Biden and Harris Snubbed Netanyahu, Yet IDF’s Experience In Gaza Will Benefit the US Military

Neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the airport, and Harris has declined to preside over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. The Bidenites have turned their back on Israel, ignoring, among many other salient facts, that Israel’s methods of avoiding civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as its overall experience in fighting in urban settings, will benefit the U.S. military.

The war in Gaza has been an unprecedented challenge for the IDF, as it conducts urban warfare in one of the most densely-populated places on earth, against an enemy hellbent on hiding its operatives and weapons among civilians, in schools, apartment buildings, mosques, and hospitals, as it uses its own civilians as human shields. The IDF soldiers have been learning along the way, have put into use elaborate new systems — they call it “three-dimensional warfare” — that are able to seamlessly integrate air power with what the soldiers advancing on the ground are doing, yielding spectacular results. And the IDF, of course, will be sharing its experience in Gaza with its American ally. More on Israel’s latest amazing advances in fighting in urban settings, and the lessons learned by the IDF in Gaza, can be found here.

The Israel Defense Forces’ experience in fighting Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, an area described by observers as the most challenging urban warfare environment in history, likely holds important benefits for Israel’s allies.

One of the key lessons, according to Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman, vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, is the IDF’s use of what he described as “three-dimensional warfare.”

This concept relates to creating an unprecedented capability to generate a 3D picture of the battlefield in real-time, one that shows available friendly firepower sources in the air and the ground, and the location of enemy targets. This data is then pushed to ground forces and the Israeli Air Force, enabling new levels of cooperation.

“This means that when IDF soldiers enter an alleyway, they can see what’s behind the house because someone gives them the picture of what’s in front of them,” said Lerman.

“This is definitely the most significant and heaviest complex military campaign conducted to date under these conditions, to my understanding,” Lerman, a former deputy director for foreign policy and international affairs at the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, and an ex-IDF Military Intelligence officer, told JNS.

Lerman said that the IDF and the U.S. Armed Forces have been engaged in a process of mutual learning for years, adding that “the Americans had their share of urban battles [such as Mosul, Mogadishu, Kabul]. It’s not that we invented the wheel, but it seems to me that there is one central component that was implemented in combat in Gaza by the IDF with very great effectiveness, and it is three-dimensional warfare.”

The unparalleled degree of integration between advancing ground forces and the air force accompanying them from above, all working on the basis of a common battlefield picture featuring continuous updates on enemy and friendly force positions, meant that the IDF gained a major advantage against “an enemy that under normal conditions would be invisible,” said Lerman.

IDF ground forces have visual assistance through tablet-like devices that inform their combat needs at any given moment, and work more closely than ever with fighter jets, combat helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as the navy….

Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. Army officer who taught at West Point, stated, “I think there’s much to learn for foreign militaries from the experience in Gaza. I’m confident that the United States and its allies are taking copious notes.”…

“Israel should get those weapons and munitions it needs now and stockpile them so that Israel has what it needs, when and if things get much worse,” Bowman warned.

Bradley Bowman recognizes the many achievements of the IDF, in its battle-management system known as Torch 750, that integrates the use of air power with advancing ground troops, that has enabled the Israeli infantry to “see” around buildings; in its ability to detect and destroy terror tunnels dug deep underground; in the ability of the revolutionary Israeli-made Trophy active-protection system, which can instantly detect and intercept lethal armor-penetrating threats, such as anti-tank guided missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, and is now used on all Merkava 4 tanks and installed, as well, by the U.S. Army on four brigades of Abrams tanks. Even Israel’s success at quickly mobilizing 360,000 Reservists holds lessons, Bowman says, for Taiwan as it readies itself to defend against a Chinese invasion.

And there is so much more that proves, yet again, that the American military has no better or more useful ally than the IDF.