School of War - Ep 130: John Spencer on Israel’s Unprecedented War (or, Urban Warfare 101)

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute and host of the Urban Warfare Project, joins the show to talk about urban combat and how Israel is fighting an unprecedented war against Hamas with justice and humanity. ▪️ Times      •      01:50 Introduction      •      02:08 Fighting and teaching     •      09:31 Changes in urban warfare     •      17:14 Terrain still matters     •      21:54 Israel’s unprecedented war       •      26:11 Learning on the ground      •      33:24 Genocide         •      43:57 The battle of Manila     •      49:41 Suffering is the strategic aim      •      51:04 Tunnels         •      55:51 Outthinking the enemy Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

John Spencer, our guest today, is an Iraq veteran who literally wrote the book on urban warfare, just as the war in Ukraine was kicking off and not long before fighting began in the Gaza Strip. On the show today, we'll hit both wars, but spend most of our time on Israel and Gaza, where John has spent a good chunk of time since 10-7. This episode is pretty tactical and operational. How does fighting in tunnels actually work? What is Israel doing to mitigate civilian casualties? what historical precedents actually exist for Gaza?

For any of you nerds, obsessed with the 1945 Battle of Manila, this is your moment. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of it. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people are not seen...

We shall bite down the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I am delighted to be joined today by John Spencer. He is the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute. He's the co-director of the Urban Warfare Project, hosted the Urban Warfare Project podcast. many other qualifications and reasons why he is the best person to talk to about our subject today. He was also, he was, right? You're no longer on active duty. You did serve in the Army. You did multiple deployments to Iraq. You taught the Rangers School. And today you are a leading expert on urban warfare and on tunnels and have been outspoken on the question of the war in Gaza.

John, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me, Aaron. I gave the kind of thumbnail version there. But if you wouldn't mind, you know, how did you grow up? How did you end up in the Army? How did you end up, focused on the rather grim subject matter that you spend your time on. How this all come to pass? Yeah, that's a long conversation that I'll try to keep short for you. You know, I joined the Army at 17 from private to start first class, then transferred to be an officer, did the invasion of Iraq, taught at Ranger School, went back into Iraq for the surge, basically, and was part of the Battle of Sutter City for another year as a company commander, transitioned out. I went into a program,

a great program where you get a master's of Georgetown, spend two years in a Pentagon. And then right as I was leaving that assignment, both on the joint staff and OSDE staff, I competed to be in this thing called the Chief of Staff of the Army Strategic Studies Group, which is a think tank that the four-star of the U.S. Army created doesn't exist anymore.

And for a year, one, this group of officers, enlisted and civilians, a small group of 20, were trained to try to think about problems differently and then also look at something that the chief wasn't looking at. And for that year, we looked at mega cities and whether the U.S. military was prepared to operate in a city of over 10 million.

So really large-scale combat operations in a very dense, large urban area. Basically, the finding was we weren't ready. I looked at my small part of it. But that started kind of my academic look into urban, I moved to West Point after that assignment because you know the Army, we got to move. Went to West Point where I was teaching military strategy and also helped create the institute I work for now called the Modern War Institute. And I was starting to write about urban combat a lot for my research center and doing trips to look at research for urban combat and underground warfare, which I'm sure we'll talk about.

I retired in 2018. I stayed and took the position I currently had, the chair of urban warfare studies, where for over a decade now, I've been focused on this, but really when I left active duty, I was able to travel the world going into urban combat areas that had just ended or now the ones that are ongoing. So I went to Nagorno-Karabakh. I went to India to study the 2008 Mumbai attacks. I've gone into Ukraine four times for like the Battle of Kiev and the urban battles there and now Gaza. But I had been going to Israel for years studying. their approach to urban and underground warfare.

This may accidentally catapult us forward in the conversation past, get us to Gaza faster than I was planning on, but how much, to what extent do your experiences, as someone who participated in OIF1 and then later in the surge as a young officer, as a company-grade officer, affect your thinking and your work today? Like, has so much changed that it's not super relevant?

Is it like kind of relevance? Like help me understand that. No, I mean, I try strongly not to rely on my experiences, although I served 25 years in the U.S. Army. I try to rely on my research. And one of my biggest projects I have going is this case studies project I have with my friend Jason Jureu and Liam Collins, where we go back and look at battles to include the ones that I partook in and analyze what was happening. But yes, like when I was on the ground in Gaza with the 98th division and, you know,

Con Unis, of course, I relate to a lot of those three-dimensional challenges of urban combat with the skyscrapers or the tall buildings around you. But I also can look at my own experiences in combat in hell, basically, and how hard that was for me as a young officer, even though I had an illicit experience, but still leading soldiers in urban combat in both as a platoon leader and a company commander. and the cognitive load that that causes, and I've written about that. Of course, I can relate to that when I go into places like Gaza or Kiev and Ukraine, but I also can appreciate that this is a lot different than what I faced

from the challenges and the context and the goals. So yes, it's there, but I really try to, sometimes it helps me with the question, right? Because a lot of times it's not about, and when you're doing research like I do, are you asking the right questions for my research? So yes, my experience has helped me ask, but I, you know, not the first order question, but that second or third order, or recognize something that's vastly different

than something that I did. And with the tunnels in Gaza, that was kind of when I'm on the ground. Like, I never experienced that. I know from my research, nobody has experienced that in modern history or in general. So it both helps, but I also really cognitively,

try to make sure it doesn't override the actual research that I'm doing. Yeah, these things are so unique. My only significant experience personally is Marja in 2010. And I was instructed, as my whole class of officers, we were all taught in Quantico by veterans of Fallujah and Ramadi. And I still idolized these guys. These guys were in our heroes. And they taught us how to win the Battle of Fallujah.

