Quotes of the Day:

"Consensus is the absence of leadership." 

- Margaret Thatcher

"Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to."

- Ashleigh Brilliant

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these." 

- George Washington Carver

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 13, 2023

2. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, October 13, 2023 

3. The Irregular Warfare Implications of the Israel-Hamas Conflict

4. How Hamas Fooled the Experts

5. Iran Update, October 13, 2023

6. Lessons for the US military from Ukraine and Israel

7. Special Operations Forces in Great Power Competition, Valuing Low-Tech and Cognitive Dominance

8. On Point: Beijing, Pay Attention: Don't Let Ukraine-Gaza Lead to WWIII Taiwan

9. Palestinians flee northern Gaza as Israel masses troops for assault

10. How Hamas secretly built a 'mini-army' to fight Israel

11. ​AMERICA'S STRATEGIC POSTURE – The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States

12. An Invasion of Gaza Would Be a Disaster for Israel

13. The Path to AI Arms Control

14. US intelligence warned of the potential for violence days before Hamas attack

15. What Israel Will Face in Gaza

16. It's Not Just America in Decline. Culture Wars Threaten Western Civilization

17. Could Israel shock waves hit Taiwan?

18. Philippines in historic US-backed military base expansion

19. Recovery of American hostages to be led by Israelis, US to advise

20. Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system works well – here’s how Hamas got around it

21. Top Marine outlines priorities for next four years

22. EXCLUSIVE: Former Special Operators, Advocates Call On Congress To Block Cuts To Special Operations

23. How Hamas Overran Southern Israel and Killed 1,300

24. The Bolduc Brief: Evaluating the Leadership Failure of Generals and Admirals in Today's Military

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 13, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-13-2023

• Ongoing Russian offensive operations throughout the Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast area on October 13 reportedly faced setbacks around the city.
• The Russian military command appears to be restricting discussion of the Russian offensive operations around Avdiivka in the Russian information space, likely in an attempt to adapt to previous information shocks and control any narratives that emerge in the Russian information space around these operations.
• The Kremlin is likely attempting to frame Russian offensive operations around Avdiivka and other localized efforts as Russian forces seizing the operational initiative in Ukraine.
• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 13.
• Russian forces continue to target Ukrainian critical infrastructure facilities with drone and missile strikes, as well as localized cross-border raids.
• Russian authorities arrested four lawyers who represent prominent opposition figures on extremism charges on October 13, likely to set conditions for the upcoming 2024 Russian presidential elections.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Donetsk City, and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area and western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced in various sectors of the front.
• A Ukrainian military intelligence official reported that Russian forces are struggling to equip newly-formed military formations.
• Ukrainian partisans reportedly targeted Russian military assets in rear areas in southern Ukraine on October 12 and 13.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 13, 2023

Oct 13, 2023 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 13, 2023

Nicole Wolkov, Christina Harward, Grace Mappes, Angelica Evans, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Mason Clark

October 13, 2023, 6:45pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1:30pm ET on October 13. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the October 14 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

NOTE: ISW has added a new section on Russian information operations and narratives to the daily Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, found at the end of the update.

Ongoing Russian offensive operations throughout the Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast area on October 13 reportedly faced setbacks around the city. Russian sources claimed that Russian forces continued to attack areas north and south of Avdiivka, and geolocated footage published on October 12 and 13 indicates that Russian forces advanced south of Krasnohorivka (5km north of Avdiivka) and southeast of Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka).[1] Russian sources also published conflicting reports about previous claims by Russian sources of Russian control of the Avdiivka Coke Plant, and ISW has not observed any evidence to confirm that Russian forces control the plant as of publication.[2] Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian forces continue to repel Russian attacks around Avdiivka.[3] A Russian milblogger noted that Ukrainian forces are using minefields to slow down Russian advances in the Avdiivka direction.[4] A Russian volunteer in the 4th Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Brigade (2nd Army Corps, Southern Military District) claimed that worn out barrels are reducing the accuracy of Russian artillery near Avdiivka, a complaint about Russian artillery that ISW has previously observed from Russian sources.[5] The volunteer assessed that Russian forces can ”compress the [Ukrainian] perimeter” by capturing less fortified Ukrainian-held territory near Avdiivka, but expressed concern that Russian generals will misinterpret these limited advances and try to speed up offensive efforts towards Avdiivka. The volunteer noted that such a misinterpretation may lead Russian forces to “beat on concrete” fortifications until these forces run out.

The Russian military command appears to be restricting discussion of the Russian offensive operations around Avdiivka in the Russian information space, likely in an attempt to adapt to previous information shocks and control any narratives that emerge in the Russian information space around these operations. A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on October 12 that the Russian military command was “dispensing information [about Russian offensive operations] in doses,” but then claimed on October 13 that the Russian military command was ”minimizing the release of information into the public domain” as the Russian military does not want “media hype” surrounding operations near Avdiivka.[6] Another Russian milblogger also claimed on October 13 that unspecified actors, likely Russian military leadership, instructed milbloggers to not discuss the details of the fighting near Avdiivka.[7] A Russian source stated that he supported the Russian military’s decision and urged milbloggers to discuss only information that does not affect Russian military operational security, whereas other Russian milbloggers noted that this is the time to figure out which of the Russian milbloggers are lying about the situation on the frontlines.[8] The Russian military command likely seeks to adjust for previous major offensives in which it lost control of perceptions of Russian actions in the Russian information space. Some milbloggers are following (and will likely continue to follow) the MoD-imposed narrative line, but this attempt at centralized control may provoke a backlash from select milbloggers.

The Kremlin is likely attempting to frame Russian offensive operations around Avdiivka and other localized efforts as Russian forces seizing the operational initiative in Ukraine. Russian UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya claimed on October 13 that Ukrainian counteroffensive operations are “formally over” because Russian forces have switched to “active combat operations along almost the entire frontline."[9] The Kremlin is likely attempting to use Russian offensive operations around Avdiivka as well as localized efforts in other areas of the front to shift the Russian and international narratives to focus on Russian offensive operations and military capabilities. Ukraine is highly unlikely to have concluded its ongoing counteroffensive as Nebenzya claims, and as ISW has previously noted Ukrainian counteroffensive operations will likely continue into the winter months, though likely at a reduced pace and scale.[10]

Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 13. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) direction and the Bakhmut direction.[11] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued unsuccessful attacks along the Klishchiivka-Andriivka-Kurdyumivka line (7-13km southwest of Bakhmut) and along the Robotyne-Verbove line (10km south to 18km southeast of Orikhiv).[12]

Russian forces continue to target Ukrainian critical infrastructure facilities with drone and missile strikes, as well as localized cross-border raids. Spokesperson of the United Press Center of the Northern Direction Ukrainian Defense Forces, Colonel Yurii Povh, reported on October 12 that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian sabotage and reconnaissance group attempting to cross into Sumy Oblast and stated that these Russian forces likely aimed to reach a Ukrainian critical infrastructure facility.[13] Povh stated that Russian sabotage and reconnaissance groups have unsuccessfully attempted to cross the international border between Russia and Ukraine 10 times in the past two months.[14] Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Deputy Chief Major General Vadym Skibitskyi reported on October 13 that Russian forces are attempting to increase weapons production during the fall and winter in order to strike Ukrainian energy and other critical infrastructure.[15] Skibitskyi stated that Russian forces have decreased their use of air-launched missiles and more frequently use cruise missiles and Iskander ballistic missiles.[16] Skibitskyi also reported that Russia has resumed the production of Kalibr and Kh-101 cruise missiles but faces challenges in increasing the volume of production.[17]

Russian authorities arrested four lawyers who represent prominent opposition figures on extremism charges on October 13, likely to set conditions for the upcoming 2024 Russian presidential elections. Russian authorities arrested three of imprisoned Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny’s lawyers – Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin, and Alexei Liptser – for allegedly participating in an extremist community.[18] Russian authorities also charged and fined Alexei Ladin, who represents many Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian citizens accused of terrorism, espionage, and participating in banned groups, for allegedly discrediting the Russian military and distributing extremist symbols.[19] Lawyer Alexander Molokhov, who represents imprisoned ardent nationalist and former Russian officer Igor Girkin, called on the Russian Federal Chamber of Lawyers to conduct a one-day strike in solidarity with Kobzev, Sergunin, and Liptser and criticized the Russian government for prosecuting these lawyers for “connecting Navalny with the outside world.”[20]

Key Takeaways:

• Ongoing Russian offensive operations throughout the Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast area on October 13 reportedly faced setbacks around the city.
• The Russian military command appears to be restricting discussion of the Russian offensive operations around Avdiivka in the Russian information space, likely in an attempt to adapt to previous information shocks and control any narratives that emerge in the Russian information space around these operations.
• The Kremlin is likely attempting to frame Russian offensive operations around Avdiivka and other localized efforts as Russian forces seizing the operational initiative in Ukraine.
• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 13.
• Russian forces continue to target Ukrainian critical infrastructure facilities with drone and missile strikes, as well as localized cross-border raids.
• Russian authorities arrested four lawyers who represent prominent opposition figures on extremism charges on October 13, likely to set conditions for the upcoming 2024 Russian presidential elections.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Donetsk City, and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area and western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced in various sectors of the front.
• A Ukrainian military intelligence official reported that Russian forces are struggling to equip newly-formed military formations.
• Ukrainian partisans reportedly targeted Russian military assets in rear areas in southern Ukraine on October 12 and 13.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Kupyansk direction on October 13 and reportedly advanced. The North Ossetian “Storm Ossetia” and “Alania” Russian volunteer battalions claimed that Russian forces made “serious advances” in the Kupyansk direction but did not provide any evidence for this claim.[21] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces advanced towards Krokhmalne (24km southeast of Kupyansk) but did not specify the scope of the advance.[22] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces seized a few Ukrainian positions near Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk) and Petropavlivka (6km east of Kupyansk) but noted that it is too early to speculate on Russian advances on this front.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Synkivka, Ivanivka (19km southeast of Kupyansk), and Kyslivka (21km southeast of Kupyansk).[24]

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line on October 13 but did not make any confirmed territorial gains. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces seized several Ukrainian positions west of Svatove but did not provide additional information on the claimed advance.[25] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Makiivka (20km southwest of Svatove), southwest of Kreminna, and in the Serebryanske forest area south of Kreminna.[26] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces attacked towards Serebryanka (12km southwest of Kreminna) from the Kuzmyne (3km southwest of Kreminna) direction in an effort to break through Ukrainian defenses and reach the Siverskyi Donets River.[27] The milblogger added that Russian forces attacked near Torske (14km west of Kreminna) in an effort to cut off the Ukrainian supply route over the Oskil River. Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov indicated that the Chechen “Amur” group of “Akhmat” Spetsnaz forces is operating in the Serebryanske forest area.[28]

A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the newly-formed Russian 25th Combined Arms Army (CAA) face organization problems that are slowing down Russian offensive operations on the Svatove-Kreminna line, confirming ISW’s prior assessments.[29] The milblogger claimed that elements of the 25th CAA, which recently deployed to the Kreminna area, are conducting a ”crawling offensive” due to their lack of combat experience and organizational errors that affect their ability to execute orders from above.[30] ISW previously assessed that the 25th CAA is likely largely combat ineffective due to its rushed deployment to the frontlines.[31]

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Ivanivka, Synkivka, Dibrova (3km southwest of Kreminna), Yampolivka (16km west of Kreminna), Torske salient, and Serebryanske forest area.[32]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut on October 13 and did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued assault operations south of Bakhmut.[33] Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting is ongoing near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (10km northwest of Bakhmut) and along the Klishchiivka-Andriivka-Kurdyumivka line (7-13km southwest of Bakhmut).[34]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut on October 13 and made limited gains. Geolocated footage published on October 13 indicates that Russian forces made limited gains southwest of Zaliznyanske (13km north of Bakhmut).[35] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced up to half of a kilometer near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut), though ISW has not observed evidence of this claim.[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces counterattacked near Andriivka.[37]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations around Avdiivka on October 13 and advanced north and southwest of the city. Geolocated footage posted on October 12 and 13 indicates that Russian forces advanced south of Krasnohorivka (5km north of Avdiivka) and southeast of Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka).[38] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces are advancing from Vodyane (6km west of Avdiivka) and Opytne (3km southwest of Avdiivka) and in unspecified areas near Avdiivka.[39] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Avdiivka, Tonenke (5km northwest of Avdiivka), Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), Lastochkyne (6km west of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske, Keramik (14km northwest of Avdiivka), Netaylove (14km southwest of Avdiivka), and Nevelske (14km southwest of Avdiivka).[40] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces attacked near Berdychi (9km northwest of Avdiivka) and near the railway line immediately northeast of Stepove.[41] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces are clearing the area northeast of the Avdiivka Coke Plant, and another Russian source claimed that Russian forces have not captured the Avdiivka Coke Plant itself.[42] A Ukrainian commander operating near Avdiivka told the Washington Post in an article published on October 12 that Russian forces “concentrated up to three fresh brigades” in the Avdiivka direction.[43] Footage published on October 13 purportedly shows elements of the 114th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People’s Republic Army Corps) operating south of Krasnohorivka.[44]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Donetsk City on October 13 but did not make any confirmed advances. A Russian milblogger claimed that a Russian armored assault group captured several unspecified Ukrainian positions south of Novomykhailivka, though ISW has not observed evidence to support this claim.[45] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Marinka (on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City), Pobieda (5km southwest of Donetsk City), and Novomykhailivka (12km southwest of Donetsk City).[46]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Ukrainian forces reportedly did not conduct any offensive actions in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on October 13. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces did not conduct any assaults north of Pryyutne (14km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) over the past day.[47] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked near Pryuutne on October 12.[48] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled eight Ukrainian attacks in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area during the past week.[49]

Russian forces conducted unsuccessful attacks in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on October 13 and did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on October 13 that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful attacks near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[50] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces counterattacked near Novodonetske (12km southeast of Velyka Novosilka) on October 12.[51] A Russian milblogger published footage on October 13 claiming to show elements of the Russian 36th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade (29th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) operating near Mykilske (33km southeast of Velyka Novosilka and 4km southwest of Vuhledar).[52]

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted unsuccessful attacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 13. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces continued unsuccessful attacks along the Robotyne-Verbove line (10km south to 18km southeast of Orikhiv) on October 12 and 13.[53] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Ukrainian forces also unsuccessfully attacked Russian positions in Novoprokopivka (13km south of Orikhiv and 2km south of Robotyne) on October 12.[54] The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful attacks near Verbove and Robotyne over the past week.[55]

Russian forces conducted assaults in western Zaporizhia Oblast on October 13 and marginally advanced. Geolocated footage published on October 13 indicates that Russian forces marginally advanced north of Kopani (11km southwest of Orikhiv and 5km northwest of Robotyne).[56] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful attacks near Robotyne.[57] A Russian milblogger claimed on October 12 that Russian forces recently improved their positions near Pyatykhatky (25km southwest of Orikhiv and 29km northwest of Robotyne).[58] A Russian milblogger published footage on October 13 claiming to show elements of the Russian 108th Air Assault (VDV) Regiment (7th VDV Division) operating near Verbove.[59]

Russian forces are reportedly conducting defensive preparations in occupied Kherson Oblast and Crimea amid continued concern over a possible future Ukrainian attempt to cross the Dnipro River. Russian sources, including the Russian MoD, claimed on October 13 that Ukrainian forces continued efforts to establish long-term positions on the Dnipro River islands and east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.[60] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that Russian forces are actively equipping forward positions, laying mines, and engineering fortifications on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River.[61] Mashovets reported that Russian forces have laid at least three minefields near Kakhovka (65km northeast of Kherson City) and Malokakhovka (61km northeast of Kherson City) and are quickly restoring the Kerch Strait Bridge in order to support Russian military logistics in southern Ukraine in the winter.

Mashovets also stated on October 13 that the Russian military command is adjusting its posture in the Kherson and Crimea directions in response to concerns about the possibility of a large-scale Ukrainian crossing of the Dnipro River and the development of Ukrainian offensive operations targeting Crimea.[62] Mashovets stated that Russian command reinforced the “Dnepr” Grouping of Forces and the Crimean Civil Defense Guards, the main forces defending in this area of the front, with elements of the Russian 70th Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) and unspecified Russian units based in Crimea. Mashovets reported that the Russian “Dnepr” Grouping of Forces and Crimean Civil Defense Guards consist of elements of the 49th CAA (SMD), recently formed 18th CAA (SMD), and 2nd Army Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Army Corps. Mashovets stated that the total number of Russian forces defending in this area is just over 75,000 personnel, including mobilized Ukrainians from occupied Crimea, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts.

Mashovets stated that the Russian “Dnepr” Grouping of Forces consists of: eight motorized rifle, naval infantry, and costal defense brigades and consolidated tactical groups; 17 motorized rifle, tank, air assault, and naval infantry regiments; three consolidated tactical detachments, including BARS (Russian Combat Army Reserve); and one reserve motorized rifle regiment.[63] Mashovets stated that the Russian ”Dnepr” Grouping of Forces is only 60 to 75 percent staffed but noted that this grouping has largely avoided combat operations and that the Russian military command plans to further reinforce the grouping with personnel and equip it with equipment.[64] Mashovets stated that the Crimean Civil Defense Guards consists of: seven motorized rifle, rifle, VDV, and naval infantry battalions with two tank companies as reinforcement; seven motorized rifle, airborne, and infantry brigades; nine motorized rifle battalions, and seven VDV battalions.[65] Mashovets added that Russian military command is forming new units comprised of mobilized personnel in the Crimea direction, including the 126th Separate Coastal Defense Brigade (22nd Army Corps, 18th CAA), the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet), and an additional unspecified motorized rifle battalion. Mashovets stated that Russian military command is also forming new units subordinate to the Russian 47th Motorized Rifle Division (40th Army Corps, 18th CAA) and the 70th Motorized Rifle Division in occupied Crimea and Rostov Oblast.

Russian and Ukrainian sources confirmed recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian ships in the Black Sea. Russian sources, including a Kremlin-affiliated milblogger, confirmed reports that the Russian patrol ship Pavel Derzhavin sustained minor damage due to a Ukrainian strike near occupied Sevastopol in the Black Sea on October 11.[66] Ukrainian outlet Ukrainskaya Pravda reported on October 13 that sources in the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) confirmed that Ukrainian forces conducted a naval drone strike on the Pavel Derzhavin on October 11 and another naval drone strike on the Russian Buyan missile carrier on October 13.[67]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

A Ukrainian military intelligence official reported that Russian forces are struggling to equip newly-formed military formations. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Deputy Chief Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated that Russia specifically aims to equip the 104th Airborne (VDV) Division and continues forming the 25th Combined Arms Army (CAA) but is struggling to equip these formations.[68] Skibitskyi stated that Russia aims to produce 2.1 million rounds of ammunition annually by 2024 but will need assistance from other countries to achieve this goal. Skibitskyi also stated that Russia is actively removing heavy equipment and artillery systems from storage and restoring them to equip these new formations.

US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby stated on October 13 that North Korea has delivered over 1,000 containers of military equipment and munitions for Russia to use in its war in Ukraine.[69] The White House released satellite images depicting shipping containers moving from Najin, North Korea to Dunay, Russia between September 7 and October 1, 2023. Kirby’s statement confirms a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report stating that rail traffic between North Korea and Russia significantly increased in mid to late September and assessing that the shipments include munitions.[70]

A claimed Wagner serviceman alleged that Russia has given former Wagner Group fighters immunity from the prosecution of crimes for one year after service.[71] ISW has frequently reported on former Wagner personnel accused of committing violent crimes since returning to Russia from Ukraine.[72] The Wagner fighter also claimed that Wagner fighters cannot travel abroad for one year after service.[73] The official Wagner Group Telegram account claimed that this statement is false, however.[74]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Ukrainian partisans reportedly targeted Russian military assets in rear areas in southern Ukraine on October 12 and 13. Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko reported on October 12 that Ukrainian partisans burned down a warehouse storing Russian combat engineering equipment and supplies for constructing fortifications near Mariupol.[75] The Ukrainian Special Operations Forces Command reported that a Ukrainian special forces resistance unit successfully blew up a section of a railway track, which Russian forces use to supply ammunition and fuel to troops operating in the Zaporizhia direction (western Zaporizhia Oblast) on October 13.[76] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that the attack damaged 150 meters of railway tracks and a train that transported logistics and looted goods between Melitopol and occupied Crimea daily.[77]

Russian Information Operations and Narratives:

NOTE: ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin has and will continue to exploit the Israel-Hamas war to advance several Russian information operations about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, ISW has notably not observed any evidence – and does not assess – that the Kremlin supported, directed, or is involved in the Israel-Hamas war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated multiple standard Kremlin narratives against the West at a meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Member States on October 13. Putin repeated the false narrative that the West and Ukraine initiated the conflict in Ukraine in 2014.[78] Putin also claimed that the West’s policies caused the Israel-Hamas war and offered Russia as a mediator in the conflict. Putin did not present any new or noteworthy narratives during his speech.

Putin attempted to allay claims that the Russian-Armenian relationship is deteriorating. Putin claimed that he has “constantly” been in contact with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and that Armenia is not leaving the CIS.[79] Putin also claimed that the Armenian and Russian governments continue to work together and that he invited Pashinyan to Russia. ISW previously reported that Armenia has been ostensibly distancing itself from Russia after a decades-long security relationship.[80]

Putin seemingly clarified the Kremlin’s stance on the return to Russia of Russian citizens who left the country after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, possibly in response to recent contradictory statements from Russian government officials about the matter.[81] Putin claimed that Russians who wish to return have the right to choose where they live, but that the “overwhelming majority of [Russian] citizens” may treat returnees who “behaved immorally towards Russia” differently upon their return, implying returning citizens will not face legal action but threatening them with pariah status.[82]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that elements of the Belarusian 120th Separate Guards Mechanized Brigade conducted battalion tactical exercises at the 227th Combined Arms Training Ground on October 12.[83]

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, October 13, 2023 

Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update-october-13-2023

Key Takeaways   

1. The Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party are discussing a joint presidential ticket and may form one before the January 13 election.
2. The Chinese Communist Party blamed the United States and Europe of “biased” support for Israel, indicating that the party aims to delegitimize the United States as a responsible regional actor.

CHINA-TAIWAN WEEKLY UPDATE, OCTOBER 13, 2023

Oct 13, 2023 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

China-Taiwan Weekly Update, October 13, 2023  

Authors: Nils Peterson of the Institute for the Study of War 

Data Cutoff: October 12 at Noon ET 

The China–Taiwan Weekly Update focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s paths to controlling Taiwan and relevant cross–Taiwan Strait developments. 

Key Takeaways   

1. The Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party are discussing a joint presidential ticket and may form one before the January 13 election.
2. The Chinese Communist Party blamed the United States and Europe of “biased” support for Israel, indicating that the party aims to delegitimize the United States as a responsible regional actor.

Taiwanese Presidential Election 

The Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) are discussing a joint presidential ticket and may form one before the January 13 election. The KMT aims to overcome its third place standing in the presidential race by partnering with the second place TPP to create a competitive challenge to the leading Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Lai Ching-te. The second place TPP also seeks a joint ticket to increase its competitiveness against Lai. KMT presidential candidate Hou Yu-ih and TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je have expressed openness to working together over the past two months but have not agreed on specific measures for cooperation. The KMT and TPP leadership began planning for pre-negotiation discussions during the past week and scheduled the first staff dialogue for October 14.[1] The parties taking tangible steps towards dialogue is consistent with ISW’s October 5 assessment that the TPP could form a joint presidential ticket before the January election.[2]

• Ko has been open to cooperating with Hou to forge a winning electoral strategy since August but without working toward a joint ticket.[3] KMT Chairman Eric Chu and Hou also have expressed a willingness to work with the TPP in late August.[4] Several local district level KMT leaders called for cooperation between Hou and Ko on September 20.[5]
• Ko proposed on October 10 to hold three debates with Hou before a third-party poll that would determine the presidential candidate for a joint KMT-TPP ticket. He also nominated his campaign chief Huang Shan-shan and campaign office chair Chou Yu-hsiu for negotiations with the KMT on organizing the debates.[6]
• Ko leads Hou by 7.4 percentage points in the presidential election, according to the most recent poll by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation from September 25.[7]

ISW assesses that the CCP holds the following leverage points over each of the Taiwanese presidential candidates:

ISW asses that a joint Ko-Hou presidential ticket would have the following implications for the CCP leverage points over the Taiwanese presidential candidates:

Chinese Communist Party in the Middle East

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) blamed the United States and Europe for “biased” support for Israel, indicating that the party aims to delegitimize the United States as a responsible regional actor. The CCP condemned violence between Palestine and Israel but did not condemn Hamas.[8] The party called for all involved parties to remain restrained and immediately implement a cease fire on October 8 and October 9. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesman Wang Wenbin expressed support for the October 11 resolution passed by the Arab League that called for an immediate cessation of Israeli military action in Gaza.[9] CCP English-language propaganda outlets accused American and European countries of hindering the creation of a Palestinian state because of “biased” support for Israel.[10] This narrative places the blame for the current instability in the Middle East on the West. This aligns with the CCP’s messaging during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine which blamed the United States and NATO expansion for instigating the crisis.[11]

• The CCP’s October 8 statement called for an immediate ceasefire in order to protect civilians and prevent the situation from deteriorating.[12] PRC Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Mao Ning stated on October 9 that the party’s top priority was for the war to end as soon as possible.[13] She also declined to label Hamas’ actions as “acts of terrorism” and refused to state whether the PRC urged Iran to restrain Hamas.[14] This statement came after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer met with CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping on October 9 in Beijing. Schumer urged him to “stand with the Israeli people and condemn [Hamas’] cowardly and vicious attacks.”[15]
• The CCP-controlled English language Global Times claimed on October 10 and 11 that American and European “biased” support for Israel would worsen the situation and reveal the greed of the American military-industrial complex. The outlet also questioned the motives of Secretary of State Blinken’s Israel trip. It asked “But what is he supporting exactly? Is it a retaliatory mass killing?”[16]

The CCP is portraying itself as an ostensible neutral broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The PRC MFA pushed for a two-state solution amid the war.[17] The CCP also framed itself as a neutral broker in the Ukraine War.[18] The similarities in CCP-propagated narratives between Ukraine and Israel indicate that the party will use the claim of neutrality to portray itself as a responsible power compared to the allegedly irresponsible West.

• The party began portraying itself as a neutral broker via Special Envoy on the Middle East Zhai Jun, who called the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on October 10 to offer PRC assistance to broker an “immediate ceasefire and cessation of violence, and to provide humanitarian support to the Palestinian people.”[19] Egypt has not publicized its response. 
• This framing of ostensible neutrality would allow the CCP to build off its March 2023 mediation of Saudi-Iran diplomatic normalization to enhance its political stature in the region.[20] This also advances the CCP narrative of a PRC-led world order as founded on principles of non-intervention and peace compared to the alleged militarism of the United States.[21]
• The English language CCP propaganda outlets China Daily and Global Times framed the United States' move to deploy the USS Gerald R. Ford near Israel as evidence that the American military-industrial complex perniciously exploits the conflict for profit.[22] Such articles propagate the narrative that the United States is a destabilizing world power.

