General David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts, co-authors of the new book Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, discuss how they believe this war will evolve, how it compares to other conflicts of the last seven and a half decades, and what we can learn from the mistakes made during those wars.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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As Israel continues to respond to the attack carried out by Hamas I’ve been thinking about another war that might serve as something of a cautionary tale.
In April 2003, during the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, David Petraeus was a two star general, commander of the 101st Airborne Division. He was ordered to take Najaf, a city of about 500,000 people, famous for its gold-domed mosque. There had been several days of tough fighting against the Fedayeen — the Iraqi paramilitary group loyal to Saddam Hussein that carried out guerilla style attacks on the U.S.-led coalition forces.
David Petraeus: We were ordered to secure the city of Najaf, take the city of Najaf, and several days of tough fighting — all three of our brigades, each of which has about 3,500 troops, lots of attack helicopters, air support, everything, all being employed. My boss had come to watch the kickoff of the operation. I remember standing on the hoods of Humvees, actually, next to each other with binoculars, watching as the first soldier was exposed to the enemy and so on. Several days later, the fight is over. The enemy has collapsed, uh, disappeared. We take control of the city. And I get on the radio and I call him and say, ‘Hey boss, I've got good news and bad news. Uh, the good news is that we own Najaf.’ He asked, ‘What's the bad news?’ I replied, ‘We own Najaf. What do you want us to do with it?’
As General Petraeus describes it there was no real plan in place for what was supposed to happen after they took Najaf. They'd assumed the local Iraqi civil servants — government workers, bureaucrats and even the police would stick around.
But that's not what happened. So Petraeus was forced to leave an entire brigade combat team of about 3,500 troops to oversee the city and keep it secure. It was an important lesson about why policymakers need a good plan for the day after the guns fall silent.
David Petraeus: So I hope that some weeks, months down the road, there's not a call that's made, ‘Hey boss, I got good news and bad news. We own Gaza, what do you want us to do with it?’ There has to be a plan for the day after. I know everyone is keenly aware of that. The intensity of trying to resolve that is growing. You can now read in every journal and major newspaper articles that are… raising that issue and in some cases providing possible solutions to it or at least options. And I think it's really incumbent on Prime Minister Netanyahu not just to announce the intent to destroy Hamas, but also a vision for the future of Gaza, for the Palestinian people in Gaza, and while he's at it a vision for the Palestinians in the West Bank as well.
Petraeus has been thinking a lot about conflicts and wars like the one Israel recently declared against Hamas. He and Lord Andrew Roberts, an eminent historian of war, have written a new book called Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.
Andrew Roberts: This is not a comprehensive history of every war since 1945. It's a investigation into the way in which warfare has changed, how it's evolved. The line about only the dead have seen the end of war is, I'm afraid, a very accurate one.
The book examines the key military conflicts over the past seven and a half decades. It was published as the fighting between Hamas and Israel entered its second week.
David Petraeus: Andrew and I have gone back through all these episodes that we recount from 1945 until now, and we can't envision a more challenging context for a military commander and soldiers than this one.
This war and the terrorist attacks that preceded it has shattered some long-held assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — that somehow Israel could simply contain Hamas through its superior military and intelligence..
ARCHIVAL Pundit 1: This was an intelligence failure. This was a military failure. This was a planning failure.
ARCHIVAL John Brennan: Clearly the Israelis, didn't have the either human or technical sources that gave them insight into this. Uh, this clearly was a failure of, uh, epic proportions.
ARCHIVAL Pundit 2: A catastrophic failure of intelligence for the Israelis, the likes of which haven't been seen since the Yom Kippur War.
So I sat down with Petraeus and Roberts to find out how they imagine this war might evolve, and how it compares to other conflicts fought since 1945 and what we can learn from the mistakes of the past.
I'm Peter Bergen, This is In The Room.
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One of the key ideas Petraeus and Roberts lay out in their book is about the role of the leader in a conflict, what they call the strategic leader. This is usually the civilian leader, like the prime minister or president and the military commander.
In order to succeed and achieve the outcome they want, these leaders need to get the big ideas right and then, they need to know how to communicate them, and not just on the battlefield.
David Petraeus: So you got to get the overarching strategy right. You have to communicate the big ideas effectively throughout the breadth and depth of the organization that the strategic leader is leading — whether it's a country or a military force or allies, coalition, really uh everyone who has a stake in the outcome of a conflict. You have to oversee the implementation of the big ideas. That's what we normally think of as leadership, actually. It is how the leader spends his time. This is very, very important because you drive the execution of a campaign plan through myriad meetings and, and visits to the troops and trips back home. And then a fourth task, which is to determine how the big ideas, the strategy need to be refined, changed, adapted so that you can repeat the process again and again. And the performance of these tasks really determines, in many cases, the possibility of success or can foreclose that as well if they're not sound.
