What America can learn from Israel on the battlefield

Full article Daniel Greenfield, https://tinyurl.com/yvkzpen5

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 (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.55adMore

The problem with this model is that it failed. 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 is there 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 terrorist 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 it 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.

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.

Perhaps American politicians and generals ought to reconsider the COIN model next time they get involved in a war.