The Return of Strategy and the Nation of Walls

Israel and the Future of War | By Aaron MacLean

I. The Consensus

There is consensus among experts on the character of war in the mid-2020s, and it runs something like this. Sophisticated “reconnaissance-strike complexes”—the revolutionary leveraging of information technology to find targets and destroy them with precision and economy at a rapid tempo, which America debuted operationally during the Persian Gulf War—are now widely proliferated. Now that many powers can perform such feats of precision, in general firepower has the advantage over maneuver on the battlefield. This means that, as in World War I, defensive warfare has the advantage over the offense, all other things being equal. Under these conditions, the likelihood of stalemates and of long wars increases accordingly.

As much can be seen in the savage military laboratory of Ukraine, where battlefield maneuver is generally visible and swiftly targeted. The fight there juxtaposes trenchworks that would be familiar at the Somme in 1916 with uses of modern technology—military and civilian—that were once the exclusive domain of science fiction writers. Drones are one of the most significant features of the new battlefield. Their sensors contribute mightily to the near-total conditions of visibility, but they also serve as sources of firepower, all at a relatively low cost. Using them and countering them effectively are now the hallmarks of successful operations.

You also need enough of them. Cheap mass (the consensus holds) is required, in equipment, munitions—and manpower. Longer, more static conflicts will require the kinds of conscript forces that the West has largely done away with. These masses will engage in attritional struggle beneath a twilight battle unfolding in space, where the most sophisticated sensors and communications nodes already do their work, joined each year by yet unleashed ex-atmospheric destructive capabilities.

This layering of the sci-fi new upon the grinding old, occurring against a backdrop of the accelerating failure of American deterrence and the dissolution of longstanding strategic taboos… well, it’s a hell of a picture.

There is at least one structural advantage in which Americans might take comfort. If the defensive form of war has the advantage, that’s not entirely bad for our interests. Current political boundaries are more or less where we want them to be—that’s the definition of being a status quo power.

Further consideration shows the situation is not quite so simple. China, to improve its chances of success in dominating its neighbors, and having observed with concern what the United States could do to Iraq’s large and reasonably well equipped army in 1991, has now built its own reconnaissance-strike complex in the Western Pacific to attempt an “anti-access, area denial” strategy—effectively a kind of wall that would prevent America from coming to the rescue of its friends in the region. Isolated and un-reinforceable, Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, etc. could be picked off.

But such preparations for war do not occur in a vacuum. The United States has forces already *in* the region, supplemented by local militaries, some of them quite decent. Together with our allies, we own and operate reconnaissance-strike complexes that are already in place in the East Asian littoral, even if they could be stronger. These defenses-in-depth, these 21^st century walls, overlap with the Chinese ones. No strategist can look at the prospect of maritime invasions in the region—for example, at an invasion scenario for Taiwan—and think that it will be a piece of cake for the PLA to pull off a sudden D-Day across the Strait without first eliminating the 21^st century hi-tech equivalents of the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine, a massive shaping effort that took the allies two years in World War II. The emerging consensus might suggest that attempting such an operation as a surprise gambit would be nutty. It is more likely, the conventional wisdom posits, that we will see more politically ambiguous and sophisticated strategies—like a blockade of Taiwan, a dare to America to see if we will run it, and an effort to strangle the island into capitulation rather than seize it by main force.

This more deliberate option is obviously available to the Chinese and it is quite possible they will pursue it. It is also possible that our conversations about cross-strait scenarios impose too artificial a distinction between ambiguous coercion, blockade, and sudden invasion—a campaign that starts as a blockade could easily shift into an attempt at a seizure; likewise, a failed invasion could fall back into attempts to strangle.

But it is another of 2024’s savage laboratories—Israel, where I recently embedded for several days with the IDF in Gaza and in the north—that provides compelling warnings against rigidity and complacency in American thinking about the near- and middle-term future of war. To find lessons from the Israeli experience is nothing new. The history of modern Zionism bears some similarity to the ancient Greek theater—it is the whole human experience packed into an impossibly compressed timeframe and what seems like an artificially circumscribed space. It is no surprise that, like the 1973 war before it, Israel’s war today has much to teach Americans. Indeed, two particular moments so far give indications about the conditions in which major, swift offensive gambits on the battlefield can succeed operationally. The first is what happened on October 7, and the second is Israel’s recent (and amazingly successful) offensive against Hezbollah. Both have been enormously consequential—the latter in particular contributing in recent weeks to the fall of the Assad regime, the tremendous weakening of Iranian neo-imperial power projection in the region, and the (perhaps unintentional, from the Israeli point of view) ascent of Turkish power.

