Urban Warfare, Civilian Casualty, & Human Shields | John Spencer | EP 454

50m read

·Nov 7, 2024

In Gaza, though Hamas not only built 400 miles of tunnels, but it built underneath all these structures. They weaponized the law of war. Some people call it a human shield, but unique to the challenge that the idea faced on October 8th was not a combatant, although they are a terrorist organization. But it's an army; it's a power, a political structure with a vast army who has a human sacrifice strategy. In my history, in my study of war, I've never found that.

Hello everybody! I have the opportunity today to talk to John Spencer, and we talk about urban warfare. Now, John had a long military career as an on-the-ground infantryman, both as a regular serviceman and as an officer, in combat in both positions. He then came to develop an academic career where he focused specifically on the complexities of urban warfare. That was actually a relatively newly developed field because most wars in the past haven't been fought in an urban environment, but the planet has radically urbanized. It was necessary for a new discipline to be developed to concentrate on that. It happened to be particularly relevant at the moment because the conflict between Israel and Hamas is essentially a conflict of urban warfare.

Now, there are other elements to it as well, which we also discuss: the public relations element. So the conversation focuses primarily on Gaza and Israel, what the Israelis are attempting to accomplish, what the barriers are there, and the nature of urban warfare, the complexities of urban warfare, and the strictures and opportunities that the Israelis have as a consequence of the October 7th events. I found the conversation extremely enlightening, and I hope that you'll concur. So welcome!

All right, well, we might as well dive right in. We're going to talk a fair bit today about the state of the world in general with regard to all the wars that are currently raging, but I think we might as well zero in on urban warfare as such. That's your particular area of expertise. So maybe we can start just if you outline for everybody watching and listening why urban warfare is your specialty and what that means exactly.

Well, as an academic, I think you understand I fell into an area where nobody was doing research on it, so that's why urban warfare became my specialty. I spent 25 years in the Army, and of course, I have my own urban warfare experiences. I was part of the invasion into Iraq, and I went back during the height of the violence, basically the sectarian violence, but around 2014, I became an academic looking at mega cities—really any city bigger than ten million.

For the four-star general who said, "Look at something that we're not thinking about right now," I looked at only mega cities for over a year. Could you accomplish a military mission in there? Then I moved to West Point—I was teaching strategy, the full breadth of military history, military theory, to different challenges or changes in the character of warfare. I also stood up a research center that I now work for, the Modern War Institute, because we also saw a gap in people's understanding of the wars that are going on now. Historians cover wars that happen in the past, and they're really rigorous about how they do that. Embedded journalists cover modern wars, but really, like an actual study of what's going on now, there was a gap.

So we created the Modern War Institute, and I started writing about urban warfare, and it went viral. Like an academic, it's just like a dream come true—like what do you mean there's an area that nobody is studying? In urban warfare, as I dug into even the institutional approach, the militaries don't study urban warfare because in our doctrine for years, we've been writing "avoid and bypass at all times; don't do it."

Even this dead Chinese general that never existed, Sun Tzu, said the worst thing you can do is attack a besieged city because it's been factored in. There's a huge history of war, right? There's a huge history of fighting for cities, but not in cities. That started to change really in the 21st century, where militaries got smaller, advancements in technologies made it, so it doesn't make sense to stand out in the open as a military—even if you're a big military. The urban areas, with the urbanization of the world—the population growth—the size of peoples in militaries, the rise of non-state actors—all war moved into cities.

Arguably, even on-state warfare, like today we see Russia and Ukraine, the decisive battles—the battles that actually determine the future of the wars—are happening in urban areas. Urban areas have always been the prize, the object, the capital city, the economic engine of nations, but militaries have not wanted to fight in cities for all the reasons I don't want to fight in cities today.

A couple of things there: one of the things you pointed out in your 2022 book was that in the 1950s, there were 80 cities in the world with populations of more than a million, and now there's more than 500. That is an unbelievably radical change, and the cities are also much bigger. Is that part of the explanation for why there was no specific study of urban warfare until 2014? I mean, that's kind of shocking. So is it merely the consequence of the fact that the world has urbanized so much that no one was paying attention to this? Is it the fact that maybe people didn't want to pay attention to it because fighting in cities is such a complicated affair? What accounts for that?

All of it. It really becomes, you know, as I was working for a four-star general in charge of the entire U.S. Army—a over million-man force—I understood that militaries are also institutions with cultures. So there actually was an office a long time ago that studied urban operations. Because of institutional change, it was a decision made like, "We don't need that office anymore."

Absolutely. Wow, that's unbelievable. It is. There have been many recommendations to include congressional recommendations, like you should have a center, an academic program. I mean, there used to be a jungle warfare center, an Arctic warfare center, a desert warfare center—never an urban warfare center. It is the war—the battle that nobody wants, even though it's the war and the battle—think of any war ever where urban hasn't been the key factor.

One of the reasons we have urban warfare is like, you know, ancient siege warfare. You sent your army forward of your castle to destroy the other army that's approaching rather than go into siege warfare because that doesn't end well for both sides. There's a long-term cognitive, kind of historical reason for that—then some of it's also cultures don't like change. In militaries, to include those that lead the military, they want to envision a future war of army against army.

What do they say? The military is always 100% prepared to fight the last war. Yeah, one of my war... they do—they say generals always fight the last war. One of my mentors said that's not even true. Militaries want to fight the war they're comfortable with. Yeah, right.

To imagine that war... okay, now you said, too, that it's particularly dangerous for modern armies to be out in the open, sorry, as a consequence of technological transformation. So one of the things that I've noticed, maybe, and I don't know how accurate this is—but I like to think about how things can go catastrophically wrong. It seems to me that as military equipment gets larger and larger and more expensive, it's very much in the interest of the people who would be fighting such gigantic machines to produce very small and very inexpensive means of bringing those things down.

And so we have drones now, obviously, and they're extremely inexpensive and easy to pilot. You said that it's very hard on armies to be out in the open. Okay, so what does that mean exactly? Why is it hard for them to be out in the open, and how potentially devastating is that? And I guess maybe I'm curious about how that... is it the Houthis that are wreaking havoc in the Middle East?

Well, they seem to me to be the emergence of a kind of warfare that might be successful against giant equipment. Can we talk about that a little bit? What is it about being out in the open, and how has warfare shifted because of extremely new technology?

