Why Hamas Must Be Destroyed

Letting Hamas survive after the barbarism of October 7 would be tantamount to permitting Nazi Germany to end the war in 1944 with Hitler still in power.

By FRANK SOBCHAK

JUNE 19, 2024 23:39

Updated: JUNE 20, 2024 07:55

Among the many disingenuous and ahistorical narratives that have developed surrounding the Hamas-Israel war is one that Israel has done enough harm to Hamas that it should allow the damaged but not defeated organization to survive and perhaps even remain in power in Gaza.

Such an argument is often made under the premise that Hamas will be difficult to destroy and that Israel should cut a deal to free its hostages.

One commentator even posited that it would be “extraordinary” to suggest Hamas should accept its absolute annihilation during ceasefire negotiations, implying that it was irregular for a victor to insist that its opponent disarm and dissolve.

White flag

But such an allegation is patently false, as many times in history, one side has demanded the unconditional surrender of its adversary or annihilation of its military force.

During World War II, the Allied powers expected an unconditional surrender from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Indeed, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in Europe, told his troops before D-Day, “We will accept nothing less than full victory!”

For the Pacific Theater, the Potsdam Declaration decreed that Japan surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction” and threatened “the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and... the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.”

There was no illusion on the part of the Axis powers that their governments would be dismembered and their military forces annihilated when they accepted those terms. And yet in both cases, the defeated powers agreed to unconditional surrender and accepted their fates.

World War I concluded with an armistice followed by a negotiated settlement, but there was little question as to what would become of the military forces and political systems of the Central Powers. The Triple Entente demanded the near annihilation of the German war machine, with bans on conscription, submarines, and an air force. Its army and navy were largely dissolved, and the scuttled remains of its once great fleet can now be visited by vacationing scuba divers. Germany lost more than a tenth of its territory, and its allies, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were carved up by the victors.

During the American Civil War, Union forces infrequently required the unconditional surrender of Confederate forces, but still left the Confederacy as a gutted military force. At the Battle of Fort Donelson, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant earned the moniker “Unconditional Surrender” Grant for telling his opponent, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.”

The larger conflict, however, gave slightly more generous terms to Confederate forces when they surrendered at Appomattox Court House, with combatants paroled and allowed to keep their sidearms as they returned home.

Military material such as rifles, cannons, and other public property were stacked and handed over to Union soldiers, preventing Southern forces from resuming large-scale conflict and abolishing them as an organized military. The Confederate States of America, the South’s political governing body, was dissolved and a military occupation began.

Achieving a successful war termination that creates a lasting peace afterward is a strategically difficult challenge but not a rare occurrence. When utter annihilation of the enemy is paired with a generous peace, such as with the Marshall Plan after World War II, there is greater likelihood of a long-lasting peace. On the other hand, creating a Carthaginian peace, with a post-conflict period that punishes rather than rebuilds, can often pave the road for the next conflict, as it did with the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Even worse, the nuances of those peace accords later allowed Germans such as Adolf Hitler to declare that their country had never been defeated militarily, paving the way for rearmament. In the American Civil War, an inability to rebuild the South during Reconstruction and punish those who continued to fight for their tortured ideologies led to nearly endless low-level conflict that America still endures. The worst possible war termination option is completing a negotiated settlement that leaves the combatants ready to resume fighting: a real recipe for perpetual conflict.

IF ANYTHING is to be learned from the endings of these earlier conflicts, it is that letting Hamas survive after the barbarism of October 7 would be tantamount to permitting Nazi Germany to end the war in 1944 with Hitler still in power.

Imagining a world in which the fascist powers from that conflict had been allowed to endure as wounded versions of themselves is nothing less than a ludicrous nightmare that today we should do everything in our power to prevent with the modern-day fascists of Gaza, who cloak themselves in a false anti-colonial liberation narrative.

The writer, a PhD, is a publishing contributor at The MirYam Institute and a 26-year veteran of service in the US Army and Special Forces.

Why Hamas must be destroyed: The race to the bottom for terror groups - opinion

By Frank Sobchak

On October 7, the terrorist group Hamas perpetrated the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Many have explained away those crimes by blaming Hamas’s deep antisemitism, but while that explanation rings true, it is insufficient. 

Organizations such as Hamas compete with each other to obtain financial resources, public support, and recruits. Because media attention is crucial in all those factors, terror groups have been in a race to carry out ever more awful acts of inhumanity, vying to outdo each other. As brutal as October 7 was, if Hamas is not destroyed and made an example of, the next attack from a terrorist group will likely exceed its barbaric depravity.  

United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis coined the term “race to the bottom” to describe heightened competition between states or companies engaged in irrational economic decisions to gain competitive economic advantages. He observed that when competition increased in a particular geographic region or economic sector, governments engaged in deregulation to lower the cost of production to attract businesses. Hence, competition drove a race to the lowest standards possible so that those entities could continue to be competitive. The events surrounding October 7 are illustrative of a “race to the bottom” where terrorist groups compete to stay globally relevant and for allocations of limited resources such as manpower and money. For these groups to stay pertinent, they must generate as much fear and media coverage as possible and will race each other to the bottom in ever more brutal acts.  

Terrorism is fundamentally about using fear as a psychological weapon to generate effects far beyond the number of casualties in individual attacks. 

Traditional media coverage amplifies those effects because of the journalistic adage, “If it bleeds, it leads,” meaning that exceptionally sensational and violent stories are promoted above others. Social media, whose algorithms are often set to maximize viewing based on relevancy and popularity, has only accelerated this truism as our mobile phones now alert us when horrible things happen and demand that we take notice. Over time, repeatedly witnessing such extreme violence across different contexts leads to rapid desensitization and the public becomes numb to brutality. 

Therefore, to continue instilling deep levels of dread, terror groups must perform ever worse levels of cruelty.  

There is also an economic component to the vicious logic. Terror groups require money to function and carry out their attacks, and these funds come from various sources. The level of donations is often directly tied to the amount of publicity generated, with groups sharing short videos of their exploits along with links to send money. Funds from state actors, such as Qatar, are also intertwined with the amount of media coverage attacks create. 