II. October 7: Surprise and the Start-Up Nation

The military context of Israel’s war is a Middle East in which it seems like everyone and their mother has (or had until recently) a reconnaissance-strike complex—not just heavy-hitters like Israel and Iran, but Iranian proxies like Lebanese Hezbollah too, not to mention glorified bandits like the Houthis, who have succeeded in largely shutting down commercial traffic in the Red Sea by finding and striking targets with precision and economy beyond their own horizon. The fruits of the revolution in military affairs have been democratically distributed.

Israel, the friend of America and the Start-Up Nation, embraced the leveraging of information technology for the purpose of national defense first and, most effectively, teaching its strategic patron a thing or two along the way. A modern nation in the region where the first walls in human history were built, Israel built its own 21^st century walls high and with all modcons. There was still peril, especially in the north, where despite having a comparatively less sophisticated and robust reconnaissance-strike complex, Hezbollah had built up an alarmingly deep magazine of munitions, some sophisticated and some not, that could be volleyed at a high rate at Israel’s population and economic centers, potentially overwhelming the integrated air and missile defenses that are such an important part of Israel’s wall. But where Israel’s capabilities more clearly overmatched its adversaries, as in the south with Hamas, it seemed that something like a technological-overmatch peace dividend could be enjoyed.

Of course, we now know this was a lie. Hamas’ Qassam Brigades, backed by hordes of equally barbaric ordinary Gazans, obliterated the defensive complex around Gaza on October 7, 2023. Their gains were short-lived, but the initial military success was real. Walls, even 21^st century walls, only work when they are manned. The morning of Simchat Torah, they were not—both in the literal sense, where unforgivably small units of ill-prepared IDF soldiers, many of them young women serving in non-combat capacities, were essentially abandoned to their fates, but also in a deeper sense. The technological overmatch that allowed the Israeli security services to watch and listen and identify and track and occasionally strike in Gaza at its leisure had bred arrogance.

Hamas’ leadership identified this arrogance. It also identified the fact that what Israel’s leaders wanted most of all was to not think about Gaza. There was Iran, there was the north, there were so many other pressing issues—and as ever in a liberal society, there was a hopefulness in some quarters that maybe even savages like Hamas could moderate, if only just enough to allow a tense modus vivendi that would be only occasionally violent. There would be not war but, in the language of academic security studies, an ongoing “deterrence dialogue.”

Arrogance, hope, and dead political science metaphors are not the foundations of battlefield success. This Israeli mental universe exposed it to a sophisticated Hamas strategic deception plan that played out over several years. The plan revolved around the issue of worker permits. Every day, thousands of Gazans traveled into Israel to work, injecting millions of dollars into Gaza’s economy. Hamas wanted, and demanded, more permits. As tense and violent as these negotiations were, Israeli leaders took from them a promising implication: that Hamas felt the need to focus on material concerns, on the bottom line. It needed cash because, whatever its stated genocidal goals in the long run, more immediately someone needed to collect the trash. The demands were so material, so quotidian—evidence, if not of moderation exactly, then of an organization reconciling itself by necessity to the real world.

And so Israel’s walls were not only all but unmanned, but even when indications were detected of the impending brigade-level assault—it is impossible to plan, rehearse, and then load the assembly areas for a large operation in a reconnaissance petri dish like Gaza without being detected—those indications were actively considered and dismissed. Hamas achieved surprise. We know the rest.

More than a year on, Hamas and the population that voted it into power have paid a steep price. I visited Rafah on my embed. There is no more Rafah. The destruction is stunning to see with one’s own eyes—in the neighborhoods I saw, Berlin had fared better in 1945. There are some tunnels left here and there, and every now and then, a fighter or two pop out of them, facing odds that preclude securing life insurance at affordable premiums. All that is visible are dogs, birds, and rocks. (When I shared this observation with a colleague who was with me on the visit, he remarked, “I must have missed the dogs and the birds.”)

