School of War - Ep 163: School of War Goes to Israel—Lessons from a Savage Year

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Host Aaron MacLean recently embedded with the Israeli Defense Forces and saw firsthand Israel’s war with Iranian proxy groups Hezbollah and Hamas. What lessons can Americans learn from Israel’s year of fighting for its survival?  ▪️ Times    •      03:28 The North      •    04:26 Metula      •    07:45 Yishai     •    10:00 Realities and misconceptions       •    18:06 Stalemate     •    22:33 Shaping the fight      •    40:00 Reconnaissance-strike complex       •    46:38 Dotan Razili     •    50:50 Iron Dome in action     •    54:43 Sarit Zehavi     •    1:11:01 Hezbollah defeated       •    1:12:58 “Knowing but not understanding” Follow along on Instagram or YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

This episode is an experiment, and I welcome your feedback. Every episode of School of War to date has been interview-based. I talk to somebody in a studio, or, let's be honest, I interview them online while we're all in our pajamas, and we go deep on this or that issue from strategy or military history. But today's episode will be School of War's first foray into war reporting, an analysis conducted actually on the battlefield. I recently had the opportunity to embed for several days with the Israeli defense forces, both in the north where the IDF has been fighting Hezbollah and Lebanon and in Gaza.

And I also spoke to people in the security establishment in Tel Aviv about the broader dimensions of the war and in particular about Israel's direct confrontation with Iran. In many cases, I wasn't permitted to record what I was seeing and the conversations I was having, though I am permitted to tell you what I learned from those conversations. I was permitted to bring a crew and record in the north while the fighting was still ongoing up there and you'll hear portions of the conversations I had with troops. others up in that part of the country, along with my commentary and analysis during the course of this episode. We'll also be releasing some of the interviews I conducted in the North separately as independent

episodes, and on the School of War Substack, I'll be releasing my analysis in the form of a longer essay in the next few days, so please feel free to sign up for that. My main purpose on this embed was to figure out what America can learn from Israel's Savage Year of War, and that, along with the fighting in Lebanon and in Gaza, is our subject for today. My focus throughout was at the level of war fighting rather than the level of policy and quote-unquote grand strategy. Though, to be sure, there are lessons to be learned at that highest level as well. But the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, which came to pass just as we were wrapping up work on this episode, and which is in many ways a direct consequence of Israel's defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon,

you can see one such high-level lesson, that Israel, despite tremendous pressure from the Biden administration, to act with restraint and to seek accommodations with its enemies, instead pursued largely military solutions, and instead of being myriad and quagmires, has shifted the balance of power in the Mideast away from the Iranian axis and in Israel's favor. Now, nothing is simple,

and it's not like the Turkish-backed Sunni forces taking over in Syria aren't going to pose problems of their own, but Iran is clearly on the back foot now, and its regime is endangered. But that wasn't my main focus. At the level of war fighting, my headline takeaway was that for all the talk about how we are living in an era where the defense is primary, that we're back in World War I with drones, in a world where maneuver is instantly visible and likely to fail. Well, based on what's happened in Israel in the last year, I think all of that is substantially overstated. Given the right conditions, battlefield offense is very much alive and well, and that should concern the United States when we are thinking about the Western Pacific.

What are those conditions? How does it all work? Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. 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. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

We're going to start in Israel's north, where a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was recently declared. But I, like many others, am skeptical about the prospects for this ceasefire. For one thing, shortly after it was signed, Israel struck a series of targets in Lebanon, and that seems to be ongoing, as does fire in the other direction. So it seems to be the kind of ceasefire where we can expect some intermittent fire from time to time, which I'll discuss in greater detail below. But let's get on the ground to see how Israel's northern front, shows how a more capable force can act ambiguously,

leveraging its advantages and intelligence and precision, to shape the battlefield for maneuver and solve problems at much lower costs than anticipated. We'll start with an Israeli reconnaissance unit based out of a place called Matula. At the entrance to Matula, which is the northernmost community in Israel, surrounded on three sides by Lebanon

and a ring of hostile Shia villages, some Christian population there as well, which is not hostile. And this place has been hit hard since October the 7th. You can see as you go up and down the roads here, the destruction from tanks moving up and down and other heavy vehicles to defend the place from repeated Hezbollah attacks. You can hear drones in the overhead as the IDF continues to operate over the line, see apple orchards full of apples that aren't going to get picked

because there's nobody here to pick them, which obviously comes at a tremendous economic cross to the locals here. This is really the leading edge of Israel's defense against Hezbollah up until a couple of weeks ago when they started to operate north of the border with installations around here as springboards. What Israel knew long prior to October 7th, but which was not visible to the naked eye,

was that these collections of structures across the border were villages only in a secondary sense. Their primary use was as Ford staging bases for military operations. The quote-unquote civilian infrastructure, virtually all of it, concealed military resources with almost every house, school,

clinic, and so forth, containing forward-staged weapons, equipment, munitions, cameras, and so on. The underground domain was used as in Gaza, but to a lesser extent, as the limestone hills there require more resources to dig in than to sand. All down the line,

and for kilometer after kilometer deeper into Lebanon itself, Shia village after Shia village, had been transformed in this way. I spoke to a lieutenant colonel in the reconnaissance battalion operating out of Matula, Yishai, as he gave me a look at the battalion's area of operations in his souped-up utility vehicle, which was kind of like a Mad Max golf cart. We are trying to do a front-line defensive, a new term. So no one lives now in Metula except 20-25 family.

Most of them evacuated to Ockels in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Tiberius. Yeah. And there is some people, some residents that are part of the army. These great guys that we met on the gate is from Etula. And in the last year, they are here part of the defensive company. Yesha and I then sat down in an abandoned bowling alley used by his unit. to have some coffee and speak at greater length. My name is Ishaib.

I'm married to Shira, 33 years old. And I'm a proud father to Yonatan and Michael. And I'm ruling as G3 here in the Recon Battalion of the 55 Brigade. I'm already in the Reserve Army 400 days since the 7th of October. Talk to me a bit about Hezbollah's tactic. You were a company commander in Khan Yunus, and now you're up here fighting Hezbollah. What are the differences between confronting Hamas

and preventing Hezbollah in the field? So first of all, I have to say that we train to meet and confront Hezbollah as an organization, as a system. And because of all the attack, the up, the pre-attack from the pagers' attacks, to the air attack in Dahlia, etc. When we are fighting Hezbollah terrorists right now, it's looking similar to what we find in Gaza.

One, two, three, five to ten Hezbollah terrorists that they are surrounded by the Israeli army and they are fighting until their death but it's not the system that was the main that was the main threat. I mean, if I trained to meet missiles and grenades, and et cetera, and another, I don't know, like to meet one battalion and other, after a few hours,

I mean the other battalion or Fuji of Hezbollah, now we are fighting with one or two, one sniper here, one missile there. It's not the organization. the system, and for us, of course, it's so much better. To the soldiers in the end, when they are fighting in face-to-face combat, it's not matter if they have all the system, but for me, as a battalion point of view or a division, it's easier.

What Yishai is making reference to is the way in which Israel's shaping attacks, which kicked off in mid-September, absolutely devastated Hezbollah's ability to fight cohesively on the battlefield by the time the major IDF offensive began in October. On 17 September, in a sophisticated supply chain attack that was years in the making, Israel detonated hundreds of bombs hidden impagers that Hezbollah had unwittingly purchased, essentially, from the Israeli intelligence services. The next day, Israel did the same thing again, but now with Hezbollah's walkie-talkies. A few days later, Israel killed the entire senior leadership of Hezbollah's Red Wan unit in an airstrike.

The decapitation campaign then accelerated, climaxing and the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrullah in his command bunker in Beirut on September the 27th. Only then did Israel invade Lebanon on the ground in force, shifting its main effort north after focusing on Gaza and the Hamas threat in the south for most of 2024. Remember, Israel's war began in the south on up to. October 7th of 2023 when Hamas invaded Israel, taking hostages, murdering, raping, and looting their way through Israel's southern communities. This attack was a shock on every level and particularly surprising given Israel's total overmatch in capabilities vis-à-vis Hamas. Hamas was more or less

literally a third-rate terror threat to Israel's security, while Israel itself, the friend of America, the quote-unquote startup nation, surrounded by a bunch of people who want it to disappear, had a serious first-rate military. And like any serious first-rate military in the 21st century, Israel leveraged revolutions and information technology and precision weaponry to build a reconnaissance strike complex. This was the revolutionary approach to warfare that America debuted operationally during the Persian Gulf War, and which is now widely proliferated.

Now that many powers can perform such feats of reconnaissance and precision, there's a general consensus that, in general, in all other things being equal, firepower has the advantage over maneuver on the battlefield. This means that, as in World War I, defensive warfare has the advantage over the offense. Under these conditions, the likelihood of stalemates and of long wars increases accordingly, as much can be seen in Ukraine, where battlefield maneuver is generally visible and swiftly targeted. The fight there juxtaposes trench works that would be familiar at the Somme in 1916 with uses of modern technology, both military and civilian, that were once the exclusive domain of science fiction writers. Drones are one of the most significant features of this

new battlefield. Their sensors contribute mightily to the near total conditions of visibility, but they also serve as sources of firepower, all at a relatively low cost. Using them and countering them effectively are now the hallmarks of successful operations, and you also need enough of them. Cheap mass, so this consensus holds, is required in equipment, in munitions, and in manpower. Longer, more static conflicts will require the kinds of conscript forces that the West has largely done away with. These masses will engage in attritional struggle beneath a twilight battle unfolding in space, where the most sophisticated sensors and communications nodes already do their work, joined each year by yet unleashed ex-atmospheric destructive capabilities.

Of course, the situation in Israel's south before the October 7th attacks was substantially less spectacular than all that. Indeed, what you had was a modern military with an extensive sensor complex monitoring threats across the Gaza Strip facing off there against a smaller terror army of highly limited capabilities. In this context, Israel's reconnaissance strike complex was a sort of high-tech wall, a virtually impenetrable defense capable of identifying, fixing, and smiting any threat as it assembled to do harm to Israel. As opposed to the more dangerous situations in the North and vis-à-vis Iran, it seemed that something like a technological overmatch peace dividend could be enjoyed. So how did Hamas's Qasan brigades, backed by hordes of equally barbaric, ordinary

gossans obliterate this defensive complex around Gaza on October the 7th, 2023. Their gains were short-lived, but the initial success was very real. Well, walls, even 21st century walls, only work when they are manned. The morning of the Jewish holiday Simkat Torah, they were not, both in the literal sense, were unforgivably small units of ill-prepared IDF soldiers, many of them young women serving in non-combat capacities, were essentially abandoned to their fates, but also in a deeper sense. The technological overmatch that allowed the Israeli security services

to watch and listen and identify and track and occasionally strike in Gaza at its leisure had bred arrogance. Hamas' leadership identified this arrogance. It also identified the fact that what Israel's leaders wanted most of all was not to think about Gaza. There was Iran, there was the North, there were so many other pressing issues, and as ever in a liberal society, there was a hopefulness in some quarters that maybe even savages like Hamas could moderate if only just enough to allow a tense modus vivendi that would only be occasionally violent. There would not be war, but in the language of academic security studies, a quote, ongoing deterrence dialogue. Well, arrogance, hope, and dead political science metaphors are not the foundations of battlefield

success. This Israeli mental universe exposed it to a sophisticated Hamas strategic deception plan that played out over several years. The plan revolved, principally, around the issue of worker permits. Every day, thousands of Gazans traveled into Israel to work, injecting millions of dollars into Gaza's economy. Hamas wanted and demanded more permits. As tense and violent as these negotiations were, Israeli leaders took from them a promising implication that Hamas felt the need to focus on material concerns on the bottom line. It needed cash because, whatever it stated genocidal goals in the long run, more immediately, someone needed to collect the trash. The demands were so material, so quotidian, that they were taken as evidence

of, if not moderation, exactly, than of an organization reconciling itself by necessity to the real world. And so Israel's walls were not only all but unmanned, but even when indications were detected of the impending brigade-level assault, it's impossible to plan, rehearse, and then load the assembly areas for a large operation in a reconnaissance petri dish like Gaza without being detected. Those indications were actively considered and dismissed. Hamas achieved surprise. And we know the rest. More than a year on, Hamas and the population that voted it into power have paid a steep price. I visited Rafa during the course of my embed. Rafa is a city in southern Gaza on the Egyptian border.

There is no more Rafa. The destruction is stunning to see with one's own eyes. In the neighborhoods that I saw, Berlin had fared better in 1945. There are some tunnels left here and there, and every now and then a fighter or two pop out of them, facing odds that preclude securing life insurance at affordable premiums. All that is visible is dogs and birds and rocks,

and I have to say that when I shared this observation with a colleague who was with me on the visit, he remarked, I must have missed the dogs and the birds. That was the South. What's not as widely known, however, is that Hamas was simply ripping off an existing Hezbollah plan. An elite organization, Redwan, had been formed and trained by Hezbollah in its Shia patron, Iran, for years to do exactly what Hamas actually did do on October the 7th. Hassan Nasrullah, apparently surprised by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar's initiative, declined to launch his own assault, and by late on October 7th, Israel's northern wall

was increasingly well-manned. A red-won assault after that point would have been suicide. But the moment passed, Hezbollah's significant magazines of rockets, drones, and anti-tank missiles remained, and it began firing intermittently at Israel on October 8th. 11 months of stalemate along the border ensued, with casualties on both sides, as Israel prioritized the fight in Gaza and Hezbollah tried to eat its cake and have it too, supporting the resistant fighters of Hamas through harassment attacks without sacrificing the deterrent power implicit in its ability to deliver an overwhelming series of air attacks

on Israel's population and economy. The early decision to evacuate the communities along Israel's northern border made the stalemate both painful and politically unsustainable, but it was hard to see how the situation could be changed without a violent and costly northern war, not to mention without American and international condemnation, as the Biden administration had been clear from the get-go that the prevention of escalation with Hezbollah and Iran

was its top priority. There was a period this past spring, where the dilemmas of this northern stalemate, combined with the slow progress of the fight in Gaza, could cause a sympathetic observer of Israel's situation to question whether or not, Iran had the upper hand. Consider what it means when Iran declares its intention to destroy the state of Israel. What serious Iranian strategic planners actually might understand when they say

things like that. These men are not idiots, and so they know that the chances that main military force will drive the Jews into the sea are fancifully low. The objectives of 1967 and 1973 are not available in the early 2020s, and they were barely available in 67 and 73. But what if instead, Tehran, through its policies and its proxies, to generate conditions that made Israel a less attractive place for Jews to live? In Israel, where large swaths of territory were uninhabitable, engaged in protracted military confrontations with no victory in sight, internationally isolated, politically divided, a once globally engaged and integrated economy and liberal society, transforming into something more autarkic, something more religious, something geared for endless war.

What if Jews who could afford to leave left? If the Iranian objective was very gradually to render Zion unlovely, or even unlovable, to Jews, well, it was not entirely out of the question that the strategy had lags. To break out of it would require regaining the advantage over Iran and its proxy Hezbollah. Intimately linked objectives, as Hezbollah's own strike capacity, its wall, was Iran's most powerful to in the region. Prior to this autumn, it was common to hear Israelis speak of the prospect of a northern war, as though they were anticipating the blitz in London in the fall of 1940. The north would be in flames. skyscrapers in Tel Aviv would fall. There might not be much left of Haifa. Civilian deaths would number in the thousands. Nothing of the sort has happened. Instead, a truly remarkable campaign

dealt a massive blow against Hezbollah and regained the initiative against Iran. In an era where the defense is meant to have the advantage and where Israelis had a genuine wariness about Hezbollah's ability to defend its territory, largely because of the pain Nassarala could unleash against civilian and economic targets if attacked. Israel's feet of arms gives further indications of the conditions required for the offense in the 21st century. As the weeks went on, the fighting south of the Latani River took on a guerrilla flavor, as Yishai points out, dangerous to the IDF soldiers prosecuting it, to be sure, but a far cry from the modern terror army that the axis of resistance had taken such pride in. Was that true the lack of the system and the effectiveness of the shaping fires to destroy that system and the decapitation strikes and everything else?

In the first few days of the offensive, or in those first few days when you guys went, you guys went north of the line, were they still operating more at the company or battalion level? Or were they done for you start? So, yes and no. I have to say that, yes, in the first few days we saw more company level, not the Italian level, not all the area. They are working in areas companies. It's not like infantry in a regular army because it's guerrilla. They are working in territorial bases.

I mean, Farkil, this is their base, this is their people that live there, and they know where is their shelters, their places where they put the explosive, etc., etc. So in the first days, we met more company level, but they broke very fast, very quick, because they understand that in the back office, they don't have any answers. They can get a supply, they can get air support, etc. So some of them left, some of them surrounded, and some of them fight until they die, but in small amount, then we thought that we were going to meet. These conditions were achieved because, before the offensive launched, Israel enjoyed near-total intelligence dominance of the battlefield,

combined with an exquisite ability to strike precisely and effectively at difficult, sometimes heavily fortified targets. But these factors of overmatch do not tell the full story. As with Hamas's successful surprise attack on October 7th, the full story involved the manipulation of perception and the seizure of initiative through surprise. Nassarlaw died in the decapitation attack on his bunker, one Israeli security official, suggested to me, not knowing that his war had yet started. day after day as the shaping campaign got underway, Israeli audacity sliced through Hezbollah complacency,

steadily harming Hezbollah's capabilities to command and control a war and a series of actions that occurred so quickly and in an atmosphere of such ambiguity regarding their intent that by the time it was clear that the Northern War had truly begun, it was too late for Hezbollah to resist the coming ground maneuver effectively, or to retaliate against the Israeli population and economy as it had long planned. That's not to say that Hezbollah wasn't able to resist at all, or indeed that it doesn't retain capabilities that are a real concern for northern Israel, even with a ceasefire in place. For one thing, even a fighting force of relatively limited means like Hezbollah can now boast, in effect, an air force.

First, let's talk about Hezbollah and drones. Did they have, do they have air capacity? How do they use it at the level that you're experiencing up here? Not strategic strikes. Of course. Of course. So the Ukraine War changed all the... discourse about drones. They learned us, they learned all the world how you can use it.

First of all, explosive drones and Hezbollah use it all the time. It's very cheap, very easy. You send it, you can find your target, vehicles as you said, infantry, and the damage is very demonstrated because it's very hard to protect yourself. from this threat if you are outside in the battlefield. If you are secure in your homes or in the shelters, it's quite good. But more problematic using of drones, it's not the explosive drones, it's the optical drones.

The drones are using to find our soldiers and now you don't need the J-TACC that will be in battlefield. You can use it and, then to target your artillery or mortars from 10, 12, 15 kilometers, and then you can see where you fight. And from the other side, we are using a lot and a lot in drones in the same missions to throw some grenades, to find their locations, to open roads, and to understand where they are, they are

arding. How are you learning how to use them? And what I mean by that is you got in the army as a reservist and then acted before for a long time. I presume when you came in like when I was serving, drones were controlled. There weren't that many of them and they were controlled by higher echelons of command. Now, you know, any squad can have one. Yeah.

How do you think about that? Is the army, the IDF providing doctrine down? Are you learning from the soldiers? How is it actually proceeding? It's a great question. I have to say that our division started to do it from the ground. from the soldiers up to the army. Because when we started in the 7th of October,

as you said, most of the drones was in our special forces or in the Air Force or some units. And we understand that what people are using in events or in weddings to take pictures, we also can use it. So we start to buy by ourselves, the nation. or we have a few gamers in our battalion, and they start to teach and to train their friends. And then now the army, we met before our deputy commander.

