War - Part 3
I want you to imagine yourself in the situation I am describing. Just give it a shot. Flow with it.
You are the officer in command of a large ground unit, with the mission of eliminating elements of the same enemy your country has faced for the last century. This time, they went too far, and savagely attacked your country, causing the single most atrocious event in the history of your people since before your parents were even born.
And not just in number of deaths, but especially in the ways those deaths were dealt, entire communities devastated, elders, women, children, families, consumed by a haze of hate, burned, stabbed, raped, mutilated, kidnapped.
A horror not seen for many years, finally on display, for all to see. Now it’s your turn. And you are sent into the territory that enemy controls, where you know they hide behind their own people, using them as shields.
They hide in tunnels and bunkers, schools and hospitals, they have no uniforms. They blend in, disappear like ghosts, and the only time you can tell who they are, is when they shoot at you. So you move in, knowing this will be hard. Knowing these monsters have no rules, except one: to kill every single one of you, and your families. Not with a bullet in the head, but in the most excruciating way they can come up with.
You are now in enemy territory, and your intel is solid. Inside a town, just across a creek, there is a large number of those monsters, hiding among the population. No doubt they are ready for you.
There will be traps, tunnels, suicidal elements, IED’s, and the living hell that is urban warfare, plus they use women and children as both shields and weapons. You have a decision to make.
You lost friends in those places they attacked. Your country is small, many of the soldiers under your command lost friends too, that day. Some lost family, cousins, uncles, siblings, parents…
You all feel the loss and the pain in the flesh, not in abstract, but really deep in your own flesh.
You were sent in to do a job, and the job is to destroy these monsters under the conditions depicted in your briefing, just as I told you above.
You look around you. You look at the young faces of your men and women in uniform, ready to give their lives in defense of their homeland. Your decision will impact their future, and the future of your country. They are young, but they are ready, and they will follow you into hades and back, if you order them to. You look to the town across the shallow creek, and you need to make a move.
Your country is strong. Your troops are well trained and equipped, and you control land, sea and air at will. No real resistance against the might of your armed forces. You have it all at your disposal. You look at the radio operator by you, waiting. You are in control of the operation, the decision is yours. You have air support standing by, long range artillery standing by, even naval assets ready to assist you.
The town is a dense amalgamation of structures, filled with people. There are potentially thousands of those monsters hiding among those people.
Your options are clear. You consider what these soulless ghouls are, and what they have done, and you consider those under your command.
If you decide to go in and root out the enemy, street block by street block, house to house, the number of casualties among the population will be high, but you can try to save many.
Doing this, however, means the certain death of many of the men and women in your unit. Those young faces now looking at you, fearlessly, just waiting for the order to move in. You are responsible for their future.
So you consider your other option. To call an all out strike from land, air and sea. To turn the town into a more manageable pile of rubble, in which many of those monsters will be buried, many of the traps destroyed, tunnels collapsed.
As the commanding officer in charge of the operation, the future of those people in the town is also your responsibility, but you can choose to minimize the loss of lives under your direct command, to make sure as small a number of them are lost in the coming battle, placing them above those of the people in that town.
It’s your call.
What are you going to do?
Spare the town from obliteration and lose a large number of your troops? Or call in fire support and destroy it, keeping your casualties to a minimum, once you move in?
Think about it for a minute.
If you decide NOT to order the remote strike, and spare the town, making it harder for your unit to move in and take it, congratulations. You just earned humanitarian of the month, and killed as many as a third of your men and women. Good job. Now go write a letter to their families, and explain to them why they had to die, along with the ones already lost on the day those monsters attacked you. Good luck sleeping after that.
If you decide to order the remote strike, and destroy the town, along with a good number of enemies, their traps and tunnels, making it easier for your unit to move in and take it, at the expense of civilian lives, you are right. Your first responsibility is to your unit, and not out of love, but out of operational logic. You cannot lose the ability to fight, by provoking an excessive number of casualties, when you have the option to considerably reduce the risks. It’s called war.
I don’t want to know what your call would be. That’s between you and your conscious, but I can tell you what my call would be. I would call in the strike. And as a soldier, I would keep my fucking mouth shut, suck it up, and find comfort in the lives of the men and women I saved, under my command, to try and sleep at night, knowing the destruction I caused, and the innocent lives I took. But as a human being, maybe later in life I would curse the leaders who put me in that position.
You see, some people tend to blame soldiers for everything in war. They want them to be human and kind, and magnanimous. But they forget what a soldier is. And they have no fucking clue what war is. And if it’s true some soldiers are unworthy of their uniforms, most are ordinary people trying to do extraordinary things, and using their best judgement to do so, on the field, in real time.
The ones with time to think, to strategize, to analyze and come up with solutions, are the ones we elect to command those soldiers. The ones that move their units on the map, that order those planes in the air, those ships at sea. Expect results to reflect the caliber of those leaders, not the judgement of their soldiers. And try to think what it would be like, to write 300 letters to the families of your lost soldiers, when you could have written 10, or 5, or none.
I felt some reluctance from some of you, reading part 2 of this series, when you reached post 21 of 21, where I wrote a sounder strategy would signify more IDF casualties, and less Palestinian civilian casualties. I didn’t quantify. I was talking about the outcome of a strategy, in which sparing civilian lives is paramount. A strategy Netanyahu would never agree too, for he cares as much for Palestinian lives as Hamas cares for Israeli lives.
When you decide to take the harder path in war, one that will allow you to try and make the suffering of those affected by it as little as possible, you know there will be more pain on your side. It’s not easy to conduct war in a civilized manner, for war is meant to destroy civilization. All I am saying is you have to do your best, while keeping your soul.
That’s why we should elect leaders that can carry such burdens for us. In the extreme, also for the soldiers on the field. So if you want to blame anyone, blame the leaders. And leave the fucking soldiers alone. God knows they are doing their best, taking a lot of chances, and plenty of casualties as it is.
Now go back and read part 2 again.
War doesn’t give a shit about your feelings.
It really does not.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Replies:
From @lisaaronowatelier:
It’s entirely an impossible situation. There are no true winners in war. The only ones who benefit from war are the arms and ammunition makers.
From @robbiekirshner:
As I’m reading and visualizing this impossible scenario, where every option sucks, I can’t stop thinking about the tunnel monsters forcing the IDF into using whatever lethal force their mission requires. G-d bless the IDF.
From @deb.mcclanahan.9:
This is why Israel needs elections now to install a non-Netanyahu government that doesn’t have the incentive to keep the war going at top speed and intensity. And to do a thorough investigation on how Oct 7th happened, overtaking the best security and intelligence services in the world.
From @ne_oublie5150:
Thank you for taking the time to write down the cost of war. 98% of Americans, have no idea of the costs of that Service or the toll it takes on those who wear the uniform. Every man and woman, that takes to the field of battle, returns a changed human being. If they return home at all.
Today in 45 swipes, you have outlined, what every member of a society needs to know about what war is. And yet, even if they read everything you wrote, you have only scratched the surface.
While there is much more you could add, what you have written in three parts is enough for anyone interested in the nature of war and learning more about it, rather than just opining. Thank you so much for all your hard work. As always much love to you, brother.
Ne Oublie Am Yisrael Chai and Ukraine.
