naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I've been thinking about the bigger implications of the Improvised ParaGliders that Hamas apparently used as part of their Oct 7 attack (I'll call them IPGs for short). I don't think we've gotten much hard information about them yet, so I'm going to be making some guesses.
What was the security plan for Gaza before Oct 7? I don't have access to the full one, and it's probably too long anyways, but for some suppositions, the basic idea was, a relatively light but carefully watched fence all around Gaza, no IDF personnel inside Gaza under normal conditions, Hamas is responsible for all internal security, and decently equipped quick-reaction forces on bases near the fence to respond to any observed breaches. Careful checks of all items coming through the border to stop actual weapons and anything that could reasonably turned into a weapon from coming in. It's probably impossible to keep order among 2.1ish million people without at least some weapons, and would be impossible to strip them out completely given the history of the region, so we accept that Hamas has some number of infantry weapons including handguns and rifles, and probably some machine guns, RPGs, grenades, etc. They would be decisively prevented from having anything bigger like artillery, proper armored vehicles, and aircraft, plus precision stuff like guided anti-armor and anti-air rockets, though perhaps with somewhat less success.
What was Hamas's attack plan for Oct 7? As far as I know, no proper military strategist / historian has actually assembled enough info to put it together yet. But I gather it looked something like, send in a wave of lightly armed IPG troops first, aimed at all known QRF bases and a few other juicy targets, like the rave and some towns. They may not win all of the battles with the QRF bases, but the goal is to cause enough chaos, confusion, and distraction to allow several substantial convoys of more heavily armed ground troops to storm through the fences faster than anything strong enough can be organized to stop them. The plan after that seems rather fuzzy and less relevant to the point, so I'll leave it aside here.
It appears this IPG tactic was novel and effective enough to substantially disrupt the normal response to this sort of thing. So then, what is the new security plan for a future Gaza strip to prevent this sort of thing from being effective? I believe this is an important question - if we want a future for the Gaza Strip that resembles the pre-Oct 7 status quo of ~millions of people living there in a peaceful-ish way, we need to have a practical and effective security plan. Can we hope to prevent enough construction supplies from getting in there to build these things? Banning I guess small gas engines, tarps, and cords? Can we hope to build some sort of system to track and shoot down these things? How detectable are they on radar? Antiaircraft rockets are probably too big, expensive, and more firepower than needed. Maybe we need smallish drones with regular machine guns on them? It feels like it's a sticky problem.
Along those lines, if IPGs truly are an effective tactic that's hard to stop, I gotta wonder where we're gonna see it next. Ukraine maybe? They have at least some actual helicopters, but probably not as many as they'd like. Maybe Yemen or Sudan? The Israel-Gaza war and Russia-Ukraine wars seem to be sucking up most of the energy on war reporting, I'm actually not that sure offhand what else is going on around the world.
Along those lines, if IPGs truly are an effective tactic that's hard to stop, I gotta wonder where we're gonna see it next. Ukraine maybe?
The paragliders were like out of Mad Max. Like the cheap NOD buggies from command & conquer.
But:
I can't find the source video on Youtube, so sorry for the Twitter links. This is the fast-paced propaganda video from Hamas "rehearsing their deadly Israel attack". This is how they want to be seen:
It is terrifying, but only if you don't have a gun. The gliders are slow moving, they are loud, they have zero cover. It is like shooting ducks. If you have a gun, which the festival people didn't.
One hot take a few days ago by Eetan was that the Israelis need gun rights:
I wouldn't be so quick for this American solution. But I don't expect to see glider soldiers in the heavily armed Ukraine war and in principle it should be easy for the IDF to detect and defend against them.
I think I would dispute that part actually. Actual paratroopers seem to be similarly vulnerable - also slow moving, without cover, and very big and obvious. Not as loud, but also no ability to maneuver. But they were dropped anyways. In the era when large-scale parachute drops were more common, they seemed to be considered not too vulnerable. It's probably harder than it might seem to hit a moving airborne target with a small number of rifles. Presuming neither one drops directly onto a large formation of highly alert troops, they're usually pretty survivable.
I don't expect to see America or China going that way. It may not be terribly likely to be used in the Ukraine war either. But it seems plausible that the kind of low-budget forces that field things like technicals might try this too.