In areas where the Strip’s population has been gathered, Hamas still operates and still holds hostages as the keystone of its defensive concept—now more a last-resort survival scheme. In its initial offensives, the IDF rapidly eliminated Hamas’ ability to operate at any level of sophistication and scale. But a year of grinding, deliberate ground maneuver was required to root out its bits and pieces block by block, house by house, and is still not fully completed. Hamas has now been utterly defeated as a viable military threat to Israel, and so the basic conditions have been set for the repopulation of the Gaza envelope, Israel’s first and most important war aim. But for now, Hamas’ remnants maintain the balance of terror over any potential competitors for power among the Strip’s population. Different proposals circulate for displacing Hamas as the entity that controls aid and monopolizes violence among Gazans—private security firms, an international consortium, local tribal leaders, the Palestinian Authority, a committee of Palestinian technocrats... None of these potential solutions have fully cleared the horizon yet; the only thing that is clear is that the IDF is in Gaza to stay, even if it seems dedicated to constructing a system where it interacts with the population as little as possible. Having been surprised by a deception plan that, in its basic elements, was as old as warfare itself, there will now be Israeli troops forward of the wall, in number—and, strictly speaking, there will be no “day after.”

III. The North

If Hamas’ success in 2023 shows how even a massively more capable force is vulnerable to strategic surprise, Israel’s thus far successful offensive in the north against Hezbollah shows how the more capable force can act ambiguously, leveraging its advantages in intelligence and precision to shape the battlefield for maneuver and solve problems at much lower costs than anticipated.

Across the border from Metula—Israel’s northern most community which I visited as a guest of the IDF reconnaissance battalion currently operating there—villages traditionally dominated by Hezbollah surround the place on three sides. What Israel knew long prior to October 7, but which was not visible to the naked eye, was that these collections of structures were villages only in a secondary sense. Their primary use was as forward staging bases for miliary operations. The “civilian” infrastructure—virtually all of it—concealed military resources, with almost every house, school, and clinic containing forward-staged weapons, equipment, munitions, cameras, and so on. The underground domain was used as in Gaza, but to a lesser extent, as the limestone hills here require more resources to dig in than does sand. All down the line, and for kilometer after kilometer deeper into Lebanon itself, Shia village after Shia village had been transformed in this way.

These military installations could be used for defensive purposes, of course—but their main purpose was offense. An elite organization, Radwan, had been formed and trained for years to do exactly what Hamas actually did on Oct. 7. Hassan Nasrallah, apparently surprised by Yahya Sinwar’s initiative, declined to launch his own assault, and by late on October 7 Israel’s northern wall was increasingly well-manned. A Radwan assault after that point would have been suicide. The moment passed.

But Hezbollah’s significant magazines of rockets, drones, and anti-tank missiles remained, and it began firing intermittently at Israel on October 8. Eleven months of stalemate along the border ensued, with casualties on both sides, as Israel prioritized the fight in Gaza and Hezbollah tried to eat its cake and have it too, “supporting” the resistance fighters of Hamas through harassment attacks without sacrificing the deterrent power implicit in its ability to deliver an overwhelming series of air attacks on Israel’s population and economy. The early decision to evacuate the communities along its northern border made the stalemate both painful and politically unsustainable for Israel—but it was hard to see how the situation could be changed without a violent and costly northern war, not to mention without American and international condemnation, as Washington had been clear from the get-go that the prevention of escalation with Hezbollah and Iran was its top priority.

There was a period this past spring where the dilemmas of this northern stalemate, combined with the slow progress of the fight in Gaza, could cause a sympathetic observer of Israel’s situation to question whether or not Iran had the upper hand. Consider what it means when Iran declares its intention to destroy the state of Israel—what serious Iranian strategic planners actually might understand when they say things like that. These men are not idiots, and so they know that the chances that main military force will drive the Jews into the sea are fancifully low. The objectives of 1967 and 1973 are not available in the early 2020s—they were barely available in 1967 and 1973. But what if instead Tehran, through its policies and proxies, could generate conditions that made Israel a less attractive place for Jews to live? An Israel where large swathes of territory were uninhabitable; engaged in protracted military confrontations with no victory in sight; internationally isolated; politically divided; a once globally engaged and integrated economy and liberal society transforming into something more autarkic, something more religious, something geared for endless war. What if Jews who could afford to leave, left?

