The_Capt

Well yes. We are basically talking Defensive supremacy at its full expression. If the RA can marshal and project hundreds of strike tac UAS capable of penetrations of 10s of km. And the UA is doing the same...well this thing is essentially frozen no matter how much hardware we throw at the problem. Ukrainian president and CHOD have admitted that we are at stalemate/positional warfare but no one has really articulated "why?" With that density of UAS, no force on earth could break this right now. I am not even sure the US could handle this if someone introduces full autonomy into the equation, even if it was for the last 1000ms. Short of strikes at Russian supply chains, there isn't much room to manoeuvre here.

I knew that the RA had drones and were doing strikes but no one has really articulated "en masse". Anyone have some reliable stats on this? I mean stream of individual strikes are interesting but I would be interested to see some statistics. This would go a long way to explaining why the UA cannot concentrate for mechanized assaults.

That is particularly disconcerting. One thing the Russian military knows is firepower. Not sophisticated or precise, just massed firepower. If they can translate that doctrine into sustained massive waves of tac UAS, then we have a far more serious problem. I also suspect the RA will be pushing hard for fully autonomous systems. Current EW technology does little for that.

True, but even the use of a civilian occupied building, religious or medical site for military purposes is technically also a war crime. But you make a solid point. At what point do Palestinian fighters stop being Hamas and just locals trying to defend themselves? We could see this thing morph into a general resistance, much like we saw in Iraq in '03. At that point one is biting off a complex CT/COIN operation which we lived through twice in the last 20 years and neither worked out very well. Complex situations like that are just ticking time bombs for a civilian massacre as soldiers tend to get pretty jumpy. So while I have no doubt that Hamas does employ human shields, we are really at a point where that is very hard to determine who is a shield and who is engaged in the universal human right of self-defence. Further, I seriously doubt Israel is being that judicial on targeting based on the levels and rates of destruction being applied. This looks a lot more like - "take a few shots from a building = level the building with a JDAMs" but all the evidence is being held by Israel and the US at the moment.

Just to follow up a bit on a very good post. They also use fundamentally different strategies. Guerrilla warfare normally employs a strategy of exhaustion. They will attrit an opponent over time until the opponent becomes tired. A Death of a Thousand cuts. Then once the opponent begins to weaken they actually tend to switch to more conventional approaches to defeat decisively. Terrorism employs a strategy of intimidation (and possibly subversion). They employ a strategy designed to intimidate an opponent into action, while at the same time very often looking to exploit political or social divisions within a society. Those are two fundamentally different “Hows”. They require different Means mechanisms as well. They may even share the same Ends, but they come at them from very different directions. One area they do have in common is with respect to Decision. Both employ negative decision pressure. Guerrilla warfare aims to project null decisions - to make undecided over time. While Terrorism aims to project anti-decision - to undecided that which we though was decided, this induces tremendous uncertainty in the form of “terror” to trigger a political reaction. Both guerrilla warfare and terrorism may employ the other ways but we are talking primacy of approach not absolutes. Each approach to decision spaces fits their over all Ways. So Hamas employed a strategy of intimidation that projected anti-decision upon Israel in order to 1) get an overreaction, which we are seeing and 2) exploit regional - now global, divisions on entire issue. Hamas has not demonstrated any real guerrilla warfare strategy, they simply are not setup for a 10 year war in Gaza to slowly make Israel and the US walk away in frustration. They are employing some elements of guerrilla warfare but still are acting like terrorist (eg hostages, use of civilian shields etc) to further their overall strategy.

Not interested in the gore but RA tactical capabilities are important. If we don’t keep an eye on both side of this was we simply become a skewed echo chamber. If the RA is using UAS en masse, to the point that they are essentially replacing artillery, then this war is shifting. If Russia can begin to employ corrosive warfare on Ukraine then it is possible for them to shoot for operational offensive actions. For that I don’t need to see RA video streams because we will definitely see a major RA operational success on mainstream. But to understand why it may happen is a different story. I get that video after video of RA soldiers and vehicles feels good. But if the RA is increasing ISR/Unmanned/PGM capabilities then we need to know about it.

I swear to god we have had the same conversation before. Different location, but same analysis. Maybe it is just me.

