America has never successfully liberated and held territory from Islamic terrorists.
After thousands dead in Afghanistan and Iraq: Both countries are now controlled by Islamic terrorists.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Hilariously, many top defense officials—current and former—who oversaw both disasters—despite a track record of zero wins—have been criticizing Israel for not following in their footsteps.
Everyone from former Gen. David Petraeus to current Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown offer the familiar criticisms:
Israel is not following the COIN or counterinsurgency model.
Chief Brown argued:
Not only do you have to actually go in and clear out whatever adversary you are up against, you have to go in, hold the territory and then you’ve got to stabilize it.
Blind obedience to textbook warfare?
The problem with this model is that it failed
and left a lot of widows and orphans along the way.
The United States spent over 50 years losing wars, prestige, and young men:
[B]y trying to follow the familiar strategy for defeating guerrilla armies through conventional warfare followed by efforts to hold and stabilize the territories. And what exactly do we have to show for it?
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) discarded
this conventional wisdom for another approach.
Rather than trying to hold territory filled with an enemy population among whom the terrorists move, it has used its manpower to attack concentrations of enemy forces, moving quickly and at times unpredictably, while refusing to get bogged down by trying to ‘hold’ any particular area.
This strategy has frustrated the entire Hamas war plan which like that of Jihadis in Iraq and Afghanistan depended on using terror attacks to pin military units in place, forcing them to defend and patrol a territory, and then exploiting their weaknesses to launch ambushes.
Israel learned a hard lesson from Oct 7:
– It’s not interested in playing defense anymore,
– Instead the goal of the initial stages of the war has been to keep the terrorists forces on the defensive,
– Complaints that Israel has to ‘reclear’ areas that it’s already taken miss the point. The enemy population supports the terrorists and so the area can’t be ‘cleared’ or ‘stabilized’, and
– [O]nce Israel has taken control of terrorist infrastructure, it’s better able to understand their operations.
When Israel ‘re-cleared’ Al-Shifa hospital, it took by surprise and captured much of the leadership of Islamic Jihad and some Hamas leaders as well.
Rather than a weakness, re-clearing is a strength because when terrorists return to territory that Israel is now familiar with, it can turn the tables and launch surprise attacks on those old positions.
Israel is not fighting to take land, but to grind
down enemy forces wherever they operate.
Gen McChrystal told the Senate about his Afghanistan strategy in 2009:
The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed.
McChrystal’s strategy killed a lot of Americans instead.
Israel is betting that McChrystal is wrong.
It’s measuring effectiveness in just that way.
Holding and stabilizing territory, the basis for the COIN model, bogs down armies in defensive modes, while Israel’s approach is purely offensive and plays to its strengths.
The IDF is bad at defensive operations, but quite good at rapid assaults.
COIN would play to Israel’s weaknesses and the strengths of the terrorists, much as it did with us in Iraq and Afghanistan, but discarding COIN has made the IDF’s campaigns far more effective even if they’re nowhere near the end.
The IDF has well learned of moslems combining initiatives against them:
Once Israel went into Rafah, Egypt cut off aid through its crossing into Gaza to manufacture another ‘humanitarian crisis’ and allow Hamas to take control in Rafah again.
Israel has a more realistic assessment of those Arab moslem “partners” than D.C. does.
Also, Israel knows not to listen to America
concerning, ‘How to deal with moslems.’
To wit, America has failed to learn its lesson concerning moslem “partners”:
– While America searched for Osama bin Laden, Pakistan was harboring him in one of its military towns,
– Qatar harbored Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and
– Saudi Arabia, which provided most of the hijackers (along with our other regional allies) rushed to defend the terrorists at Gitmo.
Further, those brilliant military minds of the western world:
[C]laim the collateral damage from the war will allow Hamas to recruit more men, but the Israelis know what really allows terrorists to recruit is leaving them in power.
Allowing Hamas to control Gaza for 17 years is what built it an army.
Israel is out to destroy Hamas as an organized force.
The goal of the war is to take out its leaders and reduce the enemy to its smallest possible components.
Perhaps our politicians and generals ought to consider this before they drag us into another war.
The first step will be to rid America of Obama and his puppeteers.