Incidentally, I would also argue for better Israeli gun rights. I doubt it would have had all that big of an effect on this attack though. Maybe some of the villages that were attacked would have fared somewhat better. I doubt a giant rave is ever going to be heavily armed though. And the military bases were surely armed, but didn't seem to be alert or organized to repel this sort of attack.
Actual paratroopers seem to be similarly vulnerable - also slow moving, without cover, and very big and obvious. Not as loud, but also no ability to maneuver. But they were dropped anyways.
Weren’t paratroopers-as-paratroopers mostly a failure, in that they have very specific use cases and dropping outside of that context just gets them all killed, and the context in which they are useful more or less just speeds up your victory by a day or so, and that’s only against an enemy too dumb to surrender at the writing on the wall, and that for that reason modern day ‘paratroopers’ are mostly just light infantry?
Something we don't know that impacts their effectiveness for non-Jihadists: how many of the IPG operators survived the day and successfully returned to Gaza? My initial guess would be none, and certainly I suspect that the expectation among both Hamas' planners and the operators themselves was that this was a purely one way trip, any that did ultimately survive were a result of success that exceeded expectations. They expected to insert these militants deep into Israel, where they would effectively shoot in random directions before being killed, but in the process they would distract Israeli response forces and allow other militants to achieve direct aims.
Gaza, for a variety of reasons both religious and material, has an unusually large supply of young men willing to kill themselves for the cause. While countries like Ukraine and Azerbaijan have a plentiful supply of nationalist psychopaths willing to die for the nation, a certain-death suicide mission is a different animal. Le Guard Meurt Mais Ne Se Rend Pas! is a very different attitude than that of the suicide bomber. The Gazans also did not need to be particularly talented or trained, they were sent to attack a music festival. Send them to attack even a soft military target, or to achieve any real sabotage or destruction of infrastructure that might impact a battle, and they'll need training and skills. Training, skills, and courage that you won't particularly want to sacrifice for a single battle. It's not clear that the IPG would have any value if you didn't have men you were willing to sacrifice who were willing to be sacrificed.
Paragliders are novelty that could be effective only once.
Hamas just went in force and caught IDF unprepared. There is no defence that could not be overwhelmed.
The questions are
Why was the amassing of power missed?
Why were IDF unprepared?
Had Israel went softer from the long period of relative peace and iron dome?
They were less vigilant that they should have been. And I think that for older generations the idea of musical festival next to the Gaza Strip would have been a bad one. There is definitely mismatch between the rhetoric of Israel being under constant existential threat and their behaviour in this case.
Who helped hamas organise this thing? Is there a new Arab Thrawn in the Gaza Strip? I don't think it is Iran because - well Iran are incompetent . They have no fresh experience in this type of warfare.
Being able to put a man airborne on any platform, no matter how cruddy, has military utility, but, and sir mix a lot likes this but and cannot lie, a powered paraglider is a cruddy platform. It allows small numbers of troops to move in ways that roads or terrain don’t allow over short distances, and that’s literally it. Helicopters are a better solution to this problem because you can mount a machine gun and maybe a grenade launcher to them, and they have more carrying capacity. And of course when you have more conventional ways to approach, that’s a better alternative than these things.
I don't think we've gotten a full tactical breakdown, and we may never get one, but this (caveat: It's the New York Times) and this point to broader issues: Hamas struck at communications, observation, and relay posts, often ones that the IDF believed were heavily obscured or distant enough that fast-reaction groups could protect them, while bringing a massive level of coordination across a wide area that the IDF believed would not be possible without the IDF having detailed early notice, at least given holiday standings. The paragliders had some impact for increasing the chaos, but much of the attack looks to have gone through the normal 'how strictly do you define a technical'-style road-based troops.
Which is pretty typical for light aircraft as a military force. Paragliders, gyrocopters, plain passive gliders, all have a long history, but there's a reason they've historically been limited use.
I expect the bigger immediate question's going to be how Hamas got that level of planning done without it getting into the newspapers (or just someone starting things off early!), and where they got the information to do that planning. The former may be an unavoidable consequence of Israel keeping its military and civilian groups out of Gaza, but it's also possible that the IDF got so complacent that they mixed LARPing with not. On the information control side, there's been fingers pointed at the Gazan work permit program, and there's basically zero chance that survives the month, but I don't think that provides a sufficient level of detail for this operation. Maybe we're all just underestimating what open-source intel can do, or the Gazan border was a nest of light drone incursions, but I've seen red teams try to exploit far more completely-covered fields before and not been able to pull that level of detail and coordination together.
