标题: A Book on Post-1945 Warfare, Co-Written by Retired General David Patraeus [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 11-4-2023 11:04 标题: A Book on Post-1945 Warfare, Co-Written by Retired General David Patraeus (1) Jonathan W Jordan, How Wars Are Fought and Won; Modern military history is a succession of partnerships to counter violent challenges from nationalists, terrorists and dictators. Wall Street Journal, Oct 17, 2023, at page A15 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ht-and-won-e52d7a8d
(book review on David Petraeus, Andrew Roberts, Conflict; The evolution of warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. Harper, 2023)
two consecutive paragraphs:
"China’s brutal civil war, the authors observe, demonstrated “that guerrilla warfare undertaken according to Maoist military principles by smaller forces could ultimately be successful against a Western-backed government.” This drama would play out over the next 40 years from Vietnam to Nicaragua, with rival superpowers taking supporting roles.
"Invoking the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the authors argue that the first job of a strategic leader is to get the big ideas right. Those who have succeeded include Gerald Templer, who became Britain's high commissioner for Malaya in 1952 and whose reference to winning 'the hearts and minds of the people' we are told, 'remains the most succinct explanation for how to win a counter-insurgency.' By contrast, the nationalist forces in China, the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam got the big ideas wrong and paid a steep price.
My comment:
(a) Perhaps it was too painful for KMT to even think about Chinese Civil War. KMT or Taiwanese government was entirely silent on this topic up to 1984 when I left Taiwan. It was a total void, even in textbooks. In Taiwan, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was remote and not liked (except by a clique of people close to him). Presumably Chinese on Mainland China during the Civil War disliked him even more (than Taiwanese). So, when this review fleetingly mentioned, "," my interest was piqued.
(b)
(i) HarperCollins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarperCollins
(ii) Harper (publisher) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_(publisher)
("the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins [both] based in New York City")
An imprint of a publishing company is akin to a brand in a multi-brand company.
(c) Carl von Clausewitz https://www.merriam-webster.com/ ... %20von%20clausewitz
(pronunciation)
died of cholera. en.wikipedia.org under his name.
(d) Gerald Templer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Templer
`````````````````````````
As Europe’s first big cross-border land war since World War II grinds through its second year and a mass terror raid sparks memories of the Yom Kippur War, a top-to-bottom look at how wars are fought in the era of Pax Atomica has become grimly relevant.
“Conflict” brings together one of America’s top military thinkers and Britain’s pre-eminent military historian to examine the evolution of warfare since 1945. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who co-authored the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency warfare and oversaw the troop surge in Iraq in 2007, brings a professional eye to politico-military strategy. Andrew Roberts, who has been writing on military leadership since the early 1990s, offers an “arc of history” approach to the subject of mass destruction. The pair’s ambitious goals: to provide some context to the tapestry of modern conflict and a glimpse of wars to come.
The book begins with the early struggles of the postwar era. China’s brutal civil war, the authors observe, demonstrated “that guerrilla warfare undertaken according to Maoist military principles by smaller forces could ultimately be successful against a Western-backed government.” This drama would play out over the next 40 years from Vietnam to Nicaragua, with rival superpowers taking supporting roles.
Invoking the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the authors argue that the first job of a strategic leader is to get the big ideas right. Those who have succeeded include Gerald Templer, who became Britain’s high commissioner for Malaya in 1952 and whose reference to winning “the hearts and minds of the people,” we are told, “remains the most succinct explanation for how to win a counter-insurgency.” By contrast, the nationalist forces in China, the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam got the big ideas wrong and paid a steep price.
The longest chapters, frequently narrated in the first person by Mr. Petraeus, cover Iraq and Afghanistan, where political dysfunction swamped military success. On the 2021 collapse of Afghanistan’s government troops, who had been so expensively trained and equipped under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, Mr. Petraeus remarks that “the troops were brave enough—the 66,000 dead Afghan soldiers killed during the war attest to that. But they fought for an often corrupt and incompetent government that never gained the trust and confidence of local communities, which had historically determined the balance of power within Afghanistan.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 serves as the book’s case study on how badly Goliath can stumble against David. As Hitler did with Stalin, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin placed his hopes on a quick knockout blow. When that failed, corruption, improvised logistics, the lack of air superiority, a failure to prepare for economic backlash and the lack of mass public support doomed Russia’s chances of a swift victory. Noting an increase in both German military spending and European weapons supplies pouring into Ukraine, as well as the expansion of NATO to include Finland and likely Sweden, the authors conclude that, “in setting out to make Russia great again, Putin was actually making NATO great again.”
The authors broadly cover the roles of economic sanctions, social-media manipulation and consumer activism in the Ukrainian war. Elon Musk’s control of the Starlink satellite internet system, they note, gave him a unique veto power over Ukrainian operations in Crimea. “With individual tycoons such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos wielding such extraordinary power,” the authors tell us, “wars of the future will have to take their influence into account.”
The final chapter teases out the contours of future conflicts. Artificial intelligence, strategic mineral monopolies and “hybrid wars”—where weapons include deepfake disinformation, political manipulation, proxy forces and cyberattacks—cap an incisive look at the next phase of warfare. “Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries,” the authors caution. And with the line between limited and total wars growing fuzzier every year, the combatant of the next war might be a woman sitting at a drone desk, a computer geek hacking into a power grid or a robotics designer refining directed-energy weapons systems.
“Conflict” is, in some ways, an extension of Mr. Roberts’s thesis in “The Storm of War” (2009)—that dictatorships tend to crack under the stress of a sustained war against popular democracies. While autocracies enjoy some advantages at war’s outset—they are nimble and can achieve true strategic surprise, for instance—if the sucker punch doesn’t end the fight quickly, democracies, shocked into action, may bring to bear more motivated, more efficient and often larger forces to turn the tide.
For all its technical erudition, “Conflict” is remarkably readable. Mr. Roberts’s engaging prose softens the edges of Mr. Petraeus’s straight-shooting analysis. Both men see modern military history as a succession of partnerships created to counter violent challenges from nationalists, terrorists and dictators.
The book was written before the recent outbreak of war on Israel’s southern border, where a coordinated terror raid has spurred a more conventional military riposte. As gunmen ride to massacre scenes in pickup trucks and precision missiles take to the air in response, the authors’ introductory caveat snaps into focus: “Warfare evolves; it does not ossify. Yet it is clearly also capable of being suddenly and shockingly thrown into reverse.” Many of the elements that “Conflict” dissects—the use of low-cost drones, the targeting of infrastructure, the power of social media and the patronage of outside powers, to name a few—flash across our screens in real time, reminding us that “war is thus still very much worth studying.” Timely, engaging and instructive, “Conflict” is the best one-volume study of conventional warfare in the nuclear age. It sets a new benchmark in understanding modern war.
Mr. Jordan is the author of “American Warlords: How Roosevelt’s High Command Led America to Victory in World War II.”
Click "Read a Sample" beneath the cover, and you will find that Both Introduction and Chapter "1. The Death of the Dream of Peace, 1945–1953" are free.
I Introduction (three pages)
Note:
(a) Introduction opens with a quotation from "Professor Cyril Falls, Inaugural Address as Chichele Professor of War at Oxford, 19461." The 1 just prior to the period is an excrescence. It should be (the year of) 1946. See Chichele Professors
hiphttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichele_Professorship
(section 2 Holders, section 2.2 History of war)
Likely this book is a pre-proof version of the book, where page numbers are lacking.
(b) "In the early hours of Thursday, 24 February 2022, President Vladimir Putin of Russia unleashed what he hoped would be swift and devastating attacks on Kyiv and other points in Ukraine, intended to topple its government by a coup de main."
(i) English dictionary:
* coup de main (n; plural coups de main; etymology: "French, literally, hand stroke"): "a sudden attack in force" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coup%20de%20main
is used in English in the military sense to mean a surprise attack, whereas in Modern French, the term means a helping hand. See Wiktionary.
* warfare (n): "the activity of fighting a war, often including the weapons and methods that are used <guerrilla/naval/nuclear/trench warfare> <psychological/nuclear warfare> <economic warfare>" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/warfare
(ii) French-English dictionary:
* main (noun feminine; plural mains; from Latin [noun feminine] manus hand): "hand" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/main
II Chapter 1. The Death of the Dream of Peace, 1945–1953
deals with Chinese Civil War five pages into the chapter.