Ya, no doubt doctored. Of course if that was an RA UAS then that HIMARs was still too close for my comfort. One of the limiting factors in this war is the range of tac UAS (well most of them). HIMARs were not designed to be in tac ISR range. Unless the video was shot from another platform. This is no doubt the most filmed war in history but a lot of it is either skewed or incoherent.

Am I the only one who is getting a weird sense of Deja vu?

Possibly but 1/3 max range of the ER is 50 kms, that is well back from RA CB. If one has a target that the HIMARs need to come within 10kms of the front line so it could get range it would have to be a very high value target. And to do it in daylight is even riskier. Whole point of HIMARs is that they put range artillery systems. Now if this was Feb 23 the Russian artillery had not been fully mauled. The speed of that CB is hard to tell but it was likely in minutes. Ukraine needs to continue to have a layered deep strike system linked into an integrated C4ISR system. They lose that and Zalaban nightmares do become possible.

Video kinda makes me nervous instead of confident. RA should not be capable of rapid CB fires at this point due to attrition. And what in the sweet seven hells is a HIMAR doing within range of CB in the first place?! GMLRS has a min range of 70kms and should be well back. I am pretty sure US has supplied the ER versions at 150kms…so what is that system doing 10-15 kms from the front? I am sure the editors had something else in mind but that video is not really good news story.

Just what China and Russia wanted. Now what comes nexts gets to splash ol Uncle Sam too. The US may have just voted to keep warcrimes going - pending investigations etc. Which technically may make the US complicit in the commission of these crimes. Of course Putin did the same thing. But that was the entire point of the resolution. The narrative will be “Oh when Russia does it we have a warcrime. When the US does it, we have collateral damage.” Yeesh what a mess.

Or a learning disability. True story (put your helmets on), one of my troops in Bosnia put a round between the guys legs in front of him clearing his weapon…on the first night. He cocked, then took the mag off and fired. No one got hurt but of course he was charged. At his trial the CO asked him to demonstrate that he knew how to clear a weapon. The guy did the exact same thing! - thank god it wasn’t loaded. The kid has some sort of mental block. He ended up getting fined and doing 10 days CB’d and old-school punishment duty. Teenagers and guns, never boring.

Gotta be a little bit skeptical here. So basically the negotiation is for Russia to admit total and complete defeat - not sure that is going to go over. Or face a stronger Ukraine backed by what is looking more and more like a shaky defence industrial and political base within the US and Europe. For Russia there is no “choice” here. I mean, hey cool if you can pull it off but this is not really a strategy. It is more of a political statement and posturing. In fact for Ukraine to be truly “stronger” the focus should be defence industry in Ukraine or Ukrainian owned/controlled. Building a long term Ukrainian defence industry that can shore up this war is far more likely to make Russia think.

No need to tuck tails. It was a solid point/question. This is a highly charged subject. “What does Israel do now?” Well an immediate response was required, no getting past that. But CT/CVEO work when done with precision takes time and resources. So the trick would have been a balancing act between overt high profile strikes to keep the public feeling safe. And a rapid acceleration in a deliberate CT campaign to dig out Hamas from the Palestinian people. Or if one is going to go all full conventional, then demonstrate restraint and precision wherever you can. If terrorist go into a building…raid the building by hand, don’t drop a JDAMs on it. There are munitions and systems that can kill with much less collateral. It will be slower and you will take casualties but you may avoid the pitfalls of the situation they are stuck in. One must have an air of righteousness even if the war itself is dirty. Beyond that, I honestly think Israel was screwed the second the attack came off. Arming everyone in the communities around the Gaza Strip (eg local militias). Making each home a fortress Afghan style. Redundant manning along the fence line with ready forces. It all costs, but compared to where they are now it would have been a pittance. I do not for a second blame Israel for the 7 Oct attacks - that is a narrative being picked up by some. Nothing Israel had done with respect to Gaza deserved the horror stories coming out of that. There may have been a political solution to the Palestinian Problem but that is over now. Israel is off the hook and losing control of the larger strategic narratives. It is in effect risking doing more damage to itself than Hamas ever could. The real answer would be to get the Palestinian people to reject Hamas itself - I am no expert on what that would look like. But now that ship has sailed. My sense is that Israel needs to define an endstate in this war that does not look like 2 million Palestinians being driven into the desert to die.

