Thoughts in Israel

Ukraine, Israel and the convergence of proxy wars

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine sent shockwaves around the world that marked the end of an era of a specific kind of peace. Many, myself included, thought that the sort of sustained combat witnessed over the past 18 months in Ukraine between two modern nations in the age of nuclear weapons simply wasn’t possible. It rattled assumptions about global stability. More specifically, it rattled foundational beliefs about what it meant to live in a world with suburbs and high speed internet and metropolitan culture centers, global commerce and Instagram. What’s clear today that perhaps wasn’t as late is February of 2022 is that we’re not so safe as we might have thought from the horrors of the first half of the 20th century.

This past weekend the news coming out of Southern Israel can be viewed with related layers or importance. The first is that what happened is an unforgivable act of terrorism by Hamas that targeted civilian including women and children. The videos are monstrous. There is no excuse. For many of us who spent decades at war with Jihadists, it’s not new. The moral bankruptcy of ends justifies the means rhetoric is at the heart of it. If we believe that political or social progress is worth intentionally targeting women and children for murder, then what’s the point of anything. That alone should unify the world against those responsible, independent of internal political bent. We’re seeing a good deal of that inside the U.S. It’s not quite what it would have been decades ago when there was far less sympathy in America for the plight of the Palestinian people. But it’s safe to say that at least some of justified good will gained in Western Liberal politics evaporated with the scenes of music festival massacres and kidnapped mothers and daughters. Which forces a question at the heart of the discussion. Why such a brutal and globally condemnable act?

A potentially troubling answer is the layer below the normal terrorism + condemnation + overwhelming superior military response pattern that has characterized the last 50 years of asymmetrical conflict. It’s that it no longer matters if anyone upsets the global polis because the world is divided across a different world order than it previously was. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s appropriate response to fight it via proxy war has changed the dynamic. I made this point last year in reflection of the initial Ukraine invasion.

It’s near certainly correct that Hamas could not have done what it did this weekend without support. It’s definitely true that terrorists operating just about anywhere around the globe have received state support from the usual suspects. What’s not clear is how that plays out now with a live shooting war in eastern Europe lining up the teams to take sides. If the U.S. does something completely precedented when allies or U.S. interests are hit with an attack of this magnitude and responds with something like a TLAM strike, how can it be viewed as a limited action?

The last layer of this all is that I don’t really know how circa 2023 limited warfare plays out in this conflict. Just like I really didn’t (and still don’t to be honest) understand how the Russian war machine hasn’t toppled Ukraine, I don’t understand exactly what will happen when the IDF rolls into Gaza. What I do know is that if it ends up turning into a long and contested occupation, things don’t work the way they used to and many bets are off. 15 years ago when I was a part of the team that created SOCOM’s early small and portable drone capability, we were trying to do something very specific; end run a capability that previously took millions of dollars of air frames maintenance and decades of pilot training and deliver something that could be carried in a cargo box with pilots and techs that could be trained in weeks. That was then. What exists now is so far beyond that we’re wandering into the sort of tactics shifts that came with repeating rifles or motorized cavalry. And I’m not sure anything outside of Ukraine has caught up. I may be overstating this, but I bet I’m closer than skeptics think. I shudder to think what Al Anbar circa 2007-9 when I was there would have been like with today’s drone capability.

Mostly what that means is that I don’t know what happens from here, but I have grave concerns for innocent people on both sides. If I learned anything from my experience in the GWOT it’s that terrorists are one thing and the people they claim to represent are something different. Believing in the same cause and believing murdering innocent people is justified to support it are two very different things. And so the Palestinian people and the operatives that planned and executed these attacks are two very different things even if they are politically aligned. When you start believing they are one and the same, it’s a good bet you’re quite far away from both of them. And when we lower the cost of human suffering because of the stakes of war, we march another step closer to tumbling into global war.