"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 31

Episode 31: Is Israel Prepared for this Ground War?

Three experts on urban and underground warfare explain why the war in Gaza will be long, difficult, and brutal.

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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John Spencer: If your mission is to go into dense urban areas, it's going to take tens of thousands of soldiers. So just by the math of it, it's going to soak up, like a sponge, your entire army.

Liam Collins: When you look at urban battles historically, 90 percent of buildings are damaged or destroyed.

Daphne Richmond-Barak: There's no miracle method for taking out tunnels. It still is, I think, militarily, a quasi-impossible challenge.

This is the scenario Israel is facing with its decision to launch a ground invasion in Gaza.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The IDF has pledged a full air, land, and sea attack on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Israeli forces say that they have encircled Gaza City for what's likely to be a fierce battle with Hamas.

Hamas fighters operate in a dense urban environment and an extensive network of underground tunnels. The airstrikes of the past few weeks can’t alone achieve Israel’s stated goal of destroying Hamas. And so an invasion is underway.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Tanks and troops having encircled Gaza City, one of the most densely populated places on earth and riddled with Hamas tunnels.

If this were just a military proposition, it would be extraordinarily challenging. But there are also some 240 hostages and hundreds of thousands of civilians in the battle zone, and Hamas has had years to dig in, making the situation all the more difficult — and tragic.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: The humanitarian situation in Gaza has become catastrophic.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 5: As many as a million people are on the move, but there are few places to hide, and the bombing never stops.

On today’s show, I’ve turned to three experts on urban and underground warfare who will help explain how conflicts of the past can offer some insight into the combat that lies ahead.

They say the war in Gaza will be long, complicated, and very bloody.

They also give a sobering assessment of Israel’s capabilities, saying the Israeli military is in many ways unprepared for the large-scale urban combat it will likely encounter in Gaza, both above and below ground. This type of operation can take many months because an advanced military like the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, loses many of its advantages when fighting inside a city.

Liam Collins: If you probably asked many of them when the last time, if ever, that they've done any kind of urban training, oftentimes that equates to just room clearing or something like that, but not really thinking about how do you actually take a city. How do you occupy it? What do you bypass? When do you use force? When not to? And they're not as prepared for those kind of things. But then no military in the world is.

I'm Peter Bergen. And this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

If you want to study something of a precedent in modern warfare that can shed some light on what may be in store in Gaza … let’s take a look back at the battle of Mosul against ISIS in Iraq. That battle began in late 2016 as some 100,000 Iraqi forces — aided by U.S. military advisors and American air power — retook Iraq's second-largest city from the terrorist group. The fighting in Mosul against ISIS raged for nine months.

ARCHIVAL 2010s Newscaster: [COMBAT SOUNDS] Urban warfare on a momentous scale. This is the place where IS proclaimed its caliphate. Here it was born, and here Iraqi forces say it will die. [COMBAT SOUNDS]

John Spencer: A lot of the civilians were trapped in there, it's the most recent like-battle that we might see, where you have the same or similar amounts of density of buildings.

That's retired U.S. Army major John Spencer. He spent two combat tours in Iraq and more than two decades as an infantry soldier and officer. Now he's head of Urban Warfare Studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

And he co-wrote the book Understanding Urban Warfare, which includes detailed case studies of nine intense urban battles that have taken place between World War II until the present day.

John Spencer: Mosul is the greatest example because of the enemy. Hamas is very similar to ISIS. The challenge of a defender who's willing to die in the urban terrain. ISIS had two years to build a very complex and from my perspective as an academic, a very well put together defense on the surface and underground, right? So they were able to create massive obstacles over two years and really prepare for somebody trying to attack the city.

John Spencer: Hamas has done that for decades underground, just haven't had that freedom of movement on the surface. So they'll have what I will call a strong point defense. So they'll rely on guerrilla tactics and using the underground to move between these strong points, these strong buildings or fighting positions that they'll try to maneuver around and pull the IDF into the center.

Estimates vary, but it seems around 10,000 civilians were killed during the nine months of fighting in Mosul.

ARCHIVAL 2010s Newscaster 1: The city's been the center of the militants’ power in Iraq. But after months of brutal fighting, often street to street...

ARCHIVAL 2010s Newscaster 2: [GUNFIRE SOUNDS] In Mosul's streets, life or death is decided in the blink of an eye. [GUNFIRE SOUNDS]

There are already more than 10,000 fatalities in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials.

