Radical acceptance of radical transparency in warfare
Internet blackouts versus "the whole world is watching"
Spent Friday in Syracuse at the university’s Maxwell Center for Citizenship and Public Affairs, judging end-of-class projects put forth by mid-career military students working a graduate-level certificate in national security decision making.
I was struck by one presentation regarding the emergence of network-enabled Grassroots Voluntary Organizations (GVOs here, often VGOs in online descriptions) that respond to, and sometimes get deeply involved with, military conflict and civil strife. These local citizen-based initiatives and actions fill the space that opens up when traditional — foreign — Non-Governmental and Private Voluntary Organizations (NGOs/PVOs) are prevented from accessing the conflict zone or are driven out by circumstances.
We are watching that sort of swap-out now in Gaza for reasons entirely self-evident.
The upshot of the students’ analysis was that GVOs are a good thing because they involve locals acting locally and thus they engender and enjoy far more trust and legitimacy among the local population than outsiders coming in response. They simply pop-up, self-organizing and without any bureaucracy, do their thing, and then disappear once their actions reach sufficient fruition. No long-term dependencies are created. Locals are not infantilized. It is serious self-help very intimately and immediately delivered, meaning GVOs are a rising force in conflict zones — one not to be dismissed but rather to be accommodated.
These GVOs are likewise significant conduits of real-time information across both the battlespace (which makes military forces oftentimes suspicious and even hostile to their activities) and from that zone to the outside world. But, from the perspective of outside powers operating in supporting roles, GVOs should be judged in a benign and realistic light.
Why?
They reflect the growing reality that any battle space comes with radical transparency of the sort long described as the-whole-world-is-watching dynamic. Fighting them or trying to marginalize or delegitimize GVOs is pointless: they are simply part of the landscape in a networked world. Thus, radical acceptance of both they and the larger reality they represent is called for.
To reject radical transparency is to attempt to black-box the conflict zone. This is justifiable on operational grounds, of course: I want to shut down all of my enemy’s comms to the fullest degree possible (pervasive jamming). But the suspicions engendered by that approach, particularly in a crowded urban environment, are inherently difficult to manage. No matter how you play the scenario, word will get out, as will all manner of disinformation (see the whole debate over the Gaza hospital that was bombed).
Thus, the battle to define and judge what has happened becomes more important than the actual outcome of the actions taken. Like all insurgencies, Israel-v-Hamas will be in many ways decided by public opinion, both within Israel and across the world. Already throughout the US and Europe, we are watching the Left grow divided over, and resistant to, Israel’s bloody and slow-motion incursion into Gaza, while the Right, despite what rhetoric and immediate funding it offers in support, is clearly wary of getting back into that region’s most permanent and unwinnable conflict (linking that dynamic to a feared invasion of terrorists posing as immigrants).
In sum, the modern conflict space is one in which any actor must be prepared to account for every action taken — an argument of mine going back to the beginning of America’s Global War on Terror. How this conflict actually works out in that space won’t really matter next to how that outcome is judged over the long haul.
This is why I have argued in previous posts (on LinkedIn before switching here) that Israel needed to get done whatever it felt needed to be done with maximum speed. When you speed the killing, you abstract the numbers and suffering. But when you draw it out day by day, you personalize and individualize everything — a losing proposition. The story of 7 October is rapidly receding in the court of global opinion (it happened so fast that it is easy to abstract it now), which now increasingly accuses the West and the US in particular of valuing White/Western life in Ukraine over non-White/non-Western life in Gaza. There is no way to win that argument; one can only shorten its relevance through quick action.
Israel is attempting to, and seems to be largely succeeding in, blacking out Gaza as its invasion unfolds (see satellite shots above). The military logic is sound; the probability-of-win logic is not. By definition, the longer this drags out, the more Israel is delegitimized and the more punishment and condemnation both Israel and the US (due to its open support) will be made to endure.
The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a column a bit back lamenting the “hierarchy of human life” that is clearly evident in America’s support to Israel: we value Israeli lives more than Palestinian lives. In terms of morality, his argument is unassailable, but, in immediate national security terms, it is entirely irrelevant.
When you work in national security, you most definitely adhere to and accept an implied hierarchy of life: as in, ours come first, followed by our allies. We can argue about what lies between our allies and our enemies (innocents, bystanders, fellow travelers, etc.), but you can’t challenge those top two spots without abandoning your commitments, even as those in-between groups will challenge your morals.
There was a lot of assumptions being made by security experts early on in Israel’s response that this conflict would not only spread but pull the US in. It has spread as expected (Iran-backed attacks from Lebanon and Syria), and that spread has triggered US strikes. But, rest assured, there is no widespread instinctive US public desired to re-engage the Middle East in any systematic or invasive fashion. It’s just not there.
Israel is operating on a very short fuse here. It needs to speed up this show before the American public starts questioning Israel’s position in that unspoken hierarchy of life.
It’s not fair, but it’s the nature of warfare today.
Israel needs to prioritize its defense relationship with the US over success in destroying Hamas. The latter is virtually impossible to achieve while losing the former would be devastating. Israel needs to pay attention to how this is playing out among younger US generations without righteously demeaning and dismissing their concerns.
Every time the US comes to the aid of an ally, that relationship is essentially reborn. Israel cannot lose track of that dynamic; it’s the only clear long-term win to be had in this fight.