Andrew Milburn is an interesting character. He was born in Hong Kong and raised mostly in the UK. After graduating law school from the University of Westminster, he joined the US Marine Corps (his mother’s American), serving as an infantry and special operations officer for 31 years, including as commander of the fabled Raider Regiment, before retiring as a colonel in 2019. He is also a school-trained joint operational planner. Since leaving the service, he has published a best-selling memoir and, among other things, co-founded the Mozart Group, spending a little over a year on the ground helping train Ukrainian soldiers in the aftermath of the Russian invasion.
I know him mainly from a Facegroup group founded by yet another lawyer-turned-Marine special operator. He’s been pretty critical of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza.
The latest post on his Substack, “Why the IDF doesn’t Clear and Hold,” provides the best analysis I’ve seen about why the IDF operates as it does. It does a great job of explaining why the IDF gains territory only to have to come back weeks or months later to regain it. All emphases in the excerpts that follow are mine.
It’s all too familiar a phenomenon for anyone who has fought insurgents in cities. I was eating my Christmas meal in Fallujah, three weeks after the battle to retake the city had officially ended, when insurgents entered the building next door and killed three Marines. In Gaza, tunnels make holding any terrain for any period of time exponentially more difficult. For almost three months, Hamas was able to shuttle fighters, weapons, and hostages between north and south Gaza beneath the wetlands of Wadi Gaza – an area in which IDF engineers were sure that the confluence of water would make digging a tunnel impossible.
‘My battalion set up a 360-degree defense for three weeks before I realized that it was useless’, a battalion commander from the 98th Division’s Commando Brigade told me. ‘It was like a chess game between me and the Hamas company commander. I was playing him above ground – while he played below ground.’ One night two insurgents popped up through a tunnel right by his command post – killing one soldier and wounding two others before disappearing again.’
This is why the IDF is so obsessed with the tunnels. They radically change the equation in favor of Hamas.
In recent comments to the press, IDF leadership has – unofficially at least – blamed the government for the problems it is experiencing in Gaza now, arguing that the absence of clear strategic goals is derailing their campaign. They are partially correct – but Hamas owes its resurgence in Gaza to more than political dithering.
One reason is simply that the IDF doesn’t [have] enough infantry, even with its full complement of reservists, to secure all of Gaza. As high-tech though war has become, it still takes infantry to seize buildings – and only infantry can hold them to prevent the enemy from coming back in. And with pressure on the government increasing to release reservists back into society, the problem becomes even more acute. This is already the longest war that Israel has fought. A country with a population of less than 10 million cannot lose some 300,000 people from its workforce without significant impact on its economy. At the same time, the IDF cannot wage a war on two fronts – or even one for that matter – without them.
This is a key point that almost every analysis, including my own, tends to miss. Israel’s military has rightly earned a reputation as one of the best, pound-for-pound, in the world. But that elides how tiny it is. The United States has over two million uniformed professionals on active duty; Israel has under 170,000. The entire regular IDF is smaller than the US Marine Corps. This means even with comparable training and equipment, they simply can’t fight in the manner that we take for granted.
So they don’t.
There’s another reason why the IDF doesn’t ‘clear and hold’ – a concept that is firmly embedded in US counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine – and that is because the IDF doesn’t do counter-insurgency. ‘Why train for COIN when you don’t plan to stay?’ a retired IDF major general and former national security advisor in the current government explained, before adding ‘It was a huge mistake’.
Maybe, but at the time the decision probably made good sense. Counter-insurgency implies occupation – and that’s not a concept that aligns with Israel’s previous strategy of waging quick, decisive wars that stop short of totally defeating the enemy. Occupation means casualties, economic strain, global criticism, and political risk. It reminds Israelis of Lebanon – a 20-year occupation with its steady stream of casualties and bad news. That was the first time that Israel appeared in the eyes of the world, and to many of its own citizens, as Goliath not David. Lebanon brought down governments and ended careers.
[…]
When you are a citizen army that only has its soldiers for a few weeks a year, you must prioritize what you teach them. And given their nation’s attitude to the concept of occupation in the aftermath of Lebanon and faced with limited resources – the most precious of which for the large reserve force was time, it made sense for the IDF to scrub COIN from its mission essential task list.
Instead IDF doctrine focuses almost exclusively on combined arms maneuver to seize terrain, consolidate and prepare for counter-attack. But it provides little to guide a unit commander tasked with holding that terrain against a dispersed, lightly equipped enemy who waits until after the storm to pop back into play.
While Milburn thinks IDF training and doctrine make sense given the nature of a small, conscript force and the political realities faced by the government, it means they’re forced to fight the war in a way that larger professional armies wouldn’t.
