Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

What America Can Learn From Israel on the Battlefield

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Using the military to actually win a war.

America has never successfully liberated and held territory from Islamic terrorists. After thousands dead in Afghanistan and Iraq: both countries are now controlled by Islamic terrorists.

Many top current and former defense officials who oversaw both disasters, despite a track record of zero wins, have been criticizing Israel for not following in their footsteps.

Everyone from former Gen. David Petraeus to current Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown offer the familiar criticisms that Israel is not following the COIN or counterinsurgency model.

“Not only do you have to actually go in and clear out whatever adversary you are up against, you have to go in, hold the territory and then you’ve got to stabilize it,” Chief Brown argued.

The problem with this model is that it failed and left a lot of widows and orphans along the way.

The United States spent over 50 years losing wars, prestige and young men by trying to follow the familiar strategy for defeating guerrilla armies through conventional warfare followed by efforts to hold and stabilize the territories. And what exactly do we have to show for it?

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) discarded this conventional wisdom for another approach.

Rather than trying to hold territory filled with an enemy population among whom the terrorists move, it has used its manpower to attack concentrations of enemy forces, moving quickly and at times unpredictably, while refusing to get bogged down by trying to ‘hold’ any particular area.

This strategy has frustrated the entire Hamas war plan which like that of Jihadis in Iraq and Afghanistan depended on using terror attacks to pin military units in place, forcing them to defend and patrol a territory, and then exploiting their weaknesses to launch ambushes.

Israel learned a hard lesson from Oct 7. It’s not interested in playing defense anymore. Instead the goal of the initial stages of the war has been to keep the terrorists forces on the defensive. Complaints that Israel has to ‘reclear’ areas that it’s already taken miss the point. The enemy population supports the terrorists and so the area can’t be ‘cleared’ or ‘stabilized’. But once Israel has taken control of terrorist infrastructure, it’s better able to understand their operations.

When Israel ‘re-cleared’ Al-Shifa hospital, it took by surprise and captured much of the leadership of Islamic Jihad and some Hamas leaders as well. Rather than a weakness, re-clearing is a strength because when terrorists return to territory that Israel is now familiar with, it can turn the tables and launch surprise attacks on those old positions.

Israel is not fighting to take land, but to grind down enemy forces wherever they operate.

“The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed,” Gen McChrystal told the Senate about his Afghanistan strategy in 2009. McChrystal’s strategy killed a lot of Americans instead.

Israel is betting that McChrystal is wrong. It’s measuring effectiveness in just that way.

Holding and stabilizing territory, the basis for the COIN model, bogs down armies in defensive modes, while Israel’s approach is purely offensive and plays to its strengths. The IDF is bad at defensive operations, but quite good at rapid assaults. COIN would play to Israel’s weaknesses and the strengths of the terrorists, much as it did with us in Iraq and Afghanistan, but discarding COIN has made the IDF’s campaigns far more effective even if they’re nowhere near the end.

COIN advocates cite their ‘successes’ against ISIS in Iraq. But those successes pitted one group of Islamic terrorists against another. They would like Israel to pit the PLO against Hamas, but not only is the PLO unwilling to fight Hamas (and lost badly the last time it tried to do so) but the end result would be the same disaster in which Iraq fell into the hands of Shiite terrorists.

The problem with COIN when applied to Muslim countries is that whoever wins, we lose.

COIN in Afghanistan propped up an ineffective warlord and kleptocrat alliance that couldn’t survive without our military support while COIN in Iraq turned over the country to Iran. Not only did both pathways lead to dead ends, but neither one is even available for Israel to utilize.

The Biden administration and some former defensive officials have proposed finding Muslim nations willing to help “stabilize” Gaza afterward. Not only aren’t such nations available, but Egypt, which controls the Rafah crossing into Gaza, did everything possible to stop an Israeli advance in order to cover up the massive tunnels leading from Gaza into Egypt.

