The Team House - Urban Warfare Isn't an Alibi | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

In this episode of Eyes on Geopolitics, Dee and Andy Milburn discuss the complexities of urban warfare, particularly in the context of the Gaza conflict. They explore the high civilian casualty rates, the military decision-making processes, and the ethical implications of targeting practices. The conversation delves into the role of intelligence, the challenges of verifying targets, and the impact of civilian deaths on future conflicts. Andy emphasizes the need for restraint and the consequences of treating civilian casualties as an acceptable cost of military operations.Andy's article: https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/gaza-and-the-conduct-of-urban-war-civilian-harm-risk-and-responsibility/00:00 — Gaza War Explained01:17 — Urban Warfare Targeting03:40 — Civilian Casualties Breakdown09:27 — Rules of War in Cities16:03 — Targeting Mistakes & Intel25:32 — Evacuation Warnings in Gaza33:40 — Human Shields Explained40:15 — AI Targeting & BlowbackBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Eyes on Geopolitics, a special on today. I'm joined by Andy Milburn. Of course, you know him. All his links are in the description. Check them out there, of course. He's got a great new article that he put out on War on the Rocks. That link is also in the description, so check it out.

And basically, I want to do it justice. You know, it's called Gaza and the Conduct of Urban War, Civilian Harm, Risk, and Responsibility. The first line pops out to me. You know, urban warfare is often invoked as an alibi. Dense terrain and embedded enemy, human shields, and imperfect intelligence. You guys, we're going to talk about the article, but please go check it out. That link is in the description. Andy, what's up, man?

It's good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too. Thanks very much for having me on. Please. This is your show, too. So I think, you know, probably the best way of doing this, of course, you're the producer is, I can give you just an overview of the article. For those of our audience,

please do read it. Save you, save you that trial. By the way, so the article came out in War on the Rocks yesterday, and, you know, I've written, I'm not a prolific article writer, but I've had a number of articles published. I would say just as far as direct feedback, this is solicited, more direct feedback than any other article that I have written just in the, you know, the first 24 hours. It was out.

It was published in the early bird, which is kind of the circular that goes out every day. It's not sent out by DOD, but it goes out throughout DOD. It's produced by, I think it's the military times, and it's a compilation of top, you know, fence news over the previous 24-hour period, and it was on that this morning. And yeah, I didn't, you know, honestly, this is a topic, as you know, that I've been looking at researching for a while. It plays to my background. I'll talk about that in a little bit, and it's part of the research for my book. I do want to say before I start talking about this thing, you know, the research, a lot of it came from personal interviews, over 50 interviews, conduct.

with members of the IDF, most of whom were involved in the targeting process at some stage. A lot of them were commanders, some of them were intelligence officers, targeters, and even the ones who defended the methodology were open and honest about how it is done. So I was able to get beneath the surface of, you know, hey, we have these procedures. and look at how exactly those procedures were implemented. So, yeah, so, you know, to your point, the urban warfare is often treated as an alibi. You know, the dense terrain, an embedded enemy, human shields,

just the uncertainty of war, imperfect intelligence. You know, all of those are kind of used to justify harm to civilians or to explain civilian casualties. You know, just my article is, well, no, that by themselves they are not. You know, all of those things are real, but they don't explain outcomes by themselves. Because every modern military that has fought in cities in recent years faces uncertainty in civilian presence. And what distinguishes campaigns, it isn't how commanders respond to that uncertainty.

it is, I mean, it is, it's how commanders respond to that uncertainty. It is in the uncertainty itself. It's, you know, how do they prioritize risk? What levels of civilian harm, civilian death are treated as acceptable? And that's the core argument of my article. And I, you know, I begin, I point out the scale of civilian and death in Gaza is exceptional. And in terms in total numbers, and I talk about the fact that, you know, we're in the 70s of thousands and that the Lancet British paper points out that indeed the actual numbers may be as high as 40% higher than that when you factor in indirect deaths from starvation, from lack of medical care, you know, polluted water, whatever it may be. And so you're probably talking about civilian death toll of over 100,000, which is staggering.

But then, you know, you have to ask, so what percentage of those tens of thousands are combatants? That's really the question. And, you know, even when you look at just the demographics, the undisputed figures, right? two thirds of those figures are women and children. Now Hamas, aside from using them as suicide bombers, Hamas doesn't use women as fighters. And by children, I mean 16 or below, generally, you know, too low to be below military-aged males, right?