And they taught us how to win the Battle of Ramadi. or battles, I should say, more accurately. And you get to a place like Marja. And, you know, honestly, looking at the imagery, a lot of it does look pretty urban. And then you get there and you realize actually these bad guys, they actually don't want to fight up close very much. They, like, stand off. And by the way, there's a lot of big open fields here.

And within a few hours, you realize this is actually a lot more like what I presume it was like for guys in Vietnam, like, in terms of the challenges and the tactics and remembering, you know, what does echelon right look like? You know, like stuff like that kind of, you sort of figure out as you go, because it was totally different. It was a totally different war at every level, but to include the tactical and operational level. Yeah. I know you could appreciate that. And I get those moments as well. You know, every urban area is different, but every battle is different, too. Like, why is it that the 2000, the second battle of Fallujah in 2004 is the largest battle of the entire Iraq war,

larger than the Battle of Baghdad, as in the scale, the amount of fighting, the death and destruction, because this is what I've been able to appreciate in all these different case studies, is to acknowledge to see why the battle is happening the way it is, what are the major differences? How, I mean, a prepared defender versus a meeting engagement, you know, all these make those differences that I think sometimes escape other people. Yeah. So let's, let's take it back to, well, I don't want to talk as though your only focus is

Gaza, because it's not, as you yourself say, you spent a lot of time in Ukraine. So your work covers the gamut here. Maybe I'll take us back then to before the battle, the fighting around Kiev in early 2022. So before Putin goes in, for at least several years, presumably your research has been more in the realm of history. Even recent history, I guess you have mouse will not that far back in the Ruby Mirror. What was the sort of state of thinking on urban warfare and the nature of urban warfare, given technological developments and evolution or change in operational art for our various adversaries? out there. And then how has real life played out

in Ukraine and Gaza compared to how you thought things were going to go? Does that make sense? What have you had to change in your view and understanding of things based on the nature of urban warfare in the last couple of years? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if I've had to change anything because a lot of times I'm just

recognizing the where history is rhyming that doesn't repeat itself, but also acknowledging and being able to see modern history's comparison to even World War II War I history. The evolution of current thinking on urban combat, and I served 25 years, I didn't know the root of that evolution, right?

So I didn't know where close quarters battle, the battle drills for urban warfare that you and I both practiced, where the root of that came from. And it didn't come from World War II large-scale battle, urban battles like Ockin and Berlin and all these major urban battles or Tona, now I have that appreciation. So when I saw like the battle, and yes, we'd actually, my institute, because we do a lot of contemporary battlefield assessments,

had sent research teams to Georgia, to study the Russian incursion into Georgia and Bosnia, everything, trying to understand those differences. But as somebody who got to teach strategy, it's also the role of the city that comes into the actual war, right? So what are the objectives of the war? And the, for instance, is why, interesting story about Ukraine, how I injected myself into the war, which was, I think, unique. But also being able to see, as we all did when we were doing podcasts with Russian experts on the Russian military, a raid around Ukraine.

like they're getting ready to invade. Okay, fine. They invaded. Now, what are their goals? They have seven different cities that they're attacking. Only one of them matter to achieve the goal. And, you know, my urban warfare lane that I like to stay in sometimes gets like, okay, what's the goal of this war?

Like, and luckily I can rely on, you know, teaching strategy and understanding what I didn't even understand as a soldier. And like, what is the larger goal? Like, why are we doing this, this battle? Why are we having this street fight? Like, what is the larger goal? When Russia invaded Ukraine, I was able to see, like, Russia is stating in their opening message that they are overtaking the nation of Ukraine. And they want to overthrow the government.

And in order to do that, they were going to attack Kiev, get inside the city, raise the Russian flag, overthrow the government. And, you know, it put in their puppet. So I got to see the similarities of that war unfolding to the past history of invading. of other countries from, you know, Chechnya to Iraq to Afghanistan, and then how would the urban areas play or not play a role, right? Because Kiev and, you know, the, Kiev has been a battleground for many wars, from World War to before. The world has changed, and again, that megacity study was about how much the world has urbanized, right? The thinking of urban combat outside of our tactical world of how do you enter and clear a

room, how do you clear a block, all this stuff, which again has roots of thinking to it. The real military thinking that was in our manuals for a long time was avoid and bypassed at all. And the theory of victory in a military is usually to defeat the other military. You know, it's an enemy focused military, right? maneuver warfare. But in some aspects, the terrain is also the goal, right? So the capital city, the economic engines of the nation. the that where you achieve your maneuver warfare goal, which is that cognitive win by through speed, overwhelming force to achieve the goal.

I saw Russia doing that. Now, it didn't bring what it needed to the table, but this is where I immediately focused in on the capital city of Kiev and why I've gone so many times back to Kiev to understand how Russia was defeated in taking the nation of Ukraine when it couldn't take Kiev through urban combat. So there are a lot, you know, in order to, yeah, I have my own podcast with like 80 episodes, like looking at all the different attributes of urban warfare is changing challenges and the role of cities and urban combat in war, which really is what we see now, right? We have a long history of fighting forces cities, like militaries have a long history of fighting for cities. Like that's the goal, right? But not a long history of fighting in cities, right? again, even our own recent history, the fall of the regime, the Taliban in 2001, the Saddam regime in 2003, there are urban-centric goals, right?