Quote: "Chinese Civil War * * * is still easily the largest military engagement since the Second World War in terms of the number of people involved * * * when it [World War II] ended, 80,000 Chinese soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek's Sixth Army were flown into Nanjing to reclaim their capital. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, poor peasant soldiers of the Ninety-Fourth Army were greeted as heroes by the wealthy Chinese citizens of the city: the liberated finely dressed in silk gowns, the liberators lucky to be wearing straw sandals. * * * By 1945, Mao's National Revolutionary Army numbered well over a million fighters, and 100 million Chinese lived in areas controlled by the communists. * * * A myth has developed, sedulously propagated by the Chinese Communist Party, that it won because the Chinese people were yearning for Marxism-Leninism. This is nonsense.
Note:
(a)
(i) 国民革命军陆军新编第六军 Sixth Army https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/国民革命军陆军新编第六军
(ii) Ninety-Fourth Army 国民革命军第九十四军
(1944-1948; "抗战胜利后，新六军从芷江机场 ['位於湖南省怀化市芷江县': zh.wikipedia.org; 1936- ] 空运南京接收城市，参与了中国战区的日本投降仪式") https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/国民革命军第九十四军
(1926-1949; "1945年8月，该军由广西柳州空运到上海，隶属汤恩伯第三方面军，接受上海、苏州地区日军投降")
(b) "100 million Chinese lived in areas controlled by the [Chinese] communists"
The en.wikipedia.org for "1953 Chinese census" gives the total of "582,603,417," probably deducing the number of people not under PRC direct control.
(c)
(i) sedulous (adj) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sedulous
, whose section "Did You Know?" states in part: "the word sedulous ultimately comes from Latin se dolus, which literally means 'without guile.' * * * Don't let the sed- beginning mislead you; sedulous is not related to words such as sedentary or sedate (those derive from the Latin verb sedēre, meaning 'to sit')."
(ii) Latin-English dictionary:
* se- (prefix): "without" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/se-
^ Latin preposition sine (which gives rise to English preposition sans meaning without) means without.
* dolus (noun masculine): "deception, guile" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dolus
(iii) The English verb sit descends from Old English, not Latin. However, Going back further in time, the verb sit is derived from Proto-Indo-European language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language
or PIE. https://www.etymonline.com/word/sit
("from PIE root *sed- 'to sit' ")
M where the asterisk in the left upper corner of a word means the spelling is deduced (or reconstructed).
(d) "the historian Rana Mitter has pointed out, 'American disillusionment with the Chongqing government was fuelled by the wreck of the regime that ruled China.' "
(i)
(A) Rana Mitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Mitter
(born in 1969 in Cambridge, England of Bengali descent; "specialises in the history of the Republic of China. He is ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School
(B) ST Lee stands for Seng Tee LEE or LEE Seng Tee 李成智 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Seng_Tee
(ii) fueled/fueling vs fuelled/fuelling. Grammarist.com, undated https://grammarist.com/spelling/fuel/
(e) "For a Chinese landlord, ownership of as little as two-thirds of an acre constituted a death sentence. This was not the spontaneous acclaim of the Chinese peasantry for the precepts of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic so much as a land grab, and often the settling of ancient local grievances."
(i)
(A) acre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre
("about 40% of a hectare [which is 10,000 square metres, or 100 metres square]. Based upon the international yard and pound agreement of 1959, an acre may be declared as exactly 4,046.8564224 square metres")
The 4,000 square meters is 63 meters square (63 meters x 63 meters). Two thirds if an acre is 51 meters square.
(B) Chinese units of measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_units_of_measurement
(section 3 Modern Chinese units: mǔ 亩 614.4 m2 in 1915, or 666+2⁄3 m2 in 1930)
, though 亩 as area measurement has existed since 周 dynasty, according to zh.wikipedia.org.
(ii) dialectic (n; Did You Know?) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dialectic
I do not know its definition. But I hope to tell you that in linguistics, the noun dialect has the corresponding adjective dialectal.