Hamas fighters took advantage of this by using GoPros and phones to record the carnage they created and posting it on social media and/or sharing it directly with victims’ families. There was no shame in their depravity because they knew it would create a financial windfall that would put them far ahead of rival organizations. Competing in the media space and getting more social media views is economically lucrative and terrorism has become big business, with the head of Hamas’s worth estimated at $4 billion.  

Public support is also directly related to the media attention that terror groups receive.  

More coverage and social media hits result in increased popularity, and groups that are savvy can garner international credibility and backing. Press exposure, even of atrocities, can similarly result in increased recruiting. When faced with which group an individual decides to join, those with the greatest media presence are likely to benefit the most. But to stay relevant and keep getting views, donations, and supporters, groups have to keep outdoing each other in a race to the bottom of more and more awful acts of inhumanity.

Race to the bottom

Indeed, the race to the bottom amongst terrorist groups is nothing new as Islamic terrorist groups have been engaged in escalating violence against civilians for the last 20 years. Al Qaeda in Iraq split with its parent organization because it believed that Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were not aggressive enough – and set too many limits on which groups were fit to be slaughtered.  

ISIS grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq and took its depravity to the next level, which was so horrific that even Al Qaeda, an organization content to crash airliners full of innocents into civilian buildings, disavowed ties. 

Hamas has political competitors in Gaza, and across the Palestinian territories in general, and its abominations are driven in part by a desire to overshadow them. 

The best way to counteract this downward spiral is to utterly destroy Hamas – annihilate the organization’s military and political wings – so other terror groups recognize that copying them only will result in following them into oblivion. 

Respecting the laws of armed conflict is essential, but such a requirement is not mutually exclusive with ensuring the destruction of Hamas. At the same time, eradicating Hamas, which will be difficult militarily and politically, is not enough. It is also critical for the world to condemn what happened. Unequivocally. No platitudes that the barbarity must be contextualized, as if slicing off a woman’s breast could ever be put into perspective. In all likelihood, we will see even worse horror next time if we can’t stomach accomplishing both tasks.  

After the October 7 attacks, Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, pontificated: “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times. The Al-Aqsa Flood (the name Hamas gave its onslaught) is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” 

We should take Hamad and his organization at their word. Not just for the sake of Israel and the broader region, but also because other terrorists are watching the world’s response. They will undoubtedly be spurred to use the same level of brutality – or worse – in the future- if Hamas is not fundamentally dismantled. 

October 7 is a canary in the coal mine for terrorist violence. A new Pandora’s box of monstrosities has been opened and if an example is not made of Hamas, these horrors will happen again and again.

Frank Sobchak is a retired US Army Special Forces colonel and a publishing contributor at the MirYam Institute. Iris Sobchak has taught history at the US Military Academy at West Point and is a publishing contributor at the MirYam Institute.

U.S. Deterrence Failed in Ukraine

By FRANK Sobchak & LIAM COLLINS

A great deal of praise has been heaped on Europe and the United States for their sustained and determined response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with much of the congratulatory talk centered on the damage being done to Russia. Kyiv’s Western allies have provided the fledgling Ukrainian military with Javelin and Stinger missiles, rocket artillery, and, most recently, modern tanks. Yet, until Feb. 24, 2022, the United States made little effort to deter Russia, despite ample evidence that it intended to invade.

From President George W. Bush’s tepid response to the 2008 invasion of Georgia to the Biden administration’s antebellum halfhearted gestures of support for Ukraine, U.S. policies left the perception that the United States was not willing to make a renewed assault painful for Russia. The result was yet another war and a tremendously costly one at that.

It is often difficult to determine when deterrence works because, almost by definition, it is the proverbial dog that does not bark. Absent being in the room when leaders remark that they are not carrying out an action due to a threat, it is difficult to assign the cause to deterrence.

When it comes to war, realist scholars such as John Mearsheimer have noted that for deterrence to succeed, the state seeking war should perceive that the chances of success would be low and the costs high. Part of altering a state’s calculus is simple numbers: how many tanks, missiles, aircraft, and other weapons the defending state possesses. In his seminal work Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling artfully puts it, “The power to hurt is bargaining power.”

This created the central failure of U.S. policy. Refusing to send sophisticated weapons to Ukraine failed to signal to Russian leaders that an invasion of Ukraine would hurt—and potentially even fail.

In the run-up to the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin thought that his forces would march into Kyiv in a matter of days with few losses. After all, the international community did little when he annexed Crimea in 2014. Washington’s muted reaction to previous Russian provocations signaled an unwillingness to incur any costs to prevent Russia from doing what it wanted. U.S. intransigence toward providing lethal aid seemed to confirm that Ukraine lacked the capacity to resist, further reinforcing the Russian belief that the invasion would likely be easy and quick. The recent war in Ukraine is, therefore, a direct result of the West’s lack of resolve and failure to credibly deter Russia. Moscow thought it could get away with murder—as it had in the past.

Recall the aftermath of the 2008 invasion of Georgia. The Bush administration airlifted Georgian soldiers serving in Iraq back to Georgia to fight, provided a humanitarian aid package, and offered tersely worded denouncements and demarches. But it categorically rejected providing Georgia with serious military assistance in the form of anti-tank missiles and air defense missiles and even refrained from implementing punishing economic sanctions against Russia. The United States’ lack of resolve to punish Russia for its gross violation of international law was underscored when U.S. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley’s remark “Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?”—made during a National Security Council meeting after the war started—was later released to the media.

When the Obama administration took office, his team sought to reset relations with Russia. In short order, the United States abandoned Bush administration plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, canceled sanctions against Russian arms sector, and reduced the U.S. presence in Europe. By 2013, there were no U.S. tanks on German soil, a historic end to a deterrent force that had been in place for nearly seven decades. U.S. Army troops across Europe shrunk to a historic low of 30,000, just one-tenth of the commitment during the Cold War.