Hamas' attack on Israel is the focus of international attention, and the CCP may exploit the situation to advance its coercion campaign targeting the Republic of China (Taiwan). The table below lists some of the CCP’s coercion efforts, their status, and how the party could advance them.

3. The Irregular Warfare Implications of the Israel-Hamas Conflict

Excerpts:

The Israeli government has vowed to crush Hamas and seems to have the necessary public support to weather any protracted conflict. While the most visible portion of Israel’s counterattack will be the large scale clearance of Gaza by the IDF, the Israelis will undoubtedly also pursue the irregular warfare approaches they have previously demonstrated to retaliate and attempt to control escalation. Far afield from the Levant, Israel might potentially engage in its own indirect, non-attributable, and/or asymmetric attacks against Hamas’ supporters and wide-ranging financial infrastructure to either degrade their operational funding or expose illicit activity to further sway international opinion against the group. The Israeli intelligence services could also bring retribution against Hamas or its Iranian supporters at the times and places of their choosing, allowing for more subtle “exchanges” and potential off-ramps to further escalation.

Any additional fuel sprayed on this already raging inferno, by Hezbollah or another Iranian proxy attacking Israel or its interests abroad, will certainly lead to uncontrolled escalation. The web of overlapping and conflicting interests between all the major players in the region – the US, Israel, Iran, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others – has created a powder keg primed to detonate. And underlying all is a timeless competition for power and influence undergirded by irregular warfare in its most intricate and complex form. The future is entirely unwritten, but the history that will be made in the Middle East in the coming weeks and months will prove valuable to the study of multi-echelon irregular warfare.

The Irregular Warfare Implications of the Israel-Hamas Conflict - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Doug Livermore · October 12, 2023

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ devastating surprise assault on Israel this past weekend, it is tempting to focus exclusively on the horrific carnage and wanton destruction on both sides of this now only days-old conflict. Beyond the bloodshed and sorrow, however, there are far broader irregular warfare implications that must be considered locally, regionally, and globally. Recently, the US Department of Defense published an updated description of “irregular warfare” in Joint Publication 1 Volume 1 (Joint Warfighting), defining it as, “A form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities.” Hamas’s initial success in raiding Israeli territory and settlements at an unprecedented scale to destroy equipment; kill or capture key military leaders; and seize over a hundred hostages in an effort to prevent retaliation will provide analytical fodder for years to come. And while the ultimate outcome of the conflict is far from clear at this early stage, there are already emerging considerations for the scholars, practitioners, and policymakers of irregular warfare to study, understand, and apply.

The Israeli intelligence services have a nearly mythical reputation around the world, yet they failed to detect Hamas’ massive preparations for their overwhelming attacks that struck across Israel. Hamas’s remarkable ability to mobilize its forces covertly and take the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) completely by surprise is a testament to their growing expertise in irregular warfare tactics at the grassroots level. As much as one might be led to accuse Israeli intelligence of incompetence or arrogance, it is far more likely (and useful) to study the considerable efforts that Hamas must have undertaken to hide the marshalling of their fighters and resources, conceal their multi-echelon planning efforts, and ensure that their communications were secure up to and through the execution of this attack to prevent Israeli detection.

Prior to the attack, Hamas pre-positioned munitions caches and prepared thousands of rockets and drones of various sizes to launch from hundreds of hidden locations. This initial bombardment overwhelmed Israel’s vaunted “Iron Dome” air defense systems. Using tactics like those honed during the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Hamas drone operators destroyed Israeli tanks and armored vehicles to facilitate the breaching of Israel’s borders at multiple locations. At the same time, Hamas operatives staged powered paragliders, manned assault boats, and occupied launch points to conduct stealthy airborne and sea infiltrations of areas deep within Israeli territory, allowing Hamas operatives to sow widespread confusion and destruction in parts of Israel long considered secure. Finally, during the assault itself, their commanders initiated and coordinated the attack with communications that Israel was seemingly unable to detect or disrupt.

Hamas’ capacity to leverage a diverse range of asymmetric capabilities was instrumental in delivering an initial, devastating blow against the IDF and Israel. The losses sustained by Israel dwarf, per capita, those suffered by the US on 9/11, and the monumental effects on Israeli society will take time to fully assess. This episode highlights Hamas’ prowess in guerrilla warfare, showing how adeptly they harness local resources and knowledge to achieve their objectives, all while maintaining an extraordinary level of secrecy. It underscores the evolving nature of conflict in today’s world, where non-state actors can rival conventional military forces in both strategy and execution, making them formidable adversaries on the modern battlefield.

Despite initial accusations of complicity in planning and approving of Hamas’s attack against Israel, Iran has vehemently denied involvement and both the US and Israel currently claim that there is no intelligence suggesting any connection. All the same, the escalating war between Israel and Hamas will certainly cause reverberations across the entire Levant.

Expanding our view to the regional implications, the ongoing involvement of both Iran and the United States in Syria and Iraq hold significant implications for irregular warfare dynamics within the broader context of the Israeli-Hamas conflict. With both the United States and Iran pursuing divergent objectives in Syria, the region has become a hotbed for proxy conflicts, creating a multifaceted environment where irregular warfare thrives. Whereas Iran backs the Syrian regime of its ally, Bashar al-Assad, the US seeks the lasting defeat of the Islamic State terrorist group and has aligned itself with the Syrian Kurds to achieve that end, requiring that it help secure the southeast corner of the country against Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian proxies intent on destroying the Kurds and ousting the Americans. Recent years have seen a violent tit-for-tat between the US and its Kurdish partners against Iran and its aligned militant groups – punctuated by exchanges of fire and repeated de-escalations as each side seeks to accomplish their goals in the region.

In addition to providing considerable support to Hamas, Iran’s patronage for other militant groups, such as Hezbollah, has allowed them to exert influence and establish a presence in the Golan Heights to amplify the threats to Israeli security. In response, Israel has conducted both covert and overt operations within Syria to counter this encroachment, such as by destroying caches of Iranian weapons bound for Hamas and Hezbollah. In some instances, Iran has tasked its proxies to retaliate for Israeli strikes by attacking American targets. As the IDF directs its attention toward the siege and potential clearance of Hamas from the Gaza Strip, Iran and Hezbollah might be unable to resist the opportunity to strike its distracted foe. These developments illustrate the intricate interplay of state and non-state actors, emphasizing the role of irregular warfare in shaping regional dynamics. Furthermore, it underscores the challenge for Israel and the US, as they must navigate not only the immediate threats posed by Hamas to Israel, but also the broader regional complexities that have direct implications for their shared and collective security.

Within the larger southwest Asia region, the complex and often contentious interactions between Saudi Arabia and Iran represent another competition layer affected by the latest conflict between Hamas and Israel. These two regional powers, representing distinct branches of Islam and competing for influence in the Middle East, have been involved in a broader struggle for regional supremacy for years. As both nations support different factions and groups across the region, this rivalry amplifies the complexities of conflicts such as the Israeli-Hamas struggle. Saudi Arabia’s recent rapprochement toward Israel and its growing ties with Arab states has set the stage for a potential shift in regional dynamics, while Iran’s support for groups like Hamas and its ties with Syria and Hezbollah create a web of irregular warfare networks. Separately but related, Iran also provides considerable support to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, which Tehran has leveraged to attack Saudi Arabia and undermine its interests. The ongoing regional competition adds a layer of complexity and uncertainty to the Israeli-Hamas conflict, highlighting the intricate role of benefactor states and their proxies in shaping the broader security landscape in the Middle East.

Finally, the strained relationship between the United States and Russia, exacerbated by intensifying global competition, will absolutely have implications for this conflict between Hamas and Israel. The historical rivalry between these two superpowers has often extended to proxy battlegrounds, with both nations supporting various actors and factions in the Middle East at different times in history. The Israeli-Hamas conflict has witnessed subtle but influential maneuvering by the US and Russia, each pursuing its strategic interests. America’s unwavering support for Israel, backed by extensive military aid, has bolstered Israel’s capabilities in past conflicts and will certainly prove critical in the coming battles. By contrast, Russia has sought to strengthen its presence in the region, propping up Syria and indirectly supporting groups like Hamas. The interaction of these two major powers adds layers of complexity to the irregular warfare landscape, as the Israeli-Hamas conflict becomes intertwined with broader geopolitical dynamics already inflamed by the US and its partners’ support to Ukraine as it resists Russia’s ongoing and savage invasion. Russian propagandists have been working furiously to spread disinformation accusing Ukraine of selling US provided weapons to Hamas, leading some Western politicians to question continued aid amid Kyiv’s grinding counteroffensive against the Russian occupiers.

The Israeli government has vowed to crush Hamas and seems to have the necessary public support to weather any protracted conflict. While the most visible portion of Israel’s counterattack will be the large scale clearance of Gaza by the IDF, the Israelis will undoubtedly also pursue the irregular warfare approaches they have previously demonstrated to retaliate and attempt to control escalation. Far afield from the Levant, Israel might potentially engage in its own indirect, non-attributable, and/or asymmetric attacks against Hamas’ supporters and wide-ranging financial infrastructure to either degrade their operational funding or expose illicit activity to further sway international opinion against the group. The Israeli intelligence services could also bring retribution against Hamas or its Iranian supporters at the times and places of their choosing, allowing for more subtle “exchanges” and potential off-ramps to further escalation.

Any additional fuel sprayed on this already raging inferno, by Hezbollah or another Iranian proxy attacking Israel or its interests abroad, will certainly lead to uncontrolled escalation. The web of overlapping and conflicting interests between all the major players in the region – the US, Israel, Iran, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others – has created a powder keg primed to detonate. And underlying all is a timeless competition for power and influence undergirded by irregular warfare in its most intricate and complex form. The future is entirely unwritten, but the history that will be made in the Middle East in the coming weeks and months will prove valuable to the study of multi-echelon irregular warfare.

Doug Livermore is the Director of Integrated Deterrence for the Department of the Navy and a U.S. Army Special Forces deputy commander in the North Carolina National Guard. He recently returned from a yearlong mobilization as the deputy commander for Special Operations Advisory Group – Iraq. In addition to his evacuation and advocacy work with No One Left Behind, Doug is the National Director of External Communications for the Special Forces Association, National Secretary for the Special Operations Association of America, and the Director of External Communications for the Irregular Warfare Initiative. He is widely published as a subject matter expert on and advocate for special operations and national security issues. You can connect with Doug on LinkedIn.

All opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect the official positions of any department or agency of the United States Government.

Image caption: An Israeli Defense Forces soldier fires his M4 carbine during joint training with U.S. Army paratroopers on March 12, 2019, in Israel. The training involved rifle marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat techniques, and other physical competitions designed to hone infantry skills.

4. How Hamas Fooled the Experts

Excerpts:

Yigal Carmon, a retired IDF colonel and counterterrorism adviser to Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute, took a similarly clear-minded approach. On Aug. 29, he published a short yet freakishly prescient analytical piece titled “Signs of Possible War in September-October.” MEMRI had published a prequel of sorts in May of 2018, amid the global uproar following the IDF’s killing of nearly 100 Palestinians during the so-called “great march of return” at the Gaza border. That piece noted that half of those killed had been members of Hamas, and that the Islamist group had been explicit about its aim of infiltrating Israel and carrying out attacks on neighboring kibbutzim.

“They said exactly what they are going to do—to breach the fence, then drive to the towns, and to kill,” Carmon said. The moral being that to predict this week’s attack, you simply had to ignore the policy world’s access and credential-fueled orgy of confidence in its own superior understanding of human motives, and instead study an abundant and in retrospect unambiguous public record of what Hamas has tried to do and says it wants to do. Then you had to make the not unreasonable analytical leap of actually believing them.

“I didn’t buy into the stupidity that we are buying their quiet,” Carmon said of Israeli policy toward Hamas. “Because I knew that what they say is meaningful. It’s in open sources. Open sources are the whole world. The secret sources are minor to it.”

How Hamas Fooled the Experts

Why so many misread the Palestinian terror group’s openly stated intentions and motives

BY

ARMIN ROSEN

OCTOBER 12, 2023

Tablet · by Armin Rosen · October 12, 2023

For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably unshakable habit of murdering Jewish civilians could be understood within the normative politics of “resistance movements.” Their behavior could therefore be modulated and controlled through a proper combination of sticks and carrots.

This view is untenable after this weekend, but I understand why it existed for so long. I once held versions of it myself. I visited the Gaza Strip on a two-day reporting trip in the winter of 2014, a couple of months after what was naively thought of as a major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. I joined the ranks of journalists stupid enough to believe what we thought we’d seen there.

The Hamas statelet, though no poorer than places I’d been in Egypt and Jordan, and materially better off than Somalia or South Sudan, possessed its own special feeling of isolation that had the weight of an ambient despair. It was unnerving to turn on the radio and hear martial chanting about avenging Al-Aqsa, or to constantly look at billboards of Knesset member Yehuda Glick in a sniper crosshair. Members of the Strip’s Hamas-controlled police force used the empty lot down the street from my hotel on the Gaza City waterfront as a drilling ground.

But that was hardly the whole story, I thought. After all, my hotel offered a comfortable room with stunning views of the Mediterranean. Hamas was eerily invisible in the Strip once you were past their checkpoint on the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing, whose Israeli half is an absurdist labyrinth of concrete corridors, sinister loudspeakers, and remote-operated doors. Most Gazans I met had no particular love for the group and just wanted to be left alone. Gaza was hard to beat for sheer surrealism, what with the war damage and the excellent fish restaurants. I experienced the Hamas-era Strip as a weird and tragic expression of a bleak roster of immovable realities.

I now know I suffered from a failure of imagination, both moral and practical. Under Hamas, Gaza wasn’t a place where extremists had resigned themselves to their own strange version of normality. Rather, it was an active launching pad for an insane utopia, for the vision of a purified world the group’s fighters carried out during their atrocious rampage this past weekend.

The expert class labored under similar delusions. “It wasn’t so much a misreading of what was in [Hamas’] hearts as it was the sense that they had accommodated to reality,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush, including the period when Hamas won the only Palestinian parliamentary elections in history and took over the Gaza Strip. “They understood they couldn’t destroy Israel, and that their real goal in these 15 years was to take over the West Bank as they had taken over Gaza—to create the maximum amount of violence and terror in the West Bank, and to protect their rule in Gaza. You have to look fairly widely to find someone who didn’t basically accept that view.” Abrams did not exempt himself from this group.

Michael Stephens, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former research analyst for the British Foreign Office, sometimes met Hamas operatives when he was living in Doha a decade ago. Stephens’ work at the time often brought him to the headquarters of Al Jazeera, Qatar’s state-owned satellite network. Khaled Mashal and his entourage were a frequent though inconspicuous presence at the channel’s offices, their arrival announced through the excited chatter of the many Syrian and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the channel’s employ. The Hamas men usually wore gray suits, Stephens recalled. “If they came into the room, you wouldn’t necessarily have known they were there.”

Stephens had lived all over the Middle East, including in Israel, and believed he could situate Hamas within the region’s usual run of armed extremists. “I’ve dealt with many people in the Middle East who I disagree with where I can see a logic,” he said. “When I used to talk to the Shia militias in Iraq, it was: I don’t agree with your view on how this conflict goes, but I can see how you think that. I felt the same way with Hamas. They were pretty uncompromising, they were pretty, in my view, unrealistic about their political demands. But they were political demands.” In private, some of the Hamas guys would even say they could accept a Palestinian state along the lines of the 1967 borders. Stephens now realizes, with admirable analytic humility, that he had misassessed who and what Hamas really was. “At no stage did I think that these were the sort of people that would delight in women and children and babies being slaughtered for no real reason whatsoever other than that it could be done.”

In 2006, Richard Haass, a former high-ranking State Department official who was, until recently, the long-serving president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that “U.S. officials ought to sit down with Hamas officials, much as they have with the leaders of Sinn Féin.” That same year, the council published a breezy profile of Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashal, which now serves as a thumbnail for the next 17 years of elite opinion. “Seen as charismatic and possessing diplomatic skills, Mashal is ‘welcomed with open arms in various capitals and he’s seen as a legitimate political actor,’” according to Jess Sadick, a former U.S. intelligence analyst. “Since Hamas’ electoral victory in January 2006, Mashal has served as its representative in talks with the Egyptian and Russian governments, as well as the Arab League. He even met with a group of retired U.S. diplomats in February. Following that meeting, Edward Peck, a former ambassador to Iraq, told The Times of London that Mashal seemed to be ‘moderate in many senses’ and ‘entirely rational.’”

The day after Hamas killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians, this “moderate and rational man” appeared on TV from his Qatari safe haven to call for the global harassment of “Zionists” and their American allies, and to “ask the mujahedeen to go in long caravans to spill their blood on the land of Palestine.”

At no stage did I think that these were the sort of people that would delight in women and children and babies being slaughtered for no real reason whatsoever other than that it could be done.

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Disturbingly, though unsurprisingly, numerous Israelis with impeccable security credentials, including the former Mossad director Efraim Halevy, voiced their support for talks with the Islamist group. Israel’s vaunted security leadership in general proved itself more than willing to provide cover for the decadeslong effort to normalize Hamas, in part because they believed their country had no other viable strategic choice, in part because saying credulous things about a millenarian terror group is the pathway to approval (and nice fellowships!) in Washington and Cambridge, and in part because they are technocrats with an inevitably narrow understanding of people who turn out to be different from them.

In 2008, Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shabak, assured a Council on Foreign Relations audience that Hamas was sensitive to the Palestinian popular will. “Hamas’ leadership asks itself before each terrorist operation how Palestinians will react. Only if the leadership believes that the public will support the operation does Hamas proceed,” Ayalon stated. He provided no particular evidence for his claim, of course, because none was needed; the belief in the “rationality” of Hamas was foundational to a worldview shared among the global class of security technocrats. Hamas’ reliance on public support was important, Ayalon continued, because “if Palestinians see President [Mahmoud] Abbas’ efforts as successful and the situation in the West Bank improves, Palestinians in Gaza will pressure Hamas to moderate.”

Ayalon is one of Israel’s great pro-peace liberals, and he had his own specific ideological reasons for wanting to believe, and for wanting others to believe, that Hamas would ultimately be measured, self-interested, and attuned to the inner desires of the people it rules. But his country’s right-wingers agreed with him too. “We made a huge mistake, including me, in believing a terror organization can change its DNA,” the former national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, a relative hardliner, told journalists earlier this week. “We heard from our friends around the world that they’re behaving more responsibly. And we believed it—in our stupidity.”

In the era of the Bush freedom agenda, experts who tended to be skeptical of the triumph of American-imposed democracy in the Middle East still wanted to believe—and wanted others to believe—that elections and popular accountability could moderate Hamas. Martin Indyk and Tamara Cofman-Wittes—Middle East officials in future presidential administrations—argued in 2006 that Hamas’ shocking victory in that year’s Palestinian parliamentary elections should naturally be treated as an opportunity to legitimize the group on the U.S.’s terms. “[T]he Bush Administration should specify steps that Hamas could take were it inclined to observe the ‘rules of the game,’ and should make clear that if Hamas met these conditions, then the United States would treat it as a legitimate government,” the pair wrote. “The most important step would relate to violence and terrorism.” To put it very generously, over the next 17 years whatever limited interest Hamas did have in reducing violence and terrorism, or even in being treated as a legitimate government by the U.S., turned out to be insignificant when held against more pressing concerns, such as killing Jews.

In the early 2010s, the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot and ideological fellow traveler, appeared to be the main beneficiary of the Arab Spring protests. Analysts routinely argued that in an apparently democratizing Arab world, Western tolerance of elected Islamists would prove the viability of a more open political space, which would itself serve as a hedge against both secular autocracy and jihadism. A couple of years later, right-thinking people commonly argued that Hamas was a valuable counterweight to ISIS. “ISIS is threatening Hamas in Gaza,” read the headline of a 2015 Vox article. “That’s scary news.”

As Stephens explained this week, in the mid-2010s the success of the Muslim Brotherhood meant Hamas was effectively an international group, with important bases of support in Turkey, Qatar, Libya, Tunisia, and Lebanon, along with a unique position in the fight against both ISIS and the Assad regime. The slaughter of Israelis could seem like a parochial goal in light of Hamas’ centrality to a number of regionwide historical shifts. “I probably had this view of Hamas as an organization that had much larger goals and aims other than just killing people,” Stephens acknowledged. “But apparently not.”

Hamas was thought to be on the edge of irrelevance by the end of the 2010s, thanks to a regionwide crackdown against the Brotherhood, the accumulated effect of wars with Israel, and Gaza’s general isolation and squalor—and of course the less threatening Hamas was militarily the less risks were inherent in engaging them. “Hamas is on the ropes economically, its political support is weak, and it has few means to press Israel,” the Brookings Institution’s Daniel Byman wrote in 2018. Byman endorsed the expert consensus that Israel had no option but to live with a semisovereign, Hamas-ruled statelet as its neighbor, however weak the group had supposedly become. “Unfortunately for Israel, there is currently no credible alternative to Hamas in Gaza,” he wrote.

In both Israel and the U.S., a perfectly mainstream member of the U.S.-managed regional security alliance put the wealth and prestige of a nation-state behind the project of normalizing Hamas. Qatar’s patronage of the group, and the hosting of its senior leadership, meant that the Islamists became the medium through which Doha could establish functional relations with Israel without going through the trouble of opening formal diplomatic relations. Qatar gave $1.1 billion in aid to Gaza between 2012 and 2018 alone, much of it brought in suitcases by Qatari diplomats entering the coastal strip through Israel.

Qatar was similarly generous in spreading cash around Washington, specifically to think tanks like Brookings and the International Crisis Group that repeatedly soft-pedaled Hamas. In 2014, for example, Martin Indyk—who co-authored the article with Tamara Cofman-Wittes that urged the Bush administration to attempt to normalize Hamas—accepted $14.8 million in donations from Qatar in his capacity as vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings. He then went on to serve as the lead U.S. peace negotiator after the 2014 Gaza war.

One reason the massive payment from a leading Hamas sponsor to a program run by Indyk, a senior American diplomat whose decisions and gestalt directly impacted Hamas, didn’t attract much attention is that the financial relationship between Qatar and Brookings was itself old news by then. It began in 2007, when Brookings and Qatar made an agreement to open a branch of the think tank in Doha. By 2014, Qatar was Brookings’ single largest donor.

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Throughout the 2000s, Doha also became home to numerous offshoots of at least six American colleges and universities.

Hamas became an accepted and quasi-normal feature of the regional landscape because of the drudgework of managing an active international border, which was the issue that allowed Qatar to serve as Hamas’ semiformal diplomatic advocate. Teams of Qatari diplomats would often travel to Israel to coordinate aid deliveries into the Strip. As of 2018, an average of 425 trucks and 20 fuel tankers entered Gaza through the Keren Shalom border crossing each day. Some 17,000 Gazans held Israeli work permits before Saturday’s attack, compared to 7,000 as recently as mid-2021. The Strip received much of its electricity and its water from Israel. This summer, Israel moved toward allowing Gazans to use the international airport in Eilat. Israel made each of these decisions with the tacit understanding that they would benefit Hamas. A number of them could only have been implemented through coordination with Hamas.

The Gaza border represented one of the more perverse dilemmas a state can face. If Israel denied Gaza work permits, electricity, and Qatari cash, the place promised to become even poorer and more miserably isolated and more restive than it already was, glutting Hamas with willing recruits and forcing the Islamists even deeper into the embrace of its Iranian patron. Sealing the border would also create new and unnecessary diplomatic irritations for Jerusalem. But giving Gaza work permits, electricity, and Qatari cash meant subsidizing the killers who controlled the other side of the fence, the Hamas militants who send millions of Israeli citizens into bomb shelters every few years.

It is madness to subsidize a group that exists to terrorize you. It is something you only do if you believe you are heading off some still darker alternative. Israeli leaders believed Hamas was a bulwark against allegedly even worse groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and they thought Hamas was the only force that could save Israel from having to reoccupy the Strip and govern the place itself. In 2014, Israel halted a ground operation in Gaza at a point when it would still have been operationally possible, and perhaps not even particularly difficult, to have rounded up the group’s surviving leadership and put them all on trial, or in a row boat. Benjamin Netanyahu was spooked enough by the prospect of a post-conflict vacuum to send a negotiating team to Cairo, which assured its Hamas counterparts that Israel’s restrictions on the coastal territory would be softened.

When Netanyahu returned to the premiership in late 2022, David Pollack of the Washington Institute predicted that the Gaza front would remain relatively quiet. “For its part, Hamas has demonstrated its clear intention to focus inward on its Gaza sanctuary rather than actively outward against Israel—at least for the time being, and at least on the southern front,” Pollack wrote.

To understand why so many experts and decision-makers misjudged Hamas so severely across such a long period of time, it might be useful to consult the handful of people who consistently got Hamas right. Mario Loyola, a former Pentagon official and White House speechwriter, argued in a 2021 essay for National Review that Hamas had already shown itself to be a strategic-level danger to Israel, sincerely dedicated to the country’s destruction.

“With more than 4,000 powerful missiles fired across a wide swath of Israel’s civilian population, in just eleven days, Hamas demonstrated that it poses an intolerable threat to Israel,” Loyola wrote shortly after the conclusion of that year’s Gaza flare-up. Loyola took Hamas at its word, trusting it had accumulated a stockpile of rockets and turned Gaza into a massive bunker not to shift Israeli behavior along the margins or to win an internal Palestinian political battle, but because of its stated goal of making Israel uninhabitable for the people currently living there. “The most potentially effective strategy that the Muslim extremists have to eradicate Israel is to terrorize the whole population into leaving,” Loyola told me this week. “Since missile terrorism poses an existential threat to the state, we’re in a logic of unconditional surrender.” Loyola had made this same argument more than two years ago.

Yigal Carmon, a retired IDF colonel and counterterrorism adviser to Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute, took a similarly clear-minded approach. On Aug. 29, he published a short yet freakishly prescient analytical piece titled “Signs of Possible War in September-October.” MEMRI had published a prequel of sorts in May of 2018, amid the global uproar following the IDF’s killing of nearly 100 Palestinians during the so-called “great march of return” at the Gaza border. That piece noted that half of those killed had been members of Hamas, and that the Islamist group had been explicit about its aim of infiltrating Israel and carrying out attacks on neighboring kibbutzim.

“They said exactly what they are going to do—to breach the fence, then drive to the towns, and to kill,” Carmon said. The moral being that to predict this week’s attack, you simply had to ignore the policy world’s access and credential-fueled orgy of confidence in its own superior understanding of human motives, and instead study an abundant and in retrospect unambiguous public record of what Hamas has tried to do and says it wants to do. Then you had to make the not unreasonable analytical leap of actually believing them.

“I didn’t buy into the stupidity that we are buying their quiet,” Carmon said of Israeli policy toward Hamas. “Because I knew that what they say is meaningful. It’s in open sources. Open sources are the whole world. The secret sources are minor to it.”