So what we say in teaching strategies is the character of warfare is always changing. The weapons, the technologies, the tactics—the nature of war never changes; it's human; it's for political objectives; it's enduring. That aspect of the evolution of aerial platforms from balloons that were literally in the 1800s in wars to drone warfare today is an evolution of that air power.

This is why I found myself in a place called Nakhchivan in 2021. In 2020, there was a massive war between Iran and Armenia over this area called Nagorno-Karabakh, and the use of drones, to include Israeli drones, that the Iranians have wreaked havoc against an older military standing in the open. I went there because everybody said that's the future—that was the future of drone warfare.

When actually the war came to an end, a decisive end, over one city called Shusha, 400 special forces climbed a cliff and infiltrated the city. All these other things were a factor in that—the drone technology, the ability to see your enemy. If you can see them, you can kill them. But that urban terrain, again—because it was the objective—became one of the critical factors.

So yes, the evolution of technologies matters on where war happens, who has power, who doesn’t. I mean, from the evolution of the nuclear weapon and the ideology or the thoughts about attacking a nuclear weapon, which was meant to destroy a military in the open, and that's kind of gone as the nuclear deterrence and all that has evolved.

Not to be a thing anymore now; it's for, you know, national defense—survival kind of acceptable. There are so many aspects of this and why, you know, we understudy this aspect of strategy—how did the tools impact the political decisions or the actual where combat happens? This is why I get to study urban warfare: one, nobody was studying it; two, there's also the evolution of it migrating into cities as all these people—without the weapons—like who's going to stand toe-to-toe with a state actor like the United States, Russia, China? Nobody.

But lots of people still want power. They still want all the other different things that people fight wars for. If this, and he said long time ago, hasn't changed. But these power structures—why wouldn't if you pull a military into an urban area? It's called the great equalizer. You can take away its power; you can force them into places they don't want to go; you can break apart; you can make their aerial platforms less effective; you can make their weapons less effective.

You have readymade defensive positions in buildings that you would never have anywhere else on the planet. So that's a pronounced advantage for the defender—absolutely a 15 to one advantage depending on how you calculate combat power. If you get there first, even some...

One of my studies is I've found out there's a lot of urban legends about urban warfare—like things that have happened in the past. We, as a kind of human civilization, remember what people write about history, not necessarily what happened. So I'm going back and looking at all the urban battles, working my way back: what actually happened there?

A lot of them are actually meeting engagements, like the Battle of Stalingrad. Nobody was in Stalingrad defending it really; they hadn't prepared defenses. But the terrain made it be this massive political battle that made no sense—same thing in Ukraine and Bakhmut. But if somebody's actually in urban and prepares it—let's talk like in Gaza for 15 years, prepares it—I can defend it against the world's biggest military for a certain amount of time.

Defenders usually lose in urban terrain, but, politi... you know, war is not about destroying the other military. That never was the objective of Hamas. It's about that political strategy and time. If I can get into an urban area—this is why I wrote a book for Ukraine in 2022; I wrote a little handbook based on all that I had learned about urban warfare, and it went viral. It was just about how do you hold an urban area for some amount of time so the situation can change. And it went viral because there's this giant gap of knowledge, even though it's there because there's nobody studying it.

Okay, so let's talk about Gaza because that's almost entirely urban warfare. Yes, okay. And so you said that the defenders have a 15 to 1 advantage. So what's your assessment of the situation? I don’t mean politically. I mean militarily. Are the Israelis successful in their venture, and how are they conducting the war in your estimation?

I know so little about the actuality of the situation on the ground that any information is useful. So how do you conduct... how do you even go about conducting an urban battle?

Sure, it's... it's one... is what I've written things, because I've studied the history of this. When I tell people that nobody has faced the challenge that Israel faced in Gaza, it's not from an opinion; it's from an analytical statement of the size of the military.

So it's a 40,000 defending force that had 15 years to prepare an urban defense, which included 400 miles of tunnels ranging from 15 to 200 feet underground. The reason it kept going deeper underground, if you know that if you’ve ever studied Israel, is because Israel developed weapons technology that could hit farther underground. So Hamas just kept going deeper underground.

Now they’re at a range in many places where no military ammunition can reach. And unique to Hamas, like everybody has tunnels; I wrote in my little book for Ukraine, "Start digging," because if you're underground, you can negate your...whether being observed or hit. Right?

But unique to the world, there's 400 miles in Gaza built solely underneath urban civilian structures—homes, hospitals, schools—for the sole reason to use this thing called lawfare, which is when there’s a history of war. Matter of fact, one of my mentors, Colin Gray, says the evolution of war—most efforts to limit the brutality of war have actually caused more war brutality.

Because when you, like, you know the evolution of laws of war, which I've had to study as well because in urban combat, is where the laws of war most apply. Because after World War II, the Geneva Conventions said we would never again try to punish the civilians to get their political government to give up fighting.

Because war is a contest of will. It's not about destroying the other military, really. It's about convincing the military to give up or the political government to give up. Right? Right. Like this or convincing the civilian population to overthrow it. Right? But we said, as a globe, those who follow the law of war, we wouldn't do that anymore. We wouldn't carpet bomb Tokyo and kill 300,000. We wouldn't do Dresden. We wouldn't do these things.

You have to target only military targets. So in the urban area, that's where the most constraint on the use of force—again, why a military wouldn't want to go in an urban area. I can't do whatever I want onto the other military because he's intermixed between protected objects and protected populations.

Yeah, so if—especially if you're not a law—if your law of war-following organization, you want to pull that military in there. In Gaza, though, Hamas not only built 400 miles of tunnels, but it built underneath all these structures, and they weaponized the law of war.

This is why every hospital in Gaza has Hamas has been bound in it because hospitals are protected places. They're hiding within the law fundamentally. Some people call it a human shield, but again, what’s unique to the challenge that the idea faced on October 8th was not a combatant—although they are a terrorist organization—but it's an army; it’s a—it’s a power, a political structure with a vast army who has a human sacrifice strategy.

In my history, my study of war, I've never found that.

Okay, so explain the human sacrifice strategy.

Yeah, human... well, I'll explain the human shield. Human shield strategy means that you put your people in front of you so the other military can't attack you; so they'll switch themselves. And the same thing, if you use protected buildings, like mosque, hospitals, schools—that's more of a human shield strategy.

And you know that that other force can't directly attack you without actually going through the laws of war notifications and all these things, right? And that means that they'll lose the public relations battle.

Let's say one of the things I thought when this conflict started was that really all that the Palestinians, the Hamas, needed to do—and Iran, let’s say behind it all—was hold out long enough to let the Israelis obtain a victory at a cost that was too great on the human relations front. Right?

