Max Boot
At first glance, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza don’t appear to have much in common. The fight in Ukraine is a conventional conflict pitting two states against each other, while the Gaza War pits a conventional military against a terrorist organization. Yet, as I’ve been talking in recent weeks with current and retired U.S. generals and civilian analysts who are studying both conflicts, I have concluded that they actually reinforce many of the same lessons. Those are lessons that the U.S. military urgently needs to internalize.
Hamas isn’t just a terrorist organization, after all. It’s a quasi-governmental entity that entered the war with an estimated 30,000 fighters — and, just like the Russian army in Ukraine, it has engaged in terrible war crimes. In both cases, the brutal violence is intended to terrorize its enemies into surrender. Hamas leaders appear to not care about the terrible costs inflicted on civilians — or even on their own fighters — by the war they started on Oct. 7. (Note that they don’t open their tunnels to shelter civilians from Israeli bombing.) Likewise, the Kremlin has shown a shocking willingness to not only kill Ukrainian civilians but also its own soldiers, who have been sacrificed in “meat grinder” assaults for a few meters of ground.
The wars in both Gaza and Ukraine should remind complacent Western leaders that our adversaries do not share our liberal values and, thus, are much less casualty-conscious than Western militaries are. That gives them a major military advantage.
Ukraine’s commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, recently admitted to the Economist that he was wrong to believe that he could stop the Russian onslaught by inflicting heavy casualties on the invaders. But even though U.S. intelligence estimates that 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded, Vladimir Putin just keeps on attacking. So, too, Israeli commanders are mistaken if they think that inflicting pain and suffering on Palestinian civilians will lead Hamas to stop fighting. This is known to intelligence analysts as “mirror imaging,” and it’s a critical mistake to avoid.
Gen. James E. Rainey, commander of the U.S. Army Futures Command, recently told me that the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts should both remind us “that war remains primarily a human endeavor, land is decisive, urban conflict is as unavoidable as it is undesirable, and close combat proficiency at the small unit level is required and decisive.”
Such conclusions might seem obvious, but they run counter to the modern tendency in the West, including in both the Israeli and U.S. armed forces, to try to reduce warfare to a long-range targeting exercise utilizing precision strike systems. Those capabilities remain important, but both Ukraine and Israel are learning anew the need for ground forces that can close with, and destroy, enemy forces in close-quarters combat.
Attacking is particularly hard to do in cities, where buildings offer cover for defenders and civilians are in the line of fire. Ukraine has seen a series of bloody battles waged in and around cities such as Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Kherson. Now, in the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces are fighting simultaneously in two major urban areas — Gaza City and Khan Younis — where Hamas’s vast tunnel network presents another threat dimension. Given that about 68 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050, it’s vitally important to master what the U.S. military calls MOUT: military operations on urbanized terrain.
U.S. forces have experience in recent decades fighting in Fallujah and Ramadi and supporting local forces fighting Islamic State in Mosul and Raqqa, but they have not faced the kinds of challenges that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is encountering in more built-up urban areas. “When was the last time a U.S. infantry battalion cleared a hospital — or a skyscraper?” write retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David W. Barno and defense analyst Nora Bensahel in War on the Rocks. “The U.S. military would not be able to rely solely on standoff tactics and precision strikes during urban operations in a large city. … This means that U.S. military ground forces … should be better organized, trained, and equipped for intense urban fighting.”
Another lesson taught in Ukraine, and reinforced in Gaza, is “that we must engage and win the information war,” retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander Europe, told me. “This means dominating the news cycle, producing compelling visual content (think TikTok-style video) and putting forward competent, believable spokesmen.”
Ukraine has done a better job of information operations than Israel because it has a better story to tell — it is the victim of unprovoked aggression, and it is not killing Russian civilians. The civilian death toll is entirely on Ukraine’s side, helping to generate popular sympathy for its cause. By contrast, Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields, making it inevitable that Israeli combat operations will inflict large numbers of civilian casualties. (More than 18,700 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry.)
Israel insists that it abides by the laws of war, but such arguments count for little compared with the emotional power of a photo of a dead Palestinian child. In the battle of victim narratives, Israel’s most effective counter has been to expose the depravity of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack — for example, by highlighting Hamas’s use of sexual violence against Israeli women. Even so, there’s little question that Israel is losing the information war, and that could lead it to lose the whole war.
Another important point was made to me by retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who says that we should have “a healthy skepticism of intelligence assessments.” He points out that while the U.S. intelligence community accurately predicted that Putin would invade Ukraine, it did not anticipate how successfully Ukraine would resist the invasion.
Israel’s intelligence and military establishments, for their part, vastly underestimated Hamas’s capabilities in much the same way that the United States did with al-Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001. As the New York Times reported: “Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened …. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.” Complacency is one of the deadliest military sins — and one of the hardest to avoid when dealing with less powerful adversaries.
Reliance on technology brings its own vulnerabilities. Hamas carried out its long-planned assault with startling success by using simple expedients — such as attacking cell towers with drones — to blind Israel’s high-tech monitoring systems. Russia, meanwhile, has used more advanced electronic warfare systems to jam the GPS guidance of Ukraine’s U.S.-made rocket systems. Both examples show other adversaries, from China to Iran, how to blunt the United States’ military edge by blinding U.S. sensors.
“I am always concerned about sabotage of technology-driven systems (e.g., GPS),” retired U.S. Army Gen. Joseph L. Votel, a former head of Central Command, told me in an email. “I am also worried that the ubiquity of technology is making it a cheap resource for everyone — including terrorist organizations.”
The final lesson from the Ukraine and Gaza wars is the need for a robust defense-industrial capacity, because high-intensity conflicts always consume vast quantities of ammunition. The proliferation of rocket technology makes it especially critical to maintain supplies for missile-defense systems such as Israel’s Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow and Ukraine’s Patriot, IRIS-T and NASAMS batteries.
Both Israel and Ukraine are counting on replenishment from the United States. Yet even if Congress could get its act together to provide critically needed support (which is in serious doubt at the moment), the U.S. defense industry cannot produce enough munitions to go around. “Our defense industrial base has atrophied over the past 30 years and has now become a critical vulnerability,” Lute noted. The war in Gaza should reinforce the message of the war in Ukraine about the need to reinvigorate U.S. defense production.
As of this writing, the outcomes in both Gaza and Ukraine remain uncertain. We don’t know whether Ukraine will receive the support it desperately needs from Washington, given growing Republican isolationism; if it doesn’t, the results could be catastrophic. In the case of Israel, it’s not clear whether the IDF will have the time it wants to destroy Hamas amid growing global outrage over the number of civilian casualties it is inflicting.
Whatever happens in the future, both Israel and Ukraine have already suffered heavy losses because they were caught off-guard by enemy attacks. That should offer an urgent warning to the Pentagon to learn the right lessons from the ongoing conflicts as it prepares its own forces for the wars of the future. As Israel and Ukraine remind us, the price of unreadiness will be paid in blood.
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