Tablet · by Armin Rosen · October 12, 2023

5. Iran Update, October 13, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-13-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Hamas continued conducting rocket attacks into Israel at a lower rate of fire compared to previous days. The group also urged Palestinian civilians to remain in place in response to Israeli calls for civilians to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip.
• Palestinian militants clashed with Israeli security forces across the West Bank at a higher rate, which is consistent with Hamas’ call for escalation.
• The Iranian regime is messaging that US and Israeli actions could expand the war beyond Israel and the Palestinian territories while trying to intensify violence against Israel in the West Bank.

IRAN UPDATE, OCTOBER 13, 2023

Oct 13, 2023 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, October 13, 2023

Ashka Jhaveri, Amin Soltani, and Nicholas Carl

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. For more on developments and in Iran and the region, see our interactive map of Iran and the Middle East.

Note: CTP and ISW have refocused the update to cover the Israel-Hamas war. The new sections address developments in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as noteworthy activity from Iran’s Axis of Resistance. We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Key Takeaways:

• Hamas continued conducting rocket attacks into Israel at a lower rate of fire compared to previous days. The group also urged Palestinian civilians to remain in place in response to Israeli calls for civilians to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip.
• Palestinian militants clashed with Israeli security forces across the West Bank at a higher rate, which is consistent with Hamas’ call for escalation.
• The Iranian regime is messaging that US and Israeli actions could expand the war beyond Israel and the Palestinian territories while trying to intensify violence against Israel in the West Bank.

Gaza Strip

Recorded reports of rocket fire; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Hamas continued conducting rocket attacks into Israel at a lower rate of fire on October 13 compared to previous days. Hamas began reducing its rate of attacks on October 12 to conserve its rocket stockpile and prepare for a prolonged war, as CTP and ISW previously reported. Hamas targeted northern, central, and southern Israel on October 13. Hamas’ military spokesman announced that the group fired 150 rockets at Ashkelon, 50 rockets at Sderot, and bombed the Ben Gurion Airport in central Israel.[1] Israeli civilians have evacuated the periphery areas of Gaza.[2] Hamas’ al Qassem Brigades claimed that the rocket barrages are in response to Israel’s displacement and targeting of civilians.[3] The IDF’s operational update on October 13 notes that militants have launched 6,000 rockets from Gaza.[4] CTP-ISW previously reported that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) have expended around 33 percent of their rocket arsenal since the war began.

• The IDF intercepted an Ayyash 250 rocket that Hamas launched from the Gaza Strip toward the IDF Northern Region Command headquarters in Safed. Safed is the furthest location that Hamas has targeted since the war began on October 7.[5]
• CTP-ISW also recorded several other rockets launches by PIJ and the al Qassem Brigades into Israel as of October 13, including the al Qassem Brigades launching two al Zouari one-way attack drones at IDF soldiers in Saad and a Mutabar 1 air defense missile at an Israeli drone flying over Gaza.[6]

Recorded reports of rocket fire; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

CTP-ISW recorded one clash between Palestinian militants and Israeli security forces in Israeli territory on October 12. This reflects a decrease compared to the first few days of the war, when Hamas militants engaged in fierce fighting across southern Israel.[7]

Hamas urged Palestinian civilians to remain in place in response to Israeli calls for civilians to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip on October 13.[8] The IDF informed the UN on October 12 that the 1.1 million residents in northern Gaza should relocate within the next 24 hours.[9] The IDF said in the coming days it is expected to continue to operate significantly in Gaza City and wants to avoid harming civilians.[10] Hamas spokesperson Abu Ubaida described the call as “psychological warfare” against Palestinians and urged locals to stay.[11] Hamas continues to use civilians as human shields, which intentionally puts these civilians in harm's way, to protect Hamas’ military infrastructure and weapons.[12] Civilians leaving the northern Gaza Strip en masse would risk depriving Hamas of the ability to use regular civilian activity to mask its military activities. The UN reported that 423,000 out of 2.3 million people in Gaza are now internally displaced.[13]

West Bank

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and marches in the West Bank.

Palestinian militants clashed with Israeli security forces across the West Bank at a higher rate on October 13, which is consistent with Hamas’ call for escalation. CTP-ISW recorded 32 instances of small armed combat between locals and Israeli security forces or Israeli settlers on October 13. A US-based research analyst similarly noted an increase in violence in the West Bank.[14] Hamas released a statement on October 12 celebrating clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank and called for continuation and further escalation.[15] PIJ released a statement announcing the launch of a campaign to conduct widespread attacks in Jenin, a Palestinian militant stronghold in the northern West Bank.[16] PIJ has established several subunits, which operate in Tubas, Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm.[17]

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan on October 13.[18] Abbas called for an end to Israeli aggression and stated that the displacement of people from Gaza would constitute a “second catastrophe for our people” in the meeting.[19] Lebanese Hezbollah-affiliated Al Mayadeen framed the meeting as “tense” and cited Palestinian leadership, who claimed Abbas told Blinken that the Israeli displacement in Gaza is a prelude to plans to displace residents in the West Bank.[20] ISW cannot corroborate the report. The report is consistent with Hamas’ stated objective for the Al Aqsa Flood operation to extend to the West Bank.[21]

South Lebanon and the Golan Heights

Recorded reports of rocket fire; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) claimed to attack four Israeli positions in northern Israel on October 13. LH said the attacks were in response to Israeli attacks on several southern Lebanese towns. The IDF responded by striking LH-affiliated targets with a drone.[22] CTP-ISW recorded two reports of unspecified militants approaching the border and clashing with Israeli security forces.[23] A correspondent for Al Jazeera noted that the IDF shelling is more extensive than previous days and that Palestinian groups are believed to be behind the infiltration attempts.[24] The Lebanese Army also engaged in small arms combat and artillery fire with Israeli security forces along the Israel-Lebanon border. This level of attacks is a slight uptick from the previous days’ levels of kinetic activity around Israel’s northern border.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and LH deployed forces to the southwestern Syrian border on October 13. The IRGC transferred elements of its engineering units from Albu Kamal to the Golan Heights.[25] LH redeployed militants from Mayadin to Damascus, which is part of its effort to redeploy all members from the Syrian provinces to Quneitra and Damascus, according to a locally based opposition outlet.[26] The Iranian- and LH-directed deployments are consistent with the scenario in which the current conflict in Israel expands into a multi-front war surrounding Israel.

Iran and the Axis of Resistance

The Iranian regime is messaging that US and Israeli actions could expand the war beyond Israel and the Palestinian territories while trying to intensify violence against Israel in the West Bank. Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian repeatedly emphasized that a continuation of the Israeli “war crimes” against Palestinians could expand the conflict to the region during several meetings with Lebanese and Lebanese Hezbollah officials on October 13.[27] He similarly argued that the expansion of the conflict to other fronts would depend on Israeli actions during his meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al Sudani in Baghdad on October 12.[28] Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other regime officials emphasized that Iran had no role in the October 7 Hamas attack.[29]

• Abdollahian criticized the United States for supporting Israel to “kill Palestinians on the one hand” while calling for others to “exercise self-restraint on the other hand” during a press conference in Beirut on October 13.[30] Abdollahian warned that “any possibility is conceivable” were this situation to continue.[31] Abdollahian also stated that the United States must control Israel in order to avoid the outbreak of regional war during his meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati in Beirut on October 13.[32]
• IRGC Commander Major General Hossein Salami emphasized the American role in “managing” Israeli operations against Gaza during his Friday prayer sermon in Tehran on October 13.[33] Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi similarly pointed to the American “complicitly” in Israeli actions during a trip to Fars Province on October 13.[34]
• Iranian Intelligence and Security Minister Esmail Khatib and Interim Tehran Friday Prayer Leader Ahmad Khatami called for the “Palestinian resistance” to deliver greater responses to Israeli aggression on October 13.[35] IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency recirculated calls from PIJ to expand the conflict beyond Gaza and “intensify” the resistance in the West Bank against Israeli “invaders” on October 12.[36]

6. Lessons for the US military from Ukraine and Israel

Excerpts:

Ironically, the U.S. military is dependent upon integrated systems that offer persistent video and voice data links on the battlefield — links that are subject to compromise against an opponent. This suggests that the United States should at least question the network-centric theories and legacy systems that it has become reliant upon over the past 50 years. Answering such questions would involve a reformation of military thought that challenges many of the assumptions underpinning concepts such as multi-domain operations and combined joint all-domain command and control.

Reliable logistics, sufficient personnel reserves, and network liberation vs. integration are inconvenient lessons because they cannot be resolved through acquisition reform, doctrinal revision or buzzwords. They require political muscle to reinforce alliances, begin hard conversations about American strength and assume risk in operational design.

These three factors are likely to play a critical role in Israel’s fight as much as Ukraine’s not because of their novelty, but because of their legacy. Tackling them is one way the Pentagon can ensure the lessons purchased with Ukrainian and Israeli blood are not squandered if the American military is once again called upon to take the test for which it studies.

Lessons for the US military from Ukraine and Israel

BY MICHAEL P. FERGUSON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 10/13/23 2:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4254674-lessons-for-the-u-s-military-from-ukraine-and-israel/

Hamas’s shocking attack was the largest incursion into Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Lessons from that conflict shaped modern U.S. defense, and Israel’s next war could have similar effects on American military thought. While the ripples of what some are calling Israel’s 9/11 remain to be seen, there is no doubt that the world will be plunged into a period of instability that should concern all Americans, especially as the war in Ukraine rages on.

Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Western market for lessons learned has been booming. A torrent of such commentary began only months into the conflict, to the point that Ukraine has become the U.S. defense community’s distance learning classroom. Most of these lessons involve Kyiv’s exploitation of commercial technologies, or high-level discussions on the perceived value of attrition and maneuver strategies. Senior U.S. defense officials, such as Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin and Secretary of the Army Christine E. Wormuth, have commented on the need to absorb these lessons into the government’s policies and military plans.

The logic behind this movement is well founded. Russia’s attack on Ukraine is the most significant conventional ground conflict involving a major state competitor of the U.S. since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Much has changed since then, especially regarding technology and the character of war, so America’s voyeuristic fascination with learning lessons is natural.

Yet three factors have received far too little attention: Ukraine’s proximity to material support from NATO, the number of human beings required to wage a conventional war and the vulnerability of technological dependency in modern warfare.

Ukraine can sustain massive expenditures of unmanned systems and munitions because it is waging a fundamentally defensive war on NATO’s border. Kyiv can replenish these losses by tapping into NATO’s significant logistical resources through its relatively secure western sector; the alliance’s members are generally united in their support for Ukraine. These advantages would be contested or nonexistent in a different environment, such as the Indo-Pacific. What works in Ukraine is therefore not universally transferable.

The second lesson concerns human mass on the modern battlefield, which, despite impressive technological advancements, remains staggering. Some historical context is in order here.

The last time the U.S. military won a war decisively against an opponent with similar capabilities, it did so at the cost of roughly 15 million Allied military deaths, including about 10 million Russians, 900,000 British soldiers, 416,800 Americans, 240,000 Polish, and 217,000 French, among others. In contrast, the failed U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan (2001-2021) used at its peak 100,000 troops to secure a country the size of France and Poland combined. 

On a recent podcast with Ron Granieri of the U.S. Army War College, Army officers Col. Kent Park and Lt. Col. Stephen Trynosky discuss some alarming numbers from their research on America’s personnel reserves. In 1973, when the U.S. abolished the draft and created the all-volunteer force, it had 759,000 reservists. Today, it has 75,000. According to Park and Trynosky, perhaps less than 50,000 of them would be fit for service if called upon, and it would take six months to muster them. Israel, meanwhile, has a half-million reservists, even with a population of 9.3 million. These numbers will be essential to delivering on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise of an overwhelming response to Hamas’s horrific attacks.

In Ukraine, despite Russia’s generally lackluster performance, Moscow brought forward 300,000 reserves in autumn 2022 and is now adapting to the fight. Western observers have made a habit of mocking Russian incompetence on the battlefield, but America has underestimated its opponents before, and one of war’s enduring principles is surprise. In a potential fight against China, that surprise could appear in the form of how Beijing decides to employ its two million active troops in conjunction with its half-million reservists.

The third and final lesson is an indictment of America’s inherently technological way of war.

Jan Kallberg of the Center for European Policy Analysis made a salient observation last month regarding what he called “chatty micromanagers” in the Russian Army: “Generals and colonels wanting to micromanage their troops will be identified, and their command posts targeted, and as we have seen in Ukraine, they will die.” More than 250 Russian generals, colonels and lieutenant have been killed in Ukraine since February 2022, many of them for using devices that gave away their digital signatures, such as cellphones and other forms of electronic communication. 

Ironically, the U.S. military is dependent upon integrated systems that offer persistent video and voice data links on the battlefield — links that are subject to compromise against an opponent. This suggests that the United States should at least question the network-centric theories and legacy systems that it has become reliant upon over the past 50 years. Answering such questions would involve a reformation of military thought that challenges many of the assumptions underpinning concepts such as multi-domain operations and combined joint all-domain command and control.

Reliable logistics, sufficient personnel reserves, and network liberation vs. integration are inconvenient lessons because they cannot be resolved through acquisition reform, doctrinal revision or buzzwords. They require political muscle to reinforce alliances, begin hard conversations about American strength and assume risk in operational design.

These three factors are likely to play a critical role in Israel’s fight as much as Ukraine’s not because of their novelty, but because of their legacy. Tackling them is one way the Pentagon can ensure the lessons purchased with Ukrainian and Israeli blood are not squandered if the American military is once again called upon to take the test for which it studies.

Capt. Michael P. Ferguson, U.S. Army, is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is coauthor of “The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age.” The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense or Government.

7.  Special Operations Forces in Great Power Competition, Valuing Low-Tech and Cognitive Dominance

Excerpts:

At its essence, cognitive mastery revolves around grasping, influencing, and forecasting human actions and choices. Think of it as the art of strategic anticipation. It's the uncanny knack of foreseeing an adversary's move, tuning into the sociopolitical pulse of conflict zones, and acting several steps ahead. For operations involving SOF, where the nuances of local sentiment can be as formidable as physical hurdles, such cognitive foresight becomes invaluable.

...

To genuinely reshape the great power dynamics, SOF might need to recalibrate its approach. While cutting-edge tech tools are undeniably game-changers, the emphasis should shift towards honing human-centric proficiencies - mastering local dialects, cultivating a profound cultural sensibility, and refining expertise in gathering human intelligence. Combined with a low-tech strategy, this ensures that our SOF remains nimble, flexible, and elusive.

Training regimens need to underscore the development of mental agility, high-pressure decision-making, and the nuanced science of influence. By sharpening these skills, we arm our Special Forces with the tools for cognitive mastery, positioning them always a step or two ahead in the intricate dance of modern warfare.

​...

The evolving tapestry of great power competition will invariably witness an increasing tilt towards tech-centric solutions. However, SOF, if they are to carve out their niche, may need to embrace a contrarian strategy: reverting to the basics, foregrounding human intelligence, and underlining cognitive mastery. Merging low-tech methodologies with a laser-focused grasp on human behavior could be their trump card, enabling them to chart the unpredictable terrains of future conflicts with unmatched finesse and insight.

Images from the Internet

Special Operations Forces in Great Power Competition, Valuing Low-Tech and Cognitive Dominance

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/special-operations-forces-great-power-competition-valuing-sal-artiaga%3FtrackingId=kSu%252FWcjiTjevgwjZNvuzUg%253D%253D/?trackingId=kSu%2FWcjiTjevgwjZNvuzUg%3D%3D

Sal Artiaga

Independent Consultant & Irregular Warfare Strategist | SOF Sensitive Activities Expert | Network Developer | PhD Candidate | MBA | MA

18 articles Following

October 14, 2023

Introduction

As we hurtle forward in this technological age, there's no denying the seductive pull of advanced military gear. AI-driven surveillance, drones patrolling skies, and sophisticated communication systems are becoming the bedrock of modern defense strategies. Yet, history serves as a poignant reminder: in the chessboard of global power plays, it isn’t always the side armed with the shiniest tech toys that emerges victorious. Rather, it's those who couple adaptability and psychological astuteness with their strategies. For our Special Operations Forces (SOF), this could translate to an intriguing blend of low-tech tactics buttressed by an unwavering focus on cognitive supremacy.

Decoding Cognitive Mastery

At its essence, cognitive mastery revolves around grasping, influencing, and forecasting human actions and choices. Think of it as the art of strategic anticipation. It's the uncanny knack of foreseeing an adversary's move, tuning into the sociopolitical pulse of conflict zones, and acting several steps ahead. For operations involving SOF, where the nuances of local sentiment can be as formidable as physical hurdles, such cognitive foresight becomes invaluable.

Past Meets Present, Gleaning Insights from Resistance Movements

The annals of history are replete with tales of underdogs, armed with basic tools but fortified with a deep understanding of their terrain and its people, stymying their technologically superior rivals. Case in point: the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War era. Confronted by the might of the US military, they didn't ramp up their tech arsenal. Instead, they leaned into guerrilla warfare, exploiting their profound knowledge of the locale, and consistently catching their enemy off guard. Their approach was decidedly basic - think ambushes, tunnels, traps. Yet, their cardinal strength lay in their ability to comprehend and sway local sentiments and to consistently outwit their technologically advanced adversaries. The narrative was strikingly similar to the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan conflict. While they did have their hands on modern weaponry at times, their predominant strength lay in their ability to merge with the local populace, utilize the rugged terrain, and wield age-old guerrilla tactics against the technologically superior Soviets.

An equally riveting tale is that of the Maquis during World War II. Across occupied France, these bands of French resistance fighters, often working in tight-knit cells, rose against the formidable and technologically superior Nazi German forces. Operating in the shadows and deeply entrenched in their local communities, the Maquis leveraged their intimate knowledge of the French countryside to strike at German supply lines, communication hubs, and garrisons. Their toolkit, though not sophisticated – a mix of stolen weapons, homemade explosives, and relayed intelligence – combined with their fierce determination, proved invaluable. Their unyielding spirit, deep-rooted local connections, and ability to disrupt and confound a far more technologically advanced adversary make their resistance an epitome of low-tech, high-impact warfare.

Harnessing “Just-the-Right” Tech

Being tech-savvy is good; the trick lies in knowing where to draw the line. The goal? Wield "just enough tech to pack a punch." For instance, leverage rudimentary encrypted tools for communication that bolster coordination without making one's position vulnerable. In stark contrast, a heavy reliance on intricate systems can be a double-edged sword, with adversaries potentially intercepting or disrupting them.

A limited tech footprint ensures that SOF retains the element of surprise, moving like shadows and striking with precision.

Pivoting to Basics in Special Operations Forces

To genuinely reshape the great power dynamics, SOF might need to recalibrate its approach. While cutting-edge tech tools are undeniably game-changers, the emphasis should shift towards honing human-centric proficiencies - mastering local dialects, cultivating a profound cultural sensibility, and refining expertise in gathering human intelligence. Combined with a low-tech strategy, this ensures that our SOF remains nimble, flexible, and elusive.

Training regimens need to underscore the development of mental agility, high-pressure decision-making, and the nuanced science of influence. By sharpening these skills, we arm our Special Forces with the tools for cognitive mastery, positioning them always a step or two ahead in the intricate dance of modern warfare.

Final Thoughts

The evolving tapestry of great power competition will invariably witness an increasing tilt towards tech-centric solutions. However, SOF, if they are to carve out their niche, may need to embrace a contrarian strategy: reverting to the basics, foregrounding human intelligence, and underlining cognitive mastery. Merging low-tech methodologies with a laser-focused grasp on human behavior could be their trump card, enabling them to chart the unpredictable terrains of future conflicts with unmatched finesse and insight.

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Sal Artiaga

Independent Consultant & Irregular Warfare Strategist | SOF Sensitive Activities Expert | Network Developer | PhD Candidate | MBA | MA

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18 articles

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Embracing the Art of Irregular Warfare: Balancing Tech & History In an era marked by cutting-edge military technology, it's tempting to rely solely on advanced gear. Yet, history teaches us that victory often goes to those who combine adaptability and psychological insight with their strategies. For our Special Operations Forces (SOF), this means blending low-tech tactics with unwavering cognitive supremacy. A few months back, I delved into an eye-opening article titled "SOF Hyper-Connected and Hyper-Enabled Technology: SOF's Strength or SOF's Achilles' Heel" (seriously, it's a must-read). It got me pondering, hard, about SOF and their increasing reliance on technology. Now, let me be clear, I'm all for staying ahead of the game and having our Commanders dialed into what's happening on the ground. But here's the kicker: while advanced tech undoubtedly has its shining moments, some situations scream for a more stripped-down, boots-on-the-ground approach. Call me old-school, but sometimes a mix of austere, low-tech, and cognitive mastery is the secret sauce. Maybe it's time we steer USASOC SOF back to the basics, back to the bread-and-butter stuff that made us who we are.  #IrregularWarfare #Historymatters #SpecialForces #USSOCOM #History #USASOC #BacktoBasics #SOFMissions

8. On Point: Beijing, Pay Attention: Don't Let Ukraine-Gaza Lead to WWIII Taiwan

I think this was written before the clarification on the beheaded babies (but we later learned of burned bodies of babies.)

On Point: Beijing, Pay Attention: Don't Let Ukraine-Gaza Lead to WWIII Taiwan

strategypage.com

by Austin Bay

October 11, 2023

FACT ONE: A major land war rages in Europe. Twenty months ago, Russia invaded Ukraine without provocation and the horror grinds on with mass casualties and World-War-I-like attrition.

FACT TWO: War in the Middle East. An Iranian proxy army, Hamas, launches a complex and well-planned attack on Israel. Mass atrocity by Islamist terrorists shocks the civilized world -- at least what's left of civilization.

OK, the Gaza Strip is a confined space. FACT THREE: Iranian proxies have fired into northern Israel -- from Syria and Lebanon. Israel could hit the proxies, then retaliate against Iran. Thus the Hamas War can quickly escalate to a regional conflict involving the Persian Gulf's energy-exporting states. The global economic effects are dire.

Is war in Asia the next explosion igniting World War III?

To be accurate, several wars afflict Asia -- and several of these wars involve powerful communist China.

China wages a frozen war with India in the Himalayas -- the Sino-Indian War of 1962 is not over. Since the 1990s China has waged a slow but calculated war of territorial aggression in the South China Sea. In July 2016, The Hague's international arbitral tribunal, relying on the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea treaty (UNCLOS), issued a ruling supporting the Philippines' claims that China had violated Filipino territory in the South China Sea by seizing islets and "sea features."

Despite having signed the U.N. treaty (and accepted the arbitration process), China's communists disdained the court's authority and ignored the verdict.

By ignoring the verdict, the Chinese Communist Party declared war on international order. Yes, that's a world war of a subtle but dangerous sort.

In 2023 China has major economic problems and faces demographic decline. Even usually benighted Washington think tanks wonder if communist China's strength is peaking. "Peak China" is the term.

A fading power can become a risk-taking power.

In 2023 the weak-willed and slow-to-react Biden administration runs Washington. I am certain the 2021 Afghanistan debacle encouraged Russia's Ukraine aggression and very likely encouraged Iran.

So, here's the right-now scenario. With Russia-Ukraine and Hamas-Israel diverting U.S. and global attention -- especially diverting their military power -- is this the moment Beijing attacks Taiwan?

FACT FOUR: In the past four months, China has increased its air and sea probes of Taiwan -- especially violating Taiwanese airspace at will.

In order to support Ukraine, the U.S. has expended its missile and artillery round stockpiles. The most optimistic estimates claim it will take six to eight months to replenish them.

In order to support Israel, the U.S. has moved naval assets to the Indian Ocean and eastern Mediterranean.

Does this expose the western Pacific to Chinese attack?

In a U.S.-China war in the western Pacific, sea power will play the preeminent role. And right now, the U.S. Navy is short of warships. If a TV admiral says otherwise, he's lying.

I grant this: It's possible that Beijing is as surprised as Israel, the U.S. and Europe are by Hamas' barbaric terror war.

That noted, Beijing and Tehran have been touting their improving diplomatic relations.

Here's another thought that might give wiser brains in Beijing pause: Iran and Hamas have poisoned world opinion.

I'll explain it to Beijing. Behead 40 babies, rape dancing pacifists, shoot 80-year-old women in the head, record these evils on video then with barbaric glee show the video to a global audience.

That's what Hamas did. What happens afterwards?

Intelligent and responsible humans prepare for worst cases. When the intelligent and responsible see videos of 40 beheaded babies, they correctly conclude the worst about the evil perpetrators, the perps' allies and their enablers.

Then they act on that knowledge -- act on the hard evidence -- to defend the intelligent and responsible.

Beijing, pay attention. Ayatollah Iran, Hamas, other Iranian proxies and their enablers worldwide now face this response.

The following historical reference strikes me as apropos. Isoroku Yamamoto, Marshal Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy, said in the immediate aftermath of his surprise attack on Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have wakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve."

strategypage.com

9. Palestinians flee northern Gaza as Israel masses troops for assault

Palestinians flee northern Gaza as Israel masses troops for assault

Reuters · by Nidal Al-Mughrabi

• Summary
• LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
• Israeli families fear for loved ones held hostage
• U.N. fears deadly Gaza epidemic without fuel for water system
• Aid blocked at Rafah crossing with Egypt
• Washington hopes crossing can be opened on Saturday

GAZA/JERUSALEM, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Thousands of Palestinians fled the north of the Gaza Strip on Saturday from the path of an expected Israeli ground assault, while Israel pounded the area with more air strikes and said it would keep two roads open to let people escape.

Israel has vowed to annihilate the Hamas militant group that controls Gaza in retaliation for a rampage by fighters, who stormed through Israeli towns a week ago, gunning down civilians and making off with scores of hostages. Some 1,300 were killed in the worst attack on civilians in Israel's history.

Israeli forces have since put the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million Palestinians, under a total siege and bombarded it with unprecedented air strikes. Gaza authorities say more than 2,200 people have been killed, a quarter of them children, and nearly 10,000 wounded.

Israel had given the entire population of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, which includes the enclave's biggest settlement Gaza City, until Saturday morning to move south. It announced overnight that it would guarantee the safety of Palestinians fleeing the area on two main roads until 4:00 pm. (1300 GMT).

"Around the Gaza Strip, Israeli reserve soldiers in formation (are) getting ready for the next stage of operations," Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus told a video briefing early on Saturday.

"They are all around the Gaza Strip, in the south, in the centre and in the north, and they are preparing themselves for whatever target they get, whatever task."

Hamas has told people not to leave and says the two roads Israel has declared open are unsafe. It says dozens of people have been killed on them in strikes on cars and trucks carrying refugees Friday, which Reuters could not independently verify. Israel says Hamas is preventing people from leaving to use them as human shields, which Hamas denies.

In Gaza City's Tel Al-Hawa neighbourhood, part of the area Israel has ordered evacuated, warplanes bombed a residential area during the night, hitting several houses, according to residents who posted appeals on social media platforms.

Hundreds of residents of the area took refuge at the nearby Quds hospital and planned to join those fleeing to the south in the morning.

