naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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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.
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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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.
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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