Once Israel went into Rafah, Egypt cut off aid through its crossing into Gaza in order to manufacture another “humanitarian crisis” and allow Hamas to take control in Rafah again.

That is what Israel’s prospective Muslim “partners” are really up to behind the scenes.

But that was also exactly how America’s Muslim partners acted. While America searched for Osama bin Laden, Pakistan was harboring him in one of its military towns. Qatar harbored Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and Saudi Arabia, which provided most of the hijackers (along with our other regional allies) rushed to defend the terrorists at Gitmo.

Israel has a more realistic assessment of those Arab Muslim “partners” than D.C. does.

Oct 7 was enabled by generations of peace accords overseen by D.C. beginning with the Camp David Accords, that enabled Egypt to recover territory that it had lost in a war without actually offering anything more than the coldest possible peace, and then followed by the Oslo Accords and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza which turned over the territory to Hamas.

The Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords and the withdrawal allowed Hamas to not only dominate Gaza, but connected it directly to Egyptian territory and forced Israel to refight the conflicts that it should have left behind in the 50s because there was no longer a security zone.

If Israel still controlled the Sinai and Gaza, Oct 7 would have been impossible.

Oct 7 happened because Israel put diplomacy and its hope for peace ahead of its strategic imperatives. After Oct 7, it’s finally putting strategic imperatives ahead of diplomatic ones.

Nation-building, currently referred to by politicians as a ‘day after plan’, is not on the agenda. Israel is not trying to “hold” or “stabilize” territory. Even if such considerations emerge later, it will only be when the situation on the ground has shifted significantly. The current focus is on destroying concentrations of Islamic terrorist forces and their infrastructure.

Biden administration critics claim that the collateral damage from the war will allow Hamas to recruit more men, but the Israelis know that what really allows terrorists to recruit is leaving them in power. Allowing Hamas to control Gaza for 17 years is what built it an army.

Israel is out to destroy Hamas as an organized force. The goal of the war is to take out its leaders and reduce the enemy to its smallest possible components.

“If they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do, then you’re going to have a vacuum, and a vacuum that’s likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy, and ultimately by Hamas again,” Secretary of State Blinken complained on CBS News.

Chaos and anarchy, while not ideal, are still a better deal than Hamas. Given a choice, Israel would prefer to live next door to Haiti than Iran. Islamic terrorists fighting warring gangs over territory are far preferable to terrorists building rockets and missiles.

After Oct 7, Israel is applying a crude realpolitik to the problem. It’s insufficient as a solution, but it’s a whole lot more pragmatic than the nation building and counterinsurgency rabbit hole that swallowed up a generation of our finest fighting men with nothing to show for it except despair.

Israel is trying to limit its casualties while maximizing its results. Our politicians and generals could learn a thing or two from that. The IDF is not being tasked with digging wells, winning hearts and minds or having three cups of tea with the terrorists. Its soldiers are tasked with pushing out and engaging enemy forces to expose their leaders and command structure.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, we used military force to achieve political and diplomatic aims, while Israel is using military force to achieve military aims. What a shockingly sensible notion.

Perhaps our politicians and generals ought to consider it next time we get involved in a war.

Comments

  1. We won’t learn anything because we think we are smarter than everyone else ala McClellan, the CIA, AOC, barak Obama, etc. A little humility goes a long way towards wisdom.

    • Interestingly, 40 rounds, the Biden administration still feels that it can tell Israel how to conduct its war against Hamas.

      • Yeah and Israel realizes what dopes Democrats are and ignores them thankfully

    • I liked even more of the the approach of the South African mercenaries hired in 2016 to fight the Muslims of Boko Haram and Fulani Tribesmen in Nigeria, they took no prisoners. When fighting ISIS savages who had murdered brutally murdered Christians and Yazidis, had taken sex slaves and mass murdered older Yazidi women, the Americans and other Western countries forces took prisoners. Why? The South African would have killed this trash.
      The Western world can wail over civilians in Gaza getting killed in Israeli assaults, I don’t. Most of these Muslim civilians support the October 7 Hamas barbarism, are used as human shields by Hamas and in the usual Muslim way hate Jews and Israel, so if they get killed tough luck, I don’t care about them just as they didn’t care about Muslim barbarism against Israelis on October 7. This is war

    • The French tried to tell us how to lose Vietnam. We did not listen. We lost.

