Ep 130: John Spencer on Israel’s Unprecedented War (or, Urban Warfare 101)
John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and host of the Urban Warfare Project
Aaron MacLean:
John Spencer, our guest today, is an Iraq veteran who literally wrote the book on urban warfare just as the war in Ukraine was kicking off and not long before fighting began in the Gaza Strip. On the show today, we'll hit both wars but spend most of our time on Israel and Gaza, where John has spent a good chunk of time since 10/7. This episode is pretty tactical and operational. How does fighting in tunnels actually work? What is Israel doing to mitigate civilian casualties? What historical precedents actually exist for Gaza? For any of you nerds obsessed with the 1945 Battle of Manila, this is your moment. Let's get into it.
Aaron MacLean:
For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter @AaronBMacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by John Spencer. He's the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute. He's the co-director of the Urban Warfare Project, host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast, many other qualifications and reasons why he's the best person to talk to about our subject today. He was also, he was, right? You're no longer on active duty. You did serve in the Army, you did multiple deployments to Iraq. You taught at the Ranger school. And today, you are a leading expert on urban warfare and on tunnels and have been outspoken on the question of the war in Gaza. John, thank you so much for joining the show.
John Spencer:
Well, thanks for having me, Aaron.
Aaron MacLean:
I gave the kind of thumbnail version there, but if you wouldn't mind, how did you grow up? How did you end up in the Army? How did you end up focused on the rather grim subject matter that you spend your time on? How'd this all come to pass?
John Spencer:
Yeah, that's a long conversation that I'll try to keep short for you. I joined the Army at 17 from private to sergeant first class, then transferred to be an officer, did the invasion of Iraq, taught at Ranger school, went back into Iraq for the surge basically and was part of the battle of Sadr City, for another year as a company commander. Transitioned out, I went into a program, a great program where you get a master's at Georgetown and spend two years in the Pentagon. And then right as I was leaving that assignment both on the joint staff and OSD staff, I competed to be in this thing called the Chief of Staff of the Army Strategic Studies Group, which is a think tank that the four star of the US Army created, doesn't exist anymore. And for a year, one, you're with this group of officers, enlisted and civilians, a small group of 20. We're trained to try to think about problems differently and then also look at something that the chief wasn't looking at.
And for that year we looked at megacities and whether the US military was prepared to operate in a city of over 10 million, so really large-scale combat operations in a very dense, large urban area. Basically the finding was we weren't ready. I looked at my small part of it, but that started my academic look into urban combat. I moved to West Point after that assignment, because you know the Army, we got to move. Went to West Point where I was teaching military strategy and also helped create the institute I work for now called the Modern War Institute, and I was starting to write about urban combat a lot for my research center and doing trips to look at research for urban combat and underground warfare, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
I retired in 2018. I stayed and took the position I currently have, the chair of urban warfare studies, where for over a decade now I've been focused on this. But really when I left active duty, I was able to travel the world going into urban combat areas that had just ended or now the ones that are ongoing. So I went to Nagorno-Karabakh, went to India to study the 2008 Mumbai attacks. I've gone into Ukraine four times for the Battle of Kyiv and the urban battles there. And now Gaza. But I had been going to Israel for years studying their approach to urban and underground warfare.
Aaron MacLean:
This may accidentally catapult us forward in the conversation, get us to Gaza faster than I was planning on, but to what extent do your experiences as someone who participated in OIF1 and then later in the surge as a young officer, as a company grade officer, affect your thinking and your work today? Has so much changed that it's not super relevant? Is it kind of relevant? Help me understand that.
John Spencer:
No, I mean, I try strongly not to rely on my experiences. Although I served 25 years in the US Army, I try to rely on my research. And one of the biggest projects I have going is this case studies project I have with my friend Jason Jeru and Liam Collins, where we go back and look at battles to include the ones that I partook in and analyze what was happening. But yes, when I was on the ground in Gaza with the 98th Division in Khan Younis, of course I relate to a lot of those three-dimensional challenges of urban combat with the skyscrapers or the tall buildings around you. But I also can look at my own experiences in combat in hell basically and how hard that was for me as a young officer, even though I had enlisted experience, but still leading soldiers in urban combat in both as a platoon leader and a company commander and the cognitive load that causes, and I've written about that.
Of course I can relate to that when I go into places like Gaza or Kyiv in Ukraine. But I also can appreciate that this is a lot different than what I faced from the challenges and the context and the goals. So yes, it's there, but I really try to... sometimes it helps me with the question, because a lot of time it's not about... And when you're doing research like I do, are you asking the right questions for my research? So yes, my experience has helped me ask, but not the first order question, but that second or third order, or recognize something that's vastly different than something that I did. And with the tunnels in Gaza, that was when I'm on the ground, I never experienced that. I know from my research, nobody has experienced that in modern history or in general. So it both helps, but I also really cognitively try to make sure it doesn't override the actual research that I'm doing.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah. These things are so unique. My only significant experience personally is Marjah in 2010, and I was instructed, as my whole class of officers, we were all taught in Quantico by veterans of Fallujah and Ramadi. And I still idolize these guys. These guys were and are heroes, and they taught us how to win the Battle of Fallujah and they taught us how to win the Battle of Ramadi, or battles, I should say, more accurately.
And you get to a place like Marjah, and honestly, looking at the imagery, a lot of it does look pretty urban. And then you get there and you realize actually these bad guys, they actually don't want to fight up close very much. They like standoff. And by the way, there's a lot of big open fields here. And within a few hours you realize this is actually a lot more like what I presume it was like for guys in Vietnam in terms of the challenges and the tactics and remembering what does echelon right look like? This is stuff like that you figure out as you go because it was totally different. It was a totally different war at every level, but to include the tactical and operational level.
