It's so refreshing to have the POV of someone who has actually been there/done that, rather than the bloviating fools whose sole experience of "combat" was defending their dissertation.
Agree with all the broad strokes of this piece, with the exception of one: that of the IDF are trying their damnedest to avoid killing civvies. From Phil Klay’s piece in The Atlantic this week: “…Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credibility.” (My own additional note is that during the “Shock and Awe” phase of the Iraq invasion we launched about 1,500 strikes over the first 96 hours—and that was with targets mostly in the open across a much wider AOR)
As a geospatial analyst who looks at satellite imagery for a living nowadays, I’d tend to agree with Klay that between the quantity of ordnance dropped into dense urban neighborhoods and what we end up seeing on the satellite imagery in the aftermath, the IDF is being *extremely* loose with their airstrike ROE, and these are the primary causes of civvies getting killed. It’s hard for me to contrast the most lenient Hamas/civilian body count ratios with the massive ordnance tallies and the overhead imagery of structural flattening without saying this is overkill on the part of the IDF.
That said, “never point out a problem without offering a solution,” so what would I do in Rafah as opposed to what was done in Gaza? This is going to draw out my bias as a former combat engineer, but I’d say use the D9 & Merkava instead of the F-16. Cordon off the area the way we did Fallujah and clear it block by block using D9 dozers and 120mm smoothbore shells instead of air strikes when contact is made on the ground. This way you have a firm set of eyes between target and response so as to only engage structures *confirmed* to have hostiles inside—unlike with intel-backed airstrikes, but you’re also less likely to do as much widespread neighborhood flattening as a result of limiting the response to contact to dozer-smashing structures or putting a tank shell through them (much smaller explosive yield than a 200 or 500-lb bomb. Will this prevent all civvies from dying? No. Will it drastically improve the margins? Yes, in my opinion. Just my $0.02 on Rafah vs Gaza and what tactics might be worth changing. Thanks for your writings as always Will.
The article discusses 2,000-lb bombs (larger than the Mk48/GBU-38-sized bombs I referenced), drop angles, and depth-of-detonation, which are all fair points when discussing the precision of things like JDAMs on individual targets. But what I was talking about was the *quantity/volume/scale* of ordnance being dropped collectively into a given spatial density over a given temporal period rather than the payload size and/or method of strike for any one individual strike--not to mention that some 40-45% of ordnance dropped into Gaza by the IDF's AF are unguided (an ODNI assessment sourced via CNN).
Think of this in the sense of how we scaled up of our drone campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen that also resulted in a scaling up of civilian casualties. We found good effect against a number of terror groups in a number of AORs employing Mk48 JDAMs and AGM-114 Hellfires from the wing tips of persistent/loitering RQ-9 ISR platforms against targets of opportunity from roughly '09-'17 at a time when we were trying to move toward a more strike-focused campaign and away from a ground-based campaign across a wider AOR within CENTCOM/AFRICOM under the Obama admin. This was a move to reduce ground operations that inevitably produced US casualties and local anger about American night raids while keeping various terror orgs on their toes via strikes instead of ground incursions--in many cases in places we couldn't actually send in ground troops like in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. When we scaled up the strike ops while scaling down the ground combat ops, it bought the Obama admin some space back home to make Americans forget about the wars while fewer SMs returned stateside via Dover caskets. But what this ended up doing in aggregate was scaling up civilian casualties as a side effect of scaling up the strike ops--particularly once certain terror orgs started playing swap-the-SIM-card at gatherings or "let me borrow mom's phone" once they realized that SIGINT was providing geolocation for the RQ-9 strikes. So by swapping ground ops for strike ops we ended up trading ISAF casualties for local civilian ones, which caused massive civilian backlashes to the counterinsurgency campaign we had invested into Afghanistan, undermining the local government we were trying to stand up there. It also provided Terry with more recruits who wanted vengeance for slain family members, bringing the EKIA vs fresh recruit ratios into balance with one another. What I see is the IDF making this same mistake from the get-go in Gaza.