He's the leader of the drones in our division, and they are starting to write the theory, they're trying to understand the logistics of this. equipment because from one side it's new equipment, but the practice that you're going to use it, if it's to find the targeted, it's instead J-TAC. Or if you're using to kill some people with grenades, it's instead motors. They are here. Now you need to make the shapes and to use it from the beginning.

Beyond drones, Hezbollah's use of anti-tank weapons has proven to be a major ongoing issue, both on the battlefield and also with strategic effects concerning Israel's ability to allow civilians back to their homes in the north, because there is no effective countermeasure to the missile. Unlike Hezbollah's rocket arsenal, which can be countered by Israel's missile defense architecture, most famously Iron Dome. Talk about the anti-tanked, the coordinate threat, whether that's still a major concern and what they use it for. How did they use that? Of course.

So I trained as anti-tank company. So it's very familiar for me, the abilities and the skills and how you can use these missiles. The coronet have a range of five to six kilometers. The new models can be around the eight kilometers. But now we are speaking about even more effective brand. It's called Elmas. and he has a range of like 10 to 12 kilometers.

First of all, Hezbollah got a lot of skills and trained a lot in these missiles in the war in Syria. The civil war in Syria, Hezbollah was a huge player in this game as part of the Iran Revolution. So they trained a lot out to shoot these missiles on cars, on vehicles of. of course, tanks, engineer mechanical, vehicles and unfortunately on civilian places and civilian infrastructures, homes, schools, pharmacy. And they took all this knowledge and in the last year they did it here. All the villages in the Israeli side that was on this site on the five to eight kilometers here in front of the border of Lebanon,

was on the line of the fire and you couldn't move. Now we had a nice short tour. A few months ago, we didn't have the ability to do it because of the threat and because they really tried to kill everyone that felt free to move in our areas. Now, because we push them, at least 8 kilometers from the border, we feel more safe here in the villages. But we still have the problem of the almas.

Why the almas is still a problem? Because if you want to shoot a cornet missile, anti-tank cornet missiles, you need to have a side line between the cornet to the targets. The almas, because of the big range, the huge range, you can do an end loss. It's called. You can shoot it in the air and when you are up, you can find your target and then... With a separate observer? With a separate observer, a drone, a hundred or because you can understand where is the bases or where is the villages, you don't need anyone. It's a big range, great optical tools and...

I see. I see. Because there's no effective countermeasure to the system, that means that for northern Israel to be safe and for people to be able to return to their homes, Hezbollah really does need to be pushed a substantial distance back from the border in order to protect civilians. And it created challenges for the IDF on the battlefield as well,

to a much greater extent than they faced earlier this year in Gaza. Our basic as infantry is to put a huge bag on our backs and to go. And this is what we trained for. In Gaza, we add that. ability to work very close with a lot of armor vehicles, one, the tanks, and the other technical engineer vehicles. And the second option is like the M113 or other platforms to move and to take the infantry from place A to B.

But here in Lebanon, because, as you said, the anti-tank missiles, and not only because of that, the geographic of level, Lebanon, it's different. There is a lot of rivers, big mountains. So we're back to basic, as we like and love. And here we are feeling more safe to be by ourselves with our two legs and our bags around the area. In other words, in Gaza, vehicles often led.

In Lebanon, due to both terrain and the anti-tank threat, the infantry was the main effort. At a task the IDF has been performing has been the destruction of Hezbollah's military infrastructure. In particular, the staging infrastructure intended for use by Red Wan, the force task organized to invade Israel. Such infrastructure is almost always disguised as or hidden within civilian infrastructure or under it. So the underground infrastructure in Lebanon is different, essentially, than Gaza.

In Gaza, most of the underground was... strategic, big tunnels that you can move your soldiers from one side to other side. Here in Lebanon, most of the underground infrastructures are bases for soldiers. Even if you have tunnels, we are speaking about short length that most of them use to bring people wearing civil clothes to put them downside. We are speaking about places that can hold thousand people, 500,000 people, with all the equipment there, with the bags, with the uniform, with the Kalashnikov,

grenades, etc., etc., etc., and in one minute, to bring 3,000 people to the border. So most of the infrastructures here are more army bases than... tunnels or attack tunnels, it's different. And a lot of this infrastructure was obviously controlled by Red Wan. It was going to be utilized as essentially a forward staging for an assaulting to Israel. As you assault into Lebanon, are you encountering Redwan? Are you encountering the territorial forces? Can you really tell the difference?

Yes. You can tell the difference. The difference between the territorial soldiers and the Radoan, first of all, it's how much they are practice. They are trained, also their equipment, but more than that, the Radwan terrorists already serve, do some tours in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iran, in Iraq. They already fight the coalition here and there, so they are not only trained, they already fight other people, so they felt the bullets. So this is the most different,

and now when we are fighting Fisbalah, we are fighting Red Rewan. Most of the territorial, let's say soldiers, active left with their family. And as you went north onto the offensive, what was the battalion's mission in general terms? That is to say, are you clear to hold?

Are you raiding? What's the mindset? What's the concept? Okay. So the mission is to build the opportunity for the people of the North to back to their homes. And this is very big, very high level. For us, it's mean to be sure that no one will have the opportunity to invent Israel. So if it's meant to clear 500, 600, 600 from the border, all the line from the sea, and

to the mountain we cleaned already five to six hundred meters if it's mean all the buildings in the mountain that already controlled the cities that already launched missiles that killed people in Kfah Yuval or in Kfar Giladi or here in Metula it's mean to go there with explosive on our backs it's taking one night tonight and to clean the area from this threat. This is the mission. If the government will decide something else, we are ready and we are prepared to do something else.

But so far, we are trying to promote this mission to bring back the people. And the people will come back if they will know that they can sleep well and to walk up in the morning. Those anti-tank missiles for which there are really no effective countermeasures, if they're out at 10 plus kilometers, it's a pretty big zone that has to be clear. This is sort of above a battalion pay grades. I want to ask it in a way that you can even answer. In military terms, military efficiency, how do you think about the options for what comes next, just in terms of what troops are capable of doing?

So I think that it's combined of two things. As you said, you have the kilometers that you need to clean if you want to protect these 10 kilometers. But it's not only that. It's as we speak about in the first, in the beginning, if you are managing to break the system of Hezbollah, their morality or their opportunity to share, shoot these missiles. If the village is in the 10 kilometers understand that after one or two missiles

that coming out from the village, the Air Force is coming to visit them, the Israeli Air Force, and the power of Hezbollah will be less and less on their people, on their Lebanese civilians. I'm quite sure that we will see less and less missiles that coming from these people. places. So aviation's going to play a big role? Yep, of course. Aviation and intelligence, artillery also are very effective in these ranges. Yishai's observation here proposes an answer of sorts to a key question.

With Hezbollah having been substantially degraded, though not like Hamas, militarily destroyed, how does Israel plan to protect its north in a lasting fashion? An occupation of southern Lebanon, which Israel, of course, conducted from 1982 to 2000, is not a proposal that met with enthusiasm from any Israeli I encountered. But a full ceasefire and a total withdrawal absent the intervention of an effect of third party in the region will, of course, just allow Hezbollah to accelerate the process of reconstitution. In a few years, Israel will be back on October 6th. The temporary ceasefire that's now in place contemplates the intervention of a third party,

but I can't say that any of us should have much faith in that. Yishai's observations regarding the future square with what I heard from others in the IDF to include senior members of the IDF. And I think it also squares with the ongoing strikes we're all seeing in the news from day to day now. As Israel has on several other occasions in the past year when faced with apparently painful dilemmas, it's looking for a way to decline to choose. The IDF's preferred vision is to operate its reconnaissance strike complex within Lebanon indefinitely, largely withdrawing on the ground, but without foreclosing on the possibility of special operations, and especially relying on airstrikes and indirect fire to prevent Hezbollah's reconstitution to October 6th levels.

In this vision, Lebanon would be transformed as an area of operations into something like Syria during the pre-October 7th War Between the Wars. Not exactly a free fire zone, and perhaps a scene of quite infrequent fires, depending on the diplomatic progress of a ceasefire, but also not a place where the Iranian axis can operate or reconstitute with impunity. There's also the question of how Israel's security strategy in the North affects its grand strategy and character as a nation. The IDF's preferred course of action in Lebanon poses obvious challenges for Israel's international relationships.

It implies that Israel is now a nation always, at least to some limited extent, at war. This also at some point starts to take a toll on an army constituted very substantially by reservists. This is a reserve unit, right? Your battalion's reserve. fought a battle in Khan Yunus, fighting a battle in the north. I've a lot to ask with people who have families and jobs.

I'm not to ask, the young active in the trip. How's that, do? Great question. It's not easy. And we are feeling the the stress or the conflict between our families,

our jobs, our careers. Some people lost their jobs because of this war. Unfortunately, some people lost their families, marriages. It's not so easy, but from the other side, we understand and we know what can happen if we will not be here. We woke up at the 7th of October and we get the biggest reminder of what can happen if we will let it be. And now we are here up north because we don't want to walk

up again in the next 7th October from the north. And from other side as commanders, we are trying all the time to balance between this conflict, between the army to their life.

So we have soldiers that we are trying to help them with money. There is soldiers that are getting more time at home. We are trying to build a network for their families, to help them, to make a group of colleagues that understand the situation. We are making calls to universities, to their boss.

We are trying to explain the situation. But it's not easy, but this is our country. In the United States, in the 90s when I was a kid, our military is very casualty averse. If you had one or two soldiers killed, that could be in the end of an operation. My impression was before October the 7th, the IDF was similar. How do you and how do your troops at this level think about casualties?

How do you process them? How does it affect your operations? It's a great question. As I said before, we lost six soldiers, six friends. Some of them are father, some of them. young fellows, young boys, and every one of them that left, it's very hard. We have families now that we are going to be with them all their life. But because of the mission, because we understand how sacred the missions,

we can do it more and more. and we understand that in the next home, in the next place that we are going to in Lebanon, we can have more casualties, more people that will be wounded or even worse. We know it. We are not naive people. But we understand that if it's not to be our soldiers there in Lebanon, it will be families or malignytheir. and kids here in Fire Yuval and Narea. There's an old truism about Israel and its enemies,

that if Israel's enemies laid down their arms, the war would stop, but if Israel laid down its arms, Israel would disappear. There's a lot of truth to that observation. Israelis, I spoke to you, genuinely want peace. But a full ceasefire honored on the Israeli side and violated on the Hezbollah side, as was the case before October 7th, will only provide a false short-term appearance of peace

at least until more fundamental conditions change. Perhaps the fall of the Assad regime will lead to such a change in conditions in Lebanon, making Hezbollah's dominant role in southern Lebanon unsupplyable and thus untenable. It's too soon to say. On the other hand, the kind of ongoing low-grade violence that a continuation of hostilities would evolve,

which, by the way, seems to be actually happening, means that Israel's northern communities will struggle to get back to anything resembling normal. In itself, a big strategic achievement. for the bad guys. Here's Dotham Rizili, a reserve officer serving with a line brigade that's been fighting in Lebanon, walking me through the streets of Ailan, a community within spitting distance of the Lebanese border in northern Israel. Alon is in Rizili's brigade's area of operations, and somewhat amazingly for an American visitor whose whole experience of war is as part of an

expeditionary force. Alon is also Rizli's home where he's lived for years with his family. Let me just describe what we're seeing here because it's dark and also some people will only hear this on audio But we're on this lovely residential street with very nice houses It's not deserted there are cars, but it's also not busy and then we have this ridge line right in front of us to the north It's probably what a thousand? Yeah, yeah To give it 300 400 meters? Yeah, a little more a kilometer a kilometer a kilometer a kilometer Okay, thousand meters yeah I mean I mean up yes Yes, up up to two thousand two two two hundred feet nothing more okay so and then on the top of

We can see some lights of another community right on line. And basically the top of the ridge line is just behind the top. That's the border. Okay. So it's an empty street. It's quite, we are gardener, the kibbutz gardener stayed. And we decided to pay him salary. So the outside looks quite good.

But if you look inside in some yards and in some places, you see overgrowth and sidewalks are closed by the trees and people are not taking care of their homes. We had December and January, we had to go into the houses and clear the refrigerators. Because people left, or either they turned the electricity down, or we had a power shoulders, or the power stopped going. So the refrigerator got spoiled. But for many, many days and many, many weeks, nobody got in the house. Did you grow up up up in Kibbutzum from room? My wife is from here. I see. Okay, so that's when, how long you lived in Alon?

