To see the future of urban warfare, look at Gaza

For armies lucky enough to be at peace, other people’s wars are learning opportunities. Take Israel’s northern front, where the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have been exchanging rockets and drones with Hizbullah, the Lebanese militant group. To stop Hizbullah’s increasingly capable drones, the IDF has resorted to heavy jamming. The impact on the electromagnetic spectrum is so strong that Israeli soldiers have had to eschew digital maps for printed ones. That is one of many tactical lessons identified in a new report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a think-tank in London, based on extensive interviews with IDF officers. (“ccommanders were not accessible for interview,” the authors observe, laconically.)

Many Western armies believe future wars will involve intense urban combat, whether they are NATO defending Baltic cities from Russia or America parrying a Chinese invasion of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. The battle for Gaza city, which began in November, is a cautionary tale. Israel’s heavy firepower reduced much of it to rubble. Tank drivers struggled to judge the depth of craters through night-vision goggles, causing vehicles to roll over. Troops calling in artillery or air strikes found it harder to describe precise locations, because distinguishing features had been blasted away, and to differentiate fighters from civilians.

Read all our coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas

Critics have inferred from Russia’s war on Ukraine that the tank is too vulnerable to be effective. In Gaza, by contrast, the active protection systems (APS) on Israel’s tanks—which counteract incoming projectiles—largely kept them safe from anti-tank missiles. Tanks were especially useful in pairs, because their overlapping APS provided additional protection.

The authors, Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, also shed light on Hamas’s use of tunnels. They describe two sorts, those for commanders and those for lowlier operatives, with the former deeper and better equipped. The IDF initially thought it would first occupy territory and then search for tunnels. It soon learnt that this allowed Hamas to mount ambushes before retreating underground.

The lesson is that armies cannot bypass tunnels, but need to fight on and beneath the ground simultaneously. This was especially tricky because the boundaries between one Israeli unit and another—essential to avoid friendly fire—did not map neatly onto subterranean routes. Tunnel warfare also proved “extremely stressful”, with the possibility of meeting Hamas around every corner creating “a staccato quality to the pressure on individuals that was corrosive of morale”.

Above ground, drones proved essential. Previously, small strike drones, like the first-person view (FPV) explosives-laden ones commonly used in Ukraine, were not in the Israeli order of battle and held only by one experimental unit, much as in other Western armed forces. Once the war began, the IDF discovered that these could be highly effective if pushed down to small units like companies (80-plus soldiers). Those with strike drones, say the authors, “could monitor more urban terrain and conduct precision strikes at tempo”. The catch was that it proved impossible to track everyone’s drones. The result was a “high degree of air-defence fratricide”.

Some might question whether these lessons are truly useful for American or NATO forces. Most European armies are far smaller and more feebly equipped than the IDF, which has deployed more than 20 brigade combat teams thanks to the use of conscription and defence spending that exceeds 5% of GDP. Those armies are, in turn, contemplating a war against adversaries that are larger and better armed than Hamas, which has fought sporadically using small platoons and with no air power and only rudimentary jamming capabilities. Mr Watling and Mr Reynolds flip the proposition around with a slightly mischievous analogy. “For the British Army, it is in some respects more useful to consider itself in Hamas’s position,” they suggest, “defending urban areas with a coastline to the rear against a numerically superior enemy operating at divisional scale.”

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