Antony Blinken’s Ahistorical Advice for Israel Raids and airstrikes can be tactically effective, but they don’t amount to a strategy for winning a war. By John Spencer and Liam Collins
The Biden administration is keeping the pressure on Israel not to invade Hamas’s final stronghold, in Rafah. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that such an assault would be “a mistake” and “not necessary.” Three months earlier he claimed that Israel could defeat Hamas by using “targeted operations with a smaller number of forces.”
But could it? A strategy dependent on raids and airstrikes alone has never been effective in defeating a large enemy. If Israel believes a military response is the only way it can defeat Hamas, it should ignore Washington and pursue a ground invasion supported by targeted raids and airstrikes.
U.S. thinking about the war is plagued by what former White House national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster called the “Zero Dark Thirty” fallacy. The term—named for the 2012 film about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden—refers to the mistaken belief that raiding alone can constitute a military strategy. Gen. McMaster described the thinking: “The capability to conduct raids against networked terrorist or insurgent organizations is portrayed as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, conventional joint force capability.” In other words, we can’t expect strategic outcomes from tactical missions.
America’s military efforts reflect that axiom. In the Iraq war, the U.S. quickly ousted Saddam Hussein’s Baath party and fought multiyear counterterror and counterinsurgency campaigns against enemy forces. The U.S. was successful through the combination of a small number of special operations using intelligence-driven raids to target terrorist leaders and a large number of conventional forces working to secure the local population, gather intelligence and help build institutions for governance.
In their new book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine,” Gen. David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts argue that intelligence-driven special-ops raids aren’t enough to wage successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Such efforts must be combined with a population-centric strategy, requiring sizable conventional forces to “clear, hold, build” in insurgent sanctuaries.
The same goes for counterterrorism campaigns that involve drone strikes and precision bombing. President Obama conducted hundreds of drone strikes against terrorist networks between 2009 and 2017. In many cases, those strikes may have been the only prudent or politically viable option. The fallacy emerges, however, when policymakers believe that raids and precision attacks are the best options simply because they’re popular.
Hamas isn’t a typical terrorist group. It governs Gaza with significant military capability, including prepared defenses, hundreds of miles of defensive tunnels, and thousands of rockets. Its fighters were believed to number 30,000 to 40,000 at the start of the war, and most of them hide among the civilian population. This makes a strategy reliant on targeted raids extremely difficult. Whereas so-called decapitation strikes may be an effective strategy against small terrorist groups, their success would be dubious against an enemy of Hamas’s size.
There is no historical evidence that commando raids or a series of precision strikes have defeated a deeply entrenched urban defender. Gen. McMaster argues that “like precision strikes, raids often embolden rather than dissuade the enemy.” Short-lived raids also place the raiding force in a vulnerable position, especially when their mission is their dominant strategic tactic. The U.S. realized this firsthand after its seventh raid into Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, which led to the death of 18 service members. Israel knows the best way to mitigate this risk is to employ raids in concert with a large conventional force.
The same applies to targeted airstrikes, which require time to gather actionable intelligence on key leaders. Recommending that Israel rely on this tactic ignores that the ammunition necessary to destroy the enemy could cause more collateral damage than a ground invasion would. Israel has already killed aid workers with errant strikes. Urging its forces to depend on raids and airstrikes is likely to exacerbate this problem, not reduce it.
America’s record of fighting in enemy-held cities underscores how a raid-and-strike approach is ineffective. When U.S. forces prematurely terminated the First Battle of Fallujah in the spring of 2004, they were left to conduct only strikes and occasional raids against al Qaeda targets within the city. This approach was so fruitless that the coalition was forced to conduct the Second Battle of Fallujah six months later, involving a large conventional force that had months to prepare against a much smaller force than Hamas is today. When coalition forces cleared Ramadi and other Iraqi cities between 2004 and 2006, they used a combination of precision strikes and a large coalition presence. Ditto for the Battle of Mosul in 2016-17, when the U.S.-backed Iraqis employed conventional land and air power against a much smaller force in a less defensive posture than Israel faces in Gaza.
Recent history has proved that commando raids and precision strikes are a tactic, not a strategy to win a war. No matter how much Washington argues to the contrary, Israel understands the fallacy.
Mr. Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute. Mr. Collins is executive director of the Madison Policy forum and a fellow at New America Foundation. They are the co-authors of “Understanding Urban Warfare.”
Comments are closed.