Is that—that as Israel's victory mounts, and the human cost of that is broadcast, that would mean defeat for the Israelis on the public relations front? My suspicions were that—I don't know what you think about this hypothesis, but my sense was that Iran prodded the Palestinians into the October 7th attack so that they could undermine the Abraham Accords, and so they provoked the Israelis into the response that we’ve seen, hoping that that would turn certainly the Islamic, the Arab world viciously against the Abraham Accords and cause the West and Iran’s enemies undue trouble.

And so far, the Abraham Accords have held, but we’ve seen the consequences of the public relations battle that’s been produced as a result of Israel’s foray into Gaza. So is that in accordance in any way with your understanding of the situation?

Absolutely. I mean...

Okay, so that is what you think is happening?

Absolutely.

So why are we so stupidly taken in by the Iranian maneuvers then? Because it seemed obvious to me right from the beginning that that was the strategy. So why do you think it is, for example, that there’s so much noise and protest on the universities that’s essentially in favor, really fundamentally, in favor of what the Iranians are doing? Why is that succeeding?

Because our world’s greatest academic institutions are creating the dumbest people.

Oh, okay. Who can't critically think—who can't critically think of, like literally the—just get your facts straight on what you did, as you are aggrieved by or that you're so opinionated by.

Well, Kman himself had tweeted out two days ago his thanks to American universities for providing him with the support that they've provided.

Well, even if you say, "Free Palestine," from what?

Yeah, right.

The river to the sea.

Um, I study strategy, right? So I try to stay out of politics, although war is the pursuit of objectives. What you just stated with Iran’s direct funding, training, and direction to its proxies—which include... doesn’t matter what their religion is—Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iraq Shia—these are all facts.

And there is an element of proxy warfare, which is within the global international order of a thing, right? Proxy warfare, it’s a thing now. Iran being unique in history as the world's global exporter of terrorism—I lost soldiers in Iraq to Iranian forces crossing into Iraq training Iraq Shia militias to attack the United States.

That was known. But in this sense, I can tell you that that's a part of the strategy, of course, of what happened on October 7th. But from a military strategy, what you briefed as well is Hamas's attack on October 7th—while I walk that ground and understand it as an invasion, not a terrorist attack—it was an invasion of Israel with the intention to go as far north as they could to activate all the West Bank, to activate Hezbollah, and to really do a large-scale attack.

I see, I see.

So it was part of a much broader plan?

Sure.

Why didn't that work?

Hundreds of Israelis, many of them without even the weapons, standing in the door—standing in the, what I would call, the hot gates.

I mean, there's so many moments that I've walked that ground in southern Israel where just like an off-duty name police person in a vehicle dying at a critical point, which just slowed that advance down.

There's one... just so ordinary Israelis—many of them ordinary Israelis or off-duty—oh yeah, who, you know, 70-year-old men who used to serve in the military heading south to stand in door to prevent them from heading towards Tel Aviv, towards Jerusalem, to other places.

But their maps actually said—Hamas maps said where they were headed, and they just didn’t get there because of many situations.

I hope those stories get out, and I can tell you many of them where they ran into an Israeli who was willing to fight for their nation, which is really a big part of war as well, right?

So they had a—the Israelis had a population that was ready at the individual level to protect the country, right? So they weren’t defending; they weren’t depending only on their military to stop this invasion.

There's lots to that—absolutely—you know, a nation is built with this security apparatuses, both the actual military whose job is to defend the nation; then you have the security forces.

There is a cultural aspect of living in Israel where you’ve been attacked so many times that you have to be ready—whether it’s the bomb shelter that you have to jump into or the actual... how many times Israel has, as a nation, had to fight back.

I mean, five nations at one time, I understand that history, have walked much of that ground.

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So does that imply in some way that one of the strategic necessities when urban warfare is a likelihood is that the general population itself needs to be prepared to fight, trained and prepared to fight?

This is, again, going back to my injecting myself into the Ukraine war in a unique way through Twitter. I made a tweet—a seven-thread tweet on February 26th of 2022, two days after the invasion. As a guy who studied urban warfare for 20 years, just if I was standing in a city in Ukraine, this is what I would do. Because most civilians don't know how to resist, even if they have the will to resist.

But this is why, again, the history of war and why we can look at what Israel has done in Gaza under the political constraints and why it has done the things it's done. The United States wouldn't have done it that way.

The whole purpose of war is to rapidly overwhelm your enemy, not destroy them, so they lose that will to fight.

So like Russia's invasion of Kyiv, the whole point was to rush it—get into the center, take out the government, raise the Russian flag, war is over.

But the people resisted because they had the will; they didn't have the way.

So yes, if you're—this is called total defense, and it goes way back in European history. All the European countries had this concept of, "If invaded, we're all going to stand up."

Whether it’s the Finnish gun culture, the Polish, you know, this idea that you're going to resist, defend. Some people call it resistance; I call it total defense.

It is a big part of actually having a society, especially if you have somebody—again, with no military, has faced in modern history where Gaza is two miles from Israel and is attacking.

That proximity to an existential threat is real; it is clear if not evidenced by October 7th, which actually factors into the law of war, like proportionality. Like this is the number... one of the terms that started getting misused on October 8th, right?

This number of Israelis died, so you can only proportionately kill—that's not the way the law of war works. The law of war says you can respond with the appropriate force, proportionately, to achieve the goal.

Like, right? So that’s minimal necessary force in a sense, like this, like the common law, Dahrabi, right?

So you shouldn't use any more force than necessary to achieve your valid military aim, which in Israel's case would have been the elimination of a potential future threat of the same type they faced on October 7th, I presume—a real threat.

Yeah, and this is again, going back to that human sacrifice strategy: like nobody will—to include these kids on college campuses—won't listen to the words that Hamas say.

Like they imagine some grieving... and I know you've covered this a lot about that, who's the oppressed and who's the oppressor. You won't take the organization's words and actions for what they are.

So a human sacrifice strategy—nobody has done—Nazis, Japanese, ISIS—where they state and act in a way that they say they need as many of their population, their population, to die as possible to achieve their political goal of the war.

Okay, so it seems to me that there would be two tiers to that then. So tell me if I've got this wrong. I mean, my sense with regards to the Palestinians in general—and this is especially true in Iran—is that the Iranian powers that be would use all the Palestinians as sacrificial victims at any moment if they could provide an effective thorn in Israel's side and in the side of the West.

