US defense secretary's advice to Israel revolves around martial "Clausewitz challenge"

The US has historically been Israel's fiercest supporter, with the two countries' strategies and worldviews mostly aligning throughout the decades. When the October 7 massacre hit southern Israel, Washington was one of the first countries to express its unconditional support to the Netanyahu government in their fight against the Hamas militants. Two months into the war in the Gaza Strip the unconditional nature of the support seems to have shifted as thousands of Palestinian civilians have fallen victim to the ongoing war against the militants. Bloomberg has highlighted a fragment of US Defense Secretary Austin Lloyd's latest speech regarding the conflict, bringing forward the deeper meaning of his recommendation to Israel by reading between the lines. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

"Pay attention to the advice that Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary, just offered to Israel as it resumes waging war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. 'You can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians', he said. 'You see, in this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat'.

There are at least two ways to tell that his insight is profound. The first is that Austin was immediately dismissed as 'naive' by Senator Lindsey Graham, who mindlessly rebroadcasts every platitude circulating in the GOP and hasn’t had an original strategic thought in his life. If Graham doesn’t grasp something, there’s probably something to be grasped.

The second hint is Austin’s choice of words. In the context of the relationship between military tactics and strategy, the 'center of gravity' is an idea straight out of On War, the magnum opus of Carl von Clausewitz, often considered the deepest thinker on all things martial.

Clausewitz was a bookish Prussian officer who lived through the Napoleonic wars. One of his observations was that good warcraft means concentrating force against the enemy’s center of gravity. He names three examples: an opponent’s army, its capital, or the army of its ally. Were he alive today, he might add other possibilities, such as an adversary’s economy, public opinion in neutral countries, or the propaganda battle for the winning narrative.

The hard part for a strategos [Greek for 'general'] is correctly identifying that center of gravity. When Hannibal fought the Romans, he thought it was Rome’s legions and allies, when instead it was the city of Rome itself — so he won the battles but lost the war. By contrast, Napoleon started losing when he mistook Moscow as the Russian Empire’s center of gravity, which it turned out not to be. It just depends.

The situation in Gaza is completely different, of course. But Austin recognizes it from his own experience commanding US troops in Iraq fighting against the Islamic State, a barbaric terrorist group to which Hamas has been compared since it entered Israel on Oct. 7 to maim, rape, torture, kidnap and kill.

Israel and its friends, in the US and anywhere, agree that Hamas is the enemy and should be taken out. The question is how. What is its center of gravity? Its tunnels under the Gaza Strip? Its weapons caches or bank accounts? Its fighters and leaders? Or is Hamas a mentality that could morph into other guises and names, a protean ideology born ultimately out of the misery of a population?

You might at this point recall 'The Battle of Algiers', a famous and hauntingly realistic movie shot in the 1960s in newsreel style. It describes the struggle by French forces in the 1950s to defeat the Algerian rebels fighting for independence. Colonel Mathieu, who’s in charge, keeps scrawling cell nodes on his blackboard, indicating insurgents to be eliminated, and is convinced that he’s winning. Yet the rebellion only grows, as both sides commit ever viler atrocities. The film ends as France is about to lose the war.

Austin’s instinct is that Hamas’ center of gravity today, like that of Algeria’s National Liberation Front then, is the local population. The fighter, as Mao Zedong described the guerilla method he practiced in his youth, 'moves amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea'.

Israel cannot dry up the entire sea — and we certainly wouldn’t want to contemplate where that kind of discussion would lead. But it must realize, Austin implies, that it cannot destroy Hamas with bombs and bullets alone. It was American tactical victories against al-Qaeda that spawned the Islamic State. In the same way, every elimination of a terrorist in Gaza at the cost of multitudes of dead innocents will radicalize even more Palestinians. And the civilian body count already exceeds 15,000.

There is a big difference between Israel today and France in the 1950s. The French were colonizers and the Algerians colonized. By contrast, the Israelis and Palestinians — despite tropes on the antisemitic left — are both indigenous peoples in the same region, with equal rights to live there in peace and security.

By conjuring up Clausewitz, though, Austin is reminding Israel, and all of us, of a larger point. Clausewitz’s most famous line is that 'war is nothing but the continuation of politics with other means'. Often misunderstood as a cynical endorsement of violence, the thought means the exact opposite. Clausewitz was saying that a strategist, as opposed to a mere tactician, must wage war in a way that points toward the ultimate objectives — that is, to the peace that is to follow the war.

What exactly is the eventual peace that Israel envisions in Gaza? As of now, it’s unclear. Are Israel and the US at least aligned in searching for an answer? 'We don’t know', a top US diplomat tells Bloomberg Opinion. With the trauma of Oct. 7 so recent, and so many hostages still in captivity, the Israelis are 'not in a mood to discuss ultimate objectives yet'.

This refusal to discuss strategy as opposed to tactics, understandable as it is after the horrors of Oct. 7, must stop. And it behooves Israel’s best friend in the world, the US, to insist on it. Lloyd Austin and other American leaders are right to ask Israel the big question: How exactly will all this end?"