What Israel in Gaza tells us about modern warfare
If there is one lesson that modern security institutions have learned about combating terrorist insurgencies, it is that a sledgehammer is not the appropriate tool. Armies and security forces created to deal with Cold War–style confrontations prove painfully inadequate when confronted by modern low-intensity conflicts, as was amply demonstrated by the recent Israeli campaign in Gaza. Why were the Israelis, armed with vastly superior weaponry, manpower, and resources, unable to stop the rocket fire from Gaza this January, or from Lebanon in 2006? The Israeli campaign in Gaza is a case study in three major challenges that modern militaries and security apparatuses face when attempting to defeat terrorist insurgent groups such as Hamas: antiquated Cold War tactics, decoupling of military and political goals, and the lack of a counterinsurgency strategy.
Fighting the Cold War
The modern Israeli and American armies were designed and equipped to defeat an invasion by large conventional armies armed primarily with Soviet equipment. But after the end of the Cold War, military funding decreased dramatically worldwide and much of the same weaponry was retained to fight the new low-intensity conflicts that Israel now confronts in Gaza, or that the United States faces in Afghanistan and Iraq. After the incredible military success of the first Gulf War during Desert Storm, a conception arose that modern wars could be won primarily with the application of relentless modern air power.
But fighting terrorist insurgents, called counterinsurgency, is an extraordinarily difficult and very different business. “After Vietnam, the U.S. Army decided it would neglect further study of counterinsurgency and instead focus on conventional operations. This approach made strategic sense in the context of the Cold War but lost relevance in the post–Cold War era,” U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Raymond Millen explained to the HPR in an interview from Afghanistan, where he is currently serving.
The most important counterinsurgency lesson of the past has been that a terrorist insurgency movement cannot be bombed into submission from the air or even with a ground invasion. Rather, eliminating the roots of terrorism — poor living and economic conditions, lack of job opportunities, corrupt leadership, and anger at these factors expressed through religious or ideological extremism — is the only way to truly remove the support structure of a terrorist network, after which it will collapse of its own accord.
“The broader question is conventional Western militaries, designed for Cold War fights, adapting to counterinsurgency,” said Dr. John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel and counterinsurgency expert, fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Wars against organizations that … tend not to be fully configured states … [are] a far more challenging endeavor for security forces like the Israelis or ours that are designed and best equipped to confront state [actors],” Nagl told the HPR.
Decoupled political and military goals
Carl von Clausewitz, renowned Prussian 19th century military strategist, wrote that war is merely a continuation of politics by other means. The recent Israeli campaign in Gaza has arguably been bereft of this high-level geopolitical purpose, and thus could not have succeeded because there was no clear metric by which to measure success. “The Israelis going in there, are they just trying to conduct a punitive strike or are they trying to do something to stop the fighting for the long term?” asked Dr. Carter Malkasian, a counterinsurgency researcher and director of the Center of Stability and Development at CNA, in an interview with the HPR.
Dr. Chuck Frielich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser and currently a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, believes that Israel is handicapped more by political indecision than by any need for military restructuring. For example, in Gaza the Israelis claimed that their goal in starting the war was to end the rocket strikes, but the mere ending of rocket strikes would not end Hamas’s hostility toward Israel. “I don’t think that putting a complete end to rocket fire was a realistic objective, and the operation could have even been stopped earlier because I think the point had been made,” Frielich told the HPR. But Lt. Colonel Millen cautioned that it can be hard to portray counterinsurgency victories as such in the eyes of the media and the world. As he explained, “Gaza is about managing the level of the threat and not a decisive victory like in conventional wars. We have to be careful when referencing Clausewitz because his perspective was the Napoleonic Wars, which was inter-state warfare? … the Israeli political goal is to protect itself from non-state actors in perpetuity.” Transposed to today, the war and politics adage may no longer hold true.
Incoherent counterinsurgency strategy
Once a high-level political goal has been formulated, it is still necessary to produce a coherent and workable strategy for suppressing an insurgency like Hamas in Gaza or Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Rather than hitting insurgents with “Shock and Awe” air strikes, as in Desert Storm or the early American experience in Iraq, successful counterinsurgency operations more closely resembles the recent American set of strategies referred to as the “surge,” where a combination of security provided for villages by local police and armies, strong efforts to work with the locals, reconstruction efforts, and surgical “pinpoint” strikes on terrorist leaders serve to lure the people to the American side rather than trying to scare the terrorists out of hiding with force alone. “We’ve tried to do things in Iraq [differently], we’ve tried to change the way we operate to win the people over to a greater extent,” Malkasian said. But the most important element is security for the people. “The foundation of hearts and minds lies in creating security in order for development and construction to occur. Without security, life becomes precarious,” Lt. Colonel Millen added.
There is, of course, no simple answer in terms of strategic or organizational changes for the Israeli army and government to be more successful in combating Hamas and other terrorist groups. “The challenge Israel faces is extraordinarily difficult. That’s a set of problems in which when you try to solve one you make another one worse and they’re all interrelated,” said Nagl. Furthermore, “Israel is not really conducting a classic counterinsurgency campaign, trying to separate the insurgents from the Palestinian population, because that would be nigh impossible,” Millen explained.
Nonetheless, connecting lessons about counterinsurgency to the Israeli situation show that it is unrealistic to expect a World War II–style victory of Israel over Hamas in Gaza. The end of that conflict, most agree, became yet more distant after the Gaza campaign. As Frielich commented, “I think in the next few years we’re probably talking about conflict management, not talking conflict resolution.”¨
