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Israel's New Approach to Tunnels: A Paradigm Shift in Underground Warfare

(U.S. Military Academy) Maj. (ret.) John Spencer - Before the war against Hamas in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces were the only army in the world to have a full brigade-sized unit dedicated to training, researching, and developing new technologies and tactics solely for underground warfare. Their responses to these challenges signal a paradigm shift in modern approaches to underground warfare. The IDF faced a Hamas military organization that had spent fifteen years engineering the infrastructure of an entire region for war, with a vast and expensively constructed subterranean network under Gaza's population centers. No military had faced anything like it in the past. On Oct. 7, 2023, the IDF's Yahalom unit, a brigade of special operations forces engineers, was fully equipped with technologies and tactics to detect and map tunnels and bunkers, and to clear and destroy them. It used drones and robotic devices designed to work underground. In some cases, military dogs with cameras mounted on their backs were deployed, but the risk of losing dogs to booby traps made this tactic rare. After careful study of Hamas tunnels, the IDF changed its approach, sending special operations forces into uncleared tunnels at the exact same time it was maneuvering on enemy forces on the surface. These forces were equipped with all the specialized equipment needed to breathe, navigate, see, communicate, and shoot underground. They turned tunnels from obstacles controlled by the defending enemy into maneuver corridors for the attacker. The lessons learned by the IDF will save the lives of other soldiers in other battlefields. The writer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point.
2024-12-03 00:00:00
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