John Spencer:
Yeah. I know you could appreciate that and I get those moments as well. Every urban area is different, but every battle is different, too. Why is it that the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004 is the largest battle of the entire Iraq war? Larger than the battle of Baghdad, as in the scale, the amount of fighting, the death and destruction. Because this is what I've been able to appreciate in all these different case studies, is to acknowledge, to see why the battle's happening the way it is. What are the major differences. A prepared defender versus a median engagement, all these make those differences that I think sometimes escape other people.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah. So let's take it back to... I don't want to talk as though your only focus is Gaza, because it's not. As you yourself say, you spent a lot of time in Ukraine, so your work covers the gamut here. Maybe I'll take us back then to before the fighting around Kyiv in early 2022. So before Putin goes in for at least several years, presumably your research has been more in the realm of history, even recent history. I guess you have mouse, so not that far back in the rearview mirror. What was the state of thinking on urban warfare and the nature of urban warfare, given technological developments and evolution or change in operational art for our various adversaries out there? And then how has real life played out in Ukraine and Gaza compared to how you thought things were going to go? Does that make sense? What have you had to change in your view and understanding of things based on the nature of urban warfare in the last couple of years?
John Spencer:
Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if I've had to change anything, because a lot of times I'm just recognizing where history is rhyming that doesn't repeat itself. But also acknowledging and being able to see modern history's comparison to even World War II, World War I history. I mean, the evolution of current thinking on urban combat, and I served 25 years, I didn't know the root of that evolution, so I didn't know where close quarters battle, the battle drills for urban warfare that you and I both practiced, where the root of that came from and it didn't come from World War II, large-scale urban battles like Okin and Berlin and all these major urban battles or Tona. Now I have that appreciation. So when I saw the battle, and yes, we'd actually, my institute, because we do a lot of contemporary battlefield assessments, had sent research teams to Georgia to study the Russian incursion into Georgia and Bosnia, everything, trying to understand those differences.
But as somebody who got to teach strategy, it's also the role of the city that comes into the actual war. So what are the objectives of the war? And the for instance is why... Interesting story about Ukraine, how I injected myself into the war, which was, I think, unique, but also being able to see, as we all did when we were doing podcasts with Russian experts on the Russian military arrayed around Ukraine, they're getting ready to invade. Okay, fine, they invaded. Now what are their goals? They have seven different cities that they're attacking. Only one of them matter to achieve the goal. And my urban warfare lane that I like to stay in, sometimes it gets like, "Okay, what's the goal of this war?" And luckily, I can rely on teaching strategy and understanding what I didn't even understand as a soldier, what is the larger goal? Why are we doing this battle? Why are we having this street fight? What is the larger goal?
When Russia invaded Ukraine, I was able to see Russia's stating in their opening message that they're overtaking the nation of Ukraine, and they want to overthrow the government. Then in order to do that, they were going to attack Kyiv, get inside the city, raise the Russian flag, overthrow the government, and put in their puppet. So I got to see the similarities of that war unfolding to the past history of invasions of other countries from Chechnya to Iraq to Afghanistan, and then how would the urban areas play or not play a role, right? Because Kyiv has been a battleground for many wars from World War II and before. The world has changed. And again, that megacity study was about how much the world has urbanized. The thinking of urban combat outside of our tactical world of how do you enter and clear a room, how do you clear a block, all this stuff, which, again, has roots of thinking to it.
The real military thinking that was in our manuals for a long time was avoid and bypass it all. And the theory of victory in the military is usually to defeat the other military. It's an enemy-focused military, right? Maneuver warfare. But in some aspects the terrain is also the goal. So the capital city, the economic engines of the nations that where you achieve your maneuver warfare goal, which is that cognitive win, through speed, overwhelming force to achieve the goal. I saw Russia doing that. Now, it didn't bring what it needed to the table, but this is where I immediately focused in on the capital city of Kyiv and why I've gone so many times back to Kyiv to understand how Russia was defeated in taking the nation of Ukraine when it couldn't take Kyiv through urban combat. So in order to... I have my own podcast, like 80 episodes looking at all the different attributes of urban warfare is changing, challenges, and the role of cities in urban combat in war, which really is what we see now.
We have a long history of fighting for cities. Militaries have a long history of fighting for cities. That's the goal, but not a long history of fighting in cities. Again, even our own recent history, the fall of the regime, the Taliban in 2001, the Saddam regime in 2003, there are urban-centric goals. The capital cities, once you drove a tank regimen into the center of Baghdad and there's this cognitive win, those evolutions are there. But I really think what's the biggest difference is the role of militaries fighting in cities rather than for cities. You're not going to fight that open army-versus-army fight that we imagine, right? Militaries, this is what I learned really working for the chief of staff of the Army, is that militaries are designed for a very specific battle or war in a very specific environment. For the US military, there's actually only seven or eight scenarios in which you design the entire military against.
Yeah, we're going to fight a bunch of other wars and battles, urban fights and everything, but it's designed for something. Arguably, and what we were saying back then and what I still say today, we're not designed for that major urban fight in a city. Because we're going to use such overwhelming joint power that we're going to achieve our victory quickly, not have these fights that we seem to keep having, which are these slug fests, block by block, things that even General Krulak was talking about back in the '90s, right? The three block war where you need the strategic corporal, all these things that he was echoing after things like Mogadishu and other battles.