You know, the capital cities, once you drove a tank regiment into the center of Baghdad, and there's just cognitive when those evolutions are there. But I really think what's the biggest difference is the role of militaries fighting in cities rather than four cities. You're not going to fight that open army versus army fight that we imagine, right? Militaries, this is what I learned really working for the chief of staff of the army, is that militaries are designed for a very specific battle or war in a very specific environment. And like for the U.S. military, there's actually only like seven or eight scenarios

in which you design the entire military against. Yeah, we're going to fight a bunch of other wars and battles, urban fights and everything. but it's designed for something. Arguably, in what we were saying back then and what I still say today, we're not designed for that major urban fight in a city because we're going to use such overwhelming joint power that we're going to achieve our victory quickly, not have these fights that we seem to keep having,

which are these slug vests, block by block, things that like even General Kulak was talking about back in the 90s, right, the three-block war, where you need the strategic corporal, all these things that he was echoing after things like Mogadishu and in other battles. Just to go back to my sort of my personal experience, which is, as you point out, not a sound basis, widespread or more widely founded research is what you should really face your views on, but all I have is my personal experience. And going through the training pipeline in 2007, 2008, being taught by these guys who were all Iraq veterans, but they were all at pains to emphasize for us.

when it came to urban warfare was how violent and brutal it was, even compared to other kinds of terrain that we would fight on. And that, by the way, it was purely a question of terrain. This was an important part of the doctrine that we were taught. It's just like anything else fundamentally. You just have to account for the different and frankly more dangerous terrain. And I have a vivid and fond memory of an instructor of mine, Captain Wagner, who is, I believe Colonel Wagner today,

who I was an admirer of, and he had this whole speech he did where you guys think, you're picturing in your minds like the first day of Mount, you guys are picturing, you know, zero dark 30 hadn't come out at that point. We hadn't killed Bin Laden at that point,

but you're picturing movies like that. You know, you're picturing the raid and Black Hawk down, and you guys are going to be going through the hallways and hockey helmets. And I'm here to tell you right now, this is not what you're doing. You're going to take a bulldozer

and you're going to knock the building down if you can't drop a bomb on it. You know, it's this whole, the upshot of the speech being, this is highly destructive, and you were going to push through and flatten stuff and seize objectives and kill the enemy. Just so happens you're doing it in the city.

Is that 15 years on the going doctrine? How have things changed? So that's a really good question. I teach in the world's only urban warfare course designed for division and brigade planners. It's a 40th and 52 division urban planners course. And you get active duty. reserve, guard, foreign militaries there

who have a mental model of what the battle will beat, the fight will be. I agree with you. And it's, I've written about this, right? The curse of our past. Not that I believe in that terminology, you don't invite your last war. But if you understand militaries,

military's culture, doctrine actually means the way we do things. So there is a cultural thing that people bring into the military even from watching movies and everything, right? They think they're going to be doing what they saw in the movies. And what the lesson that usually gets relearned in certain types of urban battles, not all of them, is that the thinking that you had going into it,

that's not what you will be required to do, right? This is the, you're not stacking on, and it happened even in the Second Battle of Fallujah, where they started off with Marines and armed personnel stacking on doors, and that quickly went away as soldiers and Marines lost their lives to, that's a tactic when you have overwhelming surprise, violence of action. If you lose the element of surprise and they know that you're going to do that, this is why the Israeli military never goes through windows and doors. Starting back from 2002, they go through buildings, right?

Which I have a really important picture that I use all the time, which is is Marine in the Second Battle of Lujia, which is a sledgehammer inside of a house building a hole to go through the walls because standing on the streets and the alleyways is too dangerous, right? Or if you go in through a door, that's where the enemy knows you're coming, so it'll be either booby-trapped or that will

be the fatal funnel that you might get a couple guys through. But there is a cultural element. A lot of people say I talk about tactics too much. I'm like, no, I can talk to strategy as well, but we have a cultural mindset of the urban battle that we think will face. And I agree

with you is that the actual thinking to this highly contested, right? So when there's a defender in place, like the Second Battle of Fallujah, why does the battle Baghdad worlds of difference from the Battle of, you know, a city of five, six million compared to Fallujah, a city of 300,000? Why is it orders of magnitude different? Well, because the defender was prepared. It was waiting for you.

You didn't have overwhelming surprise, maneuver, cognitive maneuver warfare. when it comes to those positional fights, militaries need to have the ability to break their culture of that and prepare for that fight. Like in the second battle of Lugia, where we were dropping an artillery round in every vehicle along the street just because it might have been a vehicle port ID.

Or instead of going into a building, if you know there's a guy there, drop a bomb on it, a mortar around, or bring up a tank or a Bradley to deal with the enemy you know that's in that building. Having people make that shifts really hard because I've been to like range 29 or, you know, Fort Irwin to our urban centers. It's really hard to train that, that level of destruction and violence of action, right?

It's a lot easier to do the laser tag, enter and clear room thing, right? It's a lot easier. And that's an important skill for a very specific mission set. I think the gap is what you're pointing out. And you have veterans from a few battles to say, like, that's going to get you killed. what you think you're going to be doing and you're building that flexibility for our servicemen

to be able to know the requirements and that's really the passion I have. Like you said, my experiences was somewhat unprepared despite all the levels of training and not having access to all this well, how did the other people do it in the past? Like you said, like the number one thing

you need in an urban battle. What we've learned in the biggest urban battle since World War II, the battle of Missouille, 2016, 17, And oh, by the way, the bottle of Morari in 2017. And now in Gaza is that you better lead with something like a bulldozer because they're prepared. They're waiting for you. You're not going to surprise them in that target building.

They're coming for you. So you have to put something in front of the soldiers, not lead with your face as a mentor mind says. You wrote in February that the war Israel was fighting slash the conditions it was facing in Gaza were unprecedented. Yeah. What did you mean by that? So both, it's unprecedented in the scale of the urban defender. So, you know, a force, if you think like the second battle of Pluja, 3,000 insurgents. That's the max.