The United States did little to prevent or respond to the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rejecting calls from within the administration and a bipartisan coalition in Congress, the Obama White House outright refused to provide any form of lethal aid to embattled Ukrainian defenders.

President Barack Obama, encouraged by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was worried that providing even defensive weapons could result in an uncontrollable escalation. Ukraine also suffered from significant corruption, and there was fear that the weapons might fall into the wrong hands—a consideration that hadn’t come into play in far more corrupt states like Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, Ukrainian pleas for Javelin anti-tank missiles, Apache attack helicopters, and other weapons were ignored. Instead, the administration rapidly provided $120 million in security assistance and another $75 million in military equipment such as night vision goggles, medical supplies, Humvees, and unarmed unmanned aerial systems. During Obama’s tenure, total military assistance amounted to $600 million—but never included weapons.

For its primary response to the 2014 invasion, the administration banked on punishing sanctions to alter Russian behavior. These amounted to travel bans levied on senior Russian political, military, and economic leaders; frozen assets; and economic restrictions. Key business leaders and cronies of Putin were targeted, and entire industries were banned from doing business with the United States. Many allies followed suit.

Such actions were seen as “smart sanctions” that focused, like precision-guided munitions, on hitting critical industries or individuals involved in the conduct of the war. The hope was to minimize the damage to common Russians. But without making the public pay a price for war, the economic pain was inherently limited. Russia simply devalued the ruble and cashed out the reserves it had built up in its central bank from a decade of high energy prices to weather the sanctions-induced recession—a cost it felt worth paying in return for the seizure of Crimea.

The shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014 by Russian-controlled separatists was also met with a muted response from Washington. The U.S. response was limited to assisting the investigation and calling on Russia to end the war against Ukraine. While some additional sanctions were levied against Russia, particularly by Europe, the attack actually served to harden Obama’s resolve against providing weapons to Ukraine, reflecting his worries about further escalation.

Instead, to improve deterrence against Russia, the administration pushed for NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence. The new defense posture consisted of four multinational battalion-sized units deployed to areas—the Baltic states and Poland—most likely to be attacked. However, these measures were meant to deter Russian aggression only against NATO states and had no bearing on the danger of future conflict in Ukraine.

Next, the Obama administration established the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine in 2015 with the mission of training, equipping, training center development, and doctrinal assistance to the Ukrainian armed forces. The group included hundreds of trainers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Lithuania. Notably, U.S. trainers were limited to providing only “nonlethal training” to the Ukrainians, producing a muddled and incoherent set of rules. For example, U.S. trainers could train Ukrainians on small unit tactics that involved “shooting, moving, and communicating” but were prohibited from teaching sniper skills because these were considered “lethal.” That lack of commitment signaled, yet again, that the United States was not willing to give Ukraine the training or firepower it would need to repel Russia.

The Trump administration aimed to make a clean break with its predecessor and demonstrate strength. But in reality, President Donald Trump’s approach differed little from the previous two administrations. He reversed the prohibition on providing lethal aid to Ukraine and agreed to ship the much-desired Javelin missiles. Still, only 210 were delivered along with a paltry 37 launchers. More importantly, they were banned from being used in combat and instead were required to be locked up in a storage facility to serve as a “strategic deterrent.”

The amount of security assistance saw similar cosmetic changes, with a modest bump up to $350 million in the administration’s first year. But those unexceptional annual increases came with caveats and considerable drama. In 2019, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Trump for more Javelins, he demurred and blocked the delivery of nearly $400 million in assistance unless Zelensky agreed to investigate former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden—his opponent in the 2020 election—and his son. Trump held up the assistance for 55 days, only releasing it when his actions became public, eventually leading to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even though Trump begrudgingly allowed the Javelins and more aid, his administration was unwilling to send a general officer to serve as the senior defense official in Ukraine. The Obama administration had appointed retired Gen. John Abizaid to be the senior defense advisor to Ukraine, but he was only a part-time consultant and no longer on active duty. Abizaid supported assigning an active-duty general to Ukraine to coordinate the U.S. effort and made this known to U.S. European Command and the Defense Department. The response was that the U.S. military did not have a general it could dedicate to the mission.

Previously, when the priority was great enough, the U.S. miliary has assigned generals or admirals to serve in the U.S. embassies in Israel, the U.K., Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq—yet could not spare even one of its 620 generals or admirals for Ukraine.

Further weakening the U.S. deterrent posture, Trump began questioning the United States’ commitment to NATO and even declined to affirm NATO’s Article 5, its most important mutual defense clause. Worse, in 2018, Trump employed heavy-handed tactics more suited for a transactional relationship than an alliance, explicitly threatening member states that he would not come to their aid in the event of a Russian attack unless they paid up. Trump described NATO as “obsolete” and, like a 1940s union boss, harshly decried its European members for not paying their dues.

By some accounts, Trump was even considering the nuclear option: leaving NATO altogether. The message to Russia from such fratricidal melees was clear: If the United States would not protect fellow NATO states that it was treaty-bound to defend, then the United States would definitely not defend a non-NATO country in Russia’s backyard.

The poor signaling only continued with the Biden administration. Even as it became clearer that Russia was considering an attack, the United States drastically limited the supply of weapons that it provided to Ukraine. In November 2021, U.S. officials snubbed Ukrainian requests for shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles—a purely defensive weapon.

Then, in December, barely two months before the invasion, the White House hesitated approving a package of “lethal and nonlethal assistance” that included Javelins, counter-artillery radars, sniper rifles, small arms, and other equipment because it worried that the assistance would be “too provocative to Russia.”

Only when it became clear that the invasion was imminent did the United States provide a modicum of uptick in aid, consisting of a limited number of Javelin and Stinger missiles, with the latter coming from U.S. allies as opposed to from the United States itself. Useful as those proved, they did not alter Russia’s cost-benefit analysis. And with little talk of additional aid, this was a clear signal to Russia that the United States’ commitment would hardly be different from what it was in 2014.

Most of all, the United States seemed to be convinced, as Moscow was, that Ukrainian resistance would rapidly crumble in the face of a Russian assault. Given the United States’ paltry efforts to build Ukraine’s military into one that could credibly deter Russia, it should not be surprising that both nations made this miscalculation. On Feb. 14, 2022, just prior to the invasion, the United States sent another important signal that further communicated a lack of commitment to Ukraine and a resignation that the war was already lost: It announced it was closing its embassy in Kyiv. By comparison, the United States refused to close its embassy in Paris even as Nazi Germany threatened France and maintained an embassy in Vichy after the surrender and occupation. The closure of the Kyiv embassy echoed moves by the U.S. military to withdraw the vast majority of military advisors days earlier.

Both actions conveyed clearly that the United States had little stake in Ukraine and was not willing to risk American lives. In many ways, it gave a green light for the Russian assault that Moscow anticipated to be a fait accompli repeat of Crimea. To the Ukrainians, it sent the message that instead of fighting, they should pursue a diplomatic solution as they had done, unsuccessfully, for Crimea in 2014.

In the final weeks before the invasion, there was some debate in Washington as to whether to impose withering sanctions in an attempt to deter Russia or afterward as a punishment and future deterrent. But Russia had already amassed more than 100,000 troops at Ukraine’s border, a momentous strategic move that bore considerable costs. Barring a significant deterrent act by the United States and its allies, the die had already been cast. Sanctions could possibly have inflicted enough of a cost to deter the invasion, but one of Russia’s key lessons from 2014 was that it could weather any new measures that the United States and its allies were likely to implement.

When the invasion came, U.S. actions spoke louder than words. Officials in the Biden administration believed that Ukraine could not win and that Kyiv would fall within days. The United States even offered to evacuate Zelensky, to which he famously replied, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Publicly communicating an expectation that the invasion would be over quickly only undermined deterrence by signaling the cost would be minimal to Russia. It was only after Ukraine demonstrated capability and resolve that significant military assistance began flowing and punishing sanctions were enacted—actions that, ironically, might have deterred Russia in the first place.

The sad irony is that U.S. leaders, of both parties, chose to avoid deterrence for fear of escalating conflict—only to find themselves continually escalating their support once conflict started. Time after time, the United States chose the option that was perceived as the least provocative but that instead led to the Russians becoming convinced that they were safe to carry out the most provocative action of all: a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The United States ignored the eternal wisdom of the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”) and instead hoped that half-steps and compromise would suffice. While so far those decisions have prevented direct conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers, they have caused Russia and the West to be locked in a continuing series of escalations with an increasing danger of a miscalculation that could lead to exactly that scenario.

The authors would like to thank Steven Pifer, Lionel Beehner, Alexander Lanoszka, and Michael Hunzeker for their thoughtful feedback.

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Col. Frank Sobchak (Ret.), PhD is an adjunct professor at the Joint Special Operations University and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Read full bio here.

Col. Liam Collins is the Executive Director of the Viola Foundation and the Madison Policy Forum and a permanent member with the Council on Foreign Relations. A retired Special Forces Colonel, Liam served in a variety of special operations assignments and conducted operational deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa and South America. Read full bio here.

A nuclear Iran could create a Middle East nightmare

By Frank Sobchak

Much ink has been spilled over how much of a threat a nuclear Iran would pose to Israel and her allies. Most scholars and practitioners agree that allowing an aggressive, expansionist regime that has described Israel as a “one-bomb country” to acquire the most terrifying weapon ever invented would be reckless and suicidal. However, recent efforts to rekindle the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) have led to a string of pundits and politicians describing how to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.  

Before accepting such a fatalistic position, it is important to review all the potential repercussions of such a tectonic change. One rarely explored impact is the potential for further proliferation within the Middle East. If Iran crosses the nuclear threshold — which White House officials worry could happen in weeks — Saudi Arabia will do everything possible not to be left behind.  

In the intelligence world, assessing a threat is often based on two elements: capability and intent. Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program has both. In terms of capabilities, Saudi Arabia began building a 30-kilowatt research reactor in 2018, a curious decision given that producing energy through nuclear reactors is exponentially more expensive than burning fossil fuels, of which they have an abundance. More telling is that the Saudis have not agreed to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world’s nuclear safety and proliferation watchdog. Saudi Arabia has approximately 90,000 tons of unmined uranium, likely enough fuel for that reactor as well as a weapons program, especially if reports are correct that China helped construct a facility to process the raw ore.  

Even if Saudi Arabia decides not to obtain the materials necessary for a weapons program, such as centrifuges or plutonium reprocessing facilities, there is credible evidence that they have an agreement with Pakistan to provide nuclear weapons in the event of a crisis such as Iran becoming a nuclear power. Saudi Arabia is long believed to have financed Pakistan’s weapons program, which is assessed to have approximately 160 warheads. Several U.S. and NATO officials indicated that a small subset of those weapons is earmarked for such a crisis. Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli Military Intelligence, observed that if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, “The Saudis will not wait one month. They already paid for the bomb; they will go to Pakistan and bring what they need to bring.” Those warheads could be fitted to an arsenal of intermediate-range ballistic missiles that originally were provided by China but now are produced domestically.  

In terms of indicators, there is extremely strong evidence that the kingdom has every intent to join the “smallest club on earth,” as the group of states possessing nuclear weapons has been described. One needs only to explore the official statements of its leaders to understand how clearly they have communicated their objectives. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MbS, bluntly noted in 2018, “Without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” 

Such overt displays of Saudi nuclear intent are not new. As Prince Turki al-Faisal, who served as chief of intelligence and ambassador to the U.S., told a conference in 2011, “We must, as a duty to our country and people, look into all options we are given, including obtaining these weapons ourselves.” Further communicating Saudi Arabia’s stance is what it has not said: It has refused to sign nonproliferation agreements and has not agreed to bans on enriching uranium or reprocessing spent fuel — the two ways to produce weapons-grade material.  

The kingdom’s intent to acquire nuclear weapons is driven, in part, by the fact that Saudi Arabia and Iran have engaged in a series of proxy wars since Iran’s 1979 revolution. While a component of the conflict is sectarian, dating to the Sunni-Shi’a schism, the core of the struggle is for dominance and power in the Middle East. Saudi support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, combined with Iranian expansionism as part of its plan for a “Shi’a crescent,” has led to conflict between surrogates in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. The conflict has escalated so much that even Saudi Arabia itself is not off-limits to attacks. 

In some ways, the two states parallel the nuclear pathways of similar arch-rivals Pakistan and India. Each views the other as an existential threat and if one stands poised to acquire nuclear weapons, the other will seek the same to maintain the balance of power.

Recent changes in the kingdom’s geostrategic position increase the odds of proliferation. In the past, Saudi Arabia benefitted from a warm relationship with the United States. Like Japan and South Korea, having America as a powerful friend ensured that other regional powers could not become existential threats. But that calculus has changed. Following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia became an international pariah. President Biden publicly threatened to make the Kingdom “pay the price” and described its government as having “little social redeeming value.” Saudi Arabia is somewhat on its own now, and with the possibility of its nemesis acquiring nuclear weapons, it faces little choice but to do the same. The painful lesson of Ukraine and Libya — which gave up their nuclear weapons — is that the survival of states that don’t have nuclear weapons is at the whim of states that do.

If a Saudi acquisition of the bomb is not enough to generate concern, it should be noted that they are not the only country that stands on the precipice of proliferation. There are indications that Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are considering developing similar programs with the hope of establishing a deterrence as well as earning the prestige that accompanies possessing a weapon that is “the destroyer of worlds.” 

Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon would not be the end; it would be just the beginning. Any thinking about how the world could live with it should include the almost certain impact of further proliferation in an unstable region that is rife with systems of government that could change violently overnight. We must consider such future nightmares while we debate what must be done now with Iran.  

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Col. Frank Sobchak (Ret.), PhD is an adjunct professor at the Joint Special Operations University and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Read full bio here.

The Army Needs to Understand the Afghanistan Disaster

By Frank Sobchak & Matthew Zais

The U.S. war in Afghanistan was a costly failure. More than 2,400 Americans died during the two-decade conflict. Tens of thousands more returned home with life-altering wounds. The Kabul government collapsed before American forces had withdrawn and the Afghan Army simply evaporated. The Taliban marked its victory with celebratory gunfire and parades.

This disastrous outcome deserves an honest reckoning. Such introspection is especially needed within the U.S. Army, which provided most of the mission commanders and a majority of the troops. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for either the service’s leaders or bureaucracy to conduct such an inquiry.

Iraqi forces similarly collapsed after the U.S. departure. We helped draft the Army’s historical inquiry of the Iraq war from 2013 to 2019. This effort was championed by Gen. Ray Odierno, at the time the Army chief of staff, and Gen. Lloyd Austin, who then ran Central Command and is now defense secretary.

Our findings weren’t always flattering, including that American generals had offered inflated assessments of Iraqi military capability. Gen. Odierno’s successor, Gen. Mark Milley, attempted to bury the work and its lessons. Gen. Omar Jones, the Army’s senior public affairs officer who had tried to block a conference that aimed to draw lessons from the My Lai Massacre, supported Gen. Milley’s effort to quash the Iraq study. Gen. Milley eventually agreed to publish the Iraq war history, after the story appeared in the press.

Gen. Milley was successful, however, in shelving plans to incorporate the findings into the Army’s professional military education; releasing the full declassified archives that accompanied the history; and printing copies for military leaders and soldiers. A bootlegged version from Amazon is now the easiest way to get a copy.

The U.S. military needs to avoid repeating the mistakes that doomed the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. But who should conduct this study? And how should it be done? The House Armed Services Committee recently approved a commission, but an inquiry done by lawmakers will fall prey to partisanship.

The Army’s record suggests the service can’t conduct an unvarnished review of itself. In the 1980s, Army leaders tried to suppress one of the seminal works of the Vietnam conflict, Andrew Krepinevich’s “The Army in the Vietnam War.” The Defense Department and Secretary Austin should instead direct the formation of a team of academics and practitioners. This team should answer to the National Defense University, while being fully empowered by the Defense secretary.

Organizing the group outside normal military structures and having it led by civilians should prevent the services from trying to kill an unflattering assessment. As an additional precaution, the group’s charter should allow civilian leaders to publish the findings without the approval of the military services.

The group should be diverse and include civilian academics, journalists and current and former military members who served and didn’t serve in Afghanistan. The leader will need bipartisan credentials, perhaps an acclaimed author of military history. The inquiry should include members from all service branches, though the team should be focused on the ground war and thus draw members largely from the Army and Marines. 

Once formed, the team should focus on providing a brutally honest assessment, one unafraid to criticize senior military officers. The perspective should be of the theater commander, while also including strategic deliberations with the president, senior Pentagon officials and Congress. The study should also look at how well battlefield commanders carried out that strategy.

The study must be unclassified and, similar to the Iraq inquiry, the team should be granted full access to the emails of all general officers who served in or had responsibility for Afghanistan. Secretary Austin should order a full declassification effort and direct his subordinates to cooperate.

The first step in recovery is admitting that one has a problem. Deep introspection is necessary at the Defense Department to understand the role the U.S. military and its uniformed leaders played in the Afghanistan tragedy. The military isn’t infallible, and it is time to be held accountable for our part in defeat.

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Frank Sobchak is a PhD candidate in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Read full bio here.

Matthew Zais, a retired Infantry colonel, is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Both were co-authors of the Army’s history of the Iraq war.

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan

By Frank Sobchak

In recent weeks there have been a number of articles written prognosticating that America’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan spells wholesale doom for U.S. and Israeli counterterrorism efforts, and the broader security and wellbeing of both states. While we are right to worry over the coming humanitarian disaster, anxiety over the security impact of the withdrawal is grossly misplaced. Instead, both nations should be thankful that the long drain on resources is finally coming to an end, and that their leaders will be able to refocus their grand strategies in areas that matter, rather than waste valuable resources in areas of strategic distraction.

There is an old adage that if you try to defend everything, you defend nothing. Proper grand strategy, something neither state has been effective at imagining and then implementing recently, requires carefully balancing risks, costs, and benefits. It requires thinking clearly and rationally rather than acting with emotion – — as hard as that may be. It also demands recognizing that no state has unlimited resources. To determine how to allocate those scarce resources, states should meticulously assess what are their most vital interests and then commit resources towards protecting those interests. Difficult decisions will have to be made, often with the best choice being the least bad of a series of unsavory options. 

Pretending that Afghanistan qualifies as a vital interest for the U.S. or Israel is simply ludicrous. The Afghan war started with little thought of costs, consequences, or second or third order effects. As a result, the strategy (using that term loosely) of the U.S. and its allies has drifted for many years, with national leaders more afraid of domestic political costs than reassessing the core assumptions of the conflict or evaluating our chances of success or goals.

This has caused a monumental expenditure of our limited resources. Many estimates put the U.S. cost of the Afghan war in the range of $1 trillion. When all expenditures are totaled, it will almost certainly cost trillions more due to the long-term impact of veterans’ care as well as the interest on loans taken out to finance the war. There is considerable evidence that Al Qaida’s strategy was to draw the U.S. into Afghanistan and keep us there until bankruptcy. This was no farcical fantasy:  Afghanistan economically bled dry the empires of Alexander the Great, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The conflict in Afghanistan was such a gross waste of resources that it would probably have been more useful if the U.S. had set the trillions of dollars spent on the war on fire and used it for heat.  

In addition to its financial cost, the war also spent the nation’s reserves of public willingness to face its enemies. War weariness is at an all-time high, and if we had continued to stay and fight in Afghanistan, it would have further degraded America’s willingness to confront our true enemies and the world’s real dangers.  

When thinking of our vital interests, the U.S. should focus on areas that matter to us strategically and the enemies that can threaten those interests. While we squandered our finances in Afghanistan, the forces of authoritarianism have been on the march. Russia and China present complicated global threats to the existing liberal order that the U.S spent decades building. Iran, a nation that has pledged the destruction of both Israel and the United States, presents a regional threat to that order and is on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power – a grave danger that could ignite an arms race that would further destabilize a crucial region. Afghanistan is a distraction from those threats. 

Even if a vestige of the terrorist threat rises again in Afghanistan, it is unlikely to be significant enough to require another large-scale intervention as no American administration of either party would blithely sit by while such a threat re-established itself there. The vast majority of the current fighters are domestic combatants engaged in the struggle for Afghanistan’s future. While there are some Al Qaida and Islamic State militants in Afghanistan, long ago those organizations spread across the world to survive. The global jihadist movement metastasized and learned. It would require a willful suspension of reality to pretend the senior leaders of those organizations would return to set up terrorist training camps or operate overtly in Afghanistan as this would put them in the crosshairs of American and coalition aircraft. If anything, the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan provides fodder for recruitment of the global jihadist network. Ending our involvement in the conflict will hurt their recruitment efforts – a positive consequence for both the U.S. and Israel.

As John Quincy Adams noted, we should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The world is full of monsters who wish us ill. If we continuously go hunting for them, as we have for the last two decades, we will find ourselves insolvent, exhausted, and our skills dulled. It is time for us to rest and prepare so that when they do come for us, we will be ready.

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Frank Sobchak is a PhD candidate in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Read full bio here.

Israel’s Shift to CENTCOM: Big Things Come in Little Packages

By Iris SOBCHAK & FRANK Sobchak

In the waning hours of his presidency, President Trump ordered the U.S. military to change its Unified Command Plan by moving Israel from European Command (EUCOM) to Central Command (CENTCOM).  

Seemingly a small and semantic change, in reality the shift is nothing short of tectonic and momentous. While the decision did not receive much coverage because of the attack on the Capitol and surrounding events, it is an important issue with many considerable ramifications. Specifically, it will have immediate practical implications and will create new opportunities for engagement that could trigger another wave of diplomatic developments and normalizations.

European Command was established in 1952 to provide unified command and authority over US forces in Europe focused on the danger of a Soviet invasion during the Cold War. By contrast, Central Command was established by Ronald Reagan in 1983, taking over from the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force to address Middle East crises. Israel, Lebanon, and Syria were chosen to remain in EUCOM, at least in part because Egypt was the only country in CENTCOM that recognized Israel. Also informing the decision was the thought that the animosity towards Israel from many Arab nations would complicate coalition negotiations and operational planning.  

At the time, simply having an Israeli entry stamp in one’s passport prohibited American military planners from entering most Arab states, and the ridiculous posturing of officials maintaining two passports became a necessity. General Norman Schwarzkopf believed that not having Israel in CENTCOM made his job as coalition commander during the 1991 Gulf War easier and noted, “I’d have difficulty impressing the Arabs with Central Command’s grasp of geo-political nuance if one of the stops on my itinerary had been Tel Aviv.”  

But the decision had negative consequences on U.S. interagency planning. In the Department of Defense, Israel was under EUCOM while in the State Department it was organized under the Near Eastern Bureau with its Arab neighbors. This caused difficulties in the areas of defense and diplomacy, including when negotiating treaties or coordinating operations. But the geo-strategic tides shifted and in 1994 Jordan joined Egypt in recognizing Israel. 

Fast forward to more recent months and we note that as part of the recent Abraham Accords, Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, and Sudan have also normalized relations. 

Moving Israel to CENTCOM is a significant step towards correctly aligning the State and Defense Department regional bureaus and commands. The logical realignment of Israel in CENTCOM is good for governance and will allow the U.S. to manage the national bureaucracy and communications between these governmental organizations and with our allies in the region.  

Additionally, the two most pressing regional (and potentially geo-strategic) dangers of our time, a rearming and resurgent Iran and the threat of militant Islamic fundamentalists groups such as Al Qa’ida and ISIS, are issues that require the involvement, coordination, and assistance of countries throughout the region.   

The U.S. has long sought to build a regional defense arrangement to counter Iranian expansion and prevent Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons. By including Israel in the appropriate plans and operations, CENTCOM will have greater success in achieving these goals, whether they be through missile defense, non-proliferation, countering terrorist financing, or simply killing or capturing senior terrorist leadership. Israel and her neighbors will also benefit greatly as the change aligns with their own security objectives. 

Switching Israel to CENTCOM also creates new opportunities. Such a realignment will compel other Arab states that have not yet recognized Israel to engage more with her more readily. The alignments also has the potential to lead to warmed relations or even a new wave of recognitions or normalizations. 

At the CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, there exists an “engagement village” where all countries included in the region send liaisons to coordinate and make connections. Having Israel as  part of this engagement village will open an additional back door of communications that will enable further cooperation on a multitude of issues. Even countries that do not yet formally have established relations with Israel would have to collaborate with Israel in such an environment and it is not inconceivable that such efforts could lead to the quiet prospering of informal relations with Iran’s principal Gulf rival, Saudi Arabia.

Another possible outcome could be that Israel’s shift results in a larger American military unified command plan reassessment. Such a review could spur the movement of the countries in northern Africa that are more culturally and geographically similar to those in the Middle East to be realigned with CENTCOM as well. Making this move would line up CENTCOM with the way that the State Department has structured their Near East Affairs Bureau. It makes logical sense to have Morocco, Libya, Algeria and Tunisia in the same regional headquarters, as they are facing similar issues as the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt.  

The decision to shift Israel to CENTCOM is one that will have significant, immediate, practical benefits for the United States, Israel, and the Arab nations of the region. The only possible downside to this decision is that should Israel come into conflict with any of the other countries within CENTCOM, decision making and operational planning would become more complicated. More likely however, is that such a realignment would help deter this kind of conflict and create a greater peace between Israel and the other countries of the region.  

Engagement leads to personal connections and the dispelling of biases and prejudices.  As the American author Mark Twain wrote, “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” Let us all hope that this move helps inspire such views.

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Frank Sobchak is a PhD candidate in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Read full bio here.

Iris Sobchak (Lieutenant Colonel, Retired Army) has had a diverse 29 year career in the military, academia, financial services and in women’s leadership consulting. She taught History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and she holds a BS in international/Strategic History from West Point and a MA in Latin American History at Penn State.

QUESTIONING ABRAHAM

By Frank Sobchak

This week Sudan agreed to the normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for its removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism; joining Bahrain, UAE, and a growing chorus of nations that have seemingly put an end to decades of Arab-Israeli conflict. The Trump and Netanyahu administrations have heralded these achievements as byproducts of their diplomatic efforts, and President Trump has been personally nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite these claims, such an assessment would be a poor interpretation of events. Although the Abraham Accords are encouraging and historically significant developments, they are more a byproduct of tectonic changes that have transformed the region over decades than the result of diplomatic work of the parties involved. Most responsible for the accords is the restructuring of the Middle East regional balance of power as well as massive domestic transformations across the Arab world. 

For three decades, the two Iraq wars and their aftershocks have restructured the power dynamic of the Middle East, producing what scholars term the phenomenon of balancing - when countries shift alliances to collectively meet the challenges of a rising power. States that have little in common and few incentives to form partnerships band together against what they perceive to be a common and larger foe. Here, the decline of Iraq and the rise of Iran have led countries across the region to reassess their regional and international partnerships. Such a change in circumstance did not occur overnight. America’s two wars with Iraq, Desert Storm in 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, militarily emasculated Iraq, which had long been considered Iran's regional counterbalance. Iraq’s armed forces, which in 1990 was the fifth largest in the world now cannot even provide domestic security. 

The deterioration of Iraqi military strength increased Iran’s relative power and emboldened their behavior. Iranian surrogates operate in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq; all part of an aggressive regional strategy known as the axis of resistance. Iranian forces or their proxies have launched attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, exacerbating the traditional Sunni-Shi’a schism and terrifying many of Iran’s neighbors whose militaries are dwarfed by the new regional hegemon. Iran’s active military is roughly three times Saudi Arabia’s and six times the size of UAE’s. Worse, the U.S., which has often played the role of regional policeman, has seemingly retreated into an era of limited overseas commitments and can’t be counted on to intervene against Iran- a policy consistent across the Obama and Trump administrations. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, viewed by many in the U.S. and Europe as a way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, is perceived very differently by most Sunni Arab states. They see it as poorly designed and enforced; a destabilizing factor that could result in a nightmarish scenario. These factors have frightened Iran's neighbors into novel alliances with Israel which demonstrate the classical balancing verdict that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  

Shifts in the regional balance of power, when added to the diminishing importance of the Palestinian cause among Arab populations, has resulted in new opportunities for Israel-Arab relations.  Twenty years ago, when Arabs were polled about their most important personal issue it was almost always "liberation" for the Palestinians. In Arabic, the word “Jerusalem” was seemingly inseparable from “occupied,” reflecting that the plight of the Palestinians mattered in daily life. Polls today do not reflect these concerns. A Palestinian state has dropped to the second most important foreign policy issue (behind Iran) for many Arab states and has often fallen behind economic issues and education in personal concerns. Majorities in many states now see normalization of relations with Israel as a positive development.

Fatigue with the Palestinian conflict, alongside a greater recognition of their own domestic problems makes many Arabs less inclined to follow the traditional Arab narrative on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The fracturing of the Palestinian position into two diametrically different camps in the West Bank and Gaza further accelerated this process. Frustration from the Arab Spring’s lack of progress towards political change refocused many domestic audiences towards their own problems rather than those of the Palestinians. And the brutality of the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars put the notion of suffering into painful context.  

Access to non state-run media sources have enabled Arabs across the region to bear witness to these problems like never before. Old orthodoxies are thus questioned. Tired narratives lack the support they once did. 

Some Syrians and Lebanese have posted videos stating they would rather be Arabs in Israel than in their own countries, and others have denounced Hezbollah as “worse than Israel.”  Even Saudi Arabia, once a stalwart defender of the Palestinians, has begun to criticize Palestinian positions. Put together, these changes have begotten opportunities for advances in relations and normalization; most tellingly manifested in the form of the Abraham accords.

Given the impacts of the shifts in the Middle East balance of power and Arab domestic political changes, it is more likely than not that subsequent normalizations between Israel and other Arab states will occur in the near future. 

But more important than the simple tally of new alliances is the question of how long lasting and deep rooted those new friendships prove themselves to be. Allegiances that have shifted can shift back. That reality raises questions.

If the interests that led to normalization abruptly change, how heightened will concerns over the controversial sale of advanced F-35s stealth fighters to UAE become? Those concerns remain, despite Israel's recent condoning of the sale. Will Sudan’s removal from the list of state sponsors result in a real change of behavior and policy? Time will tell, but before we celebrate in earnest, these questions are certainly worthy of answers.

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Frank Sobchak is a PhD candidate in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Read full bio here.

SIX DAYS & THE FOREVER WAR

By Frank Sobchak

This June marks the 53rd anniversary of Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 Six Day War when the Israel Defense Forces defeated the combined militaries of several of its neighbors.  

Israel’s decisive military victory is often studied by the armed forces of other nations and many have applied its lessons in other conflicts. 

This year also marks eighteenth year of constant conflict for the U.S. in what was originally named the global war on terrorism. The juxtaposition of these two conflicts brings pause to military strategists and begs the question if Israel’s success in 1967 could ever be repeated, there or elsewhere.

In the U.S., children who were not born at the time of the 9/11attacks are now old enough to fight in the seemingly never ending conflict, an all too common situation amongst members of the military whose offspring are statistically more likely to follow in their parent’s footsteps.  

It is a situation that Israel is also familiar with, having seen the success of 1967 dissipate into a protracted conflict against amorphous terrorist groups, guerrillas, and extremist organizations after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 

Pundits of all political persuasions in both countries have bemoaned this parallel development, arguing that such a perpetual “Forever War” threatens the fabric of democratic governments, erodes societal civil military relations, creates too many casualties to bear, and generates costs that destroy opportunities for future generations. Yet is this seemingly everlasting struggle as bad as they make out? 

It is important to note that I am not advocating that war is a good thing. I have lost friends, classmates, subordinates, and students to the unforgiving scythe of battle and wish that we all could live out the rest of our days in peace. But I also recognize their sacrifices have tamped down war’s natural tendencies to escalate and expand and that these seemingly endless conflicts have prevented much larger and much bloodier wars from developing. 

This is also not to say that both countries have always fought their conflicts intelligently. The Iraq War will probably go down in U.S. history as one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the history of the Republic. 

Yet although the prolonged fighting has been devastating at the individual and family level, we should recognize two facts. First, that the conflict both nations are engaged in is a war of ideas against nebulous transnational actors, a struggle that is not likely to be won decisively. 

Second, that the current era of conflict, by comparison to other time periods in history and other wars, is far less destructive than almost all the wars of the past.

One of the main reasons why we should not be deceived into assuming that either country could safely walk away from conflict without it boomeranging back is because we are in a war of ideas against a loosely aligned set of violent extremist organizations. 

The U.S. has fought ideologies before and won great victories: against slavery and white supremacy in the U.S. Civil War, Nazism and Fascism World War II, and Communism during the Cold War. 

Israel has had to fight the very notion that it should not be allowed to exist. 

Yet even in those conflicts, the core ideology of each group sadly persists today and we still have to fight neo-Nazis, white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other villainy. Destroying an ideology is nearly impossible, even after defeating it on the field of battle and discrediting its supporters.  

Furthermore, because we are fighting a networked non-state actor spread across the globe that hides amongst the population, rooting out their poisonous creed is much more difficult.  

In this struggle, there will be no surrender by our enemies under the guns of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.  Hamas, Hezballah, Al Qai’da, and ISIS will not be giving up anytime soon. To force those organizations to capitulate would require such horrors that we should thank providence that we are in a forever war rather than a traditional conflict. 

In World War II, the allies had to resort to firebombing cities and dropping atomic bombs to convince Germany and Japan to surrender, even though rationally there was no pathway to victory for either of those nations after mid-1944 (at the latest). Unfortunately, human beings will continue to fight, suffer, and die far past the point when they should logically give up.  

This point brings out a larger fact- that as horrible as the post 9/11 wars have been, they have been much less devastating than conventional wars. This is a truism of wars which have been called “low intensity conflicts” because casualties are often a fraction of what they are in larger struggles. 

American losses in more traditional forms of warfare include 405,000 killed in World War II, 58,000 in Vietnam, and 36,000 in Korea. Israel lost nearly 3,000 soldiers during the Yom Kippur War, and 1,000 during the Six Day War. By contrast, the two decade long “Global War on Terrorism” has claimed roughly 7,000 American combatants. 

By comparison, the U.S. lost roughly the same number of soldiers in one month during the battle of Iwo Jima, as it did during the Forever War. 

As painful as the losses were, Israel’s casualties amounted to under 100 soldiers killed during the 2014 invasion of Gaza and approximately 200 in all the conflicts with Lebanon and Hizbollah since the year 2000. 

Those losses occurred in the prevention of amorphous groups from coalescing into powerful nation states against which any campaign would be much bloodier. 

Warfare has changed, as noted by military theorists and scholars such as Rupert Smith, Martin Van Creveld, and Sean McFate. 

In this new paradigm, conflict is timeless, almost unending and the venue of fighting has shifted from a traditional battlefield to one where parties operate amongst civilian populations.  

Rather than deny that these changes have occurred, we should recognize and accept them for what they are. We must live in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. And in that world, the best option might just be the military equivalent of “mowing the lawn” every few years. 

When fighting a virulent ideology, an outcome of a protracted conflict where we endure a never-ending drip of a handful of losses a year is still better than the alternative of facing off against a well-armed, industrialized, and tech-savvy nation state. 

In such a context, the Forever War is likely the best that we can hope for.  While it is hard to stomach, such a truism reinforces the ancient wisdom: Only the dead have seen the end of war.

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Frank Sobchak is a PhD candidate in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Read full bio here.