israel-dan-senor/1143499668 The speech that I reference in today's episode -- in which I discuss the resilience of Israelis in this moment -- can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WygtNbwf-tk By the time you listen to this episode, we may be witnessing escalation on Israel’s Northern border. Certainly there’s a highly anticipated address by Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. This will be his first major address since the October 7 War began. If there is major escalation, we will be dropping an emergency episode with Dr. Matthew Levitt, an expert on Hezbollah who was on this podcast last week. Today’s guest is Dr. Fred Kagan, an expert in understanding war theaters – as he tries to help us understand the various battlefields in which Israel is currently fighting or might be fighting in the future. Fred is a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He spent meaningful time in the Middle East informally advising US military commanders. You can find more of Fred’s work at: The Critical Threats Project – https://www.criticalthreats.org/ Institute for the Study of War – https://understandingwar.org/

It's 11 p.m. in New York City on Thursday, November 2nd. It's 5 a.m. in Israel on Friday, November 3rd, as Israelis get ready to start their day. That day is Day 28 of the war. By the time you listen to this episode, we may be witnessing major escalation on Israel's northern border. Certainly there's a highly anticipated address by Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. This would be his first major address since the October 7th war began. We'll be monitoring events closely, and if there is a major escalation, we will drop an emergency episode with Dr. Matthew Levitt from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who we had on a few days ago to give us a tutorial on the history of Hezbollah. Before we get into an update on other events in Israel, one housekeeping note. In just a few days, next Tuesday, my and Saul Singer's next book,

The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World, will be published. It's a book about Israeli resilience, the same resilience we are seeing and are about to see across Israeli society. Haredi, secular, Jews from the East and Jews from the West, really just about every segment of Israeli society. I gave a speech about this moment in Israeli society on Sunday at the Jewish Leadership Conference here in New York City. I'll provide a link to that speech in the show notes. We hope you'll order the book this week. It would mean a lot to us. I'm sending the proceeds to an organization in Israel working on the rebuild, and quite a rebuild it will be, working to help the hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the South and the

North that will need to begin anew. As for other developments in Israel and on the borders in the North and South, we mentioned Hassan Nasrallah's upcoming speech. It's also noteworthy that there are reports that Esmail Khaani, who is commander of Iran's expeditionary Quds Force in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, is said to be in Lebanon to coordinate a possible wider confrontation with Israel. Now, as you remember from our conversation with Dr. Levitt, the IRGC is the principal guardian of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the Quds Force, which is part of the IRGC, is the principal exporter of the revolution. So here's the commander of the Quds Force, the exporter of the Islamic revolution in Iran, in Lebanon, as things are getting hotter on Israel's

border in the north, and at a time that there are serious questions about Iran's direct involvement of what could become a multi-front war for Israel. Other updates in Gaza, under tightened secrecy, the IDF has encircled Gaza City after penetrating Hamas's outer defense capabilities through what appear to be fierce battles. Of course, we can't see exactly what's happening. That's a conversation we're going to get into today as to why we can't see as much of what is actually happening in the battlefield as we typically see these days in other battlefields around the world. But from what we understand, the IDF has successfully killed approximately 130 Hamas terrorists, destroying munitions

capabilities, and uncovering a number of tunnels. Tragically, these battles have claimed the lives of 19 IDF soldiers and officers. Today, we are going to try to understand the battlefields, the battlefields in the South and the battlefields in the North, what exactly we can discern as to what the IDF is doing and encountering and what their options are and what exactly is the U.S.'s role in all of this. To help us understand these issues, we return to a frequent guest to the Call Me Back podcast, Dr. Fred Kagan, who's the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, and he also works closely with the Middle East team at the Institute for the Study of War. Both the Critical Threats team at the Institute for the Study of War. Both the Critical Threats Project and the Institute for the Study of War are invaluable resources. I highly recommend you visit both of their websites to see their latest daily reports, weekly reports,

and in-depth research papers. Fred is a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and over the years he has spent meaningful time in the Middle East informally advising a number of U.S. military commanders. So he certainly knows the region well, and he also understands the thinking of a number of the actors that are caught up in the conflict we have been analyzing on this podcast. Fred Kagan on Understanding the Battlefield. This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend, Fred Kagan, military historian, military analyst.