Peter Bergen: By the standards that you just laid out, how would you rate Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu so far?
David Petraeus: Well needless to say, it's an incomplete so far.
Peter Bergen: Yeah.
David Petraeus: But, but in particular… if the big idea right now is: destroy Hamas — that means rendering the enemy incapable of accomplishing his mission without reconstitution. As s a military commander, that means not just a lot of, uh, as precise as possible, airstrikes and indirect fire, but at some point you have to go in on the ground, clear every building, every floor, every room, every basement, every tunnel, and it's an extensive tunnel system, of an enemy who knows this better than the back of his hand, who has shown a willingness to blow himself up to take Israeli soldiers with him, improvised explosive devices, diabolically terrible, clever booby traps, uh. And by the way, you not only have to clear every building like that, you have to then retain it by leaving a substantial force behind, one that's large enough that it can't be swarmed by the enemy and added as hostages to the over 200 hostages that have already been taken. And of course, this will all be done in a densely populated area, even with hundreds of thousands having left, uh, Gaza City and northern Gaza. And, of course, these hostages that will be used as human shields.
Peter Bergen: It seems to me as a non-practitioner that two of the goals are incompatible: destroy completely Hamas, and rescue the hostages.
David Petraeus: Well, and then beyond that, 'cause I should have continued. What's incomplete is the lack of the big idea about how to administer Gaza. And again, not just handing out humanitarian assistance and rebuilding and reestablishing markets and schools and so forth, but also, continuing a counterinsurgency campaign to ensure that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad can't come back. … And then a vision for the Palestinian people that really should be part of this as well. During the surge in Iraq, we sought to convince the Iraqi people that life will be better if they support us in the elimination.
David Petraeus: And we had to clear and hold huge cities as well — nothing as big as Gaza — but hundreds of thousands of people in Ramadi, Fallujah, Baqubah, eventually Mosul, Samarra, parts of Baghdad, et cetera. We have some significant experience with this. But then we had a plan for what would follow. Uh, and it was that we would control it for a period. We would gradually build up, uh, Iraqi security forces. We would reconcile with some of the insurgents, as many as we could, that were rank and file, that just were in the wrong place tacitly or actively supporting al-Qaeda. But, but then we had to go after the irreconcilable leaders, and these are the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq — the major Sunni insurgent organizations. And over time also, the Iranian supported Shia militia, they were irreconcilable and they have to be captured or killed. This is very similar to what Israel's going to do, but this is a much more challenging enemy, in a much more complex situation,
Andrew Roberts: And it's also worth pointing out, of course, that you've got to do all of this in a situation where you don't know what Iran's going to do next. You don't know what Hezbollah's going to do next… the West Bank… constitute a number of fronts that, uh, could open up at, at any moment.
Peter Bergen: You know, Mosul seems like a pretty interesting analog, a city of two million people that ISIS took over, had plenty of time to dig in, multiple car bombs, people willing to fight to the death. It took about a year, more or less, but from planning…
David Petraeus: Nine…certainly over nine months.
Peter Bergen: Over nine months.
David Petraeus: Longer if you just take the planning, the positioning, and setting the conditions, right. But yes, there was enormous damage And that's with, again, considerable American — what we call advise, assist, and enable. The enabling being lots of drones, precision munitions. We'd have an American officer in an Iraqi command post, you know, at every level, literally watching the same screen, uh, watching our feed so that they could make decisions together. They could call on American air power, precision ground surface to surface, uh, munitions, and so forth.
Peter Bergen: It still took nine months
David Petraeus: Still, exactly right.
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Peter Bergen: You were CENTCOM commander. Your area of operation included all the countries that are, that are around Israel, pretty much, in terms of, you know we're seeing the Houthis, there was in Yemen, who are obviously backed by Iran…
David Petraeus: Iranians supported, yes.
Peter Bergen: …shooting missiles off were intercepted by a U.S. ship. We saw drones going towards U.S. military bases in Iraq. The Iranians have a presence in Syria. Hezbollah in Lebanon. So when you look at all that, what do you think?
David Petraeus: Enormously challenging and it could, could get worse. There could be regionalization of the war in a way that would be very, very serious. You can assess that I don't think, again, Hezbollah wants to revisit 2006 and the enormous damage and destruction inflicted on them by Israel in the wake of their incursion into Israel. But Iran may push them that way, public sentiment, or at least the Lebanese Hezbollah area sentiment. It's an Iranian-supported Shia militia,on steroids.