For 25 years. So we had to take refrigerators out of the houses. They were covered with beetles, black. And imagine the smell. But since then, we've cleared them. So we're expecting the people to come back. I'll take you inside the house. Inside, Rizili shows me the unique attributes of an Israeli house near the Lebanese border. We're a house So kids' room But this Yeahel I'm married But this is

Yael's room But it's actually A safety room So it's a inside bomb shelter You can see the difference In the walls This has a gum

Also a locking mechanism Which I did Five years before The 7th October Because Ruby, if Ruby Tirdi Because I understood

What the threat is Yeah So So So there's a balance because if she locks herself inside, it's really if she gets mad and locks herself inside, it's a problem. So we hear that here. We have another. Raising a teenage girl. Yes. Exactly. But those are the challenges. So raising a teenage girl that can shut herself down

and nobody can enter and having a bomb shelter that can be safe for the whole family. So we've hidden another key. I won't say well, but it might not work. So she knows not to lock. the door, but she closes the door. And of course, no windows because we have to have a, the, the window is closed by a steel door. But this is a safety room. Actually, in the- Can you open that? Yeah, it's been open it, but it's been closed for the, more than a year. Makes sense. And for code, we also have NBC clearing, because of the 91 war with Iraq, with chemical weapons. You also have to have a chemical clearing, air conditioning. So you can connect it, and you're supposed you can see there without masks.

It's like a gas mask for 12 hours. I think I'm not sure if they're still making it, making you have it, but this is part of that. So it connects to this or it's separate? No, it filters the airs from there. You connect it to there and it filters the outside air. Amazing. A ceasefire that goes the way of past ceasefires here in the north.

That is to say, a ceasefire that Israel honors, while Hezbollah flagrantly violates it under the cover of a weak and ineffectual UN in Lebanese government presence, would mean that communities like Ilan would soon need to be prepared for a renewed Hezbollah ground threat. Even so, some I spoke with,

preferred such an option to an ongoing, low-level cross-border exchange of fire, which is the alternative. Surit Sahavi is a lieutenant colonel in the IDF reserves, but I spoke to her in her civilian capacity, where she is the director of the Alma Center, a think tank focused on the security of Israel's north. Annette with her in her office, overlooking the hills of the Western Galilee and the coastal plain to our west.

First, the Pagers attack, the Wauki-Toki attack, the killing of the senior leadership, not just commanders, which is Nasrallah, and the head of the southern front in Hizbalah, Karki, and the deputy of, not a deputy, there was, these are alerts. For us? Effie. He has me. The interceptions were The interceptions that we saw were in here, okay, and the alerts were all the way from Zarit, which is here,

Shurmerer Zarit, so they probably were launched from here all the way to Akker, Rayot, and everything that is on their way. And did the alert do they stretch for such a long distance because you know the you know the direction of the projectile but you don't know the impact or because the interception may happen anywhere along the way and you want people to stay

down or both or okay clearly this was not a barrage that was meant to these areas it was meant to this area we had during the war barrages that were specifically to those areas we had during the war barrages that were both to Naharia and the Karayot and Akir at the same time. Each time is different. We don't always know. As from what we saw just outside of the window, I believe that it was meant to this area.

We don't always know, but sometimes you've developed instincts. Do you understand what's going on? Yeah, of course. You have a year of muscle memory now. More, but a year of intense. My 11-year-old daughter, she knows how to differ between a jet and interceptor. They make the same memory. noise. You wouldn't know.

I believe it. If I have over your head, it sounds the same. As you can hear, as Zahavi and I were speaking, Hezbollah unleashed a salvo of rockets at Haifa, and we watched the intercepts by Iron Dome from her conference room window. We sat back down and got back to recording. Here's Zahavi describing her reaction to the October 7th attacks and her thoughts on potential upsides in a ceasefire approach.

There is life before October 7th and life after October 7th. As simple as that. We used to have a nice life here, a nice, quiet community, that I could host my family in the holidays and have a birthday party for my children at home and sleep at night. And none of that exists anymore. In October 7th, early in the morning, I heard the phone going blip, leap, lip, lip, clip.

And I understood that somewhere there's something is happening. And when I opened my cell phone and I saw that there are barrages of rockets up to Tel Aviv from Gaza, I told my husband, wake up, it's war, let's go and prepare the bomb shelter. There was nothing going on up north. The north was quiet. It was another day, a holiday. I waited three hours. After I saw in TV, the reserve is drafted.

I crossed the street. I went to the synagogue. I have a synagogue across the street, and I called the rabbi who also serves as a military rabbi. And I told him, reservists are drafted, it is war. And each time I'm telling that, I'm joking because my father had done the same thing in 1973. Wow. And of course, just to explain, the rabbi wouldn't have been following the news because... Yes, because they're not allowed to have the cell phone.

And the first question the rabbi asked me is, Sarit, should I open my cell phone? Because I'm not going to the synagogue on Saturday, is usually on... on the holidays, I'm not secular, but I have a good relationship with the rabbi of my community. Afterwards, I met him a few months later when he was in uniforms, and he told me Sariti were the first one to tell me that it was war.

And I didn't tell the people of the synagogue. I went until the service ended, and only then I told them. So this was October 7th. The next day, October 8 was the day that the campaign started up here, the war started up here. Hezbollah started with attacking the borderline. like not the civilians.

At first it attacked the military assets of the ID have fear, the positions, the cameras, the antennas, etc. For me, after learning what Hamas had done, very quickly the information came out. I thought these are preparations for invasion. So I took my kids away. Afterwards, I brought them back, but I took my kids away for a few weeks.

They were not here up north. And I was like almost sleeping with my shoes on, waiting for Hispanic to come to my leave. living room. This was the feeling. You talked about Hizbana offensive plan. When I came to the office in October 8th, I remember that Hizbana published its offensive plan. And I found a video. This is the video here. Now when I watched the video, this video is exactly like what Hamas had done, step by step.

Okay? If we had met, and we had met, just before the war. And you ask me, Sariq, what's the scenario? You talk about me, suddenly talk about, Odwaran, what's the scenario? I would never prescribe this. Even though I saw it. Why not? Because it was behind my imagination. When I saw this, I thought, this is just propaganda.

No way they are capable of launching this. But they did develop the capability. And I knew the capability exists. There was a psychological barrier. And I'm saying that as an ex-intelligence officer, we couldn't imagine the level of atrocities. We failed to imagine that. So Iron Dong and the fact that people could continue to live relatively in routine,

as you just saw, it's not routine. This just sent tens of thousands of Israelis to Shunton, what you just saw. It's not routine. But the people in Tel Aviv don't sense that. The people in Jerusalem clearly don't sense that. We here have 15 seconds to run for shelter. That's the difference. and it's the same in the south.

Now in the south they build them shelters everywhere and they put the iron dome and okay, nobody believed that it will end up like that. Today for the people of the north, we are not going to accept anything like October 6th reality here. And we are not willing to live in a situation that we have 15 seconds to run for shelter and the children are studying in a regular classroom.