You think the 2016-17 Battle of Massou may be 5,000 insurgents. And they use 100,000 soldiers there. Unpresident in the scale of the combatant embedded in the dense urban areas, using human shields, which is not new, but using human shields. shields, but who had 15 years to prepare for the battle or the war, right? Because this, you know, a battle, everybody tries to compare Gaza to a single battle. Well, this is a war. There's 24 cities in Gaza. There's, you know, 10 major cities that would warrant comparison to like Missouille, Fallujah, Raqa. So, but this is a defender who's prepared for 15 years,

if actually longer. So the scale of the enemy, the amount of time that they prepared the defense and the way they prepared it through the use of subterranean. So there's nobody else, not Vietnam, not in any of the battles that the U.S. forces have taken part in the last 40 years, 50 years, even if you can't the Korean War, where the enemy has built a vast subterranean network for military purposes only. It's not dual purpose. Like in Ukraine, where you have subway tunnels and everything that get used to shield civilians and military. equipment and things, but this is a single military purpose built underground cities. And what they thought was in Gaza, they actually were wrong. They thought it was around 300 miles of tunnels and it's 400 miles of tunnels ranging from,

you know, just below a building to 200 feet underground where no military bomb can reach. That all those things, the scale of the enemy, the preparation of the enemy, the underground network. And lastly, we've all, you know, lots of militaries that faced non-state actors, terrorist, insurgents, who use human shields, use the law of war, which has evolved that why militaries don't like fighting in the cities.

And most of us line grunts didn't understand that, yes, we know, like, you know, you can't, you know, if you're taking fire from a mosque, you can always fire back, right? That's a small, you know, since Pelugia is what actually called,

you know, the city of mosque because of how many mosques it has. It's a saw vignette of this thing called lawfare where an enemy uses the laws of war against a military who follows the law of war, like the United States, most Western militaries, and they build their defensive strategy using all the protected sites and populations.

But what Israel faced was the first time that I can find in history, an enemy with all those preparations and all those capabilities and with the rockets and everything, who uses a human sacrifice strategy. Where, like, even ISIS, that wasn't their thing, right? ISIS didn't say, I need all of the Sunni people to die so I can achieve my martyrdom

and achieve the will of Allah that I think is the goal. This is the first combatant our military has faced in dense urban areas who uses a human sacrifice strategy where they literally want as many of their population, the enemy population, to die as possible, not just to use them as shields to keep the military from using force against them,

but to cause as many of them to die as possible to achieve their goal, which is to cause another military, right? The U.S. military, yes, you know, debatable on like the invasion of Iraq and the coalition and all this stuff, but there's nobody want to say, hey, U.S. military, you need to stop right now. Israel fights wars in a different context where in Israel's past, it has usually been the United Nations, the U.S. says that, look, I know you're attacked.

I know you can defend yourself, but your military needs to stop immediately, right, where it's at, just stop. So Hamas built this entire operating environment where they, I used to say before I visited Gaza that they built all their tunnels underneath all the civilian homes, hospitals, schools. And what I found out was no, in many cases, they built the tunnel and then put the school on top of it. How many times have you made it to Israel and Gaza since the 7th? And what have you learned on the ground? Like, how has that informed your perspective on the war?

So I visited, one, I had been going to Israel for years because uniquely, they're the most prepared for contested dense urban combat in underground warfare of any military in the world. Just because of requirements, right? Like I said, our military is an expeditionary global force that prepared for certain scenarios, most likely, most dangerous. I had been going to Israel for years doing tunnel conferences, studying their bulldozers, everything. Since October 7th, I've been twice, once in December, 2023, and then I went back in February

24 and four. Both times I got into Gaza, both times embedded with the idea. my last visit in February, I embedded with the division and went into Con Unis. The problem is I learned so much that I have a backlog of things I want to write about. So we can discuss which ones I think are. Yeah, pick your, pick your top two. The top one, number one is, which I know is counter to the uninformed majority opinion. It's the number one thing I learned was all the things that the idea,

and Israel were doing to protect civilians from harm, right? And again, the only way I could be surprised by that was after having studied all these different cases, right? So I have, if you go to my, our website in Omano War Institute, you can see the case study on Masul, 2017, on Belugia 1, Beluja 2, Ortona, Stalingrad. Like, I can say with very strong condition that not only was I observing, externally, Israel doing everything that everybody else had ever done to protect civilians, like evacuating cities before attacking them, which actually doesn't mean that there are drawbacks

to that as much as, of course, huge benefits to protecting civilians to get them out of the combat areas. I was observing all that externally. I'm like, look, wow, Israel's doing everything that anybody's ever done to include us in the Second Battle of Flusia and everything. But when I got on the ground, I learned that they were doing things that nobody had ever even imagined on protecting civilians, like handing out their maps to the civilians, the things that I teach people in this division level course I teach once a year how to develop these control measures, like the GRG maps and everything that you and I would be familiar with. Israel started issuing those out to the civilians and to the enemy, and then they developed the technology where they

could track a population on like, just like on a three-block area. So their forces know at all times if an area is heavily populated still, even though it's been evacuated through the use of you know, signals intelligence on, cell phones on or off through aerial photos and everything. And they use those civilian harm mitigations, the terminology now, to guide operations. So when I was on the ground with the idea, if I was kind of taken aback by not only were they doing all the same things that we do, right, restricted fire lines, no fire areas, protected buildings, all the evacuations, although they used things that we'd never tried, like drones with speakers on them, they'll fly into the areas and tell the civilians to evacuate all the phone calls and hundreds of

soldiers on phone banks calling into the environment. Nobody's ever done that, dropping giant parachutes with speakers on them into the enemy area, telling the civilians evacuate. But they were using this awareness of the way of the civilians war to guide operations. So not only is there areas when I saw the unit in February, like, what are? What are you? this map that they had handed out and this GRG and this civilian harm mitigation cell at the really at the Army level that could direct

operations like well you can't go into that area because it has a this percentage of civilians so it needs to be evacuated so even if you take fire from that area you can't go there some of those restrictions on the use of force that's the number one thing that I saw in Gaza

that even as a student of this for over a decade like they are doing more despite the the world opinion to protect the things that any military has in the history of war. The other one, number two,

so if I only get two. Please, please. Yeah, number two is the evolution of tunnel warfare, right? I've been studying, you know, I've been in Hezboa tunnels

in the north, Hamas tunnels in the south. I've been in North Korean tunnels, tunnels in Ukraine, Nagana Karobok. Because of the fact that the IDF

were the only military to have a brigade of special forces engineers who have dedicated their train, manning, and equipping to only underground warfare, they were uniquely prepared for underground warfare, and I knew that.