So two-thirds are women and children, obviously not combatants. Now, that already puts Gaza's death toll of civilians, ratio of civilians to combatants on a different level than, for instance, in Mosul, where combatants were around 50, you know, people can challenge my numbers, you can look these up, but between 45 and 60 percent of total deaths, right, and Fallujah around the same. You'd have to go all the way back to Grozny, right, in the 90s, Grosny 1 and 2, which Grosny is commonly regarded as the most civilian deaths. intensive battle since the Second World War.

You'd have to go back to that, find comparable numbers. And even then, they're not quite at the level. The ratios aren't quite the same. Grosnia was about, it was two-thirds. It was around 70%. But recently, this is coming from the Israelis, uncovered by investigative reporting. And again, you can look this up.

The Israelis themselves have come up with figures that show that 83% of those killed were civilians, which is an extraordinary, extraordinarily high toll. And when I say extraordinary, I'm not just shooting from the hip, I mean, compared to other battles in modern warfare, right? Was that leaked? What's that? Was that?

Yeah, it was leaked. Yeah, it was leaked and it was picked up by the Guardian and Israeli I can't remember the name of the outlet. It's a strange name. It's Flas 972 or something, but it's a well-known Israeli media outlet, and they have published those reports. So that's irrefutable that Israeli intelligence came up with those figures.

Those aren't produced by the health ministry or anything else that are coming from the Israelis themselves. So when, you know, my point is this, When civilian death reaches that scale and shows that level of demographic consistency, something's going on, all right? Something's going on beyond terrain, density, or enemy tactics because we had all of that shit in Mosul and Flujer. I was involved in both battles.

And so that's, you know, that invites a closer analysis of how force was applied because therein lies the answer to why those figures are so high. And this is an argument about intent, okay? I'm not, I'm not going, launching down the genocide route. It's an argument about process. Civilian deaths and war are not random accidents. They're the predictable outcome of how targets are, how targets are defined, how intelligence uncertainty is handled,

what weapons are chosen, and how much risk commanders are willing to accept, or for their own forces, or to transfer, at what point did they transfer that risk? What's the threshold for them transferring that risk under the civilian population? Look, I've commanded, as you know D, and this isn't me chest beating here,

but I've commanded U.S. forces in urban combat, including in Fallujah and Mosul. I've lived with the moral weight of the proving strikes where civilians might be present, where you're balancing that against your obligation to support the forces in the fight themselves, knowing that delays may result in more casualties for them. You know, I get it.

Those are not easy decisions, but I've had to make those decisions scores probably hundreds of times. And, you know, the other piece is that I know as well as anyone, that uncertainty never disappears in war. But in professional militaries, it's supposed to tighten restraint, not loosen it. So when intelligence is ambiguous, when you don't have a good handle on civilian patterns of life, or when you lose custody of a target, and you know, I can get into that

in a moment, what that means. The expectation is that strikes either slow down or they stop, you know, you pause precisely because the risk of killing civilians increases. And you may ask, Well, why do you care? Well, you care because, you know, as I've said before, we fight, we fight with the values that we represent in Western militaries, right? We don't adopt those at the enemy. But even if you don't give a shit, right, even if you don't give a shit about the civilian population, there are good pragmatic reasons not to slaughter them en masse because you are, you may be solving the immediate problem, but you're going to generate far greater problems for yourself down the line.

And again, I'm not shooting from the hippie. You can look at studies. There's a very good one done by Rand on insurgent regeneration in Afghanistan and the rock. And the link between that and civilian casualties. And there is definitely a strong link. In other words, you start killing civilians willy-nilly. You're creating anger, resentment that simmers and feeds right into that. Surgeon narrative. I mean, that's not rocket sciences. You can you can understand that. And in Gaza,

I can only imagine where something like 75% of families have lost people. I mean, close, you know, families, close relatives, I can't imagine the level of resentment and anger that is simmering. And if you and I were in that position, we would want to get revenge, even though we're not vengeful people, dear, at least you're not. But in Gaza, I mean, that's just human nature, right? Like, you know. Of course.

Yeah. Your mom dies. Why would you imagine otherwise? Why would you imagine that a population that is incurred that number of casualties, whether it's 70,000 or 100,000, in a 2 million, a two million total population, why would you assume that life would return to normal after that

and there would be no sense of resentment? I mean, imagine that happening in the United States city. I mean, all these casualties too have occurred in an area roughly the size of Philadelphia. So can you imagine 100,000 deaths in Philadelphia? It's just chaos everywhere you turn, right? Yeah, at least a single building. Another big. So anyway, that, that, you know, for those who accused me of being a bleeding hard and who cares and there, there are pragmatic reasons.