Aaron MacLean:
Just to go back to my personal experience, which is, as you point out, not a sound basis, widespread or more widely founded research is what you should really base your views on, but all I have is my personal experience. And going through the training pipeline in 2007, 2008 being taught by these guys who were all Iraq veterans. What they were all at pains to emphasize for us when it came to urban warfare was how violent and brutal it was even compared to other kinds of terrain that we would fight on. And that, by the way, it was purely a question of terrain. This was an important part of the doctrine that we were taught. It's just like anything else fundamentally, you just have to account for the different, and frankly, more dangerous terrain. And I have a vivid and fond memory of an instructor of mine, Captain Wagner, who's I believe Colonel Wagner today who I was an admirer of.
And he had this whole speech he did where you guys think you're picturing in your mind, it's like the first day of mount. You guys are picturing... Zero Dark Thirty hadn't come out at that point. We hadn't killed Bin Laden at that point, but you're picturing movies like that. You're picturing the raid in Black Hawk Down. You guys are going to be going through the hallways in hockey helmets, and I'm here to tell you right now, this is not what you're doing. You're going to take a bulldozer and you're going to knock the building down if you can't drop a bomb on it. The upshot of the speech being this is highly destructive and you're going to push through and flatten stuff and seize objectives and kill the enemy. It just so happens you're doing it in the city. Is that 15 years on the going doctrine? How have things changed?
John Spencer:
That's a really good question. I teach in the world's only urban warfare course designed for division and brigade planners. It's the 40th Infantry Division Urban Planners course, and you get active duty, reserve, guard, foreign militaries there who have a mental model of what the battle will be, the fight will be. I agree with you, and I've written about this, the curse of our past, not that I believe in that terminology you know it by your last war, but if you understand militaries and militaries' culture, doctrine actually means the way we do things. So there is a cultural thing that people bring into the military, even from watching movies and everything. They think they're going to be doing what they saw in the movies. And what the lesson that usually gets relearned in certain types of urban battles, not all of them, is that the thinking that you had going into it, that's not what you will be required to do.
This is you're not stacking on... And it happened even in the Second Battle of Fallujah where they started off with Marines and armed personnel stacking on doors, and that quickly went away as soldiers and Marines lost their lives to... That's a tactic when you have overwhelming surprise, violence of action. If you lose the element of surprise and they know that you're going to do that, this is why the Israeli military never goes through windows and doors. Starting back from like 2002, they go through buildings, which I have a really important picture that I use all the time, which is this Marine in the Second Battle of Fallujah with a sledgehammer inside of a house, building a hole to go through the walls because standing on the streets in the alleyways is too dangerous.
Or if you go in through a door, that's where the enemy knows you're coming, so it'll be either booby trapped or that will be the fatal funnel that you might get a couple guys through. But there is a cultural element. A lot of people say I talk a lot about tactics too much. I'm like, "No, I can talk the strategy as well," but we have a cultural mindset of the urban battle that we think we'll face. And I agree with you, is that the actual thinking to this highly contested... So when there's a defender in place like the Second Battle of Fallujah, why is the Battle Baghdad worlds of difference from the battle of... A city of five, six million compared to Fallujah, a city of 300,000, why is it orders of magnitude different? Well, because the defender was prepared. It was waiting for you. You didn't have overwhelming surprise, maneuver, cognitive maneuver warfare.
When it comes to those positional fights, militaries need to have the ability to break their culture of that and prepare for that fight, like in the Second Battle of Fallujah where we're dropping an artillery round on every vehicle along the street just because it might've been a vehicle-borne ID. Or instead of going into a building, if you know there's a guy there, drop a bomb on it, a mortar round, or bring up a tank or a Bradley to deal with the enemy you know that's in that building. Having people make that shift's really hard, because I've been to Range 29 or Fort Irwin to our urban centers. It's really hard to train that level of destruction and violence of action. It's a lot easier to do the laser tag, enter and clear a room thing. It's a lot easier. And that's an important skill for a very specific mission set. I think the gap is what you're pointing out, and you have veterans from a few battles to say that's going to get you killed, what you think you're going to be doing.
And you're building that flexibility for our servicemen to be able to know the requirements. And that's really the passion I have. Like you said, my experiences was somewhat unprepared, despite all the levels of training, and not having access to all this, "Well, how did the other people do it in the past?" Like you said, the number one thing you need in an urban battle, what we've learned in the biggest urban battle since World War II, the Battle of Mosul 2016, '17, and, oh, by the way, the Battle of Marawi in 2017, and now in Gaza, is that you better lead with something like a bulldozer because they're prepared. They're waiting for you. You're not going to surprise them in that target building. They're coming for you, so you have to put something in front of the soldiers, not lead with your face, as a mentor of mine says.
Aaron MacLean:
You wrote in February that the war Israel was fighting slash the conditions it was facing in Gaza were unprecedented.
John Spencer:
Yeah.
Aaron MacLean:
What did you mean by that?
John Spencer:
So both it's unprecedented in the scale of the urban defender, so a force... If you think of the Second Battle of Fallujah, 3,000 insurgents, that's the max. You think the 2016, '17 Battle of Mosul, maybe 5,000 insurgents, and they used a hundred thousand soldiers there. Unprecedented in the scale of the combatant embedded in the dense urban areas using human shields, which is not new, but using human shields, but who had 15 years to prepare for the battle or the war, right? Because a battle, everybody tries to compare Gaza to a single battle. Well, this is a war. There's 24 cities in Gaza. There's 10 major cities that would warrant comparison to like Mosul, Fallujah, Raqqa. But this is a defender who's prepared for 15 years, actually longer. So the scale of the enemy, the amount of time that they prepared the defense and the way that they prepared it through the use of subterranean.