But nobody knew the true scale and complexity of Hamas' tunnels. I knew, back to our culture, that Israel also had a culture of not entering the tunnels. Despite having this whole brigade of forces trained for underground warfare, they still within themselves had a culture of, don't go in no tunnels.

Like, they have a history of soldiers being kidnapped and drug into tunnels. they have a history of soldiers getting killed, even around the tunnel interest. They had a very cultural, I've seen since my first visit to my second visit, a complete paradigm shift within the Israeli defense forces on how to deal with tunnels.

To where what I saw in February was the first thing, again, looking at the history of this, I've never seen a military purposely go into tunnels to use them as a maneuver corridor for themselves while operating forces on the surface. So they went from a culture of not entering tunnels, although they had special operations forces that could deal with the tunnel once found. They found thousands of tunnel shafts in northern Gaza, or over a thousand, I say, to where they have done a complete paradigm shift because of, you know, necessity as a mother of all innovation. They're the first military I've ever seen maneuvered forces on the surface and underground at the same time to achieve their goal of achieving a, you know, a win over the enemy.

that evolution, that mental cultural shift, I think is massive, something that I learned in my last visit. So I want to go deeper on both of your points here, starting with the management of civilians, the avoidance of civilian casualties. I'm perplexed because, as you allude to, I could turn on the TV right now and pick out the sort of median news program. And I would, well, in the median news program, I would probably hear commentary to the effect of Israel as being reckless and kind of murderous. as a matter of national policy. They're not genocidal exactly, but they're behaving in ways that are just demonstrate

want and disregard for civilian life. And then if I turn on, you know, MSNBC or Al Jazeera, I probably can just encounter the claim that this is genocide, a more extreme version of the same argument. And yet here you are, having been on the ground saying,

that's not what you've seen. You've also been out there in the press making this case. What are kind of the craziest argument or scenarios you've encountered as you've done that, have you had any success in explaining that, you know, when asked who to believe, you know, your interlocutor on one of these panels or your own lying eyes,

like, do you have success in conveying in what you're seeing? That's a good question. So have I had success to convincing people? Absolutely. Have I provided people with facts to argue against disinformation? I believe so. I have to believe so. Also, it's my job to do research.

So I'm not necessarily trying to convince people of things. I'm trying to do research and present the facts. Also highlight where there's anomalies in even mass stream media reporting on something, like the casualty figures, right? So that's been from day one, I was like how I've never seen a battle or a war in all the ones I've ever studied where you could have a daily running civilian death toll. I've never seen one, especially where you take the word of a terrorist. organization. Although this isn't new, right? You probably know the history of the first battle of Fallujah versus the second battle of Fallujah. The first battle of Fallujah,

right? So four American civilians are killed, dismembered, burned, hung from a bridge. The U.S. president over the Marines objective orders them to move in to get those accountable for it. And because of Al Jazeera mainly, at the hospital in Fallujah, showing photos of children harmed in the fighting and, which most people don't remember, giving false accounts of the number of civilian casualties that were being incurred, the Marines were stopped six days into the battle. Basically, we're defeated by definition of they were prevented from achieving their goals. I've never seen a war. So again, not battle, war, where the world immediately takes a daily running count of civilian deaths when it's just

impossible to have it. Like, he's never been in an urban battle, even when the U.S. military has been involved where anybody could have a daily count. and take the word of a terrorist organization. So this isn't even like a media organization on the ground saying this. It's literally like according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which is Hamas, right? It's just like saying any other country's medical system. Like you're not in that position unless you're either a member of Hamas or you're not going to say anything without the risk of death unless it's approved by Hamas. That was the starting point of like the world is like upside down.

Like how are we taking this word? Like, I can tell you as an expert in urban combat that there's no way to have a number, that after massive battles, it was months, if not years later, that they come up with a number of how many civilians were dead. And for some reason, because of there aren't the reasons for this, but that the world takes any number and goes, that's all innocent civilian death. Like, well, how many bad guys are, you know, how many combatants in our word, our terminology? Well, that doesn't, you know, well, no, we don't separate between it, too.

But you're saying it's civilian deaths, which is, again, mind-blowing. I had to write an article. I, like, I've had to, this is the reason why I haven't been able to write about the research of Gaza. I've had to say the crazy obvious, which has reached, like, national level around the world, like people parroting the number of civilian deaths in Gaza without actually even, like, do you know the difference between civilian and combatant or somebody who's partaking in the hostilities? like you said, or like we, like I recently discussed, like the hostage rescue operation that Israel did, which is crazy level of historic ability to do it into intimate territory. But they came out with an immediate number of civilians died.

Like there were civilians holding the hostages in their house captive. Like those, they're partaking in the hostilities. They don't get to, they're not civilians. There are differences. But I had to say that in an article and why I've been so busy to say the obvious of like, no, there hasn't been that many civilian deaths. And you don't want to be gruesome, but then everybody started with, this is the most destructive war in the modern world. This is the most amount of civilian deaths ever.