I personally care about the legal reasons and I care about the ethical reasons because I represent, I did represent the United States military and I believe in the values that we, that we represent, right? But there are those who don't give a shit about those values. And I would say, well, there's good pragmatic reasons. And you're going to undermine your cause. it's a you're going to tactical success will lead to strategic failure if you're simply slaughtering civilians anyway so you know i talked about hey when when the level of uncertainty goes up and you know you're not getting good intelligence you're not getting good patents of life uh then then then then you have to or you know for us in the u.s that means we show more restraint that doesn't

mean we see strikes altogether we don't support our forces we find you know other ways of doing it perhaps you know we lay we we have a greater alliance on direct fire um or we move more cautiously and sometimes that means incurring greater risk to your own troops and that's just the nature of the game that is that's what we're in i don't mean to say it suggests i mean look at feluzia as an example right 100% d and you know i've i was in philuja and um and i can tell you in in absolute contrast to the way the IDF operate in Gaza we went in the clearhead every single building we weren't allowed to blow buildings away we could under certain circumstances if we were taking fire but the level of authorization for that was was relatively high you know as a customarily

battalion level and yes that was frustrating at times and it was terrifying and you lost Marines Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can tell you, too, as an advisor, where every time we went in, we cleared buildings there had to be an American leading the way into, you know, knocking down the door, going down, going through the fatal funnel, down that hallway in the dark, just waiting for someone with a PKK to let rip. It was a terrifying, bloody experience. And when you were inside those buildings, and remember, NVGs are not, especially in the Marine Corps then, were pieces of crap. And so, you're. were you were at a disadvantage to your enemy. I don't mean to digress here, but absolutely you were at a disadvantage. It doesn't matter that you represented the most powerful military in the world with all the resources we have. When you went in that door and it was you leading the way with one guy, you know, just staggered behind you. It was you too against whomever was in that house. And you were, And because you were moving and you were, you were silhouetted, you were at a disadvantage. But we did that time and time again.

Now, of course, I would hope that now, if we had to do it, we'd do a lot more with unmanned systems. But my point is this, and no one can accuse me or they can of not understanding the problem. Oh, yeah, I understand the problem. And I've been at a, at the kind of the dog's body end of this. Right, you've lived the problem. Yeah. So anyway. But in Gaza, uncertainty functioned in the opposite direction.

It created license rather than restraint. And in my article, I show examples of this intelligence. Gaps were treated permissively. So it was like essentially like, oh, we don't know exactly, but like let's just drop whatever. But what that hell? Yeah, because otherwise our guys are going to have to go in there, you know. And by the way, just one last analogy with Fulia, we had, we didn't have as many tanks as Israelis had.

Certainly not, I mean, I'm talking about it on the Marine side, not at all. But we had the ones we had to use to good effect and the, and they were great. They are actually, and the Marine Corps doesn't have tanks anymore, but they were an extraordinarily, extraordinarily useful asset. And believe it or not, tanks actually help. rather than indirect fire tanks help you cut down on collateral damage. Yes, I know the, you know, the velocity of the tank shell. But I'm talking about being able to pinpoint targets, to use thermals and all these other things, to not just shooting, but to establish where the threat is and to cover yourself as you cross danger areas.

Anyway, so what I'm saying, and I use examples here, in Gaza, The IDF defined targets very, very broadly. And if you, you know, as I have done and examined this and looked at, okay, why is this building being targeted? Well, we had a report from such and such that it was being used as a weapon storage place. How old is that report? Three or four weeks. Okay, what exactly, you know, is being stored there? Well, you know, we think it's this or that.

It's very vague stuff And of course things and people get moved around all the time in an urban environment So let's say let me ask you something, Andy If they had a report like that, right? There's a weapons store at a certain building that's three or four weeks old, the report. They wouldn't send like a drone or some try to get some eyes on on it and see like confirm it maybe No, and that's the other thing. They had more drones.

We didn't have any drones in fluidia. we had drones in Mosul. But there's no shortage of assets. And where I'm heading on this is, so yes, you confirm, and then we've, you know, we've got a term in the U.S. military that's been overused, but the unblinking eye, right? So you lock on to the target, whether it's a human or it's infrastructure, and you hold on to that to determine that you're getting the right person, if it's a person. And to ensure that there is, you know, that there are, you know, that there civilians wandering in and out of the target area, the area you're going to head. The Israelis don't do that as a practice at all.