The answer to a Fallujah/Gaza is a ground-based solution rather than a strike-based one when you focus on the real mission of making sure that Hamas doesn't replenish its ranks with angry males who have lost family members to strike ops. If Hamas' recruitment numbers in the wake of IDF strikes beat out EKIA numbers from said strikes then you've not changed the equation of bringing the number of Hamas fighters down to zero, which is the *real* mission at the end of the day for the IDF. Making sure recruitment stays low means making sure the fewest amount of civvies die possible, because every time they do some male family member--if not already a Hamas fighter/supporter--is going to join up on a personal vengeance path. For that reason, I favor the ground-focused ops that employ a much lower volume of scaled ordnance deployment--in addition to lower ordnance yields when they are employed--as compared to a scaled-up strike campaign where only some 50% of that dropped ordnance is guided and the volume of ordnance deployment makes "precision" a hollow term when contrasted with the scale of employment and satellite imagery results. D9s and 120mm smoothbore can do plenty of EKIA-making in the urban environment without nearly as much collateral damage, which helps the IDF bring that Hamas fighter-fielding math equation to zero a lot better than a strike-focused campaign in dense urban spaces does (in my opinion anyway). But go figure that a convo between an AF guy and a USMC guy comes down to bombing things versus ground-side ops. That's not stereotypical at all :-)
Good analysis except I’d argue that comparing a nation in a protracted war half a globe away with a nation fighting on their own doorstep is fraught with error. Most notably, the US has often had to pace their strikes on ammunition supplies in theater. I know, it’s hard to believe that the mighty USAF wouldn’t be able to fully sustain any pace of ordinance employment, but that’s not the reality. I’ve participated in strike where we used the second- or third-choice munitions over the optimal one to preserve our limited stock. And, we prioritized targets at time to expend munitions against threat to the homeland targets over collective self defense targets. We even began prioritizing munitions aboard B-1/B-2 aircraft who could rearm further from the battlefield to preserve the ones on the CAS/Strike assets. There were also times we expended all available munitions in our platform and had to bring in a buddy to kill a single target. I call him the Million Dollar Man. 🚀 💸
Structural flattening… like we did to Kobani supporting our Kurdish allies? We didn’t drop 6k ordinance a month, but we leveled the city (70% destruction) over months while our Kurdish friends were moving to contact so we knew which buildings to level. And the Kurds took far more casualties in that protracted battle than the IDF could afford to take. And let us not talk about Bakhmut, but that’s a real shooting war not a protracted long war.
The IDF has no motivation to lie because it is an organization that has to report to an elected government? That rational stopped working for me during Vietnam.
If they showed me a photo of a 100 Hamas bodies lined up, I would start believing them. If the IDF was killing this many Hamas, there wouldn't be a burial detail, there would be a burial brigade. Where's the cemetery?
As a professional historian, I will start believing reports about this war after I've read about four good books 20 years from now.
I love this. As a kidlet, my local paper, the Philadelphia Bulletin, every day would run a tiny box on the front page with the body count from the day before in Vietnam. I thought it was a measuring tool of American progress. I was also 8. As an adult, I have lived in a city with a serious shooting-each-other problem. You hear about survivors; I know what that means in actual devastation of lives.
I find this article very enlightening since 1) I have no idea of anything about this topic; 2) It is refreshing for someone to tackle it given the topic's use by civilian know-nothings (of which I am one) and 3) It is tackled by someone who knows a great deal about it (you). Thanks for putting this out there.
It's so refreshing to have the POV of someone who has actually been there/done that, rather than the bloviating fools whose sole experience of "combat" was defending their dissertation.
I'm stealing that last line, brotha. I love it.
Agree with all the broad strokes of this piece, with the exception of one: that of the IDF are trying their damnedest to avoid killing civvies. From Phil Klay’s piece in The Atlantic this week: “…Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credibility.” (My own additional note is that during the “Shock and Awe” phase of the Iraq invasion we launched about 1,500 strikes over the first 96 hours—and that was with targets mostly in the open across a much wider AOR)
As a geospatial analyst who looks at satellite imagery for a living nowadays, I’d tend to agree with Klay that between the quantity of ordnance dropped into dense urban neighborhoods and what we end up seeing on the satellite imagery in the aftermath, the IDF is being *extremely* loose with their airstrike ROE, and these are the primary causes of civvies getting killed. It’s hard for me to contrast the most lenient Hamas/civilian body count ratios with the massive ordnance tallies and the overhead imagery of structural flattening without saying this is overkill on the part of the IDF.
That said, “never point out a problem without offering a solution,” so what would I do in Rafah as opposed to what was done in Gaza? This is going to draw out my bias as a former combat engineer, but I’d say use the D9 & Merkava instead of the F-16. Cordon off the area the way we did Fallujah and clear it block by block using D9 dozers and 120mm smoothbore shells instead of air strikes when contact is made on the ground. This way you have a firm set of eyes between target and response so as to only engage structures *confirmed* to have hostiles inside—unlike with intel-backed airstrikes, but you’re also less likely to do as much widespread neighborhood flattening as a result of limiting the response to contact to dozer-smashing structures or putting a tank shell through them (much smaller explosive yield than a 200 or 500-lb bomb. Will this prevent all civvies from dying? No. Will it drastically improve the margins? Yes, in my opinion. Just my $0.02 on Rafah vs Gaza and what tactics might be worth changing. Thanks for your writings as always Will.
Here is my rejoinder (sorry, I don't have the bandwidth to parry some of your excellent points - juggling a couple of gigs right now) : https://www.commentary.org/articles/david-adesnik/media-lies-about-israeli-bombs/
The article discusses 2,000-lb bombs (larger than the Mk48/GBU-38-sized bombs I referenced), drop angles, and depth-of-detonation, which are all fair points when discussing the precision of things like JDAMs on individual targets. But what I was talking about was the *quantity/volume/scale* of ordnance being dropped collectively into a given spatial density over a given temporal period rather than the payload size and/or method of strike for any one individual strike--not to mention that some 40-45% of ordnance dropped into Gaza by the IDF's AF are unguided (an ODNI assessment sourced via CNN).
