John Spencer, a retired US Army officer and director of a number of urban warfare projects at the US military academy at West Point, posted a thread on X/Twitter last night (Monday) explaining all the ways in which the IDF takes extraordinary and even unprecedented care to avoid killing civilians when possible.
Among other things, Spencer addressed the argument that the IDF is bound by a need to use a particular ratio of guided to (relatively) unguided munitions in war to avoid civilian casualties, saying:
"Use of precision guided munitions (PCMs). Despite the ignorance of reporting on ratios of PCMs to non-PCMs, Israel has used many types of PCMs to include lower collateral damage munitions/small diameter bombs & technologies & tactics that increase the accuracy of non-PCMs (dive bombing) limit civilian causalities (sat imagery, AI, cell phone presence)."
Spencer added that discussions of what bombs are necessary and what types unnecessary needs to factor in things like military tunnels underneath the target:
"Also myths about choose of munitions & proportionality assessment/value of target/collateral damage estimate such as saying a 500 lbs bomb would achieve the same military task of a 2,000 lbs bomb with no mention of tunnels that would require greater penetration or availability of types/quantity of munitions."
Spencer noted that the US Army did not make such heavy use of PCMs in the First Gulf War, for instance, and did not come anywhere close to what the IDF did in trying to warn civilians.
Indeed, per Spencer, the IDF has gone above and beyond in trying to warn civilians, not only using live phone calls and texts and even allowing for humanitarian pauses - but even providing civilians with general maps of the army's deployment and planned directions of advance.
He finished his thread by saying that "There is no modern comparison to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Israel is not fighting a battle it is fighting a war" and that "No military in modern history has faced 30k defenders embedded in more than more than 7 cities, using human shields and hundreds of miles of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites while holding hundreds of hostages and launching over +12k rockets at the attacking military's civilians areas."
Read the whole thing here:
