The Dispatch Podcast - Gaza Changed Urban Warfare | Interview: John Spencer

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Jamie is joined by John Spencer, an author, former colonel in the California State Guard, and urban warfare expert with 25 years of experience in the Army, to examine Israel’s tactics in Gaza and weigh in on allegations the IDF is committing genocide and/or war crimes. The Agenda: —Joe Rogan accuses Israel of genocide —John’s experience in Gaza —War is not quantitative —How to determine proportionality —"High threshold of civilian death" —We are at war with ignorance —H.R. McMaster’s “zero-dark-thirty fallacy” —Reception of his expertise in Ukraine vs. Gaza Show Notes: —John: Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is John Spencer. He is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, co-director of the Urban Warfare Project, host of the Urban Warfare podcast, founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare, author of several books, including Understanding Urban Warfare. He also spent 25 years in the Army before joining the California National Guard as a colonel, or at least rising to the rank as a colonel there. And as you imagine, given his background, we talk extensively about the war in Gaza, what is truth and what is false about accusations of Israel doing harsh tactics in Gaza, killing too many civilians, getting expert wisdom and insight into what is actually going on there. I think you will find this podcast informative and interesting, just like I did. Without further ado, I give you Mr. John Spencer. Colonel John Spencer, welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. Thanks for having me. In our

Forespondents, I was very happy to hear when you first responded, or at least your most recently responded yesterday saying that you don't talk politics, so you don't know if you're right for the show. That's exactly right for this episode, definitely. There will be no politics in this episode because we were looking for your expertise. And as the listeners have heard in my intro, you have extensive expertise in urban warfare. But if you could just briefly maybe just walk us through your background starting in the military to how you became kind of one of the universally recognized experts on urban warfare. Sure. And thanks, James. Thanks for having me. It's, well, I'll say it's unique that I say I don't do politics, but all war is

politics. So it's, and I taught strategy at West Point, so complicated. From my background, I served 25 years in the U.S. Army as an infantry soldier and officer that included two combat tours, year-long combat tours in Iraq, so a little bit of urban warfare myself. Along my tour, I was an advisor to a four-star general in the Pentagon where I started my academic career, really looking at large megacities. And that was in 2014. Could a military do an operation in a city bigger 10 million? I moved to West Point. I started teaching strategy. I stood up a research center that I now worked for and started writing about urban warfare over a decade ago, and that started my journey into, you know, if somebody's relying on just their experience, then you probably

shouldn't listen to them, because war has a very long history, almost to the history of civilizations. In 2018, I became the chair of urban warfare studies for the Modern War Institute, which is that research center that helped stand up, where I got the job of traveling the world and going into war zones and studying battles firsthand and then writing about them. So I have multiple books on urban warfare, over 100 articles, and have been to many places that others just haven't been to, especially Gaza. So I just got back a couple weeks ago from Gaza, from Incon Unis, where I interviewed everybody from the prime minister, the chief of the military, to division commander in the fight, battalion commanders, brigade commanders, and walking the ground of what

I view is the biggest military challenge any military is faced in modern history. Well, let's get into that a little bit by starting with a tweet that you tweeted. We're recording this on Friday. I think it was either yesterday or the day before to Joe Rogan. You said, at Joe Rogan, you were very wrong on Israel and how this war is going in Gaza. I just got back from Gaza. I'm one of the world's leading experts in urban warfare. Let's have a conversation. about facts, opinions, disinformation, myths about it in the history of warfare. And that was in response to a video that I watched that Joe Rogan talked about the war in Gaza with not an expert, but a comedian, or at least I didn't find him very funny, but it's a supposed

comedian. And he said the following, in part. They're always saying they're only targeting Hamas and everybody else is a casualty. Well, if those are just unarmed civilians and they're walking alone, and that's what they appear to be, and you just blast them from the sky with robots, if you can't talk about that, if you can't say that's real, what you're saying is that is genocide is okay, as long as we're doing it, and you're saying that from the perspective of someone who literally went through the Holocaust and your people, your tribe, you went through the Holocaust, and now you're willing to do

it. I think it was in the context of a video which is going around the internet. We don't have much context to it, who those four people are where either a jet or a drone missile takes them out. It's an incredibly serious charge that Holocaust survivors are committing a genocide in Gaza. You were an expert in urban warfare. You said you just got back from Israel. How do you respond to that? I want to respond to it over a long-form conversation because in less than a minute, there are so many errors in just interpreting what we can see from a video.