(f) "The twentieth century was the most brutal of all the many centuries of human existence; it is estimated that more people had already perished violently in the first half of the twentieth century than in all the previous centuries put together. * * * In a world that has expensively and painstakingly developed precision weaponry and smart bombs, the Russians deliberately chose to revert to a brutal, Second World War – and, in parts of the Donbas, First World War – style of fighting [trench warfare]. * * * Russia won untarnishable glory in 1945 for having provided the oceans of blood necessary to rid the world of the evil of Nazism. For every five soldiers killed fighting Nazi Germany on the battlefields of the Second World War, four died on the Eastern Front. * * * This use of proxies to fight the superpowers' wars opened them both to the charge of being hypocritically willing to fight to the last Chinese, or Angolan, or Nicaraguan – or latterly Ukrainian. * * * 'soldiers existed on handfuls of rice which they carried compressed in their pockets.' * * * the communists laid siege to city after city, starving the populations into capitulation, the most horrific example of which was the five-month siege of Changchun [May 23 - Oct 19, 1948], the largest city in Manchuria. Lin Biao, commander of the PLA's Manchuria Field Army [东北野战军], ordered it to be turned into 'a city of death [死城].' * * * Chiang was able to communicate his counter-attack proposals to his powerful subordinates such as General Wei Lihuang [东北剿匪总司令部 衛立煌], the commander in Shenyang, and General Fu Zuoyi, who commanded in northern China, but neither was willing to dilute his own forces to help save Jinzhou * * * In January 1950 China and the USSR signed a security agreement [Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance 中苏友好同盟互助条约 (signed on Feb 14, 1950)] which laid the seeds for the Korean War less than six months later."
(i) Donbas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donbas
(ii) English dictionary:
* latterly (adv): "of late: RECENTLY" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/latterly
* exist (v): "to live at an inferior level or under adverse circumstances <the hungry [meaning the hungry people] existing from day to day>" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exist
(iii) 东北人民解放军 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/东北人民解放军
("1948年1月，改称东北人民解放军，区分为东北军区和东北野战军两部，为一个总部领导") 作者: choi 时间: 11-4-2023 11:08
(3) David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts, Israel's challenge in Responding to a Brutal Surprise Attack; Hamas staged a shockingly successful operation against the Jewish state, but history shows that wars are seldom won by such tactics. Wall Street Journal, Oct 14, 2023 (Tuesday), at page C1 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle ... ise-attack-6432d2c0
Excerpt in the window of print: Victory in war usually goes to the side that can outlast the enemy, continue to provide logistical support to its troops and survive economically.
Quote:
(a) " 'Surprise attacks happen so often,' former U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz [(2001-2005), under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W Bush; Wolfowitz is civilian, not a military man] once observed, 'that the surprising thing is that we are still surprised by them.'
"But history shows that the tactic almost always backfires. Nations subjected to surprise attacks may be weakened in the immediate days and weeks afterward, but they tend to be more unified, more resolute and more focused on righteous vengeance than nations that drift into war. * * *
(b) " * * * Israel began the Six Day War with a surprise attack on Arab nations in 1967, and Egypt and Syria took revenge with a surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. * * *
"With the exception of Israel's [pre-emptive] attack in 1967 [that started Six Day War], surprise attacks tend to be initiated by totalitarian leaders and movements, rather than by democracies, which need to win over the opinion of the public or dissenting politicians before going to war. And in every one of these cases, again with the exception of the Six Day War, the perpetrator of the surprise attack wound up being comprehensively defeated or having its capabilities massively degraded. The lesson of history is simple: Surprise attacks do not work in the long run.
"This is partly because victory in war usually goes to the side that can outlast the enemy, continue to provide logistical support to its troops and survive economically. * * *
My comment: These two quotations are the takeaways of this article. I did not read the latter half of this article.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Surprise attacks happen so often,” former U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz once observed, “that the surprising thing is that we are still surprised by them.”
But history shows that the tactic almost always backfires. Nations subjected to surprise attacks may be weakened in the immediate days and weeks afterward, but they tend to be more unified, more resolute and more focused on righteous vengeance than nations that drift into war. Hamas’s attack on Israel last weekend fits this pattern.
The Oct. 7 attack, in which Hamas fired some 3,500 rockets at Israel and militants invaded by air, land and sea, has been described as Israel’s 9/11 moment. But in per capita terms it is much larger: Approximately 1,200 Israeli deaths, out of a population of 9.4 million, is equivalent to some 40,000 Americans killed, well over seven times the number killed in Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined. In both of those cases, the U.S. response was rightly devastating, and so should be Israel’s today.