The Battle of Mosul displaced almost half of the city’s nearly 2 million people, it created 10 million tons of rubble, and it left Iraq holding a reconstruction bill totaling around $2 billion.

John Spencer: In Gaza City, though, it's a different type of density where you have, 10, 15 story concrete apartment building blocks, very narrow streets and alleyways - what we call urban canyons. It is a special kind of dense complexity. Plus in Gaza City, there is no empty urban terrain, so even in Gaza, where you have all this density, now you have many portions will be rubbled and continue to be rubbled.

Peter Bergen: What did Mosul look like after nine months of fighting ISIS? What did it do to the city of Mosul?

John Spencer: It sure heck looked like it had been destroyed. And the different UN and other organization numbers from 60 percent to 80 percent, all structures damaged in some way, 40 percent completely destroyed. You can look at an image -

Aerial photographs of Mosul from before and after the battle are pretty easy to find online. In the before pictures, you see a tapestry of streets and buildings in varying shades… as densely patterned as a Persian rug. And in the pictures from after, entire neighborhoods have been reduced to what looks like vast parking lots of pulverized gray. And Spencer thinks we can expect similar images to come out of Gaza.

John Spencer: I think it's very, very, very likely it will look very similar, that you will see it look like they pulverized it on purpose, even though they went building to building, and identified that building as a military target with the enemy in it. This is the nature of modern urban warfare.

Peter Bergen: The Israeli defense forces have a pretty good reputation when it comes to counterterrorism operations. But what we're seeing unfolding in Gaza is clearly, urban warfare at a pretty large scale. Is this something they have a lot of experience with?

John Spencer: Despite Israel's status as a world-class urban fighting capability, this will be the biggest challenge they've fought in a generation. To fight in Gaza, in the cities of Gaza will put any military to the test. It will put Israel's military to the greatest test just because of understanding the hell that is this type of urban warfare.

Peter Bergen: What's the difference in scale between other Israeli operations over the past decade and a half that have been in Gaza either with airstrikes or limited ground incursions. What's the scale of magnitude different between what is likely to unfold here and those previous operations?

John Spencer: Vastly different. . I don't want to say definitively, but I'm pretty sure the IDF has never, I mean, they've of course, mobilized to the scale right in the Six-Day War, in the Yom Kippur War, but they've never mobilized at the scale of combined arms in a compacted area of dense urban terrain like this. And to be frank, not many militaries of the world have, right? So even the U.S. military, it's been a long time, really, since World War II, where we would send this many forces directly into urban terrain. Even if you look at the invasion of Iraq in 2003, what gets pushed into Baghdad is a, you know, a single brigade.

Peter Bergen: Which is about 3,000?

John Spencer: Ours are 4,000 to 4,500. Yeah.

Peter Bergen: So, I'm going to make the assumption that Israeli defense forces are a pretty advanced military, relatively speaking. What advantages do they lose when they're fighting in an environment like Gaza City?

John Spencer: Western militaries are designed to destroy other militaries, not so much move forward and seize complex terrain. There's a lot of military theory there on what the goal of a military is. Destroy the other military or, you know, like take a capital city, seize it, defend it, things like that. All of the IDF's advantages in some way are reduced, not taken away, in the dense urban terrain. You start to lose your ability to strike and see the enemy far away because either he can be inside of a concrete building you can't see or be underground in a tunnel that they've built. All of their weapons capabilities are reduced.

John Spencer: Even a bunker buster, all the direct fire weapons, the tanks, everything, the weapons effects on the enemy inside of a concrete building or a bunker or a tunnel get reduced. In an urban environment where the narrow streets constrain you to a single road, a single block, alleyway. Splits up your forces from that giant division down to a single platoon fighting at the very pinprick of your operation. They call urban terrain the great equalizer, but it's the great reducer in my mind.

Peter Bergen: Reducer of the advantage of an advanced military. And then, at the same time, defending is always easier than attacking. So, what is the typical ratio of needed attackers in a defended city? What should that ratio look like?

John Spencer: In urban terrain, we say you need five attackers to one defender. Not necessarily just numbers of soldiers, it's combat power. So you need 15 times the combat power. So that's soldiers, weapons, aerial reconnaissance, aerial capabilities to the one defender because of all the advantages in combat power they get from living in an environment, knowing an environment, which every building can really be a bomb-proof bunker.