And you know, you're familiar with, just as an example, the only strike they really investigated was the time when seven, do you remember when seven World Central Kitchen, eight workers were killed in a convoy, well-marked, coordinated through the IDF. And there's, you know, horrific, I've seen a horrific video of that where each vehicle was destroyed in succession, right? And everyone inside killed. Well, they lost, they didn't, first of all, they didn't track that convoy. And having been on the other side of the coin,

having, as you know, being in Ukraine running humanitarian convoys under fire and coordinating with the Ukrainian military, being tracked all the time by friendly force is very important. They didn't do that. and they didn't, you know, they, they weren't tracking what they thought was her mask target. They lost custody and then they picked it up and assumed it was the World Central Kitchen Convoy, but there's no verification, and so they blew it away. Now, that case was investigated because the Australian government launched a,

I mean, it was terrible publicity for them. The Australian government launched, I mean, an official complaint. But there are many other cases of that happening. That was kind of the norm. It was just that one, that was the one time they investigated it. And so, you know, civilian presence was frequently just assumed away rather than actively assessed. Right, right.

And you can look at my article for, you know, back in evidence backing this up. And so the result isn't just incidental civilian. But it's repeated death, okay? It's not, mistakes happen. You hear that, well, you know, this shit. happens. Yeah, it does, sadly. Of course it does. Even when you're taking all the precautions in the world. But repeated civilian death at scale reflects a pattern with how dissidents were being made. It's not the difficulty in the environment. And, you know, you've probably read

John Spencer's article saying that the, you know, the IDF show. unparalleled restraint that's the term that that he uses that no other I mean it's kind of scary that he could like you talk in absolutes like that that they use unparalleled restraint I mean that's I feel like that's a bit of a stretch but yeah I mean what's your thought ofitative yeah he he unparalleled never before he uses a lot of absolutes in in the first few paragraphs is an article on Newsweek magazine it was republished elsewhere he's appeared on CNN major networks And he's cited by, this isn't about being pro or counter IDF, by the way.

I do want to say this. And again, no one can, they can, but, you know, I've been involved in efforts to support and do things for the IDF in the past. There's very, probably, I would say very few people of my peer group within the military, special operations community who are more closely involved with activities and efforts. in support of Israel. So my credentials there are solid. I'm not jumping on the anti-Israeli bandwagon here by any means.

But I'm talking here. Remember about process. This is not an emotional argument. And so Spencer's arguments have been picked up by those defending Israeli methodology. As, hey, look, we've got this expert. Spencer calls himself an expert on his website. That's his choice. I personally avoid that term expert. I use the term student. I'm a student of modern war, an unwilling student at times. Not an expert. And why does that matter? I think when you start calling yourself an expert,

I think there's a danger that subconsciously you're going to cut yourself off from alternate points of view, right? anyway so you know for instance uh spencer's article and i do urge people to read it he talks about um he you know he it says that hey listen the Israelis use this process it's just the same process as we use uh but actually they're even more restrictive on on how they exercise restraint well so his article is essentially his article is essentially like not defending IDF in terms of like saying that they'd done more to show restraint than the American forces did in Fallujah or Mazzul or any urban warfare. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's not the existence of the process.

The process ostensibly is there. You know, targeting cells, legal advisors, precision guided weapon, munitions, warning procedures. It's how they are applied. okay it's how they function under pressure that is the real truth teller and I don't I can't imagine from what Spencer has written that he really took a close look at how the these processes function under pressure I think it I don't know how he wrote his article but it looks as though he just took it as as face value so all these things you know precision guided munitions targeting cells warning procedures

They're often cited as evidence that everything was done to protect civilians. But let's, you know, let's take some examples. I've already talked about, I've already talked about how intelligence was interpreted, how the Israelis dealt with intelligence uncertainty, right? They accepted a very high level of intelligence. And for us, what would be an unacceptable level of intelligence uncertainty? They didn't follow through. they didn't double source it, they didn't employ a blinking eye approach.