  2. Like Europe, they can learn kill muslims instead of importing them.

  3. Israel has been taking advice from the US its whole history. Each war ends with an imposed ceasefire before the full defeat of those who have attacked. Thus they fight endless wars and more people are killed on both sides. This is their neighborhood and they have to survive, unlike the US retreating and being able to return to our own lands across the seas.

  4. If actual everyday Americans were in charge Iraq and Afghanistan would have ended differently. Unfortunately for us we are saddled with current and former defense officials mucking everything up.

    • The only American military success I recall was the David Patraeus inspired “surge’ in Iraq that was carried out by McChrystal, but then both turned quite useless. The other utterly useless influence in war was the utterly useless Barack Obama who deliberate forced U.S. troops in Afghanistan to fight was disgraceful restrictions. Obama was the enemy and stiil is.

  5. In the Gulf war it took General Schwarzkopf and his men four days to wipe out the Iraqi army. He could have turned left and headed to Baghdad unopposed and avoided the second misadventure in Iraq altogether. At that time large numbers of Iraqis would have been glad to see him coming. Many hated Saddam. But no, the experts told him not to do it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfQG0I9eTWk

    In hindsight, the experts were wrong in 91 and so we ended up with Iraq 2003 to 2011 and a lot more dead Americans.

  7. One of Americas problems is that we attempt nation building and “winning hearts and minds.” Neither work. We should not do nation building when our own government is in a shambles and winning hearts and minds is for after we win the war like we did in wwll.

  8. I can’t see where Democrats ever wanted and American victory or American recovery. They have depleted the military might and the point the US can barely defend itself if invaded. The population has arms and the individual States have militias to defend the Feds have very little. Israel needs to continue to deplete the numbers of Hamas combatants and reduce the amount of their armaments. There is an objective reality in that there is a divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims which may be exploited after Hamas is wiped out. The ideological war can be won only when the ideology is exposed and revealed to be a demoniacal entity that it is. That entails much more wisdom than is possessed by ordinary human beings.

  9. Israel does not want to govern Gaza but may be forced to militarily administer/occupy because no other nation has the will to defend Israeli citizens against Jihadists. Like wise Israel is being forced to occupy Judea and Samaria (West Bank) because 1) it is legally Israeli land and 2) nobody else can do it. The Biden Admin is clearly on the side of the Jihadists and thus is bowing to the Islamic Republic. The basic truths surrounding this war is clear to Bible readers. This war is a battle between Darkness and Light. I prefer to use the term Islamic Republic instead of Iran as most Iranians do not support the ayatollah regime. Just calling a spade a spade!

  11. Daniel Greenfield’s analysis makes perfect sense…..AT THIS POINT IN THE CONFLICT! But what to do after the major fighting subsides? If Israel is “forced to militarily administer/occupy” Gaza as Mr Greenfield suggests, then all the COIN strategies will indeed end up coming into play.

    Let’s not forget how Israel was forced to occupy southern Lebanon in the early 80s and that by 2000, after Hezbollah’s bloody campaign of resistance, the Jewish State had unilaterally withdrawn with their tail between their legs….begging the International community to document how they’d left every inch of Lebanese territory….(Hezbollah still found a way to continue justifying attacks against Israel by manufacturing the Shebaa Farms controversy).

    If America learned ANYTHING in Iraq, it was that destroying the enemy in the initial fighting is the easy part. It is the subsequent occupation that creates the vulnerability to low-level insurgency.

