Jocko Podcast - 463: Urban Warfare Perspective on Ukraine and Israel. With John Spencer

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground<John Spencer is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies w the Madison Policy Forum.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko Podcast number 463 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also, joining us once again tonight is John Spencer, John Spencer, who is on podcast 462. We talked about his book, Connected Soldiers, Life Leadership and Social Connections in Modern Warfare. He was active duty in the Army for 25 years. He went up through the ranks. Do you guys call it a Mustang?

Yes. Okay. So he was a Mustang like me from private to major. served as a platoon leader and a company commander in Iraq. And right now he is the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, West Point. Also serves as the chair of urban warfare studies with the Madison Policy Forum

and a member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare. And he's written a bunch of books. We've covered one of them. He's written a bunch of articles. I've read some of them. He's contributed to a bunch of different books. and I guess the reason we stopped last time

is because we were about to start getting into what you started doing when you retired from the Army. But I think one of the things that led to you what you did when you retired was teaching at West Point. Was that impactful? So you're still in the Army and you ended up teaching a West Point. Yep. Talk to me about that.

So actually my ex for the young EOD lieutenant had gotten a job to teach psychology at West Point. and I needed to keep the family together, so I applied for a position in the Department of Military Instructions, teaching tactics. But it was also in the rest of the time I had just come out of the Pentagon, actually working for the four-star general of the U.S. Army General Oudnero. He had created, and I hate to admit this,

something off of what the Navy had created. They called it the SSG Strategic Studies Group, and the CNO had won for like 20 years. He closed it, but the, the general at the time one and once, we put together this band of like 20 senior officers, junior officers and civilians to think outside the box for him, the things that he wasn't watching.

For a year, I studied megacities, which was really the introduction of my academic study of urban areas, so the growth of cities around the world, urbanization, everything. And how many megacities are there? There's over 35 at this moment. There are predictions.

So those are cities over 10 million, but that wasn't as important as the fact that just from 1960, where we only had around 63 cities over a million, now there's over 500. So the rapid urbanization of population growth, but also it meant that more war was going to happen in urban areas. The year study found that the U.S. military wasn't prepared for operating in mega cities, and they had some recommendations.

But I, like most military people, had to go on and do my next job. But that year was very formidable in my ability to think unconstrained by like what we were talking about in the last podcast about wave military. So I actually was studying how the U.S. military is designed for certain planning scenarios. Like we'll fight counterinsurgency when we need to, but the military is designed to fight certain battles against certain enemies in certain locations. They're called defense planning scenarios. So I took that out of that.

But I went to West Point. You got to get back to your job. And I was teaching, you know, ambushes and raids and military departments. But the superintendent of West Point, who's a three. star general said he wanted a relook at the the United States military academy's military program because it's a college you know that has a robust academic program but also has military right so I I was a part of because I had come out of the Pentagon I got a point in charge of this external review we brought in General McMaster General Abiza a bunch of people to do and look at it was

West Point being the best you're not just in academics but in military programs and one of the solutions or one of the products of that review was to create a research center called the modern war institute because what we found looking you want your military academies and you want of course you want your military to be prepared for modern wars but we found that historians study war from like 20 years ago or 200 years ago right yeah thousand years ago right but you know for a historian to publish on war it takes them a long time just by the I make fun of historians a lot. Journalists embedding, you know, like the Sebastian Youngers and all those that report

on what's going on now, but the military had actually not had from an academic lens people studying modern wars that much. That's, we created the modern wars to staffed it. I was the deputy director of it. And this is when you were still active duty? Still active duty, major. I also started teaching strategy. So I went from teaching platoon tactics to teaching strategy.

So like introduction to strategic. studies. So teaching cadets about Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Jomene, Boyd, Warren, all these. So it was really... B.H. Liddell Hart? Yep. Heart. Yep. All of it. Yeah. No. We get we cover you. Um, could we have a defense and strategic planning or strategic studies, um, academic major there at West Point. So I was teaching it, which was a little challenge. I hadn't learned any of that. So I had to learn it and then teach it. But it gave me, you know, some of the stuff I incorporated in the books and not others, but also a language.

language of connecting strategy or the history of how to study war because some people don't even know like even Claus was books is a guide to how to study war and how to study the width depth and context of it which really starts to come into play when I start studying urban battles is the context of it teaching but it's time to go military says you know either you've moved to this job away from your family or you can you know take the exit and I took the exit. But the modern Warnestead

was up and running and I actually had written one article a part of the modern warrants on the U.S.

military's use of concrete in Iraq. It's actually like the most effective weapon on the modern battlefield is

concrete. T barriers. Let's go. That's right. And I found out that the world did not know that the

U.S. military put up concrete in Iraq. That's how we reduced the IEDs. That's how we created the safe neighborhoods.

We fought a whole battle called the bottle of Sutter City where we put a wall around the enemy. It went viral, like National Geographic picked it up. It was insane that the world didn't know that that was a big part of our actual how we fought the war in Iraq, whether it was Automedia, the Great Wall of Alamedia. There was a market for urban research, but also because

I had done that work on megastities, I knew that there's not a single office in the U.S. military that studies urban warfare. There's not a single school outside of like some, you know, inner and clear rooms schools so that the the the gap in the body of knowledge from military studies was there I wrote that article and responded and then I started writing more articles what year was that that was 2017 okay my friend Seth Stone he was a troop commander that supported the effort to build the wall in Sauter City and so he got home and he was going to brief like someone at the Pentagon, probably the, probably the CNO or something along these lines, right? And so he came to my house and he was, he was preparing his slides and stuff and it was crappy,

you know, but that's why he was over there because he knew it was crappy. And he's like, dude, you got to help me. Like, I got to give this brief and everyone's going to be there, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, because I watched him do it like two times and I said, no, and I gave him this opener. And I gave him the opener. It was like five sentences of explaining what Sauter City, you know, Sotter City had been a stronghold for the Mottie militia for since 2003.

It had this many casualties a day. It had Mississippi rockets fired from it. And we needed to stop this. So we utilized an ancient military strategy. We built a wall. And that was the opening of his thing. And it was freaking legit. I actually, so I write case studies now, which I find fascinating.

because there's a lot of urban legends about urban warfare, like what we think happened, whether it's even our own experiences, first battle of Fallujah, second battle of Fallujah, Ramadi, haven't finished that case study. But we just finished a Sodder City case study,

which was interesting because I was there. But then they have to use this framework, because case study uses the same framework to analyze like the strategic environment, the operational down to the tactical, and how we actually, we actually, the wall wasn't the plan at all.

The wall, there's actually a company commander saying like well if I connect this wall this wall they can't get to their rocket firing point or some badass company commander was like hey hold on a second yeah let's just finish building this thing then you had like a division commander going yeah yeah do that that's awesome and then it cut the it cut the enemy off from the money supply because the market was right outside the wall so we're about to release that case study this is also that concrete interesting that concrete article the model worship also came out 2016 17 there's There's a big battle happening, right? There's the 2016 battle of Missoule, the largest urban battle since World War II. And I all of a sudden I get a call from some down range going, we'd like to talk to you about your concrete article. Like, why are you going to talk to me about my concrete article?

Because we left a lot of concrete in Iraq. We left all those T-walls. Like, you know, the Iraqis, if you stayed there long enough, we'd just move them out of the way or everything. Well, what did ISIS do with all that military-grade fortific? It used them and built very massive fortification lines made of our T barriers RT bars which are really hard to do anything about because it's still reinforced you know steel rebar running through those and you can drop a J-d-a-dame on some of them and they'll still be there.

So they it was really interesting from you know academia to be called like man we got some questions about what your ideas about concrete are. But 2018, it was, It was time to hang up the hat in the modern warrants two said, we were also doing something, big part of doing the research was something we call contemporary battlefield assessments. We had this photo at West Point of cadets going to the battlefields of World War II, like weeks after the war ended.

They got on a ship in New Jersey and went there and they were being walked around the battlefield by veterans who had fought there. So awesome. Yeah, we had that photo. It was a little part of standing at the Modern War II is that West Point used to do this. Yeah. I think we do an event called Battlefield, and we take people to Gettysburg.

You do, yeah. And I think we have pictures of them. Well, we definitely have pictures of all kinds of West Pointers walking the battlefield at Gettysburg. We do it every year. Which is awesome. But actually, it's funny. You know, I was pointing out the fire that we had at my gym, which is right here. And the firefighters, because it was a real fire, they really, they got to fight the fire, which you don't normally get to fight a fire.

the way they fought this fire. People had to go inside. People had to put the hose down. They'd rip open the roof. And so they walk their cadets through there now and their probies. They walk them through and show them this is how, this is what the guys. And like the guys that did it go there in brief. Yep.

So yeah, that's a very powerful thing. And I guess you guys at West Point were saying, wait a second, they used to take these guys right there, right after the battle. What are we doing? We don't do it anymore. Like we do Gageberg every year. And I can talk to you about every stand. And so we built into building this research center that that was one of the core functions.

Because in the summers, West Point Cadets go all around the world. They go to Africa. They go all around the world. They do language, culture. They embed with like the three-letter organizations. It's really a robust summer program, but nobody goes out and studies war. So we built this program called the contemporary battlefield assessments.

The first place we took them was Bosnia to study like the Siege of Sarajevo. So I actually took, one of the last things I did in 2018 before retiring was take cadets to Mumbai, India, to study the 2008 Mumbai attacks, where 10 terrorists take down a megacity in one of the most impressively planned terrorist attacks that I've ever seen, but to walk the ground of every site that the terrorist attacked and how they did it, how they planned it, everything. And then we went up to the north towards the Pakistani border because there are two-week studies. But really after that, and that was amazing, too, to learn about that if you haven't studied that attack. In saying what they were able to do with a bunch of privates, basically, with the terrorist had earphone, basically satellite in their ears, so they were being commanded from outside the country to attack and do certain things against these. They hit five locations simultaneously and just brought down a megacity, overloaded its systems. everything from an urban warfare perspective was fascinating but I also learned like

you can't replace walking the ground right about then is when I'm retiring and then the because of the uniqueness of there's like 27 research centers at West Point that also have the ability to hire external researchers and I got offered like do you want to keep doing this that's a dream job so at 2018 I started this academic urban warfare project which I would focus only on urban warfare study it, write about it. I started the podcast, it's now many years, to include interviewing experts in, like, smart cities

and policing, like, police chiefs and SWAT team leaders and everything, because there's two aspects in my job of, there's understanding urban warfare and, like, military operations, urban training, but there's also understanding cities. And it's a giant gap in the world, let alone militaries.

Even the combatant commanders, I was at a conference where more inspiration of my job. A combat commander said, look, I had this AOR, and I didn't have anybody in the entire combat command that could tell me about one of the cities because they do country teams. They can't tell you about like, Dakau or Mumbai. When I was in Mumbai, like, who's your Mumbai expert? Like, what do you mean Mumbai? We don't have a Mumbai expert. We have, we have country teams. Yeah, that's crazy when you think about how unique cities are, even cities inside their own country, like just the methodology, that the ways the cities are laid out, what they're constructed with,

how what the transportation's like what the infrastructure is like like like cities are so different even inside of america cities are so totally different now you go overseas yeah that's going to be radically different and we did i actually was doing this as well taking cadets because it's close to new york city right which the united states only has two megacities new york city um but the influence and there's a there's a concept of like mayors of the world like there's some cities and nations that are more powerful than the nation itself it has more economic you know like all all the city is the nation, but we have this nation-state country mindset,

which applies to even international relations, law of war, like a whole bunch of things. I teach a course here in California where we actually take, this is their urban operations, planners course, for divisions and brigades on how to fight large-scale combat operations. Then a part of the developments,

I also do that in the California State Guard, but we'll fly them over Los Angeles. I mean, you couldn't ask for two different cities the New York City and Los Angeles. Both are mega cities, but the complete terrain, you know, strategic importance, everything. All the variables that we teach are vastly different. So you can't urban warfare at that scale, especially that big scale, it's really hard when so many cities are so different. Like even the power structures.

Like Mumbai has a, Mumbai has a slum built on trash that is a million people in a one mile area. if you've ever seen the movie Slum Dog Millionaire I have not seen it Yeah But it I went in there And like

You would never even want to Let alone do a military operation In there So I started doing that In 2018 I started writing Writing writing And I'm publishing articles

About everything From drones and warfare To The deeper I understood Urban Warfare I also understood Like everything from Even the battle drill

Like where does this stuff come from? Like where does our thinking Thinking, going back in the past, now writing case studies about Stalingrad, Akken, Ortona, like there are similarities in military approaches, but there's uniqueness, the difference between first battle of Fallujah, second battle of Fallujah, and just becoming more and more aware and learning every year. But then there's a war that starts.

Well, actually, yeah, there's a war that starts. The 22nd War of Nagano Karabakh. You know, if your listeners don't know that, there's a place between, but it used to be a place between Azerbaijan and Armenia called Nagorno-Karabakh. It was a really big war, and everybody was watching because, you know, military is not in war. They're watching other wars. And as I'm like this external now war researcher, I'm watching the media about it,

like the drone war, like drones are the future. Like this whole war is about drones. And actually that war ended in a battle of a city, a single city. The entire war, decisive battle over one city called Shusha. But because I was in this new role as a civilian, we thought, oh, maybe this could be a contemporary battle. It says maybe we could take cadets there once. So we started reaching out to the two country teams of Armenia and Azerbaijan and saying,

well, can we go in there? Like, it had been like six months since the war ended. And they're like, no, you can't go in there. Nobody's allowed in there. I got invited, I won't tell you by who, so I took my blue passport because I'm a civilian and I went to Azerbaijan and I went into Nagorno-Karabag

and went all the way to where that battle ended to this place called Susha which is you would love it I mean they basically inserted two battalions of commandos they combined their basically version of Navy SEALs and Rangers combined them inserted them over a long terrain the city was the decisive they knew it was the objective and they scaled like a 400-foot cliff to infiltrate into the city and take it down without a fight.

But I went there to study like, okay, like everybody's talking about the drone warfare, but this city, this war ended when that city fell. Urban, you know, cities are the economic engines.

A lot of times they are the objective, like take out the political apparatus, Baghdad, right? The drive to Baghdad. Punch to the middle, drive a tank around, psychologically, defeat your enemy.

