Social Media Changed Warfare | John Spencer

You know, I've had some friends who've been looking at the social media warfare end of this who are trying to understand what information the college kids who are protesting are getting and why they believe it. TikTok in particular is flooded with images that suggest that the IDF are barbarians beyond belief and that the casualty rates are extremely high. Once you click on one of those, then that's all you get in your feed, and that seems to be particularly effective. The use of imagery of injured children, for example, seems to be particularly effective for women, and of course, the majority of the protesters on the Ivy League campuses are women. So they're the targets of this particular scoop.

And so that's another; it's a dream for Russia, right, to have this access to the youth mind? Yeah, absolutely. It's Russia, China, and Iran; it's a dream that they had this access in algorithm that feeds it. You don't have to do the work; Al feeds it. There's actually a battle in my work in urban warfare history where the United States was defeated because of this—the First Battle of Fallujah. I don't know if you remember that, but there were four American contractors that were killed in the city of Fallujah in April of 2004. The U.S. president ordered—because they dismembered American citizens, burned them all and hung them from the bridge—that the U.S. president ordered the Marines to go in and get those responsible for that action.

So the Marine Corps, over their objections, launched an operation. Al Jazeera was sitting in the hospital airing photos of children that had been casualties of the operations and trumping up numbers of civilian casualties, unverifiable. In six days into the battle, the Iraqi governing council, the U.S. allies, all threatened to disband if the United States didn't stop its battle. That was basically an echo to what we have today, uhuh, where you can defeat a superior power easily through the use of information warfare. The pictures of children—like why did those resonate? I know that's your field of study; like, that resonates very strongly, to include me.

Yeah, of course. I don't want to—I have children; I don't want to see any children. I've seen children, and this again goes back to even these kids won't acknowledge what Hamas is. When I watch, well, children are the ultimate victims, right? The ultimate innocent victims. And so if you're playing a victim-victimizer ideological game, then obviously pictures of hurt children are incredibly effective weapons in that regard. And of course, if there is a war, there's going to be hurt children. So it's a strategy that's very difficult to counter, that's for sure.

But there's an ideology that the IDF would do it purposely. When I can show you the video of October 7th, where Hamas Psychopaths, like it's like Jeffrey Dahmer, were standing over children making a death moan and laughing over top of them. I've been in war and seen children injured, and every individual, no matter who he wants, is dying in their heart to help that child. So the idea that the IDF would purposely harm a child isn't backed up by evidence. Now, do civilians get caught in between two war factions? Yes. But despite going back to our statement that the IDF have done everything anybody's ever thought of and created ways that nobody's ever thought of—I mean, they have drones with speakers going back to drones that go into enemy-held territory and announce to the civilian populace, "Leave; this is a combat area."

They've used technologies to track every cell phone in an area, now whether it's on or off, to know if there are civilians there, and they won't even allow the military into that area until a certain population gets out. Okay, so, alright, so are the Israelis meeting with any success in their military ventures? Do they—are they winning the battle against Hamas, all things considered? Do you think?

Absolutely, you think so? Okay, so what's the evidence for that? Yeah, the evidence is if you can go by hostages. So half the hostages are home. Yeah, okay, right; there's 124 left in hostages—left in Hamas hands. Basically, whether it's a dead body or a living person, it's really hard to tell how many of them were freed alive. Do you know? I don't know what the exact number was, but most of them were freed during that temporary ceasefire, where over 100 were released by Hamas at great military disadvantage to Israel to do that exchange.

Most people don't recognize that; like the fact that during that ceasefire, Hamas forced civilians to reoccupy places like Khan Yunis; they increased the population of a city by 300% during that ceasefire so that their human sacrifice strategy would work better. That kind of escaped the national media. Yeah, surprise surprise. So the hostages—Hamas has—how do you—what do you make of the fact that something like that, for example, escaped the national media? Like, how is that possible?