And then my sense is too that the Hamas leadership, given its history, is sufficiently corrupt and under the sway of Iran as well so that it has no qualms whatsoever about using its citizens as cannon fodder for its designs on Israel and the West.

Is there anything—is that an accurate analysis?

I think so. I mean, Iran's willingness to sacrifice all its proxies, that's pretty rational.

Well, why wouldn't they?

Apart from what you might regard as humanitarian concerns, which I don't really think apply in the current situation in the least. Take them for their words. Their strategy—they call Israel the little Satan, and America the great Satan—and they want to destroy both through the use of this exporting of terrorism and the pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

Like they say, "Fine."

Yeah, right. Well, that seems to be exactly what's happening. But the difference, Hamas, I don't think you can classify as cannon fodder. Again, listen to the words they say—they need, because they believe in their ideology that martyrdom is the path.

So they're willing to martyr all of their population to achieve their political goal—not to achieve some geographic ideal of a new place. Their goal, stated and written, is the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews in the world, and their path to that is the death of their population that they act.

Okay, so you're saying that it isn't only that the civilians are being manipulated by the Hamas leadership in Iran, but that they're participating in this as a consequence of the fundamental doctrine of Hamas.

Correct.

Right. Okay, so then I guess my question would be, to what degree are the Palestinian citizens, especially the younger ones—and I suppose this is partly what the compassionate people on the university campuses are getting at—I mean, if you're 15, 16 years old and you've been bombarded by Iranian propaganda since you were even younger than that into believing that your best pathway forward is martyrdom, then to what degree can you be held responsible for the fact that you believe it?

And so what... I mean, I have the same conundrum, for example, with regards to the protesters on American campuses. I mean, a lot of these kids have been propagandized throughout high school into this victim-victimizer narrative, and they buy it completely. It’s very unfortunate, and I think that they're very dangerous in consequence, but I've seen the consequences of that propaganda among young people. It's very demoralizing, and it’s also extremely effective.

We did a study in 2016 looking at the predictors of support for politically correct authoritarianism, which is very relevant with regards to what's happening on the campus. One of the things we found was that even having had one politically correct course at any time in your life was a significant predictor of sympathy with politically correct authoritarian views.

Now, there were other predictors: not being very bright was one of them, right? So low verbal IQ—well, that's relevant; you know, low verbal IQ was a good predictor comparatively speaking, and so was being female and having a feminine temperament. And the fourth best predictor was ever having been propagandized.

How much of the doctrine that... I know maybe I’m taking you out of your area of specialty here, you know, because this is a more political or even a theological question, but how much of the propaganda story that's driving the Palestinian civilian cooperation with Hamas do you think is a consequence of planned propaganda at the hands of the Iranians?

How much...

A lot.

Oh yeah, I mean, this is the problem with the ramifications of this war, right? Because it would be a proven Iranian strategy: spend decades radicalizing culture from primary school on the books, the payment structure, you know, the pay-for-slave program of the Palestinian Authority.

All those are multi-decade approaches to radicalize a population to achieve your political goals. So absolutely that's there.

For me, as my expertise, though, this is where I think we will definitely reach that point in the war against Hamas and Gaza is this: how do you defeat an ideology?

That's for sure. I work in the world of strategy and war, but I am fighting on a daily basis now with people who have spent their PhDs in counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and saying that you're creating more enemies or more terrorists than you're killing.

Right, right.

Because of the military?

Of course, because of the military.

Right, right.

So it's even if there’s a short-term victory, that doesn’t mean that you're ensuring the long-term victory. Quite the contrary.

Right, right. And do you think that's happening in Gaza?

It's a fallacy of thinking, and I think it's anti-intellectual, that's okay—okay, explain why that’s like saying you cannot remove Hitler and the Nazi regime or dismantle its military because you’ll further radicalize the German population who believe in the Nazi ideology.

Okay? Well, you can imagine a circumstance under which that might occur, but the one that you just laid out obviously didn't occur. Quite the contrary; the defeat of the Nazi regime meant really meant, all things considered, the defeat of the Nazi ideology.

Okay, so let's go back to Hamas. Yes, what do you think the Israeli strategy is at the moment? How is that playing out? Are they being successful? Do you think it's a good strategy, and do you think it has a chance at defeating this ideology? I mean, if it's fostered by Iran...

Okay, I actually got to go visit—I've been into Gaza twice—in December, in Hamas tunnels, and in February with the IDF in Khan Younis. I interviewed the Prime Minister: "What are your strategic goals you gave to the military?" I interviewed the head of the IDF, multiple subordinate commanders.

The objectives for Israel, the path to victory, which is always hard to define in war, right? Because now at this point, the problem—there're already people who have said it's a strategic failure for Israel already, and the war's not even over yet.

But it is very clear what was the objectives: number one, bring the hostages home. So of the 240 hostages taken on October 7th, it’s a clear war goal to bring them home.

Israel has brought over half of them home. There are 124 left in Gaza. The other one was to remove Hamas from power and dismantle its military capability.

Right, okay, but then the question is, who exactly is Hamas? How do you distinguish them from the civilians?

And what are the... So you said you can respond proportionately. So you're going to remove Hamas's military capacity, but if Hamas is in some ways indistinguishable from the Palestinian civilian population, then how do you know when you’ve won in a manner that's going to matter in the future?

I love this—I love this specificity that most people don't ask: how do you distinguish in a situation like this where Hamas is using human sacrifice, where there’s not a single Hamas military building in Gaza?

Right, right.

Not one. So how do you move forward?

I actually want the laws of war upheld; there’s actually very clear guidance. Even with a non-state actor not wearing a uniform, what classifies a combatant or non-combatant or as a person partaking in the hostilities is you're shooting at the IDF; you're a combatant.

Clear.

Yeah. Now, who’s in Hamas? This is actually my visit to the IDF: they have a board, like walls of every member of Hamas's military from brigade commander, battalion commander, company commanders, and their exes were killed and captured as they are breaking apart.

The goal of dismantling a military is never just like we talked about in the beginning to destroy all of them, to kill every member of Hamas. It’s never been the goal in war, and always after the war, once you remove that power, whether it’s the Japanese emperor or Hitler himself, there’s still going to be tens of thousands.

You have to reconcile them; you have to do de-radicalization programs; you have to disarm people. Right? Those—and that is possible. It's possible, proven. Everything worked in Germany; worked in Japan. I can't tell you what that looks like the day after, but I can tell you it will never even begin to work if Hamas stays in power.