They didn't track civilian patterns of life. So a lot of what they said was assumed. Plus, you've got the fact that in Gaza, the density of the population was magnified many times by evacuation orders. And many times civilians were evacuated or told to move. They weren't aided in doing so from one area. into another and that area was subsequently bombed. Also, the interesting thing about your article, too,

that you mentioned, like, uh, like the, what they do with like the roof knocking or even like sending out messages to a phone network that is essentially degraded to the, on purpose, purposely degraded to a point where it doesn't work, but they let people know, hey,

we're going to bomb this shit out of this area. So get out of the way. They send it on text or wherever phone calls and people don't get the messages because their cell phone network is fucked up. or their internet is there. Yeah, in a battle space where, you know, electricity, cellular networks, internet access have all been deliberately degraded. You can't assume warnings, warnings have reached civilians. And the time allowed for people to move wasn't, it wasn't realistic, you know, especially when you're talking about elderly or disabled people.

And this discussion about roof knocking. So roof knocking is an IDF practice of firing a smaller munition into the roof of a, say, a multi-story apartment building to warn the inhabitants that you're going to strike that building and to give them a chance to get out, right? Well, there's all kinds of problems with using an explosive munition to warn people that you're going to use explosive munitions. right and I can tell you having been under air attack and artillery bombardment myself it's not intuitive right or reliable it's like oh that one was that was a warning we better get out of here yeah to distinguish between a bomb ammunition that's intended to kill you and one that's intended to to warn you but you know the bottom line is this i mean warnings that do not reliably remove civilians from danger they don't they don't meaningfully reduce civilian debt

You know, in practice, they often function as a procedural step that allows a strike to proceed rather than to, you know, rather than to really warn civilians to get themselves out of the way. Uh, hang, let me ask you this about, you know, they were to issue evacuation orders and they'd move folks to, you know, different areas as they were cleaning, as they were bombing specific areas. why didn't they let people leave Gaza, right? We saw with Ukraine, right, when Russia took, you know, millions of folks left Ukraine. I mean, it's a great question. So, you know, for, and I'm not an IDF spokesman, but of course the IDF would argue that was a security concern. There was nowhere to go.

You couldn't, Egypt wouldn't take them and you're not going to let them onto Israeli soil because now you've got that security concern on your own soil, right? However, I would argue that the problem was this, D, there were all kinds of problems with communicating with local population, as we pointed out. But there was no clear, reliable way to ensure, effort made to ensure that there were safe evacuation zones. And what I'm saying here is you don't, you didn't have to evacuate them out of Gaza if you really didn't. You believe that was a security concern. I mean, Gaza, I know everyone keeps saying how densely populated it is, but there are far less dense.

Within that, within the strip, all right, it's like a 20-something kilometer mile strip. There are areas, for instance, the beach area by the coast, and areas between the major population centers that could have been evacuation zones. Evacuation corridors could have been set up. And listen, the Israelis are very advanced when it comes to biometrics and combining biometrics with AI facial recognition. They're already using this technology in the West Bank to scream civilians moving from one way, one place to another. And it's very effective. If anyone who's gone from Israel onto the West Bank knows, you don't see a human being when you go through all these turnstiles.

but you are being screened, your faces being identified by and matched against known bad actors. So they've got this technology. They could have set it up to ensure that there were evacuation. And they had organizations, relief organizations within the strip. And I spoke to a South African who worked for the UN there, and who explained how they, you know, the UN was willing to assist the Israelis in setting up evacuation plans and to do much of the planning for them. All they needed was certain things from the Israelis to include forbearance and places, you know, where they, they would set up and assist in directing

civilians, but they made no effort to do so. Instead, just drop leaflets or sent text messages saying, hey, you've got by noon to move from here to there, and this area is going to be rubbled. And then there was poor coordination within the IDF, right? So again, you can look this up as a result of investigations. Often Israelis were herded, I mean, Israelis, Garzans were herded into areas, which were then struck. And that wasn't purposeful, necessary. I mean, it wasn't purposeful, but it was just poor coordination within within the Israeli military.

I mean, that happened more than once, Andy? Oh, yeah. Yeah, certainly. How is that poor coordination if it's happening multiple times? Again, I'm getting a little bit off track here, but one of the characteristics of the Israeli military that some people may find surprising

because, you know, you always think of the Israeli military as being representative, as being a forerunner, in pushing mission command and initiative down to the lowest levels. That is not the IDF today. That was the IDF of maybe 1973, 1967, 1956, but it's not the IDF today.