If we're lucky, I think the practical result is gonna be increased buffer zones (probably extracted from Gazans), hard border restrictions, and strongly increased isolation, along with turning those buffer zones into a shooting gallery for anything bigger than a paper airplane and destroying any military leadership that tries to unify what's left inside the zone. The more pessimistic options... don't look great.
Reading more about it, it is indeed sounding like their real force multiplier was not so much the IPGs, but the much better than expected intelligence, planning, and execution on the part of the militants, and how they managed to keep it completely secret from the vaunted Israeli intelligence services. Which suggests we should expect over-reaction on the part of the Israeli security forces and decision-makers due to not so much due to the sheer outrageousness of the brutality against civilians but instead how many people must have been asleep at the switch for this to be possible.
I’m no expert, but I heard Jocko’s take today and it seems he was more surprised at the overall coordination of the attack as opposed to individual tactics. Multiple teams attacking by truck, gliders, and boats across a decently wide area. All hitting their targets within a few hours. It seems like that level of military sophistication and coordination is beyond what many thought Hamas was able to achieve.
He also suggested they may have some more heavy weaponry such as AA guns and rockets.
They’re basically inferior to helicopters in every way…except, of course, cost and availability. Any radar which could pick up a suicide drone could spot one easily. At that point, I would expect a humvee with a machine gun, appropriately deployed, to make short work of slow, clumsy aerial targets.
If you’re ever in the DC area, I highly recommend the extra Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy museum. It’s by Dulles airport instead of the National Mall. In addition to some of the best and most historic aircraft, it is positively studded with ultralights and gliders.
At that point, I would expect a humvee with a machine gun, appropriately deployed, to make short work of slow, clumsy aerial targets.
IMO it seems most likely that, as terrorism tactics go, future uses will be about as practical as hijacking commercial airliners to crash into targets: it's a tactic that really only works once with the benefit of surprise. The next time, the border guards (and maybe even Iron Dome operators: it's probably an easier target than a small rocket on a ballistic trajectory) won't hesitate before shooting.
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Notes -
I've been thinking about the bigger implications of the Improvised ParaGliders that Hamas apparently used as part of their Oct 7 attack (I'll call them IPGs for short). I don't think we've gotten much hard information about them yet, so I'm going to be making some guesses.
What was the security plan for Gaza before Oct 7? I don't have access to the full one, and it's probably too long anyways, but for some suppositions, the basic idea was, a relatively light but carefully watched fence all around Gaza, no IDF personnel inside Gaza under normal conditions, Hamas is responsible for all internal security, and decently equipped quick-reaction forces on bases near the fence to respond to any observed breaches. Careful checks of all items coming through the border to stop actual weapons and anything that could reasonably turned into a weapon from coming in. It's probably impossible to keep order among 2.1ish million people without at least some weapons, and would be impossible to strip them out completely given the history of the region, so we accept that Hamas has some number of infantry weapons including handguns and rifles, and probably some machine guns, RPGs, grenades, etc. They would be decisively prevented from having anything bigger like artillery, proper armored vehicles, and aircraft, plus precision stuff like guided anti-armor and anti-air rockets, though perhaps with somewhat less success.
What was Hamas's attack plan for Oct 7? As far as I know, no proper military strategist / historian has actually assembled enough info to put it together yet. But I gather it looked something like, send in a wave of lightly armed IPG troops first, aimed at all known QRF bases and a few other juicy targets, like the rave and some towns. They may not win all of the battles with the QRF bases, but the goal is to cause enough chaos, confusion, and distraction to allow several substantial convoys of more heavily armed ground troops to storm through the fences faster than anything strong enough can be organized to stop them. The plan after that seems rather fuzzy and less relevant to the point, so I'll leave it aside here.