"We lived a night of horror. Israel punished us for not wanting to leave our home. Is there brutality worse than this?", a father of three told Reuters by telephone from the hospital, declining to give his name for fear of reprisals.

"I was never going to leave, I prefer to die and not leave, but I can’t see my wife children die before my eyes. We are helpless."

In Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, Israeli planes struck a four-storey building, killing and wounding several people. Neighbours rushed to rescue people trapped in rubble.

"This is a genocide, not a war, it's genocide. And it's an attempt to displace the people of the Gaza Strip, but this will not happen," said neighbour Mohammad Sadeq. "Martyrs are stuck under the rubble and until now neither us nor the medics nor civil defence were able to take them out."

'RELEASE OF THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN'

The attacks on Israel plunged the nation into deep mourning and galvanised the country, which mobilised hundreds of thousands of reservists within days.

Families of the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas are terrified for their safety. Avichai Brodetz, a farmer from Kibbutz Kfar Aza whose wife and three children were taken captive to Gaza, set up a camp outside the Israeli army headquarters to focus attention on their plight.

"The first thing that needs to happen is the release of the women and children," he told reporters. "I don't want to be political, I don't want to stand here with you. I love my friends and my home and my kibbutz. I hope we can return there and you'll never see me again."

[1/9]Palestinians search for casualties under the rubble in the aftermath of Israeli strikes, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 14, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa Acquire Licensing Rights

Israel's attacks on Gaza have not halted Hamas missile strikes deep into Israeli cities. Air raid sirens wailed in central Israel on Saturday morning and rockets smashed into a greenhouse in Ashkelon and wounded four people at a kibbutz.

The only route out of Gaza that is not under Israeli control is a checkpoint with Egypt at Rafah. Egypt officially says its side is open, but traffic has been halted for days because of Israeli strikes on the Palestinian side.

Egyptian security sources said the Egyptian side is being reinforced and Cairo has no intention of accepting a mass influx of Palestinian refugees.

A senior U.S. State Department official said the United States was working with Egyptian, Israeli and Qatari officials to open the crossing later on Saturday to let some people out. Washington had been in touch with some Palestinian-Americans in Gaza who wanted to leave, the official said, adding it was not clear whether Hamas would let anyone reach the crossing.

Countries and aid agencies have sent supplies to Egypt but have so far been unable to bring them into Gaza. Israel says nothing can enter through Rafah without its coordination.

The Gaza Strip is already one of the most crowded areas in the world, and Israel's evacuation order for the northern half meant those fleeing south were forced to shelter with relatives and friends, in schools or in hastily rented apartments.

Israel says the order is a humanitarian gesture to protect residents from harm while it roots out Hamas fighters entrenched in Gaza City.

The United Nations says so many people cannot be safely moved inside the besieged enclave without causing a humanitarian disaster. It warned on Saturday of the threat of deadly water-borne disease without urgent deliveries of fuel to power Gaza's fresh water system.

Hamas has vowed to fight until the last drop of blood, and says the order to leave the north of the enclave is a trick to force residents to give up their homes. Gaza City mosques have blared calls telling people to stay.

Reuters Graphics

'EVEN WARS HAVE RULES'

The Israeli military said on Friday tank-backed troops had mounted raids to hit Palestinian rocket crews and gather information on the location of hostages, the first official account of ground troops in Gaza since the crisis began.

The United Nations estimated that tens of thousands of Palestinians headed south from northern Gaza after the Israeli order on Friday, adding to 400,000 Gazans already displaced earlier in the week.

"We need immediate humanitarian access throughout Gaza, so that we can get fuel, food and water to everyone in need," U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Friday. "Even wars have rules."

The United States has firmly backed its ally Israel, but has called on it to avoid civilian casualties. President Joe Biden said tackling the humanitarian crisis was a top priority.

"The overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas and Hamas' appalling attacks," Biden said in a speech. "And they're suffering as a result as well."

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a lightning tour of the Middle East to rally allies, met Saudi Arabia's foreign minister in Riyadh and was due to travel to the United Arab Emirates. He has already visited Israel, Jordan and Qatar.

Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Ari Rabinovitch, Dan Williams, Henriette Chacar, Dedi Hayun, Maayan Lubell, Emily Rose and James Mackenzie in Jerusalem; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Jon Boyle

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Nidal Al-Mughrabi

Thomson Reuters

A senior correspondent with nearly 25 years’ experience covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including several wars and the signing of the first historic peace accord between the two sides.

Reuters · by Nidal Al-Mughrabi

10. How Hamas secretly built a 'mini-army' to fight Israel

How Hamas secretly built a 'mini-army' to fight Israel

By Samia Nakhoul

October 13, 20233:25 PM EDTUpdated 16 hours ago

Reuters · by Samia Nakhoul

• Summary
• Hamas grew from protest group to armed power
• Obtained weapons with Iranian finance, training
• Survived several rounds of urban warfare with Israel
• Battle-hardened group builds many of its own weapons

DUBAI, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Israeli forces poised to invade Gaza on a mission to wipe out Hamas will confront an ever-more capable opponent trained for years by a clandestine support network that stretches far beyond the tiny enclave to Iran and allied Arab groups.

Hamas' deadly attack on southern Israel six days ago - unprecedented for the group in its planning and scale - was a devastating demonstration of the military expertise it has gained since seizing control of Gaza in 2007.

"Necessity is the mother of invention," said Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official, adding that the group had long drawn on money and training from Iran and Iranian regional proxies like Lebanon's Hezbollah, while bolstering its own forces in Gaza.

Difficulties in importing weapons meant that over the past nine years "we developed our capabilities and are able to manufacture locally", said Baraka, who is based in Lebanon.

In the 2008 Gaza war, Hamas rockets had a maximum range of 40 km (25 miles), but that had risen to 230 km by the 2021 conflict, he added.

Today the secretive and sprawling organisation is unrecognizable from the small Palestinian group that issued its first leaflet 36 years ago protesting at Israeli occupation, according to Reuters interviews with 11 people familiar with the group's capabilities, including Hamas figures, regional security officials and military experts.

"They are a mini-army," said a source close to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. He said the group had a military academy training a range of specialisations including cyber security, and boasts a naval commando unit among its 40,000-strong military wing.

By contrast, in the 1990s Hamas had less than 10,000 fighters, according to the globalsecurity.org website.

Since the early 2000s the group has built a tunnel network under Gaza to help fighters melt away, house weapons factories and bring in weapons from abroad, according to a regional security source, who also declined to be named. The group has acquired a range of bombs, mortars, rockets, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, Hamas officials have said.

The expanding capabilities have produced increasingly lethal results over the years. Israel lost nine soldiers during its incursion in 2008. In 2014, the number jumped to 66.

H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at Britain's Royal United Services Institute, said Israel was capable of destroying Hamas in its expected attack on the densely populated enclave.

"The question isn't whether it's possible or not. The question is what sort of price will be exacted on the rest of the population, because Hamas does not live on an island in the ocean or in a cave in the desert."

After the most recent Gaza war in 2021, Hamas and an affiliated group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad managed to retain 40% of their missile inventories, a key target of the Israelis, according to the U.S. based non-profit Jewish Institute for National Security of America, keeping roughly 11,750 missiles compared with 23,000 before the conflict.

OVERWHELMS DEFENCES

Hamas, whose 1988 founding charter called for Israel's destruction, is classified a terrorist organisation by Israel, the United States, the European Union, Canada, Egypt and Japan.

For Iran, Hamas has helped it realise a years-long ambition to encircle Israel with legions of paramilitaries, including other Palestinian factions and Lebanon's Hezbollah, according to Western officials. Armed with sophisticated weaponry, all share a longtime enmity to Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.

The group's leaders are spread across the Middle East in countries including Lebanon and Qatar, but its power base remains Gaza. It has urged Gazans not to heed Israel's call to leave ahead of the expected ground invasion, which follows days of Israeli bombardment that has killed about 1,800 people.

In the attack on Oct. 7, the worst breach in Israel's defences in 50 years, Hamas fired more than 2,500 rockets as fighters using paragliders, motorbikes and four-wheel drive vehicles overwhelmed Israeli defences and tore through towns and communities, killing 1,300 people and taking dozens hostage.

The sources Reuters spoke to said that while Iran trained, armed and funded the group, there was no indication that Tehran directed or authorized the Oct. 7 attack

"The decision, zero-hour, all of that was in Hamas' hands – but of course the general cooperation, training and preparation all came from Iran," said the regional security source.

Iran acknowledges it helps finance and train Hamas but has denied a role in the attack, although it praised it.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, said in an interview with Al Jazeera television last year that his group had received $70 million in military help from Iran. "We have rockets that are locally manufactured but the long-range rockets came from abroad, from Iran, Syria and others through Egypt," he added.

According to a U.S. State Department report from 2020, Iran provides about $100 million annually to Palestinian groups, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

An Israeli security source said that Iran had significantly increased funding for Hamas' military wing in the past year from $100 million to about $350 million a year.

HAMAS FOUNDER SHEIKH YASSIN

The idea of Hamas - meaning zeal in Arabic - began to take form on Dec. 10, 1987, when some members of the Muslim Brotherhood convened the day after an Israeli army truck crashed into a car carrying four Palestinian day-workers, killing all of them. Stone-throwing protests, strikes and shutdowns in Gaza followed.

Meeting at the house of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Muslim cleric, they decided to issue a leaflet on Dec. 14 calling for resistance as the First Intifada, or uprising, against Israel erupted. It was the group's first public act.

After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas began importing rockets, explosives and other equipment from Iran, Western intelligence sources have said. They were shipped via Sudan, trucked across Egypt and smuggled into Gaza through a labyrinth of narrow tunnels beneath the Sinai Peninsula, they added.

Flows of weapons, training and funds also went from Iran to other regional paramilitary allies, eventually giving Tehran a commanding presence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza.

Some of these allies form part of a "Shi'ite axis" that extends from Shi'ite paramilitaries in Iraq, to Hezbollah in Lebanon to Syria's ruling minority Alawite, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.

The jewel in the crown of Iran's militia network is Hezbollah - conceived at the Iranian embassy in Damascus in 1982 after Israel invaded Lebanon during the 1975-90 civil war.

Hezbollah bombed U.S. targets and ran a hostage-taking and hijack agenda, drove Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 and then gradually seized hold of the levers of the Lebanese state.

Iran seized the opportunity to co-opt Hamas in 1992 when Israel deported about 400 Hamas leaders to Lebanon, the source close to Hamas said. Iran and Hezbollah hosted Hamas members, shared military technology and trained them in building home-made bombs for suicide attacks, the person added.

Baraka, the Hamas official, said the ultimate aim of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel was to win the release of all 5,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, halt Israeli raids on Al Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, and lift a 16-year-old blockade of Gaza.

He warned that if Israel's ground offensive went ahead, blessed by the U.S. and Britain, the war wouldn't be confined to Gaza but could spill over into a regional conflict.

"It's not just an Israeli war on Gaza, there is an Atlantic war on Gaza with all the powers," he said. "There will be new frontlines."

(This story has been refiled to clarify sources in paragraph 18)

Additional reporting by Jonathan Saul and John O'Donnell in London; Editing by William Maclean and Pravin Char

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11. ​AMERICA'S STRATEGIC POSTURE – The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States

The 160 page report can be downloaded here: https://armedservices.house.gov/sites/republicans.armedservices.house.gov/files/Strategic-Posture-Committee-Report-Final.pdf

​AMERICA'S

STRATEGIC POSTURE

The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY                                         

The United States faces a strategic challenge requiring urgent action. Given current threat trajectories, our nation will soon encounter a fundamentally different global setting than it has ever experienced: we will face a world where two nations possess nuclear arsenals on par with our own. In addition, the risk of conflict with these two nuclear peers is increasing. It is an existential challenge for which the United States is ill-prepared, unless its leaders make decisions now to adjust the U.S. strategic posture.

The Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States was established by the Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and concludes that America’s defense strategy and strategic posture must change in order to properly defend

its vital interests and improve strategic stability with China and Russia. Decisions need to be made now in order for the nation to be prepared to address the threats from these two nuclear- armed adversaries arising during the 2027-2035 timeframe. Moreover, these threats are such that the United States and its Allies and partners must be ready to deter and defeat both adversaries simultaneously.

We arrive at these conclusions following a comprehensive year-long review of the threats America faces and its strategy and planned capabilities to address those threats. The evidence demonstrates that the U.S.-led international order and the values it upholds are at risk from the Chinese and Russian authoritarian regimes. The risk of military conflict with those major powers has grown and carries the potential for nuclear war. Therefore, the Commission reached the unanimous, non-partisan conclusion that today’s strategic outlook requires

an urgent national focus and a series of concerted actions not currently planned. In sum, we find that the United States lacks a comprehensive strategy to address the looming two- nuclear-peer threat environment and lacks the force structure such a strategy will require.

In reaching that overall conclusion, we make clear that the fundamentals of America’s deterrence strategy remain sound, but the application of that strategy must change to address the 2027-2035 threat environment. Those changes drive necessary adjustments to the posture of U.S. nuclear capabilities – in size and/or composition. A full spectrum of

non-nuclear capabilities is also essential to the nation’s strategic posture. Such adjustments, in turn, drive the need to strengthen and expand the capacity of the infrastructure required to sustain and enhance U.S. strategic capabilities. In addition, Allies and partners are central to our findings regarding strategy and posture. We also emphasize the need for robust risk reduction efforts as fundamental to the U.S. approach in the new threat environment.

Adhering to the stipulations of our mandate, the report that follows delineates 131 findings and makes 81 recommendations. Those findings and recommendations are found at the beginning and end, respectively, of each chapter that follows; a complete list is also included

following the report’s conclusion. Our most important recommendations are summarized here:

STRATEGY

¢ To achieve the most effective strategy for stability in light of the 2027-2035 threat environment, the Commission identifies three necessary changes:

►   The United States must develop and effectively implement a truly integrated, whole-of-

government strategy to address the 2027-2035 threat environment.

America’s Strategic Posture

►   The objectives of U.S. strategy must include effective deterrence and defeat of simultaneous Russian and Chinese aggression in Europe and Asia using conventional forces. If the United States and its Allies and partners do not field sufficient conventional forces to achieve this objective, U.S. strategy would need to be altered to increase reliance on nuclear weapons to deter or counter opportunistic or collaborative aggression in the other theater.

►   The size and composition of the nuclear force must account for the possibility of combined aggression from Russia and China. U.S. strategy should no longer treat China’s nuclear forces as a “lesser included” threat. The United States needs a nuclear posture capable of simultaneously deterring both countries.

¢ The Commission recommends the United States maintain a nuclear strategy consistent with the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), based on six fundamental tenets—assured second strike, flexible response, tailored deterrence, extended deterrence and assurance, calculated ambiguity in declaratory policy, hedge against risk—and apply these tenets to address the 2027-2035 threat.

STRATEGIC POSTURE

In the context of a strategic posture deploying both conventional and nuclear capability, the Commission believes the traditional role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strategy remains valid and of continuing importance: deterrence of adversaries; assurance of Allies; achieving

U.S. objectives should deterrence fail; and hedging against adverse events.

¢ The Commission recommends fully and urgently executing the U.S. nuclear modernization Program of Record (POR), which includes replacement of all U.S. nuclear delivery systems, modernization of their warheads, comprehensive modernization of U.S. nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3), and recapitalizing the nuclear enterprise infrastructure at the DOD and DOE/NNSA.

¢ The current modernization program should be supplemented to ensure U.S. nuclear strategy

remains effective in a two-nuclear-peer environment.

¢ Comprehensive risk-mitigating actions across U.S. nuclear forces must be executed to ensure that delays in modernization programs or early age-out of currently deployed systems do not result in militarily significant shortfalls in deployed nuclear capability.

¢ The U.S. strategic nuclear force posture should be modified to:

►   Address the larger number of targets due to the growing Chinese nuclear threat.

►   Address the possibility that China will field large-scale, counterforce-capable missile forces that pose a threat to U.S. strategic nuclear forces on par with the threat Russia poses to those forces today.

►   Assure the United States continues to avoid reliance on executing Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) launch under attack to retain an effective deterrent.

►   Account for advances in Russian and Chinese integrated air and missile defenses (IAMD).

¢ The U.S. theater nuclear force posture should be urgently modified to:

►   Provide the President a range of militarily effective nuclear response options to deter

or counter Russian or Chinese limited nuclear use in theater.

►   Address the need for U.S. theater nuclear forces deployed or based in the Asia-Pacific theater.

►   Compensate for any shortfall in U.S. and allied non-nuclear capabilities in a sequential

or simultaneous two-theater conflict against Russia and China.

►   Address advances in Russian and Chinese IAMD.

Executive Summary

NUCLEAR SECURITY ENTERPRISE INFRASTRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION

¢ The Commission recommends the DOD and DOE/NNSA strategic infrastructure be expanded

to have sufficient capacity to:

►   Meet the capability and schedule requirements of the current nuclear modernization POR and the requirements of the force posture modifications recommended by the Commission in time to address the two-peer threat.

►   Provide an effective hedge against four forms of risk: technical failure of a warhead or delivery system, programmatic delays, operational loss of delivery systems, and further deterioration of the geopolitical environment.

►   Flex to respond to emerging requirements in a timely fashion.

¢ To support the proposed strategy, the Commission recommends Congress fund an overhaul and expansion of the capacity of the U.S. nuclear weapons defense industrial base and the DOE/NNSA nuclear security enterprise, including weapons science, design, and production infrastructure. Specifically:

►   Congress should fund the full range of NNSA’s recapitalization efforts, such as pit

production and all operations related to critical materials.

►   Congress should forge and sustain bipartisan consensus and year-to-year funding stability to enable the defense industry to respond to innovative DOD contracting approaches and invest with more certainty.

►   Congress should enact annual DOD and DOE authorization and appropriation bills before

the beginning of each fiscal year.

►   Congress should place the purview of all “050” programs (President’s Budget line item for “national security”) that are in NNSA under Defense appropriations subcommittees (House Appropriations Committee-Defense (HAC-D), Senate Appropriations Committee- Defense (SAC-D).

►   Cabinet Secretaries, working with states and union leaders, should establish and increase the technical education and vocational training programs required to create the nation’s necessary skilled-trades workforce for the nuclear enterprise.

¢ The Commission recommends a number of specific actions to expand the capacity and effectiveness of the nation’s infrastructure and supply chain for its strategic capabilities.

NON-NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES

The Commission recommends:

¢ The United States urgently deploy a more resilient space architecture and adopt a strategy that

includes both offensive and defensive elements to ensure U.S. access to and operations in space.

¢ The United States and its Allies take steps to ensure they are at the cutting edge of emerging technologies – such as big data analytics, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) – to avoid strategic surprise and potentially enhance the U.S. strategic posture.

¢ The United States prioritize funding and accelerate long-range non-nuclear precision strike programs to meet the operational need and in greater quantities than currently planned.

America’s Strategic Posture

^¢ The United States develop and field homeland IAMD that can deter and defeat coercive attacks by Russia and China, and determine the capabilities needed to stay ahead of the North Korean threat.⁴

¢ The Secretary of Defense direct research, development, test and evaluation into advanced IAMD capabilities leveraging all domains, including land, sea, air, and space. These activities should focus on sensor architectures, integrated command and control, interceptors, cruise and hypersonic missile defenses, and area or point defenses. The DOD should urgently pursue deployment of any capabilities that prove feasible.

¢ The Secretary of Defense and the Military Departments transfer operations and sustainment responsibility for missile defense to the appropriate Military Departments by 1 October 2024. This will allow the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to focus on research, development, prototyping and testing.

ALLIES AND PARTNERS

The Commission believes it is in the U.S. national interest to maintain, strengthen, and when appropriate, expand its network of alliances and partnerships. These relationships strengthen American security by deterring aggression regionally, before it can reach the U.S. homeland, while also enabling U.S. economic prosperity through access to international markets.

Withdrawing from U.S. alliances and partnerships would directly benefit adversaries, invite aggression that the United States might later have to reverse, and ultimately decrease American, allied, and partner security and economic prosperity. Further, the Commission believes that

our defense and the defense of the current international order is strengthened when Allies can directly contribute to the broader strategic posture, and the United States should seek to incorporate those contributions as much as possible.

¢ The Executive branch should recognize that any major change to U.S. strategic posture, policies, or capabilities will have great effect on Allies’ perceptions and their deterrence and assurance requirements. As a result, any changes should be predicated on meaningful consultations.

RISK REDUCTION

The Commission believes it is of paramount importance for the United States to work to reduce strategic risks. This involves activities and programs across the U.S. government, including in nonproliferation and arms control, as well as maintaining strong, viable, and resilient military forces.

¢ The Commission recommends that a strategy to address the two-nuclear-peer threat environment be a prerequisite for developing U.S. nuclear arms control limits for the

2027-2035 timeframe. The Commission recommends that once a strategy and its related force requirements are established, the U.S. government determine whether and how nuclear arms control limits continue to enhance U.S. security.

¢ The Commission recommends that the United States continue to explore nuclear arms control

opportunities and conduct research into potential verification technologies in

order to support or enable future negotiations in the U.S. national interest that seek to limit all nuclear weapon types, should the geopolitical environment change.

¢ Where formal nuclear arms control agreements are not possible, the Commission recommends pursuing nuclear risk reduction measures to increase predictability and reduce uncertainty and the chances for misperception and miscalculation.

Executive Summary

The 2009 Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States reported that the United States was at “a moment of opportunity, . . .but also a moment of urgency” – because the security environment had improved and the threat of nuclear proliferation was the principal concern. Since 2009, the security environment has dramatically worsened and new existential threats have emerged. This Commission concludes that the United States now faces a high- stakes challenge that requires urgent action. Nevertheless, the Commission has not seen the

U.S. government demonstrate the urgency and creativity required to meet the challenge. Nothing other than synchronized steps taken by the Executive and Legislative Branches will craft the strategy and build the posture the nation requires.

The challenges are unmistakable; the problems are urgent; the steps are needed now.

12. An Invasion of Gaza Would Be a Disaster for Israel

The trinity rules: passion, reason, and chance..

Excepts:

Those urging Israel to invade Gaza with maximalist goals are pushing their ally into a strategic and political catastrophe. The potential costs are extraordinarily high, whether counted in Israeli and Palestinian deaths, the likelihood of a protracted quagmire, or mass displacement of Palestinians. The risk of the conflict spreading is also alarmingly large, particularly in the West Bank and Lebanon, but potentially far wider. And the potential gains—beyond satisfying demands for revenge—are remarkably low. Not since the American invasion of Iraq has there been such clarity in advance about the fiasco to come.

Nor have the moral issues been so clear. There is no question that Hamas committed grave war crimes in its brutal attacks on Israeli citizens, and it should be held accountable. But there is also no question that the collective punishment of Gaza, through blockades and bombing and the forced displacement of its population, represent grave war crimes. Here, too, there should be accountability—or, better yet, respect for international law.

Although these rules may not trouble Israeli leaders, it poses a significant strategic challenge to the United States in terms of its other highest priorities. It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza. The states and peoples of the Global South far beyond the Middle East will notice.

The Biden administration has made very clear that it supports Israel in its response to the Hamas attack. But now is the time for it to use the strength of that relationship to stop Israel from creating a remarkable disaster. Washington’s current approach is encouraging Israel to launch a profoundly misbegotten war, promising protection from its consequences by deterring others from entering the battle and by blocking any efforts at imposing accountability through international law. But the United States does this at the cost of its own global standing and its own regional interests. Should Israel’s invasion of Gaza take its most likely course, with all its carnage and escalation, the Biden administration will come to regret its choices.

America Must Prevail on Its Ally to Step Back From the Brink

By Marc Lynch

October 14, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Marc Lynch · October 13, 2023

In the early morning of October 13, the Israeli military issued a warning to the 1.2 million Palestinians of northern Gaza: they must evacuate within 24 hours, in advance of an expected ground invasion. Such an Israeli assault would have the avowed goal of ending Hamas as an organization in retaliation for its shocking October 7 surprise attack into southern Israel, where it massacred over 1,000 Israeli citizens and seized over a hundred hostages.

An Israeli ground campaign has seemed inevitable from the moment Hamas broached the security perimeter surrounding the Gaza Strip. Washington has fully backed Israeli plans, notably refraining from urging restraint. In an overheated political environment, the loudest voices in the United States have been those urging extreme measures against Hamas. In some cases, commentators have even called for military action against Iran for its alleged sponsorship of Hamas’ operation.

But this is precisely the time that Washington must be the cooler head and save Israel from itself. The impending invasion of Gaza will be a humanitarian, moral, and strategic catastrophe. It will badly harm not only Israel’s long-term security and inflict unfathomable human costs on Palestinians, but also threaten core American interests in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and in Washington’s competition with China over the Indo-Pacific order. Only the Biden administration—channeling the United States’ unique leverage and the White House’s demonstrated close support for Israeli security—can now stop Israel from making a disastrous mistake. Now that it has shown its sympathy with Israel, Washington must pivot toward demanding that its ally fully comply with the laws of war. It must insist that Israel find ways to take the fight to Hamas that do not entail mass killing and displacing innocent Palestinian civilians.

UNSTEADY STATE

The Hamas attack upended the set of assumptions which have defined the status quo between Israel and Gaza of nearly two decades. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, but did not end its de facto occupation. It retained full control over Gaza’s borders and airspace, and it continued exercising tight control (in close cooperation with Egypt) from outside the security perimeter over the movement of Gaza’s people, goods, electricity, and money. Hamas assumed power in 2006 following its victory in legislative elections, and it consolidated its grip in 2007, after a failed U.S.-backed effort to replace the group with the Palestinian Authority.

Since 2007, Israel and Hamas have maintained an uneasy arrangement. Israel keeps up a stifling blockade over Gaza, which severely restricts the territory’s economy and imposes great human costs, while also empowering Hamas by diverting all economic activity to the tunnels and black markets it controls. During the episodic outbreaks of conflict—in 2008, 2014, and again in 2021—Israel massively bombarded the densely populated Gazan urban centers, destroying infrastructure, and killing thousands of civilians while degrading Hamas’ military capabilities and establishing the price to paid for provocations. All of this did no discernible harm to Hamas’s grip on power.

Israeli leaders had come to think that this equilibrium could last indefinitely. They believed that Hamas had learned the lessons of past adventurism through Israel’s massively disproportionate military responses, and that Hamas was now content to maintain its rule in Gaza even if that meant controlling the provocations of smaller militant factions, such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The difficulties the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) experienced in a brief ground offensive in 2014 tempered its ambitions to attempt more. Israeli officials waved off perennial complaints about the humanitarian effects of the blockade. Instead, the country was content to keep Gaza on the back burner while accelerating its increasingly provocative moves to expand its settlements and control over the West Bank.

Israeli leaders had come to think the status quo could last indefinitely.