Peter Bergen: You quote the Australian strategist Dave Kilcullen in your book, “Cities are sponges for troops”. Why is that?

John Spencer: Because historically, from the major battles of World War II up until today, If you're gonna go into urban terrain, whether it’s Berlin, Stalingrad, Mosul, or Gaza. It's going to take tens of thousands of soldiers. A single building can take a battalion, and it's very historical to have an entire battalion of 900 soldiers fighting for one building. So just by the math of it, if your mission is to go into the dense urban terrain and clear them out and destroy them, it's going to take tens of thousands of soldiers and soak up like a sponge your entire army.

Peter Bergen: You mentioned tanks. So tanks have the firepower to take down buildings, et cetera. On the other hand, in a kind of environment where there's a lot of rubble and narrow streets, they're also pretty vulnerable. How do you deal with that sort of tactical issue?

John Spencer: The tank is the vital, non-replaceable, mobile, protective firepower that militaries need, especially attacking in urban terrain, but they're highly vulnerable, of course.

It may surprise you to hear that a heavily armored tank could be so vulnerable. But in practice, on an urban battlefield, tank crews can’t always see attackers above them or crawling close to them with rocket-propelled grenades or anti-tank missiles. Which means that foot soldiers need to put their lives on the line to keep the tanks rolling forward safely.

John Spencer: So a tank is very limited on what it can see. Let alone where it can shoot. So, a tank, if you're the driver or the gunner or whatever, even with modern technologies, it has a very limited field of view. And why it wants to, it was developed as a tank on tank from thousands of meters away. In the urban terrain, that comes down to two meters away, where you can have an enemy beside you, and you not know it.

John Spencer: So the infantry with human eyes can not only see, but it also can engage. A tank can't raise its barrel above, like, the fourth floor of a building. it can't usually lower its barrel below the street level. So like if something's in a basement firing, you can't fire at it. So it's very vulnerable in what it can see and where it can shoot. It was designed, the tank was designed to fight another tank. So, most of its armor is on the front and on the side. So it's vulnerable in the back and on top, depending on the tank. So the infantry have to move with it so that when something pops up from somewhere where the tank can't see or can't shoot, the infantry can rapidly move to it or even move forward and clear the area so there's no surprises. So the tank can move into position. The military has to put soldiers, humans at risk to get the tank into position to do its job.

Spencer’s co-author, Liam Collins, says the Israeli government's current publicly stated goal — to destroy every Hamas fighter in Gaza — is basically unrealistic.

Liam Collins: It's just not possible, first of all, you'd have to go through the entire Gaza Strip. Second of all, then you've got to be able to identify who's Hamas and who's a Palestinian citizen that's not Hamas. And that is really hard to do other than somebody picking up a gun and shooting you.

Collins is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel. He served for 27 years with multiple deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq and is now a senior fellow at New America, where I also work.

Liam Collins: Just to clear, basically, six Manhattans would take an enormous amount of time to do that, and as soon as you do it, it's no longer done, because as soon as you leave, the new militants will be spawned, new supplies will be smuggled, and then it's gonna rebirth, right?

Peter Bergen: I know it's hard to make predictions about the future, but given what you know about the Israeli defense forces and their capabilities and also what Hamas has got in store, whether it's the tunnels or human shields or hostages or the fact that there's the element of surprise is pretty much non-existent for the Israelis.

Peter Bergen: How do you anticipate this all playing out? Usually, people have certain expectations about how things are going to go. People thought World War I would be over in weeks.

Liam Collins: I mean, the one thing I can tell you is whatever I say will be wrong, but I'll tell you what it is anyway. I mean, one, wars always go on longer than you think they're going to go. So you're right on that one. But I think for this. Probably another from the start of the operation, I think in less than three months, they'll be culminated with their operations and pulling out. And not because they've necessarily defeated Hamas, but I think it'll be to that point of diminishing returns.

Liam Collins: The political pressure will ramp up, the humanitarian requirement, and they will have eliminated enough of Hamas's capability. You could go all the way across Gaza and you could eliminate every weapon in there, every fighter that they have, but once you clear it, it's no longer clear. As soon as Israel pulls out, right, there's smuggling routes in there. Rockets will come back. Guns will come back. New fighters will be reborn, recruited. And so that's why you hit this culminating point where you hit a point of diminishing returns because you can never truly eliminate the capability because you can't kill the idea. You can degrade it, but you can't destroy it. So I think it'll be probably by that three-month mark.