Decisions are made. It's a very hierarchical organization. It's a very Middle Eastern organization in that respect. Information is not well shared between units, between organizations, and I think that resulted in a lot of, a lot of these mistakes, and I call them mistakes, because I'm not for a moment suggesting that these were purposeful, you know, when this happened. But it's negligent. And they happen because

not enough, again, you know, risk was pushed on the civilian population, which was an undercurrent of everything that I'm talking about. And I haven't even discussed, you know, the IDF's attempts at population control during Operation Gideon's chariots in 2025. But the goal is, again, to separate Hamas from the local population and to move the population into, it's like a form of villageization. The British use the Malaya. We attempted to use in Vietnam. You move the population into secure areas and you separate them from Hamas.

but the concept wasn't bad but the implementation was so so poorly done that it resulted as you know in widespread starvation and whether you want to call it famine or not that is what the UN ended up calling it so the number of the I mean the significant number of galsons died of from lack of food lack of water what about the argument about like Hamas using human shields yeah great, great arguments. So Human Shields arguments also frequently invoked to explain civilian deaths in Gaza. Now, by, you've got to differentiate between Hamas using civilians, coercing them into position to shield fighters, and Hamas just simply operating from civilian areas.

Okay, the distinction is important because international humanitarian law requires for the human shield argument to work that there be some element of coercion. There's been no proof of that. In fact, although the Israelis commonly, and there's no doubt about it, they listen, Hamas used civilian infrastructure. I mean, Islamic State use embedded themselves in civilian infrastructure in Mosul. It's a common feature of urban war. But the Middle East Institute, reputable DC-based think tank did an investigation into Israeli claims of human shield arguments and came up with the fact that although that argument was frequently cited, there was actually no proof of it actually occurring. And in cases where they said, you know, Shifa Hospital is being used for this or that, they could produce no evidence. But regardless, you know, international law is very clear.

enemy violations don't erase the attacking forces obligations and civilian presence is still supposed to be a constraint or not an excuse it's um it's like the comedian uh what's his name bill bar yeah like he says you know if you want to beat the shit out of your neighbor and he's holding a baby you don't punch him through the baby right i mean yeah that was essentially the idfs argument i love that bull bar reference that was very nice in the arra yeah when civilians can't be Separated from the battlefield, international law places the obligation on the attacking force to exercise greater restraint. Not acceptance of our civil. Right. Like, let's just wipe everybody out. Yeah. At that point, let's just nuke Gaza, if that's the... Look, I mean, we've seen this before.

In Mosul, where I authorized strikes, the Islamic State was deeply embedded in the civilian population. They used protected sites to include mosques. They constrain civilian movements. So there is proof. You can look this up. proof that they did use humans, civilians as shields in Mosul. And yet civilian to combatant death ratios are significantly lower than in Gaza. And when you factor in the number of civilians killed by the Islamic State, that ratio becomes even more traumatic.

That contrast. So like, I read Spencer's stuff. And one of the things he said about, like, you can't really judge proportionality if you're not, if you don't have access to classified intel. That was like one of like the, you know, like you don't really know what's going on and why they're doing this because you don't have access to the, to the classified stuff. Yeah, I mean, he kind of dodges the, he kind of misses the point there. So that's exactly right. He said, well, he talks about using a small, you know, how do you know what munitions should be used, you're no expert.

That's not the point. Commanders are commanders because they are judged competent to make those calls, right? Of proportionality. That's really what he's talking about. You know, how do I deal with this threat and cause the minimum number of, minimum number of casualties. As far as the intelligence argument, it's irrelevant. What I'm arguing is, it doesn't matter, you know, the whole point is not what an outsider knows, it's what that commander knows for sure and what he's assuming. And my point is that for us and the US military,

the onus is on you to verify that intelligence, all right? And so this was rather a kind of an opaque argument. And then Spencer says, well, they use precision-guided munitions. They do. But the point is, a precision-guided munition can cause just as merely civilian casualties. If it, you know, if it hits a target that hasn't been assessed for civilian presence, right? Precision in delivery is not the same as precision in targeting. So a bomb can strike exactly where you intend it to and still kill somebody. civilians and large numbers if the target itself was poorly defined or your intelligence was stale

and you hadn't verified civilian presence or the, you know, civilian pattern of life. Andy, let me ask you, you mentioned about the unblinking eye, like what the U.S. would do, like we would have eyes on a target or a potential target. I like the way you said that. See what you did that? With eyes on. Yeah, I don't. Thank you.

Like and subscribe. Why wouldn't Israel do that? that, you know, they're technologically advanced. They're using drones. You know, they're a modern military. Why not do that at a, for a particular target? Well, I've, you know, I'm speculating here because it wasn't, look, you've got the rules, right? You've got the law of armed conflict and then you have your procedures.