So there's nobody else, not Vietnam, not in any of the battles that the US forces have taken part in the last 40 years, 50 years, you maybe count the Korean War, where the enemy has built a vast subterranean network for military purposes only. It's not dual purpose like in Ukraine where you have subway tunnels and everything that get used to shield civilians and military equipment and things. But this is a single military purpose-built underground cities. And what they thought was in Gaza, they actually were wrong, because they thought it was around 300 miles of tunnels, and it's 400 miles of tunnels ranging from just below a building to 200 feet underground where no military bomb can reach. All those things, the scale of the enemy, the preparation of the enemy, the underground network, and lastly, lots of militaries have faced non-state actors, terrorists, insurgents who use human shields, use the law of war, which has evolved and why militaries don't like fighting in cities.
And most of us line grunts didn't understand that, yes, we know you can't... If you're taking fire from a mosque, you can always fire back. That's a small, since Fallujah, what's actually called the City of Mosques because of how many mosques it has, it's a small vignette of this thing called law affair where an enemy uses the laws of war against a military who follows the law of war, like the United States and most Western militaries, and they build their defensive strategy using all the protected sites and populations. But what Israel faced was, for the first time that I can find in history, an enemy with all those preparations and all those capabilities and with the rockets and everything, who uses a human sacrifice strategy. Where even ISIS, that wasn't their thing. ISIS didn't say, "I need all of the Sunni people to die so I can achieve my martyrdom and achieve the will of Allah that I think is the goal."
This is the first combatant or military has faced in dense urban areas who uses a human sacrifice strategy where they literally want as many of their population, the enemy population to die as possible. Not just to use them as shields to keep the military from using force against them, but to cause as many of them to die as possible to achieve their goal, which is to cause another military, right? The US military, yes, debatable on the invasion of Iraq and the coalition and all this stuff, but there's nobody going to say, "Hey, US military, you need to stop right now."
Israel fights wars in a different context where in Israel's past, it has usually been the United Nations, the US says that, "Look, I know you're attacked. I know you can defend yourself, but your military needs to stop immediately right where it's at. Just stop." So Hamas built this entire operating environment where I used to say, before I visited Gaza, that they built all their tunnels underneath all the civilian homes, hospitals, schools. And what I found out was, no, in many cases they built the tunnel and then put the school on top of it.
Aaron MacLean:
How many times have you made it to Israel and Gaza since the seventh, and what have you learned on the ground? How has that informed your perspective on the war?
John Spencer:
One, I had been going to Israel for years because, uniquely, they're the most prepared for contested dense urban combat and underground warfare of any military in the world just because of requirements. Like I said, our military is an expeditionary global force that prepares for certain scenarios, most likely, most dangerous. I had been going to Israel for years doing tunnel conferences, studying their bulldozers, everything. Since October 7th, I've been twice, so once in December 2023, and then I back in February 2024. Both times I got into Gaza, both times embedded with the IDF. My last visit in February, I embedded with the division and went Khan Younis. The problem is I learned so much that I have a backlog of things I want to write about, so we can discuss which ones I think are-
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah, pick your top two.
John Spencer:
The top one, number one is, which I know is counter to the uninformed majority opinion, is the number one thing I learned was all the things that the IDF and Israel were doing to protect civilians from harm. And again, the only way I could be surprised by that was after having studied all these different cases. So I have, if you go to our website in the Modern War Institute, you can see the case study on Mosul 2017, on Fallujah 1, Fallujah 2, or Tona, Stalingrad. I can say with very strong condition that not only was I observing externally Israel doing everything that everybody else had ever done to protect civilians, like evacuating cities before attacking them, which actually doesn't mean that... There are drawbacks to that as much as, of course, huge benefits to protecting civilians to get them out of the combat areas. I was observing all that externally, I'm like, "Look, wow, Israel's doing everything that anybody's ever done to include us in the Second Battle of Fallujah and everything."
But when I got on the ground, I learned that they were doing things that nobody had ever even imagined on protecting civilians, like handing out their maps to the civilians. The things that I teach people in this division level course I teach once a year, how to develop these control measures, like the GRG maps and everything that you and I would be familiar with. Israel started issuing those out to the civilians and to the enemy, and then they developed a technology where they could track a population just like on a three-block area. So their forces know at all times if an area is heavily populated still, even though it's been evacuated, through the use of signals intelligence on cell phones on or off, through aerial photos and everything. And they use those civilian harm mitigations, the terminology now, to guide operations.
So when I was on the ground with the IDF, I was kind of taken aback by not only were they doing all the same things that we do, restricted fire lines, no-fire areas, protected buildings, all the evacuations, although they used things that we'd never tried, like drones with speakers on them they'll fly into the areas and tell the civilians to evacuate, all the phone calls and hundreds of soldiers on phone banks calling into the environment. Nobody's ever done that. Dropping giant parachutes with speakers on them into the enemy areas telling the civilians evacuate. But they were using this awareness of where the civilians were to guide operations.
So not only is there areas, when I saw the unit in February, like this map that they had handed out and this GRG and this civilian harm mitigation cell really at the army level that could direct operations like, "Well, you can't go into that area because it has this percentage of civilians, so it needs to be evacuated. So even if you take fire from that area, you can't go there." Some of those restrictions on the use of force, that's the number one thing that I saw in Gaza, that even as a student of this for over a decade, they are doing more, despite the world opinion, to protect civilians than any military has in the history of war. The other one, number two, so if I only get two.
Aaron MacLean:
Please, please, please.
John Spencer:
Yeah. Number two is the evolution of tunnel warfare. I've been studying... I've been in Hezbollah tunnels in the north, Hamas tunnels in the south. I've been in North Korean tunnels, tunnels in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh. Because of the fact that the IDF were the only military to have a brigade of special forces engineers who have dedicated their trained man and equipping to only underground warfare, they were uniquely prepared for underground warfare, and I knew that. But nobody knew the true scale and complexity of Hamas' tunnels. I knew, back to our culture, that Israel also had a culture of not entering the tunnels. Despite having this whole brigade of forces trained for underground warfare, they still within themselves had a culture of don't go in no tunnels. They have a history of soldiers being kidnapped and drug into tunnels.
They have a history of soldiers getting killed even around the tunnel entrance. It had a very cultural... I've seen, since my first visit to my second visit, a complete paradigm shift within the Israeli Defense Forces on how to deal with tunnels to where what I saw in February was the first thing... Again, looking at the history of this, I've never seen a military purposely go into tunnels to use them as a maneuver corridor for themselves while operating forces on the surface. So they went from a culture of not entering tunnels, although they had special operations forces that could deal with the tunnel once found. They found thousands of tunnel shafts in Northern Gaza, or over a thousand I'll say, to where they have done a complete paradigm shift because of necessity is the mother of all innovation, they're the first military I've ever seen maneuver forces on the surface and underground at the same time to achieve their goal of achieving a win over the enemy. That evolution, that mental cultural shift I think is massive. That's something that I learned in my last visit.
Aaron MacLean:
I want to go deeper on both of your points here, starting with the management of civilians, the avoidance of civilian casualties. I'm perplexed because, as you alluded to, I could turn on the TV right now and pick out the median news program. Well, in the median news program, I would probably hear commentary to the effect of Israel is being reckless and kind of murderous as a matter of national policy. They're not genocidal exactly, but they're behaving in ways that just demonstrate wanton disregard for civilian life. And then if I turn on MSNBC or Al Jazeera, I probably can just encounter the claim that this is genocide, the more extreme version of the same argument. And yet here you are, having been on the ground, saying that's not what you've seen. You've also been out there in the press making this case. What are the craziest arguments or scenarios you've encountered as you've done that? Have you had any success in explaining when asked who to believe, you're an interlocutor on one of these panels, or your own lying eyes? Do you have success in conveying what you're seeing?
John Spencer:
That's a good question. So have I had success convincing people? Absolutely. Have I provided people with facts to argue against disinformation? I believe so. I have to believe so. Also, it's my job to do research, so I'm not necessarily trying to convince people of things. I'm trying to do research and present the facts. Also highlight where there's anomalies in even mainstream media reporting on something, like the casualty figures. That's been from day one, I was like, I've never seen a battle or a war in all the ones I've ever studied, where you could have a daily running civilian death toll. I've never seen one, especially where you take the word of a terrorist organization. All this is new. You probably know the history of the First Battle of Fallujah versus the Second Battle of Fallujah. The First Battle of Fallujah, so four American civilians are killed, dismembered, burned, hung from a bridge.
The US president, over the Marine's objective, orders them to move in to get those accountable for it. And because of Al Jazeera mainly, at the hospital in Fallujah and showing photos of children harmed in the fighting, and, which most people don't remember, giving false accounts of the number of civilian casualties that were being incurred, the Marines were stopped six days into the battle, basically were defeated by definition of they were prevented from achieving their goals. I've never seen a war, so again, not battle, war where the world immediately takes a daily running count of civilian deaths when it's just impossible to have it. There's never been an urban battle, even when the US military has been involved, where anybody could have a daily count and take the word of a terrorist organization. So this isn't even a media organization on the ground saying this. It's literally according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which is Hamas, right?
It's just like saying any other country's medical system, you're not in that position unless you're either a member of Hamas or you're not going to say anything without the risk of death unless it's approved by Hamas. That was the starting point of the world is upside down. How are we taking this word? I can tell you as an expert in urban combat that there's no way to have a number, that after massive battles, it was months, if not years later, that they come up with a number of how many civilians were dead. And for some reason, because of there aren't the reasons for this, but that the world takes any number and goes, "That's all innocent civilian death." Like, "Well, many bad guys. How many combatants?" In our terminology. "Well, no, we don't separate between the two." But you're saying it's civilian deaths, which is, again, mind-blowing.
I had to write an article. I've had to, this is the reason why I haven't been able to write about the research of Gaza, I've had to say the crazy obvious, which has reached national level around the world. People parroting the number of civilian deaths in Gaza without actually even, like, "Do you know the difference between civilian and combatant or somebody who's partaken into hostilities?" Like you said, or I recently discussed, like the hostage rescue operation that Israel did, which is crazy level of historic ability to do it into enemy territory, but they came out with an immediate number of civilians died. There were civilians holding the hostages in their house captive. They're partaking in the hostilities. They're not civilians. There are differences. But I had to say that in an article, and why I've been so busy, to say the obvious of there hasn't been that many civilian deaths.
And you don't want to be gruesome, but then everybody started with this is the most destructive war in the modern world, this is the most amount of civilian deaths ever. In comparison to what? And again, because I've done all this research, I was able to say, "What are you using in comparison? Are you using a single battle?" Which most people were, like Battle of Mosul, where there's maybe 5,000 ISIS insurgents in there and 10,000 civilians are killed, even though the number was as great as 40,000 a year later. So all these nuances, have I had success on convincing people? To me, it doesn't matter. I'm going to continue to report on the truth of it. And one of the reasons I do that is because this has been an evolution. If you take the First Battle of Fallujah, there are others, First Battle of Fallujah reporting, which caused political because of the context of the moment. Because it wasn't that they were saying, "US, if you don't stop this First Battle of Fallujah, we're going to sanction you."
It was the interim government of Iraq, and the coalition was saying, "If you don't stop, we're all walking away." That was because of wars' politics. But if what's happening in Gaza is basically continued, like the reporting on the number of 2,000 pound bombs Israel has dropped, even though it's a very standard military munition that we use tens of thousands, over 15,000 just in the invasion of Iraq in one month, if it comes to the point... Because I know the genesis of that ideal to where the next war, let alone if it's an existential war, and somebody's going to say, "Well, you can't use those tools. And what is your civilian-to-combatant predicted ratio that you're going to make? Because if it's not low enough, then you shouldn't even fight this war." Like Ukraine, you shouldn't defend yourself, or whoever.
I think it's really dangerous, and this is why I think more of the motivation as well, is what you're saying, if you put that on another war, yes, Israel is held to a double standard, a triple standard, actually, again, because I know the history of even civilian harm mitigation, Israel is currently being held to a standard that no military, to include the US, has ever been held to. So if you think that this should be the future, that we should hold every military to these standards of, well, what is your civilian-to-combatant ratio? Well, we've never asked that before. The law of war is very clear on proportionality and assessments. Okay, but how many 5,000-pound, 2,000-pound bombs have you used?
That's not the question. The question is, how many enemy targets have I engaged that were underground, that I needed a bomb that could reach underground in order to achieve the military goal, which has accounted for taking all feasible measures to prevent civilian harm? I hope you can see why I'm passionate about. It's because I'm a student of this. I know how militaries are prepared, but I'm also a student of the opposition of urban war at all, which is one case is that there's a giant initiative called the Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas Initiative, which is a United Nations initiative, which when it was originally written, was to ban the use of all bombs, missiles, artillery, and mortars in urban combat. So could you imagine the Marine Corps fighting the Second Battle of Fallujah without a bomb, a missile, a mortar?
Aaron MacLean:
Well, I hear you say that. I think, well, why don't we just go ahead and ban war again? We did that with the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Why these half measures? Let's just ban the whole thing. Why has no one thought of that?
John Spencer:
I mean, I understand. This is why I'm kind of so vocal about it. Yes, I care about that you're holding Israel to this crazy standard that nobody's ever followed. You're not acknowledging what Israel is actually doing, the constraints that they're putting on themselves and the constraints that the world has put on themselves. Even force ratio, Israel invaded Gaza with four divisions. They wanted five. They went with four. If you take four divisions, 10,000 per fighting force, against 40, that's like a one-to-one ratio. We fought the Second Battle of Fallujah. We basically put a division, General Mattis, against 3,000 insurgents in a city of 300,000. If you were to extrapolate that combat power analysis of what Israel could have put into Gaza to achieve their goal quickly, but they were actually being told, like, "You can't go with that much."
And actually very recently in the Rafah operation, they, according to sources, were planning two divisions to go into Southern Gaza, and they were told by the world like, "Yeah, that's too much. You need to do one division." So could you imagine our... Somebody like, "Well, that's not going to happen in the United States. Nobody's going to give that level of, you can't do that." But where we're going to use a smaller force, put them at greater risk, not give them the tools they need to achieve the goal, while also protecting civilians, which there are ways and lots of lessons learned, of course, but I think it gets really dangerous when you extrapolate this out to future wars.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah. There's two things that occurred to me from what you just said, that I really do blame people for not understanding, people who ought to know, people in government, people in decision-making roles. I get why the man on the street wouldn't know these things. But one, that if we were sitting there on October the sixth in the Hamas planning room for the final brief, and they had their DOD-style slide on the wall about what their defensive concept was for post October 7th. Of course, they got the tunnels, they got their maneuver forces, they got all this stuff. But then as we go down the bullet points, use of civilians and civilian casualties and press amplification of civilian casualties is absolutely one of the bullets, along with the hostages. And those are part of the defensive concept of Hamas, how we are going to win. We are going to defeat Israel, just as you point out in the First Battle of Fallujah, we're going to defeat Israel through publicity and inflation of civilians, who, by the way, we are putting in harm's way through the way that we operate.
We are intentionally putting them in harm's way. So that's point one that it frustrates me that the people who ought to know better don't sufficiently appreciate. And then point two is assuming that Israel is committed to the destruction of Hamas as its goal and Israeli politics is a fraught thing, and every week there's some new Israeli controversy, Israeli on Israeli political violence. But assuming that that is their goal, the longer this is prolonged, the longer the tragedy. War is a tragedy. And your reference to the reporting on Rafah and the forces to go, "Well, why would we want a longer Battle of Rafah?" Who wins there? I mean, I guess on some level, Hamas.
John Spencer:
That's right.
Aaron MacLean:
The longer this is stretched out, it's Hamas that's winning, but the people of Gaza are definitely not winning the longer this thing is stretched out.
John Spencer:
And I've said this, and people don't like it when I say it, but the world owns some of the suffering that has happened in Gaza. The world, and I don't do politics, but the United States and all people who have said that, "Israel, hey, Israel, there's a different way to do this. You can do this a different way." And matter of fact, the guidance on October 8th was don't launch a ground invasion. Don't launch a... You can do it through something else, which is again, cultural. And I wrote this article for the Wall Street Journal, which I do blame people for advice, where the advice was, "Well, you can achieve your goal through the use of targeted raids and strategic strikes," which is such a real big hangover of the counter-terrorism campaign, and especially discounting the hostages, like you said. That's another reason.