Peter Bergen: Because Hamas knows that it can't defeat the Israeli Defense Forces, but what it can do is buy time for the politics around this to change so that there's a lot of pressure on Israel to stop its operations.

Liam Collins: That's their thinking. And the thing I didn't address was, will this escalate, right? Is Lebanese Hezbollah going to get involved in it and make it a two-front war? What's Iran or others going to do with this? I think it'll probably stay more isolated, but there's a good chance I’m wrong on that one.

Peter Bergen: Well, let me ask you about Hezbollah because, obviously there's routine exchanges of fire on the northern border between Hezbollah and Israeli defense forces. As this drags on, the pressure on Hezbollah is going to get larger to do something, even if they maybe don't really want to do something.

Liam Collins: But when Israel and Hezbollah fought the last time in the 2006 war, at the time, it seemed to me that it didn't go for Israel quite the way Israel had expected. Hezbollah inflicted a fair amount of damage on Israel, and at least my interpretation was, it looked like a bit of a draw. So where do you fall on that? It was war, so I think it went badly for both, probably. I think more of a strategic draw for Israel, but more of a tactical loss for Hezbollah. I think they did take heavy losses and, and I think they, they do not desire to escalate it. Israel does not desire to escalate it. You might get some fighters, or Lebanese Hezbollah might be like, Hey, we've got a ramp up, you know, a rocket attacks to make it look like we're doing something, but we really don't want to do something. I don't think what we see, you know, happening in Gaza, they want to see happening there. And so I think neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants to escalate it to a significant level, but that doesn't mean it might not happen.

And even if no additional outside parties enter this conflict, there's another feature of Gaza that could inflate the death toll on both sides. A labyrinth of underground tunnels. Hamas claims to have built 500 kilometers of tunnels deep beneath Gaza. The tunnels hide fighters and an arsenal of rockets. And it’s widely presumed the tunnels also hide some of the 240 hostages taken during Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

The third expert I spoke with, Daphne Richemond-Barak, didn't begin her career looking to become an expert on tunnels. She was a professor of international law and security in Israel when the tunnels came to her.

Daphne Richemond-Barak: The trigger was, exactly 10 years ago, in 2013, Israel discovered a tunnel that was crossing between Gaza and Israel, dug by Hamas. This tunnel was coming in very close proximity to an Israeli community, civilian community, called Ein Hashlosha. And this actually got quite a lot of attention in Israel, even though it was not the first time that Israel really was faced with tunnel threats before it was well known that Hamas had tunnels inside Gaza, but this was a cross border tunnel, and it was close to a civilian populated area.

Daphne Richemond-Barak: And it ended up on the front page of the paper and it definitely caught my attention. And then here's my lawyer mind, right? Starting to think, okay, wait a second. This is an infringement of sovereignty. This is interesting. When you have cross border tunnel at your border, can you go to war? I also wondered, what kind of law applies inside these tunnels? I quickly discovered that, really in pretty much no discipline, was there a really deep, analysis of this tactic of war, even though it was really an old tactic of war, but I couldn't find anything in military history, a little bit on Vietnam, maybe, but nothing that I found satisfactory. And that's how I embarked on this project.

The project was a book titled Underground Warfare, which traces the history of fighting in tunnels from before ancient Rome…up to conflicts with Hamas and ISIS in the last decade.

Peter Bergen: Why does Hamas have a tunnel structure system?

Daphne Richmond-Barak: Tunnels are the best way to reduce the asymmetry between a terrorist group and a state that has very large military capabilities. When you use tunnels, when you go underground, what do you achieve? You neutralize the contemporary battlefield.

Peter Bergen: And so, during the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong used tunnels. Fighting against the Americans, and also the South Vietnamese government, but how important was it during the Vietnam War?

Daphne Richmond-Barak: During the Vietnam War, it was a major headache for American forces. Not just a headache, it was a cause of endless amount of casualties. This was a threat that the U.S. really struggled with. After all these conflicts in which tunnels were used they don't win the war, but they make it that much more complicated and that much more lethal.

Peter Bergen: Well, I guess we're all scared of tunnels in some shape or form. I mean, it's just a natural reaction to going into the dark and not knowing what's coming next. You've gone into Hamas tunnels; what does it feel like? What does it smell like? What's the atmosphere?

