THE YOUNG DECADE of the 2020s has already seen major wars in the Horn of Africa, Armenia, Ukraine, Palestine, Yemen, and Myanmar, as well as sputtering irregular wars across Africa’s Sahel. What can you learn by looking at these recent wars? The wrong lessons, usually, if you follow the dominant news sources. That coverage almost always advances the “our team” versus “the other team” perspective. There are lessons to be learned from observing modern warfare, but you have to look for patterns, not sentiment, not who claims the moral high ground, not even who has the most advanced military.
Some patterns are plain as day. Sometimes the wars are all too simple, and the disaster is there for all to see. In October 2023, Hamas fighters broke out of Gaza and wreaked havoc for a day before the Israeli Defense Forces took revenge from the air for months, running up the count of dead civilians as if that were the real point—which it was. Only one aspect of the horrific Gaza war has been interesting from a military standpoint: the total failure of IDF and Israeli intelligence to be prepared for the Hamas attack. That’s a level of incompetence with few precedents in military history. You could cite the Red Army’s failure to spot the signs of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, or the United States Navy not noticing that Japanese carriers were steaming toward Pearl Harbor, but there were mitigating factors: Stalin’s touching faith that Germany would abide by its treaty; the Americans’ distaste for espionage in Roosevelt’s time; and the limitations of 1940s technology—no radar and no drone overflights.
The IDF had none of those excuses. They knew Hamas was armed and had vowed a terrible revenge for the blockade of Gaza and the settler violence that the Israeli government was orchestrating in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel had 24/7 surveillance over every street corner in Gaza by way of gizmos that they export to the entire world with the cachet that it’s good enough for Israeli border forces. So for the IDF to fail so utterly in Gaza, a tiny enclave one-fourth the size of London and as transparent as a goldfish bowl, is one of the great intelligence debacles in history. Haleigh Bartos and John Chin of the Modern War Institute hypothesize that Israeli intelligence had an outdated idea of Hamas’s capabilities and dismissed warnings that conflicted with their preconceived assessments. The IDF made up for its own failures by inflicting a disproportionate revenge on Gaza. This happens frequently: an army fails in its basic mission and then takes it out on civilians in the enemy territory. With an endless supply of free U.S. air-to-ground munitions, the IDF attempted to erase its shame by erasing the neighborhoods of Gaza one by one. The hecatomb was so savage that even the Biden administration’s lower ranks began to protest. As the proverb saith so wisely, “Even buzzards sometimes gag.”
Hellbound and Down 