But the culture within an organization matters a lot. You know, I can tell you, having served in Iraq and Afghanistan, that overwhelmingly the institutional impetus was on sparing civilian life, on minimizing heroic restraint, right, was the term that we were used. What that meant is someone has to bear risk in war. Either soldiers accepted or civilians do, although they don't willingly accept it. Right, yeah, yeah. In the U.S. military, it's a much more balanced discussion.

We can't routinely shift risk onto civilian forces. Sometimes we have to bear a portion of that risk. If we're uncertain about civilian presence or there is a significant civilian presence and so we can't use the munitions that we require before an attack, we have to accept that it's going to be a little more dangerous to attack that objective and making this sound quite simplistic. These are hard calls, but that's the bottom line. But we hear that from our commanders.

And we had tactical directives all the time in Afghanistan outlining that as a policy. It was very clear that that was institutionalized. In the IDF, that is not the case. You have civilian leaders. You know, you've got the head of military intelligence, Halievi saying, I mean, it was leaked. You know, he didn't intend to say this publicly,

but, you know, the fact is he was head of military intelligence. And he said, hey, we're going to kill. kill 50 Palestinians for every Israeli we lost from 7 October and then says it doesn't matter if they're children. That's just the point. That's the way it's going to be. All right. You've got that.

You've got Galant talking about we're going to cut off that food. We're going to cut off their water. They're just animals. You've got the president. What's interesting is Galant's been, you know, ever since he resigned or got fired, was like touted as like the sane one in that. well, I guess it's all relative, isn't it? You've got Herzl, you know, who is the supposedly liberal president saying,

hey, the whole population is responsible for 7 October, right? And so you've got this institutional messaging. Do you really think that commanders then? And then you've got this, you know, as I said, only one investigation was ever conducted into a strike gone wrong. And that was the world's central kitchen strike. And that was after Australia objected. So commanders know, you know, the messaging isn't,

hey, you've got these procedures. There's a law of armed conflict that is, who gets fired when shit goes wrong, right? Yeah. And when that isn't happening, when you're hearing your own leaders going, they're animals, they're responsible, hey, 50 of them should die for everyone.

Do you really think you're going to exercise heroic restraint. I mean, you know, so I mean, that, that, and, and then you get this, these investigative reports coming out about how AI was integrated into targeting. Well, that's not certain, not necessarily a bad thing. Right. It's, if you're using it to support decisions, but if you're using it as a rubber stamp and the, and the, and the human in the loop is simply going, okay, okay, okay, then, then that becomes problematic. You have Lamarne. You have Lamar, investigative report that shows that, you know, for every Hamas fighter, it's really IDF instructions where, hey, you know, you can kill 20 civilians. Jesus Christ.

You know, and that's just for lower level guys. I mean, that's a pretty significant threshold. We wouldn't have that. We wouldn't word things that way. And the point is, you're going to tell people you can kill 20 civilians. Do you think they're going to stop there? Oh, hey, it was 50. I mean, so these are, what I'm saying is the institutional messaging was such that it really, it suggested restraint was a bad thing.

Now, if you challenge all of those things, well, you know, these are far, I'll go revert to Occam's razor. The fact that these are far more plausible explanations for one, thousand or 70,000 whichever number you believe or people were killed than unparalleled restraint which is what Spencer says yeah I don't know how you can eat that's a tough yeah so anyway I mean you know and what happened what was happening was civilian death was treated as an acceptable cost of doing business an acceptable price to pay for the speed, the tempo, forced protection that you needed in order to execute the campaign.

All right. And what's interesting, like you mentioned, not to harp on it, but like you mentioned, it's just going to regenerate insurgents. Yeah. I hate talking about that too because these are human beings that have lost lives and lost loved ones, right?

Like, it's a terrible thing that's going on. But the fact is human nature is human nature, and people are going to want, back after they see a family member get killed and you know moves their lives. Yeah and and you know as we said I mean this matters beyond legal debates or moral outrage it becomes a strategic liability and we learned that in Iraq and Afghanistan when the bottom line is this I mean you can you can refute try and refute this but it's very difficult when you look at the studies that have been being conducted on this when civilians are killed

in large numbers it fuels recruitment it hardens opposition it undermines your legitimacy which is important point and it prolongs conflict and so you know tactical gains achieved through through civilian destruction almost always generate long-term insecurity I mean, so, I know we're coming to the end here, but I mean, I, look, you know, civilians, you're not going to make war clean. You can't avoid, I mean, you're just not. It's never going to be a point where we can avoid civilian casualties, especially certainly in urban warfare. Civilians are killed at this scale as they were and killed in Gaza. It's not because urban warfare makes restraint impossible.