We usually have Fred on to talk about the Russian-Ukraine war, but he tends to track war theaters all over the world, and he's been tracking events quite closely in Israel and in Gaza and the region, so we are grateful to have him here to discuss what is going on in this war. Fred, thanks for joining us. Dan, thanks for having me. I'm very sorry to be here with another war to talk about. I know. I mean, you know, in so many words, you kind of predicted this a while ago, in that not necessarily the conflict playing out this way, when where but the idea that that once yes russia ukraine got hot depending on the world's response we'd start seeing flare-ups elsewhere uh and um and here

we are not that they're all directly connected but um there is a sense of the of the world of disorder in the world and sure enough here, here we are in the Middle East. Fred, over the last 20 years, we've been used to seeing wars from the Iraq War, when I was there, to the Russia-Ukraine War. We were used to seeing these wars play out on television, cable news, in the case when I was in Qatar and then Iraq, we would see it play out on the pan-Arab news networks. And then now, obviously, they play out on social media, almost in real time, everywhere. But what seems different about this war is we're actually seeing very little. I mean, we're seeing a lot of

commentary on television and on social media, and we're seeing a lot of vitriol spewed and a lot of emotions, but we don't really understand what's going on in Gaza right now. We know bits and pieces, but we don't really know what's going on the way we understand what's going on in these other places. So why is that? Well, so, Dan, the Israelis have a much greater degree of control over the information space in Gaza and, well, of course, in Israel than most other countries do over the places in which they're fighting. And so Israelis have been able to disrupt communications coming out of Gaza and themselves are very, very disciplined about their own, what kind of information they release. And they've been very clear that they are trying to avoid letting Hamas develop a clear picture of what it is exactly that they're trying to do.

And so when you put those factors together and the fact that Gaza is a tiny place with just limited ways of communicating with the outside world, it's just very different from the environment in Iraq and Ukraine and Syria and elsewhere where we've seen much more information coming out. That having been said, there is information that's coming out, and so it is possible to piece together something of what's happening.

But as you say's it's much more limited um and the israelis are much um just much more tight-lipped as they often are about what they're actually doing so it is it is very intentional by the israelis oh clearly yeah i mean if the israelis wanted there to be you know rolling coverage of what was going on, they can make that happen. But they don't for reasons that I think are understandable. And so they, you know, they are controlling the information flow out of here very rigorously. And again, they're controlling the information flow out of their own forces very tightly so that they are not providing a huge amount of detail in their briefings about what they're doing and so on, which again, is not especially surprising to me.

You know, when you undertake military operations, you have calls to make about what kind of levels of tactical surprise you want to try to be able to achieve against the enemy. And a lot of the time it doesn't matter that much because by the time anything makes it to even social media, the enemy's already figured out where you are and what they're doing. And so, you know, it doesn't, it's not that important. In this case, I think the Israelis are trying to confuse Hamas and make it harder for Hamas to figure out exactly what they're trying to do. And in that case, the sort of tactical surprise that they're trying to preserve may well be important. And how do you go about accessing information and understanding what's going on and conducting your analysis, because what you have at your

Critical Threat Centered AI and what you and Kim have at the Institute for the Study of War is pretty deep, pretty rich analysis. So what's your methodology? So it's been a challenge, of course, but we've got a great team that's really, really risen to it. So there have consistently been sources reporting out from Gaza, including, of course, Hamas, which is able to get its message out under any circumstances. And just as we look at what the Russians say and then subtract the lies and try to figure out what's real, we also look at what Hamas is reporting, subtract the distortions and try to run it up against other sources and figure out what's going on. The Israelis do provide limited tidbits of information. They also provide periodically

videos and imagery of their forces moving around. And there is a robust community now that is out there that spends its time geolocating videos that people post. So we benefit from the work of that community to help locate, you know, this Israeli armored column actually was over here, this one was over there, and then we run that against what the Hamas claims are and what the Israelis say. And then finally, we also, you know, in the modern world, you can get pretty close to near real time satellite imagery. And one of the advantages of war in the desert is that

it's pretty easy to see tank tracks. So one of the things that's going on, at least in this initial phase of Israeli penetration into the strip, you can see where the tank tracks go and you can see where they stop. And that gives a sense, since Hamas doesn't have tanks, that you can be pretty sure that if you see in tank tracks, they're Israelis. And that gives us a sense of how far they've gotten and what's going on. That'll probably cease to be useful pretty soon, I think, because the Israelis have,

we can talk about this more, but are completing this sort of close encirclement of Gaza City. And at that point, I think we're just going to end up seeing more tracks over tracks. But for now, as we've been watching the initial advance, it's been helpful to be able to see where the tank tracks end. The last time the IDF fought inside Gaza in any way comparable to this was a decade ago, almost a decade ago in 2014, Operation Protective Edge. Also during the premiership, or previous premiership, premiership of Prime Minister Netanyahu, although composition of the government was much different. What did the IDF learn from that experience, and what tactics do you think it's developed

as a result as it approaches this? Is it a completely different world now in Gaza, 10 years later, and that the lessons from 2014 are just not relevant? Or were there a lot of learnings that can be applied? Well, I mean, Dan, I think the key thing that is different here is the mission that Prime Minister Netanyahu has given the IDF, which is to destroy Hamas. And that's not the mission that the IDF has previously really pursued against Hamas. And this is, this is a very important issue to discuss. There are militarily, when you talk about end states and missions, there are really three missions that you might give a commander vis-a-vis an

enemy in descending order of difficulty and finality, it's destroy, defeat, and disrupt. Destroy means render the enemy incapable of fighting until it has been fully reconstituted. That is to say, basically, so thoroughly wreck the enemy, so thoroughly kill and capture his fighters, deprive him of the tools of war and so forth, that the only way he can start fighting again is by rebuilding his force from scratch. That's the destroy mission. Defeat means deprive the enemy of the will or ability to continue to fight we'll set aside will here because nobody's going to you know break Hamas's will to continue to

fight here but depriving the enemy of the ability to fight is a is a temporary condition now it can be a long-term temporary condition can be years worth but it implies as contrasted with defeat that you're not completely destroying their ability to fight. You're depriving them of the ability to fight right now. And so you would leave in place some element of their force that they would be able to rebuild on without having to reconstruct the whole thing. That would be a normal defeat mission. And then disrupt of course is less than that. It's just to basically interfere with the enemy's ability to conduct combat operations

without depriving them of the ability to do so. So in the past, the Israelis have generally, I think, pursued some combinations of disrupt and defeat in their operations toward Hamas. And you know, and I know, I mean, you know, Israelis often talk about mowing the grass and other things that really are characterizing disrupt, even if it's long-term disrupt missions. Those have, it's a much lower bar to meet to disrupt an adversary's operations for a time. So, but

Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that he's not willing to accept that low bar anymore. And now he's, you know, going for the destroy option. That's the thing that sets this apart, really. Because I don't, I don't think that, at least in cast lead or protective edge, I don't think that, at least in caste-led or protective edge, I don't think that the Israelis really set themselves the mission of destroying Hamas. So I think that's actually the biggest distinction more than any other. Okay, so that's what the IDF may have taken away from 2014. What do you think, from Hamas's perspective, they learned from 2014? I'm not sure how much of this is about learning from 2014 and how much of this is trying to take advantage of a number of big changes that have occurred in the world.

It's very hard to look at the initial Hamas attack and think that the intent was anything other than to draw Israel into exactly this kind of operation. I mean, if you had designed an attack, if you'd set out to design an attack and said, we want to make it so barbaric and so heinous that there's no way that an Israeli prime minister could do anything other than move forces into the Gaza Strip at scale. He would design an attack like the one that they did. They're, for the most part, achieving the effect that they had intended to achieve. I think a possible difference is in the past, you know, the Israelis have tended to come in hard and fast and sort of blitz the place and move on. And this time, Bibi is undertaking, you know, is given a different mission. And the IDF is doing this in a very different, more deliberate way. I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas was a bit surprised at the way that the Israelis have actually responded to this. I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas was a bit surprised at the way that the Israelis have

actually responded to this. I think they likely expected to draw the Israelis into a fight here. I don't think that they expected the Israelis to come in in this extremely deliberate fashion, making it clear that they were in for a long war and that they were seriously going to come in and dismantle the whole thing. I doubt that that's what Hamas thought that they would do. I think Hamas obviously surprised Israel with the initial attack. That was, I'm sure, based on lessons learned from previous things. But I think the IDF is probably surprising them a bit now with the approach that it's taking. Fred, can you describe what the IDF approach is? So the IDF appears to be moving to take up positions for what would basically be a close encircle to cut Gaza City off from the south and take control over movement north-south into and out of the city.

And they've also been pushing in along the coast and then also from the northeast, again, through the relatively more open agricultural lands in those areas toward the city. And it looks like what they intend to do is to take up positions outside the city and then begin working their way into the urban area. It's a very deliberate operation. They've been very cautious. They've said that they have preceded all of these advances with what we in the U.S. military would call route clearance packages, basically a couple of Merkava tanks and an armored bulldozer moving down the road to clear it of IEDs and mines and things before they advance and then sending armor and infantry down

the roads to take up these positions. You know, I mean, again, Gaza is very tiny. You can blitz through it in principle in a short period of time, but they're not doing that. They're being very, very deliberate and they're bringing a lot of force from multiple directions. So it looks like they're preparing to sort of peel it like an onion and start, I assume, gradually working their way through the more urban area from bases right outside, you know, right outside of the city, and ripping through the Hamas strongholds, and also presumably getting after and taking out the tunnel complexes.

There was almost three weeks between October 7th and the formal launch of the ground incursion. And during that time, there were a lot of questions, both inside Israel and outside Israel, more so, I guess, outside Israel than inside Israel, about why it was, quote unquote, taking Israel so long to launch the ground incursion, and that they were giving up the advantage to Hamas with giving them all that time to prepare, anticipate, plan for the Israeli incursion, land incursion. That was one concern. On the other side of that analysis, there were some who argued that, well, first of all, Israel is surging in reserves. 360,000 reserves hasn't had to do something like that in a very long time. It takes time to get all those people called up, trained, supplied, resourced, especially because the turnout for reserves was

so much higher than the IDF expected. A, B, there was, they were getting a lot accomplished from the air. And so there was a lot of work, the clearance, as you kind of put it, the clearance packages from the air that would help prep the battlefield for the land incursion. And I can go on and on, but there were many reasons argued on the other side why actually the time was important, and they weren't giving up as much advantage as some who were looking for an urgent response would argue. Where do you come down on that? Well, you know, when you have an adversary like Hamas that initiates an extremely well-planned and well-prepared surprise attack, you should assume

that they are also going to be prepared for whatever they expect the response to be. So I'm not sure what specific preparations Hamas would have been making in that period that they hadn't already made. You know, they initiated this with an action that would have been an act of war between two states. You expect that you're going to be in war after that. So the Israelis were right to take the time to mobilize properly and get set. Think this through. I'm sure part of that time was devoted to figuring out exactly what it was that they were going to do. This isn't something where you look at this and you say, okay, Hamas has just done this incredibly horrible, heinous

thing. We can't accept this anymore. We're going to destroy Hamas. And then you say, IDF, go get it. That doesn't work. The military has to take time to understand the situation, which they clearly didn't because they were surprised by it, and see what's going on and then come up with a sensible plan. All the while, you're mobilizing reserves. People are flying back. That takes time. You don't know how the war is going to go.

We have the risk of escalation all along. I mean, there's a lot of reason not to rush this. And I actually think that it's good that they took the time to think about what they were going to do and get ready for it and do this in a deliberate fashion. I expect that Hamas actually was probably expecting more of a spasmodic response in truth, because that's been a little bit more the pattern that they've gotten used to. So I don't think that that's a valid criticism on the whole. There are two Gazas. One is above ground, and the other is below ground. I want you to start with describing subterranean Gaza. What does it consist of? How vast, how deep, how long is it? Like, what's in there? I think, as everybody knows, there are a number of extremely extensive, you know, hundreds of kilometers of tunnel networks with, I'm sure, you know, storage

facilities, headquarters, communications, tunnel systems that interconnect and allow for movement and ambushes and surprise underneath the city. The Hamas headquarters are reportedly buried under various locations, including hospitals. And these are significant communications routes and I'm sure supply bases and headquarters of communications as well. And there are multiple of these tunnel networks, primarily in the northeast, northwest, and then in and around Gaza City itself, and then some more further south. And they're quite extensive and I'm sure will be quite challenging to deal with in principle, depending on exactly how the Israelis go about doing it. The weapon that is, or the munition that is talked about most in the current context, the GBU-57AB Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or otherwise known as a bunker buster, is

a bomb that the U.S. has had in its arsenal since i think 2004 and can penetrate up to 60 feet which is clearly based on what you're describing and others like avia sakharov have described in this podcast it's clearly not deep enough to take out the metro the almost subway system like network underground what's the latest bunker buster technology out there? Could it be effective against what you just described? Well, the latest bunker buster technology is always classified, Dan. Look, I mean, the focus on the bunker busters has been on, you know, penetrating the Fordow nuclear production facility in Iran. So you can measure the depth of that and see how you feel about it.

But bunker busters are only one way of getting after a tunnel problem. It's important to keep in mind that you focus on using bunker buster airdrop bombs when you don't have troops on the ground. Because you're certainly not going to use them in proximity to your own troops, obviously. And if you do have troops on the ground, then you start to have other solutions to the to the problem dealing with tunnels especially if you have some idea where the tunnels are there is a tendency to get fixated with weapon systems and it's not it's not advisable there's usually multiple ways of solving problems and weapon systems are rarely as magical as people make them out to be so that's really interesting because you're a military historian. So you actually study these things.

I I've never heard you say that before. Look, it all it all comes down to what is your objective? What are the effects you're trying to achieve? What is the enemy trying to do? And then relative capabilities. And you design a plan that sort of sub optimizes for a whole lot of things in order to get you to your, to your objective, that plan is going to call for achieving specific effects. So the effect is in this case, either neutralize or destroy Hamas ability to use tunnels.

All right. Well, one way to do that is with a huge, big bomb that just cracks open all the tunnels. Okay. Another way to do that is if you know where the, just cracks open all the tunnels. Okay. Another way to do that is if you know where the tunnels are, you can seal them off, you can get in there, you can interact with them. That's obviously much uglier. If you're going to have your own troops going and fighting in tunnels, it's not attractive, right? Other options include other kinds of engineering undertakings to close them off, to interact with them, to destroy

them, to do demolitions into various different points. Or you can do what the Israelis are also doing, which is to deprive the strip of fuel, recognizing that humans can't live in tunnels that are very deep without having the ability to bring in fresh air and transport things. And so this is why the Israelis are being so stubborn about, uh, not allowing fuel into the strip. Um, and they've been, they've been explicit about this. They want to, uh, drive the Hamas fighters out of the tunnels. Uh, that's another way to handle the situation. So the, the issue is really what is the effect that you're trying to achieve? There's always multiple ways to achieve a given effect.'re all they all have trade-offs um and you choose the the way

of going about it that has the trade-offs that work for you the best so that's why i say it's you know you have this discussion in ukraine also and we get very hung up on you know is the f-16 the best fighter plane for this the m1 tank has its problems and all that kind of stuff and it's these the the technicalities matter the systems matter the capabilities matter but it's important not to just get hung up on we either have this system or we can't do that because that's not that that's never actually true okay i just want to you mentioned it i just want to put a pin in this this is an an important point. The reason the Israelis, the reason the IDF are so sensitive about how fuel is taken into Gaza is primarily – it's very strategic, which is it's not about denying fuel to average Palestinian civilians. It's about the fact that Hamas is hunkered down underground in these tunnels, and they need fuel to operate and survive under there,

and Israel's trying to draw them out. And one way to draw them out is to deny them the resources they need, the basics, the essentials they need to survive under there, one of which is fuel. Right. Okay. So the hostages, assume that many of the hostages, the 230 plus hostages, assume many of them are underground in these tunnels. How does that complicate what Israel does in terms of prosecuting this war? I'm not sure that it really matters where the hostages are, Dan. I mean, Hamas has the hostages.

Wherever the hostages are, Hamas can release them, hold them, or harm them at their discretion. That's right. So the Israelis have a choice to make about whether they are prepared to let Hamas use these hostages to prevent them from prosecuting the military operation to end the threat that Hamas has just shown that it poses to Israel, or whether they're going to risk the lives of the hostages to pursue the objectives that they think they need. It's a horrible decision to have to make. It's a horrible decision for anyone to have to make.

And I don't envy Prime Minister Netanyahu for having to make the decision. But I don't see that it really matters whether they're in the tunnels or not. Wherever they are, Hamas has the same options with regard to them. If ground forces need to attack the tunnels, can you describe what fighting looks like and what tactics Hamas has likely developed? I mean, you've dealt with this. I mean, you've studied this closely in Fallujah in 2004, in Mosul over a decade after that, the kind of guerrilla warfare Israel will be facing when it's on the ground in Gaza? The observation that I'll offer is there are ways, there are pretty fundamental ways in which Hamas does not look like al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency that we fought

in Fallujah. The Sunni insurgency in Iraq and Al-Qaeda led by Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Baathist groups was overwhelmingly a ground maneuver focused insurgency. That is to say, it was oriented almost entirely on fighting us on the streets, fighting us in houses, fighting us in buildings, using IEDs and V-Bids, you know, sort of car bombs as offensive weapons against us. They did have rockets and mortars and stuff, but it was, you know, it was really all about house to house fighting. And they had huge safe areas in which they could produce enormous amounts of incredibly effective homemade explosive that they used for all kinds of purposes, like their car bombs, like loading up houses with explosives and making what we call house-borne IEDs. And the own IEDs that they scattered all across the road.