So the path to victory: step one is remove Hamas from power; step two is remove its mili—so that means targeting those people that are identified in the way that you already described—targeting enough of them until what? Like, who gives up in this situation? Like how would the Israelis know when Hamas is actually being sufficiently defeated?

Yeah, so in this case again, it's measurable. It’s literally like measures of effectiveness and measures of performance are pretty clear on how do you remove a form from power.

When they’re the leadership, that is the power, right? Just like when Zelensky would have left Ukraine, it would have went a lot differently. Right? Because the leadership is a symbol of the power. If you... if that gets broken apart, then another power can be put in place.

Like now, that person is in power. Right? We’ve done this—we bring our powers with us: invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq—we brought people with us who said that they would be the new power.

Right, that’s the challenge of the day after. But from the actual objective of the war, Hamas is still in power; it's not an insurgency; it’s not a counterterrorist campaign. Hamas is a political body ruling Gaza through its now somewhat broken apart units, but it's still there. It’s still in power in publicly stating things and negotiating all this stuff, right?

So it’s still a recognizable entity?

That's right.

Okay, it's not... once it gets to the point where it's not a functioning organization. So even from the political apparatus of the military, it's really definable militarily; you say you can destroy a military when it can't do its signed mission—attack or defend—and it can't reconstitute itself.

That's pretty easy. Politically, you could probably apply the same metric: it can't rule in its assigned geographic location.

Right?

Right. Now, one of the reasons that you have so many broken apart Hamas members from fighting is because they still think they'll win.

Right, right.

So the will hasn't been destroyed.

That's right. Why would you give up? Your leadership's still safe in southern Gaza. The message is continue to resist until we—till the IDF is stopped.

This goes back to your question about, again, military strategy is not that complicated as we want to make it. Yes, defeating an ideology is very complicated. From a military strategy, both sides had a grand strategy. I already told you what Hamas’s was, but they also had a military strategy. Hamas’s military strategy was never to defeat the IDF on the field of battle.

It’s never been, like you said. They actually have a strategy that’s based on time for the international community, namely the United States.

Like the United States has—in almost every one of Israel's wars—stopped Israel saying, "Look, I know you have the right to self-defense, whether it's the Six Day War, Yom Kippur War, you name it."

They say, "I know you have the right of self-defense, but you need to stop."

Right, right.

So hence, the protests on American campuses—that's the Hamas strategy working.

Right, right.

Of course, of course. But this is... but how much of that?

All right, so after October 7th and the campus protests emerged and very rapidly, how much of that was a consequence of a strategy that was conscious, that was put in place consciously by Iranian actors in the aftermath of October 7th?

And how much was it spontaneous, spontaneous consequence, let’s say, of the victim-victimizer narrative? Like to what degree has Iran managed to co-opt actors in the West that can organize those sorts of protests?

All organized. All history learned. I mean, I can take you back to battles in which the United States would stop through that, use of social media, Al Jazeera and others saying they’re being—violating the laws of war, too many civilians are dying, they're being disproved, and to stop.

But within Israel's context, I mean, I don't want to take away from Yaya Sinwar sitting in jail for many, many years thinking of what are the weaknesses of Israel—it’s reliance on the United States.

Mhm.

It's casualty aversion. Like it doesn’t… the IDF, Israel has stopped wars from a very low number of IDF casualties—hostages, of course.

I mean, a nation that small, you know, they've held a single guy for years and gotten thousands of prisoners in exchange, Hamas has, right?

Right, right.

So yes, Iran, in this larger picture of the geopolitical situation.

Okay, so that’s why you made reference earlier to this idea that the attempts to reduce brutality can make it worse, right?

Yes.

Because when you change the rules, you open up new strategic possibilities that are put in place as a consequence of being able to manipulate the rules.

Yeah, this is the Western... we call it the liberal dilemma.

Yeah, right. And the enemies of Western societies have learned that war is always a contest of will of three populations: the military is fighting, of course; the politicians who are ordering the militaries to fight; but then the populations.

Yeah, we lost the Vietnam War not because of the field of battle.

Of course, because the American population said, "We don’t see the interest in this."

In the media...

In the media.

Yeah, so the actual social media effect was there in the Vietnam War.

Sure, sure.

So the contest of these three wills has led to this point, absolutely.

But that weakness has also led to an aversion—so this is my again, because I've been in this field with the United Nations and Human Rights Watch and human rights groups who have risen in their vocal power to say, "That’s not okay," whatever it is.

So now that’s weaponized—that's why you have Gaza.

Yeah.

That's why you have 400 miles of tunnels underneath civilians; that’s why you have every hospital serving as a military purpose.

Tunnels.

That’s also why the Iranian Quds agents, let's say, can twist the moral force of the West to their own advantage.

It's why you have urban warfare.

Okay, expand on that. If I'm a non-state actor or a great... my actual long strategy is to defeat you. I don’t—I’m not trying to defeat you; I’m trying to turn your population against you.

So I pull you into an urban area, show you photos of dead children.

Right, right.

And you will stop your military—your government and force your government to do things they don’t even want.

And this has been the... like an example of the—you heard of the 2000-pound bomb?

Is it the bunker buster?

Yeah.

How awful it is to use in urban warfare, is it?

Okay, no, I don't know about that.

So one of the many criticisms of against the IDF's operations in Gaza has been the use of bombs.

Yeah. Matter of fact, there’s a misnomer that if you bomb less, there’ll be less civilian casualties.

We can talk about if you want, but one of the biggest things to include the U.S. administration because of this belief of the use of one bomb called a 2,000-pound bomb is that they've used so many of them that nobody else would have done that, that Israel is purposely trying to cause destruction.

Okay.

Yeah, it's a vilification of one.

Right, right, right.

That's an effective communication strategy, right? Because it sounds monstrous—a 2,000-pound bomb.

Okay, I can see how that would work effectively. And then you found a bunch of human rights groups which can tell you how much—what size of the explosion is, how much concrete it is.

Then you find different people who say, "Well, we didn’t use that many of those in the last 30 years," and Israel has used this many.

We used over 5,000 2,000-pound bombs in the one month of the invasion of Iraq.

You know why? Because there were military complexes underneath buildings.

Right, right, right.

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A 2,000-pound bomb only goes 50 feet underground, a bunker buster.

Right, right.