Yeah. Berlin, Yeah, these things are important. But that started my, and I didn't even realize, like, well, I got in a lot of trouble just, you know, why is John, you know, what is this American guy doing in that place that they're really not supposed to be? Wrote the study of the case study,

which was doing great. We used to have a practice, like we, the world, of going to other people's war just to learn about them. Like if you think about our civil war, we had the Germans here, the British here, the French here, just observing, like the, both the changing in characters and the weapons, but just, we, as Americans, we had people like in Japanese, Chinese, China War, other places.

And then Vietnam, you know, observers became advisors, advisors became boots on the ground, but... So maybe we shy a little bit away from that for a reason. There are many reasons now politically, as I've learned. Because I'm going to tell you about more that I've learned, that there's many reasons why we don't do that. But the fact is that we don't have people in war zones learning about the modern wars.

And that came at a cost at West Point because, you know, I'm preparing you for war, but what about this war that's going on right now? Yeah, and just for anybody that, like, no matter what industry you're in, Imagine, let's say you didn't know anything about construction, and then you went and spent a month on a construction site. That's going to be irreplaceable compared to someone that sat in a classroom and learned about it. Or let's say you want to learn about manufacturing and you sat in a classroom for a month versus you went into a factory and saw how everything was run. So the amount of things that you're going to learn when you get embedded and immersed in an environment is going to be exponentially better than what you learned sitting in a classroom.

classroom. So to your point, even, even, you know, whatever, 150 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, there's no doubt that when you go there and you walk the ground, you learn more than you did when you sat in a classroom or when you read a book. So now when you get there and there's an active war going on and you can talk to people and you can get the debriefs and you can watch with your own eyes and see it with your own perspective, which by the way is a nice detached perspective because you're not in it, you're watching it, and you, the ability to learn is just phenomenal. Yep.

It's, it's unmeasurable, and it's, it's crazy when I tell people like, we don't do this. Like, we mean we don't do this. The same thing when I tell you that there's, I mean, the U.S. military is millions of people, and there's not one person whose only job is to study urban warfare. There's not one office. That's crazy. Yeah. But we also, we used to have a group called the Asymmetric Warfare Group in the U.S.

Yeah. And they would go into operational areas as operational advisors to U.S. forces in certain areas. But they weren't going into other people's wars that we weren't in to learn, just to learn. Right. So I did that with Nagonakarabakh, which was great. And people really valued, like, how did that city fall? How did that it led to the end of the war? Of course, the war, two years later, it started back up.

but then the so then Russian invade Ukraine in February of 2020 at this point I had been studying urban warfare everything from tactics like and to include myself having been in the military of 20 years not like not knowing where battle drill six like inner and clear room came from how it merged like from 1973

from like Israeli special forces yam responding to the field munich grade into our special units into our special forces into the main, where I was in Ranger Regiment, hearing about it, and then we exploded across the whole U.S. military when we were struggling in Iraq,

and like everybody knows how to enter and clear a room now, even though that tactic doesn't really apply to urban warfare. I don't know if you know that, echo. So we learned to, like, do swap team tactics and stack outside of doors, you know. Hostage rescue, but in battle, in wars, where the enemy knows you're there, that goes away really quickly.

As a matter of fact, in the second battle of Fallujah, they were doing that, and they quickly stopped it. They know you're there. That tactic is on surprise and violence of action. If you don't have surprise, it's not going to work that well. And the Israelis learned that hard in 2002 when I started going through walls instead of then going through the doors and the windows.

But I had been, so the war starts in 2022, and I had been studying an urban war for a little while. I also studied it from both the operational perspective of how to win wars, like take the capital city, you know, or whatever it is, depending on what the objective of the war is.

So I saw Russia heading for the capital of Kiev of Ukraine. And this is on February 26th, I started using my, back thing that it was called Twitter. I created a seven tweet, a seven thread tweet on what I, John Spencer, as just a regular guy,

would do if my city was being attacked. It was like, you know, you block the roads, parked on trucks like literally from things I had actually written an article in December of 2021 I think yeah we're saying looking at all the battles of history like the battle of soul battle of manila what the defenders did well so I actually wrote in an article like tactics that have worked in defending cities snipers barriers like all these things and I incorporated that a couple months later I'm like hey about if that was this is this is what I would do I put out this seven tweet thread and went viral. This is the wars that we live in now. It went viral like 20 million people saw this tweet thread.

And then people started asking for more. So I started doing like little wire diagrams of do this, not that. You know, use, you know, use a bus, not sandbags. And I started putting it together these PDFs and that became, these images on Twitter, that became a PDF. And then Ukrainians were printing that out and distributing it, but the images became a manual that became what was called the mini manual for the urban defender, and they printed hundreds of thousands of copies.

Because when the Russians invaded, not just Key, but they actually attacked seven cities at once, the guidance from the Ukrainian government was resist. And they were, but that was literally the guidance. A couple guys were making Molotov cocktails, and they made hundreds. hundreds of thousands of those. And then they made these little, I don't know if you've seen these like porcupine steel girder things.

And they started putting those out everywhere. But that was the limit of the guidance. My manual within a week, the Ukrainian government took it and translated in Ukrainian and put it up on the website for resistors. And it was seen from, literally from Lviv to Maripal

as a way civilians could help resist the Russian invasion. Yeah, and it's a it's very thorough goes from everything from like the placement of you know well what you prefer to reinforce a building with all the way down to like medical advice about you know putting on turnicets the whole nine yards So it's a really comprehensive kind of like quick Freaking urban combat defense for dummies type thing no offense but like that's what it is it's that basic Hey, this is what you need to do but it's stuff that actually echo you and I were talking about this earlier today like some things that they seem real obvious once you've been told them,

but when you haven't been told them, you would never think of them. So that's what I think that manual's really good for. It's got the fundamental principles in there for defense in an urban environment, and clearly, if you've just been attacked, you're going to need those. Yeah, and I kept updating it.

So like the version five that I stopped that, like this is becoming more than a guide disability. This is becoming like a, I actually helped rewrite the Ranger Handbook while I was a Ranger instructor. about last. So I knew, also this is Ranger Handbook, if you don't know,

so what their students are required, but our infantry carrier is like an awesome manual, but it has a lot of stuff that nobody reads in it. And you really read it when you're in Ranger School because you really need it, like how to do an ambush, like it's in there, and you're allowed to have this book with you.

So I had understood that under stress people need simple instructions. So this is like, you know, go read a doctoral manner. If you ever read a U.S. military doctrine, it reads like stereo instructions. Like it just sucks. So like this is a, I'm an old infantry, lots of pictures, simple guidance. But then the manual kept growing. Like people wanted to know how to purify water because like cities were cut off from water like

Mary Opel. And then I had to get to with like survivalist like the survivor man. And actually I don't want to say anything here that's wrong. Like how to purify water with chlorine, you know, like all this. It kept growing. And then you had units like, well, how do you do an ambush? Like, well, I know how to. I stopped doing it because it became more than that.

But, and that's great and it helpful. And I'm very proud that it helped a lot of people. But then it started to stop writing when they said, how do you run the staff side of the PowerPoint? You counter drone, like all this stuff. I left it be. But then it started being translated by other countries. So I get requests like, and I put it out there for free, of course,

like just as a PDF on my website where it still is. But then I started getting questions from like Mirrenmar. Like, can we translate this? Like, why? or it was actually during the women life freedom movement in Iran as well like can we translate this into Persian like sure go ahead why then like the Polish education system can we translate this into Polish for our education system like sure why because this ideal I actually didn't I hadn't studied this but this ideal of total defense right the ideal so we have there's an ideal called total resistance but total defense but total defense but total defense is, you know, not an insurgency, like the person's already in the country, but like everybody's going to defend not letting the enemy in. It's very ancient.

There's actually some from World War II that I actually started tapping into, like the British had one, the Swiss have one that, like, under attack, our nation is going to defend ourselves. But with all of that, you know, the access to information, you know, the simple instructions of stuff like that for civilians got lost. So now I have, now it's in 17 different language. and has been seen like in crazy places around the world. Because the simple instructions that are common to you and I, like nobody knows, even if they have this idea that of course all are,

you know, red dawn. Like yeah, but you need to know more than just like red dawn. Like you need to know. Some of my book is even like what not to do. Like don't stand in the open. Don't stand on a rooftop. Like that's the worst place you could be in a modern battlefield. So I was really surprised.

by really happy about it. That went out and everything, but I'm also, you know, I'm a, I get paid to do research. So because of Nagano Karobach, then I'm like, me and my, my partner who I do a lot of stuff with, like, can we go into Ukraine right now? Of course, the answer is no, you're not allowed, as in like if you're associated with the military or anything. And back then, this is, I actually was commenting on, you know, writing the manual as, so that happened in February 2020.

Russia was defeated in April of 2022. And by defeated, I mean they did not achieve their strategic goals of overthrowing the nation and race in Ukraine from existence. And they actually withdrew all their forces from Kiev. I understood that that was. Was that the stated Russian goal? Yes. Was to turn Ukraine into Russia, all of it? Yeah.

It was to de-nazify Ukraine. So a lot of people try to do revisionist history and go back to it. It was a NATO was expanding like I don't want it's a long conversation of things that have been said in the past that people have then attribute to like no this dude assembled 200,000 Russian forces around Ukraine and then made a statement that the opening moments and said we are entering Ukraine to denotify it from its government and to overthrow the government and to put basically to create Belarus 2.0 Putin wanted to put a you know within this breakup of. of the Soviet Union, he has, and he talks about all the time, like his revisionist history of Peter the Great and everything, that Ukraine isn't a country, according to him. And that's, in his statements, he said,

like, he has said, like, Ukraine isn't, it isn't a language, it isn't a people, it's Russian. His opening presidential comments on the opening of the war said, I'm doing this to denotify and free the Russian people. So he literally doesn't believe that Ukrainian should exist. So his objective and what he did to do it.

So you could say, okay, words don't matter, but like, but that was the, That was the scheme of maneuver that he set up. That's right. And he made a lot of mistakes, and I'm written about this. So if his goal was to overthrow the government, pretty simple, classic war, a goal, right? Take the capital city, overthrow the government, replace a friendly government, much like Iraq, Afghanistan, right? He launched, the decisive operation was Kiev, and he had to take the capital city, but he also launched against Mariople, Sumi, Harkev.

He actually attacked against seven different fronts, seven different cities because he wanted them for different reasons. He didn't wait the main objective. He sent, and I've written about this. So in order to achieve the strategic goal, you had to take keep. You didn't have to conquer it. You just had to raise the Russian flag over the center of the city and say it's yours, much like we did in Baghdad. And you cognitively defeat your enemy. He's lost a will to fight.

They think it's useless. He thought he would do a Baghdad attack on Ukraine and use overwhelming. surprise and speed and forced to do it. That happened in February. He actually tried to take an airfield. He tried to do a joint forcible entry, much like when I was a ranger, we would try. He tried to seize an airfield,

Hostomel, inside the capital city. He launched two mounted patrol, mounted formations over 20,000 soldiers, one down out of Belarus and one out of Russia to attack the city and to take the city. He ran into a lot of variables that had been studied. He ran into urban terrain.

He ran into people resisting that he didn't think would be resisting. He didn't listen to the Special Forces principle that one is none. So he tried to take one airfield, didn't have a backup. So the plan started falling apart. My manual was a side show of it, although my manual was actually implemented in Kiev, as in they started parking dump trucks in the streets and things like that, just trying to slow them down.

Because in this war, the strategic objective was to, rapidly take your objectives and rapidly take the city. So if you could slow them down, this is where there's an idea about, does, you know, the court in the closet with the defense is the strongest form of warfare, but not politically,

but tactically. I think it's, you know, if you're in a defense, it's a lot easier, you know, than somebody, than you're attacking a defense.

But in war, the, the objective could just be time. So in this case, Russia thought that they would take Ukraine quickly. And their military hadn't been tested at this scale a long time. So as I started, also I hit the kind of the news commenting position. Once I did that tweet thread, once I, you know, like there's an urban warfare guy.

I started talking about Kiev. And then I started getting requests to be on CNN and things like that about, okay, what's the goal here? How did they do it? As you've listened to my podcast recently, there's lots of ways you can take a city. You don't have to encircle it and methodically take it down. You can infiltrate it like I had just seen. You can second battle of flusia punched in the middle and make them fight you. You can, there's so many ways to take a city.

I was analyzing, well, this is the way they clearly, they're trying to do it. And they actually had like four courses of action that were close. So to give Russia some credit, I guess. They had put years of work into taking it down from inside the city, like with saboteurs, eliminating the government through. But you said they had plans for that? Yep. They had gone through like course of action planning.

Yep. And picked the final one was speed, surprise, violence of action, get in there and overwhelm? No, they actually implemented all three at once. Oh, okay. So they did all three of these things. So they had Spetsanos and FSB forces inside the city who would like bought rented apartment complexes next to the government building

who were identifying targets to be attacked. they had put some work into the intelligence operation, which they had had success in. I wrote this for the war in Iraq's, the Battle of Hostomel, which breaks you through. The first course of action in Russia wanted it was to take it down from within, which is, of course, the best way to do it. So they wanted to eliminate, use the sleeper cells,

and they had a lot of them, activated the sleeper cells to take the city down from within and take the government building, you know, either kill or capture Zelensky, and they implemented that. There's some reasons why it didn't, work to include um again if you and i had to learn all this as well but after the 2014 made on a revolution in ukraine you know this is when the united states started doing some defense

partnership but we also other people were also helping them so they reinvented their army they reinvented their police so you know this is again you think about urban warfare we think about military on military but most cities have tens of thousands of armed people police so Their police started doing signals intelligence raids on supercells days before the invasion who were being activated. And so they did immense amount of works. And that story hasn't been written. And I had, you know, this is me going back in there and recreating the Battle of Key.