Again, I can only find one battle in modern history, if you call it modern, that has any of the variables that Israel faced in Hamas, the Battle of Manila where we had 3,000 American and British prisoners of war, but also internees, so men, women, and children being held in Manila by the Japanese Navy, actually at that point it was the Navy. And MacArthur said, "Go get the civilians." I mean, "Go free the internees," basically at one of the locations in Manila. And actually MacArthur banned the military from using air power, which I've written in an article. It was like, "You want to see where this banned the use of bombs, missiles goes to?" And there were a hundred thousand civilians killed in that battle to retrieve those 3,000 of our citizens. That element of you could have done it a different way. Yeah, Israel could have done it a different way. We could have supported them to use overwhelming force to achieve the goals quickly. But the inherentness of do it this way, well, one, the ideal that raids and strategic strikes would have achieved the goals.
Literally, people were saying this imprint, yeah, it'll take you a couple of years, but you'll get the job done. So you're saying a nation has to leave 240 hostages in captivity for a couple years, and they had to leave Hamas who just committed this invasion of the nation in power for a couple of years. I think it's ridiculous, but I do understand the politics of war. But you understand, I understand that the world owns some of the suffering, especially the humanitarian crisis, although another very misinformed media campaign to what Israel has or has not done to alleviate humanitarian issues, like bringing in of aid and reestablishing water lines, all this stuff. It's just so much inaccuracies in reporting or the use of disinformation, which sometimes has a bit of truth to it, but the world owns some of that suffering because it isn't like Hamas is saying, "Look, I'll do a ceasefire if you just bring my people more food."
We want to have... Which I've had to deal with as kind of a strategist, even in wars, again, what is the goal? But for people to understand war, they want everybody, we all think that everybody has the shared human values that we do, right? That nobody wants to see children. I mean, the First Battle of Fallujah, in Gaza, other places of the world, the pictures of suffering kids or harmed kids is very emotional and it really hits populations and everything. But you think that Hamas has a shared value. Of course, Hamas doesn't want their people killed. No, actually, they've said that they need as many children and women to die as possible.
They're the ones preventing. As we're talking right now, there's a thousand truckloads of food sitting in Gaza on the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom that the United Nations isn't delivering because they say it's too dangerous for them, even the criminal networks, to get the food to the people. So if this was about just stop the war so that everything will get better, again, you don't understand. Hamas doesn't have that shared interest in people not suffering. They actually have the goal of people suffering. But we, in all of our reporting, think that everybody has this shared, which is just a huge misunderstanding of this organization and war in general.
Aaron MacLean:
And human nature. I remember my first fight in Afghanistan kind of on the outskirts of Marjah before the big exercise in clearing. It was a pretty big platoon-on-platoon scale action, went on for several hours. And we were taking a fair amount of fire, returning a fair amount of fire, and we were having difficult... We couldn't see anyone maneuvering. The firing would just sort of start and stop at different places, though we could see people moving around the battlefield, unarmed people moving. And then it didn't take you too long to realize, "Oh, wait, that's the maneuver. I'm watching the maneuver. They're just smart enough to not maneuver carrying their weapons."
And then one of the most shocking things I saw in the whole deployment was right in that first fight was watching a military-age male zip through the gunfight, zip across the battlefield with a kid on the back of his bike, looked about 10, 12 years old, something like that. What I witnessed in that deployment was not quite the same level of psychopathy as Yahya Sinwar. It wasn't the systematic genocidal zeal that this guy seems to have, but they made strong gestures in that direction from time to time. And their value, the value they placed on human life, frankly, was not what we did, simply wasn't.
John Spencer:
Right. I mean, I even faced this before I was a father being deployed. I mean, it hurt me and my soldiers to see... We had an incident where a young Iraqi boy was killed by an EFP that missed our convoy, hit the civilians on the other side, and it just crushed everybody in the platoon trying to help that person. But even as before I was a father, you meet even people of different cultures that they just want a better life for their kids. But when you find out that, like Hamas, they want the death of, and they're willing to sacrifice everybody to achieve this radicalized, fundamentalist ideology of their religion and of their goal, which is what they state. But I've never seen, Aaron, really somebody who states vocally in action in every way to get as many of their population killed as possible. Not the Nazis, not the Japanese, not ISIS. Nobody I can think of has a military faced a combatant who states and acts in every way to harm its own population to achieve their goal. It's crazy.
Aaron MacLean:
In the few minutes we have left, I know you could speak on this subject for hours, but in the five minutes or so remaining, I want to drill down on your second point on tunnels. Sticking at the tactical operational level, like imagining you were talking to officers, NCOs who are about to do this kind of thing, how are the Israelis fighting in tunnels? How are they getting it done?
John Spencer:
So it's a wide variety of ways. One, having already had access to all the men, weapon, and equipment, so all the specialized equipment, commo, ear protection, breathing apparatuses, dogs, so tunnel dogs, the drones. We say these are off-the-shelf things that we have researched and we'll get them when needed. Israel found out, even though they had had an entire organization with all the research and development and equipment that they needed, they just didn't have it at scale. How to deal with the tunnel when you find it is one thing, how to enter and clear the tunnel is another. But what the Israeli military is doing now, which is using... which I've been trying to say, why do we always view... And we do, Aaron, we do view a tunnel as an obstacle to deal with when we find it. I can't convince a planner in an urban planning course, like, "You know there's a vast metro tunnel in the city. Were you thinking about using that as a concealed maneuver corridor?" "No, we wouldn't. That's too risky. We wouldn't do that."