And I just told you I was in 150 feet underground in a Hamas tunnel in December. But all the criticism of the 2000-pound bomb and Israel's use against a combatant in an underground structure says, "You know, it's just, you know, avoid that they would use this tool in war."

Right? I think it puts our national security at risk so next time when you send my brothers and sisters—or our military—into war, you're going to say that they can't use a 20-pound bomb against an enemy underneath certain buildings or in a bunker.

Right, right.

That's really where we've gone, but it's the evolution of this hitting at the West—the liberal de—liberal dilemma, to say that you can find a different way.

Got it.

So tell me, what Israel is doing, and has done?

So they’re fighting urban warfare, you said, with a 15 to 1 disadvantage. Fundamentally, now my understanding is that the IDF is doing what it can do to minimize non-combatant targets. Do you believe that that’s the case?

I've written with evidence that Israel is doing more to prevent civilian casualties than any military has done in the history of war.

Okay, okay.

So you think that’s valid? So what sort of things do they do to make that a reality?

Sure, and this is why I went back in February: I wanted to see it for myself, not just what the access to information everybody else--I wanted to ask them, "How are you doing this?"

Given the complexity of a combatant who uses human sacrifice, right?

So the number one thing that people have done, although again—I think the strategy to win wars is to do it rapidly, right?

And is that also because opposition to the war mounts as it...

Yeah, as it protracts.

Politics, yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. So the more dragged out it is, the more dragged out a victory—the more costly it is on the public relations side.

That’s right. I mean, the loss starts to look like victims, right?

Or if they have... I mean, this is... Ukraine had to hold for a while; it had to slow Russia down from achieving an overwhelming coup, which is overthrow the government and the fight’s over.

Right, right.

So it’s always to get in there and rapidly achieve your goals.

Uh-huh.

If you can slow the army down, then all these other political elements...

Sure.

What Israel did, though, was implement things to prevent civilian harm after October 7th. They waited three weeks before they entered Gaza, right? They did evacuation.

That is the overwhelming number one thing that any military has ever done in the history of war to prevent civilian harm is evacuate cities.

Although, well, and that’s a very strange thing in this situation because the city is the target.

This was the misnomer, too: I saw that Gaza is the densest place on Earth. I saw that on October 8th. Now I study cities for a living; like they’re not even—it’s not even in the top 100. It has ten massive cities, a total of 24 cities.

Um, that are very dense, but there’s also... it’s not one continuous urban area.

But you are right that in any war I’ve studied, there’s never been a population trapped in the combat area.

Although, in the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul, a city of a million, the Iraqi government told the civilians to stay in the city.

Yeah!

850,000 of them to stay in the city during the battle because they didn’t have a place for them to go.

Eventually, it told them to get—but because of Egypt, the Palestinian people of Gaza had nowhere to go!

Right!

So Israel... can you explain that? Why did the Palestinians have no place to go?

Because of Egypt. There’s a long history there. To include there’s a city, Rafah, that used to be on both sides.

And that Egypt... that history escapes our campuses, I guess?

Yeah, you might say that.

Yeah.

Egypt destroyed the homes of 100,000 people on their side and evacuated all those people because there were a bunch of smuggling going in between and terrorism on their side, right? They don’t want a radicalized population, right?

So they don’t want to bring them in.

Well, it is the case, if I’ve got this right, that the Arab world in general has refused to take Palestinian refugees in any great numbers?

That is the case.

And this is the reason, the reason that you just described, depending on what nation you’re talking about.

Absolutely, some say it’s because they don’t want a forced displacement, so use that as an excuse.

But for Egypt, it's very clear.

Okay! They share the border with Gaza!

Okay, it would be very easy for them to open that side up, create a humanitarian zone outside of the combat area.

It's just not rational.

So where did the Palestinian refugees that Israel allowed to escape go?

They went to a place that Israel established, and nobody has asked this question: like why did Israel create the Al-Azi humanitarian zone on the southwestern edge of Gaza?

Right!

I haven’t even heard of that!

Yeah, that's the giant over a million people humanitarian tent zone that Israel designated in October for all the displaced people to go because it's the one area they knew Hamas did not have immense defensive positions set up, like tunnels.

I see, I see, I see.

So how did Israel ensure that when all the refugees went to this zone that hadn't been militarized, let’s say by Hamas, that it wouldn’t just be as infiltrated by Hamas as Gaza itself is?

Like how do they know that the refugees are refugees and not military combatants?

Great question. I know you have to identify, but, okay, it's a good question.

So initially little control, so right?

Quick!

Yeah, um, Israel did move forward and split Gaza in half along what's called the Wadi Gaza. This is a river that splits Gaza almost in half.

I mean, it's 25 miles, but they split in half: 850,000— which is actually an effective metric of evacuations.

So the world said, "You can't do it." I don't know if you remember that when Israel announced evacuations to protect civilian life before they moved in to get their hostages and destroy Hamas.

The world said, "You can't do that! You can't evacuate a million people!"

That literally was the statement from the United Nations and others, "You can’t do that."

Israel did it and successfully evacuated 850,000 below that.

But you’re right. Many Hamas leadership and hostages were moved during that time as Israel was allowing for the protection of civilians, rather than like other militaries invading a territory do it with overwhelming force to achieve quickly.

Right, right.

Right, so they took the risk of the hit on the public relations side because they know from their own history they have to keep international will, even after October 7th.

Yeah, right.

International will, and the United States who started making recommendations on day one of what Israel could or couldn’t do.

Right, like Israel wanted to go in with a larger force, and there were, you know, discussions at the political level.

All wars politics—you can’t go in with five divisions; you have to use four divisions. And now we’re in Rafah— you can't go in with two divisions; you gotta go in one division—that's what you...

One one.

But Israel learned, so Israel did, by the time I visited in Khan Younis.

Interesting, as we go through all the metrics and all the things Israel has done that no military has done in history— I went in with the division commander who talked to me about basically the political atmosphere, was that you had to bring the civilian casualties to zero.

There’s literally what the statements were, which would mean the war needs to stop.

So you had a division in Gaza in Khan Younis, which is another Hamas strong point, doing operations with the overwhelming backdrop of, "You can’t not have civilian casualties."

So they did what... an example of how they prevented that basically: the migration of Hamas, although it's still inaccurate to say that that migration isn’t showing Israel as successful, because dismantling a military means taking away its military capability.

So Hamas wasn’t moving with this 20,000 rockets, right? It wasn’t moving with its deep-buried military weapons production plants.

Yeah, okay.

In all its weapons supplies, so you still gotta get in there and clear that and discover it.