If the Iranian objective was very gradually to render Zion unlovely, or even unlovable, to Jews—well, it was not entirely out of the question that the strategy had legs. To break out of it would require regaining the advantage over Iran and its proxy Hezbollah—intimately linked objectives as Hezbollah’s own strike capacity, its wall, was Iran’s most powerful deterrent in the region. Prior to this autumn, it was common to hear Israelis speak of the prospect of a northern war as though they were anticipating the Blitz in London in the fall of 1940. The north would be in flames. Skyscrapers in Tel Aviv would fall. Civilian deaths would number in the thousands.

Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, a truly remarkable campaign dealt a massive blow against Hezbollah and decisively seized the initiative against Iran. In an era where the defense is meant to have the advantage and where Israelis had a genuine wariness about Hezbollah’s ability to defend its territory, largely because of the pain Nasrallah could unleash against civilian and economic targets if attacked, Israel’s feat of arms gives further indications of the conditions required for the offense in the 21^st century. Initiated with a series of supply chain attacks against beepers, hand-held radios, and laptop computers that had been years in the making, followed by the decapitation strikes that killed Nasrallah and the rest of the Hezbollah leadership structure, when the IDF maneuvered north of the border in force (it had been conducting special operations there since the spring) hell was not unleashed on Israel, and Hezbollah could only fight in a coordinated fashion at the company level, and even that for only a few days. The fighting quickly took on a guerrilla flavor—dangerous to the IDF soldiers prosecuting it, to be sure, but a far cry from the modern terror army that the Axis of Resistance had taken such pride in.

What were the conditions for Israel’s success?

Israel enjoyed near-total intelligence dominance of the battlefield, combined with an exquisite ability to strike precisely and effectively at difficult, sometimes heavily fortified targets—but these factors of overmatch do not tell the full story. As with Hamas’ success on October 7, the full story involved the manipulation of perception and the seizure of initiative through surprise. Nasrallah died, one Israeli security official suggested to me, “not knowing that his war had yet started.” Day after day as the shaping campaign got underway, Israeli audacity sliced through Hezbollah complacency, steadily harming Hezbollah’s capabilities to command and control a war in a series of actions that occurred so quickly and in an atmosphere of such ambiguity regarding their intent that by the time it was clear that the northern war had truly begun, it was too late for Hezbollah to resist the coming ground maneuver effectively, or to retaliate against the Israeli population and economy as it had long planned. With Hezbollah rendered ineffective, Turkish backed Sunni opposition forces in Syria seized their moment and took down the Assad regime, putting the future of Iranian influence in Lebanon in question.

But though the balance of power along Israel’s northern frontier has been fundamentally altered, the old problems are far from solved, and new problems (in particular, a new Syrian regime with a background in Islamist terrorism) loom. The absence of effective countermeasures to anti-tank weapons that can strike precisely from distances of over 10 kilometers means that a substantial envelope of Lebanese terrain needs to be cleared of hostile forces for anything resembling real security. A temporary ceasefire is now in place and, theoretically, the Lebanese state could take advantage of a weakened Iran to elbow Hezbollah out of its longstanding control of the area. Another approach—an occupation of southern Lebanon, which Israel of course conducted from 1982-2000—is not a proposal that meets with enthusiasm from any Israeli I encountered. But a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal without the intervention of an effective third party in the region will, of course, just allow Hezbollah to accelerate the process of reconstitution. In a few years, Israel could be back on October 6.

As it has on several other occasions in the past year when faced with apparently painful dilemmas, the Israelis seem to be declining to choose. The IDF’s preferred vision is to operate their reconnaissance-strike complex within Lebanon indefinitely, largely withdrawing on the ground but without foreclosing on the possibility of special operations, and relying heavily on air strikes to prevent Hezbollah’s reconstitution to October 6 levels. The wall would be built high and operated proactively and kinetically, mostly from the air. In other words, Lebanon would be transformed as an area of operations into something like Syria during the pre-October 7 “war between the wars,”—not exactly a free-fire zone, but also not a place where Iranian Axis forces could operate or reconstitute with impunity.

