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TAMPA, Fla. — Robotics will play a key role in 21st-century conflicts but face limitations in urban environments or underground operations. Real-time communication between field commanders and air support has been a game-changer, and social media narratives can have a greater influence on the trajectory of war than perhaps anyone expected.
Those are just a few lessons learned from Israel’s war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, analysts say.
The clash, now approaching its seventh month, is under close study inside the Pentagon and in national security and military circles worldwide. Along with the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas conflict is among the first major wars in the age of drones, artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge tools.
Unlike the war in Ukraine, Israel’s battle against Hamas is playing out in one of the world’s most densely populated patches of land. Israel has one of the most technologically advanced militaries, allowing observers to study modern-day urban conflicts aided by the most sophisticated warfighting tools.
Lessons from the war will be key topics at the Special Operations Forces Week conference, organized by U.S. Special Operations Command and the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation. The event is one of the world’s largest gatherings of special operations professionals and defense industry leaders. It serves as a showcase of military technologies and a forum for large contractors and niche startups to demonstrate and potentially sell their products.
SEE ALSO: Hamas says it accepts cease-fire proposal to end fighting in Gaza; Israel weighs options
The technology and products on display often mirror current conflicts or wars about to erupt. The heavy focus on naval capabilities and maritime technology has increased as war planners prepare for a potential U.S. clash with China in the Pacific.
Modern-day battlefields
The Israel-Hamas war is helping drive the conversations. From the broadest perspective, specialists say, the conflict has crystallized the reality that even the best-trained, best-equipped fighting forces lose much of their advantage in urban war zones packed with civilians.
“This war has highlighted the theory of asymmetric warfare, specifically that the larger and more powerful force holds the upper hand over the smaller and less powerful force in battle is essentially flipped in an urban combat environment where the smaller force is entrenched within the battlespace,” Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, told The Washington Times.
Israel has struggled to destroy Hamas, which was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal after the Palestinian militant group slaughtered more than 1,200 civilians and took more than 250 hostages on Oct. 7. The group is notorious for embedding its operations inside civilian infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals. Finding and killing combatants without harming innocent civilians is arduous and gives critics fuel to accuse Israel of indiscriminately killing women and children.
The war also has provided valuable information about how a modern military can minimize civilian deaths with the proper fusion of ground, artillery and aerial assets. Mr. Melamed said one of the major advances on display in Gaza is the virtual perfection of real-time, direct communications among ground commanders, artillery batteries miles away and air support overhead. That means ground-level intelligence about targets’ locations and strike orders can be almost instantaneous.
“When historians look back at Israel’s war in Gaza, they will no doubt focus on Israel’s success in shortening the communications circuit between battlefield commanders and their artillery and air support, creating a more direct conversation between units operating in the same urban battle space and by effect shortening the time frame between the gathering of field intelligence and the operations it leads to,” he said. “That operational innovation, not specifically a technological one, is likely to be employed by militaries in their future operations.”
New tools
Israel has employed a host of cutting-edge tools, sometimes sparking even more outrage in the Arab world, among the political left in the U.S. and Europe and in other quarters.
Israel has aggressively disputed assertions that it is using an artificial intelligence system for a targeted killing program that tolerates civilian deaths as acceptable collateral damage.
Explosive news reports last month that Israel has a secret AI-powered killing machine called Lavender cited anonymous intelligence sources involved in the war.
Israel Defense Forces said it does not use AI to designate people as targets for military strikes.
“Contrary to claims, the IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist,” the IDF said in a statement last month. “Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.”
Israel has relied on other tools for potential use in urban operations, though some have limited success. Israel has reportedly used robotic dogs and other devices throughout Gaza. Ukraine has successfully employed robotic ground vehicles in its war with Russia.
Specialists say those robots, with relatively limited range and other constraints, aren’t yet able to fully replace the missions assigned to human soldiers, such as finding and clearing out the vast tunnel networks Hamas has built beneath Gaza.
“To me, Gaza underscores the limitations of robotics, especially underground. We see them doing great things in Ukraine. But they aren’t able to search tunnels as swarms in Gaza very well, it would appear,” said Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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