This is why, at least they’re disarmed, even if they’re there.

Yeah.

There’s still going to be tens of thousands of radicalized who didn’t follow the evacuation on the Palestinian side because they had the option.

So now the simple-minded...

Yep, consequence of what you said: my understanding of that would be that, well, Israel gave the civilian population ample time to clear out. Many people did.

Okay, so now if Israel goes into Hamas territory, Gaza, and there are civilians there that are being killed, who—like those are people who didn’t leave or couldn’t leave?

Okay, so...

Or, yeah, forced not to leave. Hamas also didn’t allow their own population to leave. How much of their own population...

It's hard to measure. Any approximation?

I mean, there are 850,000 that did evacuate, so it leaves you, you know, 250,000 or 150,000 still there.

Okay, okay, 150,000, 10% still there, right?

Who—but this is again—because I've studied every urban battle that has ever happened, there's always about 10% that stay.

Okay, so that’s not historically abnormal?

Abnormal for Hamas to set up checkpoints to not let people go, to not let people go, to shoot at people trying to leave, to fire from the humanitarian safe route.

So this is standard to evacuate the cities, create the road that you want them to use. Hamas would put rockets next to that so they could use media to say Israel is striking the zones that they told people to leave.

That's a fact. That’s happened.

Right, right, I see.

So there are 150,000 people left. Okay, so then Israel moves in.

Yep.

Okay, so what do they—how do you move in? What does that look like? Building by building fighting?

What does that look like? What's that like for the people who are on the ground?

Yeah, it starts with like any military would: striking known military locations, okay?

So that’s airstrikes fundamentally.

Okay, okay.

That's like standard military operation to include in urban warfare. If you know there’s an enemy bunker or an enemy headquarters or an enemy formation, you would always want to strike them as far away as you can, especially if you’ve done everything to move civilians out of harm's way.

Right, right.

The idea, like the 2,000-pound bomb, you can’t use in an urban area, which they’re actually saying doesn’t matter if there are zero civilians there, you can’t use that bomb.

Oh, right.

Okay, well that’s obviously a propaganda maneuver.

So okay, so one advantage of clearing the civilians out then would be that there would be, in principle, fewer restrictions on your ability to use air power.

So why doesn’t why don’t the Hamas forces just move everything that they have into the tunnels?

I imagine they did that to some degree.

This is why they have 400 miles of tunnels, right?

Right, right. So why have anything available to be bombed?

So this is what I... when I went there in December and interviewed brigade commanders that were fighting there, they would have a two... we battled on a single block because Hamas wasn’t in the buildings; they were underneath, running in a right— in 400 miles—in a stretch of only—there are layers and webs of tunnels underneath at varying depths.

It was so hard to imagine. I’ve never studied that; we call it the three-dimensional war.

But to know... so this is a funny thing about me going into Khan Younis. I was in Khan Younis, a lot less activity. But I was taken to a location where they were searching for a tunnel, and later that they found that tunnel.

I was standing on top of an uncleared Hamas tunnel on the surface. That’s what the IDF faced every moment, every step they took into Gaza.

And then the houses were basically rigged to blow; there were absolutely Hamas left behind.

And this is why Northern Gaza was chosen first. It was the military strong point of Hamas, of its battalions, with the signed geographic areas to hold with a vast tunnel network of caches all throughout the urban terrain.

Same thing that you would teach somebody to do if...

Okay, so this whole tunnel network was produced over what period of time?

At least 15 years.

15 years, and there was some present already when the IDF were there before they gave up Gaza and gave it to the Palestinian people?

So it was obviously prepared under the assumption that Israel would eventually move in?

Yes, okay. But it wasn't for the purpose—again, their defensive tactics.

So they spent 15 years, which is unique in urban warfare—to prepare their terrain for solely military defense, but not to... because defenders usually lose.

All they had to do was hold the IDF long enough for the international community and the United States to turn.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay.

So that dictated the T... absolutely. It’s been the strategy—the tunnels, I wrote this article, you know? War is a contest of politics, but I wrote the article in like November, like this is the first war I’ve studied where the underground is more important than the sea.

Right, right.

Because the Hamas are in the tunnels, the hostages are in tunnels, the tunnels are the key methodology to achieve the strategy.

Sure, well how effective has been— how effective has Israel’s invasion of Gaza been then?

If the Hamas terrorists can just retreat to the tunnels...

And have all the tunnels been identified, or does anyone even know that?

Yeah, right now the estimate went from 300 miles to 400 miles, but they found tunnels that they couldn’t have imagined. Just the size of them, the depth of them—how effective had they been at finding and destroying?

Is it possible to destroy them all?

Right, but if they’re so dug underneath every structure in Gaza, they’re not going to destroy them all.

They’ve had to make critical decisions on which ones to destroy, and there’s not enough explosive in the world to...

So they’ve made really tough decisions on which ones they find to destroy and how to destroy it, mainly because they tried this flooding thing for a little while.

Yeah!

I thought it was a really innovative attempt. It actually worked for Egypt along the Egypt-Gaza border to flood the tunnels because they were made of sand, and they kind of collapse down.

Oh yeah!

But these are billions of dollars. Jordan used that—that would have gone to the Palestinian people, right? Billions of dollars to use to build these—and that’s a money...

Yeah!

Well and money that they take from... You know, they basically, um, the market that they drive up the prices, and Hamas takes that money.

So both direct aid money given to Hamas, but also Hamas’s subjugation of its population into poverty involves the population having...

What about funding from places like Iran?

The direct funding for the construction of the tunnels? Is that also part of the strategy?

Absolutely! But Iran has helped in many ways, yeah.

But again, what do you make of the knowledge of the international community, let’s say, the UN for example, with regards to the presence of these tunnels?

I mean, how much of the fact that these tunnels existed has come—as it come as a surprise to and who knew?

So this is the idea of who is the United Nations?

Yeah, there’s a good question, or who is UNRWA, the United Nations organization in the Palestinian areas?

Right?

Unrwa—the UN voice in Gaza is UNRWA. So we're rational people that like have facts and can make deductions off facts. If there are Hamas data centers underneath UNRWA headquarters or if there’s Hamas tunnels underneath UNRWA facilities, schools, mosques, hospitals—but UNRWA, who has been there for 15 years, says that we did not know about that.

To me, that doesn't make logical sense.

Well, it’s either a confession of incompetence or malevolence. It’s one of the two because how could you not know? It’s just a lie.

Of course you knew!