As in Gaza, there is no “day after” in this vision of the IDF. Another potential issue is that such a strategy trades the false quiet of a permanent ceasefire for a likelihood of steady (if only occasionally effective) Hezbollah retaliation against Israel with rockets, drones, and anti-tank missiles. Every now and then, something will get through. Will the people of the north accept such a state of affairs indefinitely? Assuming that no third party takes security responsibility for southern Lebanon, that Hezbollah finds ways to hang on with some level of capability, and assuming a return to full-scale occupation is out of the question, the choice seems to be between a “war-between-the-wars” anti-access/area-denial complex in Lebanon, or a deceptively calm ceasefire that lasts until there is sufficient Hezbollah reconstitution that another round begins. And, of course, there is Syria and its uncertain future to consider.

There is also the question of how Israel’s security strategy in the north affects its grand strategy and character as a nation. The IDF’s preferred course of action in Lebanon poses obvious challenges to Israel’s international relationships and implies that Israel is now a nation always, at least to some limited extent, at war.

IV. The Return of Strategy

With the degradation of Hezbollah’s rocket capacity, Iran’s failures in April and October to prove that its ballistic missile capacity is especially effective, Assad’s fall, and the return of Donald Trump to the White House, Tehran is in a much more perilous position than it was this summer. Its principal deterrent methods have been all but eliminated. Will the regime feel the need to dash for the Bomb to restore deterrence? Will Trump return to maximum pressure? Will the Israelis strike the Iranian nuclear program, perhaps with American support?

It is too soon to answer these questions, but Israelis know that Iran has been the author of their troubles for many years now, for which there will be no substantial relief without a fundamental change in its character. Israeli security officials, with one relatively coordinated voice, would like Americans to appreciate that their Iranian threat is our Iranian threat, which in turn is linked to the threats to American security posed by Russia, China, and North Korea. Their case is strong.

There is much for Americans to learn from the first year of Israel’s war, from both its failures and its successes.

At the level of warfighting, both the Hamas attack on October 7 and the Israeli offensive campaign in the north since mid-September highlight how ambiguity, deception, and surprise—in a word, strategy, in the older sense of the term as the employment of “stratagems” or generals’ tricks—allow a weaker party to overcome its operational disadvantages, or a stronger party to overperform with an already decent hand. Indeed, when a stronger party can leverage overmatch in intelligence and strike capabilities for the targets that matter, conditions for lasting offensive success, including successful ground maneuver, can be generated.

How far from such overmatch is China in the Western Pacific? What is its intelligence picture of targets in Taiwan? Guam? Hawaii? What if the PLA actually tried to *win* the war—to generate a territorial fait accompli swiftly and then rely on its superior industrial base, not to mention its nuclear capacity, to ward off American attempts to liberate seized terrain? The comparisons with Israel’s northern war are there, while of course not perfect—two opposing reconnaissance strike complexes, one destined to be used as a defensive wall. But walls can be stormed, for example, when the men meant to watch them have been complacent, or when their commanders have been killed before orders can be issued.

What kinds of ambiguity and deception could generate a strategic context in which such battlefield progress could be made in the Pacific? Hamas’ manipulation of the worker permit question calls to mind Franklin Roosevelt’s famous remarks to Congress on December 8, 1941. Everyone remembers the opening regarding the “day that will live in infamy,” but Roosevelt quickly moved on to condemn the Japanese for attacking Hawaii even while “at the solicitation of Japan, [the United States] was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.” In dastardly fashion, “the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.” If the subject of ongoing, hope-inducing negotiations then was the resolution of tensions over China and the American oil and gas embargo on Japan, what will it be for us today?

At the level of grand strategy and international politics, Israel and the United States have rarely, if ever, occupied such divergent mental universes. The Israeli mentality today is that World War III is already underway and they are fighting in one of its early stages. Suffice it to say that this is not the prevailing American mentality, on either the right or the left. Americans of both parties would prefer to manage this conflict, to delink it from others, to lower its significance so we can prioritize solving bigger problems.

The Israelis look at their Iran problem and note that their unilateral options regarding its solution are weak. So they are manning their walls, and have a coherent military theory of how to use them to survive. The history of human politics, which began in the Middle East, is a history of walls, and so it has been in Israel. Walls as defenses, walls as boundaries, walls as memories and as sources of meaning. These less visible, 21^st century walls are the latest chapter in the extraordinary history of Zionism. Regarding the Israeli attitude toward the interconnection of Eurasian threats and the likelihood that “World War III” is just beginning, one senior Israeli security official said to me, “this you are knowing but not understanding.” There is a good chance he is right. And if there is any one lesson from Israel’s violent year, it is that walls can still come tumbling down.