Daphne Richmond-Barak: Interesting that you ask about the smell. I didn't think about that, but it's stuffy. You're right. There is a bit of a smell there. It's a big black hole in front of you, seemingly endless. There might be arteries on the side, but really from where you're standing, you can't see these openings. It looks like a straight line, even though it probably isn't. You quickly become very disoriented, it's dark, it's disorienting. It's pretty scary and terrifying.

Peter Bergen: Do you suffer from claustrophobia?

Daphne Richmond-Barak: No, I don't actually so I can be in the tunnels. But I remember some points where I just was ready to, to leave.

Peter Bergen: I've heard a lot of different estimates about the size of the Hamas network of tunnels in Gaza. Give us a sense of the extent of the network to the extent that it's possible to say.

Daphne Richmond-Barak: I'm very careful with estimates, but let's think for a second, right? The Gaza Strip is a rather small piece of land and territory. So that leads people to be very surprised when they hear these estimates, which are Hamas estimates. So that's why I'm also very careful with them, of 500 kilometers — that sounds a lot for a small piece of territory. So it's important to explain. How can that be? Well, it's because the tunnels crisscross this Gaza Strip , in various directions, and they're also not linear, the tunnels, they zigzag, and they are on different levels. I don't think it's even possible, really, for Israel to know with precision the extent of this tunnel network.

Daphne Richemond-Barak: This would require the ability to fully and completely map this network, to find out exactly what is the route of those tunnels. Is that really possible? No. And that's why also, I think eliminating the entirety of Hamas's underground infrastructure. is not a realistic goal if you really think about it. Why? Because it's impossible to know exactly how broad or how extensive this network is. Where is every single little tunnel in there? Does Israel have a complete map of it? Absolutely not.

Peter Bergen: So how prepared is the Israeli army for underground battle, do you think?

Daphne Richmond-Barak: The Israeli army is more prepared than any other army has ever been for this fight. That said, the challenge has not gone away. It still is, I think, militarily, a quasi impossible challenge to operate in an environment that combines three very, very difficult environments. First, the urban terrain, which in and of itself is never easy for states to prevail in and often requires the destruction of the city actually. And then comes the subterranean challenge. So this is the network of tunnels, which is constantly taking you by surprise and especially by a group that has been waiting to greet you in those tunnels and has been trying to bring you to engage, because this is where they have the upper hand. But the hostages, this is a third layer of a very significant challenge facing the IDF. It's Israel's own nationals being present in that network of tunnels.

And all three of the experts I spoke with said it's clear there will be far more deaths of soldiers and civilians. A key reason being that Israel needs to put soldiers on the ground because they're fighting an enemy dug into buildings and tunnels who can't be defeated by simply dropping bombs from the air.

This is the former U.S. Army Special Forces officer Liam Collins:

Liam Collins: From my own experience in Afghanistan, we hit a compound, you know - kind of standalone compound dropped two 500 pound bombs on this place. And you look at it and you would say, nobody could have lived through that. And then sure enough, somebody gets up and throws a grenade at you. And the other challenge is as soon as you clear that area and you move on, you can't assume it's clear anymore, because then he could move between walls from other buildings, circle back, and occupy a building that you just cleared.

Peter Bergen: You always need to be looking behind you then.

Liam Collins: It's not only behind you, you gotta look above you, and you gotta look below you.

And that "below you" part will be particularly dangerous. This is retired U.S. Army major John Spencer:

John Spencer: One of the challenges of fighting when tunnels are present, even if you don't want to go down and you have no reason to go in it, you can't leave it behind you.

Peter Bergen: Why is that?

John Spencer: Because that would mean death. You can't leave a tunnel, which is a risk of something coming out of the tunnel and shooting you in the back.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Peter Bergen: So what does Gaza look like the day after the guns fall silent?

John Spencer: It looks like a nightmare. You can take away military capability, but the day after this operation, it's a nightmare.

Liam Collins: A lot of these urban battles, you know, 90 percent of buildings are damaged or destroyed. So think about how long does it take you to replace 90 percent of your structures?

Daphne Richmond-Barak: It ends with a city in rubble and it's a long fight with a lot of casualties on both sides. It's a tragedy.

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If you’d like to learn some more about the issues and stories in this episode, we recommend Understanding Urban Warfare, by Liam Collins and John Spencer; and Underground Warfare, by Daphne Richemond-Barak. Both are available on Amazon.

We also recommend Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump by Michael R. Gordon, which you can find on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

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