For Israel, half-measures are wholly unacceptable

Israeli tanks on the move along the border with the Gaza Strip. Picture: AFP

The Biden administration is keeping the pressure on Israel not to invade Hamas’s final stronghold, in Rafah. In March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said such an assault would be “a mistake” and “not necessary”.

Three months earlier, he claimed Israel could defeat Hamas by using “targeted operations with a smaller number of forces”.

But could it? A strategy dependent on raids and airstrikes alone has never been effective in defeating a large enemy. If Israel believes a military response is the only way it can defeat Hamas, it should ignore Washington and pursue a ground invasion supported by targeted raids and airstrikes.

US thinking about the war is plagued by what former White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster called the “Zero Dark Thirty” fallacy. The term – named for the 2012 film about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden – refers to the mistaken belief that raiding alone can constitute a military strategy.

Lieutenant General McMaster described the thinking: “The capability to conduct raids against networked terrorist or insurgent organisations is portrayed as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, conventional joint force capability.” In other words, we can’t expect strategic outcomes from tactical missions.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says an assault by Israel on Rafah will be ‘a mistake’ ” and ‘not necessary’. Picture: AFP

US military efforts reflect that axiom. In the Iraq war, the US quickly ousted Saddam Hussein’s Baath party and fought multi-year counter-terror and counter-insurgency campaigns against enemy forces. It was successful through the combination of a small number of special operations using ­intelligence-driven raids to target terrorist leaders and a large number of conventional forces working to secure the local population, gather intelligence and help build institutions for governance.

Jordan drops humanitarian aid over the Gaza Strip. Picture: AFP

In their new book, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, General David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts argue that intelligence-driven ­special-ops raids aren’t enough to wage successful counter-­insurgency campaigns.

Such efforts must be combined with a ­population-centric strategy, requiring sizeable conventional ­forces to “clear, hold, build” in ­insurgent sanctuaries.

The same goes for counter-­terrorism campaigns that involve drone strikes and precision bombing. As president, Barack Obama conducted hundreds of drone strikes against terrorist networks between 2009 and 2017. In many cases, those strikes may have been the only prudent or politically ­viable option. The fallacy emerges, however, when policymakers believe that raids and precision attacks are the best options simply because they’re popular.

Hamas isn’t a typical terrorist group. It governs Gaza with significant military capability, including prepared defences, hundreds of kilometres of defensive tunnels, and thousands of rockets. Its fighters were believed to number 30,000 to 40,000 at the start of the war, and most of them hide among the civilian population. This makes a strategy reliant on targeted raids extremely difficult. Whereas so-called decapitation strikes may be an effective strategy against small terrorist groups, their success would be dubious against an enemy of Hamas’s size.

Two boys strike an optomistic tone as they’re driven along a street in Rafah on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

There is no historical evidence that commando raids or a series of precision strikes have defeated a deeply entrenched urban defender. McMaster argues that “like precision strikes, raids often embolden rather than dissuade the enemy.”

Short-lived raids place the raiding force in a vulnerable position. The US realised this first-hand after its seventh raid into Mogadishu in 1993, which led to the death of 18 service members.

Israel knows the best way to mitigate this risk is to employ raids in concert with a large conventional force.

The same applies to targeted airstrikes, which require time to gather actionable intelligence on key leaders. Recommending that Israel rely on this tactic ignores that the ammunition necessary to destroy the enemy could cause more collateral damage than a ground invasion would. Israel has already killed aid workers with errant strikes. Urging its forces to depend on raids and airstrikes is likely to exacerbate this problem.

Children play in the rubble in Rafah on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

The US’s record of fighting in enemy-held cities underscores how a raid-and-strike approach is ineffective. When US forces prematurely terminated the first offensive to take Fallujah in the spring of 2004, they were left to conduct only strikes and occasional raids against al-Qa’ida targets within the city.

This was so fruitless that the coalition was forced to conduct a second offensive six months later, involving a large conventional force that had months to prepare against a much smaller force than Hamas is today.

When coalition forces cleared Ramadi and other Iraqi cities between 2004 and 2006, they used a combination of precision strikes and a large coalition presence. Ditto for the battle for Mosul in 2016-17 when US-backed Iraqis employed conventional land and air power against a much smaller force in a less defensive posture than Israel faces in Gaza.

History has proved that commando raids and precision strikes are a tactic, not a strategy to win a war. No matter how much Washington argues to the contrary, Israel understands the fallacy.

The Wall Street Journal

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute. Liam Collins is executive director of the Madison Policy forum. They are co-authors of Understanding Urban Warfare.