Think of this in the sense of how we scaled up of our drone campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen that also resulted in a scaling up of civilian casualties. We found good effect against a number of terror groups in a number of AORs employing Mk48 JDAMs and AGM-114 Hellfires from the wing tips of persistent/loitering RQ-9 ISR platforms against targets of opportunity from roughly '09-'17 at a time when we were trying to move toward a more strike-focused campaign and away from a ground-based campaign across a wider AOR within CENTCOM/AFRICOM under the Obama admin. This was a move to reduce ground operations that inevitably produced US casualties and local anger about American night raids while keeping various terror orgs on their toes via strikes instead of ground incursions--in many cases in places we couldn't actually send in ground troops like in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. When we scaled up the strike ops while scaling down the ground combat ops, it bought the Obama admin some space back home to make Americans forget about the wars while fewer SMs returned stateside via Dover caskets. But what this ended up doing in aggregate was scaling up civilian casualties as a side effect of scaling up the strike ops--particularly once certain terror orgs started playing swap-the-SIM-card at gatherings or "let me borrow mom's phone" once they realized that SIGINT was providing geolocation for the RQ-9 strikes. So by swapping ground ops for strike ops we ended up trading ISAF casualties for local civilian ones, which caused massive civilian backlashes to the counterinsurgency campaign we had invested into Afghanistan, undermining the local government we were trying to stand up there. It also provided Terry with more recruits who wanted vengeance for slain family members, bringing the EKIA vs fresh recruit ratios into balance with one another. What I see is the IDF making this same mistake from the get-go in Gaza.
The answer to a Fallujah/Gaza is a ground-based solution rather than a strike-based one when you focus on the real mission of making sure that Hamas doesn't replenish its ranks with angry males who have lost family members to strike ops. If Hamas' recruitment numbers in the wake of IDF strikes beat out EKIA numbers from said strikes then you've not changed the equation of bringing the number of Hamas fighters down to zero, which is the *real* mission at the end of the day for the IDF. Making sure recruitment stays low means making sure the fewest amount of civvies die possible, because every time they do some male family member--if not already a Hamas fighter/supporter--is going to join up on a personal vengeance path. For that reason, I favor the ground-focused ops that employ a much lower volume of scaled ordnance deployment--in addition to lower ordnance yields when they are employed--as compared to a scaled-up strike campaign where only some 50% of that dropped ordnance is guided and the volume of ordnance deployment makes "precision" a hollow term when contrasted with the scale of employment and satellite imagery results. D9s and 120mm smoothbore can do plenty of EKIA-making in the urban environment without nearly as much collateral damage, which helps the IDF bring that Hamas fighter-fielding math equation to zero a lot better than a strike-focused campaign in dense urban spaces does (in my opinion anyway). But go figure that a convo between an AF guy and a USMC guy comes down to bombing things versus ground-side ops. That's not stereotypical at all :-)
I promise I'm going to reply to your comments. A little hectic.
No worries brother, enjoy your Friday 👍
Good analysis except I’d argue that comparing a nation in a protracted war half a globe away with a nation fighting on their own doorstep is fraught with error. Most notably, the US has often had to pace their strikes on ammunition supplies in theater. I know, it’s hard to believe that the mighty USAF wouldn’t be able to fully sustain any pace of ordinance employment, but that’s not the reality. I’ve participated in strike where we used the second- or third-choice munitions over the optimal one to preserve our limited stock. And, we prioritized targets at time to expend munitions against threat to the homeland targets over collective self defense targets. We even began prioritizing munitions aboard B-1/B-2 aircraft who could rearm further from the battlefield to preserve the ones on the CAS/Strike assets. There were also times we expended all available munitions in our platform and had to bring in a buddy to kill a single target. I call him the Million Dollar Man. 🚀 💸
Structural flattening… like we did to Kobani supporting our Kurdish allies? We didn’t drop 6k ordinance a month, but we leveled the city (70% destruction) over months while our Kurdish friends were moving to contact so we knew which buildings to level. And the Kurds took far more casualties in that protracted battle than the IDF could afford to take. And let us not talk about Bakhmut, but that’s a real shooting war not a protracted long war.
The IDF has no motivation to lie because it is an organization that has to report to an elected government? That rational stopped working for me during Vietnam.
If they showed me a photo of a 100 Hamas bodies lined up, I would start believing them. If the IDF was killing this many Hamas, there wouldn't be a burial detail, there would be a burial brigade. Where's the cemetery?
As a professional historian, I will start believing reports about this war after I've read about four good books 20 years from now.
Looking forward to the long version. Keep writing.
I love this. As a kidlet, my local paper, the Philadelphia Bulletin, every day would run a tiny box on the front page with the body count from the day before in Vietnam. I thought it was a measuring tool of American progress. I was also 8. As an adult, I have lived in a city with a serious shooting-each-other problem. You hear about survivors; I know what that means in actual devastation of lives.
I find this article very enlightening since 1) I have no idea of anything about this topic; 2) It is refreshing for someone to tackle it given the topic's use by civilian know-nothings (of which I am one) and 3) It is tackled by someone who knows a great deal about it (you). Thanks for putting this out there.