Hamas had other ideas. Although many analysts have attributed its shifting strategy to Iranian influence, Hamas had its own reasons to change its behavior and attack Israel. Its 2018 gambit to challenge the blockade through mass non-violent mobilization—popularly known as the “Great March of Return”—ended with massive bloodshed as Israeli soldiers opened fire on the protestors. In 2021, by contrast, Hamas leaders believed that they scored significant political gains with the broader Palestinian public by firing missiles at Israel during intense clashes in Jerusalem over Israeli confiscation of Palestinian homes, and over Israeli leaders’ provocations in the Al-Aqsa complex: one of Islam’s holiest sites, which some Israeli extremists want to tear down to build a Jewish temple.

More recently, the steady escalation of Israeli land grabs and military-backed settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank created an angry, mobilized public, one which the United States—and the Israel-backed Palestinian Authority—seemed unable and unwilling to address. Highly public American moves to broker an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal may also have appeared like a closing window of opportunity for Hamas to act decisively, before regional conditions turned inexorably against them. And, perhaps, the Israeli uprising against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms led Hamas to anticipate a divided and distracted adversary.

It is still unclear the extent to which Iran motivated the timing or nature of the surprise attack. Certainly, Iran has increased its support to Hamas in recent years, and sought to coordinate activities across its “Axis of Resistance” of Shiite militias and other actors opposed to the U.S.- and Israeli-backed regional order. But it would be an enormous mistake to ignore the broader, local political context within which Hamas made its move.

TIPPING POINT

Israel initially responded to the Hamas attack with an even more intensive bombing campaign than normal, along with an even more intense blockade, where it cut off food, water, and energy. Israel mobilized its military reserves, bringing some 300,000 troops to the border and preparing for an imminent ground campaign. And Israel has called on Gaza’s civilians to leave the north within 24 hours. This is an impossible demand. Gazans have nowhere to go. Highways are destroyed, infrastructure is in rubble, there is little remaining electricity or power, and the few hospitals and relief facilities are all in the northern target zone. Even if Gazans wanted to leave the strip, the Rafah crossing to Egypt has been bombed—and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has shown few signs of offering a friendly refuge.

Gazans are aware of these facts. They do not see the call to evacuate as a humanitarian gesture. They believe that Israel’s intention is to carry out another Nakba. or “catastrophe”: the forced displacement of Palestinians from Israel during the 1948 war. They do not believe—nor should they believe—that they would be allowed to return to Gaza after the fighting. This is why the Biden administration’s push for a humanitarian corridor to allow Gazan civilians to flee the fighting is such a uniquely bad idea. To the extent that a humanitarian corridor accomplishes anything, it would be to accelerate the depopulation of Gaza and the creation of a new wave of permanent refugees. It would also, fairly clearly, offer the right-wing extremists in Netanyahu’s government a clear roadmap for doing the same in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

This Israel response to the Hamas attack comes from public outrage and has thus far generated political plaudits from leaders at home and around the world. But there is little evidence that any of these politicians have given serious thought to the potential implications of a war in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in the broader region. Nor is there any sign of serious grappling with an endgame in Gaza once the fighting begins. Least of all is there any sign of thinking about the moral and legal implications of the collective punishment of Gazan civilians and the inevitable human devastation to come.

The invasion of Gaza itself will be laced with uncertainties. Hamas almost certainly anticipated such an Israeli response and is well prepared to fight a long-term urban insurgency against advancing Israeli forces. It likely hopes to inflict significant casualties against a military which has not engaged in such combat in many years. (Israel’s recent military experiences are limited to profoundly one-sided operations, such as this July’s attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.) Hamas has already signaled gruesome plans to use its hostages as a deterrent against Israeli actions. Israel could win a quick victory, but it seems unlikely; moves which might accelerate the country’s campaign, such as bombing cities to the ground and depopulating the north, would come with major reputational costs. And the longer the war grinds on, the more the world will be bombarded with images of dead and injured Israelis and Palestinians, and the more opportunities there will be for unexpected disruptive events.

Gazans have nowhere to go.

Even if Israel does succeed in toppling Hamas, it will then be faced with the challenge of governing the territory it abandoned in 2005 and then mercilessly blockaded and bombed in the intervening years. Gaza’s young population will not welcome the IDF as liberators. There will be no flowers and candy on offer. Israel’s best-case scenario is a protracted counterinsurgency in a uniquely hostile environment where it has a history of failure and in which people have nothing left to lose.

In a worse-case scenario, the conflict will not remain confined to Gaza. And unfortunately, such an expansion is likely. A protracted invasion of Gaza will generate tremendous pressures in the West Bank, which President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority will have little ability—or, perhaps, intention—of containing. Over the last year, Israel’s relentless encroachment on West Bank land, and the violent provocations of the settlers, has already brought Palestinian anger and frustration to a boil. The Gaza invasion could push them over the edge.

Despite overwhelming Israeli anger at Netanyahu for his government’s nearly unprecedented strategic failure, opposition leader Benny Gantz has helped solve Netanyahu major political problems at no evident cost by joining a national unity war cabinet without the removal of the right-wing extremists Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. This decision is significant because it suggests that the provocations in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which Ben Gvir and Smotrich spearheaded last year, will only continue in this unsettled environment. In fact, it could accelerate, as the settler movement seeks to take advantage of the moment to attempt to annex some or all of the West Bank and displace its Palestinian residents. Nothing could be more dangerous.

Serious conflict in the West Bank—whether in the form of a new Intifada or an Israeli settler land grab—alongside the devastation of Gaza, would have massive repercussions. It would lay bare the grim truth of Israel’s one-state reality to a point where even the last diehards could not deny it. The conflict could trigger another Palestinian forced exodus, a new wave of refugees cast into already dangerously overburdened Jordan and Lebanon, or forcibly contained by Egypt in enclaves in the Sinai Peninsula

BEYOND THE PALE

Arab leaders are realists by nature, preoccupied with their own survival and with their own national interests. Nobody expects them to sacrifice for Palestine, an assumption which has driven American and Israeli policy under both former U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. President Joe Biden. But there are limits to their ability to stand up to a furiously mobilized mass public, particularly when it comes to Palestine. Saudi Arabia might very well normalize relations with Israel, that curious obsession of the Biden administration, when there are few political costs to doing so. It is less likely to do so when the Arab public is bombarded with gruesome images from Palestine.

In years past, Arab leaders routinely allowed anti-Israel protests as a way to let off steam, diverting popular anger towards an external enemy to avoid criticism of their own dismal records. They will likely do so again, leading cynics to wave off mass marches and angry op-eds. But the Arab uprisings of 2011 proved conclusively how easily and quickly protests can spiral from something local and contained into a regional wave capable of toppling long-ruling autocratic regimes. No Arab leader will need to be reminded that letting citizens take to the streets in massive numbers threatens their power. They will not want to be seen taking Israel’s side.

Their reluctance, in this climate, to cozy up to Israel is not simply a question of regime survival. Arab regimes pursue their interests across multiple playing fields, regionally and globally, as well as at home. Ambitious leaders seeking to expand their influence and claim leadership of the Arab world can read the prevailing winds. The last few years have already revealed the extent to which regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been willing to defy the United States on its most critical issues: hedging on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, keeping oil prices high, building stronger relations with China. These decisions suggest that Washington should not take their continued loyalties for granted, particularly if U.S. officials are seen as unequivocally backing extreme Israeli actions in Palestine.

Not since the American invasion of Iraq has there been such clarity about the fiasco to come.

Arab distance is far from the only regional shift the United States risks if it continues down this path. And it is far from the most frightening: Hezbollah could also easily be drawn into the war. Thus far, the organization has carefully calibrated its response to avoid provocation. But the invasion of Gaza may well be a red line which would force Hezbollah to act. Escalation in the West Bank and Jerusalem almost certainly would be. The United States and Israel have sought to deter Hezbollah from entering the fight, but such threats will only go so far if the IDF continuously escalates. And should Hezbollah enter the fray with its formidable arsenal of missiles, Israel would face its first two-front war in half a century. Such a situation wouldn't just be bad for Israel. It is not clear that a Lebanon, already laid low by last year’s port explosion and economic meltdown, could survive another Israeli retaliatory bombing campaign.

Some American and Israeli politicians and pundits seem to welcome a wider war. They have, in particular, been advocating for an attack on Iran. Although most of those advocating for bombing Iran have taken that position for years, allegations of an Iranian role in the Hamas attack could widen the coalition of those willing to start a conflict with Tehran.

But expanding the war to Iran would pose enormous risks, not only in the form of Iranian retaliation against Israel but also against oil shipping in the Gulf and potential escalation across Iraq, Yemen, and other fronts where Iranian allies hold sway. Recognition of those risks has thus far restrained even the most enthusiastic Iran hawks, as when Trump opted against retaliation for the attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refineries in 2019. Even today, a steady stream of leaks from American and Israeli officials downplaying Iran’s role suggests an interest in avoiding escalation. But despite those efforts, the dynamics of protracted war are deeply unpredictable. The world has rarely been closer to disaster.

CRIMES ARE CRIMES

Those urging Israel to invade Gaza with maximalist goals are pushing their ally into a strategic and political catastrophe. The potential costs are extraordinarily high, whether counted in Israeli and Palestinian deaths, the likelihood of a protracted quagmire, or mass displacement of Palestinians. The risk of the conflict spreading is also alarmingly large, particularly in the West Bank and Lebanon, but potentially far wider. And the potential gains—beyond satisfying demands for revenge—are remarkably low. Not since the American invasion of Iraq has there been such clarity in advance about the fiasco to come.

Nor have the moral issues been so clear. There is no question that Hamas committed grave war crimes in its brutal attacks on Israeli citizens, and it should be held accountable. But there is also no question that the collective punishment of Gaza, through blockades and bombing and the forced displacement of its population, represent grave war crimes. Here, too, there should be accountability—or, better yet, respect for international law.

Although these rules may not trouble Israeli leaders, it poses a significant strategic challenge to the United States in terms of its other highest priorities. It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza. The states and peoples of the Global South far beyond the Middle East will notice.

The Biden administration has made very clear that it supports Israel in its response to the Hamas attack. But now is the time for it to use the strength of that relationship to stop Israel from creating a remarkable disaster. Washington’s current approach is encouraging Israel to launch a profoundly misbegotten war, promising protection from its consequences by deterring others from entering the battle and by blocking any efforts at imposing accountability through international law. But the United States does this at the cost of its own global standing and its own regional interests. Should Israel’s invasion of Gaza take its most likely course, with all its carnage and escalation, the Biden administration will come to regret its choices.

• MARC LYNCH is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

Foreign Affairs · by Marc Lynch · October 13, 2023

13.  The Path to AI Arms Control

Includes a retrospective of some major arms control agreements.

Excerpts:

Biden and Xi should thus meet in the near future for a private conversation about AI arms control. November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in San Francisco offers that opportunity. Each leader should discuss how he personally assesses the risks posed by AI, what his country is doing to prevent applications that pose catastrophic risks, and how his country is ensuring that domestic companies are not exporting risks. To inform the next round of their discussions, they should create an advisory group consisting of U.S. and Chinese AI scientists and others who have reflected on the implications of these developments. This approach would be modeled on existing Track II diplomacy in other fields, where groups are composed of individuals chosen for their judgment and fairness although not formally endorsed by their government. From our discussions with key scientists in both governments, we are confident that this can be a highly productive discussion.

U.S. and Chinese discussions and actions on this agenda will form only part of the emerging global conversation on AI, including the AI Safety Summit, which the United Kingdom will host in November, and the ongoing dialogue at the UN. Since every country will be seeking to employ AI to enhance the lives of its citizens while ensuring the safety of its own society, in the longer run, a global AI order will be required. Work on it should begin with national efforts to prevent the most dangerous and potentially catastrophic consequences of AI. These initiatives should be complemented by dialogue between scientists of various countries engaged in developing large AI models and members of the national commissions such as the one proposed here. Formal governmental negotiations, initially among countries with advanced AI programs, should seek to establish an international framework, along with an international agency comparable to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

If Biden, Xi, and other world leaders act now to face the challenges posed by AI as squarely as their predecessors did in addressing nuclear threats in earlier decades, will they be as successful? Looking at the larger canvas of history and growing polarization today, it is difficult to be optimistic. Nonetheless, the incandescent fact that we have now marked 78 years of peace among the nuclear powers should serve to inspire everyone to master the revolutionary, inescapable challenges of our AI future.

The Path to AI Arms Control

America and China Must Work Together to Avert Catastrophe

By Henry A. Kissinger and Graham Allison

October 13, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Henry A. Kissinger and Graham Allison · October 13, 2023

This year marks the 78th anniversary of the end of the deadliest war in history and the beginning of the longest period in modern times without great-power war. Because World War I had been followed just two decades later by World War II, the specter of World War III, fought with weapons that had become so destructive they could theoretically threaten all of humankind, hung over the decades of the Cold War that followed. When the United States’ atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki compelled Japan’s immediate unconditional surrender, no one thought it conceivable that the world would see a de facto moratorium on the use of nuclear weapons for the next seven decades. It seemed even more improbable that almost eight decades later, there would be just nine nuclear weapons states. The leadership demonstrated by the United States over these decades in avoiding nuclear war, slowing nuclear proliferation, and shaping an international order that provided decades of great-power peace will go down in history as one of America’s most significant achievements.

Today, as the world confronts the unique challenges posed by another unprecedented and in some ways even more terrifying technology—artificial intelligence—it is not surprising that many have been looking to history for instruction. Will machines with superhuman capabilities threaten humanity’s status as master of the universe? Will AI undermine nations’ monopoly on the means of mass violence? Will AI enable individuals or small groups to produce viruses capable of killing on a scale that was previously the preserve of great powers? Could AI erode the nuclear deterrents that have been a pillar of today’s world order?

At this point, no one can answer these questions with confidence. But as we have explored these issues for the last two years with a group of technology leaders at the forefront of the AI revolution, we have concluded that the prospects that the unconstrained advance of AI will create catastrophic consequences for the United States and the world are so compelling that leaders in governments must act now. Even though neither they nor anyone else can know what the future holds, enough is understood to begin making hard choices and taking actions today—recognizing that these will be subject to repeated revision as more is discovered.

As leaders make these choices, lessons learned in the nuclear era can inform their decisions. Even adversaries racing to develop and deploy an unprecedented technology that could kill hundreds of millions of people nonetheless discovered islands of shared interests. As duopolists, both the United States and the Soviet Union had an interest in preventing the rapid spread of this technology to other states that could threaten them. Both Washington and Moscow recognized that if nuclear technology fell into the hands of rogue actors or terrorists within their own borders, it could be used to threaten them, and so each developed robust security systems for their own arsenals. But since each could also be threatened if rogue actors in their adversary’s society acquired nuclear weapons, both found it in their interests to discuss this risk with each other and describe the practices and technologies they developed to ensure this did not happen. Once the arsenals of their nuclear weapons reached a level at which neither could attack the other without triggering a response that would destroy itself, they discovered the paradoxical stability of mutual assured destruction (MAD). As this ugly reality was internalized, each power learned to limit itself and found ways to persuade its adversary to constrain its initiatives in order to avoid confrontations that could lead to a war. Indeed, leaders of both the U.S. and the Soviet government came to realize that avoiding a nuclear war of which their nation would be the first victim was a cardinal responsibility.

The challenges presented by AI today are not simply a second chapter of the nuclear age. History is not a cookbook with recipes that can be followed to produce a soufflé. The differences between AI and nuclear weapons are at least as significant as the similarities. Properly understood and adapted, however, lessons learned in shaping an international order that has produced nearly eight decades without great-power war offer the best guidance available for leaders confronting AI today.

At this moment, there are just two AI superpowers: the United States and China are the only countries with the talent, research institutes, and mass computing capacity required to train the most sophisticated AI models. This offers them a narrow window of opportunity to create guidelines to prevent the most dangerous advances and applications of AI. U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping should seize this opportunity by holding a summit—perhaps immediately after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s meeting in San Francisco in November—where they could hold extended, direct, face-to-face discussions on what they should see as one of the most consequential issues confronting them today.

LESSONS FROM THE NUCLEAR AGE

After atomic bombs devastated Japanese cities in 1945, the scientists who had opened Pandora’s atomic box saw what they had created and recoiled in horror. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal scientist of the Manhattan Project, recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer became such an ardent advocate of radical measures to control the bomb that he was stripped of his security clearance. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto—signed in 1955 by 11 leading scientists including not just Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein but also Linus Pauling and Max Born—warned of the frightening powers of nuclear weapons and implored world leaders never to use them.

Although U.S. President Harry Truman never expressed second thoughts about his decision, neither he nor members of his national security team had a viable view of how this awesome technology could be integrated into the postwar international order. Should the United States attempt to maintain its monopoly position as the sole atomic power? Was that even feasible? In pursuit of the objective, could the United States share its technology with the Soviet Union? Did survival in a world with this weapon require leaders to invent some authority superior to national governments? Henry Stimson, Truman’s secretary of war (who had just helped achieve victory over both Germany and Japan), proposed that the United States share its monopoly of the atomic bomb with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to create a great-power “condominium” that would prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Truman created a committee, chaired by U.S. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, to develop a strategy for pursuing Stimson’s proposal.

Acheson essentially agreed with Stimson: the only way to prevent a nuclear arms race ending in catastrophic war would be to create an international authority that would be the sole possessor of atomic weapons. This would require the United States to share its nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union and other members of the UN Security Council, transfer its nuclear weapons to a new UN “atomic development authority,” and forbid all nations from developing weapons or constructing their own capability to produce weapons-grade nuclear material. In 1946, Truman sent the financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch to the UN to negotiate an agreement to implement Acheson’s plan. But the proposal was categorically rejected by Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet representative to the UN.

It is essential to recognize the differences between AI and nuclear weapons.

Three years later, when the Soviet Union succeeded in its crash effort to build its own bomb, the United States and the Soviet Union entered what people were starting to call the Cold War: a competition by all means short of bombs and bullets. A central feature of this competition was the drive for nuclear superiority. At their heights, the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals included more than 60,000 weapons, some of them warheads with more explosive power than all the weapons that had been used in all the wars in recorded history. Experts debated whether an all-out nuclear war would mean the end of every living soul on earth.

Over the decades, Washington and Moscow have spent trillions of dollars on their nuclear arsenals. The current annual budget for the U.S. nuclear enterprise exceeds $50 billion. In the early decades of this race, both the United States and the Soviet Union made previously unimaginable leaps forward in the hope of obtaining a decisive advantage. Increases in weapons’ explosive power required the creation of new metrics: from kilotons (equivalent to the energy released by 1,000 tons of TNT) for the original fission weapons to megatons (equivalent to that released by one million tons) for hydrogen fusion bombs. The two sides invented intercontinental missiles capable of delivering warheads to targets on the other side of the planet in 30 minutes, satellites circling the globe at a height of hundreds of miles with cameras that could identify the coordinates of targets within inches, and defenses that could in essence hit a bullet with a bullet. Some observers seriously imagined defenses that would render nuclear weapons, as President Ronald Reagan put it, “impotent and obsolete.”

THE CONCEPTUAL ARSENAL

In attempting to shape these developments, strategists developed a conceptual arsenal that distinguished between first and second strikes. They clarified the essential requirements for a reliable retaliatory response. And they developed the nuclear triad—submarines, bombers, and land-based missiles—to ensure that if an adversary were to discover one vulnerability, other components of the arsenal would remain available for a devastating response. Perception of risks of accidental or unauthorized launches of weapons spurred the invention of permissive action links—electronic locks embedded in nuclear weapons that prevented them from being activated without the right nuclear launch codes. Redundancies were designed to protect against technological breakthroughs that might jeopardize command-and-control systems, which motivated the invention of a computer network that evolved into the Internet. As the strategist Herman Kahn famously put it, they were “thinking about the unthinkable.”

At the core of nuclear strategy was the concept of deterrence: preventing an adversary from attacking by threatening costs out of proportion to any conceivable benefit. Successful deterrence, it came to be understood, required not just capability but also credibility. The potential victims needed not only the means to respond decisively but also the will. Strategists refined this basic idea further with concepts such as extended deterrence, which sought to employ a political mechanism—a pledge of protection via alliance—to persuade key states not to build their own arsenals.

By 1962, when U.S. President John F. Kennedy confronted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev over nuclear-tipped missiles that the Soviets had placed in Cuba, the U.S. intelligence community estimated that even if Kennedy launched a successful first strike, the Soviet retaliatory response with their existing capabilities might kill 62 million Americans. By 1969, when Richard Nixon became president, the United States needed to rethink its approach. One of us, Kissinger, later described the challenge: “Our defense strategies formed in the period of our superiority had to be reexamined in the harsh light of the new realities. . . . No bellicose rhetoric could obscure the fact that existing nuclear stockpiles were enough to destroy mankind. . . . There could be no higher duty than to prevent the catastrophe of nuclear war.”

To make this condition vivid, strategists had created the ironic acronym MAD, the essence of which was summarized by Reagan’s oft-repeated one-liner: “A nuclear war cannot be won—and must therefore never be fought.” Operationally, MAD meant mutual assured vulnerability. While both the United States and the Soviet Union sought to escape this condition, they eventually recognized that they were unable to do so and had to fundamentally reconceptualize their relationship. In 1955, Churchill had noted the supreme irony in which “safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.” Without denying differences in values or compromising vital national interests, deadly rivals had to develop strategies to defeat their adversary by every means possible except all-out war.

One pillar of these strategies was a series of both tacit and explicit constraints now known as arms control. Even before MAD, when each superpower was doing everything it could to achieve superiority, they discovered areas of shared interests. To reduce the risk of mistakes, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed in informal discussions not to interfere with the other’s surveillance of their territory. To protect their citizens from radioactive fallout, they banned atmospheric testing. To avoid “crisis instability”—when one side feels the need to strike first in the belief that the other side is about to—they agreed in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to limit missile defenses. In the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear forces. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which resulted in treaties signed in 1972 and 1979, limited increases in missile launchers, and later, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), signed in 1991, and the New START, signed in 2010, reduced their numbers. Perhaps most consequentially, the United States and the Soviet Union concluded that the spread of nuclear weapons to other states posed a threat to both of them and ultimately risked nuclear anarchy. They brought about what is now known as the nonproliferation regime, the centerpiece of which is the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, through which 186 countries today have pledged to refrain from developing their own nuclear arsenals.

CONTROLLING AI

In current proposals about ways to contain AI, one can hear many echoes of this past. The billionaire Elon Musk’s demand for a six-month pause on AI development, the AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s proposal to abolish AI, and the psychologist Gary Marcus’s demand that AI be controlled by a global governmental body essentially repeat proposals from the nuclear era that failed. The reason is that each would require leading states to subordinate their own sovereignty. Never in history has one great power fearing that a competitor might apply a new technology to threaten its survival and security forgone developing that technology for itself. Even close U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom and France opted to develop their own national nuclear capabilities in addition to relying on the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

To adapt lessons from nuclear history to address the current challenge, it is essential to recognize the salient differences between AI and nuclear weapons. First, whereas governments led the development of nuclear technology, private entrepreneurs, technologists, and companies are driving advances in AI. Scientists working for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, and a handful of smaller startups are far ahead of any analogous effort in government. Furthermore, these companies are now locked in a gladiatorial struggle among themselves that is unquestionably driving innovation, but at a cost. As these private actors make tradeoffs between risks and rewards, national interests are certain to be underweighted.

Second, AI is digital. Nuclear weapons were difficult to produce, requiring a complex infrastructure to accomplish everything from enriching uranium to designing nuclear weapons. The products were physical objects and thus countable. Where it was feasible to verify what the adversary was doing, constraints emerged. AI represents a distinctly different challenge. Its major evolutions occur in the minds of human beings. Its applicability evolves in laboratories, and its deployment is difficult to observe. Nuclear weapons are tangible; the essence of artificial intelligence is conceptual.

A screen showing Chinese and U.S. flags, Beijing, July 2023

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

Third, AI is advancing and spreading at a speed that makes lengthy negotiations impossible. Arms control developed over decades. Restraints for AI need to occur before AI is built into the security structure of each society—that is, before machines begin to set their own objectives, which some experts now say is likely to occur in the next five years. The timing demands first a national, then an international, discussion and analysis, as well as a new dynamic in the relationship between government and the private sector.

Fortunately, the major companies that have developed generative AI and made the United States the leading AI superpower recognize that they have responsibilities not just to their shareholders but also to the country and humanity at large. Many have already developed their own guidelines for assessing risk before deployment, reducing bias in training data, and restricting dangerous uses of their models. Others are exploring ways to circumscribe training and impose “know your customer” requirements for cloud computing providers. A significant step in the right direction was the initiative the Biden administration announced in July that brought leaders of seven major AI companies to the White House for a joint pledge to establish guidelines to ensure “safety, security, and trust.”

As one of us, Kissinger, has pointed out in The Age of AI, it is an urgent imperative to create a systematic study of the long-range implications of AI’s evolving, often spectacular inventions and applications. Even while the United States is more divided than it has been since the Civil War, the magnitude of the risks posed by the unconstrained advance of AI demands that leaders in both government and business act now. Each of the companies with the mass computing capability to train new AI models and each company or research group developing new models should create a group to analyze the human and geopolitical implications of its commercial AI operations.

The challenge is bipartisan and requires a unified response. The president and Congress should in that spirit establish a national commission consisting of distinguished nonpartisan former leaders in the private sector, Congress, the military, and the intelligence community. The commission should propose more specific mandatory safeguards. These should include requirements to assess continuously the mass computing capabilities needed to train AI models such as GPT-4 and that before companies release a new model, they stress test it for extreme risks. Although the task of developing rules will be demanding, the commission would have a model in the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Its recommendations, released in 2021, provided impetus and direction for the initiatives that the U.S. military and U.S. intelligence agencies are undertaking in the AI rivalry with China.

THE TWO AI SUPERPOWERS

Even at this early stage, while the United States is still creating its own framework for governing AI at home, it is not too early to begin serious conversations with the world’s only other AI superpower. China’s national champions in the tech sector—Baidu (the country’s top search engine), ByteDance (the creator of TikTok), Tencent (the maker of WeChat), and Alibaba (the leader in e-commerce)—are building proprietary Chinese-language analogues of ChatGPT, although the Chinese political system has posed particular difficulties for AI. While China still lags in the technology to make advanced semiconductors, it possesses the essentials to power ahead in the immediate future.

Biden and Xi should thus meet in the near future for a private conversation about AI arms control. November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in San Francisco offers that opportunity. Each leader should discuss how he personally assesses the risks posed by AI, what his country is doing to prevent applications that pose catastrophic risks, and how his country is ensuring that domestic companies are not exporting risks. To inform the next round of their discussions, they should create an advisory group consisting of U.S. and Chinese AI scientists and others who have reflected on the implications of these developments. This approach would be modeled on existing Track II diplomacy in other fields, where groups are composed of individuals chosen for their judgment and fairness although not formally endorsed by their government. From our discussions with key scientists in both governments, we are confident that this can be a highly productive discussion.