And they were really optimized for that kind of combat. Hamas is not optimized for that kind of combat, as far as I can see, in quite the same way. Hamas has oriented heavily on its rocket and missile and drone arsenal to be conducting the kinds of attacks against Israel that it normally does, that it still is conducting every day with rockets and missiles and drones, and seems to operate in a much more sort of a light infantry kind of mode. And, you know, it's very, it's hard to tell the opacity of the battlefield is making it hard for us to see exactly what these fights look like. But

although Hamas is predictably reporting that it's killing all kinds of tanks, we're not seeing evidence that that's going on. That's already not the kind of fight that we were dealing with in Fallujah. So I think, you know, a lot of people are tossing Fallujah around. And, you know, it might be. It's possible that as the Israelis actually get into trying to clear the more built up areas and Hamas puts forward its best fighters and really gets serious about making this horrific and in populated areas, that it will look like Fallujah. It's possible. But I think it's important not to map onto Hamas the kinds of capabilities and optimizations that a very different insurgency in a different context was undertaking. So I don't want to downplay this. I mean, I think, you know, in all likelihood,

this would be an extremely painful, bloody, and destructive operation. And Hamas will, I'm sure, do everything in its power to make it like that. But I also think that I'm suspending judgment a bit more than some other people who are talking about how this is going to be Fallujah. I'm going to suspend judgment until I see exactly what Hamas capabilities look like as the Israelis start working their way through the built up areas here. Okay, you don't want to compare it to Fallujah, which I respect. The Biden administration made a point early on, President Biden himself, of comparing what Israel is dealing with to ISIS. And Israel's obviously made the comparison too. What about this is

comparable to ISIS? And what is not in terms of the U.S. in the West dealing with ISIS? What's comparable is that Hamas is a terrorist organization and ISIS is a terrorist organization and Hamas uses terrorist tactics, including extreme brutality, pursuing a totalistic ideology that is similar in some respects to ISIS's. But in terms of the way that Hamas is optimized to fight, it's a bit different. I mean, you want to remember, ISIS went into Iraq in 2014 with mechanized columns. The ISIS military force was, again, it was optimized for serious ground combat and even for offensive maneuver. That's not the way that Hamas is really optimized and structured. So I think there are lots of

comparisons to make about the degree of evil of these two groups and the kinds of ideologies they're pursuing, the ways they use media and so forth. But I think we need to be careful not to sort of take that and then say, well, they're going to fight the same way. They're going to present the same kinds of problems. Dan, I think it's also, I mean, one of the things that I do think it's important to point out is, you know, you really shouldn't do this full scale ground incursion. You really should focus on targeted strikes. And, you know, what you sort of hear lingering in the background is, you know, like we did against the terrorist groups that we've defeated. We haven't really defeated them. The Salafi jihadi movement globally is alive and well, even apart from the victory that we gave it in Afghanistan. ISIS is alive in Syria and extremely dangerous, which is very alarming in the current circumstance.

So we need to be very careful about not just looking at these different groups with some similarities and deciding that they're the same kind of thing. And then we also need to be careful not to be patting ourselves on the back for a success we haven't really earned, and then taking that as the model for what everybody else should do. Sounds like you're not signing up for the Tom Friedman plan for how the IDF should deal with Hamas. Yeah, not so much. Given the totality of what was involved in Hamas's planning and execution for this, the logistics, the resources, the financial resources that were needed, the military resources that were needed, the training, the communications

capabilities. I mean, we could go on and on and on and on, the intelligence gathering. There's this perception that these were just a bunch of ragtag terrorists on pickup trucks and motorcycles, and that's how it certainly looked. But everyone I speak to in security circles in Israel says this was so elaborate in terms of what was involved here. And can you just give a sense for what that actually means when they say that? And in terms of the various actors that must have been involved in making it happen beyond just those in Gaza? Look, I mean, at the end of the day, all military forces of a certain variety look the same, right? I mean, if you're dealing with a mechanized force, it's a bunch of guys in tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling across the desert, however sophisticated they

are. If you're dealing with a terrorist army like this, it always looks like a bunch of guys on motorcycles looking ragtag and stuff because they don't have fancy uniforms. That doesn't tell you anything about how sophisticated they actually are. That's just what those kinds of forces look like. So I think we need to not get caught up in the superficial appearances. This was a very sophisticated attack. They had studied, they clearly studied the Israeli monitoring systems, theurgents. We made this mistake for years in Iraq. Those guys look the same. But, you know, we discovered

how sophisticated their planning was. And we, you know, we captured their map at a certain point in 2006. We captured their actual like battle map for what they were doing around Baghdad. And it was they were conducting operational maneuver. It was very skillfully planned, very sophisticated. But if you look at them, then you would say, there's a bunch of guys running around in dish dashes, tennis shoes, and how can we take these guys seriously? That's incredibly dangerous.

This is a very sophisticated group. They've been thinking about this for a long time. They've been preparing for this for a long time. They've been preparing for it for a long time. And they've been preparing for it with the knowledge and, by the way. I think in this case, there are probably people who knew and probably people who didn't. But we, our teams, have been tracking coordination meetings and continual interactions between Hamas leaders and Iranians and other members of the Axis of Resistance, Iran's proxy networks, going back intensively over the course of this year. Considering how dependent Hamas is on Iran and other members of the Axis, it's not plausible that they were preparing all of this in secret in a way that was going to compromise, you know, potentially compromise or draw the Iranians into an escalation and nobody told anybody.

This is not plausible. And in fact, I think the Israelis have said there were some of the Hamas fighters involved in this had been training in Iran. We know that Hamas does train in Iran. We know that they do that. I don't know whether the specific guys involved in this were there. But this is more than Gaza. This is more than a Gaza war.

And this is more than a Hamas war. And that's the other reason for not underestimating these guys. These guys have very sophisticated drones. These guys have very sophisticated weapon systems. They have access to explosively formed penetrators, which are anti-tank IEDs that can kill M1 tanks. I don't know if they can kill Merkabas. I guess we're going to find out.

But they have a lot of sophisticated capabilities here, and they've got a lot of highly trained people. So it's really, really important not to underestimate them. From a military's perspective, this is not Iwo Jima. Israel can't plant a flag and say, we won. So what does winning this war look like from a military perspective, especially given this metro tunnel system underground? Winning a war fundamentally always looks like achieving your objective. The objective Prime Minister Netanyahu has established is destroying Hamas,

which means depriving it of the ability to fight until it has been reconstituted. I take that to mean that the Israelis intend to go in and actually clear the strip and pull out the Hamas fighters, find the Hamas weapons caches and supply depots and headquarters and destroy them and wreck Hamas as a fighting force. With tunnels, you always have multiple options with tunnels. If you can get the fighters out and you're confident that you've gotten most of the fighters out, then you do that. And then you go in and you look around or you do whatever you're going to do. If you can't do that, then you seal them off and move on. You detonate them over time in any of various ways. The tunnels are a problem, but the tunnels are just a problem.

And I think it's important not to get too fixated on that problem either. Moving through the warren of houses that is Gaza City and its outlying areas. It's a massive problem even without tunnels, as we discovered in Iraq, where, you know, the problem was not tunnel systems. The problem was just what a war in some of these places were. So that's, you know, that's going to be challenging anyway. But at the end of the day, it's victory according to the mission that Prime Minister Netanyahu has said is going to be that. It's going to be fully clearing the strip and ripping Hamas entirely out and destroying their ability to continue to fight, both in terms of their cadres and in terms of their materiel.

That's what victory is, unless Prime Minister Netanyahu defines the objective down in some way. Fred, we're recording this episode on Thursday. By the time listeners hear this conversation, my next question may already be answered. But that being said, the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has announced that tomorrow at 3 p.m. he will broadcast a speech, his first since October 7th. What is the significance of that? It's very clear that Hezbollah and Iran and the whole axis of resistance is trying to dissuade the Israelis from actually pressing the military operation in Gaza to its conclusion. They've been messaging very loudly about this speech and messaging it as presaging a major escalation. So obviously that's a dumb thing to do in the sense that it is giving everybody a lot of warning that Hezbollah is preparing for an escalation. It makes sense if the main purpose of that is

to try to dissuade the Israelis from pressing home the operation. I think it's going to fail. I don't think that Netanyahu is going to be deterred by this threat of escalation. And so I assume, and we'll see how good a forecaster I am, that we'll be in one of three situations when Nasrallah gives the speech. One situation is that he gives the speech, and the speech is itself an ultimatum with a further deadline for Israel to stop operations in Gaza or else Hezbollah will enter. That's one option. Option number two is that he says that there will be escalation and then escalation immediately starts or starts shortly after the speech. Option three is that Hezbollah enters the war and the speech is an ex post facto announcement

and justification of that entrance. Option four is that the Israelis, having identified real on the ground indications that Hezbollah is preparing to attack, preempt the attack with some much more significant, presumably primarily air operations against Hezbollah targets. I think what's very important to keep in mind here is that the Hezbollah messaging, the other messaging from other members of the Axis resistance and the Iranian messaging is all pointing toward Hezbollah's intention to enter the war. There may be circumstances in which Hezbollah and the Axis would prefer that to start with an Israeli strike so that they can portray Israel as having been the one to escalate the conflict, which will not be the case if, in fact, Hezbollah is preparing to attack.

Israel would be within its rights and within sound practice to preempt an imminent attack like that. Although I think it will not play that way if that happens. But, of course, you know, it's also possible that Hezbollah would really, you know, prefer to get its first strike off and not get preempted. Those are the options that I see. It's hard for me to see, again, this will be a live test of my forecasting ability. It's hard for me to see that Nasrallah can do anything other than either announce an escalation or issue an ultimatum, given all of the hoorah that he and the Iranians and

the other members of the Axis have made. But you never know, he could whiff in some way. The only thing I want to flag, by the way, is that without making speeches, we also have Iranian proxies in Iraq making various threats to escalate against the U.S. in Iraq and the region. So this is not just about threats from Hezbollah to escalate against Israel. It's also threats directly against U.S. forces. So I want to stay on that and maybe end on that. You are a close follower and analyst of U.S. military operations, as I said at the beginning, all over the world. What exactly is the U.S. doing here? My understanding is they have a couple of aircraft carriers. They got squadrons of aircraft. They've got Air Force aircraft. They've got 2,000 Marines. They are providing Israel with munitions and other

capabilities. Tell me what I'm missing and tell me what the significance of what you're seeing in terms of the U.S. presence and deployment in the midst of all this. Well, I mean, I think the U.S. has been, I mean, I think the administration has been pretty clear about what it's trying to do. On the one hand, it's providing Israel with materiel diplomatic support to conduct this operation. And at the same time, it's trying to deter an escalation of the conflict. So it's trying to deter an expansion of the conflict and deter Hezbollah from entering the war. And we also are trying to deter attacks against our own forces in Iraq and Syria at the same time as we seem to be preparing for the eventuality that there might be

an escalation either against us or an expansion of the war to include Hezbollah. I think we've had some comments suggesting that the US might involve itself directly in fighting if Hezbollah entered the war. I think we're certainly postured to do that with the forces that we have in theater, just in terms of bringing pain on Hezbollah. If it did that, I think we would be very focused on protecting our own forces, obviously, as they likely came under attack. I'm sure that a lot of planning has gone into that. I'm not going to speculate about how we would do that, but that's what we seem to be doing. I do think that the movement of the carrier strike groups to the region gave the Iranians and Hezbollah a pause. I don't think that they

expected that. I think that they drew a stronger response from President Biden than they had expected to. On the other hand, our responses so far have clearly not deterred them from continuing to attack, conduct limited attacks against our bases. So that deterrence is not succeeding, getting them to stop. Look, there's an escalation ladder here that the Iranians have been constructing for many years. And we have a variety of attempts at mutual deterrence going on that I think in general terms are not going to succeed. So I think the likelihood is that Iran and its allies will expand this conflict to include Hezbollah and attacks on U.S. forces, and Israel and the U.S. will find themselves required to respond to that expansion

of conflict. That is my forecast now. I earnestly hope that this one's wrong. Okay, Fred, we will leave it there. I, as always, am grateful for your time and your insights. And I know our listeners are too. So we will not overstay our welcome. And hopefully you will agree to come back on in the near future. Because I think this war is going to have a lot of twists and turns in the region, and staying close to you will be important. So thank you. Thank you, Dan. I fear that you were right. That's our show for today. To keep up with Fred Kagan's work, you can find it at the

Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, that's ai.org, or at the Institute for the Study of War, which you can find at understandingwar.org. Also, please pre-order The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Tur a turbulent world. You can pre-order that at any one of your favorite online bookstores. And please look out for a possible emergency episode that we may drop on developments on the Northern Front. Otherwise, we'll just continue with our normal schedule of releasing a new episode within the next couple days. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.