  12. Firstly don’t let the Bidenites micro manage the battlefield.

    Second, there is jo way to have a lasting cease fire with an Islwmist Jihaddist regime that is using all sorts of excuses to blame their victims for hostilities they keep on initiating, for the last fourteen hundred years in pursuit of their genocidal agenda against, firstly, all Jews of this planet which is extended against all Christians, Hindus and all other non-Muslims and when they run out of non-Muslims, they extend against other Muslims who don’t fully comply with their own sectarian customs.

    Excuses for Hamas genocidal attack on Israel abound, but not long before 7 Ictober 2023 Savage attack against Israel, on Friday 24 November 2017, not far from Gaza, at Bir Al Abed on North West Sinai, Islamic State Allies of Hamas massacred more than 300 Sufi Muslims in an unprovoked attack during Friday Prayers in their Mosque.

    There was no ‘Occupation’ or dispute over land to blame.

  13. Knock :Palestine down so far it can’t rebuild. If you want to stop the islamic terrorism stop letting muslim to migrate into your country. Then stop trading with them and giving them the money and arms to fight with. Blockade islamic countriesNo weapons, No access to non – Muslims no ISLAMIC TERRORIST.

  14. Exactly Correct. Kill the enemy quickly and thoroughly until they surrender to the victors demands

  15. All this reminds me of how astute Abraham Lincoln was during the Civil War. Unlike many of his earlier generals like McClellan, Pope, Burnsides, Hooker, et al., Lincoln realized early on that what was paramount was utterly defeating the Confederate military in the field and not taking territory, holding cities, etc. Finally, as the war wore on, Lincoln did find the commanders he had wanted all along, generals like Grant and Sherman who realized that their primary goal was to utterly decimate the enemy army, to destroy it. Only once this occurred could any kind of rebuilding begin. In short, total military victory before all else.

  16. As we discuss what needs to be done after military victory, Muslims pour across the borders into of North America.

    The open borders to the south and the Trudeau government inviting them in. I’m Canadian and am sick to death about what’s happening and what is going to happen in the near future to our countries.

    Trudeau just issued immigration papers to 5000 Palestinian families thats Palestinian “families” . If this isn’t a direct hit to North America I don’t know what is. The last time he did anything close to this was inviting 40,000 Syrian’s to Canada. What I seen made me sick. Investigating this I stumbled across documents on the government’s website telling all administration staff not to disclose the amount of young males that were coming lest they upset the population, this after saying the the numbers were the total numbers and mostly families. This is the king of thing that has been going on since these liberal criminals were first voted in, in 2015.

    There has been no vetting of any migrants they have been bringing in, this I know for a fact. My wife worked with one of the newer migrants whose papers expired 6 months ago and nothing from the government not a word looking for him at all. Our small town of thirty five hundred white people has suddenly ballooned in population and became the UN. Don’t get me wrong I’m not racist but there sure are a lot of dark coloured men in our town, no in out province all of a sudden.
    I realize this is a little off base from the main article but this has to be addressed or we know the out come. Ninety percent of these migrants are Muslims, there is no future with Muslims we need to stop brining these people here out we will pay a big price

  17. Remember who owns Israel

    The muslims and the secular lefty world,the lying corrupt media doesn’t get it

    My land
    Jeremiah 2:7

    You do not own it ..it belongs to God
    Leviticus 25:23

    God has a Rubicon regarding Israel:Jerusalem
    Zechariah 12 v 9

    The Israelis are rightful tenants of the Land.

  18. There’s a necessary step without which long-term victory is impossible. Level the madrassas. Who doesn’t know that? Every other proposal will fail without “reforming” their educational system. The Left knows this. They’ve been playing the long game forever right here in River City, K12 and beyond. Or did you think today’s campus unrest was spontaneous?

  19. The IDF probably doesn’t have mission-creep the way we have, or at least had, in Afghanistan and Iraq

  20. Generally speaking, it just seems that Islam does not play well with others. A simple reality.

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