U.S. and Chinese discussions and actions on this agenda will form only part of the emerging global conversation on AI, including the AI Safety Summit, which the United Kingdom will host in November, and the ongoing dialogue at the UN. Since every country will be seeking to employ AI to enhance the lives of its citizens while ensuring the safety of its own society, in the longer run, a global AI order will be required. Work on it should begin with national efforts to prevent the most dangerous and potentially catastrophic consequences of AI. These initiatives should be complemented by dialogue between scientists of various countries engaged in developing large AI models and members of the national commissions such as the one proposed here. Formal governmental negotiations, initially among countries with advanced AI programs, should seek to establish an international framework, along with an international agency comparable to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

If Biden, Xi, and other world leaders act now to face the challenges posed by AI as squarely as their predecessors did in addressing nuclear threats in earlier decades, will they be as successful? Looking at the larger canvas of history and growing polarization today, it is difficult to be optimistic. Nonetheless, the incandescent fact that we have now marked 78 years of peace among the nuclear powers should serve to inspire everyone to master the revolutionary, inescapable challenges of our AI future.

• HENRY A. KISSINGER is Chairman of Kissinger Associates. He served as U.S. National Security Adviser from 1969 to 1975 and U.S. Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977.
• GRAHAM ALLISON is Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Foreign Affairs · by Henry A. Kissinger and Graham Allison · October 13, 2023

14. US intelligence warned of the potential for violence days before Hamas attack

An intelligence failure or the failure to heed the intelligence estimates. Someone in the intelligence community gets it right. But wasn't his or her analysis provided to or heeded by  decision makers?

US intelligence warned of the potential for violence days before Hamas attack

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/politics/us-intelligence-warnings-potential-gaza-clash-days-before-attack?fbclid=IwAR3-Qe-WTYfV8NHTrb4eG0nsF53xcnlQ9bL8KBWAGItHUkS3AvH8OzNyBWg

By Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen, Alex Marquardt and Natasha Bertrand, CNN

 6 minute read 

Updated 3:25 PM EDT, Fri October 13, 2023

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'Two failures': Former defense secretary reacts to US having intel ahead of attack

02:22

CNN walks through the horrific site of music festival massacre

04:22

See what it looks like inside Gaza as drumbeat of invasion grows

02:20

Weapons used by Hamas militants appear to be Russian or Chinese made

02:36

'I don't even know if I'll live for the next month': Hear from student stuck in Gaza

02:34

How Hamas trapped civilians at music festival

04:24

UN official: We do not know how to help people in Gaza move safely

02:11

Dad rejoins Israeli military to fight alongside daughters

02:43

CNN anchor presses IDF spokesman on time window for evacuation of northern Gaza

00:59

'Not fair for children like us': Girl in Gaza shares what life is like right now

03:15

Drone footage of war-torn Gaza show immense destruction

02:46

Retired general: The issue with Palestinians leaving Gaza

01:40

See what it's like on the ground as Israel declares 'complete siege' on Gaza

04:13

Festivalgoer describes harrowing experience running from attack

02:52

Father describes moment he learned daughter was killed

03:49

Retired colonel points out key difficulty Israeli troops would face in Gaza

02:28

'Two failures': Former defense secretary reacts to US having intel ahead of attack

02:22

CNN walks through the horrific site of music festival massacre

04:22

See what it looks like inside Gaza as drumbeat of invasion grows

02:20

Weapons used by Hamas militants appear to be Russian or Chinese made

02:36

WashingtonCNN — 

The US intelligence community produced at least two assessments based in part on intelligence provided by Israel warning the Biden administration of an increased risk for Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the weeks ahead of Saturday’s seismic attack on southern Israel, according to sources familiar with the intelligence.

One update from September 28 warned, based on multiple streams of intelligence, that the terror group Hamas was poised to escalate rocket-attacks across the border. An October 5 wire from the CIA warned generally of the increasing possibility of violence by Hamas. Then, on October 6, the day before the attack, US officials circulated reporting from Israel indicating unusual activity by Hamas — indications that are now clear: an attack was imminent.

Hamas militants trained for its deadly attack in plain sight and less than a mile from Israel's heavily fortified border

None of the American assessments offered any tactical details or indications of the overwhelming scope, scale and sheer brutality of the operation that Hamas carried out on October 7, sources say. It is unclear if any of these US assessments were shared with Israel, which provides much of the intelligence that the US bases its reports on.

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Ex-CIA director has a warning about a potential 'end result' in Israel-Hamas conflict

01:53 - Source: CNN

Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are also on a “hot spots” list included in intelligence briefings for senior officials almost daily, a person who receives the briefings said.

Intelligence assessments are written by the intelligence community to inform policy makers and enable them to make decisions.

“The problem is that none of this is new,” said one of the sources familiar with the intelligence. “This is something that has historically been the norm between Hamas and Israel. I think what happened is everyone saw these reports and were like, ‘Yeah of course. But we know what this will look like.’”

But the assessments were among a wave of high-level warnings given to the Biden administration by both its own intelligence community and Middle Eastern allies over the past year, raising questions about whether the US and Israel were appropriately attuned to the risk.

Israeli tanks move near Gaza border as Israeli army deploys military vehicles around the Gaza Strip, Israel on October 12, 2023.

Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu/Getty Images)

A senior official from an Arab country in the region said their country repeatedly raised concerns with US and Israeli officials that Palestinian anger was reaching a dangerous pitch. “But they never listened every time we warned them,” the official said.

A Middle Eastern diplomat in Washington, DC, also told CNN that their government had repeatedly warned the White House and US intelligence officials of a buildup of Hamas weapons and anger among Palestinians that was set to explode.

“The arms that exist in Gaza is beyond the imagination of anybody’s thinking,” they warned, the diplomat said. “The arms that exist in the West Bank, via Hamas, are also becoming a real problem and Hamas control of the West Bank is a real issue.”

“This in every meeting, every meeting in the last year and a half,” the diplomat added.

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And in February, CIA Director Bill Burns told an audience at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service that he was “quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians.”

CIA Director William Burns during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, March 8, 2023.

Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP

“I would not come to the conclusion that the intel community was not tracking this from a strategic level — in fact they were,” a US official told CNN.

Yet those strategic warnings did nothing to help US or Israeli officials predict the events of October 7, when more than 1,000 Hamas fighters poured across the border into Israel in an operation that would leave more than a thousand Israelis dead. For most US and Israeli officials who were tracking the intelligence, the expectation was that there would likely be just another round of small-scale violence by Hamas — perhaps some rocket fire that Israel’s Iron Dome would intercept, one source familiar with the intelligence explained.

“If we had known or if we know of a pending attack against an ally, we would clearly inform that ally,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Friday.

Senior Biden administration officials — as well as current and former intelligence officials — continue to say they remain focused on the crisis at hand and insist that is too soon to review how the planning for such a massive attack was missed.

Multiple current and former intelligence officials, as well as some lawmakers briefed on US intelligence, pushed back on the notion that the failure to provide tactical warning of the attack was the US’s responsibility — because so much of US intelligence reporting on Gaza originated with Israel in the first place.

The mother (L), sister (R) and immediate family of Valentin (Eli) Ghnassia, 23, who was killed in a battle with Hamas militants at Kibbutz Be'eeri near the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip, react during his funeral, October 12, 2023 in Jerusalem, Israel.

Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Another source familiar with the intelligence sumbumed up the US view: “Israel missed this, not us. We have a level of confidence in Shin Bet, the IDF, Mossad and others.”

The New York Times also reported on the existence of some of the reports and that they were not briefed up to President Joe Biden.

“There was no information warning about the terrorist attack in advance,” a Biden administration official told CNN.

The Office of Director of National Intelligence and the CIA declined to comment.

Missed signs

Based on conversations with dozens of current and former intelligence, military and congressional officials, the view is coalescing among US officials and lawmakers that Israel’s failure to predict the explosion of simmering rage from Gaza was primarily due to a lack of imagination.

Hamas likely hid the planning of the operation through old-fashioned counterintelligence measures such as conducting planning meetings in person and staying off digital communications whose signals the Israelis can track. But US officials also believe that Israel had become complacent about the threat Hamas posed and failed to recognize key indicators that the group was planning for a large-scale operation.

For example, Israeli officials failed to recognize routine Hamas training exercises as a sign that the group was preparing an imminent attack. The militants trained for the onslaught in at least six sites across Gaza, a CNN investigation found, including at one site less than a mile from Israel’s border.

“There were numerous indicators of a change in posture generally by Hamas and then pivoting both in public rhetoric and posture more towards violence and attacks generally,” said one source familiar with US intelligence.

In general, the Biden administration’s public posture in the lead up to the attack also did not reflect a heightened sense of alarm about the potential for violence. The intelligence community’s annual assessment of worldwide threats, released in February, does not mention Hamas.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2023.

Susan Walsh/AP

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at The Atlantic Festival on September 29.

“Challenges remain,” Sullivan said, citing “tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. “But the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced.”

Hamas had refrained from entering two smaller cross-border skirmishes within the last year between another Palestinian militant group and Israel. Israel believed that its policy of offering work permits to Gazans and allowed Qatari money into the country had given Hamas something to lose — and lulled the group into quiescence.

“Hamas is very, very restrained and understands the implications of further defiance,” Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s national security adviser, told an Israeli radio channel six days before the assault.

It’s also possible that the Hamas operation was more successful than the group anticipated, one former intelligence official and another source familiar with current intelligence said.

“I think that it’s very possible, if not probable, that Hamas vastly exceeded its own expectations,” the second person said. “They thought we would mount this assault and there would be a couple dozen killed but never did they think it would rise to the level it did.”

This story has been updated with a response from the Biden administration.

15. What Israel Will Face in Gaza

Excerpts:

Making this attack all the more difficult to predict is the uncertainty around Hamas’s capabilities. Past assessments of Hamas suggested that the group had only limited strength and skill. But the well-planned attack on Israel, which involved secrecy, operational deception, and tactical innovation, suggest the organization is far more talented than it is often thought to be. And even as Israeli forces face off with Hamas in Gaza, they may be in for additional surprises outside of the territory. Hamas, for example, tried to foment civil strife inside Israel and the West Bank during a flare up in fighting in 2021. It could do so again, particularly in towns home to many Arab Israelis and in mixed Jewish-Arab cities.

Fortunately for Israel, Hamas is trapped. Gaza is surrounded by Egypt, Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea; there is nowhere for Hamas fighters to go. Some of them might hide, but many of its fighters and its political network will be killed or captured. If Israel reoccupies all of Gaza, it can slowly find, isolate, and arrest or kill the Hamas leadership, although weeding them out from the civilian population will be a difficult task even with control of the territory.

But even then, Israel will have to contend with the challenge of who will establish law and order in Gaza. Israel cannot hand control back to Hamas or other terrorist groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but there are no easy alternatives. The Palestinian Authority, evicted from Gaza in 2007, has little legitimacy there, and it has demonstrated little competence as a governing agency in the West Bank. Israel’s only solution may be to occupy Gaza for the foreseeable future by setting up checkpoints to monitor population movement, conducting occasional raids, and building a more robust and heavily mined border between Gaza and Israel.

Yet a protracted Israeli military occupation of Gaza is not ideal for Israel or for people in Gaza. As difficult as the military campaign will be for Israel, finding even a temporary political and governance solution for Gaza will be the most challenging part of the conflict. As a result, Israel may find its best option is to hit Hamas hard but eventually withdraw to avoid an indefinite and grinding occupation.

What Israel Will Face in Gaza

The High Costs of Crushing Hamas

By Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones

October 14, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones · October 14, 2023

Israel is on the verge of launching a major invasion. Over the last three days, the government has called up over 300,000 military reservists. It is massing forces near the Gaza Strip and it has started bombarding the territory. In the early morning of October 13, it asked the United Nations to evacuate 1.1 million people from the north of Gaza, and later that day it dropped leaflets in the territory telling people to move south. The question is no longer whether Israel will send its military into Gaza, but rather how deep Israel will go into the enclave and how long it will stay there.

On one level, an Israeli attack on Gaza is not entirely unprecedented. Israel and Hamas have clashed repeatedly in the strip since the militant group seized power there in 2007. But these battles were fairly limited. Israel hit Hamas hard with airstrikes on personnel and key infrastructure in Gaza, but it only ventured sporadic raids on the ground. The reason for this restraint was straightforward: Israeli ground offensives in Gaza are exceedingly bloody and difficult. During the last major one in 2014, approximately 66 Israeli soldiers, six Israeli civilians, and well over 2,000 Palestinians died, even though the military penetrated only a few kilometers deep into the enclave. Most of the Palestinian deaths were civilians, a quarter were children. To the Israelis, then, it has never seemed worth trying to retake the territory, especially because the Israeli government believed it could control and deter Hamas without ordering major assaults.

Today, however, the calculus is vastly different. The 2014 operation, which seemed massive at the time, was responding to Hamas rocket attacks. Those strikes posed a threat to Israel, but they were largely intercepted by the country’s Iron Dome missile system and resulted in minimal damage. Hamas’s recent attack on Israel, by contrast, was much more deadly. The toll—more than 1,300 Israelis killed in one day—may represent the single worst loss of life in the country’s history. The brutal, indiscriminate nature of the killings (whose victims included many children and elderly people) shocked Israel and the wider world. Israelis are out for blood, and no credible Israeli leader will be able to call for a return to the status quo ante or just marginal gains against Hamas. A return to the status quo ante would leave Hamas fully in charge of Gaza, again able to build up its strength.

As a result, Israel’s immediate military objective will now be to destroy Hamas, or at least cripple it severely. Israel will look to either kill, capture, or drive underground Hamas’s political and military leadership, and it will try to demolish Hamas's infrastructure and caches of weapons. These aims, in turn, will likely require at least a temporary occupation of all or part of Gaza. Hamas is simply too entrenched, in too many places, to be rooted out with bombs and raids alone.

But seizing Gaza will prove very costly to Israel. Israeli forces will need to engage in house-to-house urban combat against an enemy that is well prepared and committed to making invaders pay for each inch. Progress will be slow, and the fighting will be brutal. Israel will need to use overwhelming firepower to make serious gains and achieve its objectives. In the process, it may kill enormous numbers of civilians.

The battle also will not end when Israel has reoccupied the territory. There is no Palestinian entity that Israel trusts to govern Gaza in Hamas’s stead. As a result, a military victory could mean Israel has to administer the territory for the foreseeable future. Israeli officials, in other words, will have to govern an immiserated people who see them as their enemy and who may wage a guerrilla war. The prospect of such resistance makes a new occupation of Gaza rather unpalatable for Israeli planners. The best scenario for Israel might be to hit Hamas hard and significantly strengthen Israel’s border with Gaza, but not stay too long.

DOOR TO DOOR

To take Gaza, Israel will have to fight in deeply inhospitable terrain. The enclave has over 20,000 people per square mile, one of the highest population densities in the world, and these residents are no friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Much of the strip is built up, with narrow alleys, warrens, and concrete buildings of various heights—a landscape that Hamas and other Gazan groups know intimately. They will use this geography and knowledge to entrap and slow down Israeli forces.

Relative to most militaries, the IDF is extremely competent in urban combat, thanks to years of operations in the West Bank. But urban warfare is difficult even for the very best militaries. Defenders almost always have the tactical advantage in cities, at least initially, and IDF soldiers will face threats from snipers, improvised explosive devices, suicide bombers, anti-tank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, and drones. Operating openly in Gaza’s streets will expose soldiers to direct and indirect fire, and so they will instead move house-to-house wherever possible by creating “mouse holes”—a cumbersome process where soldiers blow holes in walls to advance forward.

Israel’s urban struggles will be compounded by Hamas’ proficiency in tunnel warfare. The group has successfully used tunnels to smuggle goods and fighters in, out, and around Gaza for years. The IDF has destroyed some of Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure, but never all of it, and it has typically focused on destroying tunnels near its border. This time, Israel will have to worry more about vast networks of tunnels within Gaza itself. If past is prelude, Hamas fighters will use these tunnels to hide leaders and to emerge suddenly behind IDF forces, possibly allowing Hamas to ambush, kidnap, and kill Israeli troops.

When conducting operations in difficult terrain, Israel typically relies on tactical surprise to gain an advantage, attacking from unexpected directions, trying to deceive adversaries, and otherwise seeking to catch its foes unaware. Hamas, however, has the initiative in this war: it surprised Israel with its attack, and it is surely expecting a devastating response. Its forces are mobilized and almost certainly well prepared. Hamas will also be supplemented by fighters from other groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and civilians who join the fight.

Israel’s usual tactics will be further complicated by the large numbers of hostages Hamas has taken. Israel is highly sensitive to the capture of its soldiers and civilians. In 2011, for example, it swapped over 1,000 prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier captured by Hamas. The country also freed a Palestinian terrorist and four others in exchange for Hezbollah releasing the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. But these exchanges are impossible templates for today. Hamas has captured approximately 150 hostages in its last operation, including U.S. and Thai citizens. It will be extremely difficult for Israeli officials to save them.

Destroying or crippling Hamas will require the temporary occupation of much of Gaza.

Tactically, Israel will worry that its forces could accidentally kill hostages when they shoot at or bomb suspected Hamas targets (something that Hamas claims has already happened). Strategically, however, the country is worried that Hamas will kill these hostages no matter what. The group has warned that it will execute hostages in response to Israeli military operations. No one thinks Hamas is kidding, and the more successful Israel is in its offensive, the more likely Hamas is to carry out executions.

The hostages are far from the only innocent people at risk of dying in Israel’s offensive. The war will likely kill thousands of Palestinian civilians. Although Israeli military planners will try to limit these deaths, Hamas has a history of turning humans into shields. It also likes to place its strategic locations, such as command-and-control buildings, weapons depots, and fighting positions, near or within civilian residential areas. It has smuggled fighters and weapons in ambulances and has used mosques and schools as locations for military operations. It will likely engage in these practices again.

Even if Hamas were not using civilians as protection, it would be difficult for the IDF to limit civilian deaths. Gaza’s dense, urban environment makes it extremely hard to exclusively hit militants. The environment also makes it difficult to distinguish terrorists and their support network from civilians. IDF soldiers, taking fire from Hamas, will be under extraordinary stress and will have to make quick decisions with imperfect information about where to attack. Israel has great human, signals, and other intelligence capabilities, along with an ability to quickly move intelligence collected from sensors and spies to operators, and it will use these tools for targeting. But Israel’s failure to anticipate the October 7 attack suggests that its intelligence capabilities in the Gaza Strip may not be not as strong as they seemed, raising the odds of deadly errors.

In past operations, Israel has helped deliver humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian citizens, even as it conducted military offensives. During fighting in 2008 and 2009, for example, the IDF set up a “humanitarian operation room” to manage the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza and to respond to Palestinian needs. It may again try to bring in assistance as it moves forward.

But given the scale and scope of the forthcoming operation, such deliveries will be much more difficult. Israel is no longer simply trying to degrade Hamas’ capabilities. It is seeking to restore deterrence, and given the losses Israel has taken, this process will require inflicting a very high price. Such a price will inevitably result in widespread destruction, including of civilian infrastructure. Strikes and ground combat will likely damage health care, food distribution, and other basic systems in the long term. Gaza is in a crisis that will only become far worse.

STEP BY STEP

So how will Israel attempt to take Gaza? It will begin, as it already has, by blanketing the strip with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, including drones and surveillance aircraft with advanced sensor capabilities. These assets, Israel hopes, can provide the IDF with an inside look at the houses and floors soldiers will need to cross as they advance. The IDF will supplement this information with intelligence from human assets, satellites, and other sources, giving the military overall guidance as they go in on the ground, and helping them identify Hamas positions and avoid ambushes.

Israeli forces are already striking Hamas with artillery and fixed-wing aircraft, such as F-15s and F-16s. The IDF will make similar attacks with military drones, such as the Hermes 450 and Heron 900. Israel has sent some special operations forces deeper into Gaza, where they are likely conducting raids to kill Hamas leaders and rescue prisoners. Israeli special operations are highly skilled, but Hamas has likely prepared for such attacks, and so these raids are risky.

Eventually, after Hamas’s military assets are weakened, Israeli forces will slowly move into Gaza using infantry transported by armored personnel carriers and supported by Merkava main battle tanks and bulldozers. The IDF will travel carefully to avoid casualties on its own side. They will try not to fire indiscriminately, but their primary purpose will be to weaken Hamas, an objective that will require substantial firepower. And ultimately, the IDF’s goal will be to minimize their own casualties and their forces will not hesitate to shoot first when they perceive a threat.

Reoccupying Gaza will allow Israel to root out and arrest or kill the Hamas leadership.

Making this attack all the more difficult to predict is the uncertainty around Hamas’s capabilities. Past assessments of Hamas suggested that the group had only limited strength and skill. But the well-planned attack on Israel, which involved secrecy, operational deception, and tactical innovation, suggest the organization is far more talented than it is often thought to be. And even as Israeli forces face off with Hamas in Gaza, they may be in for additional surprises outside of the territory. Hamas, for example, tried to foment civil strife inside Israel and the West Bank during a flare up in fighting in 2021. It could do so again, particularly in towns home to many Arab Israelis and in mixed Jewish-Arab cities.

Fortunately for Israel, Hamas is trapped. Gaza is surrounded by Egypt, Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea; there is nowhere for Hamas fighters to go. Some of them might hide, but many of its fighters and its political network will be killed or captured. If Israel reoccupies all of Gaza, it can slowly find, isolate, and arrest or kill the Hamas leadership, although weeding them out from the civilian population will be a difficult task even with control of the territory.

But even then, Israel will have to contend with the challenge of who will establish law and order in Gaza. Israel cannot hand control back to Hamas or other terrorist groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but there are no easy alternatives. The Palestinian Authority, evicted from Gaza in 2007, has little legitimacy there, and it has demonstrated little competence as a governing agency in the West Bank. Israel’s only solution may be to occupy Gaza for the foreseeable future by setting up checkpoints to monitor population movement, conducting occasional raids, and building a more robust and heavily mined border between Gaza and Israel.

Yet a protracted Israeli military occupation of Gaza is not ideal for Israel or for people in Gaza. As difficult as the military campaign will be for Israel, finding even a temporary political and governance solution for Gaza will be the most challenging part of the conflict. As a result, Israel may find its best option is to hit Hamas hard but eventually withdraw to avoid an indefinite and grinding occupation.

• DANIEL BYMAN is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
• SETH G. JONES is Senior Vice President and Director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones · October 14, 2023

16. It's Not Just America in Decline. Culture Wars Threaten Western Civilization

Excerpts:

While acknowledging the immense damage done to Western economies, self-confidence and social cohesion by three decades of left-wing iconoclasm, Baker suggests that efforts to impose a “new moral order” and re-engineer society to conform with the the Left’s ideological imperatives are failing because of internal contradictions, self-evident economic lunacy, and a growing revulsion and resistance on the part of many whose beliefs and material well-being are under assault.

Baker cites an example of this grassroots revolt in the recent national uproar over the British government’s commitment to phase out gasoline-powered vehicles and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, which caused Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to make a humiliating retreat from this unrealistic timetable. That, in turn, elicited criticism from climate activists worldwide.

Another example is the resistance by some in Australia to a forthcoming national referendum asking the Australian people to endorse a redesign of their constitution that would create a branch of government for the purpose of advising lawmakers on the needs of Indigenous peoples.

It is clear that the phenomenon of decline is not a purely American syndrome but, rather, one that is much wider. The oceans that Ben Franklin and his contemporaries believed would insulate the New World from the calamities of the Old World no longer suffice in that regard. What is unclear is whether the emerging awareness and resistance will be sufficient to reverse or even check the creeping cultural changes that may serve the ideological elites but materially and spiritually impoverish everyone else.

It's Not Just America in Decline. Culture Wars Threaten Western Civilization

Published 10/12/23 09:00 AM ET

William Moloney

themessenger.com · October 12, 2023

When in 1787 Benjamin Franklin emerged from the final day of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a woman in the waiting crowd asked, “What do we have, doctor, a monarchy or a republic?” He famously replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” Implicit in Franklin’s admonitory response was the recognition that to create a novel polity perched precariously on the edge of a continent-size wilderness was one thing; to nurture and preserve it was a different — and daunting — kind of challenge altogether.

Yet from those tentative and fragile beginnings, our fledgling republic would grow to become in less than two centuries a globe-girdling military and economic colossus and the principal architect of a rules-based international order that provided a stable framework for an era that would witness unprecedented advances in the material well-being of peoples around the world.

However, today that global order faces a growing series of interlocking crises so grave in nature as to potentially threaten its existence.

Indicative of this danger is a recent column in the Wall Street Journal by Walter Russell Mead, entitled “The Rules-Based International Order is Quietly Disintegrating,” in which he states that “the core institutions and initiatives of the American-led world order and the governments that back them are growing progressively weaker and less relevant.” By way of illustration, Mead describes tottering pillars of world order, including an increasingly paralyzed United Nations, an irrelevant World Court, a largely toothless World Trade Organization, disappearing arms control efforts, an apparent stalemate in the Ukraine war, and rapidly spreading chaos in sub-Saharan Africa.

He concludes that the Western defenders of that order, “undermined by political decadence and institutional decay from within,” are facing an existential crisis unlike anything seen since the 1930s.

Further exploring the theme of internal decadence and decay is another Wall Street Journal article, “The New Moral Order is Already Crumbling,” by Gerard Baker. He describes a lethal three-pronged assault on the values, history and moral foundations of Western civilization, conducted over the past 30 years by left-leaning elements in some of society’s institutions: the media, academia and nongovernmental organizations.

The first prong of this broad-based attack, in Baker’s view, is the bold assertion of the “ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest,” best exemplified by the “demographic tsunami” that is currently inundating such places as the Italian islands of Lampedusa or the border towns of Texas, with attendant demands that receiving countries must prioritize the needs of new arrivals over those of their citizens.

The second element is a belief in “climate catastrophism,” in which the affluent countries of the West must repent of their “energy-consuming sinfulness” through “massive sacrifice of economic progress.”

Young climate activists from the Green New Deal Rising campaign group hold a demonstration on the first day of the annual Labour Party conference in Liverpool, northwest England, on Oct. 8, 2023.OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images

The final element requires the “wholesale cultural self-cancellation” of the values, virtues and achievements of traditional civilization and replaces them with a new cultural hierarchy that demands submission to “comprehensive social and economic reparations.”

While acknowledging the immense damage done to Western economies, self-confidence and social cohesion by three decades of left-wing iconoclasm, Baker suggests that efforts to impose a “new moral order” and re-engineer society to conform with the the Left’s ideological imperatives are failing because of internal contradictions, self-evident economic lunacy, and a growing revulsion and resistance on the part of many whose beliefs and material well-being are under assault.

Baker cites an example of this grassroots revolt in the recent national uproar over the British government’s commitment to phase out gasoline-powered vehicles and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, which caused Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to make a humiliating retreat from this unrealistic timetable. That, in turn, elicited criticism from climate activists worldwide.

Another example is the resistance by some in Australia to a forthcoming national referendum asking the Australian people to endorse a redesign of their constitution that would create a branch of government for the purpose of advising lawmakers on the needs of Indigenous peoples.

It is clear that the phenomenon of decline is not a purely American syndrome but, rather, one that is much wider. The oceans that Ben Franklin and his contemporaries believed would insulate the New World from the calamities of the Old World no longer suffice in that regard. What is unclear is whether the emerging awareness and resistance will be sufficient to reverse or even check the creeping cultural changes that may serve the ideological elites but materially and spiritually impoverish everyone else.

William Moloney is a senior fellow at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate at Harvard University.

themessenger.com · October 12, 2023

17, Could Israel shock waves hit Taiwan?

Excerpts:

The problem for China is that this sort of unprincipled geopolitical fence-sitting may soon become impossible. This would be particularly true if Israel’s response to the Gaza incursion morphs into a war with Iran.

In that case, anyone with pretensions to global leadership would be required to get off the fence and finally pick a side – either the existing world order or the insurgent authoritarian coalition. Were China to defy expectations and go with the former, then a serious brake on any future Chinese kinetic move against Taiwan would likely come into effect.

On the other hand, were it to further embrace its already close identification with the authoritarian camp, then the exact opposite would occur, with extremely negative consequences for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.

Could Israel shock waves hit Taiwan?

China may be tempted to turn up the military heat on Taiwan, hoping a pre-occupied US will not be in a position to respond

asiatimes.com · by Peter Enav and Mike Chinoy · October 14, 2023

TAIPEI – Israel’s response to the devastating incursion perpetrated by Palestinian gunmen from the Gaza Strip is still in its very early stages. It is not yet possible to predict its ultimate reach.

But it is possible to consider the short- and medium-term impact on the dangerous geopolitical dynamic in and around the Taiwan Strait, which, because of China’s continuing efforts to subjugate democratic Taiwan, remains one of the world’s most volatile flashpoints.

One likely consequence of the Hamas assault is that Taiwan’s long wait for already contracted American weapons systems to defend against a possible Chinese attack will be extended even further.

Present estimates put the value of already contracted but not yet delivered American weapons systems to Taiwan at about US$18 billion. The systems include Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Harpoon anti-ship missile launchers – critical components for helping a much-depleted Taiwanese military resist China.

But following US moves to provide more military support to Israel, Taiwan will now fall to number three (at least) on the American list of preferred weapons customers – behind Ukraine, with which it had already been competing for scarce weapons allotments, and Israel itself, whose support in the US Congress and throughout the American government is very deeply rooted.

The problem for Taiwan is that the American armaments industry has experienced an immense contraction in the several decades since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

A Taiwanese AIDC F-CK-1 Ching-Kuo fighter with its armaments on display. Photo: Twitter Screengrab

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The industry did not anticipate the emergence of a new Cold War – one pitting the United States and its Western allies against an authoritarian coalition consisting of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. That short-sightedness is now coming home to roost, and through no fault of its own, Taiwan – among others – has been left holding the bag.

Another possible consequence of the Gaza war is that China may now be tempted to turn up the military heat on Taiwan, hoping that a preoccupied US will not be in a position to respond effectively.

For the next several weeks at least, the eyes of America’s foreign policy bureaucracy will be set firmly on the Middle East – a fixation that will only intensify if Israel’s deterrence-obsessed leadership decides to go beyond Gaza and punish Iran for its possible role in both encouraging and financing the deadly Hamas assault.

Among other things, this fixation affords China an excellent opportunity to put further pressure on Taiwan through rapidly escalating “grey-zone” activities – violating the island’s self-declared Air Defense Identification Zone, for example, or dispatching naval assets towards its strategically vulnerable east coast.

There may also be some voices in China pushing for even more robust activities, up to and including an attack on one or more of Taiwan’s offshore islands or even a temporary quarantine of Taiwan itself.

But barring the outbreak of a full-scale Iran-Israel war, which would utterly transform the global geopolitical landscape, such a response is extremely unlikely, not least because of China’s roiling economic crisis and the continuing problems it faces with its own military leadership.

So while a full-scale Chinese attack on Taiwan is almost certainly off the table for now, an expansion in the already worrying level of China’s grey-zone activities in and around the Taiwan Strait is not, raising the chances of accidental conflict. Where that conflict could lead – particularly given the current high level of tension between China and the United States – is not a happy prospect to contemplate.

Another consequence of the Gaza war concerns China itself –the possibility that, whether it likes it or not, Beijing could now be forced to declare where it stands in the international order.

At least since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, China has played a delicate game, opting for the ill-defined middle ground between a full-scale embrace of unadulterated international authoritarianism on the one hand, and semi-fealty to the American-led international order on the other – the same international order that has allowed its economy to grow and its international influence to expand over the past three decades.

As one example, over the past year and a half, Beijing has carefully refrained from sending large-scale arms supplies to Russia (or at least getting caught at it), even while seemingly cheering on the Russian war effort.

China’s reaction to the Gaza incursion was therefore altogether predictable: calling on both sides to “exercise restraint” while at the same time giving a significant amount of media attention to Iran’s one-sided take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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China Foreign Minister Wang Yi brokered a surprise diplomatic breakthrough between rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia. Image: Twitter / Stimson Center / Screengrab

The problem for China is that this sort of unprincipled geopolitical fence-sitting may soon become impossible. This would be particularly true if Israel’s response to the Gaza incursion morphs into a war with Iran.

In that case, anyone with pretensions to global leadership would be required to get off the fence and finally pick a side – either the existing world order or the insurgent authoritarian coalition. Were China to defy expectations and go with the former, then a serious brake on any future Chinese kinetic move against Taiwan would likely come into effect.

On the other hand, were it to further embrace its already close identification with the authoritarian camp, then the exact opposite would occur, with extremely negative consequences for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.

Peter Enav is a former Associated Press correspondent who served both in Israel and as the AP Taipei bureau chief.

Mike Chinoy is a former CNN Senior Asia correspondent. They are the editors of the Taiwan Strait Risk Report, a monthly newsletter tracking the dangers of conflict over Taiwan.

asiatimes.com · by Peter Enav and Mike Chinoy · October 14, 2023

18. Philippines in historic US-backed military base expansion

Philippines in historic US-backed military base expansion

New ATMI report uses satellite imagery to show rapidly upgraded EDCA sites in a US-funded ‘defensive’ pushback on China

asiatimes.com · by Richard Javad Heydarian · October 14, 2023

MANILA – Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr is overseeing a historic expansion in military cooperation with the United States, putting the Southeast Asian nation on a collision course with China in the South China Sea.

A new report by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington DC shows in graphic detail how the Philippines is rapidly upgrading a whole host of military bases under its Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the US Pentagon.

Combining open-access information, public statements by senior Filipino officials and high-resolution satellite imagery, AMTI has tracked accelerated construction activities across as many as nine EDCA bases across the Philippine archipelago.

The report also shows that, despite the vehement opposition by former Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte (2016-22), who favored closer ties with Beijing and often lopped politicized broadsides against the traditional allies in the US and West, infrastructure upgrades in some military bases date as far back as 2016.

Crucially, EDCA bases close to the disputed South China Sea have seen the most dramatic upgrades, with the Basa Airbase on the island of Palawan, which is close to the hotly contested Scarborough Shoal, receiving more US funding for expansion than all other facilities.

The Antonio Bautista Air Base also “received significant upgrades to its runway and aircraft storage facilities since 2016,” according to the ATMI report.

In the nearby Balabac Island, also in the southwestern province of Palawan that juts into the South China Sea, major infrastructure projects clearing the way for a three-kilometer-long airbase predated the inclusion of the facilities in the area under an expanded EDCA announced in 2023.

Just as concerning to China are ongoing US-backed plans to upgrade several Philippine facilities, both military and civilian, close to Taiwan’s southern shores.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (R) and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr (L) stride to a meeting at the Pentagon on May 3, 2023. Photo: US Defense Department / Jack Sanders

The Philippines is also fortifying its position in the Spratly group of islands, with the country’s legislative leaders recently visiting the Thitu Island and vowing sizeable funding for necessary infrastructure upgrades.

The Marcos Jr administration has repeatedly emphasized the defensive calculus behind its expanded military cooperation with the US.

By all indications, though, the Philippines is proactively enhancing its deterrence against China’s expanding footprint in the South China Sea to the west, while also preparing for potential contingencies in neighboring Taiwan to the north.

Like father, like son

In historical terms, Marcos Jr’s proactive defense policy is consistent with his late father, who ruled the Philippines with an iron fist for almost two decades while deftly leveraging the country’s Cold War alliance with Washington while enhancing the Southeast Asian nation’s strategic autonomy.

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Throughout the 1970s, for instance, Marcos Sr expanded the Philippines’ strategic footprint in the disputed Spratly Islands. This culminated in the establishment of the first modern airstrip in the area on Thitu Island, the second-largest naturally-formed land feature in the South China Sea.

Troubled by the Philippines’ proactive expansion in the disputed areas, the Richard Nixon administration sought to distance itself from its ally’s maritime ambitions.

In particular, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger insisted that Washington’s Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) with Manila should not be reduced to a “carte blanche [for the Philippines] to deploy forces anywhere in the Pacific [including in the South China Sea] with the assurance that the other Party will be bound by the MDT in the event of attack on those forces.”

In a secret cable, Kissinger reiterated that “there are substantial doubts that Filipine [sic] military contingent on island in the Spratley group would come within protection of (MDT)” in the event of conflict with other claimant states, most notably Vietnam and China. Accordingly, the Nixon administration was “most reluctant to accept” an extension of the MDT to Philippine claims across the Spratly Islands.

Following the collapse of the Marcos dictatorship, successive Philippine governments failed to build on the country’s strategic gain in the South China Sea.

Beset by more than a dozen coups and persistent economic troubles, once state-of-the-art Philippine facilities deteriorated throughout the 1990s and 2000s. As former Philippine president Fidel Ramos told the author, “We lacked resources [for such activities]”, with the nation struggling to even meet its basic defense needs.

Shockingly, the Philippines, which boasted among the region’s best-equipped armed forces throughout the mid-20th century, failed to acquire even a single modern fighter jet until the mid-2010s.

A Philippine Marine after fast-roping out of an MV-22B Osprey tiltrotor aircraft at Basa Air Field, January 22, 2016. Photo: US Marine Corps via Twitter

Under the Benigno Aquino administration, Manila adopted a more assertive stance by modernizing its armed forces, filing an international arbitration case against China, and, crucially, negotiating the EDCA with the US.

In order to maintain “the moral high ground”, however, the Philippines decided to postpone the refurbishment of its facilities in the Spratly group of islands.

The succeeding Duterte administration sought to downgrade ties with Washington to appease Beijing. In particular, the pro-China Duterte dragged its feet on the full implementation of EDCA by denying the Pentagon’s requests to preposition weapons systems in designated facilities, especially those close to the South China Sea.

Catch-up time

The AMTI’s latest report, however, shows that even under Duterte’s presidency the Philippines’ US-friendly defense establishment began infrastructure upgrades in various EDCA facilities as early as 2016.

Nevertheless, Philippine-US security cooperation has dramatically accelerated under Marcos Jr, who decided to expand the list of bases under EDCA following a mostly fruitless trip to Beijing earlier this year.

On multiple occasions, the Philippines has emphasized the EDCA is a purely defensive strategic move. During his visit to Washington earlier this year, Marcos Jr, during an event at CSIS, insisted that EDCA bases “are not … intended to be military bases to attack, to move against anyone … not China, not any country.”

The Philippines has allowed the US expanded access to its military bases under the Marcos Jr administration. Image: CSIS, ATMI

The Filipino president also made it clear that EDCA facilities won’t be used for “offensive action”, and that he will ensure they won’t be used as “staging areas” for offensive action against any other country. If anything, Marcos Jr claimed that the Pentagon “never brought up the possibility that [EDCA sites] be used” against China.

Weeks earlier, Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo clarified that the US won’t be allowed to stockpile offensive weapons at EDCA bases in the northern Philippines for any potential operations against China, most especially over Taiwan.

“EDCA is not aimed at any third country outside its meant for use for the Philippines and of course in connection with our treaty with the United States,” the Philippine diplomatic chief said during a congressional hearing in April.

On multiple occasions, however, senior Filipino officials admitted the importance of EDCA to constrain China’s rising assertiveness in the South China Sea. Earlier this year, Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) spokesperson Colonel Medel Aguilar admitted that the designated facilities will also be “made available during emergency situations for combined use of the US and the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines).”

During his visit to Tokyo earlier this year, Marcos himself admitted that EDCA sites will be crucial to the fate of Taiwan, too. Recognizing how “tensions across the Taiwan Straits seem to be continuing to increase,” the Filipino president admitted that military facilities “will also prove to be useful for us should that terrible occurrence (China’s invasion of Taiwan) come about.”

Against this backdrop of strategic ambiguity, the AMTI’s latest report on the status of EDCA facilities is highly poignant. Originally, the EDCA facilities included Antonio Bautista Air Base (Palawan); Mactan-Benito Ebuen Air Base (Cebu); Lumbia Air Base (Cagayan de Oro); and Basa Air Base (Pampanga), and Fort Magsaysay (Nueva Ecija).

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Earlier this year, Marcos Jr greenlighted the addition of four more bases that are heavily oriented towards the South China Sea including the Balabac Island in Palawan, Taiwan Naval Base Camilo Osias (Santa Ana, Cagayan), Lal-lo Airport in Cagayan and Camp Melchor Dela Cruz in Gamu (Isabela).

Last November, Washington agreed to spend $66.5 million on the original five bases. This April, ahead of Marcos Jr’s visit to the US, Washington agreed to allocate a total of $100 million on the expanded list of EDCA bases.

That month, the Philippines clarified that as many as five projects were already finished by that time, while “significant progress” was made on eight of the remaining 16 projects in the five original sites.

According to the AMTI report, the Basa Air Base located close to the Spratly Islands has received more US funding for infrastructure projects. As of the first quarter of this year, up to $66.57 million had been allocated for the development of facilities for a whole range of purposes, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) but also for aircraft parking, fuel storage, runway upgrades and command and control infrastructure.

The Balabac Airstrip, May 29, 2023. Image: ATMI / CSIS / Maxar Technologies.

The nearby Balabac Air Base, the recipient of substantial investments by the Philippine government, has also seen significant improvements in recent years, including the development of a 3,000-meter runway for both military and civilian purposes.

Upgrades are also picking up in more northern-oriented bases. In May, the AFP announced that up to 14 projects will be constructed in the four new EDCA bases, with American financing.

In September, Manila announced that it was seeking American assistance to build a command center and fuel storage facility at Lal-lo Airport as well as a pier and a repairing airstrip at the Camilo Osias Naval Base. This month, the US is expected to press ahead with help building a civilian port on the remote northernmost islands of Batanes.

Crucially, the Philippines has independently stepped up fortification of its military facilities in Mavulis Island, located just over 100 nautical miles away from Taiwan’s southern shores, as well as in Thitu Island in the Spratly group of islands in the South China Sea.

Follow Richard Javad Heydarian on Twitter at @Richeydarian

asiatimes.com · by Richard Javad Heydarian · October 14, 2023

19. Recovery of American hostages to be led by Israelis, US to advise

Excerpts:

The official did not confirm whether those advisers are from Joint Special Operations Command, the wing of U.S. Special Operations Command that deploys specialized units like the Army’s Delta Force or the Navy’s SEAL Team 6.

Regardless, U.S. troops will not be involved in any direct action, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed during a press conference Thursday.

“The Israelis have made it very clear that they don’t want foreign troops on their soil, that they want to prosecute these operations on their own,” he said. “The Israelis have made it clear that they would not welcome [foreign involvement] in any event.”

Asked whether the U.S. might negotiate an exchange with Hamas for American hostages, Kirby said he would not comment on current efforts.

“What I will tell you, just broadly speaking, is we obviously take seriously our responsibility to get Americans held overseas back with their families,” he said. “We have, in the past, entered into negotiations to do exactly that.”

All options are still on the table, he added.

Recovery of American hostages to be led by Israelis, US to advise

militarytimes.com · by Meghann Myers · October 12, 2023

American military advisers are on the ground in Israel consulting with Israeli Defense Forces leaders about rescuing Americans and other hostages being held in Gaza, where Hamas militants took captured civilians following Saturday’s attacks on Israel, a senior defense official confirmed to reporters on Thursday. There is currently no plan to send in American special operations units to help, the official added.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday confirmed that Americans are among hostages taken by Hamas, though the White House has not given an estimate of the number of hostages beyond calling it “less than a handful.”

“There are personnel on the ground as part of a larger assistance package in support of [U.S. Central Command],” the Pentagon official, who was not authorized to speak on the record about the Israel situation, told reporters. “And that includes military personnel advising and consulting on hostage recovery efforts.”

The official did not confirm whether those advisers are from Joint Special Operations Command, the wing of U.S. Special Operations Command that deploys specialized units like the Army’s Delta Force or the Navy’s SEAL Team 6.

RELATED

Here’s a look at the military firepower the US is providing to Israel

The buildup reflects U.S. concern that the deadly fighting between Hamas and Israel could escalate into a more dangerous regional conflict.

By Tara Copp, AP

Regardless, U.S. troops will not be involved in any direct action, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed during a press conference Thursday.

“The Israelis have made it very clear that they don’t want foreign troops on their soil, that they want to prosecute these operations on their own,” he said. “The Israelis have made it clear that they would not welcome [foreign involvement] in any event.”

Asked whether the U.S. might negotiate an exchange with Hamas for American hostages, Kirby said he would not comment on current efforts.

“What I will tell you, just broadly speaking, is we obviously take seriously our responsibility to get Americans held overseas back with their families,” he said. “We have, in the past, entered into negotiations to do exactly that.”

All options are still on the table, he added.

“Obviously ... if their return to their families can be arrived in a peaceful way without additional risk to their lives [posed by a military operation], that is certainly something we would take very, very seriously,” Kirby said.

About Meghann Myers

Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.

20. Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system works well – here’s how Hamas got around it

Excerpts:

The Hamas attack will have repercussions for all of the world’s major military powers. It clearly illustrates the need for air defense systems that are much more effective in two important ways. First, there is the need for a much deeper arsenal of defensive weapons that can address very large numbers of missile threats. Second, the cost per defensive weapon needs to be reduced significantly.

This episode is likely to accelerate the development and deployment of directed energy air defense systems based on high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves. These devices are sometimes described as having an “infinite magazine,” because they have a relatively low cost per shot fired and can keep firing as long as they are supplied with electrical power.

Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system works well – here’s how Hamas got around it

theconversation.com · by Iain Boyd

Because of its unique national security challenges, Israel has a long history of developing highly effective, state-of-the-art defense technologies and capabilities. A prime example of Israeli military strength is the Iron Dome air defense system, which has been widely touted as the world’s best defense against missiles and rockets.

However, on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was caught off guard by a very large-scale missile attack by the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group Hamas. The group fired several thousand missiles at a number of targets across Israel, according to reports. While exact details are not available, it is clear that a significant number of the Hamas missiles penetrated the Israeli defenses, inflicting extensive damage and casualties.

I am an aerospace engineer who studies space and defense systems. There is a simple reason the Israeli defense strategy was not fully effective against the Hamas attack. To understand why, you first need to understand the basics of air defense systems.

Air defense: detect, decide, disable

An air defense system consists of three key components. First, there are radars to detect, identify and track incoming missiles. The range of these radars varies. Iron Dome’s radar is effective over distances of 2.5 to 43.5 miles (4 to 70 km), according to its manufacturer Raytheon. Once an object has been detected by the radar, it must be assessed to determine whether it is a threat. Information such as direction and speed are used to make this determination.

If an object is confirmed as a threat, Iron Dome operators continue to track the object by radar. Missile speeds vary considerably, but assuming a representative speed of 3,280 feet per second (1 km/s), the defense system has at most one minute to respond to an attack.

The fundamental elements of a missile defense system.

The second major element of an air defense system is the battle control center. This component determines the appropriate way to engage a confirmed threat. It uses the continually updating radar information to determine the optimal response in terms of from where to fire interceptor missiles and how many to launch against an incoming missile.

The third major component is the interceptor missile itself. For Iron Dome, it is a supersonic missile with heat-seeking sensors. These sensors provide in-flight updates to the interceptor, allowing it to steer toward and close in on the threat. The interceptor uses a proximity fuse activated by a small radar to explode close to the incoming missile so that it does not have to hit it directly to disable it.

Limits of missile defenses

Israel has at least 10 Iron Dome batteries in operation, each containing 60 to 80 interceptor missiles. Each of those missiles costs about US$60,000. In previous attacks involving smaller numbers of missiles and rockets, Iron Dome was 90% effective against a range of threats.

So, why was the system less effective against the recent Hamas attacks?

It is a simple question of numbers. Hamas fired several thousand missiles, and Israel had less than a thousand interceptors in the field ready to counter them. Even if Iron Dome was 100% effective against the incoming threats, the very large number of the Hamas missiles meant some were going to get through.

The Hamas attacks illustrate very clearly that even the best air defense systems can be overwhelmed if they are overmatched by the number of threats they have to counter.

How Iron Dome works.

The Israeli missile defense has been built up over many years, with high levels of financial investment. How could Hamas afford to overwhelm it? Again, it all comes down to numbers. The missiles fired by Hamas cost about $600 each, and so they are about 100 times less expensive than the Iron Dome interceptors. The total cost to Israel of firing all of its interceptors is around $48 million. If Hamas fired 5,000 missiles, the cost would be only $3 million.

Thus, in a carefully planned and executed strategy, Hamas accumulated over time a large number of relatively inexpensive missiles that it knew would overwhelm the Iron Dome defensive capabilities. Unfortunately for Israel, the Hamas attack represents a very clear example of military asymmetry: a low-cost, less-capable approach was able to defeat a more expensive, high-technology system.

Future air defense systems

The Hamas attack will have repercussions for all of the world’s major military powers. It clearly illustrates the need for air defense systems that are much more effective in two important ways. First, there is the need for a much deeper arsenal of defensive weapons that can address very large numbers of missile threats. Second, the cost per defensive weapon needs to be reduced significantly.

This episode is likely to accelerate the development and deployment of directed energy air defense systems based on high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves. These devices are sometimes described as having an “infinite magazine,” because they have a relatively low cost per shot fired and can keep firing as long as they are supplied with electrical power.

theconversation.com · by Iain Boyd

21. Top Marine outlines priorities for next four years

Top Marine outlines priorities for next four years

In his first interview since shedding the “acting” label, commandant cites people, modernization, and organic mobility as top areas of focus.

BY CAITLIN M. KENNEY

STAFF REPORTER, DEFENSE ONE

OCTOBER 12, 2023

defenseone.com · by Caitlin M. Kenney

As Gen. Eric Smith nears 100 days of leading the Marine Corps, he says his thoughts are focused on one thing: his people.

“The first thing I think about when I get up in the morning, or the last thing I think about before I hit the rack at night, is Marines. How do I make them more capable, more lethal? How do I make it easier for them to have some control over their careers?” Smith told Defense One in his first interview since being confirmed as Marine Corps commandant.

His efforts are complicated by the fact that he is still working two jobs, thanks to a GOP senator’s blanket hold on senior military promotions.

“[W]hen you have senior people doing two jobs, that by definition means you're not focused on either job solely, which is what the Marines deserve,” said Smith, the former assistant commandant who became acting commandant when Gen. David Berger retired on July 10. “I mean, one person cannot do both jobs as well as two people can do those two jobs.”

Smith shed the acting label with his Senate confirmation on Sept. 21, but continues to carry the workload of assistant commandant—plus the duties of a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—because Sen. Tommy Tuberville is blocking Lt. Gen. Christopher Mahoney’s nomination to be assistant commandant and there is “no lawful mechanism” for someone to step in as an acting ACMC.

And the leaders of the other military services are in a similar situation, which makes it hard to work on joint topics, he said.

“Their time is split across three jobs…my time is split across three jobs…So it does affect your ability to link up on key issues,” Smith said. “Because I may be focused on an assistant commandant task when Gen. [Randy] George is focused on chief of staff of the Army task. And so it's unhelpful.”

During Smith’s first 100 days, the Marine Corps has had some wins but has also experienced tragedy. The service met its 2023 recruiting goal, while the other services continue to struggle. But the Marine aviation community has seen two deadly crashes and the loss of an F-35B fighter jet. The incidents prompted Smith to direct a service-wide safety review and then a stand down; he expects the results of the former later this month.

“It's going to tell me, are we doing our maintenance in the best possible way to generate readiness? Because readiness is safety. Pilots who have flown more hours tend to be safer than pilots who have flown less hours,” Smith said. “So all that will come to me this month during October, and then I'll put something out more formally that says, ‘Here are the top 2, 3, 4, 5 things that we found. So, if your unit isn't focused on those, I want you to focus on those.’ And that'll also drive us toward putting a general officer in charge of safety by next summer.”

Also coming this fall: Smith’s much-anticipated planning guidance. The document, in which every commandant lays out their priorities to the force, was delayed because of the drawn-out confirmation process. Not surprisingly, Smith said it will primarily focus on Marines: how to recruit them, how to prepare them to fight, and how to keep them in the service.

“[T]he focus has to be, always, on Marines. That is what makes us unique. It's not a piece of equipment. It’s not artillery versus missiles,” he said. “It's about the individual Marine and the ethos of the Marine as a warfighter.”

The emphasis on people is not new: Smith spent a lot of his time as assistant commandant working on what the service calls “talent management.” He’s also the father of a Marine, and says that “taking care of Marines is job [number] one.”

Smith plans to focus on three priorities over his four years as commandant: the Marines; supporting Force Design 2030 modernization efforts; and “organic mobility,” or the service’s aircraft, vehicles, and vessels.

On Force Design, Smith has repeatedly said the service must “accelerate.” One of the modernization efforts that needs an extra push, he said, is “communication layers,” which are critical in the current information environment.

“We need the ability—and are working hard to obtain the ability—to ubiquitously pass data securely across the battlefield. That is a real challenge in a world where adversaries have the ability to deny, degrade, disrupt those communications, to jam and or to hack into our systems. That is a fundamental need across the battlefield,” he said. “The ability to deliver cyber effects and information effects against an adversary, those are absolutely critical to the package of capabilities that Marines are going to need on the future battlefield.”

One example of this type of technology, Smith said, is the government-focused Starshield satellite network provided by SpaceX, which also owns the Starlink network being used by Ukrainian troops.

Another major priority under the Force Design umbrella is long-range fires, Smith said. While the Corps has done some great work with the NMESIS program, which has robotically fired a Tomahawk missile from a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, Smith wants to get even more nimble.

“Now, we're always looking for smaller, longer-range missiles as opposed to bigger trucks, because we're the light expeditionary force,” he said. “So, we'll continue to prioritize long-range fires, we're just looking for the smallest possible missile, lightest weight, that gets us the range that we need.”

Smith acknowledged that his priorities will require more than four years of work, and will most likely be passed on to future commandants. But he wants Marines and their families to know he is trying to balance preparation for the next fight with quality-of-life investments needed at home.

“Our mission is seize or defend advanced naval bases," Smith said. "I believe we can do that and provide a high quality of life. But it's not either/or, it's a blending of the two. And there are going to be times when there's not enough time, funding, to do everything I want to do simultaneously.