Peter Bergen: Yeah.
David Petraeus: Because it's, it approaches almost… you know, 150,000 rockets is not a little militia force. This is a very considerable, very substantial street muscle force that has enormous capabilities.
Andrew Roberts: Well, and also, if they're all fired off at the same time and Iron Dome is overcome, they also have some precision rockets as well, don't they? So,
David Petraeus: Longer range too.
Andrew Roberts: Yeah, yeah. So they can hit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Peter Bergen: Would pressure on Hezbollah mount as the weeks goes on, months, more pictures like that,
David Petraeus: Sure, sure.
Peter Bergen: to do something?
David Petraeus: So Fridays will become more challenging, uh, in these different countries. This is often a challenge in Iraq if there was some issue that arose that, that also aroused the people and then tragically it would often be amplified by the mullahs of different mosques and so forth.
Peter Bergen: There are a couple of big themes in your book that I want to draw out. Robert Gates, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, apparently kept a maxim on his desk, which said — I'm going to paraphrase — the way to achieve complete strategic surprise is to do something possibly self-defeating or even stupid. [PETRAEUS LAUGHS] So your book…you know, you say “surprise attacks are surprisingly common.” So let's talk about that, and I found it fascinating that you said, you know, that dictatorships and terrorist groups are much likelier to engage in this because democracies have to build consensus and, you know, they can't just launch a war without sort of political support of their own people.
Andrew Roberts: Yes that’s right, it tends to be authoritarian or totalitarian powers that launch these surprise attacks. Attacks like the, uh, beginning of the Korean War. Then you also obviously have 9/11. You have the Falklands. You have the Yom Kippur War. They happen again and again and again. But what we discovered again and again — and which I think by the way will also be the case here with the Gazan situation — is that the response of the country that's been attacked is all the more outraged for having been the, um, the victim of a surprise attack. Look at America after Pearl Harbor. There was a sort of righteous fury that grabbed the nation and held it for four years until that was, um, finally vindicated.
David Petraeus: Same after 9/11, of course. Now interestingly, President Biden, in addition to expressing his big idea for Israel, and America's big idea, which is to have their back also, though, offered a slight caution about what followed 9/11, acknowledging that we didn't get everything right, uh that the quest for vengeance can lead you to take actions that in some respects you might look back and say, ‘Hey, you know, we'd like to have a redo of this or that.’
Andrew Roberts: Well, partly I think it's because, especially in response to surprise attacks, you know, it's very difficult to promote a compromise solution to anything if you've just been attacked, let alone attacked in this medieval and sadistic way that uh, Hamas has attacked in southern Israel. So to get into the sort of frame of mind where you are offering something requires an extraordinary degree of statesmanship that is often not present when you're the victim of a surprise attack.
Another big theme that Petraeus and Roberts draw out in their book is the idea that you must win over the “hearts and minds of the people” involved in the conflict. Without this, a military victory can be pretty meaningless. Roberts says a good example of where this worked was in the British colony of Malaya, now part of Malaysia, where communist, pro-independence insurgents fought a guerilla war against the British.
Andrew Roberts: Malaya is a very good example, the Malayan emergency of 1952 to ‘60. It's a very good example of where the big idea was got right. The commander there, Sir Gerald Templer, offered the Malaysian people their independence pretty much from the beginning. And it really encouraged them to, to have their hearts and minds — that was where the original phrase came from, the Malayan emergency — for hearts and minds in favor of, of putting down this communist insurgency. So you got the local population on side, and that was essential really to… And, independence was given in 1957. I don't know how that would translate into the present Gazan situation, but there has to be something that you can look forward to, that the people on the ground can really look forward to — something positive.
David Petraeus: There has to be a vision. There needs to be a vision for the Palestinian people that life will be much better if Hamas is eliminated and out of your lives and we're able to support you — we now being the international community and those that care about the Palestinians.
Peter Bergen: The Israeli government has little to no credibility with the Palestinians in Gaza, so it's a problem. The Palestinian Authority doesn't have much credibility because they're in the West Bank and they're seen as sort of, in a sense, almost collaborators with Israel by the folks in Gaza.
David Petraeus: Well, and by the folks in the West Bank in many cases as well. The credibility of an Israeli vision and statement about the future for the Palestinians will be doubted at best and so what will have to happen is you have to… generate credibility by what you do. It's not what you say, it is what you do on the ground.
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Peter Bergen: So, you know, yes, Hamas has a lot of advantage on this side of the ledger. What are the advantages on the Israeli side of the ledger? Including morale, potentially.