Wars often begin with surprise attacks to gain immediate advantage over the enemy, however short-term that advantage might be. They were used by Adolf Hitler against the U.S.S.R. in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, by Kim Il Sung against South Korea in 1950 and by Saddam Hussein against Kuwait in 1990. Israel began the Six Day War with a surprise attack on Arab nations in 1967, and Egypt and Syria took revenge with a surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. Hamas chose the 50th anniversary of that attack for its assault on Israel last weekend.
With the exception of Israel’s attack in 1967, surprise attacks tend to be initiated by totalitarian leaders and movements, rather than by democracies, which need to win over the opinion of the public or dissenting politicians before going to war. And in every one of these cases, again with the exception of the Six Day War, the perpetrator of the surprise attack wound up being comprehensively defeated or having its capabilities massively degraded. The lesson of history is simple: Surprise attacks do not work in the long run.
This is partly because victory in war usually goes to the side that can outlast the enemy, continue to provide logistical support to its troops and survive economically. As military historian Cathal J. Nolan pointed out in his 2019 book “The Allure of Battle,” individual battles—including initial surprise attacks, however spectacular—are almost never the decisive factor in wars. Amateurs may concentrate on battles, but professionals focus on the logistics of campaigns.
Once the present crisis is over in Israel, there will be much soul-searching and official investigation into how Israel’s intelligence agencies, military and politicians could have failed so dismally in anticipating Hamas’s attack. It is to be hoped that the failures of intelligence and military readiness will be examined rationally and fairly, however rancorous the state of Israeli politics in the lead-up to the war.
History shows that surprise attacks often appear predictable in hindsight. Israel’s decision to attack preemptively on June 5, 1967 should not have been a surprise to its Arab neighbors, considering the warlike language that Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab leaders had been using in the preceding months. On May 17, Nasser ordered U Thant, the U.N. Secretary General, to withdraw the U.N. Emergency Force that had been guarding the Sinai frontier, which he did. Nasser moved 100,000 troops to Israel’s southwestern border and publicly informed the Arab Trade Union Congress that it was his intention to destroy Israel. At the same time, the president of Iraq said that “Our goal is clear, to wipe Israel off the face of the map. We shall, inshallah, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa.” Why Israel’s massive pre-emptive attack came as a surprise is therefore hard to comprehend.
Major surprise attacks can take place even in wars that have been going on for some time. On the evening of Jan. 30, 1968, during the week-long Vietnamese celebration of the Tet holiday, nearly 85,000 North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong soldiers struck targets throughout the South, including Saigon, where numerous military bases, government buildings and the U.S. Embassy were assaulted. The communists hoped that simultaneous attacks throughout the country would prompt the people of South Vietnam to rise up and support the insurgency—which it did not. Similarly, Hamas must be hoping today that Arabs in the West Bank and Israel itself, as well as Lebanese Hezbollah and Syria, will open up further fronts against Israel to take pressure off Gaza.
Hamas’s choice of timing for its attack was a direct reference to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and indeed it has led to the largest loss of Israeli life since that war. It is worth examining the 1973 war, which ended in the comprehensive defeat of the Egyptians and Syrians, to ask what Hamas could possibly want to emulate.
At 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 6, 1973—Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement—the Egyptians and Syrians achieved impressive tactical surprise in opening hostilities. Some 32,000 infantry crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai Desert at five separate places over a 50-mile front, supported by almost 4,000 artillery pieces. Egypt and Syria had an overwhelming demographic advantage, with a combined population of more than 40 million to Israel’s 3 million.
Yet Israel soon rebounded, and the war turned into a devastating defeat for the Arab nations. By the time it ended on Oct. 25, Israeli forces were within artillery range of Damascus and over the Suez Canal, well on the road to Cairo.
If militant Arabs remember the Yom Kippur war as a victory, it is solely because of those initial stunning successes. The decision to attack on the Jewish high holy day of Yom Kippur was reflected in Hamas’s attack last weekend on the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, when many soldiers were on leave and Israelis were gathering for religious and musical events. Just as in 1973, this cynical tactic has only served to infuriate Israelis even more.
It is important to remember the difference in scale between the attacks of 1973 and 2023. Hamas presently poses no threat to the survival of the Jewish state, as Syria and Egypt did in the early days of the Yom Kippur War.