“So we're going to attack each problem simultaneously, but that means it's going to be a 10-year problem to get out of the barracks issue. It's going to be years to fix every chow hall. It's going to be years to fix housing. It's going to be years to develop all the communications architecture I want, etc.

"And so, I think Marines do understand that. They just need to be communicated with honestly.””

defenseone.com · by Caitlin M. Kenney

22. EXCLUSIVE: Former Special Operators, Advocates Call On Congress To Block Cuts To Special Operations

EXCLUSIVE: Former Special Operators, Advocates Call On Congress To Block Cuts To Special Operations

MICAELA BURROW

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, DEFENSE

October 11, 2023

4:51 PM ET​ The Daily Caller

https://dailycaller.com/2023/10/11/special-operations-cuts-congress-dod/?utm_source=pocket_saves

• Former special operators and advocates say the Pentagon’s plan to slash thousands of Army special operations positions would cripple the U.S. military, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
• Special operations troops play unique roles that cannot be replaced by conventional forces and are as important as ever amid escalating global tensions.
• “This will gravely compromise our national security and send the wrong signals to both our foreign allies and adversaries,” the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) wrote in a letter to Congress.

An association of former special operators is asking Congress to block the Pentagon’s planned cuts to U.S. Army special operations forces, which could include Green Berets, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is poised to approve a reduction of approximately 3,000 positions from the Army’s special operations forces (USASOC), possibly including Green Berets, at the Army’s recommendation, according to service officials and media reports. The Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) opposes the cuts on the grounds that the U.S. military can ill afford to lose elite troops that historically have performed some of the most dangerous and demanding missions and filled an outsized role in deterring adversaries during a time when global crises are escalating.

“We are deeply concerned that the Pentagon is contemplating a 10% personnel reduction, equivalent to approximately 3,000 troops from the 36,000 in USASOC’s ranks. This will gravely compromise our national security and send the wrong signals to both our foreign allies and adversaries,” SOAA, which advocates for the special operations community, wrote in the letter sent to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on Wednesday. (RELATED: ‘Tipping Point’: US To Expand Troop Presence In Taiwan In Bid To Fend Off Chinese Invasion, Officials Say)

It’s unclear exactly where the cuts will take place, but media reports suggest that the cuts will occur among so-called “enablers,” the vast array of occupations that help “trigger-pullers” do their jobs. That includes intelligence operators, psychological warfare personnel and those who work in logistics, communications and civil affairs.

SOAA isn’t buying that explanation. Each occupational specialty is unique; operators in each group go through specialized training and are “the very core of USASOC’s success,” SOAA wrote.

The Army’s special operations units include Green Berets, Army Rangers and the Special Operations Aviation Unit (Night Stalkers), as well as psychological warfare and civil affairs units.

Special operations troops are known for conducting missions requiring exceptional skill and intelligence, including hostage rescue and targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders. But they also play a crucial role in telegraphing American power to adversaries, according to SOAA.

“USASOC has acted as a bulwark, preventing governmental collapses and full-scale enemy occupations. Their unique blend of linguistic, cultural, and diplomatic acumen empowers them to collaborate efficiently in ambiguous environments,” SOAA wrote.

During the Cold War, the U.S. relied on special operations troops to reinforce commitments to other countries and put a wall up against the spread of Communism, Defense News reported. They do the same today, working to increase the capacity of partner militaries.

One reason Ukraine’s military did not crumble after Russia’s invasion is because U.S. special operations and conventional forces trained and equipped Ukrainian forces after the 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea, David Cook, SOAA’s executive director and a former member of the 4th Psychological Operations Group, told the DCNF.

The “irregular warfare” capabilities provided by SOF allow the U.S. to achieve geopolitical goals short of going to war, he explained.

Now, elements of the Joint Special Operations Command, which may include Green Berets, are on standby if needed to rescue Americans held captive by terrorists. They’re currently advising the Israeli military and providing intelligence support as Hamas threatens up to 150 hostages.

#OTD 30-years-ago we remember the fierce Battle of Mogadishu. TF #Ranger had 18 killed and 84 wounded. Snipers MSG Gary Gordon and SFC Randy Shughart were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. #ARSOF were the consistent force multipliers in Somalia from 1992. #SF #CA #PSYOP pic.twitter.com/PnhSf7YIa6

— USSOCOM (@USSOCOM) October 3, 2023

Of the proposed reductions, roughly a third will come from billets that are already empty, a defense official familiar with the planning told the DCNF. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans in greater detail. No one will be forced to separate because of the cuts, the official said.

The cuts are part of a broader, long-term restructuring of the Army in response to changing national security requirements, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said earlier in October.

“There’s stuff that we built purpose built for [counterterrorism] and [counterinsurgency] that we don’t need as much anymore,” Wormuth told reporters during a media roundtable on Oct. 3. “There are new capabilities that we need to bring into the force, so that is the transformation of force structure that we have been working on.”

The Army’s total size has decreased partially due to years of short recruiting, Wormuth said. At the same time, the Army’s special operations forces have grown as a percentage of the total force during years of counterterrorism focus in the Middle East.

The looming prospect of great power competition calls for reemphasizing conventional forces, while new technologies can in cases perform the same functions as human operators, Wormuth said.

“Our SOF grew considerably over the last 20 years, given the kinds of wars we were fighting. Meanwhile, the overall Army has gotten smaller. So, I think there’s some room to make some very modest targeted reductions there,” Wormuth said, adding that the Army intended to communicate with Congress about the proposed changes and why the Army believes they are necessary.

While direction to cut positions came from the top, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which coordinates special operations forces from across the service branches, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict are responsible for determining what positions should go to maintain operational integrity and minimize risk, the defense official told the DCNF.

SOCOM reportedly pushed back against the proposed cuts, so the question reached the Office of the Secretary of Defense level, according to Defense One.

“Special operations forces are America’s premier force. In the face of recruiting challenges and growing threats, cuts to SOF aren’t the answer. The U.S. must be prepared to deter aggression by great power—that means we need a fully operational SOF,” Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst said on Oct. 5, responding to reports of imminent SOF cuts.

The Army did referred the DCNF to Wormuth’s comments from Oct. 3.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The Daily Caller

23. How Hamas Overran Southern Israel and Killed 1,300

How Hamas Overran Southern Israel and Killed 1,300

Hamas gunmen surged into Israel in a highly organized and meticulously planned operation that suggested a deep understanding of Israel’s weaknesses. Here is how the attacks unfolded.

By Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman

To reconstruct the day’s events, the reporters interviewed more than 20 survivors, soldiers, military and intelligence officials, and reviewed Hamas planning documents and footage of the attacks.

The New York Times · by Ronen Bergman · October 13, 2023

Israeli soldiers collect the bodies of civilians killed by Hamas militants on Saturday in the village of Kfar Aza. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Hamas gunmen surged into Israel in a highly organized and meticulously planned operation that suggested a deep understanding of Israel’s military secrets and weaknesses. Here is how the attacks unfolded.

Israeli soldiers collect the bodies of civilians killed by Hamas militants on Saturday in the village of Kfar Aza. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

By Patrick Kingsley and

To reconstruct the day’s events, the reporters interviewed more than 20 survivors, soldiers, military and intelligence officials, and reviewed footage and planning documents gathered by Hamas.

• Oct. 13, 2023Updated 4:47 p.m. ET

The 10 gunmen from Gaza knew exactly how to find the Israeli intelligence hub — and how to get inside.

After crossing into Israel, they headed east on five motorcycles, two gunmen on each vehicle, shooting at passing civilian cars as they pressed forward.

Ten miles later, they veered off the road into a stretch of woodland, dismounting outside an unmanned gate to a military base. They blew open the barrier with a small explosive charge, entered the base and paused to take a group selfie. Then they shot dead an unarmed Israeli soldier dressed in a T-shirt.

For a moment, the attackers appeared uncertain about where to go next. Then one of them pulled something from his pocket: a color-coded map of the complex.

Reoriented, they found an unlocked door to a fortified building. Once inside, they entered a room filled with computers — the military intelligence hub. Under a bed in the room, they found two soldiers taking shelter.

The gunmen shot both dead.

This sequence was captured on a camera mounted on the head of a gunman who was later killed. The New York Times reviewed the footage, then verified the events by interviewing Israeli officials and checking Israeli military video of the attack as well.

An image taken from a video filmed by a Hamas commander who was killed on Saturday. The gunmen are seen inside an Israeli intelligence hub.

The Hamas commander reviewing a map of the base that includes the intelligence hub.

They provide chilling details of how Hamas, the militia that controls the Gaza Strip, managed to surprise and outmaneuver the most powerful military in the Middle East last Saturday — storming across the border, overrunning more than 30 square miles, taking more than 150 hostages and killing more than 1,300 people in the deadliest day for Israel in its 75-year history.

With meticulous planning and extraordinary awareness of Israel’s secrets and weaknesses, Hamas and its allies overwhelmed the length of Israel’s front with Gaza shortly after dawn, shocking a nation that has long taken the superiority of its military as an article of faith.

Using drones, Hamas destroyed key surveillance and communications towers along the border with Gaza, imposing vast blind spots on the Israeli military. With explosives and tractors, Hamas blew open gaps in the border barricades, allowing 200 attackers to pour through in the first wave and another 1,800 later that day, officials say. On motorcycles and in pickup trucks, the assailants surged into Israel, overwhelming at least eight military bases and waging terrorist attacks against civilians in more than 15 villages and cities.

Palestinians break into the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border fence after gunmen infiltrated areas of southern Israel on Saturday.Credit...Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa/Reuters

Dead people strewn across a road in the Sderot area of Israel, following a mass incursion by Hamas gunmen. Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters

Hamas planning documents, videos of the assault and interviews with security officials show that the group had a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how the Israeli military operated, where it stationed specific units, and even the time it would take for reinforcements to arrive.

The Israeli military says that, once the war is over, it will investigate how Hamas managed to breach its defenses so easily.

But whether the armed forces were careless with their secrets or infiltrated by spies, the revelations have already unnerved officials and analysts who have questioned how the Israeli military — renowned for its intelligence gathering — could have inadvertently revealed so much information about its own operations.

Soldiers from an Israeli military counterterrorism unit battling Hamas in the intelligence hub.

The outcome was a staggering series of atrocities and massacres, in what the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has described as the worst mass killing of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

It shattered Israeli’s aura of invincibility and provoked an Israeli counterattack on Gaza that has killed more than 1,700 Palestinians in a week, the ferocity of which has never been seen in Gaza.

It also upended assumptions that Hamas, long designated a terrorist group by Israel and many Western nations, had gradually become more interested in running Gaza than in using it to launch major assaults on Israel.

Hamas made Israelis think it was “busy with governing Gaza,” said Ali Barakeh, a Hamas leader, in a television interview on Monday. “All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” he added.

‘Hamas In the Kibbutz!’

The terrorists were inside Addi Cherry’s home, on the other side of an unlocked door.

Ms. Cherry, her husband and their three children were hiding inside their eldest son’s bedroom, listening to the gunmen wander around their living room.

“Please help us,” Ms. Cherry texted a friend, as one of the assailants walked closer and closer to the bedroom door.

Then he gripped the door handle.

The Cherry family’s day had begun with a burst of rockets from Gaza, not long after 6 a.m.

Ms. Cherry, an economist, and her husband, Oren, an engineer, rushed with their children into their eldest son’s bedroom, which doubled as a bomb shelter.

Initially, the events of the morning felt distressingly familiar. The Cherry family lives in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a rural village of some 500 residents, a few hundred yards east of the border with Gaza. Early morning rocket fire — and the ensuing rush to the safe room — is a frequent feature of life in the region.

“Like always,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

But this morning soon felt different. The rockets kept coming, many of them headed deep into Israeli territory.

Interior of a house at the Be’eri kibbutz that was overrun by Hamas militants.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Evgenia Simanovich runs to the reinforced concrete shelter in her home in Ashkelon, Israel, moments after a rocket siren sounded.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

Then, from the fields around the village, came the sound of gunshots.

Mr. Cherry left the bedroom, and peeked through the shutters on their living room windows.

“Oh God,” Ms. Cherry remembered her husband shouting. “Hamas in the kibbutz! Hamas in the kibbutz!”

It was 7:20 a.m.

Hundreds of Hamas invaders, carrying guns, shoulder-borne rocket launchers and wearing the group’s green headband, were streaming through the village fields.

It was part of a coordinated assault that, documents and video show, assigned squads of assailants to precise targets. As some swept through military bases, others charged into residential areas, ruthlessly kidnapping and killing civilians.

They would reach the Cherrys’ street within minutes.

The family had to act quickly. Their bomb shelter — a teenager’s bedroom — had no lock.

The parents grabbed a chair, and wedged it under the door handle — making it harder to open.

They dragged a small cabinet, and pressed it against the chair.

Then they waited. There was an army base next to the village. Its troops would be here within minutes, Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

What she didn’t know was that many of them were already dead.

‘Take soldiers and civilians’

All along the border, the Hamas gunmen had already overrun most, if not all, of the Israeli border bases.

Footage from the attackers’ head-mounted cameras, including the video of the raid on the intelligence hub, showed Hamas gunmen — from its highly trained Nukhba brigade — smashing through the barricades of several bases in the first light of the morning.

After breaching, they were merciless, gunning down some soldiers in their beds and underwear. In several bases, they knew exactly where the communications servers were and destroyed them, according to a senior Israeli army officer.

With much of their communications and surveillance systems down, the Israelis often couldn’t see the commandos coming. They found it harder to call for help and mount a response. In many cases, they were unable to protect themselves, let alone the surrounding civilian villages.

Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian, center, from Kfar Aza kibbutz into the Gaza Strip.Credit...Hatem Ali/Associated Press

A blindfolded Palestinian prisoner speaks to a member of the Israeli security forces on the border with Gaza near the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.

A Hamas planning document — found by Israeli emergency responders in one village — showed that the attackers were organized into well-defined units with clear goals and battle plans.

One platoon had designated navigators, saboteurs and drivers — as well as mortar units in the rear to provide cover for the attackers, the document shows.

The group had a specific target — a kibbutz — and the attackers were tasked with storming the village from specific angles. They had estimates for how many Israeli troops were stationed in nearby posts, how many vehicles they had at their disposal, and how long it would take those Israeli relief forces to reach them.

The document is dated October 2022, suggesting that the attack had been planned for at least a year.

Elsewhere, other assailants were posted to key road junctions to ambush Israeli reinforcements, according to four senior officers and officials.

Some units had specific instructions to capture Israelis for use as bargaining chips in future prisoner exchanges with Israel.

“Take soldiers and civilians as prisoners and hostages to negotiate with,” the document said.

‘We Are Going to Die’

The terrorists smashed their way into the Cherrys’ house shortly before 10 a.m., according to texts that Ms. Cherry sent friends at the time.

They had already killed the kibbutz guards, as well as a civilian security volunteer who had rushed to confront them in the opening moments of the assault, according to the village leadership.

Now, the terrorists were going house by house, trying to find people to kill and kidnap.

“Please send help,” Ms. Cherry typed into her phone.

At the Cherrys’ house, they forced in the door. Then they charged in, shouting and ransacking the house, Ms. Cherry said.

The ransacked interior of the Cherry family home.Credit...via Cherry Family

The ransacked interior.Credit...via Cherry Family

“We are going to die,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

The family waited in terrified silence, hoping the intruders would ignore the door to the bedroom and assume everyone was away.

Mr. and Mrs. Cherry put all their weight against the cabinet, to brace the chair underneath the door handle.

Guy, 15, their eldest son, stood next to the door, holding an 18-pound dumbbell. If someone did break in, the plan was to drop it on the assailant’s head.

Then the handle twitched.

The parents began to push the cabinet.

The handle continued to rattle.

Then it stopped. The assailant walked away.

A few streets away, the family of Miki Levi, who oversees the kibbutz gardens, had an even closer call.

After a terrorist squad chased Mr. Levi, 47, inside his safe room, the attackers sprayed bullets at the reinforced door, Mr. Levi said in an interview.

Some of the bullets pierced the door, creating large openings, and Mr. Levi said he also fired back with his pistol, shredding it further. His wife and two young daughters sheltered to the side.

Changing tactics, the terrorists later brought two of his neighbors — a mother and her 12-year-old daughter, Mr. Levi said.

At gunpoint, the mother and child were told to persuade him to open up, Mr. Levi said.

“‘Come out and stop shooting,’” Mr. Levi recounted one of them saying. “‘The terrorists won’t do anything to you.’”

Eventually, the terrorists gave up that approach and returned with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, Mr. Levi said.

It was only when Mr. Levi shot one attacker in the thigh that they finally left, he added.

The mother and child, Mr. Levi suspects, are now captives in Gaza.

‘Bodies Were Burning’

Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus said he drove south without knowing where exactly he should go.

General Goldfus, 46, a paratrooper commander, had been on leave at home, jogging in his neighborhood north of Tel Aviv. Then he saw a video from the south, showing terrorists cruising through a city, entirely unimpeded.

Without waiting for orders, the general said he ran home, changed into his uniform and headed south.

He picked up guns and two soldiers from his base in central Israel, and called friends and colleagues to find out what was happening.

Only a few picked up. Of the rest, “There was nobody really understanding the full picture,” General Goldfus said in an interview.

The speed, precision and scale of Hamas’s attack had thrown the Israeli military into disarray, and for many hours afterward civilians were left to fend for themselves.

Using the few scraps of information he could glean, General Goldfus said he and the soldiers headed to a village north of Nahal Oz, and then gradually worked their way south.

It was around 10 a.m. All around him was carnage and atrocity.

Dead Israelis lined the roads, alongside the husks of burned-out, overturned cars.

At the site of an all-night outdoor rave, gunmen had killed an estimated 260 partygoers.

Damaged vehicles in the camp of the Israeli music festival that was overrun by Hamas terrorists.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

The bodies of Israelis killed by Hamas militants are gathered for identification at an IDF base in Ramla, Israel.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

“Bodies were burning,” General Goldfus remembered seeing at the site.

The attack by Hamas had unleashed a violent free-for-all. Some residents of Gaza had poured over the undefended border after it was breached, at times streaming what they were doing on their phones. Gazans were looting and ransacking homes, taking computers, clothes, crockery, televisions and phones, survivors said.

In some Israeli villages, residents had been burned alive in their homes, while terrorists stalked civilians at every turn, looking for people to capture and kill. Grandparents, toddlers and a nine-month-old baby were seized and taken back to Gaza, some of them squeezed between their kidnappers on motorcycles.

And during much of the mayhem, the Israeli army was almost nowhere to be seen.

Near Kibbutz Reim, General Goldfus said he ran into another senior commander by chance. Like him, the officer had rushed to the scene on instinct, without any instructions, and had assembled a small group of soldiers.

There and then, the two men came up with their own ad hoc strategy.

“There’s no orders here,” General Goldfus said. “I said: ‘You take from this place and further south — and I’ll take from this place and further north.’”

That was how some of the Israeli counterattack took place: soldiers or civilian volunteers — including retired generals in their 60s — rushing to the region and doing what they could.

Israel Ziv, a former general, reached a nearby battle in his Audi.

Yair Golan, a retired deputy chief of staff and former leftist lawmaker, said he took a gun and began rescuing survivors of a massacre at a rave, who were hiding in nearby bushes.

“We are brought up to run as fast as possible toward the fire,” said General Goldfus. “So that we can be the first one there.”

‘It’s O.K. We’re Jewish.’

The intelligence hub near Gaza was one of the first places to be recaptured by Israel.

In the late morning, soldiers and reservists from different units reached the base from separate directions, overpowering the 10 Gazan gunmen who had filmed their deadly assault on video.

The camera mounted on the Hamas commander’s head captured the moment he was shot and killed. The camera falls off, bouncing along the ground. By the time the video stops, the commander can be seen slumped on the ground, revealing his long beard and thinning hairline.

In other parts of southern Israel, the first formal reinforcements came from an Israeli commando unit that arrived in helicopters, according to the senior Israeli officer.

They were followed by other special operations units, including Israeli navy seals and a reconnaissance unit trained to operate deep inside enemy lines, rather than on Israeli soil.

Sometimes, the commandos joined forces with volunteers without body armor who had rushed into the fray to rescue family members.

Noam Tibon, a former general, drove south with his pistol to try to retake Kibbutz Nahal Oz, where his son, Amir, a journalist, was trapped.

In the early afternoon, the elder Mr. Tibon joined a squad with Mr. Ziv that was making its way through the kibbutz, house by house.

By Sunday afternoon, several villages and bases still had some kind of Hamas presence. The whole area would not be fully secured for days.

Ms. Cherry emerged around 5 p.m. on Saturday in Kibbutz Nahal Oz to find her home turned upside down, the microwave torn from the wall, drawers ripped from their cabinets and a pool of drying blood on the floor.

She had heard a gun battle in and around her home earlier in the day. She believed a terrorist had died in the house — and that his bloodied corpse had been carried off by fellow fighters.

Some survivors refused to open up, even after the army arrived.

When soldiers reached the home of Oshrit Sabag, another resident of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, she feared they were terrorists in disguise.

Even after the soldiers began chatting to one another in Hebrew, to prove who they were, Ms. Sabag, 48, was unconvinced.

It was only their Jewish prayers that made her relax.

“‘It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,’” Ms. Sabag remembered them saying. “‘We’re Jewish.’”

The funeral of Shani Kupervaser, who was killed at the music festival, in Haifa on Friday.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

The New York Times · by Ronen Bergman · October 13, 2023

24.  The Bolduc Brief: Evaluating the Leadership Failure of Generals and Admirals in Today's Military

The Bolduc Brief: Evaluating the Leadership Failure of Generals and Admirals in Today's Military

sofrep.com · by Donald Bolduc · October 8, 2023

5 days ago

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General Milley steps down as the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs after receiving repeated fire about the imposition of "woke" policies on the armed forces.

In modern military operations, the role of Generals and Admirals is critical in shaping the direction and outcomes of defense strategies. However, there has been an increasing concern over the failure of these top-ranking officers to fulfill their duties effectively. This essay examines the reasons behind this perceived failure and the implications for our military today.

I am a retired General Officer, and I know these mistakes. I have taken responsibility for these failures and my shortcomings. Accountability, commitment, trust, and the truth have been marginalized in the military. It is time to change and restore the values and principles needed to ensure our military can do its job for the American people.

One of the primary reasons for the failure of Generals and Admirals is the disconnection between strategy and implementation. The military’s senior leadership seems to be concerned with their continued advancement, stuck at the tactical level, focused on conventional warfare mindsets, concerned with pleasing their political masters, and failing to adjust to the changing dynamics of modern warfare. This mindset and approach have caused a lack of innovative strategies, a critical factor in today’s rapidly evolving battlefield.

Moreover, the prevailing culture of bureaucracy and political correctness often stifles candid discussions about critical issues. Generals and Admirals are constantly walking on eggshells to avoid political backlash, and they fail to address problems inherent within the system because they fear repercussions. This culture has led to the suppression of innovative ideas and the promotion of ‘yes men’ who are not critical thinkers. This failure to encourage open dialogue, contrarianism, and constructive criticism has, in turn, affected the military’s operational efficiency. An example is the decisions made and sustained in dealing with COVID-19 in the military devastated service members. These decisions have still not been corrected, and many service members and their families still suffer. Generals and Admirals have failed to prevent wokeness from undermining readiness in the military. Wokeness in the military is being imposed by elected and appointed leaders in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon who have little understanding of the purpose, character, traditions, and requirements of the institution they are trying to change.

The disconnect between the top-ranking officers and the ground troops is another concerning factor. Generals and Admirals are often accused of making decisions from the comfort of their offices without fully understanding the realities of the field. This lack of firsthand experience and understanding can lead to flawed strategies, potentially endangering the lives of servicemen and women. The failure of Generals and Colonels to listen to the ground commander in Niger resulted in an ambush that unnecessarily killed US Special Forces and Niger soldiers.

Recruiting and retention are two critical areas that determine the strength and readiness of a military force. The climate that Generals and Admirals have developed has negatively impacted both. When moms and dads feel political and military leadership cannot be trusted, they are less likely to promote the military as an option for their children. In addition, the retention rate is negatively impacted by poor senior military leadership that micromanages, fails to provide cover, and fails to trust their subordinates. A proposal to reduce Army Special Operations Forces due to failed recruitment is an example of the poor strategic critical thinking by senior leaders.

Furthermore, there is a perceived failure to maintain proper military ethics and standards. Several incidents have spotlighted the lack of accountability and moral integrity within the senior ranks (Afghanistan withdrawal, COVID policies, woke policies, poor readiness, Ukraine policy, Taiwan policy, and poor resource management). These incidents have eroded the trust and respect of those serving under them and the public, undermining the overall morale and effectiveness of the military.

To ensure the military’s effectiveness and efficiency in the face of evolving global threats, several areas require urgent attention and improvement.

Firstly, the military must foster a culture of innovation and adaptability. The nature of warfare is continuously changing, and the military needs to develop strategies that align with these changes. This requires a shift away from traditional warfare mindsets towards more flexible and innovative approaches that incorporate advancements in technology and take into consideration the changing geopolitical landscape.

Secondly, there needs to be an improvement in communication and connection between the senior leadership and the ground troops. The realities of the battlefield should inform decisions and strategies made by Generals and Admirals. This means that Generals and Admirals need to maintain open lines of communication with soldiers on the ground to understand their challenges, needs, and insights better.

Thirdly, ethical standards within the military need to be reinforced. A culture of accountability and integrity should be promoted at all levels, particularly among the top-ranking officers. Any lapses in ethical conduct should be addressed swiftly and transparently regardless of rank to restore trust and respect within the ranks and with the public.

Fourthly, the military should improve resource management. Resources should be allocated efficiently, ensuring necessary funds go towards essential areas such as personnel training, equipment maintenance, and soldier welfare. Checks and balances should be put in place to prevent wastage and corruption.

The military should work towards eliminating bureaucracy and promoting a culture of open dialogue. Constructive criticism should be encouraged, and the ‘yes men’ culture should be discouraged. This will foster critical thinking and problem-solving, which are crucial for the success of military operations.

In conclusion, the failure of Generals and Admirals in today’s military is a complex issue encompassing various facets, from a lack of innovative strategies to a failure to maintain ethical standards. To address these failures, a radical shift is needed in the military leadership culture, how senior leaders are selected, and accountability. This shift must encourage open dialogue, foster innovative thinking, establish stronger connections with ground troops, and enforce stringent accountability measures; leadership, especially among Generals and Admirals, has significant implications on the effectiveness and reputation of the military. These failures have threatened national security, demoralize the troops, and erode public trust in the military. Furthermore, they have led to a waste of resources, both human and financial, and potentially endanger the lives of servicemen and women. Therefore, it is imperative to address these issues promptly and effectively to ensure the military’s readiness and effectiveness in defending the nation.

Donald C. Bolduc

ABOUT DONALD BOLDUC

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General Don Bolduc (Army Ret.) started his career as a private in the United States Army. He did 10 tours in Afghanistan from 2001-2013. He now advocates for veterans and is an Associate Professor at New England College. He is a Laconia, NH native and resides in Stratham, NH.

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sofrep.com · by Donald Bolduc · October 8, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com