Israel Is Restrained

Media scrutiny, consternation over civilian casualties, and a complex political environment complicate campaign to destroy tunnels

They say the first casualty of war is the truth, and these past few weeks it has been…fashionable to spread half-truths and outright falsehoods about Israel’s intentions and motives in Gaza.

The United States Army fought subterranean battles in the tunnels of Vietnam. They were not pretty or generally humane. They were just.

All of the above is true. From the official Army history:

Following a few tear gas grenades or a charge of C4 plastic explosive, “tunnel rats” would go underground to find Viet Cong or North Vietnamese combatants or materiel. Small, slender soldiers, armed with a flashlight and a .45 caliber pistol, would crawl into the Vietnamese tunnels for reconnaissance and possibly close combat.

In 1985, The Chicago Tribune published a retrospective from veterans of the tunnel rat elements that were willing to talk to the paper. What follows is all first hand. They were there. As such, it is authoritative.

“’The Tunnel Rats were combat engineers,’ Mangold says. ‘They had to be small and thin, volunteers, and highly skilled at hand-to-hand combat. The job was to kill, capture or entomb Viet Cong with explosives. The favored weapon was a small-caliber revolver. The Americans were forbidden ever to fire off more than three shots in a row. Fire six and the enemy would know you were out of ammunition.’”

“Lean and as ascetic as the VC they hunted, the Tunnel Rats eschewed anything that would deaden their senses, even cologne or chewing gum. The knife or bayonet, weapons as old as war itself, determined whether they lived or died. Booby traps had to be felt for in pitch darkness. Long dormant instincts were rehoned. Fingertips and ears became what walking sticks are to the blind.”

Further:

“The Tunnel Rats never knew what they`d find.

The VC would take a snake—we used to call them `one-step` or `two-step` snakes. They were bamboo vipers and once bitten, you could only take one or two more steps before you died. Charlie would tie the viper in a piece of bamboo with a piece of string. As the Tunnel Rat went through, he`d knock it, and the snake would come out and bite him in the neck or face. You learned to check the ceilings with your flashlight.”

Fascinating. As an aside: there’s an idea for the IDF. Seeing as how the current strategies have brought, well, an avalanche of criticism.

General (and later President) Eisenhower was a strict adherent to operational security and secrecy. But that did not prove sufficient at the onset of the Cold War, as the political environment did not allow for the casualties increasingly dangerous missions into Russian airspace necessitated. It was with this political consideration in mind Eisenhower and his cabinet set about fashioning an alternate way to outfox the adversary. What resulted sparked a deepdive into the viability of space-based national-level platforms and ultimately produced what we now know as the OXCART, U-2, today’s X-37 and RQ-170, ‘spy satellites’, and other tools in America’s arsenal.

Political considerations—chief among them, public perception shaped by unfriendly forces at home or abroad—always gets a vote of their own.

This is, after all, what Clausewitz teaches us.

While it’s not time to slow the campaign, it is time for IDFs strategic planners to go back to the drawing board. Perhaps, the IDF and other elements of the Israeli government should explore alternative methods to combat the tunnel threat. Perhaps these methods could emulate proven tactics, techniques, and procedures and lessons learned from US Armed Forces efforts in Vietnam, Iraq, and beyond—TTPs the anti-Israel crowd seems intent on sweeping into the recycle bin of history.

Thing is, Vietnam wasn’t that long ago. It happened. US personnel devised what are essentially explosively formed penetrators, and perched them just inside and at the mouth of Viet Cong tunnels.

Don’t want to believe this happened? Too bad. It happened. It would be helpful if self-styled military intellectuals perched their glasses above the bridge of the nose as a man—not a hipster—does and cease this incessant bleating about willful civilian casualties.

As the terror tunnels remain a real threat, special attention should be given to tactics, techniques, and procedures that enable IDF and other elements to both evade media scrutiny—thereby enabling clandestine activities—while also inflicting maximum psychological and mortal harm upon the adversary. There is nothing morally ambiguous about IDFs actions to date. They take every precaution to safeguard civilian lives, to include warning civilian populations prior to commencing bombing runs.

If anything, IDF is restrained. Ask the United States Army and, more broadly, the United States Armed Forces.