David Petraeus: I mean, enormous morale. These reserves, when they were called up, they literally drove their own vehicles down to southern Israel.
Andrew Roberts: Lots of them weren't called up, were they? They
David Petraeus: [CROSSTALK] some that actually moved there.
Andrew Roberts: Yeah, Yeah.
David Petraeus: And they have just literally parked their car and left them and reported for duty. I mean, this is quite extraordinary. But that also does raise yet one more challenge. The bulk of this force is reservists. They're not serving professional, if you will, or on active duty. Some will have done considerable recent active duty and perhaps a lot of reserve duty, but by no means all. And I'm sure that there are those in the ranks who are a bit more advanced in age than the sort of typical 19-year-old infantry soldier.So they've got to be brought back in, re-equipped, introduced to the more cutting edge, say night vision goggles. Close combat optics on weapons are very, very important, so that you're going to have precise fire, not just sort of, you know, “spray and pray.” So all of this has to be done as well. You have to, again, reorganize and re-equip and re-train to some degree. At the very least, they've got to get whatever weapon systems they have now, uh, and get really acquainted with that and do drills with this stuff, so that in a very, very quick reaction, uh, that you can identify the bad guy and not shoot the innocent civilian.
Peter Bergen: And of course, reservists are people who've got day jobs in the Israeli economy. If this goes on for a very long time, you have social, political, economic effects inside Israel.
David Petraeus: If you call up 360,000, out of a population that's less than 10 million, obviously that's an enormous, uh, impact on the economy and there will be pressure to squeeze perhaps sooner rather than later because of the imperative of getting on with this.
Israel's armed response has included thousands of airstrikes. Sources in Gaza say those strikes have caused many thousands of civilian deaths. Those civilian casualties — and shortages of vital supplies after Israel moved to restrict water and fuel sent into Gaza — add up to what the UN is calling a humanitarian “catastrophe.”
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ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Desperate scenes across the region of people lining up for water and fuel and other basic supplies.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Over the last 24 hours, the hospital has received over 400 wounded. These 400 have completely overwhelmed an already drowning health system, and we've just run out of almost everything. Yesterday, a lot of the times we had very little electricity.
ARCHIVAL Pundit: The people of Gaza find themselves right now in nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe — not my words: UN officials are ringing those bells saying we are now at the point where hospitals are beginning to collapse.
There have been calls for a ceasefire to allow more humanitarian aid to reach Gaza.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: People in Gaza are desperate for life saving supplies. The UN warning if supplies don't enter faster, the Gaza Strip could see a catastrophic loss of life.
Mass protests have taken place from Jakarta to Tunis, calling for an end to the bombing of Gaza. Some families of the Israeli hostages have argued for the same thing. I asked Petraeus and Roberts whether they could see an alternative to further military intervention in Gaza. … They could not.
David Petraeus: I'm sure that there are voices even in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that are offering that caution. But there will be others who will say if your intent truly is to destroy Hamas — an organization founded on the destruction of Israel and killing of Jews — you can't do that with military restraint. So again, it's a hugely challenging decision without question.
Andrew Roberts: Also, the prime minister of Israel has gone on the record to say that every Hamas, um, soldier is going to die. He put it as bluntly as that, if that's a stated aim of the Israeli government, then this can't be done by drones and from the air. That's something that would lead to a catastrophic loss of integrity of the Israeli government if it made that threat and then didn't carry it out at all.
David Petraeus: Now you may again, note that, understandably, emotions are exceedingly high after such a traumatic, uh, event. Noting, again, that this is the equivalent of the U.S. having lost well over 40,000 innocent civilians, not the nearly 3,000 that we actually lost on 9/11, and remember the calls for vengeance and revenge and so forth then. Now, over time, perhaps there will be… at least more measured rhetoric, but this is the challenge of a strategic leader. He's got to get the big idea right. And if the big idea is to destroy Hamas and dismantle the political wing, you're not going to do that with air power.
At the same time as Israel needs to be looking ahead to how it will prosecute this war and plan for the aftermath, there will undoubtedly also be scrutiny of the weeks and months before the attack, and how it could have gone undetected by Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, or Mossad, its version of the CIA.
Peter Bergen: General Petraeus, you're former director of the CIA. After October 7th, we've heard a lot about intelligence failures. The question is when we get further away from this, do you suspect that it will be mostly a policy failure, misunderstanding Hamas's aims, having kind of a too rosy view, ignoring intelligence that was useful or might have been germane?