Um, this gets to the ID where do we get information from Gaza? So Hamas is the ruling power, has been the ruling power for 15 years.

And you can't work in Gaza, much like the Bath regime in Iraq unless you're a member of Hamas.

And you could not be like a radicalized martyr, you know, fundamentalist Hamas; but you can bet your dollar you can’t say anything without the threat to your life if you don’t even believe in the ideology.

This gets to our number of civilian casualties, like the Gaza Health Ministry—which is the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry—and that we will believe their word without even questioning to where we have the national leaders of the world paring the number which I tell you as a scholar of this. There is no number; there’s no way to know how many civilians are dying on a daily basis, down to the single digit, period.

Or that nobody will acknowledge that the Gaza Health Ministry provides a number to the world that, according to them, includes every death that happens in Gaza, no matter the cause.

Right, right.

It doesn't matter if it was the Hamas rocket that landed on a house, since 20% of the 13,000 rockets Hamas has fired have landed in Gaza.

It doesn’t matter if that death was caused by Hamas.

And the Hamas number also includes any reported missing person—whether it’s a social media post or a family member saying, "I don’t know where this person is."

That goes on Hamas's list of dead personnel, but the world just runs with 30,000 Palestinian...

Right.

And I’ve seen that number radically adjusted multiple times, which is an indication of its comparative reliability.

But this gets to the college kids that... yeah.

Like just know what the number is; the number is every death that’s happened in Gaza, no matter the cause.

You’ve... 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.

And 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.

And so they’re the targets of this particular sop.

And so that’s another... it’s a dream for Russia, right?

To have this access to the use of minds.

Yeah, absolutely! It’s Russia, China, and Iran. It’s a dream that they had this... a... an algorithm that feeds it. You don’t have to do the work; the algorithm 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.

Yes!

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 a—a basically an echo to what we have today, 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 the... even these kids won't acknowledge what Hamas is.

When I...

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—and 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.

Yeah, I’ve been in war and seen children injured, and every individual, doesn’t matter who, wants 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 warring factions? Yes, but despite going back to our statement that the IDF has 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, "Please 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.

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Okay, so, all right, so are the Israelis meeting with any success in their military ventures? Are they winning, do you think? Are 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 buy hostages. So half the hostages are home, yeah?

Okay, right.

There are 124 left in Hamas's hands.

The other one was to remove Hamas from power and dismantle its military capability.

Okay, but then the question is, who exactly is Hamas?

How do you distinguish them from the civilians?

What are the... so you said you can respond proportionately. So you're going to remove Hamas's military capacity, but if Hamas is in some ways indistinguishable from the Palestinian civilian population, then how do you know when you’ve won in a manner that's going to matter in the future?

I love this. I love this specificity that most people don't ask: how do you distinguish in a situation like this where Hamas is using human sacrifice, where there’s not a single Hamas military building in Gaza?

Not one.

So how do you move forward?

Clear.

Yeah.

Now, who’s in Hamas? This is actually my visit to the IDF: they have a board, like walls of every member of Hamas's military from brigade commander, battalion commander, company commanders, and their exes were killed and captured as they are breaking apart.

Like, who gives up in this situation? Like how would the Israelis know when Hamas is actually being sufficiently defeated?

Yeah, so in this case, again, it's measurable. It’s literally like measures of effectiveness and measures of performance are pretty clear on how do you remove a form from power; when they’re the leadership, that is the power, right?

Just like when Zelensky would have left Ukraine, it would have went a lot differently. Right?

Because the leadership is a symbol of the power. If you... if that gets broken apart, then another power can be put in place.

Right? We’ve done—we bring our powers with us: invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq—we brought people with us who said that they would be the new power.

Right, that’s the challenge of the day after.

But from the actual objective of the war, Hamas is still in power; it's not an insurgency; it’s not a counterterrorist campaign.

Hamas is a political body ruling Gaza through its now somewhat broken apart units, but it's still there. It’s still in power in publicly stating things and negotiating all this stuff, right?

So it’s still a recognizable entity?

That's right.

That's pretty easy.

Politically, you could probably apply the same metric: it can't rule in its assigned geographic location.

Right?

Right. Now, one of the reasons that you have so many broken apart Hamas members from fighting is because they still think they’ll win.

Right, right.

So the will hasn't been destroyed.

That's right. Why would you give up? Your leadership's still safe in southern Gaza.

The message is continue to resist until we—till the IDF is stopped.

This goes back to your question about, again, military strategy is not that complicated as we want to make it.

Yes, defeating an ideology is very complicated.

From a military strategy, both sides had a grand strategy. I already told you what Hamas’s was, but they also had a military strategy.

Hamas’s military strategy was never to defeat the IDF on the field of battle.

It's never been, like you said. They actually have a strategy that’s based on time for the international community, namely the United States.

They say, "I know you have the right of self-defense, but you need to stop."

Right, right.

So hence, the protests on American campuses—that's the Hamas strategy working.

Right, right.

Of course, of course.

But this is... how much of that?

And how much was it spontaneous, spontaneous consequence, let’s say, of the victim-victimizer narrative?

Like to what degree has Iran managed to co-opt actors in the west that can organize those sorts of protests?

Mhm.

It's casualty aversion.

Like it doesn’t... the IDF—Israel has stopped wars from a very low number of IDF casualties.

Hostages, of course.

I mean, a nation that small, you know, they've held a single guy for years and gotten thousands of prisoners in exchange, Hamas has, right?

Right, right.

So yes, Iran, in this larger picture of the geopolitical situation.

Okay, so that’s why you made reference earlier to this idea that the attempts to reduce brutality can make it worse, right?

Yes.

Because when you change the rules, you open up new strategic possibilities that are put in place as a consequence of being able to manipulate the rules.

Yeah, this is the Western... we call it the liberal dilemma.

Yeah, right.

And the enemies of Western societies have learned that war is always a contest of will of three populations: the military is fighting, of course; the politicians who are ordering the militaries to fight; but then the populations.

Yeah, we lost the Vietnam War not because of the field of battle.

Of course, because the American population said, "We don’t see the interest in this."

In the media.

Yeah, so the actual social media effect was there in the Vietnam War.

Sure, sure.

So the contest of these three wills has led to this point, absolutely.

Whatever it is.

So now that’s weaponized—that's why you have Gaza.

Yeah.

That's why you have 400 miles of tunnels underneath

Urban Warfare, Civilian Casualty, & Human Shields | John Spencer | EP 454

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