It's just the price. is very high. So what have the IDF achieved in the offensive phase? How did they achieve it? And what capabilities does Hezbole retain? Okay, so first to understand the goals of the offensive. The first goal was to remove the strategic threat of Krizberra. Until now, this was not done by boots on the ground, ground maneuver.

It was done in different ways. The Pagers attack, the walkie-talkie, the killing of Nasraa, the attacks against the banks of Chisbara, the attacks against the energy warehouses of Chisbara, the infrastructures of Chisbara, the attacks against the advanced weapons of Chisbara stored in Beirut and Baalbek, like long-range missiles, accurate missiles,

surface-to-sea missiles, surface-to-air missiles for the air defense systems. All of these were attacked. Now, I'm not sure they were completely eliminated, but they were attacked massively, and they suffered damages. And once this happened, and this was between September 17th to October 1st until the ground oppression, and it is still going on until today. This effort changed the question of what is Chisbalah. It is not the same as it used to be two months ago. Clearly, okay, the leadership is gone.

It is not the same. remove the strategic threat of the table. The second goal was to make sure that Chisbaa is incapable of launching an invasion, not only with regard to the decision-making process, which was dealt by killing the leadership, but also with regard to the capability on the ground. And that's why you see a maneuver of the IDF into Lebanon, taking out all the weapons, all the preparations, blocking the tunnels, of the areas next to the border.

The problem, there is a problem, its use achievements, but there is still a problem, two problems, actually. One, with the ground maneuver, that it is only for few kilometers. IDF is not on its way to Beirut. It's not even on its way to Littani River,

which is 25 kilometers on the border. It's just very few kilometers. I don't know how many. Maybe some are saying a kilometer, two kilometers, three kilometers. Probably not much more than three kilometers. That's very little. Behind this range, there is still massive military deployment of Chisbara underground,

and it's difficult to destroy it from the air. So that's one problem. And the second problem is what you just saw. There is a huge cognitive dissonance, if you light, between the major achievements of the IDF strategically and the fact that the people of northern Israel are living under the threat of the rockets that are not intercepted in open areas, and the roads are open areas

and we are afraid to drive. We cannot go to school. We cannot have normal life. This didn't change, and it's between 100 to 200 rockets every day. So it's less than 10% of what we predicted. You said Tel Aviv was supposed to be on fire, etc. It's much less than that.

There are very few attacks to Tel Aviv. Like in a month, we had 12 attacks to Tel Aviv, not every day, not few every day. In each attack, very few amounts. of missiles, not barrage like you saw now for a few tens of missiles. But at the same time, this is still an enormous amount of projectiles every day.

And before talking about the drones, which we do have difficulty to intercept, and sometimes they just crash and key civilians, and when they are due trace, when the IDF do identify that there was a crossing of a drone, we don't always know where it is heading.

So everywhere is flying, there are alias in many, many places and again this disturbed the day life so i think this should bring us to the conclusion that since chisbana was relying on or building its strategy on redundancy like spreading the ammunition all over as i've said inside the towns outside the towns in the open areas in beirut in the kha valley in south aben we will not be capable of eliminating all the launchers Okay, we may end up in a situation that until the last day of this war, Chisbara, we launch 200 rockets every day, okay?

But I think that the biggest question for us today is not are we going to continue to destroy launchers and rockets. The biggest question is what kind of arrangement we are going to have? What kind of a ceasefire we are going to have? And is this arrangement going to promise us that the damages, that were caused to Hezbollah in such an impressive way will not be recovered. Well, that's at least one major dilemma,

as I understand the situation. So please respond to this or correct the framing of it, if you disagree. The only way to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting north of the line, in addition to occupation, which seems to be no one's intent. I don't sense any strong desire

from virtually any Israeli I've spoken to in an official or unofficial capacity to keep large numbers of troops north of the border. That seems to be the least preferred option. So if you're not going to do that, the only way to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting is some ongoing tempo, some freedom, as exists reportedly in Syria, for the IDF to strike.

That doesn't really sound like a ceasefire, exactly. So help me understand that. Help me understand how the future looks here, what the options are, what should happen in your view, will happen. Okay, so we can frame it, maybe there are more, but we can frame it with three options, okay, following what you say. The first option is having a security belt. Like we used to have from 1982 to May 2000, this is what we had. The price is that instead of the civilians being those,

how do you say, um, ducks in the shooting range, I don't know how to say that's a fish in a barrel. Fish in a barrel. Fish in a barrel. Okay. Sitting ducks. Sitting ducks. Sitting ducks. That's the term. So instead of, in a situation of a security belt, instead of the situation today that civilians feel like sichting ducks, this is how we feel, the soldiers will be sitting ducks. Now for us, as mothers to soldiers, wives to soldiers, sisters to soldiers, it's not a solution. Okay. But at the same time, it would mean that Chisbala will not resettle just on top of these hills that are watching the communities. and will be capable of launching these anti-tank missiles to the kitchen of the people that are living there. So that's one option. It's a bad option of being there done that. We don't like it.

But there are Israelis, especially those who live in these communities that are saying, what are our options we have? Interesting. Okay. Okay. Another option is to have a complete ceasefire. Like what we had between 2006 to last year, this means that we are going to pay a price. Because I don't know what kind of arrangement will. enable will not enable

Chisbara to recover. And the third option is what you said, which is the campaign between the wars basically was held in Syria, will be held in Lebanon.

My question is this. If we are choosing the third option, what will promise me as a resident of the North that there wouldn't be any retaliation? Because every retaliation

means that my daughter is not going to school and that I don't have normal life. Now, if you will attack every week, you didn't solve the problem. And what if the answer is, there is no answer to that question?

So I prefer number two. Okay. I prefer there will be a ceasefire. Even if, sorry. There will be a ceasefire and we will be busy with rounds of fire rather than constant fire. Even if that allows a reconstitution of Hezbollah up to the point where they could conceivably, presumably, presumably you would intervene before they got to an October 6th level. This time, we're not going to wait 18 years.

This is, we enable the master to grow. I see. We shouldn't. Now, this is only by a discussion between me and you, there is somebody missing at this table, which is Lebanese. Where are the Lebanese? This should be their interest that Chisbalah will not recover. Where are they?