Who on earth is claiming what Hamas did was not a terrorist action?! It absolutely was, meeting just about every version of the definition out there. Why they conducted the attacks as part of a larger strategy is the point of discussion. To my mind it looks more and more like they did so to induce the Israeli response we are currently seeing. A suicidal action at its core to achieve larger strategic objectives. The most primary is the isolation of the state of Israel - regionally is low hanging fruit, globally is a possibility. I do not think Hamas "knew" the IDF would commit war crimes, but it was very likely in the calculus. In the end it does not matter. No where in international law - the governing legal framework for warfare in almost every state, including Israel- is there room for "stepping off the bus". A nation will not and cannot be given license to commit war crimes just because the other side "does it". In fact, legally, I am not even sure Hamas can be held accountable for "war crimes" as no state of war existed between the two parties and Hamas is a non-state organization. As a terrorist group they fall under criminality under most frameworks, which entitles Israel to pursuit and prosecution, not full scale war. That all said, given the size and capability of Hamas, we are in an ISIL situation where conventional warfare can be applied; however, it must follow the LOAC. The warcrime in question here, with respect to Israel is not even the broad civilian casualties - they may even be able to justify all of these targets (I doubt it, but "innocent until proven guilty" etc). The war crime in question here is the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, well beyond what would reasonably be needed to pursue and engage Hamas. As has been noted more buildings have been destroyed than the high-water mark estimates of actual Hamas forces. More simply there could have been a single Hamas fighter in every building targeted and, depending on which estimate employed, would have killed Hamas twice over already. The crime here is essentially making Gaza uninhabitable. This (according to the UN) crosses the line to ethnic cleansing. Palestinians won't be going back to large areas of Gaza because humans can no longer live there in numbers, because all of the human supporting infrastructure has been destroyed. Israel can hand out fuel, food and diapers all day long but until someone turns the power, water and internet back on, 2 million people cannot really live there. Making that happen is a war crime by international law definitions. Israel will have to make one helluva case to prove these actions were 1) required and 2) proportional under the LOAC. More bluntly put...these actions look and feel unrighteous but full judgement will have to await investigation. As to "What could Israel do strategically?" Good lord that is a loaded question. I am not even going to touch the political (2 state) options. All I can say is that with respect to Defence and Security, this failure is catastrophic on a historic scale. The IDF and Israeli security forces are some of the best in the world within their region. They very likely had assets in Gaza, within Hamas itself - no self-respecting intelligence service would not. They had all the ISR pointed at Gaza. They owned the fence-line on the buffer zone. They owned the communities that were attacked. This attack, on this scale and low level of sophistication should not have been possible. So "what could Israel do?" Well not get complacent and leave holes Hamas could literally drive a battalion through while ignoring intelligence signals. They could ensure that a clear and present threat to their nation and people was not lost sight of. The after action on Oct 7th is going to get bloody and likely cost a lot of people their jobs and legacies. As to the rest of the "Palestinian problem", I am sure books will be written about this for years. The only thing I will say is that Israel had exactly one job with respect to that problem...do not let what is happening now, happen. Do not put yourself in a position where the only way to re-establish security of Israel is dependent upon the removal of all Palestinians. It puts you in dilemma spaces from hell, and carries a very real risk of Israel being accused of genocide - and we all see the absolute tragic irony. I am not sure what it will take for the US to withdraw support. The US appears mostly interested in keeping this thing in a box and widening into a full-on Arab Israeli war. What I am surprised has not happened is a UNSC resolution for an international intervention into the region, backed by China and Russia. This would put the US in a position where they will have to veto that resolution...essentially ensuring the sh#t sprays on them as well. Are we having fun yet?

Those are some powerful stats. The targeting categories are suspect. #s 1 and 2 would constitute legitimate military targets. "Power targets" really do not have a legal definition. A nation can strike another nations infrastructure so long as a solid case can be made that the infrastructure is directly supporting the enemy war effort - so stuff like electric power generation, rail/road and even financial institutions. However, such targeting will also come under scrutiny for proportionality and collateral damage. How much human suffering and loss of life is an integral component of any infrastructure targeting process. "High rises and residential" building are right off the list unless one can literally show that the enemy is dug into them as a defensive position (i.e. in an Urban Warfare scenario). Even then targeting them is a tricky business. The other issue is that Gaza and Hamas are not technically a state (kinda part of the issue). So applying state based conventional warfare metrics to a non-state terror/insurgent/guerilla organization is also trickier with respect to targeting. Everyone remembers the US drone strikes all over the Middle East, those took a lot of targeting effort and higher level authorities...and even then we still had major errors that blewback. As to ISR/Targeting (ISTAR was an older term), in order to sustain those sorts of engagement rates the IDF has decentralized their targeting complex. Authorities are likely being held at tactical levels. What ROEs those tactical commanders have been given will be critical in the post-analysis. We likely have Bn commanders with their own ISR feeds making the call for operational level strikes. This is not necessarily bad but it is an approach normally used in a large conventional war such as Ukraine. It accelerates the projection of fires to really high levels, normally needed to overwhelm a conventional opponent. The rub here being that Hamas is already operationally overwhelmed. It once again raises the specter of war criminality if an ISR/TA process was put in place without adequate controls in place that fit the context of the situation.