And I wasn't challenging, Joe. Actually, I was like, okay, let me help you understand what we all are looking at. Even with all that we don't know, let me help you with all the words you just said. About four adult males, at one point they said kids. but you can hear in the interpretation of what is being viewed what is over six months of ignorance on war and warfare, in my opinion. And I actually really respect Joe and want to have a conversation because he's had other guests who actually have been to war

that still don't understand what this war is. In that video, there are four people walking on a road. there's unarmed civilians well there is no way to know who is civilian and who is Hamas in a video because Hamas doesn't wear a uniform and I think one of the greatest fallacies that most people don't understand

is that you don't have to be carrying a weapon to be a combatant. There's only two things in war, a combatant and a non-combatant. And if you're a member of Hamas, you're a combatant and I can kill you while you're sleeping. It is literally

the way that the laws of war work is if you're an active member of the combatant force and Hamas is a military not a terrorist organization and because of that video you have no idea what those four individuals were doing before the video started they could have came out of a tunnel actually then what is known about that is that they're in an area where no civilians are supposed to be an active combat area that's been evacuated you don't know if the facial recognition identifies who they're are and what they're doing, how they present hostile intent. But it actually is a video that facilitated confirmation bias because there is a vocal minority

who believe Israel is targeting civilians purposely, which would be one of the requirements in the accusation, which is like most people who heard that, an accusation that is very I don't know the right word. To use the word genocide, which was created by people trying to let the world understand what happened in the Holocaust where six million Jews were purposely massacred, put in ovens, given chemicals, just slaughtered on purpose intent. So to use that video to show that since you don't know who those individuals were, what they were doing, if they're members, of the other combatant force to say that it proves the entire theory that the IDF in Gaza is targeting civilians despite the fact that there's not a single piece of evidence to show that they have actually targeted a civilian but that's though this one video is now the gym of the really the people with interesting you know intentions to show the world look we were right that all the damage that's been done was done on purpose to to punish which is collective punishment, which is a term in law of war, it proves everything. And it's actually the farthest from that. I want to go to your experience in Gaza, but just one last point on

the Joe Rogan video. You know, when I see videos like that and people talking about, you know, Israel deliberately targeting civilians, I think back to the Kahan Commission after the Lebanon war in 82, where they held Ariel Shron accountable, not for what he did, but what he should have known others were doing, what seems to be a pretty high standard showing that Israel holds its own soldiers and leaders accountable for conduct that it conducted war that is unlawful. I mean, I don't know if you want to speak to that. Sure. What militaries that you know that are moral due to soldiers who do things that are unlawful

and immoral? That's right. Actually, so in the history of war, even as we're speaking, there are very few moral military forces. Yeah, if you take a collective, if you count Russia, Syria, Hamas, Iran, all the Iraq, all the people who don't follow the law of war. But those who do follow the law of war, and I've spent a lot of time with the idea, not only do they follow all the laws of war, they follow an internal, professional military ethic, as in what do we do? And that's the same with my military, the U.S. military when I served, and one of the evidence of that is the conduct

of investigation on any accusation of basically soldiers doing the wrong thing, which happens, right? The U.S. military has its own history of soldiers doing really bad things. And one of the examples of a moral force is that it has a justice system separate then, like, because we can talk about Russia, how nobody can hold Russia accountable for everything it does illegally in accordance with all law, international law, period. But the idea of if there's ever been an accusation, they do an investigation and hold soldiers who do make mistakes, who do at times have wrong intentions,

