David Perkins and Ari Cicurelon
As Israel conducts limited ground operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, it already has encountered tunnels similar to the dangerous unseen combat it has fought for a year beneath Gaza.
Not for the first time, Israel is engaged in a new kind of fight that the United States will face in its future conflicts.
Just as the United States has learned from Israel’s wars in the past, the risks of tunnel warfare and how Israel is overcoming those challenges through coordinated troop maneuvers and technological adaptations should drive a shift in the US approach to subterranean combat.
The United States has a long history of learning from Israel’s wars. The 1973 Yom Kippur War had such a transformational effect that the US Army made the largest change to its doctrine since World War II. The Egyptian and Syrian armies’ use of new Soviet weapons and tactics that were more lethal and rapid, the ability of anti-tank weapons to neutralize more tanks in the first six days of the war than the United States had deployed throughout all of Europe, and tank battles occurring at much greater ranges than ever before shocked American defense planners preparing for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
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