Like in comparison to what? And again, because I've done all this research, I was able to say, like, what are you using a comparison? Are you using a single battle, which are most people were, like Battle of Massul, where, you know, there's maybe 5,000 ISIS insurgents in there and 10,000 civilians are killed? even though the number was as great as 40,000 a year later. So all these nuances, have I had success on convincing people? To me, it doesn't matter. I'm going to continue you to report on the truth of it. And one of the reasons I do that is because this has been an evolution, right?

If you take the First Battle of Fallujah, there are others. First Battle of Fallujah reporting, which caused political, because of the context of the moment, because it wasn't that they were saying, like, US, if you don't stop this first battle of fluser, we're going to sanction you. It was the interim government of Iraq and the coalition were saying, like, if you don't stop, we're all walking away. That was because of war is politics. But if what's happening in Gaza is basically continued, like the reporting on the number of 2,000-pound bombs, Israel has dropped, even though it's a very standard military munition that we use tens of thousands, over 15,000 just in the invasion of Iraq, and one month. If it comes to the point, because I know the genesis of that ideal, it's where the next war, let alone if it's an existential war, and somebody's going to say, well, you can't use those tools.

And what is your civilian-to-combatant predicted ratio that you're going to make? Because if it's not low enough, then you shouldn't even fight this war, like Ukraine. You shouldn't defend yourself or whoever. I think it's really dangerous. And this is why I think more of the motivation as well is like, what you're saying, If you put that on another war, yes, Israel is held to a double standard, a triple standard. Actually, again, because I know the history of even civilian harm mitigation, Israel is currently being held to a standard that no military, to include the U.S. has ever been held to.

So if you think that this should be the future, right, that we should hold every military to these standards of, well, what is your civilian to cash, your civilian-to-combatant ratio? Well, we've never asked that before. it's the law of war is very clear on proportionality and assessments. Okay, but how many, how many 2,000 pound, 2,000 pound bombs have you used? Like, that's not the question. The question is how many enemy targets have I engaged that were underground, that I needed a bomb that could reach underground in order to achieve the military goal,

which has accounted for taking all feasible measures to prevent civilian harm? I hope you can see where this, why I'm passionate about it is because I'm a student of this. I know how militaries are prepared, but I'm also a student of the opposition of urban war at all, which is one case is that there's a giant initiative called the Explosive Weapons and Populated Areas Initiative, which is a United Nations initiative, which when it was originally written was to ban the use of all bombs, missiles, artillery, and mortars in urban combat. So could you imagine the Marine Corps fighting the second battle of Flusia without a bomb, a missile, a mortar, or, you know. Well, I hear you say it. I think, well, why don't we just go ahead and ban war again? We did that with the Kellogg-Briand pact. Why these half-bazers?

Let's just ban the whole thing. Why has no one thought of that? I mean, this is, like, I understand this is why I'm kind of so vocal about it. Yes, I care about that you're holding Israel to this crazy standard that nobody's ever followed. you're not acknowledging what Israel is actually doing, the constraints that they're putting on themselves and the constraints that the world has put on themselves. Like even force ratio, right?

Israel invaded Gaza with four divisions. They wanted five, they went with four. If you take four divisions, you know, 10,000 per fighting force against 40, that's like a one-to-one ratio. Like we fought the second battle of Flusia. We basically put a division, right, General Mattis, against 3,000 insurgents in a city of 300,000. If you were to extrapolate that,

combat power analysis of what Israel could have put into Gaza to achieve their goal quickly, but they were actually being told like, you can't go with that much. And actually very recently in the Ratha operation, they, according to sources, were planning two divisions to go into southern Gaza and they were told by the world like, yes, that's too much. You need to do one division. So could you imagine arson, like right? Somebody's like, well, that's not going to happen in the United States, right? Nobody's going to give that that level of you can't do that. but where we're going to use a smaller force, put them at greater risk, not give them the tools they need to achieve the goal, while also protecting civilians, which is there are ways to, and lots of lessons learned, of course.

But I think it gets really dangerous when you extrapolate this out to future wars. Yeah. There's two things that occurred to me from what you just said that I really do blame people for not understanding, people who ought to know, people in government, people in decision making. roles. I get why the man on the street wouldn't know these things, but one, that if we were sitting there on October 6th in the Hamas, you know, planning room for the final, the final brief, and they had their DoD-style slide on the wall about what their defensive concept was for post-October 7th, of course, they got the tunnels, they got their maneuver forces, they got all this stuff. But then as we go down the bullet points, use to civilians and civilian casualties and press

amplification of civilian casualties is absolutely one of the bullets, along with the hostages. Those are part of the defensive concept of Hamas, how we are going to win. We are going to defeat Israel. Just as you point out in the first Battle of Fallujah, we're going to defeat Israel through publicity and inflation of civilians, who, by the way, we are putting in harm's way through the way that we operate. We are intentionally putting in harm's way. So that's point one that it frustrates me that the people who ought to know better

don't sufficiently appreciate. And then point two is assuming that Israel is committed to the destruction of Hamas as its goal in Israeli politics is a fraught thing. And every week there's some new Israeli controversy, Israeli on Israeli political violence. But assuming that that is their goal, the longer this is prolonged, the longer the tragedy. War is a tragedy. And your reference to the reporting on Rafa and the forces to go, well, why would we want a longer battle of Rafa? Who wins there? I mean, I guess you, I mean, on some level, Hamas, the longer this is stretched out, the It's Hamas. It's winning. But the people of Gaza are definitely not winning for the long of this thing is stretched out.

And I've said this and people don't like it when I say it, but the world owns some of the suffering that's happened in Gaza. The world, and I don't do politics, but the United States and all people who have said that Israel, hey Israel, there's a different way to do this, right? You can do this a different way, right? You can do this a different way, right? And don't, as a matter of fact, the guidance on October 8th was don't launch a ground invasion. Don't launch a, you can do it through something else, which is again cultural. And I wrote this article for the Wall Street Journal, which I do blame people for advice, where the advice was, well, you can achieve your goal through the use of targeted raids and strategic strikes, right, which is such a real big hangover of the counterterrorism campaign. And especially discounting the hostages, right, like you said. That's another reason, again, there's, I can only find one battle in modern history, if you call it modern, that has any of the variables that Israel faced in Hamas and the battle of Manila, right? We had 3,000 American and British prisoners of war, but also internees, so men, women, and children being held in Manila by the Japanese Navy.

Actually, at that point, it was a Navy. And MacArthur said, go and get the, go get the civilians. I mean, go free the internees, basically in Santa Tom at one of the locations in Manila. And actually, MacArthur banned the military from using air power, which I've written in an article, is like, you want to see where this ban the use of bombs, missiles, it goes to. And there were 100,000 civilians killed in that battle to retrieve those 3,000 of our citizens. That element of you could have done it a different way. Yeah, Israel could have done it a different way.

we could have supported them to use overwhelming force to achieve the goals quickly. But the inherentness of do it this way. Well, one, the ideal that it raids and strategic strikes would have achieved the goals, literally people were saying this imprint, yeah, it'll take you a couple of years, but you'll get the job done. So you're saying a nation has to leave 240 hostages in captivity for a couple of years, and they had to leave Hamas who just committed this invasion of the nation in power for a couple of years. I think it's ridiculous.

But I do understand the politics of war. But you understand. I understand that the world owns some of the suffering, especially the humanitarian crisis, although another very misinformed media campaign to what Israel has or has not done to alleviate humanitarian issues like bringing in of aid and reestablishing water lines, all this stuff. It's just so much inaccuracies in reporting or the use of disinformation, which sometimes has a bit of truth to it.

But the world owns some of that suffering because it isn't like Hamas is saying, look, I'll do a ceasefire if you just bring my people more food. I, you know, like we want to have, which I've had to deal with as a kind of a strategist, even in wars, you know, again, what is the goal? but for people to understand war they want everybody we all think that everybody has a shared human values that we do right

that nobody wants to see children right why does I mean the first battle of Fulia in Gaza other places of the world like the the pictures of suffering kids or harmed kids is very emotional and it really hits populations

and everything but you think that Hamas has a shared value of course Hamas doesn't want their people No, actually they've said they need as many children and women children to die as possible. They're the ones preventing, there's, as we're talking right now, there's a thousand truckloads of food sitting in Gaza on the Gaza's side of Kerem Shalom that the United Nations isn't delivering because they say it's too dangerous for them in even a criminal networks to get the food to the people. So if this was about, you know, just stop the war so that everything will get better. Like, again, you don't understand. Like, Khamas doesn't have that shared interest in people not suffering.

They actually have the goal of people suffering. But we in our role of reporting think that everybody has this shared, which is just a huge misunderstanding of this organization in war in general. And human nature, I remember my first, my first fight in Afghanistan, kind of on the outskirts of Marjor, before the big exercise. in clearing. It was pretty big sort of platoon-on-platoon scale action went on for several hours. And we couldn't, we were having, we were taking a fair amount of fire, returning a fair amount of fire, and we were having difficult, we couldn't see anyone maneuvering. They seemed, the firing would just sort of start and stop at different places, though we could see people moving around the battlefield, unarmed people moving. And then if you didn't take you too long to realize, oh, wait,

that's the maneuver. I'm watching the maneuver. They're just smart enough to not maneuver carrying their weapons. And then one of the most shocking things I saw on the whole deployment was right in that first fight was watching a military age male zip through the gunfight, zip across the battlefield with a kid on the back of his bike. Look, you know, 10, 12 years old, something like that. It's not what I witnessed in that deployment was not quite the same level of psychopathy as, Yaha Sinwar. You know, it wasn't the systematic genocidal zeal that this guy seems to have. But they made strong gestures in that direction from time to time. And their value, the value they placed on human life, frankly, was not, was not what we did. Simply wasn't. I mean, I even face this, before I was a father

being deployed, I mean, it hurt me and my soldiers to see, we had an incident where a young Iraqi boy was killed by an EFP that missed our convoy, hit, hit the civilians on the side. And it just crushed everybody in the platoon trying to help that person. But even as a, before I was a father, you meet so even a people of different cultures that they just want a better life for their kids but when you find out that somebody's in some like Hamas they want the death of and they're willing to sacrifice everybody to achieve this ideal this radicalized fundamentalist ideology of their religion and of their goal which is what they state but i've never seen erin really somebody who states vocally in action every way to get as many of their population killed as popular Not the Nazis, not the Japanese, not ISIS, nobody I can think of has a military faced, a combatant who states and acts in every way to harm its own population to achieve their goal. It's crazy. In the few minutes we have left, and I know you could speak on this subject for hours, but, you know, in the five minutes or so remaining, I want to drill down on your second point on tunnels. Yeah.

Sort of sticking at the tactical operational level, like imagining you were talking to officers, NCOs who are about to do this kind of thing. How are the Israelis fighting in tunnels? How are they getting it done? So it's a wide variety of ways. One, having already had access to all the men weapon and equipment, so all the specialized equipment, commo, ear protection, breathing apparatuses, dogs, so tunnel dogs, the drones. We say these are off-the-shelf things that we would, you know, we have research and we will get them when needed. Israel found out even though they had had an entire organization with all the research and development and equipment that they needed, they shouldn't have it at scale. How to deal with the tunnel when you find it is one thing, how to enter and clear the tunnel is another. But what the Israeli military is doing now, which is using, which I've been trying to say, like, why do we always view? And we do, Aaron, we do view a tunnel as an obstacle to deal with when we find it.

I can't convince a planner in an urban planning course like, you know, there's a vast metro tunnel in this city. Are we thinking about using that as a concealed maneuver corridor? No, that's too risky. We wouldn't do that. But that's what Israel has done because they found out as they were using this methodical clearing approach that if you methodically cleared with the tunnel in front of you and dealt with it as an obstacle. You find a tunnel shaft. Okay, put a, put a soldiers on that, bring up the

specialized people to deal with it, you know, explore it, clear it, and then you got to look, how do you destroy it? They found out that that was still giving the advantage to the enemy. Like, the enemy always had the initiative, right? Because Hamak could just sit in their tunnels. And actually, there's a battle that I studied with the battalion commander who, they tried some flooding, ended up didn't working, but massive flooding, which I thought was crazy and innovative. But they actually flooded a single tunnel network for two weeks because there's company battalion and brigade tunnels, basically, of Hamas. They flooded a single tunnel for two weeks before they actually started engaging an enemy on the surface because that's how long long it took to fill that tunnel to push the enemy out. But it was still seeding the advantage to the enemy because the enemy could stay in his tunnels as long as he wanted.

If he could hold the block and you weren't going to get him out. And if you weren't entered it, he was going to take as many people with them as possible. so it really creates this obstacle mindset. But I found a division commander in Israel, who was also a former Israeli Navy SEAL, who said, like, I'm not happy with that. Like, I want to maneuver against the enemy. So he developed a team,

which would be really hard for us to do, who had the goal of maneuvering into the tunnels before the enemy had the chance to booby-trap it, right? Because that was happening, right? As you gave the enemy time, he used the tunnel until as long as he could, and then he actually just prepped all the booby traps that he already had in place.

Like they build their tunnels with the booby traps in place already. And all they do is prime them and then they leave. So it's like a very standard, you know, protocol for them, a delaying defense. So in order to take that initiative away, he had to risk some very special people to enter the tunnels with all the night vision, commo, navigation, equipment. We have access if we want it to, but also to do that and maneuver a force on the top. So because if you enter the tunnel before the enemy knows you're there, that's great. maybe you're going to kill a bunch of them before they know you're in the tunnels. But if you're using it as a maneuver corridor not just to kill what's in the tunnel,

but to maneuver on what's on the surface, you're now achieving the maneuver warfare that we, even I as an urban scholar said, you're going to have a lot of challenges doing that in urban terrain. That's a lot of risk that I don't know how many forces we have that will assume that level of risk going. I know there's a, so this is always the question we get in the,

in what I'm teaching this in a course. okay you know there's a vast subterranean networks what's the so what to you at this operational strategic level okay you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna need some different type of equipment yeah but what's the so what are you going to is it just the obstacle that you're gonna you need to deal with when you're clearing the surface because in this war very unique though right where the enemy's only objective is to buy time for that international condemnation the tunnel is the strategic means it it uses to achieve that goal so as a planner if I'm attacking that, I have to take that advantage away for them. And Israel figured out a way.

And I really hope that some of those lessons bleed into the way we think about underground warfare. Can I ask my last question is going to be a really dumb question. Yeah. If you develop this operational concept of speed and surprise and maneuvering in the bad guys' underground space. Yeah. How do you avoid generating a situation where the bad guys just always set their bibby traps? Because they, they, they, they, they're going to anticipate that you're going to be aggressive like this and they're going to start killing you for being aggressive. How do they solve that little kind of? Yeah. So it's a great question. As again, you, unlike some of my interviews, uniquely understand all wars asymmetric, right? So the enemy is, you're always trying to outthink your other, the other side. You, you never want to fight your enemy at their strengths. And so if I started talking to people about Israel is doing this, do I put more forces in danger? Because now, Hamas, but if you think about the, again, out-thinking your enemy. So if the enemy stops using his tunnels,

isn't that an advantage as well? So if he just booby traps all his tunnels and he's not using them to achieve his goal of biding time. So now I, then I can, I can leave, although they develop creative ways to deal with the booby traps, but I can,

it's not the fundamental means that the enemy is using to resist me achieving my goal. I just through, which is deterrence, right? Which is what I wanted people to get to an urban warfare. Like, why does so many not, you know, weaker forces think that they pull the United States or other militaries into urban areas they can achieve an advantage?

Well, because we're unprepared for that level of fight. So if we become more prepared, like, like, why is it, you know, what I tell people and people don't like this, like, if you want to protect civilians in urban combat, bring a bulldozer in a tank, because that's going to prevent the enemy in the environment thinking that he can do this time-constraining, restrictions on the use of force block by block house by house fights he wants to pull you into because a bulldozer is really going to prevent that if i force through if i take away that tunnel strategy from my enemy i view that as a a win and maybe i won't be able to use it as a

corridor but i might still be you know and i know your marine corps will hate i say this is that you know boyd used to say you don't fight the terrain fight the enemy and the urban environment I can push back a little bit on that. You got to do both, right? And we all know this. But if I force the enemy and I can achieve a terrain-based goal, at the same time I'm treating an enemy-based rule, depending on what the strategy of the enemy I'm fighting is,

all war is not just two enemies trying to destroy each other. There are goals, objectives, urban areas, like seats of political power, things like that, become as important as destroying the enemies. But usually when we're destroying an enemy, you know this, I know this, that we're talking about destroying their will to fight, not kill every one of them. This is why you can't measure the Israel's success on how many Hamas combatants they've killed, although they have killed like 15,000.

Are they destroying the power of Hamas to rule Gaza and its will to continue to fight because they think they're going to win? That's the better question. John Spencer teaches this subject at West Point. I should say you've literally written the book on the subject, understanding urban warfare which folks should check out thank you so much this has been a really really fascinating conversation thanks sir this is a nebulous media production find us wherever you get your podcasts