But the Ukrainian police had a huge part on taking that course of action away from the Russians. The next course of action was the joint forcible entry where they were. we're going to take a bunch of airfields, but there's five airfields in just Kiev alone, massive ones. So the police and the military went out and started parking fire trucks on all the airfields and doing moving things so that when the Russians attacked, they were bombing empty parking lots because they had moved things. Although the president had ordered the military not to be out in defensive positions,

which could potentially have saved them because had they been out in the shock and all that Russia launched with the cruise missiles and everything, A lot of stuff would have got blown up. So the joint force of entry, which is an amazing story of they've successfully penetrated Ukrainian airspace, landed over 300 special forces on one airfield, about 10 miles from the capital, less than 10 miles. 20 helicopters successfully inserted into this airfield in the capital city, and it looked like history that it was going to work. Except that they ran into just regular Ukrainians that,

were attacking them and they actually took down a couple of helicopters so the Russians had a thousand paratroopers on cargo planes in the air headed towards that airfield they just seized successfully but because of Ukrainian air forces so the special operations guys we're going to seize the airfield set it up for a landing an airborne landing and then these thousand paratroopers are going to jump in and now we have a foothold and we're moving forward they're going to air line land. So it's an air lodgment. So a joint forceable entry, seize the airfield, bring in the heavy cargo air and land it. Oh, so they weren't even a parachute in there. We're going to get started. Yep. And they were just, all they had to do was punched in the middle of the city. They had super

cells that like guiding the way, like everything. But some Ukrainians, and there's, it's a really amazing story where like a private, like a finance guy uses like an old air defense system, takes down one helicopter. One of their alligators, K-52s, which are like our Apaches, like they're a tanks in the sky. And this is the, again, studying modern war, I found it really fascinating that that picture of that Russian helicopter down did more to emboldened the people of Ukraine than anything else. Because they thought they could fight back. Like, we can fight back. And they took one helicopter like, dude, it's one helicopter out of like 20. And they still inserted like 300 of their best special forces. And they took the airfield and everything. But they took that one down and, and they started hitting.

other helicopters so they turn off the aircraft. Now you have in this battle of Kiev opening moments, you have 300 of your best Navy SEALs on the ground in enemy territory, holding there, but they're cut off and they're alone. So

literally there's CNN. I don't know if you saw this, but CNN, this is a modern war as well. It's literally on the ground within minutes trying to interview Russian Special Forces like, what are you doing here? It's like an American CNN guy who went out to the airfield,

is trying to interview them, which actually happened to me in northern Iraq when I jumped into Iraq the next morning there's CNN and Foster. So he's literally trying to interview a Russian

guy going, what are you doing here? Go away. But then you have the president say, we know they're here and they launched everybody they had, no matter who it was,

at that airfield and did a counterattack. I actually talked to the Special Forces major who had four hours to get there. And it was like shooting fish in the gallery.

It was just 300 dudes on an open airfield. with nothing more than what they carried on their backs because the airfield dropped them and left. And then they started raining artillery down. So they eliminate these 300 and then they cratered the airfield with some very big artillery they have

like 200 millimeter. Within hours though you have 20,000 Russians coming from through Chernobyl, which I found out where Chernobyl was and I didn't even want to. I got really close to it as I went into Ukraine They had 20,000 making their way to that airfield. So the Ukrainians killed those 300, basically,

pull off the airfield because they know there's a massive force. And there's only one brigade in all of the keep. They thought the Russians were going to attack east, which they did. I didn't think, I don't know if they didn't think Russia had the Cajona's to take the capital. But there's only one army brigade. So this is mostly like civilians and police and everybody fighting. And then the vehicles got stuck coming down out of Chernobyl. And then they have a fight for another like three weeks where all these mounted forces are trying to make their way into the city.

It's a massive city. I mean, Keev is a city of three million people. It's an ancient city. Actually, the biggest encirclement in military history happened there in 1941, Soviets versus Germans, millions of people against millions of people. The terrain got in their way. Ukrainian started doing things like they blew a dam and within hours of the invasion. which has history that I didn't know but they they blew a whole dam which took away an entire

axis of advance for the the Russian forces that were trying to make their way into Kiev they blew 300 bridges in 24 hours they didn't tell me how they nobody will admit to because I think some of it they sue espontade and just blew all the bridges so nobody actually will say like who blew all the bridges like you know but they blew all the bridges which meant that the tanks you know, tanks have to get to somewhere. There's only something bridges, right? You think, like, a bridge too far, things like that. Like, bridges come really important in big wars.

So Ukrainians drop all their bridges. They flooded this whole, they blew a dam, flooded a whole region. They went Red Dawn. I talked to grandfathers who, which I think this is what Red Dawn got wrong, was the veterans. Ukraine's a conscript Soviet, you know, used to be a conscript Soviet satellite. So most of the adult men have served in the Soviet military. So I have some fascinating stories of like Grandpa with an RPG on top of his house, taking out Russians. And there were a couple of winning moments in the opening hours of that where you, and literally like Grandpa who went out to the airfield and got some stuff, has given to his other Grandpa friend.

Red Dawn forgot the veterans. So you have a lot of veteran communities and what they call like territorial defenders. And in April, this goes on for a few weeks and there's a couple moments. in April the Russians literally Putin comes on like oh we didn't want to take all of Ukraine he literally changes his entire strategic objectives and pulls and within 24 hours though so you had 40,000 Russians around Kiev at this point trying to penetrate and never were able to get to the government city and then overnight they're gone 24 hours they you got to give them credit they know how to run So they executed a textbook withdrawal under fire

And I actually followed their path all the way up to as close as Chernobyl as I wanted to get Which was still too close That was April Now because I had this experience of going into wars to study it I this was the biggest Most decisive urban battle as it achieved the strategic goals for both sides So either one side failed one side was sexual and saving Ukraine Had Keeb fallen

we would probably not be talking about the Ukraine war right now because the Russian would be over So I wanted to get in there and study it So I took a flight to Poland Walked across the border Went to Kiev And started interviewing the commanders Who had defended the city

Because I still think it's one of the most decisive Battles of modern history Because it achieved the strategic goal Of course the war The war continued because Putin himself said Well that wasn't my goal Well, my strategic goals are these four districts in eastern Ukraine that he wants. So he literally within 24 hours withdrew them all back into Belarus to Russia

and then redeployed them a couple months later into eastern Ukraine. But he was defeated in April of 2022. But I went in to recreate the battle of Kiev. So this, again, was the progression of my research of going into war zones while they're still going on. I went back to Ukraine four times until, really until October 7th, trying to recreate the, like doing all the first-hand interviews with all the commanders and civilians and others that were at the pivotal moments. So I'm fascinating, you know, I'm not a historian, but trying to write applied history as how do you recreate, who writes what happened in a battle? And how do you do that? It has been really fascinating.

And these are case studies. You can do it through historical knowledge, but if you're doing it through firsthand knowledge, we had to figure out what were the key moments in the Battle of Kiev, like the airfield, Hostomel, but there's another one, another battle, like where the Russians actually had forded the river after all the bridges were blown.

And it was like one company of Ukrainian collection of people that kept the Russians from actually penetrating into the city. So I went back four times recreating and getting all the interviews with the generals to the soldiers at those moments to recreate what happened at that battle. I was also doing interviews with the Battle of Mariopal if you don't know that story where 3,000 or less, it's like their thermopyla.

3,000 soldiers hold off 20,000 Russians for over 80 days using the steel factory and underground. Most of them were captured eventually. But some of them were released. So I was doing interviews of recreating that battle, which is from an urban warfare history, very significant from a operational perspective, how they held down those 20,000 Russians

so they couldn't redeploy to the capital or redeployed this other city, how important that urban battle was to the overall war as well. Let's start with Keev. Was there anything that surprised you about Keev from an urban warfare, like lesson learned where you hadn't really thought of that or maybe some new technology or new tactics

that you saw? A lot. Yeah. So there's so many elements. One is just the history of the land. Learning that this was, you know, Kiev out dates Russia, right? Keev and Russe.

The city is like a fortress city. It was built there along the river for a certain reason. And all the battles that have happened for the city, really looking at even in 1941, the biggest encirclement, where does the battle focus on? It focuses on the east, the western side of the city.

along that river that they actually blew the dam for and increased the river. Matter of fact, the Ukrainians who defended Kiev in 2022 fell in World War II trenches at times and were back into the same trenches fighting at almost the same locations. So I learned a lot about the city. But there was also an interesting technology that the Ukrainians deployed that I had no idea about until I got there called Delta. So the Ukrainians had like their version of, like DARPA or something like that.

They had created this computer system that integrated sensors, everything from drone cameras to bank cameras to everything. They had invented it before the war. So in the Battle of Key, I didn't understand how just 3,000, that's how many military people were there, just 3,000, not even a brigade.

How were they always in the right place at the right time? Yes. So it's because of Delta. So the Ukrainians, Although I could watch first war I've ever known of. I could watch live YouTube from Kiev during the battle. And that was. And we all saw the videos of like highway cameras, catching Russians, all this stuff.

But I didn't know that the Ukrainians had this system called Delta, which was integrating all these sensors. So they knew exactly where the Russians were and basically had an eye in the sky. They actually ordered during the battle, they ordered $100,000 cameras. I don't know if this is like Amazon War or whatever. and got them into Kiev during the battle. This is between February and April of 22, and then put them up on the high rises. So they knew where the Russians were at all the times.

They only had one battalion of artillery. So there's a bunch of examples of, there's even an example that I tell where grandma, in my, I tell this story, because it's really an example of a surprise. On the outskirts of Ukraine, there was a grandma who woke up and saw a Russian convoy sitting outside her house.

So grandma picks up her phone and calls, calls it in. And I'm like, well, called it to who? The Ukrainians took basically like this government app called Dia that they had, which was like carried your passport, your driver's license, everything. And with, again, this is all under attack, transformed it to report enemy. So grandma takes out her camera or her phone, hits that button to report into me. It goes to an Intel fusion cell of civilians that they had set up. And the Delta system is able to validate that information,

and then they send a TB2 drone over to it. So this computer system called Delta gave them an all-seeing eye that allowed them to use a very small force, but also the defensive properties of you're blocking everything, blowing all the bridges, blowing the dams, buying yourself time, because the Russians only had like certain five days of supplies as well and the logistical you know the 40 mile convoy going back into Belarus and attack it was being attacked so that aspect of the Delta system was very surprising and I'd actually in my urban warfare studies heard of like I had a thing about smart cities on my podcast you know about the idea you could tap into all the cameras and all this was it in real time and they had a artillery app as well so they could integrate this all C-Sys and eye, which they had no shortage of people wanting to help, right?

So they had, like, that's all my question. Like, well, how do you fuse this? Like, so they set up all these fusion centers and all the, they cut the city up into pies and put people out there. If you're a drone operator, they told you, you're going to give us your feed or we're going to EW make it so you can't fly it. They did all this with like in a week. And they had this all seeing eye up.

So like the Russians in perspective had little chance of surprise, right? Surprise is still. everything in war. If I can, they created this all C and I, then they, like that battle of, that I told you to Moschun where they had that breakthrough

where the Russians pontoon. It was only, they knew they needed to get there. If not, it was all going to be lost. One of the early reports coming in was about the, a lot of the senior officers

and the Russian military getting killed. And it, you know, for me, I deducted that, okay, why are their senior military leaders up on the front lines?

because there's some massive amount of micromanagement going on and, you know, some centralized command, certainly causing problems. Is that what you found as well when you debriefed? Absolutely. So there's, you know, that really plays out a little bit later when they start using signals intelligence on, there's a reason why the Russians also relied on the cell phone network for their communication. They had just switched out their comma equipment. There's a lot of friends of minds that are like the Russian military experts. But that's absolutely there The Russians don't have a non-commissioned officer corps, right?

It's very officer-driven, which we all know it's a weakness. It's their system. They also had done a reorganization of their battalion tactical groups to where they had less infantry. From an urban war perspective, that really played out as well.

Like you can have a convoy, but if you don't have the infantry to protect the convoy, whether it's armor or whatever, then they found out really quickly that the changes they had made was war puts you to the test. It put their logistics to the test. and like all the rot that was there.

They ran in that problem in Cheshnia too. They did. They did. Which is interesting. Which is from a historian, not a, I'm not a historian, but from a researcher, like we have lessons that we learned and just relearn and relearn. So. Same same.

But yeah, they're officers. And then, you know, after the Battle of Kiev, Ukraine starts to become very effective at targeting senior officers and senior commands with the limited capabilities like drones and things like that that play out. But yeah, it's definitely a weakness in a Russian system. But Russia also, especially within the urban, like I'm the urban warfare guy. So like I'm studying like Kiev, Mariopal, Bakhmuts. They have a human wave tactic to where they'll just send human waves at the defender to discover where he's at and then use artillery to flatten wherever they are.

And they're still doing that today on the battlefield. So that's another aspect of their weaknesses that started to play out. and what they didn't have in Kiev that they adjusted and had in other places, like when they had the Battle of Bakhmut. How quickly did it become apparent the level of brutality that was going to be happening on like the front line scenarios here? Because I mean, I've seen, you know, like everybody else, I've seen the videos, the pictures, the reports of just savagery happening.

How quickly did that get initiated? Was it a result of frustration over time? Was it something that came immediately or did it show up as things progressed or digressed, I should say? Yeah, there's a bunch of events in the beginning that really, of course, I would say even in the Battle of Mariople where they the Ukrainians who couldn't get out of the city were trapped in the city and there's an event where they're in a theater in Mariopal. It's 600 women and children and they wrote the letters, children in Russian, on the outside in giant letters outside the theater.

And the Russians dropped like multiple hundreds of pounds bombs on it and killed them all. It was one of the first signs of they're not going to follow the rules. And then of course at the, when the Russians pulled out in April of 2022, the massacre of Butcha is discovered where they just massacred hundreds of civilians, over 100 civilians where they tied their hands behind the back, shot them in the back of the head, some video cameras of that. It became really early on recognizable that there was a lot of dehumanization that the Russians had in themselves about who the Ukrainian people were and what rules there were weren't going to follow in war. That savagery was seen immediately in Kiev because that was my research, but it's all throughout. But some of the systematic aspects of it too, like the fact that, which is problematic because now we're going to, We'll talk about it later, I'm sure, with Israel, but Russia starts stealing the children of the areas that they conquer

and sending them back into Russia. So Ukrainian babies, like thousands of them. They're taking back into Russia and giving them to Russian parents. There's actually an ICC warrant for Putin and the female that's helping them do this, not an application for an actual warrant that was issued in 2022 because it was. validate that he was doing this. So the savagery is there 100%.