and they hold them accountable. And that's a big part of who they are, who a Western military with a value system who are moral and execution of lethal force, killing people in war, which is horrible. war is killing and destruction and war is the pursuit of political objectives and when people try to create a situation where you think they're such thing as a bloodless war you know robots killing each other it's it's fiction it's never going to happen it hasn't happened yet and it's not going to

you mentioned you were on the ground in gaza recently um what did you see there uh did anything surprise you did anything make you rethink any of the thoughts that you had previously just what was your experience. Yeah, actually, it was a second trip I've taken into Gaza since the war began. And every time I've gone, despite having studied that exact type of war for over decade and having 25 years in military experience, my mind still gets blown on the challenges that the idea have faced in this war. Everything from, no matter what they do, they're accused of doing the wrong thing, despite the actual being on the ground and watching them, uh, systematically dismantle Hamas, a military of over 30,000 fighters in 400 miles of tunnels.

And yes, the tunnels have been the one thing that, and I teach division level classes to divisions how to do large-scale urban operations, to include underground. What do you do with the underground? And I still didn't imagine the complexity of the challenge with the size of the military embedded in dense urban terrain, embedded in a population in which they want to get as many people killed. I actually teach classes on human shields, and Hamas is the example. But Hamas, and this is the problem too with a terrorist evil organization,

they can say things for some reason the world doesn't take their words to meaning. When Hamas says, I want as many of my people, the civilians to die as possible, I want to repeat October 7th as many times as I ever can. they don't take them for granted, but being on the ground and seeing the idea have to go block by block, house by house, tunnel by tunnel. And I was in one of the biggest tunnels they found back in December. The scale of it still blows my mind as a military strategist and tactician. It's like, how are you doing this? How are you clearing urban terrain with killing so few civilians? And that doesn't seem palpable to the world because they don't understand what's going on. And they,

they use these numbers and think that war is quantitative. Like, what's your civilian to combatant ratio? But understanding that I live in that world, too, in the social media where, you know, a single video like the one that Joe Rogan showed, or the one, you know, back in November when a terrorist bomb went off course and exploded in a parking lot of a hospital, and the world said 900 civilians died and it ended up being less than 15 or 20. nobody really knows when i'm on the ground i get my mind blown one of like just the sheer scale of the density of the urban terrain how you find the tunnels how you find hamas who is literally dressing up um as wounded in in in wheelchairs and hundreds to a thousand of them in every hospital

and despite what they do the misinformation the misinformation is the only thing that gets reported I actually heard a very powerful person maybe in politics recently say that the world is tired of seeing wounded or wounded children being taken to bombed hospitals or destroyed hospitals in Gaza. And that's despite the fact that that person should know better is that there's not been a single hospital in Gaza destroyed. There's been not a single hospital in Gaza that's been taken offline. Every one of them still functioning even after the IDF searched everyone since they have found Hamas illegally using them for military purposes. And there's six additional field hospitals. There's not a single destroyed hospital in Gaza. John, that's actually something I had not heard, and I find that pretty interesting.

So what you're saying is that despite the fighting in all of these hospitals, they are all up and running again? Correct. Why do you think Al-Shifa Hospital, the biggest hospital in Gaza, which was searched? And the world went crazy when it went searched, even though I wrote an article about, if you think that's bad, look at the history of hospitals and how ISIS used them and we destroyed them, as in flattened them, like in the Battle of Missou, with airstrikes, with white phosphorus to help the Iraqi security forces attack the hospital that the enemy was using. Or how in the second battle of Volusia, it was the first objective of the U.S. military because it was being used as a propaganda tool to convince the world that the U.S. military doesn't fight morally. Yes, not a single hospital to include Al-Shefa, which they left quickly after destroying the tunnel that they found in it. And then a thousand Hamas remnants went back into it because they thought it was a protection.

