"Israel Implemented More Measures to Prevent Civilian Casualties.... " (John Spencer, West Point Warfare Studies)

 

  Published Jan 31, 2024 at 8:38 AM EST

 

By John Spencer

chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point; served for 25 years as an infantry soldier and two tours in Iraq

 

No military fighting an entrenched enemy in dense urban terrain in an area barely twice the size of Washington D.C. can avoid all civilian casualties. Reports of over 25,000 Palestinians killed, be they civilians or Hamas, have made headlines. But Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban war.

In fact, as someone who has served two tours in Iraq and studied urban warfare for over a decade, Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I say this not to put Israel on a pedestal or to diminish the human suffering of Gazans but rather to correct a number of misperceptions when it comes to urban warfare.

First is the use of precision guided munitions (PGMs). This term was introduced to nonmilitary audiences during the Gulf War, when the U.S. fired 250,000 individual bombs and missiles in just 43 days. Only a very small fraction of those would fit the definition of PGMs, even though common perceptions of that war, and its comparatively low civilian casualty rate, was that it was a war of precision.

Let's compare that war, which did not ignite anywhere near the same level of outrage internationally, to Israel's current war in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Force has used many types of PGMs to avoid civilian harm, including the use of munitions like small diameter bombs (SDBs), as well as technologies and tactics that increase the accuracy of non-PGMs. Israel has also employed a tactic when a military has air supremacy called dive bombing, as well as gathering pre-strike intelligence on the presence of civilians from satellite imagery, scans of cell phone presence, and other target observation techniques. All of this is to do more pinpoint targeted to avoid civilian deaths. In other words, the simplistic notion that a military must use more PGMs versus non-PGMs in a war is false.

A second misperception is a military's choice of munitions and how they apply the proportionality principle required by the laws of armed conflict. Here there is an assessment of the value of the military target to be gained from an act that is weighted against the expected collateral damage estimate caused by said act. An external viewer with no access to all information cannot say such things as a 500-pound bomb would achieve the military mission of a 2,000-pound bomb with no mention of the context of the value of the military target or the context of the strike—like the target being in a deep tunnel that would require great penetration.

See full article at NEWSWEEK