But it's also hard for people to understand the scale of this war. And again, going there, like how long it, unless I walk some of that ground, even within a city, let alone the entire front line, getting people to understand the geography and the scale of this, I mean, the Ukrainian military went from like 100,000 to a million within a year. And that's going to cause a lot of problems on the battlefield and in the country when you try to build a military under war. So there's lots of parts about the geography

and the scale of this that it was just foreign to most observers of war in general. So speaking of the scale of this, one of the things that's been debated a lot is the number of casualties on both sides. What are you thinking? What does it look like? Yeah, it's been interesting how it's,

I understand. So war is a contest of will, and this is why, again, And even in the Battle of Kiev, it was about time. It wasn't about killing on both sides. It was about the ability to get supplies in there. So I understand the information operation is part of this where Ukraine, like other countries, like Sun Tzu's maxims on the strategies to defeat your enemy are still present today.

Number one, defeat your enemy without even fighting, defeat his strategy. Number two, defeat his allies. So one of the reasons that Ukraine hides its casualty numbers is because of what it would say to the rest of the world on how's it going, basically. The third one is defeat the enemy's military. And interestingly for the urban warfare guy, the fourth one is don't attack besieged cities. Basically do it at the last cost. Those maximums still will apply. So in Ukraine's casualty numbers, I've seen reports.

I haven't, and I've been there. and I know that especially as it were continued into some of these very traditional battles like Bakhmut and others where they're just trying to hold the line that tens of thousands are dying. I try to believe, you know, this goes to what we will see later on, who do you believe, right? So the Ukrainians aren't putting it out, but like the British and the United States are putting out what Russia's are. I do believe it's a factor of like five to one of five because Russia doesn't care about their numbers. cremating them or they're not coming home that it's you know last estimates amount's like 400,000 plus Russian deaths but to be honest I don't have the both sides of number it's a lot of course but I don't I also understand

why they because now you have people saying we just want this to stop too many people have lost their lives in this battle which is almost like the Chamberlain and you know in the McCart the Churchill argument like when does survival become questionable. Like that was the option the Ukrainians got asked the question which was unique to me traveling into war zones just to feel that.

I never felt that in my own deployments is going into a country that's under attack of like an existential attack and a country can either mobilize and resist that or what they thought the Russians thought that Ukrainians would welcome the Russians. And they didn't, but that was a very unique feeling that I had when I went into Ukraine in

April, or it was actually May, is that unified aspect of we don't want, we want to survive, we don't want to be Russian. We can talk about it in Israel as well. We have people now arguing that the numbers, that this quantitative number means whether they should continue to fight to be free. And then like, okay, what's the solutions here? And in war, understanding the history of wars where reason isn't always the number one, it's human.

If it was just numbers, and I call this like the abacus fallacy, like, well, they have more troops, they have more artillery, they have more industrial base. Like, it's futile to resist. So what are you saying? Give up, which is what, as you know, Churchill was faced with. Like, it doesn't make any sense to resist out of Hitler. Like, yeah, freedom makes a lot of sense. And I felt that in all of the Ukrainian population when I visited.

Of course, there's strategies to this. And maintaining 50 plus countries as your allies is actually, is Ukraine's one of its primary strategies to win the wars if you maintain your allies? So that number is problematic for them. But, of course, it's in the, you know, tens and hundreds of thousands. You know, one thing that I thought about as soon as this thing started was, you know, war is a test of wills. And I believe that when your country gets invaded and you're defending your homeland,

your will is going to be stronger than someone that's trying to, you know, take your property and, you know, move into your homeland. It's, you know, this is why Vietnam, Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iraq. back like, hey, and this where I thought you were actually going was like, you know, you're going, you're looking at the war and you're going to leave. At some point, you're going to leave. And worst case scenario, they win. Cool, I'll go back home. I'll go back to Colorado and live my life. The people in Ukraine don't have that option. If they lose, they're going to be subjugated to this imposing force. And therefore, they're much more willing to make sacrifice because their will

is going to be stronger. Now, that being said, there are definitely cases. throughout history where people get conquered. And at a certain point, they say, oh, you know what, I was going to fight and, you know, you never know, this could have happened to Churchill. Churchill was not going to back down, but how many people, you know, how many cities could have been bombed, how many Brits could have been killed before Churchill said,

you know what, we're going to make a deal or we're going to cease to exist. Or his attitude might have been, well, we would rather cease to exist than succumb to this tyrannical Adolf Hitler. but this is this is the thing that we don't always calculate very well and I've you might have heard me talk about this before but you know in after the I-dring but I-draing valley battle we killed something like a thousand of their or two thousand of their people and they killed 155 of ours and our generals and political leaders looked at each other and said yep see we're going to win because we can kill more of them than they can of us.

And what we didn't realize at that time was they were more than willing to make the sacrifice and we were not. And every casualty that we had was a travesty and a nightmare and it would hurt our soul as a nation and every casualty that they had, every death that they had,

was moving them towards victory. So that's what I feel about Ukraine right now is Ukraine, the will of the Ukrainian people this is where they live, this is their home, and they are not going to be subjugated by anyone else, and they're going to keep fighting for as long as they possibly can. So I agree with everything you just said. When I would teach this in West Point is that though the will to fight is,

this is Clausowitz's wars, a contest, of will to compel your enemy to do your bidding, basically. But he also had the paradoxal trinity that it's not just the will of the people, It's the will of the government And it's the will of the military So this is a triangle So you could have all the will to resist You want, but if you don't have the military

To do it or your military Won't do it or it or they're incapable Or they they do a military coup And they go with the other side If your government doesn't have the will To continue like Churchill He went out and pulled the people and everything So it's a contest of wills

Between these three apparatuses And even back from ancient warfare, it is both a situational, as in like in the country resisting, but it's also in a international contest. So this is your example, right? Of course, we all know. We won every battle, but we were strategically defeated into Vietnam because the American population lost a will to sacrifice American lives for those interests, even though they didn't believe in the domino theory and all this stuff.

Each war has to be looked at through the lens of that triangle of the people, the government, and the military within themselves and the enemies. but again going back to sun zoo you're one of the greatest assets in any wars you're allies so yes if the americans had not joined Churchill in the fight then they wouldn't have played out that way right so this is so yes the people can resist want to resist all they want they have to have some means and then that's why you know this is about what i've loved and i love my my because i learned something every day about studying military history is understanding the width of whatever it is, the depth and the context. And the Ukraine's sense, the context of it is, it has a coalition of democracy helping it.

But it's not asked for anybody to fight for. It's just asking for the means. And we can talk about, you know, in the beginning, I was kind of vocal in this. Like, we were starting with like, we'll give you four pieces of artillery to fight a war. And that was, we have given billions and we could talk about what that means of, you know, if you're America first and military drawdown, how we give them our stockpiles, we buy new stuff, we're making our military better.

This is our greatest strategic competitor, according to them, and their pennies on a dollar to reduce them. But in the beginning, we were, Ukraine had to fight for itself. Now it's actually one of my visits. That's the Battle of Kiev. Nobody helped them during the Battle of Kiev.

Ukrainians defeated Russians in the Battle of Cape with some stuff that I could never have thought about, even if I was on the ground. It is about your the will of your allies. So this is where, especially in the interconnected world, they were really good on information warfare. Ukrainians were on projecting this. But it really mattered.

And you asking about Russian brutality. It's really come into effect on how they maintain like Ukrainian moral high ground. Right? There's a moral high ground in fighting for your freedom. And it can't ever be, you know, like you lose. the will of your allies and things based on the actions you're doing. So yes, you have to say thank you for the four artillery pieces. I could use more, but it plays into this, you know, political nature.

All war is politics by other means. It's the other quote. So in every context that I'm studying even a battle, I have to understand the political context of it. And why did the president tell Ukrainians they couldn't be, they couldn't defend the city? That was crazy, right? Like, why would you say that? Because he thought it would crush the, you know, make the economy, economy crash, like much, you know, it would aggravate the Russians, and then they would attack.

Like, there's many reasons to it. This is the uniqueness of studying, as you do. Wars, there's human decisions that aren't necessarily rational. But there's reason, but there's also chance, probability. This is the great profits of the last three years. I can tell you how this is going to go. Of course, this person is going to lose. They're bleeding white.

Like, do you know anything about war? there's a lot of uncertainty. I was going to say if you know anything about war. It's that we don't know anything about war. That's right. We have a really good record of getting it wrong, especially predictions. Yeah, this one's definitely going to be hard to predict

to see where this thing ends up. Right. I was studying this, it's really harder to follow a war, right? So I, you know, follow on it day-to-day, every action on the tactical to strategic. I get a lot of questions about predicting, but I could never have predicted

that you would have a Tony Soprano type of dude. who has a private military company that's an army make a run for Moscow. And that's what happened. And nobody could have predicted that. And they try to rationalize it away. But that's an example of the uncertainty of war.

We don't know what's going to happen a month from now in Russia. I mean, with their system, it isn't as firm as people believe with the oligarchs and all this stuff. And the military seems really powerful, but they're asking for Iran to give them stuff, North Korea to give them the stuff. And they give people like three days of training. And they emptied their entire prison in Chaco.

50,000 plus Russians, murderers, rapists, like, hey, you want to go fight? And then after you're done fighting, you're free? And they dumped their entire prisons into Ukraine. And then some of them actually survived, although most of them died, like in the Battle of Baku. Some of them survived and all of a sudden Russia has a lot of domestic problems because you have all these freed criminals. How long did they have to fight for? Do you know that detail? Yeah, it was like six months or something.

I don't know what the exact guarantee to which populations was it was like go fight in Ukraine for like six months. But they used them as human ways, especially in Bakmu. This is and the Black, you know, the Wagner is the private military company group. But if, you know, all these these people that are in my world that predict like, they're going to know what's going to happen and everything. Like you didn't call that one, did you? One thing that I've said a few times is, uh, I, expected and continued to expect to see more insurgency type activity guerrilla warfare from the Ukrainians as opposed to pitched battles.

Yeah. And you did see that. So that's the, I've gotten that from Elon, right? Elon Musk believes that if they speak Russian, maybe they want to be Russian. Now, you know, again, there's a history of the language. That's not true. You're like, well, there'd be more, you know, you know, rebellion in the occupied territories. Like, well, there is.

I mean, there's like grandmalls given Russians poisoned bread. and the stuff that happened in hair-sawing, where a lot of inside was able to take it down. It's just a scale issue and a means issue. I wrote this story for Time magazine about the, which you should, yeah, you probably get the guy, this Vietnam-style helicopter resupply that they do into Marriople. We have 3,000 guys that are resistant,

and they flew seven souserals. suicidal aircraft resupplies into the city. It's an amazing story. Yes, but there's a lot of history there, especially where you're talking about in the Dunbos, because that war started 2011. And the political warfare that Russia does, like it did in Crimea, where it takes out

and inserts Russia-friendly political leaders. So this is why it's also hard. One, Ukraine has gone on for so long that there's a lot of confirmation confirmation bias like, you know, it's our own warfare, that's the future,

you know, political warfare, insurgency, rebellion, it's all there. It's such a big war. Like, that's it.

That's it. That's it. Yeah. I was right. I was right. It is happening. Yeah. You know,

but there is a, you know, each area, even within Ukraine, this thing is huge. Yeah. There are different demographics, different situations,

different resistance groups in there. And you say, And you said you kept going back to Ukraine until October 7th. Right. And so how has that looked from your perspective? How many times have you gone to Israel? How many times have you gone to Gaza and what's going on over there? Yeah.

So I, one, I had been studying Israel for a long time where because of... Those are some of the most significant urban battles of modern times. They were. In these various. Yeah, I guess they were. Yeah. And very unique. there's so much uniqueness to it

because I was doing the international working group on subterranean warfare. Like I was having conferences in Israel about tunnel warfare going to Hezbo tunnels in northern Israel that they discovered in Hamas tunnels before this war. But yeah, they're a unique military too. So they're a military that can task organized

for the environments in which they face. Where most other militaries like us, the U.S. military expeditionary anywhere in the world is designed for a lot of scenarios. Why I kept going back to Israel is that they are they had some forces that were specifically trained for a contested urban warfare and had stuff that we don't have like the D9 bulldozer, which is like this three story tall bulldozers.

They learned to in our contested urban warfare. When somebody has had time to prepare for defense, you have to have something that can take a hit from whatever's waiting for you. And they had this like three story tall that got to drive in like 2020 bulldozer with a remote control that's like a, it's an armored bulldozer that's like three stories tall that. rolls down the street and take a hit from anything. And they had learned in 2002 that that was very effective. And they integrated into combined arms.

They have a tank behind it and an armor formation. But they also have one of the world's best urban warfare training sites and Salem, better than anything we have. The tunnel. So I was going there, but I also written case studies on the Battle of Sua City, Janine and others, because it's like you said, the genesis of like the close quarters battle, comes from Israel.

And some of their, I embedded with their, Magav, their, basically their version of Delta, like the Yama and others, studying Israel. So I had a lot of connections.

October 7th happened. I, of course, was watching it. I've been there three times six October 7th. I've been into Gaza each time. Because my unique connections and that experience that I had,

when I asked the question, I want to understand how you're mobilizing for these urban challenges. I had enough connections to be able to do that. So as early as December, I was on the ground, but I was also not just studying what they were doing, which I hope we get to talk about dealing with the Gaza war,

the war against Hamas and Gaza. But I also wanted to study October 7th attacks, and that was the podcast I did. So I had watched the video. I don't know if you've seen it. I have not seen it. I think I could probably help you get, it but I had seen that in November in New York City.

I got an act I got an So explain what the video is for people that don't know. So unique to Hamas, Hamas made it a very, purposely wanted to record their atrocities of October 7th. So they all wore gopros. They actually had manuals of how to wear the GoPro properly. And they wanted to record all their acts. So on October 7th, when over 4,000 Hamas in, and regular Palestinian civilians

penetrated Israel's border in 20 different locations and moved forward into the civilian areas and locked them down and started massacring everybody. They recorded it all. So Israel took Hamas' videos

but also combined it with like vehicle dash cams and home CCTVs and recreated locations and this 45-minute video is of Hamas' carnage on October 7th. And it's just a small, like,

you know, it's, it's... Some of the sites. Some of the sites. And I, I watched this in November, and I've seen a lot, right? And I've now traveled the world. It messed me up. And I actually was really adamant before I saw it.