And the IDF took it recently. So again, it doesn't get reported. The IDF went back to that hospital, secured it without bombing it, without attacking it. Yes, they had to shoot back at people that were shooting at them while they were bringing in food. water fuel to the hospital, but they captured, they killed 200 Hamas terrorists in that hospital, captured over 600 and killed zero civilians in the hospital. You mentioned numbers earlier, and that's not new in this conflict. Even before the Gaza war, you would look over the last 10 years and they would say, you know, 8,000 Palestinians killed

and only 300 Israelis killed. And the numbers now are, you know, 30,000. or so, according to the Hamas ministry in Gaza, health ministry in Gaza, versus those who died on October 7th and also the soldiers who died fighting in Gaza. How in the history of warfare do we, should we interpret numbers like this? Do we judge the morality of the side by numbers? Is there a number that when you take a multiple, then you say this, you know, the fighting army, even if they're just in going after this, this battle shouldn't continue because the numbers are getting too high. How in the history of warfare do we, do we understand numbers? Yeah, this has been the greatest travesty, I think, of our times is that the fact that people believe there is a number

that means that equates to the purpose of the attacking military, that it equates to a moral value of the target. So it's a fact that, 32,000 civilians have not died in Gaza. That's a fact. Even if I took Hamas's numbers, which I've never seen a war in which we take the enemies, terrorist organizations, numbers to and run them every day

across every news channel of the world as the fact that no matter what the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says, that's the number, down to the single digit. And as a student of urban warfare, I can tell you that that's not physically possible. It just never has been, never will be. In every urban battle, to include the ones the U.S. military executed and supervised, you've never known what the civilian casualty was in real time down to the single digit.

That's just lunacy that people run with it and believe it. Now, that's a great question on whether, is there a number? And I've gotten this, I was getting this at the beginning of the war. Like, is there a number in which it's too much? No, there's not. There is a number in the law of war the way it works. as military necessity, is the entire war necessary? If you believe that October 7th was truly an invasion of southern Israel with the intent to destroy

Israel and to kill all Jews, which is almost verbatim the wording of the enemy force, of Hamas, if you believe that, then you believe that it's an existential threat, and that calculates into whether the war is necessary. But even then, you have to go into proportionality, which has been, again, with people have no clue on what war is, started using the word proportionality and the number of civilians killed on October 7th, you know, 1,200 Israelis, with some of those being IDF, but the vast majority of them being babies, men, women, and children, civilians, non-combatants. Somebody taking that number and then say, well, that's the number we should use to compare the number of non-compatants

dying in the war in Gaza. And that's not, again, that's not the way it works. It's not a way proportionality works. The way it works is a military has to use the amount of force necessary to achieve the goal, in this case, to remove the existential threat. So that's the start of the war. And then in every operation, every strike, every round fired, you make a calculation on if there is going to be civilian casualties, if there's going to be collateral damage, you've done what's called a proportionality assessment where you say, all right, This is what I'm targeting, the military target. And only, like, that's the fundamental principle of war is do not target civilians.

Russia doesn't follow that, but do not target civilians, target only military targets. And when you do target military targets, do an assessment of the value of that target compared to the known collateral damage and have you done everything feasible, reasonable, and possible to limit collateral damage, as in evacuate the civilians, get them out of harm. arm's way and then take the operation. That's where the numbers come into play. So if you have a strike, let's say in the Jabalya city, they call it a refugee camp, but it's not, where they dropped a very large bomb on a city which was supposed to be evacuated at an underground target that was, you know, 100 feet underground, and a military commander is under there. That's just one

example that people could use to say, is it proportionate? Did they use the appropriate force? well, a 2,000 pound bond to reach 100 feet underground. And how many civilians do they think would die if we knew when they conducted the attack? And what did they do to try to limit the attack? Well, if it's a military commander of a very large unit, it has high value. And then what's the force do you need to get to it? That gets to the number, Jamie. There is no number.