David Petraeus: I think this was a real intelligence failure and I think it was also a military readiness failure. And I think that the reasons that will emerge, my speculation is that Hamas dramatically improved its operational security. It began to understand the sources and methods used, in particular by Shin Bet, because this is an internal security issue, not a Mossad. Mossad is external. Gaza and the West Bank are treated as internal.
David Petraeus: Shin Bet normally — extraordinary organization, I loved working with them when I was a CIA director and even stayed in touch beyond. They’re literally upstream normally. They can see what's happening. They can actually get inside the, the heads of potential attackers, extremists, whatever and then in many cases, prevent something from happening because of how far upstream they are. In this case, obviously they were not upstream adequately. And I think that Hamas came to understand how Shin Bet has achieved that kind of intelligence and basically got much better in their operational security practices. And then in some cases, I think we'll find that they probably delivered disinformation in those channels that they know, uh, are being monitored. They also, again, when it came to Shin Bet, the focus was increasingly on the West Bank because of the unrest over there, the challenges between Palestinians and settlers.
David Petraeus: You have the added complication that this attack was carried out on Shabbat, on a Saturday, but it was also a special religious observation. A number of soldiers were on leave. And then, I think we'll come to understand better how creative Hamas was in using all kinds of ways to get into Israel. You know, paragliders as well as bulldozers and golf carts. But in advance of that, they blinded the surveillance systems along the wall by taking out the nodes, the communication nodes that connect those... observation systems to command posts that are monitoring those systems. And so there was an over reliance on technology and that technology was blinded at a critical moment. So you put all that together, I think. And, and then there'll be some more. Mossad probably didn't pick up enough of what Iran was doing to enable Hamas to do this, and so forth.
Aside from all the questions about these security and intelligence failures is perhaps an even bigger question. Are military solutions thebest way to resolve conflicts, especially ones that have been going on as long as the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians?
In their book Petraeus and Roberts write about how the United Nations was founded in 1945 in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its founding charter stated that it hoped to quote "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Yet they note that since the UN’s creation there have been hundreds of conflicts.
Andrew Roberts: Yes, it is a dismal record. We call our first chapter the death of the dream of peace.
Peter Bergen: Turns out that getting out of the Middle East is something every American president sort of wants to do, but it never really happens.
David Petraeus: It's the same as getting out of endless wars and it used to grate a bit when I would hear someone say we have ended the war in Iraq or we've ended the war in Afghanistan. We hadn't. We ended our involvement in those wars and as Ambassador Crocker used to say, you know, you can leave the movie theater while the movie is still rolling, but the movie rolls on, um, and those wars tragically rolled on as well. And the outcomes in many respects, particularly obviously in Afghanistan, have been quite tragic, heartbreaking, and I'd submit disastrous.
Andrew Roberts: I think another tragic thing is that the United Nations was founded in an attempt to bolster the rules-based international order, intended to be part of it. And only relatively recently have Russia and China decided that the rules-based international order is, um, in and of itself a bad thing that they want to alter and get rid of. So that too is going to be something that's going to hamper the working of the United Nations.
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A war reporter named Rick Atkinson was embedded with General Petraeus and his division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Atkinson was interviewing the general throughout.Famously, Petraeus turned it around on Atkinson and asked him, “Tell me how this ends.”
David Petraeus: I think it was shortly after the Battle of Najaf when I realized that the assumptions that we'd been provided and on which were based in particular the post conflict planning, were being invalidated one by one.
Peter Bergen: Tell me how this ends, and you're allowed to say ‘no one knows.’
David Petraeus: Well, no, I think the better answer is it depends. It depends on the conduct of this campaign. Are they able to fully clear hold and then start the rebuilding? Uh, are they able to identify in particular a true vision, and announce a true vision for the Palestinian people that actually is inspiring to them. Encouraging to them, let's say. Inspiring might be a bit of a high bar. Can there be a vision for the Palestinians in the West Bank, by the way? Let's use this as a catalyst — this horrible, despicable, unspeakable, uh, set of, uh, barbaric murders to try to have a, a bit of a vision for the future that can prevent the kind of grievances and so forth and also again exterminate the, the other challenges. But then it's also, can you find a force, an organization with a mandate and the resources and leadership that can take this forward? You know, is there a great United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary General in the wings somewhere, who could lead this. But can you even get a UN security council mandate? Will China and Russia support it? It's unknown. So it depends.
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The Roman historian Tacitus famously wrote, “‘where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Again and again we see that those who don't have a real plan for what happens after the fighting is over don’t achieve peace. They simply seed the ground for the next round of conflict.
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If you want to hear more from General David Petraeus and Lord Andrew Roberts about the history — and future — of warfare, their book Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine is available now on Audible.
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