If America is going to give that much money to the Lebanese armed forces, which is already given, but it's going to give much more, who is going to make sure that the Lebanese army is using this money to truly fight? It's fighting Chisbala, okay, monitoring the same. ceasefire means fighting with his bad this is what everybody needs to understand his but his is not going to voluntarily disarm it's just it's just going to deceive everybody like he did last time it's a very it's an excellent question it's an important question I confess to similar pessimism that you

seem to express him and we looked down and I was in Gaza yesterday Hamas is destroyed as a military entity it's gone as a strategic threat to Israel it's gone but it's still whoever's left that the The onesies and twosies, the mid-level thugs who have survived, they still terrorized and control aid distribution. They seem to control large portions of the population through threat of assassination and torture. You need much less to bully your own people

than you need to actually threaten Israel, as Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah did on October the 7th. So I'm not optimistic that, you know, the laugh or the Christians or anyone else. I think that I am more optimistic about Lebanon. it's funny, I wouldn't say that a few months ago, but now I'm more optimistic about Lebanon than Gaza, because in Gaza we have hostages and our hands are tied around it.

We need to make tough decisions around it. In Lebanon, we don't have hostages. In Lebanon, we could put maximum pressure on the Lebanese government. Nobody in the world, for some reason that I don't understand, demand the Lebanese government to designate Chisbala as a terrorist organization. This is unheard of.

I truly don't understand. And the answer that I hear is that they will never agree. So what? Why would Israel agree to give up its security? Why all these demands are going to Israel and not to Lebanon? Clearly, if we want to solve the problem, everybody understands that Chisbana is a terrorist organization. The situation today is that in the government of Lebanon,

we have ministers of Chisbana. The key position, you know what's the key position there? It's the minister that is responsible for the infrastructures of Lebanon. He's responsible for all the exit and entrances to Lebanon. He's responsible for Hariri Airport and the border crossings to Syria. He is the one that enables Hezbollah to continue to smuggle weapons as we speak. This is not going to change with any agreement as long as Hezba is part of the Lebanese government. It's just not going to change.

Recording here in December 2024, one thing is clear. Israel's position is much improved since this past summer. And Iran's position is much, much more vulnerable. Hezbollah has effectively been defeated on the ground in southern Lebanon, and its rocket capacity has been substantially degraded. Iran has now failed in two massive direct attacks on Israel to prove that its ballistic missile capacity is especially effective, and it's shown itself to be quite vulnerable to Israeli retaliation by air. Donald Trump is returning to the White House, and the Biden administration, which has worked to restrain Israel throughout the last year, is leaving. and most spectacularly of all in recent days,

the multi-generational era of Assad family rule in Syria has collapsed, all but overnight before our eyes. In many ways as a direct consequence of the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, insofar as Hezbollah backed Assad and helped make his government an effective extension of Iranian and Russian power. It turns out that for Israel, following October the 7th, 2023, were, was in fact the answer, and there have, in fact, been military solutions to its problems. Iran's principal methods of deterrence have now been all but eliminated.

So will Tehran's regime feel the need to dash for the bomb to restore deterrence? Will President Trump return to maximum pressure? Will he be open to an opportunity to support the Israelis and strikes that could eliminate the Iranian nuclear program, or even directly threaten the regime? It's too soon to answer these questions definitively. But Israelis know that Iran is the author of their troubles, to which there will be no substantial relief without a fundamental change in the character of the Iranian regime. Israeli security officials, with one relatively coordinated voice, would like Americans to appreciate

that their Iranian threat is our Iranian threat, which in turn is linked to the threats to American security posed by Russia, China, and North Korea. I think their case is strong. There's much for Americans to learn from the first year of Israel's war. from both its failures and its successes. At the level of war fighting, both the Hamas attack on October 7th and the Israeli offensive campaign in the north since mid-September 2024, highlight how ambiguity, deception, and surprise, in a word, strategy, in the older sense of the term, as the employment of stratagems or generals' tricks, allow a weaker party to overcome

its operational disadvantages, or a stronger party to overperform with an already decent hand. Indeed, when a stronger party can leverage overmatch and intelligence and strike capabilities for the targets that matter, conditions for lasting offensive success, including successful ground maneuver, can be generated. Sitting here considering what Americans should conclude from all this, here are my questions. How far from such overmatch is China in the Western Pacific? What is its level of access to our supply chains, and how is it planning to use that access as part of a shaping or offensive campaign? What will our version of the beeper attacks be? What is China's intelligence picture of targets on Taiwan, on Guam, in Hawaii?

What if the PLA actually tries to win the war, to generate a territorial fate accompli swiftly, and then rely on its superior industrial base, not to mention its nuclear capacity, to ward off American attempts to liberate seas terrain? the comparisons with Israel's northern war, while not perfect, are there. Two opposing reconnaissance strike complexes, one designed to be used as a defensive wall. But walls can be stormed, for example, when the sensors that help compose those walls have been blinded, or when the men meant to watch them have been complacent, or when their commanders have been killed before orders can be issued. What kinds of ambiguity and deception could generate a strategic context in which such battlefield progress could be made in the Pacific. Hamas's manipulations of the worker permit

question in the years leading up to October 7th, call to mind Franklin Roosevelt's famous remarks to Congress on December the 8th, 1941. Everyone remembers the opening regarding the day that will live in infamy, but Roosevelt quickly moved on to condemn the Japanese for attacking Hawaii, even while, quote, at the solicitation of Japan, the United States was still in conversation with its government and its emperor, looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. In dastardly fashion, quote, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace, end quote. If the subject of ongoing hope-inducing negotiations then was the resolution of tensions over

China in the American oil and gas embargo on Japan, well, what will it be for us today? In a Harris administration, one might have been inclined to say it would have been talks about climate change. In a Trump administration, could it be talks about trade? One other thing I noticed during my time in Israel. At the level of grand strategy in international politics, Israel and the United States have rarely, if ever, occupied such divergent mental universes, at least in recent years. The Israeli mentality today is that World War III is already underway, and they are fighting in one of its early stages. Suffice it to say that this is not the prevailing American mentality

on either the right or the left. Americans of both parties would prefer to manage this conflict to delink it from others to lower its significance so we can prioritize solving bigger problems. The Israelis look at their Iran problem and note that their unilateral options regarding its solution are weak. So they are manning their walls

and they have a coherent military theory of how to use them to survive. The history of human politics which begins in the Middle East, by the way, is a history of walls, and so it has been in Israel. Walls as defenses, walls as boundaries, walls as memories, and as sources of meaning.

These less visible 21st century walls of the reconnaissance strike complexes are the latest chapter in the extraordinary history of Zionism. Regarding the Israeli attitude toward the interconnection of Eurasian threats and the likelihood that World War III is just beginning, one senior Israeli official told me, This quote, you are knowing but not understanding, end quote.

There's a good chance he's right. If there's any one lesson from Israel's violent year, it is that walls can still come tumbling down. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.