I've never seen a war in the history of war where somebody says, okay, what is your combatant to civilian death ratio? and that means whether you should continue the operation because they don't one understand how much the IDF have actually done to bring the number down to an incredibly low level in comparison to the military objective and what the actions of the enemy are

or in comparison to any other war that's ever been conducted and this is really getting to people that go on podcast shows who've actually been in wars and say they're being way too destructive, They're killing way too many civilians. We wouldn't do that. Jamie, what do you think the United States of America would do if a force invaded our land across the ground, slaughtered, raped, massacred, thousands of civilians, took thousands of civilians back into enemy territory,

and then started raining down rockets on our cities like Los Angeles or New York, wherever? I can tell you with great confidence that the U.S. would respond. respond and overwhelming, immediate lethal force to remove that existential threat, to make the rocket stop raining on our cities and to bring our people home. And I can give you an example if you want that nobody wants to listen to, the Battle of Manila, 1945. There were over 3,000 U.S. and British soldiers, civilians, men, women, and children being tortured, starved, brutalized in the city of Manila by the Japanese force that had took the

territory and we evacuated. Two years later, we regained the shrink in the Pacific and started our counter campaign to liberate. And General MacArthur, the U.S. military commander said, go to Manila and bring our people home. There were 17,000 Japanese Navy defending the city and they were literally going to defend the city to the death, and there's no surrendering of them. You couldn't convince the enemy that it was futile to resist the U.S. military because they would actually commit Harry Carey

in the last moments of the battle. 17,000 defenders in a city of 1.1 million Philippine civilians. We attacked with over a division, two divisions of 37,000 Americans. to get 4,000 American civilians and prisoners of war home. And there were 100,000 civilians killed in that battle. And it didn't hit the national news that it shouldn't have happened. Because of the enemy, and which is interesting, again, if there was a number of 32,000 that the enemy was providing in Gaza,

like in Manila, a great majority of those were killed by the enemy. the Japanese were slaughtering civilians and stacking them in the basements of bodies by five high and just slaughtering the civilians because they didn't care about the civilians they actually wanted the civilians to die but if anybody thinks there's an alternative

to taking an enemy territory that has been very well defended urban territory that has a sub-training like Manila had sub-training as well and actually MacArthur said you can't have air power you can't use bombs you can't have any unobserved artillery

because he didn't want Manila destroyed and Manila was still destroyed and 100,000 civilians were killed because if as an enemy who's willing to die for the ground I can actually make it very costly on you and on the civilians when you try. But John, but I think you alluded to it. It does seem, is there any comparison,

you mentioned the extent of the tunnels underground, but comparison to a battle that America has fought where, you know, we have the General Atlantic and Pacific, kind of protecting most of our civilian population. We're not really next door to most of the enemies that we fought. We certainly are not in wars with Mexico and Canada. But Israel, while fighting is still getting rockets into the country. So, I mean, there is an ongoing battle while, you know, in Israel proper, while they're fighting Gaza. How does that distinguish it from some of the recent complex America fought in Afghanistan and Iraq? Greatly. So much so you would think that people would stop trying to make comparisons to the battles of Iraq in Syria and Afghanistan. There is no similarity. There is no similarity in modern times to a 30,000 military force in over 400 miles of tunnels going from 15 feet to 300 feet underground with shooting 12,000 to 15,000 rockets at your civilians behind the military. And actually, when I was in Gaza in December, I,

I was in Gaza as a rocket was fired at Tel Avivu. It was mind-blown. No comparison to a combatant who is not only using human shields, it's using human sacrifice. They actually want the, and no comparison to a military who doesn't want to defeat you. This military doesn't want to defeat Israel. This military wants the world to fall into their strategy, which they have, which is to think that it's too costly to get Hamas. to bring the hostages home, to destroy a military in its military capability. The world has fallen into its strategy, which is not to resist.