Yet the situation in Gaza has been made fiendishly complicated by the fact that as many as 150 hostages are now in Hamas’s hands, including reportedly citizens of the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Nepal. Hamas has no doubt distributed the hostages around Gaza to serve as human shields so that they cannot be liberated en masse, the way Israeli commandos rescued hostages held by Idi Amin at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976.
Beyond that, Gaza is a densely built-up area where 2.3 million people live in only 140 square miles. Hamas and Islamic Jihad conceal themselves in this civilian population: Their fighters generally don’t wear uniforms, and the terrorist groups have positioned their headquarters, bases and facilities in the midst of schools, hospitals and apartment buildings.
The reason why the Islamist fundamentalists’ threat to kill hostages works is that democracies hold themselves to higher moral standards than their enemies do and, correctly, will not retaliate in kind. However often Hamas’s leaders accuse Netanyahu of being a fascist, they know that it would not cross his mind to behave like true fascists did in World War II, when it was German policy to shoot 10 hostages for every German soldier killed by the French Resistance. Other reprisals included razing entire villages, such as Oradour in France and Lidice in Czechoslovakia. Democracies fight with a higher moral code.
The Hamas attack is a reminder that the era of terrorism is not over. The U.S. may now be less interested in Islamist extremists than in China and Russia, but that does not mean the Islamist extremists have lost interest in us. Their lust for blood is undiminished. As soon as they have an opening, they will strike. As we saw with Islamic State following the final withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq in late 2011, when military focus and pressure are removed, extremist elements can reconstitute. The attack from Gaza is as much a warning for Americans, Europeans and Indians as it is for Israelis.
The varied methods of attack used by Hamas also show that warfare is always evolving in ways that are hard to predict. In an era when militaries are focused on high-tech AI and robotic weapons, Hamas scored a success using motorized hang-gliders, windsurfers, golf carts, powerboats, bulldozers and motorbikes, as well as drones that knocked out cell towers critical to Israel’s sophisticated surveillance systems.
Those who argue that the present situation might be resolved peacefully have failed to appreciate that Hamas is so powerful precisely because it is an irrational death cult whose agenda is entirely different from other organizations. A terror group that has the killing of as many Jews as possible built into its DNA is exceedingly difficult to negotiate with, except in short-term parleys to arrange specific deals. Even the Taliban seem masters of reason and logic by comparison.
The current calls for Israel to observe the laws of war in responding to Hamas are appropriate and must be heeded. But restraint will be exceedingly difficult as Israel seeks not just to punish the present attack but to change the dynamics on the ground and deter future attacks.
Sending ground forces into Gaza to destroy Hamas bases and capture or kill the group’s fighters, as Israel has every right to do, will inevitably result in substantial Palestinian civilian casualties. There are likely to be serious Israeli losses as well. The difficulties of the military operation ahead cannot be overstated.
But however enormous the challenge, Israel must maintain its long-standing commitment to its ethical code of the “purity of arms,” while also making clear that it is fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, not the Palestinian people. As U.S. and coalition forces learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, operations need to be scrutinized carefully during the planning phase to ensure that they will not create more enemies because of how the war is conducted.
Moreover, as major urban combat operations begin, the residents of Gaza—and the West Bank too—need and deserve a way forward. They must be told not only what Israel’s military objectives are but what sort of future they and their children can expect after the war. As the U.S. was reminded in the wake of capturing Baghdad and toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein, considerable thought and planning need to be devoted to the post-conflict phase, not just to combat operations.
To that end, Israel must have a plan for what to do if it decides to occupy the Gaza Strip for months or even years, as it did up until 2005. When the several-day battle for Najaf, Iraq, was complete on April 3, 2004, I (Gen. Petraeus) radioed my boss, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, that I had good news and bad news. “The good news,” I reported, “is that we own Najaf.” “What’s the bad news?” he asked. “The bad news,” I responded, “is that we own Najaf. What do you want us to do with it?”
Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Army (ret.), commanded the surge in Iraq, U.S. Central Command and NATO/U.S. forces in Afghanistan before serving as director of the CIA. Andrew Roberts is the author of 20 books, including “Churchill: Walking with Destiny,” and is a member of the House of Lords. Their new book, “Conflict: The Evolution of War from 1945 to Ukraine,” will be published on Oct. 17 by HarperCollins (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp).