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?
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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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