But that's what Israel has done, because they found out as they were using this methodical clearing approach that if you methodically clear with the tunnel in front of you and dealt with it as an obstacle, you find a tunnel shaft. Okay, put soldiers on that. Bring up the specialized people to deal with it, explore it, clear it, and then you got to look, how do you destroy it? They found out that that was still giving the advantage to the enemy. The enemy always had the initiative, because Hamas could just sit in their tunnels. And actually, there's a battle that I studied with the battalion commander who they tried some flooding, ended up didn't working, but massive flooding, which I thought was crazy and innovative.
But they actually flooded a single tunnel network for two weeks, because there's company battalion and brigade tunnels, basically of Hamas. They flooded a single tunnel for two weeks before they actually started engaging enemy on the surface, because that's how long it took to fill that tunnel to push the enemy out. But it was still ceding the advantage to the enemy, because the enemy could stay in his tunnels as long as he wanted, if he could hold the block, and you weren't going to get him out. And if you went entered it, he was going to take as many people with him as possible. So it really creates this obstacle mindset. But I found a division commander in Israel who was also a former Israeli Navy SEAL, said, "I'm not happy with that. I want to maneuver against the enemy." So he developed a team, which would be really hard for us to do, who had the goal of maneuvering into the tunnels before the enemy had the chance to booby trap it, because that was happening.
As you gave the enemy time, he used the tunnel as long as he could, and then he actually just prepped all the booby traps that he already had in place. They build their tunnels with the booby traps in place already, and all they do is prime them and then they leave. So it's a very standard protocol for them, a delaying defense. So in order to take that initiative away, he had to risk some very special people to enter the tunnels with all the night vision, commo, navigation equipment. We have access if we want it to, but also to do that and maneuver a force on the top. Because if you enter the tunnel before the enemy knows you're there, that's great. Maybe you're going to kill a bunch of them before they know you're in the tunnels. But if you're using it as a maneuver corridor, not just to kill what's in the tunnel, but to maneuver on what's on the surface, you're now achieving the maneuver warfare that even I as an urban scholar said, "You're going to have a lot of challenges doing that in urban terrain."
That's a lot of risk that I don't know how many forces we have that will assume that level of risk going. This is always a question we get when I'm teaching this in a course. Okay, you know there's vast subterranean networks. What's the so what to you at this operational strategic level? Okay, you're going to need some different type of equipment. Yeah, but what's the so what? Is it just the obstacle that you need to deal with when you're clearing the surface? Because in this war, very unique though, where the enemy's only objective is to buy time for that international condemnation, the tunnel is the strategic means it uses to achieve that goal. So as a planner, if I'm attacking that, I have to take that advantage away from them, and Israel figured out a way, and I really hope that some of those lessons bleed into the way we think about underground warfare.
Aaron MacLean:
Can I ask my last question? It's going to be a really dumb question.
John Spencer:
Yeah.
Aaron MacLean:
If you develop this operational concept of speed and surprise and maneuvering in the bad guys' underground space, how do you avoid generating a situation where the bad guys just always set their booby traps? Because they're going to anticipate that you're going to be aggressive like this and they're going to start killing you for being aggressive. How do they solve that little conundrum?
John Spencer:
Yeah, so it's a great question. As again, you, unlike some of my interviews, uniquely understand all war is asymmetric, right? So the enemy is... You're always trying outthink the other side. You never want to fight your enemy at their strengths. So if I started talking to people about Israel is doing this, do I put more forces in danger? Because now Hamas... But if you think about the, again, outthinking your enemy, so if the enemy stops using his tunnels, isn't that an advantage as well? So if he just booby traps all his tunnels and he's not using them to achieve his goal of biding time, so now then I can leave. Although they've developed creative ways to deal with the booby traps, but it's not the fundamental means that the enemy is using to resist me achieving my goal. I just through... Which is deterrence, right? Which is what I wanted people to get to in urban warfare.
Why does so many weaker forces think that if they pull the United States or other militaries into urban areas they can achieve an advantage? Well, because we're unprepared for that level of fight. So if we become more prepared, why is it... What I tell people, and people don't like this, if you want to protect civilians in urban combat, bring a bulldozer and a tank, because that's going to prevent the enemy in the environment thinking that he can do this time constraining restrictions on the use of force, block by block, house by house fights he wants to pull you into, because a bulldozer is really going to prevent that. If I take away that tunnel strategy from my enemy, I view that as a win, and maybe I won't be able to use it as a corridor, but I might still.
And I know Marine Corps will hate I say this, is that Boyd used to say, "Don't fight the terrain, fight the enemy." In the urban environment, I can push back a little bit on that. You got to do both, and we all know this. But if I force the enemy and I can achieve a terrain-based goal, at the same time I'm achieving an enemy-based goal, depending on what the strategy of the enemy I'm fighting is, all war is not just two enemies trying to destroy each other. There are goals, objectives, urban areas, like seats of political power, things like that become as important as destroying the enemies. But usually when we're destroying an enemy, you know this, I know this, that we're talking about destroying their will to fight, not kill every one of them. This is why you can't measure Israel's success on how many Hamas combatants they've killed, although they have killed like 15,000. It's, are they destroying the power of Hamas to rule Gaza and its will to continue to fight because they think they're going to win? That's the better question.
Aaron MacLean:
John Spencer teaches this subject at West Point. I should say that you've literally written the book on the subject, Understanding Urban Warfare, which folks should check out. Thank you so much. This has been a really, really fascinating conversation.
John Spencer:
Thanks, Aaron.
Aaron MacLean:
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