And the UN is openly calling it such: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-destroying-civilian-housing-and-infrastructure-international-crime#:~:text=“Carrying out hostilities with the,the right to adequate housing.

Follow up to discussion yesterday: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67565872 I am not sure that the LOAC says about deliberately making an area uninhabitable. Edit: The answer is “yes” https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml For the purpose of this Statute, ‘war crimes’ means: Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, namely, any of the following acts against persons or property protected under the provisions of the relevant Geneva Convention: -Wilful killing -Torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments; -Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health; -Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; -Compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power; -Wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial; -Unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement; -Taking of hostages.

It is a possibility but I think it a lower one. Hostage taking is actually a pretty complex operation to do it right. At this scale we are talking crazy, so sending amateurs and then things getting out of hand is not totally out of the question. But, the killing appeared pretty systemic. House by house and deliberate. This is not a sign of “getting out of hand” but pre-planned. Further if the objective was to take a lot of hostages, where was the logistical support? Trucks, buses, medical staff etc? I saw people dumped on stolen trucks and freakin golf carts. A massive sweep up also takes planning/support and I have not seen elements needed onto do it. The level of brutality also speaks to deliberate. When troops fall apart you see a spectrum of behaviour. I have not seen a single video of Hamas commanders trying to restrain their troops. If Hamas sees this thing coming back at them, you get it out quickly. Finally, has Hamas ever demonstrated that sort of level of sophistication? I mean to do a large scale scoop? So “could be” but it really looked like a major terror attack from what a could see. If so Hamas can count. They may have upwards of 40k forces - all pretty lightly armed. Against an IDF of what? 400k. Fully equipped with western support? It was pretty obvious how this was going to go down. If it was a whoopsie, it makes Putin’s look minor by comparison.

That is my sense as well. It is not carpet bombing but the effect is the same. A strategy could be to do so much infra damage as to make the area effectively uninhabitable. The cost of reconstruction for these urban areas is going to be enormous and Israel is definitely not going to do it. The psychology of suicide actions is fascinating, and I believe entirely human. There are arguments that whales and some other species do it but these look more accidental than deliberate (post here please if you know of an example in the animal world). Suicide is of course an extreme irrationality when done outside of mental health or dilemma crisis (eg people who jump from burning buildings). Suicide bombers have no possible way of benefiting from the action or even knowing if it really is going to be successful. What they do have is fiction frameworks. Humans can make stuff up and believe it so hard that we are able to effectively “remember the future”. So a suicide bomber believes in an afterlife or believes that it will somehow achieve something from which they will benefit. Failing that they believe that who they leave behind will benefit. Now for an individual or small groups these actions are still manageable. But for an entire state to effectively commit suicide is rare. A lot of states will do “hopeless” or “slightly less than zero chances” because we can convince ourselves of things through a drug called “hope”. But what is happening in reaction to Oct 7th was almost a certainty, Hamas knew they and Gaza itself was dead once they attacked. But they were willing to believe so hard, hate so hard that somehow this action would make things better…even if they would never see it. You cannot really negotiate with that. Israel has taken the gloves off and this looks more like a ghetto cleaning everyday. As I said wars come in arguably 5 basic strategies: intimidation, subversion, annihilation, exhaustion and extermination. That last one is a blast from the past - Genghis type stuff. Without being inside the IDF command loop and seeing what the plan actually is, it is very hard to make a full determination. But the results do point to an ethnic cleaning or at least give rise to it being a possibility. Next question will be whether it was deliberate or simply was self-defence that “got out of hand”? Either way, Israel’s high ground is slipping away as we watch Palestinian children being killed daily. I honestly don’t think they care about “narratives” at this point but they do need to start thinking about how they plan to live in this world afterwards. Right now they are making Assad look rational, which is pretty nuts.