Like, why won't you release this? Show the world what happened on that day. I mean, it's 90% Hamas videos. Like, they captured themselves to include beheading people and, you know, awful things that they did. After watching it, I realized,

do not release this. The way it's done, and I'm sure you have too, like I'm seeing enough carnage and I've seen Kill TV and I've seen things, but the way they did this with having different perspectives,

it almost put you at the spot of the, whatever it is that's happening. And there's one scene that really messed me up where it was Hamas had entered one of the villages, all these villages around the border, and the dad wakes up with what's going on because they have like 30 seconds to jump into bomb

because Hamas on October 7th the morning I've launched 4,000 rockets. So the entire country thought it was a normal Hamas rocket attack although the scale was beyond anything they had seen. So they all jumped into their bomb shelters. If you live in Israel, it's a requirement when you build a house to have a bomb shelter because Hamas and Hezbo and others launched so many rockets.

So in this video, the 45-minute video, is one where this dad, You know, and I'm a father is in his underwear. He grabs his two sons and he runs out to the bomb shelter because they got an alert that the rockets were coming. It just happened to be seconds before the actual Hamas terrorists were in his village. And they enter his courtyard, throw a grenade in there. And you see him fall out of the, because they're not like safe rooms. They're just shelters, sometimes in the back or sometimes in the house.

And you see him fall out and you see the two kids come out and they're all rippled with. shrapnel and everything because the grenade went in there. The terrorists take them back into the house and this house just happened to be fully equipped with CCTV camera. And the two kids are put on the couch and you can tell like they're bleeding and they're talking to each other about I can't see. Where's dad? Dad's dead.

And then I hear one of these kids make this moan that I've heard enemy make on the battlefield. This very like deep like eerie death moan I call it. and the Hamas guy is standing over them laughing. And this is the scene that people have talked about where he laughs at them, tells them to shut up, and then goes to their fridge and drinks a Coke over the top of them. For some reason, that savagery really, at that moment, like, really hit me. But it's everything.

I like the glee that they have and when they're quoting themselves, how happy they are about what they're doing was like something I had never seen. It's like they had released thousands of Jeffrey Dahmer's. into Israel. But that's what that video is. It's 45 minutes straight of seeing from the Nova Music Festival to all the different villages with all these different perspectives and from beheadings to, you know, awful things. And is it the Israeli government that compiled this?

Yes. And it's the Israeli government that has decided not to release it. Correct. And they think their reason for not releasing it is because it's too brutal? There's a few reasons. I've never asked, you know, I've interviewed now, Everybody, because I've, on all my trips, I've interviewed the prime minister, the head of the military, like, many politicians, everything. Nobody's ever said, like, John, this is the reason we didn't release.

I know many of the reasons, one is respect for the people that are in it. It's traumatizing. It literally, like, causes traumas for people that watch it, and you have to, like, get help some people that have watched it. And it's the savagery of it. So it's almost like you're fulfilling the terrorist interest. because even the Nazis tried to hide what they do. It's really unique that they wanted this to air. And you can go to places like October 7.com

and you can see a lot of the videos, just not with the Israeli kind of the dashboard cameras and stuff. You can see most of Hamas' videos that are out there, the savagery of it. So I think there's many reasons why they haven't. They tried to show it to as many groups as possible, and they want to control of it because you're almost fulfilling the terrorist,

interest of spreading it. And for the Hamas to, you know, go through such extreme efforts of training their people and how to wear these cameras so they can capture all this savagery, what's their purpose behind that? Why are they doing that? So it's, so the video, so the books are they carried. So the other videos, why they do it because it, you know, it's, you know, some people have lost the definition of terrorism.

What terrorism has meant the definition of terrorism, you know, basically violence on civilians for the purpose of political goals and instill fear and others. But I think it was a accusation of their radicalization.

Like they wanted, and this is the videos of where they're literally calling back to their mothers in Gaza saying, I just killed 10 Jews, aren't you proud of me? That level of radicalization within them is they wanted to spread to all other jihadists, their successes. So I think that was a big part of it and part of their

warped form of fundamental Islamic jihadism, which isn't even what it says. So I think that's something, although I never asked them, that's some of the reasons. But it wasn't just like where the GoPro, the books actually explained, which as a, you know, as somebody who wrote a mini manual and everything, it was really eerie that. It said stuff like, take the tires out of the Israeli's cars, light their tires on fire and then roll them into their houses so that it will burn and suffocate them at the same time. For some reason, burning was really

big to them in this plan. They also had drugs that they took to kind of, not that they needed it to almost dehumanize the fighters if they were having problems, which was actually what happened in Mumbai attacks as well. They had food with them to stay longer. They had food with them to stay longer. had, now we can get into what was it. Was the terrorist attack, which I personally don't think it is. I think it was an invasion. Because if you add up the 4,000 plus individuals who penetrated 20 different locations, the thousands of rockets, you get over a division of forces, and they plan to take terrain

and hold terrain. They had maps to go to Tel Aviv in Jerusalem. This was an invasion, and they planned for, like Kesbila did, in the north, for other people that joined them. and they had all this intelligence on all the different communities, and they locked them down from a military lens. Like I couldn't have even a ranger school taught, you know, many of those lessons were there.

They set up ambushes on any road that led into southern Israel to ambush any security personnel that would come in that direction. They had intimate information on every village, because each one of these villages have their own security personnel in the kibbutzis, and they have armories where their weapons are, which is an evolution of the gun policy. So the terrorists would enter the village and immediately cut that off

and put in snipers above that armory and take out anybody that went towards it to lock it down. The military planning of this invasion was intense, and there's so many stories that are starting to come to light, but they wanted the rest of their jihad to see what they were doing in the savagery of them. I've gone through thoughts in my brain where I was thinking that one of the reasons why they wanted this to be recorded and seen was because they wanted a strong reaction from Israel and like that's why they did these things in such a heinous way but also you know now that I'm thinking about it what you just said really landed was like the This is the actualization of someone that has been told their whole life that the Jews are demonic beasts that have oppressed everyone and killed all of our family members.

And they've held us down for centuries and we must destroy them and kill them. And if you get told that your whole life, well, then when you get a GoPro and you get the opportunity to do it, you want to record it. and you want to share it, which is really disturbing. The psychological upbringing of these kids, tell me a little bit about the background about growing up under Hamas. What does that do to me mentally? What does that do to someone mentally?

Yeah, I can't, I mean, I'm sure you could find more systematic radicalization in the world if you talk about like some other companies, but it would be really hard for such an intense amount of radicalization at birth. So by the time of Palestinian, under Hamas, right, which is this group who seized power in 2005, 2008, and then starts implementing this Sharia and radicalization. And there's lots of histories to do it, but it starts at birth. It literally isn't somebody who basically has seen actions of the Israelis and then feels that,

resentment of their actions. There's all kinds of documentation of literally, basically a version of Hamas Sesame Street with characters discussing that the how the Jews are less than human and our goal is to kill them. That's the ultimate form of basically what the religion tells you to do. So that dehumanization and interest to slaughter Israelis, which is really a part of dehumanization. It's the only way you can explain some of the things

and the rape and the mutilation and the burning and the beheading that happens on that day. That was a lot of Jeffrey Dahmer's, but that was started at birth. And you can see from the textbooks that start from the first time they can read to want to not just hate the Jewish people, but to kill them and destroy the Israeli state.

This is again going back to all these misinformed people on the American campuses that believe that this is a resistance and they just want their own state and they want self-determination and better things for their people. They have never said those things. Their entire education, their charter,

everything is about the death of the Jews around the world and Israel not existing. They even had these things called summer camps in Gaza. Summer camps were, and I thought the numbers weren't right and I had to keep looking, like 100,000 kids a summer going through camps on how to use

weapons for the sole purpose and then tactics, techniques, and procedures to slaughter Israelis and kill Israelis. And they have the sayings that, you know, like almost answer like the motto is the death of the Jews. And like that level of radicalization gets you to a deep hatred that isn't even like passed on from some action that happened. It's programmed in to achieve your ultimate. goal on life, which is crazy.

Like, they're taught that that's their goal on life is to have children to be martyred while killing Jews, to fulfill this philosophical ideal of the caliphate, which is the erasing of the Jewish people. Then on top of that, they're in an environment where when you look outside of your house and you're a little kid and you've been told that the Jews are terrible, you look out and what do you see? Oh, you see an Israeli with a weapon imposing control over you and your family and all of your people.

So you end up with this self-fulfilling prophecy because when you look around, well, you know, my teacher just told me that the Jews are bad. And then guess what? One of your friends walks too close to some security station and gets shot. well sure enough the Jews are bad and this is and it just go that goes on you know now this is the these are the people that live there in Gaza and you know because what 2005 2006 is when Hamas takes control there okay so these are the young adults and they've been raised this way since birth

and I know you and are you and I were talking before we hit record and I brought up you know being a 15 or a 13 year old in you know Nazi Germany in 1944 Like you are just, that's what you think. That's what, that's the way you, that's what you believe. You mentioned the Imperial Japanese, you know, looking at the emperor as if he was God. And because that's the only thing you know. And, you know, I mentioned actually before we hit record, I knew a guy that was raised in a cult. And he thought when he left the cult, he believed, half of him believed, well, when I leave, I'm going to get struck down.

by God. He believed that. And he had a little hole. He had a little room for error in that. He had seen the outside world and he was like, oh, this doesn't, some things didn't match up. But here, if you're in Gaza, the things match up because you're living, you don't have food, you don't have water. The things match up with what you're being told and how you're living and just reinforces this idea that the Jews are bad. They're oppressing you. And the only proper way to fulfill your destiny in life is to kill as many of them as you can and martyr yourself yeah there's a lot of the radicalization is more than just the education but it is there the the books and the religion and the sayings and everything

but you're right it's if that's what you live in and of this population you know Gaza strip is a strip you know 25 miles long five to seven miles wide is the biggest area with 2.2 million people living into it with massive cities, but 80 plus percent of the population lives well below global standards of property for potable water, food, everything. And they're taught that that's because of Israel. Although since Hamas seized power in 2005 and started launching rockets at Israel, that the leadership of Hamas are billionaires, like the ones that live in Qatar,

billionaires, the ones that live in, like those are no longer. around were millionaires. The subjugation of the people is needed to fulfill the hatred that is indoctrinated, like you said, self-propathy, validated, everything they learn about. It doesn't matter if the head of Hamas gets, you know, saved in a surgery to rid him of his cancer. Like that doesn't matter. what they view of the outside world

and to include anybody, not them, but especially for the Jewish people, is validated in what they're living in. And the cause of that, which is unfortunately even in some Western societies, that this is all Israel's fault, right? The whole idea of apartheid, the whole idea of blockade,

all of this and revisionist history, it's all Israel's fault. All they want is to live side by side as good neighbors. No, they've never said that. they've only ever said they want to kill all the Jews and erase Israel it shouldn't exist and that's what they teach and radicalize in the population but that element of them living in poverty while they're spending billions of dollars to develop military capabilities to destroy Israel that there's a break in that and everything is built into it the UNRWA refugee system

everything is meant to create this idea that they are the oppressed and the idea of just, well, I want to break away from this. I want to make a good life. I don't want that. Everything is done to ensure that that maintains and that cycle of hatred continues. And it's aimed at Israel, not aimed at, let's say, for instance, Egypt, where Egypt is right there on the border

and that border is completely shut down and you're not allowed to be a Palestinian living in Gaza if you want to escape from there, you can't go to Egypt. Nope. And there used to be, most people don't understand, you know, again, the history that people only want to, they construct their own narrative by taking the bits of the history. They want to reword in them or whatever.

But there used to be Gazans on the Egyptian side of Gaza. There was 50,000 in Roth, our city actually split on the other side. And Egypt one day said, I don't want them there. And they basically forcibly told them to all. to leave, I don't care where you to go. And then since the war, which I have been as an urban warfare specialist, looking at the history of anything similar, although there's very few, I've never seen a situation where

the civilians that don't, the non-combatants, the ones that don't want to fight, have nowhere to get out of the main combat areas because Egypt closed their gate on October 7 and said not one refugee. And if anybody knows the geography of that area, the Sinai Desert in Egypt, there's a massive area of the ability for Egypt to open the border and create a temporary displaced person camp

like there has been in many urban battles tent cities non NGOs and get in there without the threat of attack would have saved thousands of lives nobody talks about it nobody points their finger to Egypt because they have self-determination

if they want to and they did not one refugee coming out of Gaza and they have their history of why with the Muslim Brotherhood and their tenuous political situation right now, but I found it really unique today. Nobody talks about Egypt.

Like in the broader scale, like the blockade, you can't have a blockade if there's another country with a border that goes in and out and controls the borders, not a blockade. And if there are thousands of Gazans that are coming out of Gaza, which there were, over 20,000,

gossans coming out of Gaza to work in Israel, then it's not really a blockade. And if things are getting in, hundreds of trucks a day and being searched for weapons, then there are lots of reasons there, but then people reconstruct this narrative. Getting back to yours, no, the radicalization doesn't point the finger at their situation to Egypt.

Or Hamas, for that matter, obviously. Obviously. And Hamas is not the only bad guys there, right? So this is, again, a study in war. On October 7th, Hamas, and Palestinians, to be very clear, it's thousands. So there were waves, and I broke this down in the article that I wrote about the attack. There were waves of, you know, Nukba, which are the Hamas special forces that came in

and the hang gliders, penetrated the walls, came in, went to their attack points, set up the ambushes. And then there were thousands of Palestinians who said, got the notice that the attack of the Jews was ongoing. And they crossed into as well. but Hamas is not the only evil terrorist group in Gaza either. They have the Palestinian Islamic jihad, lions den, other names of people who have the same radical ideal that the whole goal in life to include to be martyred is to kill Jews. So what have you seen as far as now the operations commence in Gaza and the clearance of Gaza looks like a hellscape over there? What's that been? And you've been in Gaza since October 7th.

You've been on patrol and seen what's going on. Yeah. So I went there first in December. So I watched that video in November. I went there in December. I walked many locations, which actually was a realization. Like even watching that video, I had no clue of the scale of the October 7th attack and the military planning of it

and how they locked it down. And where were the police? Where were the... So I was studying it from a kind of an urban warfare terrorist attack perspective. But then I was also... This is the biggest urban-centric war. You could say since World War II, just on the scale of it, but that we've known just by the complexity of the urban terrain and the mission.

I went there in December to start understanding how Israel was going to move forward to achieve its three goals. And I had, I interviewed Netanyahu. I interviewed the chief of staff, like from a, like we talk about, from a strategic goal. What are the goals, right? So after the October 7th, they had to repel the enemy. The enemy took 250 hostages, men, women, children, Holocaust survivors, American citizens back into, because there's a lot of history there. The theory of they wanted this counterattack, there's a lot of history there to taking hostages.

And the head of Hamas that recently died, Yaya Samwar, spent 20 years in Israeli prisons trying to figure out what Israel's greatest weaknesses were, one of them being its reliance on allies in the international community, the deep anti-Semitism. Like, he planned this out for years and the taking of hostages being the same. I mean, that guy was,

there was an Israeli NCO sergeant that was kidnapped and held for five years, Gilaj Khalid, and Israel exchanged a thousand prisoners to get one guy back. And during that five years, from a special forces perspective, they never knew where he was in that density of Gaza. So a thousand plus people in Yahya, the mastermind October 7 being one of them.

So after October 7th, you had 250 hostages be taking, like literally eight-month-old babies and everything. The rockets did not stop. So I think some people discount this on like what is the realm of the timeline of this. You had the hostages immediately being taken. And then you had 4,000 rockets launched in their first few hours of October 7th, and thousands launched every day then on. Now it's down to zero or one to two or three a day. But nobody knew that they had amassed this level of a rocket arsenal,

but their 13,000 plus rockets launched out of Gaza despite the operation. So Israel declared war in accordance with UN Charter Article 51, like a self-defense war, with three goals. and those haven't changed since October 8th, although Hezbo attacked on October 8th, which does factor in. So we have this massive army attacking in the north as well. Their goals were to return the hostages, the 251,

to destroy, and this is where people have tried to argue that they're not doing it, destroy Hamas. And by destroyed, not from a ideal perspective, but destroy as in removed them from their military and political power. So it's more analogous than when I kind of get frustrated on people thinking that Hamas is a counterinsurgency, is that Gaza, since 2005, when Israel left, and in 2008, Hamas,

there's no, that's not Israel. Israel left it, and then after 2008, after the rocket attacks put up the wall, it was a de facto statelet, like an area. And the goal was to remove Hamas from political power and remove their military capabilities. And then lastly is, you know, prevent them Gaza from ever,

threatening Israel again, like with military capabilities. So those three goals were the start of it. Now, how did they array to do that is why I went in December to look at some of the bigger fights and how they started into the north. So Hamas was over 40,000 fighters, but the numbers don't really matter because it was a military. So it had 24 light infantry battalions arrayed across the Gaza Strip, which includes 24 cities, 10 over 100,000. Gaza cities over 600,000, you know, Rapa's, you know, 300,000,

but major urban areas, all, which I think people miss, and this is where I've tried to come in with the urban warfare experience, is that a, you had 250 hostages, rockets emanating out of Gaza with an army, a raid in that territory, prepared for the defense. So one of the reasons that the 2016-17 battle of Massoud was the biggest since World War II is because ISIS had two years, to prepare and prepared it in very good belted defenses. The second battle of Fallujah in 2004 is the greatest battle for the entire Iraq war. The entire time we're there. I know Romani was big, but the second battle of Flusia.

And because they were given nine months of defensive prep. So in Gaza, they had 15 years to prepare the ground and actually built the cities for the purpose of war. So this is where, and their budget was billions. Unlimited from some perspectives. Yes. This is where, you know, at one point there were 200, you know, and then I've gotten a lot of people like, why would you, if Israel knew this, why didn't they do something about it? Like the fact that there were 200, at one point 200 cement trucks a day going into Gaza to build hospitals,

schools and everything, but there weren't a lot of high rises going up. Because in this 15 years, they built the largest underground net. network ever seen in war. They originally thought it was 300 and as they started to interact with it, no way that it's over 400 miles, so bigger than the London Metro, the New York City Metro, Seoul Metro, under the cities of Gaza and unique to military because China and North Korea have lots of tunnels to be. They have thousands of miles.

They call it the Great Wall underground in China, but it's not built under civilians for the sole purpose of using the civilians as human sacrifice to achieve their political goal. because Hamas never like you said Hamas knew it couldn't defeat the IDF but in its history and Israel's history that's not ever the goal the goal is to attack withstand the counter attack

and then get the world to cause them to stop so this is where I said even in December Hamas's only goal is to survive if it survives the war politically they won because Israel set the goal of removing them from power removing their military capability but you have 24 battalions

of Hamas. So you have like five brigades and then you have 24 battalions arrayed across the Gaza Strip with the main part in northern Gaza with all geographic locations. Each battalion has their own arsenal of rockets and cachets in the houses

and its own tunnel network to support a delayed defense. I can't find in history where any military has faced those variables because you have the hostages that leads to time like just well let's do a siege. although doing a siege in modern wars

it would be hard to do legally because you can't cut water, food and everything from civilians. So you have the hostage thing, you have the underground network, you're not going to reach that many of them. They've removed them from power aspects of it to you have to physically do it because Israel went into Gaza in 2008,

2014, 2021, with very limited goals of just reducing the rocket supply that was emanating out of out of Gaza to do it do this though it's more analogous to like a invasion of Iraq invasion of Afghanistan invasion of Panama you know World War II style I'm gonna remove this like even the invasion of Kiev like you gotta remove the power

and then you have to take away this military capability for the next power to do it again etc etc so Israel waited for so after October 8th Israel of course mobilized because it's you know it's a very small military He only has two serving divisions, about 100 plus thousand kind of in the field. And it mobilized 300,000 in the first couple of weeks. But it also gave notifications for northern Gaza to move below the central part. And I think you were talking about this in one of your podcasts as well,

which is pretty much the standard of removing civilians from the population, right? You know what we did in the second battle of Fallujah, you drop flyers. You keep notifying. drop more flyers. Israel did that, which I found really interesting that they did that, because they're a raid,

four divisions of forces waiting to go in. They're doing, you're basically preparatory, like they're engaging rockets that are emanating out, the rocket locations. They know where our headquarters are. They're engaging in with that bombing campaign

that we could talk about. But they haven't launched the full invasion to remove Hamas from power. they give all the notifications and then what the world says you can't do that. I can't do what? Evacuate civilians out of combat areas so I can move them out of

the most risked place and they identified a road for them to go. The same thing that anybody's ever done. They identified an area to go so they couldn't go into Egypt. So Israel identified this beach area on the southwestern portion of Gaza and one of the reasons they picked it

is it's the only place in all of Gaza without military Hamas infrastructure underneath it because it's too sandy. But these 400 miles of tunnels, and they only knew some of this now from discovering it, and I was in one in December, it was a multi-million dollar invasion tunnel that ran from Gaza City to 100 meters outside of Israel Gaza's border. It had power, ventilation, communication, lighting, everything. you could now you know you could basically enter northern Gaza in a tunnel and come out in southern Gaza that's how many tunnels it's like I've never seen anything like it and you know I went in in

February and the con unis in July into central Gaza where they're creating this where that that that thing that split northern Gaza nobody thought that they that that was a barrier like a natural barriers used to be a river now it's a river basin that splits northern and southern Gaza called the wadda Gaza I thought that was like a natural barrier, but Hamas actually figured out how to dig miles long tunnels underneath that river basin to connect northern Gaza to southern Gaza. So if you're a military, though, and like, okay, what are the options here to return the hostages,

get the rockets to stop firing, remove this into the from power, this is what I teach in that course, you know, division level attack. So when I went there in December and why do I keep going back into Gaza I'm trying to analyze, like, what are the types of forms of maneuver and operations they're doing? And I did that in how they did some very innovative things to not fight the way the enemy wanted them to fight. So Hamas had built its defensive lines in a circle with the water to their back, thinking that, okay, the direction of the enemy, Israel will come this way. So they had to, you know, especially in northern Gaza, which was a strong point of the brigades,

they had developed this defensive belt, defensive belts to include the tunnel networks that went between the buildings in a kind of a crescent circle. So Israel, of course, didn't attack, a frontal attack, you know, they're not Marines. They didn't a frontal attack that. They went around it,

to include commandos coming out of the seas and came from behind that defensive belt. They also moved forward and secured the hospital, which is historical to the Second Battle of Fallujah, if you know that battle, the hospital was the primary objective because they're very strong information warfare aspects. But I found myself as I was going in there, I saw the misinformation happening about what Israel was doing, that they were being indiscriminate, that they were being excessive

and especially they were being disproportionate because proportionality in war, this is because of the social media, because of to include everybody's ideals about Israel and anti-Semitism, everybody became an expert in the law of war on what proportionality was and people thought, well, 1,200 Israelis were massacred on October 7th,

so that means you can only kill 12, there can only be 1,200 deaths on the other side. It has nothing to do with proportionality. So I had to, I started writing and talking a lot about even what is proportionality. But as I went in, I also,

because I study urban warfare for a living, I also did a lot of work with the United Nations with human rights groups that since our battles. I mean, the United Nations High Council of Human Rights said we did in like 83 cases of war crimes in the Second Battle of Fallujah to include carpet bombing, targeting civilians,

all that stuff. It's not new for these groups to say these things. Even in Ukraine, Amnesty International said that it was illegal for Ukrainian military to be in the cities they're defending because it puts civilians at risk. So this is, I had been working, I had spoken at the United Nations,

there is a giant initiative in the United Nations to ban the use of any bomb in any urban area. It's called the explosive weapons and populated areas in like 100 countries have signed us that if there's an urban war, we're going to not use really big bombs

because it's really destructive to the cities, which sounds good in theory. But as, to include a lot of military theorists is that if you understand the forced genieva Convention is out of World War II and all the things that we said we wouldn't do, that has now been taken by human rights groups

to say there should be no war and there should be no use of explosive weapons in urban areas, clearly, because it destroys cities. But it actually drives warfare into urban areas because it's a place where somebody who wants political power goes, so you can't touch me. And this is what we've seen in Hamas is really the culmination of all my studies

of the laws of war and what are protected population and protection sites, right? Hospitals, schools, medical staff, like all these are protected under the laws of war. And Hamas built cities with that in mind.

So every hospital in Gaza, Hamas used in some way for military purposes. It built these tunnels. I used to say they built their tunnels underneath all the schools and hospitals and houses. Now, after, being, especially in my February, but they built the tunnel and then put a school or a mosque on

top of it as in this what they call law fair. They have been studying the R wars and Israel's situation for years and they built an entire environment with the sole purpose of getting this world to do what it has, which is lose this mind on what the laws are and what the realm of possible is. There's only one battle. I don't know, you probably know this. There's only one battle in all of military history that I can find has any of the parallels of the war in Gaza, which is really hard for people to understand. Like, um, people have tried to compare like Ramadi or other battles to the war in Gaza. Like the, there are 24 cities in Gaza.

Gaza city itself is over 600,000 people. Which, which context are you comparing it to? There are 5,000 in all of Ramadi. There were 3,000 in Fallujah. There was only 5,000 in Masul. Are you talking about enemy fighters? Enemy fighters. And like the population of Ramadi was 400,000, the whole thing.

And by time it started, it was about 250,000. Yeah, probably 250. And yeah, like they estimate around 5,000 enemy fighters. Yeah. So what do we got in Gaza? Two million. Two million people. Yep.

And the fighters are over 40,000, just of the. Organized. The named enemy. Because this is the other thing. You enter Gaza, it might not be Hamas that attacks. you, but it's a combatant. And I've had to teach people like, what is a combatant and a non-combatant? Because you can be, this is a part of law of war that nobody understands.

And maybe I didn't know as much. Like, you can, if you're a named military that I've waged war against, I can kill you wherever you are. You don't have to be holding a weapon. If there's a barracks full of enemy fighters sleeping of the other military, I can destroy that barracks while they're sleeping. That's the law of war. And you could be a civilian and you can also, like the grandma, which you're

which is the example I tried to use that I told you about in Ukraine, who picked up the phone and called in an airstrike basically. While she was using the phone, she was a combat. She could have been killed. So civilians can, and there are rules like if she stops doing it and then she's not, but if she keeps doing it every day, then she can't be killed.

You don't have to be carrying a weapon as a civilian to be partaking in the hostilities, but if you are protecting in the hospitalities, you lose your protections. There's only one battle that I has, any of the similarities of the hostages situation, the defense of the enemy, which I think people really discount on the realm of possible.

Again, if the enemy has had time to prepare, it's going to look different than other situations where the enemy didn't, even in like the Battle of Keep, right? There wasn't a defensive position assigned. So the 1945 Battle of Manila is the only one that I've found and I that has any of the similarities. So we were defeated in the Philippines. We retreated, but we left thousands of prisoners of war and civilians.

When we regained power, we hit the beaches in the Philippines. And MacArthur said, go to Manila and free our people because there were over 3,000 American and British prisoners of war and attorneys, so civilians being held in the city of Manila. The Japanese originally had not planned to defend it, but then eventually the Navy, the Japanese generals, the Navy Admiral and the guys they're arguing, and one of them decides that they're going to defend it. They use 17,000 Japanese Navy personnel. They sink the ships in the harbor.

I know there's some Navy stuff, but they try to mess up the harbor, and they sink the ships, and they take the naval guns off the ships and put them on land. And for months, they build this defensive position around Manila. MacArthur hits the beach in 1945, says go to Manila and free our people. It's a city of a million.

There's 17,000 defenders who have barricaded the roads. They have dug tunnels. They have sewers. They have some of the aspects of the military defensive infrastructure. MacArthur said no air power. So you didn't want the Americans to destroy the city to save it. So he said no air power. So the 37,000 Americans and some Philippines attacked the city.

we retrieved our 3,000 plus prisoners of war, but it's a bloody block by block fire, and 100,000 civilians die. I've gotten into this numbers game, though, in my work where, like that's horrible, right? Well, just like I can tell you, the number of civilian casualties in the Battle of Massoud was, you know, 10,000 when there were only 5,000 fighters,

but we actually don't know how many fighters died. In 100,000 that died in Manila, the Japanese killed both of those. the Japanese were because they too didn't care about the population were slaughtering them and stacking them in the bottom of the houses They were they also starved them so that there would be a humanitarian crisis by time the Americans Got there But I think the unique aspect that MacArthur didn't want the city destroyed so he didn't use the air power Which as you know as a military person means that like in my strong point

podcast that if you I can teach you how to hold a building for weeks If it has a sub-training in it if it's ironclad made you can hold and we have this like in Stalingrad with the Pablo's house where I can hold a single building for weeks against division level attack yeah so if you don't have the ability to hit the enemy

once you know where he's at it's going to cause the fight that's why when I spoke of the United Nations like this is a bad ideal you're going to create really awful urban wars if you say you can't use munitions if you know where the enemy is to engage the enemy target

that gets you in the category of civilian harm mitigation. So that's the Manila case. I can give you the Battle of Seoul, right? Hackworth, Korea War. Most people know about the Inchon landing, right? You know about that? It's like one of the greatest maneuvers of military history. They hit the beaches of Inchon and then where were they headed? Seoul. And they had to liberate Seoul. Guess who's in charge again? MacArthur. So again, he says no air power. Take the city. It's called the battle of the barriers because the North Koreans set up barriers and they have a very protracted fight. there's only 7,000 defenders.

We attacked with over 15,000 American forces. And there is, as I wanted to help people understand, because some people said, well, that's, you know, Manila's pre-Geneva Conventionist, when we said we wouldn't carpet-bott cities, right? We were carpeted by, you know, Dresden and trying to influence the will of the people and their government to stop resisting.

Well, Seoul's post-second Geneva Conventions. and it was a in McCarthy said no air power no unobserved fires he had to release that as Americans started dying there is zero record of how many civilians died in that battle most of lots of the city was destroyed um all the Japanese just like in Manila I know that the or the the Japanese in Manila all died all 17,000 because they killed themselves there's no record of how many enemy died there's no record or how many civilians died but it's just a huge, like we raised the UN flag over

Seoul and it was a great victory but nobody was, and one of the reasons is because the South Koreans were killing people they thought were North Korean collaborators. There's two million that die in the Korean War, but there's actually that's another example of a very, when an enemy takes a city

how hard it is to take it back, but where the ideal proportionality in this war everybody started asking me, well what's the civilian and combatant ratio. I had never heard of it about, and I've been studying urban war for 10 years. I've never heard that question asked.

And that's where we're at now, we have national leaders of government saying, yeah, but their civilian to combatant ratio is all wrong. They need to stop. Like, are they doing everything that they can to prevent civilian casualties? So this is the other thing that was created after our wars, actually, after the Iraq War,

really at the end of the Afghanis War, something called civilian harm mitigation steps. As you know, McChrystal and others started doing basically changes in ROE and what you could do. And these were viewed as civilian harm mitigation steps and became a terminology that I started getting involved with. In urban warfare, some of those are like evacuated cities before you go. Things like that. Israel did that, right? I told you.

But then they started doing things that nobody does. Israel calls buildings before they strike them and tells anybody that's in them that hey we're about to strike this building I knew that I didn't think they would do it in this war they had done it in previous wars but they were doing it in November and December

they were doing it's called a roof knocking because they'll call everybody in the building tell them all like you have an hour to evacuate we're getting ready to strike this building for its military purposes people don't leave then they'll drop not you basically low yield explosives on the roof and knock on the roof

and do it they were doing that And I knew that before I went, but when I went there in February, I learned that they were doing things that no military has ever done. They were using, they had handed out their maps, so like our GRGs that we use.

Israel started, that started to be the flyers in that they were dropping, where the GRGs that they could communicate to civilians to tell this, the civilians and Hamas where they would be every day and to stay away from that area. So instead of, you know,

saying, okay, everybody in the city needs to evacuate, they cut it up and the GRG said, okay, today we're going to be operating in Area 200. Please evacuate this area and stay away from this area. We've never done that. And they started also, and this is where I think I was telling you about this guy that I really want to tell you about General Goldfuss,

who's an Israeli Navy SEAL, Flatilla 13 guy who they made a division commander. It's just their system, who was always trying to think ahead of the enemy. and I embedded with him and his division into Khan Yunus and he was doing things like encircling a neighborhood because at first Israel just said evacuate the cities

move south of the Wadi Gaza move into Amo Ossi, humanitarian zone and they had limited capabilities but they did that evacuation but reasonably thinking you know that much of Hamas or hostages or something moved with them they were being told

where to avoid, some stayed to fight, of course, and there was rough battles. In Khan Yunus, not only did he do what's called a callout. You know what a callout is? But he did it like city-wide. So he launched four brigades and a penetration into enemy territory overnight,

surrounded a neighborhood of a return of 50,000. When they woke up, they got the notice to evacuate through these Israeli positions and Israel used facial recognition. to pick out all the Hamas that were walking out, like Nukba level fighters. He's also the guy, the evolution of the tunnel warfare, why I keep going back as well as to this tunnel problem,

nobody's ever faced. Nobody's ever faced, you know, tunnels at this depth. So the tunnels run from underneath buildings to 200 feet underground. At around 100 feet underground, there's no military ammunition that reasonably is going to reach that. I mean, yeah, we dropped the Moab in Afghanistan

in 2017, but that was on a tunnel complex in the cave network. There's most, even a 2,000 pound bomb, it's only going to get you about 30 feet underground. 400 miles of these, as Israelis moved forward in northern Gaza, you know, with, they found over six, you know, at this point there were over 6,000 shafts.

It's just unimaginable. And even when I go there, it's like, I would be walking on top of tunnels that they hadn't found yet, and then they found them like an hour later, not understanding that was an enemy tunnel underneath me. But the way that they approached the tunnel, because this is about clearing the suburban terrain.

It's about also finding the supplies and removing it from those areas. They move everybody out of safety, and they've still got to clear the areas, and they're facing the same thing that we did, right? The IEDs, the houseborne bombs, the snipers, snipers are lethal. But the tunnels were the problem set

that I just didn't, Even though I studied tunnel warfare, originally they were, you know, being very deliberate about it. Like they find the shaft, secure it. They lost some soldiers even to the booby traps around the shafts. But by time they did this, the tunnel, the people in the tunnel, although they tried flooding. They actually brought in five industrial level pumps and were pumping seawater and fresh water into the tunnels, thinking that it would help destroy because Egypt had had success doing that, destroying Hamas cross-border tunnels by flooding them. It didn't work. How green it didn't work?

Because if you've ever seen, one, these are multi-million dollar complexes. And actually there's really interesting a report. In 2021, I was actually there when there was another Hamas was launching rockets and it was operation in guarding the wall. So Israel was striking the tunnel complexes and collapsed a bunch. But between that 2021 and October 7th, Hamas spent hundreds of thousand dollars to insert blast doors in the tunnels to. mitigate the blast that you know if you hit a tunnel the blast will ripple through the tunnel

they yaya somewhere himself authorized hundreds of thousands of dollars to put more blast doors in many of the tunnels so this factors in when they started flooding is that they're their concrete tubes so and some of them are made with um uh drainage in them so they they in one battle in the battle of bat an noon they spent two weeks um flood, you know, basically massive industrial level pump into this. In two weeks it started to hit the surface. And actually, that's when they started to have fights on the ground. So they were having weeks long battles with people and never, rarely seen people.

Because of the way each brigade and battalion and company have their own tunnel network. So it'd fill up, but they just drain back out. They're not, they're not made of sandy stuff that's going to collapse in on it. And if it's, if it's not a steady, like if you laterally drill from, There's some theory that if you laterally drill from the Mediterranean into the tunnel and had like a constant supply, maybe it would work, but unlikely. It just would all drain out. But anyways, they were still seating the initiative to the enemy in these tunnels. So they would get there clearing, like they'd segment like we would do.

Minor objectives in a certain area. You're going to isolate this. You're going to clear enemy personnel. You're going to search it. And they found things like things that they just didn't know were possible. I told you about the ones that going under it. but they found deep buried rocket production sites. So, you know, this is the myth that all this was brought in.

No, no. They were, they had the chemicals, the lays, everything, to build rockets, like a military industrial base in tunnels, 100 meters underground, complete workshops, which requires advanced ventilation, everything. As they were finding this, though, they were always, they're always one step behind the enemy. So Hamas was doing a delayed defense. It would fight for as long as it would,

move through its tunnel. activate all the booby traps and then leave. They were still, it was still an issue of now you had to spend all that time dealing with the tunnel and what you do about a tunnel is different than what you do about a tunnel if there's a hostage in it. So that's always in this real, from the go, where are the hostages as a factor in every action

to include what to do about a tunnel, right? And Israel's the only military in the world that has actually major organizations focused on tunnel warfare. on tunnel warfare. Again, why I was going there, they have their version of tunnel rats, we call them Weasels. It's a brigade-level

Special Forces Engineer Force that's trained, man, equipped for underground warfare. But nobody was prepared for the scale. They quickly ran out of resources. And they were seating the tunnels to the enemy.

It was General Goldfuss in Khan Yunus when I was with him, who, I guess, he just thinks differently. He literally would do like, you know, Boyd's Udo Loop. He would do Clause of His Trinity. I have a picture of him.

and like drawing this stuff out. Each time I visit him, like trying to think, because the enemy was adapting as well. So he, like the casualty numbers, like the enemy deployed basically, fighting a war with TV reporters reporting is different than there being millions of sensors in the environment.

So every action is recorded on cell phone. And Hamas did a really good job on projecting that to the world and giving them out. And this is, you know, there's a, I don't know, if you saw, this event there's one example where a bomb goes off near a hospital you know about this one the ali yeah yeah yep and in hamas immediately you've said that the bomb hit the hospital and there's hundreds of people in innocent civilians al jazeera CNN everybody ran it over 500 deaths Israel bombed the

hospital even i was like what um and it Israel waited about an hour just to to make sure like did something happen like an accident somebody dropped something they weren't supposed to everything and then come to find out it was actually the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who had had a rocket. Monster rocket and it went astray. And went astray and landed in the parking lot of the hospital and created like a grenade-sized hole.

And but Hamas, Gaza Health Ministry, it's Hamas, had formed a, before that was all revealed, had had a news conference outside the hospital with all the doctors, they emptied the morgue of all the people, laid them out and actually had people holding babies and did a national broadcast of that they had just been bombed

and hundreds of people were dead. So Hamas was, again, doing that, as Israel was trying to clear the terrain, Goldfuss was always thinking through that. That's why he's doing these big callouts. He's trying to out-maneuver the enemy, whatever the enemy strategy is to win. In the tunnels, he also said, like,

I'm seeding the initiative. But every time they find a tunnel, it would be booby-trapped, and it took all that time to deal with it. And the enemy was still in the environment. So he developed a way to enter the tunnels and not enter them to clear them, to use them as maneuver corridors.

And I told him, like, sir, I've never seen this where you have a force maneuvering on the surface, like a brigade, and then you have a force maneuvering underground. Flanking subterranean. Flanking subterranean. Or simultaneous. maneuver. And I was like,

sometimes I ask question, like, next question. Like, how did he? And I actually talked to the brigade commander who was on the surface. Like, how did you communicate with the guy? I didn't. Because they, you know, they were controlled at the division level. But they were entering the tunnels before Hamas knew they were in the tunnels. And it became, and it kept advancing this to where

they could, they could enter a tunnel and know from the tunnel's construction what type of tunnel it is. So whether it's a brigade tunnel connecting or a command and control tunnel. And they were entering the tunnel and maneuvering on Hamas before him so it it went from being an obstacle which most military's view tunnels is like an obstacle to deal with don't enter it at all

cause I think I heard you talk about just siege it like what I could go in there to where it's now their tunnels that's not Hamas don't using that's a tool yeah from the pictures it looks like much of Gaza is devastated at this point how much longer is this operation you're going to take place yeah it's a great question So at this point, as we're talking, Hamas's military is no longer has military capability. As in all of its 24 battalions, although there's rumored that one battalion is still effective.

And by effective, meaning, can do their assigned military mission, right? Destroy, in our definition, kind of like our doctrine means, unable to do its assigned mission. Sometimes there's a percentage, like 50% destroyed or whatever. It just can't attack or defend. Hamas as a military is destroyed. This leadership is gone, and its ability to hold ground and defend it is gone. So now it's like this shadow gorilla force.

How long, so other people, when I wrote this in foreign affairs, like about Israel is achieving its goals, how long would it take and does Israel need to destroy all the tunnels to win? One of the challenges that Israel discovered was how to destroy a tunnel. And you talk about a two mile long tunnel. They have some liquid explosives that they have, that they mix a compound, they put it in the ground, but they tried the flooding. It didn't work. So now they basically string anti-tank mines along the entire length of a tunnel and use deck cord and blow it that way. If you try to do that to all 400 miles, there's not enough T&T in the world. But they also figured out that there's different types of tunnels.

There's strategic tunnels that give you like maneuver all over the entire Gaza Strip or cross-border tunnels. So they're prioritizing the tunnels just to find all the tunnels. And I was in July in the Netsurine corridor. There's that strip that they're trying to split the two to make the problem bigger. And within there, there's thousands of shafts and tunnels still left in that quarter. But your question is about the war. How long would it take to achieve Israel's ultimate goal? Because this is where it could be a counterinsurgery.

Although I rail against Hamas being an insurgent force. until there is a new power, then they are the de facto power, even in the shadows right now. How long will it take Israel to create a security environment? Like you said, when we talk about Iraq, you had to bring it down to where our partners could maintain stability.

And it'd be great if the partner wasn't somebody whose goal was to destroy you. Right now, Israel is still searching for, the hostages. So if you took all three of its goals, how long is it going to take, which is a very political, um, complex issue for Israel? How long will it take to get the hostages back? There's 101 as we're speaking still left in there. So how long would it take us is a different question. Right now, as we're speaking, Israel has five divisions in southern Lebanon because they had this other terror army with over our two hundred people.

200,000 rockets attacking it daily to where it had 80 to 100,000 civilians since October 7th that had to be evacuated from northern Israel. There's only two divisions in Gaza for the last like six months since Rafa operation began. How long would it take two divisions to clear, can't hold and to build something new? They're still doing targeted raids against Hamas remnants. So these are Hamas members that are. trying to reform. They have less rockets.

They have less tunnels. They have less munitions. I don't want to give a number because we were just, we were talking about predictions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to take a long time. A long time when they have five divisions trying to push Hezboe back from its border in the north and only essentially two divisions, although they just got

Senwar with one of these divisions just by a chance contact, which is insane. It would take them a long time. But there is a lot of positives on like the ceiling of the border like this is something that we never even achieved not in Vietnam not in Iraq Afghanistan to cut off the enemy from resupply Their ability to seal that Israel Egypt. Yeah the Egypt Gaza border, which they did and really just again you got to point the finger at Egypt like there's over a hundred cross border tunnels here running a highway of munitions and everything else into Hamas since forever. And they've sealed that. And they've put in a new, the actual interesting thing about the wall

between Israel and Gaza is that it worked. The challenge before, it's almost a failure of imagination was cross-border tunneling underneath the wall. And they developed a deep sensor technology that there was none. Of course, the enemy didn't need any on October 7th because it, it was already set.

It drove bulldovers into the gate. But it did work, so now they're going to build that along the Egypt, Gaza border, a deep penetrating thing. And then maybe there's some agreements with Egypt forces on securing that. But just that step alone means less hope to the enemy. So this war only ends, Chaco, if the enemy believes they don't have a chance to win. Is there any partner force, a Palestinian group, a Palestinian tribal? leader that is ready to step up that has the Wasta and the respect to say, hey, we're actually

going to turn this small piece of Mediterranean beachfront property into an amazing place, and we're going to forge a positive future? Yeah. No, basically. Not yet. This is the idea of the Palestinian Authority, which is the group of the Judeanian Maria, West Bank, who are also terrorists. who had this massive welfare program

that pays people if they martyr themselves, it's called the Pay for Slave Program. This organization actually pays those who committed the October 7th attack and died, their families, martyr fund, money. So there is nobody waiting. There's just ideals about international, like an Arab coalition of people

that would come in to help provide the security force to allow, you know, their ideas, You could even, what Israel is doing is like the inkblot strategy, although there's a manpower problem when they're in wars right now, seven different enemies attacking them. And you have this, there's five divisions. They only use four divisions when they entered Gaza. There's five divisions and then two divisions.

This is, these are, they don't have a military. These are people in, from the economy. There's an idea to make Gaza into smaller areas and then finding local leaders. And there have been. a few during this war who have said I'll be that person

I don't want Hamas you and this is the what you've talked about the stability operation the post-conflict reconciliation all that happens if you find another power

but right now Hamas is killing anybody who says Palestinian Authority Israel knows that they're equally as bad and you know that's who Hamas killed

to take power was Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. So the answer is no, but if Israel's, it's on Israel to create the security environment, which something could form. Like if you're a Palestinian right now, if you know you raise your hand, you're going to get killed, then there's less incentive to do it.

Security for the populace. Security for the populace. So Israel is working on, and there are these ideas of islands, and there are even international hospitals within these islands. So there's ideas of like, okay, there's a Turkish hospital.

So could Turkey come in with a force to, create the environment in which a local leadership could lead. So it's not like they're not learning the lessons of our past, but it's like, look at the variables that they have, alternatives they have in the moment to do what? If they don't reduce Hamas's ideal that they can win again, then nobody's going to sign up to be the counter Hamas. And you're right, and I listen to one of your podcasts where there is now even more vocal voices within the Palestinian people or the Ghazans that are resentful to Hamas for doing

this to them. That is has started to grow as well. Well, that's a positive thing. That's a positive. But there's, I know, most people say, well, you have to do debaticalization. So I have a really good article headline of General Eisenhower after World War II. It's actually like in, it says it will take 50 years to re-educate the Nazis. And within the article, it says, if you ever think I'll give Germany the ability to wage war again, you're crazy.

I was a direct quote from Eisenhower. Is that people think that devalacization, one, can be done fast or two can be done without there being another power. If you don't find another power, this is the Taliban, right? The Taliban went to, went to Pakistan,

waited us 20 years, came back, strategic victory. Well, appreciate it. Look, I'm going to go plug your podcast again, Urban Warfare Podcast. You have a bunch of really knowledgeable people that you bring on.

You're obviously knowledgeable yourself and you actually, you know, what I appreciate is you go there. You've been on the ground. You interact so you know what's happening. What else you're working on? What else do we need to get up to speed here? Writing a new book? So I have two new books. I have one.

So I have writing, studying history is really, really hard. And I have some mentors like General McMaster and others. So I have a case study project where I've written, going back, and it's been really helpful recently as I'm like, you think this happened during that battle? Like the, so I'm working through historical battles and creating case studies. And they're on my,

the Modern War Institute website, as well as my website, of Stalingrad, Ortona, First Battle of Fallujah, second Battle of Luzia, Battle of Missouille, with a going back and, you know, take sometimes it took us a year we wrote the 2017 battle of morari i don't know if you know that one how long are these case studies like how many words is the completed document yeah under 5 000 words so we're trying to summarize because you know some people have attention span um so there's a 5,000 version for the website but we're building writing a book where we're going to take a lot of these

case studies two ones that there isn't like the battle of moiri took us a year because there's no other information out there but it was a massive battle in the philippines against isis that was very destructive. I mean, a matter of fact, destroyed 90% of the city of over 200,000. It was unhabitable.

But it wasn't like the Philippines weren't trying to protect it. Writing these case studies and it'll be one overall book and the case studies in the book will be 10,000. So the website's 5,000, but the book will be

these bigger versions of it. Yeah, that's interesting because like a battle like that, like you think, oh, well, the Americans are going into Fallujah, the Americans that are going into Romadi. They don't care, really,

if that building gets blown up or not. They, you know, it's just, They don't care. Well, first of all, we do care. But even like when you're talking about the Philippines and the Philippine forces going in, of course, they don't want to destroy the infrastructure that is part of their country. Guess what?

It's freaking hard. Yep. It's really freaking hard. There's an aspect of that. I call it the precision paradox after somebody else called it. Like in the idea that you should only use precision guided munitions in urban warfare is a fallacy. And we actually in the battle of Missou, there was that concept of, Okay, we're only going to help the Iraqi military with precision guided munitions.

We fired so many hellfire missiles that we ran out of our strategic supply. And we still destroyed like 80% of Western Missou because the enemy just went from one building to the next. So you could precisely destroy it one building at a time. So I had the case study book. And then I have this other book, which is 20 times I almost died, which I've had mostly. It's mostly written. I just don't have the title lockdown, but it's some interesting events both in military. and now that I travel into war zones

that I have been in some interesting chances to almost die but there's a little bit of a lesson there. Yeah, you're in not the safest line of work right now. It's relative, right? It's self-safety's relative. Echo might think it's dangerous. Right on.

I don't. It's very safe. I don't lose, I don't fear, my enemy fears. Echo, you got any questions? Yeah, well, this is kind of from long time ago, before the guy that you fought in the alley. We're going back to the last podcast. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I didn't get the opportunity. Was he a big, was he big? Like, was he a big guy? No. No. Okay. A wiry, actually a wiry, feisty guy that was. Like to bite.

Haymakers, fight, you know, thumbs in my eyeballs, everything. Yeah, it wasn't a big guy. Yeah, yeah. Because like if he's a big guy, you'd kind of think he wouldn't be doing the biting in the thumbs and stuff. Yeah. You wouldn't think. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Because usually like the smaller guys just busting out all their weapons. We'll do that kind of stuff. Am I right? That's right, right? The lesson there was I didn't need to be there that night. That was just so dumb.

Yeah. Feels like it. That's a good one. Right on. Cool. Good to meet you. And people can find you on the interwebs. You're at john Spencer online.com.

You're on Twitter X and Instagram at Spencer guard. Facebook, John Spencer. YouTube, John Spencer, 328. And LinkedIn, John Spencer. That's where people can find you, follow you, learn from you, and get updates from you. John, any final thoughts? No, I mean, I think that, so I'm a student of this. I don't, I mean, some people, there's experts and who we call experts.

I learn something every day. My podcast is actually, my, me learning and doing research, so my Urban Warfare Project podcast, you know, whether somebody who was in a battle or, you know, some expert in some element of, like, concrete or something like that, I'm learning. And so join me along the process. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for passing on some of these lessons that you have learned. Thanks for your service, your sacrifice, the Army.

And thanks for what you continue to do today to capture even more knowledge and pass it on. So people don't have to relearn those lessons. Appreciate it, bro. Thanks, Jock. Thank you. And with that, John Spencer has left the building. good to hear from somebody who has had boots on the ground and can tell you with a better assessment

rather than just what you see on the news so appreciate him coming in a lot going on a lot you know it's interesting there's things we could do in the world right we could build we could flourish we could destroy at least on a personal level I recommend you flourish I recommend you build I recommend

Jock Fuel Hey check it out Jock Fuel We got protein We got energy drinks We got hydration We've got everything that you need Joint Warfare

Super Cruel Things that are going to make you Healthy smarter Stronger Faster and just a better person So go to joccofuel.com Or you can go to Walmart You can go to Wawa

Vitamin Shop GnC Military Commissaries Afees to Haniford Dash stores in Maryland Wake Fern shop right H.E.B. down in Texas. Meyer up in the Midwest,

Wegman's Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, shields and small gyms. We're getting into a bunch of doors. If you got a jiu-tit-to gym, you got a cross-fit gym, you got a powerlifting gym. You got any kind of gym.

Email J.F. Sales at jocofuel.com. Also, we got, we're in chiropractors. Chiropractor. Chiropractor's for bringing us in. Jared, I think, got us into some hair salons. Okay.

Bro, oddly enough. Yeah, sure. So we're in there. Joccofuel.com. Check it out. Get the stuff that you need. Also, if you need Jiu Jitsu stuff, we didn't talk about Jiu Jitsu very much with John Spencer.

We kind of were chatting on the way out. Jiu Jitsu is an important part of everything. Train Jiu Jitsu. Get it yourself the best Jiu Jitsu uniform, OriginUSA.com. Get yourself American-made jeans. OriginUSA.com. Get yourself the clothing that you wear on your body, OriginUSA.com.

check it out American made no child labor no slave labor built by freedom origin USA.com Also talk about the store called jaco store is where you can get your shirt hats hoodies some shorts on there representing discipline equals freedom and good and other notions of similar you know dynamics You just went down to freaking Hamas tunnel with that sentence. Also, shirt locker. There was no coming out.

No, there's coming out. The short locker, if you don't know, this is a subscription scenario. You get a new shirt every month, new design every month. Design a little bit more creative, you know, all of it is at jocco store.com. Also, you need steak. Check out Colorado Craftbeef.com. Check out primalbeef.com. And get yourself the goodness.

the tasty steak, the best steak. Colorado craftbeef.com. Colorado craftbeef.com, primalbeef.com. It's the best. Go get some awesome people, awesome businesses, awesome steak. Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to Jocko Underground. Jocco underground.com.

Also, we got YouTube. We got psychological warfare. We got Flipside Canvas.com. Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Books. You heard some of the books. today, Connected Soldiers by John Spencer, Understanding Urban Warfare by John Spencer. He's also got the one that you can download.

So check that one out. Very cool. Good to have on tap. Case goes down. Want to be ready to defend your urban location. Also, I've written a bunch of books. You can check those out. Check out the kids books.

Again, we forgot to start John Spencer was talking about his kids. They're warrior kids. They're getting after he's wearing a T-shirt where his. The lone kid's warrior code is on the back. So check that out. Totally legit, Warrior Kid books. We've got a movie coming out on that. You ever heard of Chris Pratt?

Yeah, I heard great things. Yeah, well, he's in it. So you might want to be checking that out when it rolls. Mikey and the Dragons about faced by Hackworth. I referenced that a couple times in the past couple podcasts. Extreme Ownership Dicotomy of Leadership. We also have a leadership consultancy. It's called Eschelon Front.

We will teach you and your leaders how to unify together and win. So go to echelonfront.com. If you've got a company, you've got a business, if you've got a team and you need help with your leadership, which you probably do,

then check that out. Also, we have an online training academy to learn how to lead yourself and others through life. Little things, big things. Everything boils down to leadership. So you need to, leadership is a skill.

People sometimes forget that. It's like playing guitar. It's like the jiu-jitsu. You just don't, you're not born ready to play guitar. Now look, do some of us have a natural gift and talent for the Git box? Yes,

some of us do. Some of us. But most people, well, even me, I need a little help with the guitar. I need lessons. Somebody's got to tell me.

It's the same thing with leadership. So check out extreme ownership.com. You can learn lessons that will apply to every part of your life. Also, if you want to help service members active and retired, Do you want to help their families?

You want to help Gold Star Families? Check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also, Micah Fink has a great program for veterans helping them find themselves by losing themselves up in the mountains, heroes and horses. org. And Jimmy May, he is helping seals when they get out of the seal teams to find them.

their next mission and transition into the civilian sector check out beyond the brotherhood dot org and if you want to connect with us on the interwebs um john spencer you can find him john spencer online dot com he's on twitter x and instagram at spencer guard he's on facebook john spencer he's on youtube john spencer 328 i forgot to ask him what 328 was yeah i was wondering that too all right my bust LinkedIn, John Spencer. For us, I'm at jaco.com, and we are both on social media. I'm at jaco, Willink.

Echo is that Echo Charles? Just be careful, because you can waste in your entire life on that thing and you're going to get nothing from it. Thanks once again to John Spencer for your service and your continued service to share lessons of the battlefield

so that we don't have to make the same mistakes again. Also, thanks to all of our military personnel. out there who fight in urban battles around the globe, a vicious place to fight. And we thank all of you for defending our way of life. And also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks to you for keeping us safe here at home. And everyone else out there in John Spencer's mini book for urban defense, he explains the

six elements of any defense. Preparation. And by that means never stop preparing, even while you're fighting. Flexibility, be ready to change. Security, protect all your flanks. Operations in depth. That means have multiple layers. Disruption.

That means break your attackers' formations. Disrupt what they're doing. Disrupt their maneuvers. Cover and move. maneuver. We have to maneuver in urban defense. Mass and concentration, that means you need to be ready to prioritize and execute. And I would add one more thing based on his book, connected soldiers, stay connected, not just via communication, not just radio communications, not just work communications, but foster both social and task cohesion through communication, build

relationships because a connected team is a strong team on the battlefield in business and in life. And that's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.