Even, I mean, it's—it's—I understand some of the foundations for much of the talking points, but most of the world doesn't—like they don't know what that number means; they don't know what the details are to that number; they don't question it. Or when you attack a 2000-pound bomb, they don't know, right, who are the groups? So part of it's just a lack of depth of inquiry, let's say, right? Or there's a global deficiency of expertise in this type of warfare, even within— even among the military.

Yeah, right, right. So you'd expect that in spades among what passes for journalists these days, right? Where they, of course, it's all bad—like war is hell; war is killing, right? We've done—we've agreed that we're going to not do certain things, and Israel is following every measurement that we've ever had back to the successes of their objective to remove Hamas from power and dismantle its military.

Yeah, from a straight analytical perspective, they've dismantled Hamas's military to include areas it controls physically. And don't get me into the ideology part, yeah, but remove the rockets. So, if there are 4,000 rockets fired on October 7th, more than had been fired during the entire Second Lebanon War, on day one there have been 13,000 since. Now they're a lot less; those rocket supplies have been taken away. Now they're still shooting them because they still think they're going to win from Rafah and from right next to the humanitarian zone.

But from the actual measurement of what a military is—its fighters, its supplies, its production capabilities, its tunnels—Israel has been very successful in clearing dense urban terrain, very slow, very methodically, despite the constraints of the world. Right? You have, at one point, they had one brigade in Gaza because the world said you've got to do it a different way. They had one brigade in Gaza. Now, they wanted to finish this quickly, yeah, in Rafah with two divisions, and the world said—that the United States, according to reports, said you can't do that; use one division. But they have been very successful in reducing those military supplies.

Now, I can't—who's winning? Are they achieving metrics along that goal to achieve all three of their objectives, to include secure the borders? Because they have also put in many—nobody talks about them—large construction projects, new roads to create a different security environment, a buffer zone, new roads going into Gaza to include the new humanitarian entry points and roads in Gaza. Nobody talks about. They're being very successful in doing these military moves, but it won't matter; none of this will matter if Hamas, that was October 6th, the leadership, just that core leadership survives the war.

It doesn't matter whatever metric they… so where are the Hamas leadership located physically? Where are they? Southern Gaza? Okay, and how successful were— in Gaza, right? Because it goes back to the cognitive. If maybe some of them have escaped, but like going back to even the good guys, like Zelensky, if he would have left, that is less of a victory than if he stays. So I believe that that leadership is still in Gaza.

Okay, and do you have any sense of what proportion of the Gaza hierarchical leadership is still intact? I think that was a senior leadership; they've gotten one of the senior senior leadership. But this goes back to like when you hear how many—how many of those people in leadership positions are crucial? Five or six? Okay. Okay, so it's a—it's a very—it's a handful of people. I mean if Yahya Sinwar survives this war, he's achieved victory; they'll make statues of him. He will be the great terrorist that weakened Israel on the global international stage and struck at the United States's credibility. Iran will make statues of Yahya Sinwar if he survives this war.

Uhuh, he will be the great victor of this war. And let alone if October 7th becomes Palestinian Independence Day, right? If the world says we don't care—pal? Everybody agrees Palestine is a state, right? How many countries? There's European countries that have already accepted it as a state. At least Spain, Norway—I don't remember all the countries. But yeah, it would be if you—like, it's almost anti-intellectual. How do you not understand that if October 7th leads to a creation of something, despite all the challenges, it would lead to greater violence?

No logic gets in the way of virtue signaling ever, right? There's no hypocrisy, like moral hypocrisy. Yeah, this is where I can't tell you who's going to win this war. I can't. If Israel is stopped because of real pressure—because like the weapon shipments that have been threatened to be withheld—yeah, that has nothing to do with the operations in Gaza. That has to do with 100,000 Hezbollah attacking in the north. Northern Israel is currently under fire, as we're speaking, yeah, because Hezbollah has been attacking. And the real threat is that you won't have the supplies to push them back.

Because southern Lebanon is called—how serious is the situation in northern Israel with regards to Hezbollah right now? It's an existential threat; you don't get more serious than that.