It is to just buy enough time for the United States, the only superpower left in the world, to stop Israel and say, look, Israel, I know you have the right to defend yourself. I got it, but it's costing too much. What do you mean is costing? Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So, John, I searched the Internet to try to find criticism to see if there are any experts who are trying to contrast. And I did find one, and I'd just like to read a couple of his quotes and respond. His name is Larry Lewis, the director of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Naval Analysis. He wrote this on Just Security. I think you alluded to one of the points earlier. But he wrote, the IDF also appears to have adopted a high threshold for acceptable civilian

loss in Gaza. This leads to the IDF making targeted decisions that create significant numbers of civilian casualties, such an October 31st strike on the refugee complex in Jabalaya. The level of civilian harm that resulted from that strike is something we have not seen U.S. forces doing deliberately in recent operations. The IDF seems willing to conduct attacks knowing that scores or even hundreds of civilians will be harmed, it appears that Israel's risk tolerance for civilian harm compared to expected operational benefits is significantly different than in the past. How do you respond? I mean, it's not, it's not,

it's actually not, um, funny. It's actually very dangerous because it's somebody, one, I know that I know the article because it misquotes me where somebody else quoted me saying that Israel has created a gold standard, which I strongly disagree with and actually published an article saying, I didn't say that. I said that they created a new standard, which I actually think is problematic. if people think it'll repeat it. But what that author does, and I don't know if you notice how many times he says,

appears to be. Appears is an assumption, an assumption is making an ass out of you and me, to be frank. But the problem is that in order he's doing, even though that author should know better, because he actually has experience

in a law of armed conflict, effects-based condemnation. Because we fear what we don't know. So because that author doesn't know what the target was in that one strike he uses as an example, which I actually used what you didn't catch it a few minutes ago in our conversation, where you had a target that was underground. So when the U.S. military has faced targets underground, but just not in an urban area. We dropped a 30,000 pound bomb on a 30,000 pound bomb on a bunker in Iraq

in Taji, but it was a military base. The problem is that there is no military bases in Gaza, Hamas built its entire military industrial bus, all their tunnels, underneath buildings. And what I learned in my visits is actually I used to think that Hamas built their tunnels under schools and U.N. facilities and things like that. And what I've learned is that in a lot of cases, no, they built their tunnel and then built the school on top of it. So the problem with that strike in saying appears to be making a targeted decision and accept a higher level of civilian tolerance. Okay. So just in that statement, appears. So that means you don't know what they were actually engaging. And this is the point where

the world has become, it doesn't matter what the IDF Israel says, they're lying, right? So it doesn't matter what the terrorist organization that created the greatest disgusting attack on humans in modern history in the October 7th attack. But we're going to start believing everything they say. So that's really like where the world's lost their mind, like IDF lying. Hamas terrorists telling the truth. But so in this strike, he appears to have taken a higher level of civilian tolerance. Again, like the video, so you're saying that anybody who is dressed in civilians in that strike in Jabalya was a non-combatant civilian. Because the day after, the morning after, all I saw were adult military age mills surrounding that crater in an area which was told they evacuate.

But you're saying that all the civilians, because Hamas doesn't wear military uniforms, and anyone that died on that strike, who wasn't using, who wasn't a civilian, I can't prove if they were a combatant, they're all a civilian death. So when the IDF made their decision, and this is what I call it effects-based condemnation, this person who should know better is looking at what happened and said, clearly by the effect, the IDF had the intention of killing civilians or had a higher tolerance of civilians. That's not the way the law of war works. The law of war works is before Israel took the strike, what were they targeting? So they say they were targeting a Hamas commander and his men in a deep buried military tunnel underneath the civilian building. And then you would have to know what Israel knew about the civilian presence and what did they do to limit collateral damage before the strike based on what the target was. all that's not in that statement. It's all assumptions and it's actually ridiculous. Let me just quote one more part of it to get you to respond.

He says, what we are witnessing in Gaza is the IDF employing several precautionary measures that they have used before with no tangible evidence of data collection, analysis, and adaptation for the current environment. The cut and paste approach to precautionary measures we see by the IDF falls far short of the gold standard for civilian harm mitigation that is telling. when commentary is lauding the IDF can cite only those measures. Great. No, I think that's a great quote, again, to pick apart the anti-intellectual aspects of that

amount of analysis, right? So this is what people interpret what they can see. What we see. Well, that's not what I see since I've been on the ground, and I'm sure that author hasn't been on the ground, and asked the idea of what steps are you taking to minimize in targeting or in operations to minimize civilian harm. So one of the aspects of that common is that other tools that we've seen in the past that have had minimal effect, basically saying that doesn't matter what the IDF does,