I think it is kinda central to the war actually. The term Violent Extremist has gotten traction but it is not well defined either. Insurgents for example can be labeled as VEOs while not actually engaging what we consider terrorism. Key components of terrorism from a legal perspective appear to be cause, effect and how. Cause is political, religious or ethnic. It is collective, not individual (eg he slept with my wife) cause. This means there are larger objectives and certainties at play. One could argue it is all political but perhaps that is too narrow. Effect - terror, intimidation. There is not discerning of the target audience in this. So political elites of Persia or peasants it does not really matter. If one is trying to terrorize for collective cause towards a larger objective, one is in the wheelhouse of terrorism. How - illegal violence. So lawful warfare is not terrorism even though it can definitely terrorize. In fact intimidation of a population is core to warfare, even if it is indirect. Unlawful violence, so assassinations to car bombings, is a framework that encompasses the legality of the violence (the act) and the intended target. So Taliban IED attacks on coalition troops were not legally terrorism. In fact anyone in uniform could be considered a lawful target. Attacking civilians is of course a different story. You can go and look at all sorts of legitimate national legal definitions and they pretty much all have components of this. I say “legitimate” because oppressive states will make all sorts of things illegal and define them as “terrorism”. So what? Well Hamas clearly conduct terrorism before during and after Oct 7th. They continue to break the LOAC to this day. The use of civilians as cover for military operations is a big no-no. As such Hamas can and should be eliminated as a political entity. Some countries would see Hamas as a criminal organization and this whole thing as one big security operation. But I think based on scope, scale and open political declarations this has moved into war. Within the context of a war the IDF is skirting lines here and the international community is getting uncomfortable. The major issue appears to be proportionality. It is a violation of the LOAC to employ over-kill particularly if it causes undue or reckless civilian casualties. I have seen more than enough videos of IDF dropping JDAMs into buildings to kill a “Hamas Leader” to raise an eyebrow over proportionality. LOAC also does not give license to throwing out the rule book because the other guy has. In fact Israel has opened itself up to state-based terror charges in all this. If proven unlawful in violence then the next question will be if that unlawful use was designed to use terror to get the Palestinian people to do X. That is a slippery slope. It will ask questions like “what did the IDF do to remove emotionally compromised soldiers and commanders from the kill chains?” “What were the ROE and collateral damage templates? “ Does this thing stop being viewed as a military operation against a terror organization and move to an ethnic cleansing? Note that I am not proposing or promoting either position. I only raise it because it is definitely becoming a strategic consideration. In the end terrorism is all about induction - giving rise to. It is designed to 1) be high profile and widely seen, dramatic, 2) induce fear - in the name and 3) induce broader reactions from that fear. The reaction Hamas was looking for here was likely (and I say likely because I do not think we really know yet) to induce Israel into a heavy handed response that would ensure its continued regional isolation. There may have been other undertones that may come out over time but the big one it so ensure Israel-Arab reconciliation does not happen on a meaningful level. Hamas vehemently opposes this as it would in effect leave them entirely isolation (even more so than they already are) and in a greatly weakened position with respect to external support. Insanely enough they appear to have adopted a “winning-by-losing” strategy. And frankly given the shifting political narratives, they may be pulling it off. It has happened before but it is rare - Hamas/Gaza may have just done a suicide-state action.

Assassins. Carved a pseudo-state out of the Persia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Assassins Interestingly terrorism did not start out as random attacks on civilians. It started as directed political assassinations (or at least within recorded history). Hamas is arguably achieve a tangible political objective right now - sever any rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world. While at the same time damaging Israel’s political narrative. In fact terrorism does often work to a degree, particularly when it is designed to induce change. OBL wanted US in a land war in Asia…and he got two of them. ISIL wanted Armageddon, and they got a version of it. AQ wanted Spain out of Iraq and pulled it off. Problem with terrorism is achieving longer term strategic results.

Intent versus letter. Puts Caribbean nations in a weird spot too.

They also actually have coastline on the North Atlantic. Nice place actually spent 6 weeks there once. Not sure why they would suddenly want to start lobbing HIMARs at Spain but who has more fun than people?