When Hamas launched its attack across the Gaza border on Oct. 7, the Irregular Warfare Initiative sprang into action, publishing industry-leading articles and podcasts analyzing the conflict and its ramifications. On the two-month anniversary of the beginning of the latest hostilities, we take stock of our work so far.
Commentary
Our team responded to the conflict almost immediately, with IWI Director of External Communications Doug Livermore publishing an article on Oct. 12 analyzing its irregular warfare implications. “The future is entirely unwritten,” Livermore concluded, “but the history that will be made in the Middle East in the coming weeks and months will prove valuable to the study of multi-echelon irregular warfare.”
Later that month, IWI Deputy Editorial Director Jacob Ware, in co-authorship with leading counterterrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman and C. William Vardy, published an article analyzing Hamas tactics, arguing that the attack most closely resembles the mechanized mobile mass murder operations used by the Nazi German Einsatzgruppen during World War II and later adopted by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
On the attack’s one-month anniversary, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita authored an article looking at the war’s impact on U.S. geopolitical strategy. “The war between Israel and Hamas may appear a story of local counterterrorism or counterinsurgency of the sort that are no longer central to America’s national security strategy. But it is not,” he cautioned. “It is a war with profound implications for the emerging global order. It requires an American strategy that treats it as such.” Emrah Özdemir also contributed to our coverage, calling for the deployment of stability policing units to the region.
On Nov. 14, Mark Berlin, Sara Harmouch, and IWI fellow Vladimir Rauta published an article analyzing al-Qaeda’s reaction to Hamas’s attack. The jihadist group endorsed the violence, calling it a “turning point in history.” Conversely, Lucas Webber and Colin P. Clarke found that the Islamic State refused to praise Hamas, attempting to take advantage of the violence without endorsing an organization it deems apostate.
Finally, former IWI fellow Walker D. Mills assessed the maritime implications of the war for IWI’s Project Maritime, arguing that innovation in the maritime environment poses one of the most serious possibilities for escalation.
Podcasts
The podcast team has also been hard at work preparing content analyzing the conflict. In Episode 74 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast, hosts Ben Jebb and Alisa Laufer welcomed Gen. (ret.) Joseph Votel and Raphael Cohen to discuss the irregular warfare implications of the conflict—including lawfare, humanitarian concerns, and urban combat.
One of our podcast hosts, Adam Darnley-Stuart, has also created a three-part miniseries looking specifically at irregular warfare in the conflict. The first episode hosted counterterrorism expert Levi West, for a discussion linking the “tiers of national security together from tactics to strategy, exploring the effects of current events on the enduring friction between Israel and Iran, for example, and the broader impacts on the geopolitical environment.”
IWI will continue to leverage its significant resources and platform to contribute to the analysis of this important conflict—and others.
Main image: IDF troops in the Gaza Strip. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit/Wikimedia Commons)
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