They're killed when civilian protection is not. treated as a governing requirement of how force is applied. I mean, urban warfare is brutal. Civilian death, as I said, you can't ever eliminate it entirely. But how much death occurs and who bears the risk, that's a matter of choice. It's a matter of institutional choice. And in Gaza, the evidence suggests that those choices were pushed onto the civilians. And with profound human, and I would argue strategic, strategic.

strategic cost. Yeah. It's a fucking, it's just sad. One more tactical question. I remember we've talked about this many times on Izon, how you mentioned like the IDF doesn't do clear and hold.

Yeah. I mean, was that it like they wouldn't clear and hold, they would just take out of place and then leave. Would that cause? That added to, that certainly added to the confusion. Now, I will say, I'll qualify that statement a little bit by saying during Gideon's chariots in 2025,

they seem to have learned their lesson a little bit more. The bulk of units still pulled back into, it's an improvised Forbes combat outposts they call McNuns, which are kind of little fortified, ad hoc fortified positions within the city. But this causes problems because you clearly, during the day they don't they they do the conventional infantry units were not operating at night I don't know why not I think it may have come down to training

they had night vision goggles but they just weren't operating in night so they were clear an area they would move back into their mcn at night was a pattern now during that during the during the night no that you know yes Hamas would have some freedom of movement but the civilians would move back into their areas because they would hit the sounds are fighting gone and so they would move back in the area and then you get the local IDF unit coming out and clearing that area again assuming everything there is Hamas and look I've been talked about um the fact that uh you know I've just talked about indirect fire but there's a lot

of problems with how um the Israelis exercise fire control fire discipline um or lack there off In fact, I had free fire zones. You know, there's a significant amount of evidence to show that. My own interviews with people have showed that. Areas where anything, you know, they could shoot anything or anyone. And, I mean, and in an urban environment, densely packed, you're going to get civilians wandering into those areas. Like, they didn't have to be armed either? Look, I mean, I'm...

This is where you can get into, well, our rules of engagement say this. I'm talking about practice, though, in practice. And yes, you can look at all the evidence online, and I'm talking about investigation. And if that doesn't, you know, if that doesn't sway you, I mean, I've, I've, me convinced, yes, absolutely. It was a, it was, people were shot when very clearly they didn't have weapons. consistently at scale. A friend of mine

who I interviewed for the book who by no means left wing bleeding heart liberal former South African special operations guy and another guy former Royal Marine operating with the UN

told me that part of their job was just to gather bodies in the morning every morning because, of course, it was a health hazard. And, you know, they would, they'll tell you elderly, disabled, and all their time, all their time operating in Gaza, they never came across a single body with a weapon. And you could say, well, you know, the weapons were removed.

Really, you know, consistently all the time from all those bodies. Come on. So anyway, I mean, I'm getting off track here a little bit. My article is not even based on that, but I'm saying, again, this gets back to an institutional culture. I mean, the Israelis shot three of their own hostages, even after their hostages came out waving white flags. I mean, this is all covered in the Israeli media, covering white flags accompanied by an Israeli officer, all right? They still shot them. Wait, wait.

They were accompanied with an Israeli officer as well? Yeah, I mean, you can look at look up the account of how it happened. I remember when it went when it went down. No one was burned for that. No one got in trouble for that. I mean, that, and yet there was all kinds of things. And nothing was like, and it was relatively early on too, I believe, right? It wasn't like.

Yeah. And, you know, it seems like they were not rained in. I want to say it was in like April, 2024. But anyway. So, Dee, that's pretty much it. Yeah. I don't want to. Incredible.

article I want everyone to check it out you know why don't you invite john Spencer on to uh to offer a counter argument i think that would be a great idea against the young game John if you're listening yeah email me baby uh let's get you on and uh we'll

hash this out mud wrestle um check i want everyone to check out andy's article the link is in the description um it's for war on the rocks it's an incredibly it's a really good article um and of course Andy's book When the Tempest Gathers. Incredible book.

We're looking forward to the new books that are coming out. So stay tuned for that. Your substack. All those links are in the description or in the show notes if you're listening. So check them out. Andy, I love you. Always great time, Dean. All the best.

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