IDF doctrine doesn’t even mention ‘clear and hold’ – and there is no equivalent phrase in Hebrew. In a recent interview with the Jerusalem Press club a senior IDF general used the term ‘conquer and purify,’ instead but didn’t explain what the term ‘purify’ meant.
It means ‘destroy as an enemy framework,’ one battalion commander from the 98th Division’s Commando Brigade explained to me when I asked him. The IDF uses the term framework to describe Hamas’s leadership, equipment, and infrastructure –the most critical of which is their network of tunnels beneath Gaza. A ‘framework’ is a single tunnel complex – comprising one main tunnel with offshoots and all buildings above it. It’s a useful phrase because when combined with ‘ceased to exist’ – a term used by the IDF spokesman to describe Hamas’s Northern Brigade – it means complete and permanent destruction.
If you aim to destroy Hamas’ leadership and tunnel network—both of which are reasonable war aims and much more attainable than the generic “destroy Hamas” that’s been thrown around in public—and you lack a large, well-trained force to do that over a very long period systematically, you’re left with what we’re seeing now.
Faced with the mission of destroying Hamas, but without enough soldiers to prevent their return, the IDF has done its best to ensure that there is nothing to return to.
‘Our entire Brigade was organized to assault and demolish,’ was how another battalion commander described the operation in northern Gaza. I had heard this term used before as asked about clear and hold. It was in any case a much better description of an operation that was intended to tear up Hamas by the roots. ‘We weren’t chasing their fighters, our aim was to obliterate their organization’ – this meant destroying the tunnel network and the buildings that stood above it, framework by framework.
Each attack was preceded by a massive bombardment. Gaza provides the Israelis with a battleground made for supporting arms. The IDF can fire into the strip from three sides, air, land and sea. The high-rise buildings in the strip are densely packed and often poorly built. The techniques that the IDF uses for targeting Hamas fighters and warning the civilian population fall far short of the standards required by the US military. When the infantry goes in, it is with tanks and rules of engagement that allow reconnaissance by fire. The result is that along with massive destruction comes a high civilian casualty rate, which is seen as an acceptable price to pay for keeping IDF casualties low. But, as any counter-insurgent will tell you, civilian casualties always matter.
In fairness, US rules of engagement—a phrase I never heard during my time in a Cold War Army or during my deployment to Desert Shield and Desert Storm* but became commonplace shortly thereafter during operations in Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere—have evolved over three-plus decades of limited wars. My students constantly complain about having to fight by different rules than their adversaries but, as Milburn rightly notes, that’s demanded by our war aims. If the goal is to defeat an insurgency while bolstering a host government, the civilian population, not the enemy forces, are the center of gravity. I’m quite confident that, if we get into a shooting war with China, we will have decidedly different ROE.
The IDF clearly does:
Accompanying a brigade attack is an entire battalion of combat engineers along with heavy equipment and mines for demolition. The brigade will use D-9 bulldozers to clear obstacles, and proof its path, covered by tanks and infantry. Objectives are terrain features – and since they are rarely defended these attacks proceed with a momentum that is easy to confuse with success. After the infantry have seized the buildings, the engineers emplace mines in as many as they can, beginning with those above known tunnels. It takes 20 mines to take down a typical mid-rise building in Gaza. Each battalion carries 2-300 in its daily load, and usually used them all. ‘We demolished whole neighborhoods in a single day,’ another battalion commander told me. It sounded like a commercial – but concealed a truth clear to the IDF now: they didn’t destroy Hamas.
There, alas, is the rub. The described tactics may well be proportional to the war aims given the capacity of the IDF and the nature of Hamas. But another facet of the law of armed conflict is probability of success. That is, there must be a reasonable prospect of victory.* Otherwise, it’s just killing without purpose.
There are other options to holding ground – but none quite as effective. IDF commanders have pointed out that a better strategy than clear and leave, would be to maintain control of the borders – to include the Philadelphi corridor with its network of tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt, picket the strip with special operations forces working covertly, and launch raids and strikes to prevent Hamas from reforming. This offers a more practical option – but is won’t be enough to stop Hamas from resuming control. For that you would need to provide an alternative.
It’s not at all clear that one exists.
*Which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an existing term of art. It was (I found a 1983 article on the subject published in the Naval War College Review by Captain J. Ashley Roach, a US Navy lawyer) but it wasn’t widely used among the operating forces, much less in the press, because the assumption in major combat operations was that soldiers were on a live battlefield and the enemy was a fair target so long as they weren’t surrendering or otherwise hors de combat.
**This doesn’t apply to wars of self-defense, as in Ukraine. It’s arguable that October 7 makes this one as well.