it matters what the effect is, right, which again is a false statement. And one of the pieces of evidence that I have collected that would totally disprove that is one being on the ground with the IDF civilian harm mitigation set. commanded by a one-star general, whose only job is to track civilians and to issue the guidance to civilians, where to go, where to stay out of harm's way, how to get away from areas where there are is combat. And they're using technologies that no military has ever used and a, what we call a common operational pitcher, to inform military decisions, not to inform the world and make the world

feel better about war. to inform military decisions in accordance with the legal obligations in urban combat, as in do you know how many civilians are there? And are you doing everything physically possible to get them out of harm's way? This is the use of their maps, right? The IDF started handing out their map is called a GRG. It's a map with a bunch of, you know, they basically cut parts of the city up in the match. Now they're using that map and the presence of any cell phone, whether it's on or off.

satellite imagery, drones going in, to see if there are any civilians left in the environment and so they can move forward and clear. Because it doesn't matter what type of misappropriation of other wars you're applying. This is about clearing the enemy's territory, hostile environment, and how to do it with the minimal number of civilians' death. But the evidence that I've collected from being on the ground and not just watching YouTube videos or TikTok videos or whatever we can get from open source intelligence and seeing what the IDF are doing in their decisions

and in their actions to limit civilian casualties and it's historic by definition of the word it's never been done in the history of war before it wasn't what the United States did in its battles it wasn't what the United States advised the Iraqis to do in their battles it's just not factual and riddled with ignorance We are literally at war with ignorance. I saw General Petraeus, you have a given interview.

He said, this whole context is the most fiendishly difficult operation, imaginable, speaking of where Israel is fighting. Other than this gentleman who I quoted from, is there a debate within the expert community over what IDF is doing, or is there a consensus that, you know, they're doing their best to avoid civilian casualties? the debate in the expert urban warfare world? That's a great question. One, you'd have to tell me how we define an expert as people even challenged that I'm an expert, right? So if you don't believe General Petraeus, one of the greatest warrior scholars, not based on his experience as the commander, like the head military commander of the entire war in Iraq, of the entire war in Afghanistan, the former director of the CIA, a PhD, literally, a PhD, encounter insurgency. If you don't believe him, but finally, you don't believe me.

Is there a debate that it could be done any other way? There is not a debate, but there is a fallacy. A really great, again, another warrior scholar who has studied the entire history of the world, General, the war, not the world, General McMaster, who was, you know, again, another high-level commander for the U.S. military, and the national security advisor for President Trump, wrote an article about imagining the future war, and he called them fallacies. And one of them was called the Zero Dark 30 fallacy that riddles U.S. foreign policy and a military. So this gets to whether there's a debate in military circles, as in military advisors or military analysts, it could be done in another way. Look, General Petraeus is saying that nobody's ever faced it, and the way they're doing is the right way.

Yes, it will matter how you maintain international will, but this is about clearing contested dense urban terrain like we have had to do a very few times in our entire 200-plus-year history, clearing dense urban terrain from a combatant who can't be convinced to surrender or leave the terrain. McMaster talked about the Zero Dark 30 fallacy, which is the only people I've heard debate this

is the people that you see saying that there's another, other way. You could do commando raise strategic targeting of Hamas leaders. It's called the zero dark 30 fallacy that you could achieve, you could win a war through that. And it

holds in place things like time. John, just but I think what is just to make sure the listeners get in the dispatch listeners, I think are very smart. But when you say the 30 dark 30, it's the kind of the bin Laden raid in and out of Pakistan without, you know, civilians dying, and you get your target.

Correct. That's the fallacy. And he was actually writing, he wrote an article about the U.S. military relying on that theory that that could achieve your strategic goals for the future. And yet you wouldn't need a massive conventional capability to include ground forces to achieve your goal, whether it's to take what the enemy values, his strategic centers of gravity, whether that's his cities. or destroy his military, that you're not going to do that through zero dark 30 raids,

special forces conducting precision, intelligence-driven raids into enemy territory that miraculously they're not defending and you surprise them. It isn't going to happen in Gaza. It only happened in Pakistan where bin Laden, after 10 years, we found enough intelligence to say he's probably at that house. and we can get in very quickly before the Pakistan government and military, a few blocks down the street, knows we're there. That's not going to happen in any case in Gaza. It's definitely not going to happen in southern Gaza. And if you did do it, like the one raid that Israel did

to retrieve two of its hostages, which Israel was greatly criticized on using firepower to cover the forces that were going in there, the idea that you could do it without a lot of destruction and civilian casualties is also a fallacy, a myth. That's in the expert circles, then the only real pushback is an ideal that you could do it in a different way. And holding time constant, because in war, people think that there's unlimited time. And clearly in this war, there hasn't been unlimited time for Israel to maintain the will of the United States population to continue to destroy Hamas like everybody agreed needed to happen. But the time factor too is like, okay, let's stop everything. And just leave the hostages in captivity, leave some rockets,

a lot less, raining down on Israel. They can shoot those out of the sky, right? Just leave, just wait. You know, that's the problem with any alternative. It is driven by time and, you know, it totally discounts the fact that this massive other terrorist military, way more massive by tenfold, is attacking daily in northern Israel, that Hezbollah is attacking. Let me close on two questions. Sure. One is if this standard of warfare that some of the critics of Israel are making wins the day that if you are a. enemy and you hide and build facilities under hospitals and civilian territories takes hold, if you can't really fight that enemy, what is the consequences that, what will the consequences be for the Western world fighting militaries around the world in Americans in particular?

Defeat, that's the consequence. If this theory of the way that war should happen is defeat, it means no matter what the enemy does to you and your people, as long as they create an environment, they'll make it so costly that you decide that you cannot respond. So this is the Iranian strategy working. So that's who wins in this war, ultimately. Hamas could win a great victory if they survived the war, but basically Iran would win on the strategy and the architecture of a violent world that they're trying to impose on the Middle East. Develop proxies. attack Israel and the United States and create an environment where its population say,

look, I understand, you know, they attacked us on Pearl Harbor, but they're in their cities and they're in Tokyo. You can't get to them, so we should just not respond. It leads to a much more violent world, in my opinion, and it leads to a point where the Western military, which relies heavily on four forms of national power, one of those being military, that says, look, I don't care how strong you are. We think that what is your civilian casualty count going to be when you go into that war?

And we as the people decide that, well, we don't think it's necessary to fight that Nazi force wants to take over the world, or that terrorist army that's been built, or that Iran who wants a nuclear weapon to drop it on its own. neighbors. Well, we don't care. Civilians will die. It's the ideal that in any war, you could have a bloodless war,

and it's a very violent world because just like the rise of terrorism in the 1970s, if you don't respond to it, it's a proven strategy that will work and it will happen over and over and over again until you do respond to it. I don't like war either, but there's no history. There's no rationale. There's no history of mankind that says there will be no wars needed to protect people. Let me close on this question. We focused on the war in Gaza today, but you've written on many other conflicts, including recently a lot on Ukraine-Russia conflict. I'm interested just if you have a comparison contrast, how your expert advice was received when you were writing about Ukraine more versus what you're writing now about Israel. If you've seen a difference in reaction

from mainstream media outlets. Well, again, people can have opinions. Well, facts don't have opinions. And lots of people have opinions. When I was covering the Ukraine war, and people criticized me for abandoning coverage. I mean, I'm a researcher. I research wars.

I was getting, you know, I was doing 15 to 20 mainstream media interviews a day on Ukraine. And I get zero on Israel. Maybe they found better experts, I guess. or maybe there's a narrative that everything is negative and there's no hope or we're actually hoping for the bad guys to win. I don't know what, I can't speak for other people,

but I can tell you what the evidence is. In my trips into Ukraine, doing research, a lot of people were interested in that. Nobody's interested in my research on what's going on in Gaza. John, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Thanks for having, Jamie. You know, Thank you.