It appears this IPG tactic was novel and effective enough to substantially disrupt the normal response to this sort of thing. So then, what is the new security plan for a future Gaza strip to prevent this sort of thing from being effective? I believe this is an important question - if we want a future for the Gaza Strip that resembles the pre-Oct 7 status quo of ~millions of people living there in a peaceful-ish way, we need to have a practical and effective security plan. Can we hope to prevent enough construction supplies from getting in there to build these things? Banning I guess small gas engines, tarps, and cords? Can we hope to build some sort of system to track and shoot down these things? How detectable are they on radar? Antiaircraft rockets are probably too big, expensive, and more firepower than needed. Maybe we need smallish drones with regular machine guns on them? It feels like it's a sticky problem.
Along those lines, if IPGs truly are an effective tactic that's hard to stop, I gotta wonder where we're gonna see it next. Ukraine maybe? They have at least some actual helicopters, but probably not as many as they'd like. Maybe Yemen or Sudan? The Israel-Gaza war and Russia-Ukraine wars seem to be sucking up most of the energy on war reporting, I'm actually not that sure offhand what else is going on around the world.
The paragliders were like out of Mad Max. Like the cheap NOD buggies from command & conquer.
But:
I can't find the source video on Youtube, so sorry for the Twitter links. This is the fast-paced propaganda video from Hamas "rehearsing their deadly Israel attack". This is how they want to be seen:
https://twitter.com/Aryan_warlord/status/1710846439776297120
And from the ground it looked like this:
https://youtube.com/shorts/_UPSU2dEJbM https://twitter.com/OSINTNic/status/1712058746266849658
It is terrifying, but only if you don't have a gun. The gliders are slow moving, they are loud, they have zero cover. It is like shooting ducks. If you have a gun, which the festival people didn't.
One hot take a few days ago by Eetan was that the Israelis need gun rights:
https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/146562?context=8#context
I wouldn't be so quick for this American solution. But I don't expect to see glider soldiers in the heavily armed Ukraine war and in principle it should be easy for the IDF to detect and defend against them.
I think I would dispute that part actually. Actual paratroopers seem to be similarly vulnerable - also slow moving, without cover, and very big and obvious. Not as loud, but also no ability to maneuver. But they were dropped anyways. In the era when large-scale parachute drops were more common, they seemed to be considered not too vulnerable. It's probably harder than it might seem to hit a moving airborne target with a small number of rifles. Presuming neither one drops directly onto a large formation of highly alert troops, they're usually pretty survivable.
I don't expect to see America or China going that way. It may not be terribly likely to be used in the Ukraine war either. But it seems plausible that the kind of low-budget forces that field things like technicals might try this too.
Incidentally, I would also argue for better Israeli gun rights. I doubt it would have had all that big of an effect on this attack though. Maybe some of the villages that were attacked would have fared somewhat better. I doubt a giant rave is ever going to be heavily armed though. And the military bases were surely armed, but didn't seem to be alert or organized to repel this sort of attack.
Weren’t paratroopers-as-paratroopers mostly a failure, in that they have very specific use cases and dropping outside of that context just gets them all killed, and the context in which they are useful more or less just speeds up your victory by a day or so, and that’s only against an enemy too dumb to surrender at the writing on the wall, and that for that reason modern day ‘paratroopers’ are mostly just light infantry?
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Something we don't know that impacts their effectiveness for non-Jihadists: how many of the IPG operators survived the day and successfully returned to Gaza? My initial guess would be none, and certainly I suspect that the expectation among both Hamas' planners and the operators themselves was that this was a purely one way trip, any that did ultimately survive were a result of success that exceeded expectations. They expected to insert these militants deep into Israel, where they would effectively shoot in random directions before being killed, but in the process they would distract Israeli response forces and allow other militants to achieve direct aims.
Gaza, for a variety of reasons both religious and material, has an unusually large supply of young men willing to kill themselves for the cause. While countries like Ukraine and Azerbaijan have a plentiful supply of nationalist psychopaths willing to die for the nation, a certain-death suicide mission is a different animal. Le Guard Meurt Mais Ne Se Rend Pas! is a very different attitude than that of the suicide bomber. The Gazans also did not need to be particularly talented or trained, they were sent to attack a music festival. Send them to attack even a soft military target, or to achieve any real sabotage or destruction of infrastructure that might impact a battle, and they'll need training and skills. Training, skills, and courage that you won't particularly want to sacrifice for a single battle. It's not clear that the IPG would have any value if you didn't have men you were willing to sacrifice who were willing to be sacrificed.
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Paragliders are novelty that could be effective only once. Hamas just went in force and caught IDF unprepared. There is no defence that could not be overwhelmed. The questions are
They were less vigilant that they should have been. And I think that for older generations the idea of musical festival next to the Gaza Strip would have been a bad one. There is definitely mismatch between the rhetoric of Israel being under constant existential threat and their behaviour in this case.
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Being able to put a man airborne on any platform, no matter how cruddy, has military utility, but, and sir mix a lot likes this but and cannot lie, a powered paraglider is a cruddy platform. It allows small numbers of troops to move in ways that roads or terrain don’t allow over short distances, and that’s literally it. Helicopters are a better solution to this problem because you can mount a machine gun and maybe a grenade launcher to them, and they have more carrying capacity. And of course when you have more conventional ways to approach, that’s a better alternative than these things.
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I don't think we've gotten a full tactical breakdown, and we may never get one, but this (caveat: It's the New York Times) and this point to broader issues: Hamas struck at communications, observation, and relay posts, often ones that the IDF believed were heavily obscured or distant enough that fast-reaction groups could protect them, while bringing a massive level of coordination across a wide area that the IDF believed would not be possible without the IDF having detailed early notice, at least given holiday standings. The paragliders had some impact for increasing the chaos, but much of the attack looks to have gone through the normal 'how strictly do you define a technical'-style road-based troops.
Which is pretty typical for light aircraft as a military force. Paragliders, gyrocopters, plain passive gliders, all have a long history, but there's a reason they've historically been limited use.
I expect the bigger immediate question's going to be how Hamas got that level of planning done without it getting into the newspapers (or just someone starting things off early!), and where they got the information to do that planning. The former may be an unavoidable consequence of Israel keeping its military and civilian groups out of Gaza, but it's also possible that the IDF got so complacent that they mixed LARPing with not. On the information control side, there's been fingers pointed at the Gazan work permit program, and there's basically zero chance that survives the month, but I don't think that provides a sufficient level of detail for this operation. Maybe we're all just underestimating what open-source intel can do, or the Gazan border was a nest of light drone incursions, but I've seen red teams try to exploit far more completely-covered fields before and not been able to pull that level of detail and coordination together.
If we're lucky, I think the practical result is gonna be increased buffer zones (probably extracted from Gazans), hard border restrictions, and strongly increased isolation, along with turning those buffer zones into a shooting gallery for anything bigger than a paper airplane and destroying any military leadership that tries to unify what's left inside the zone. The more pessimistic options... don't look great.
Reading more about it, it is indeed sounding like their real force multiplier was not so much the IPGs, but the much better than expected intelligence, planning, and execution on the part of the militants, and how they managed to keep it completely secret from the vaunted Israeli intelligence services. Which suggests we should expect over-reaction on the part of the Israeli security forces and decision-makers due to not so much due to the sheer outrageousness of the brutality against civilians but instead how many people must have been asleep at the switch for this to be possible.
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I’m no expert, but I heard Jocko’s take today and it seems he was more surprised at the overall coordination of the attack as opposed to individual tactics. Multiple teams attacking by truck, gliders, and boats across a decently wide area. All hitting their targets within a few hours. It seems like that level of military sophistication and coordination is beyond what many thought Hamas was able to achieve.
He also suggested they may have some more heavy weaponry such as AA guns and rockets.
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It seems to me that the solution will involve the Israelis taking control of Gaza’s airspace with extensive armed and unarmed drone surveillance.
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It’s not a completely novel idea. Gliders, usually plane-towed, were used along with paratroops in WWII. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_glider
They’re basically inferior to helicopters in every way…except, of course, cost and availability. Any radar which could pick up a suicide drone could spot one easily. At that point, I would expect a humvee with a machine gun, appropriately deployed, to make short work of slow, clumsy aerial targets.
If you’re ever in the DC area, I highly recommend the extra Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy museum. It’s by Dulles airport instead of the National Mall. In addition to some of the best and most historic aircraft, it is positively studded with ultralights and gliders.
IMO it seems most likely that, as terrorism tactics go, future uses will be about as practical as hijacking commercial airliners to crash into targets: it's a tactic that really only works once with the benefit of surprise. The next time, the border guards (and maybe even Iron Dome operators: it's probably an easier target than a small rocket on a ballistic trajectory) won't hesitate before shooting.
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