Modern Warfare 3 Competitive

[Everardo Frost]

Thebattle to control the narrative is an essential element of modern warfare, especially given the prevalence of social media, the 24-hour news cycle, and the rapid speed at which events on the battlefield are shared to a global audience. The Israel-Gaza conflict, being just the latest round of intergenerational fighting between Israelis and Palestinians, is certainly no exception to this rule. Indeed, the emotive impact of the conflict extends far beyond the borders to which it is confined and has galvanised strong reactions across the world. As such, the belligerents of the conflict have an interest in presenting their side in the best light possible to attract international sympathy and support.

Victimhood is a central element of both the Israeli and Palestinian national identities. For Israelis, this self-perception is rooted in the Holocaust and successive attacks by neighbouring Arab states, as well as the broader historical Jewish experience of expulsion, exile, and genocide. A parallel sense of victimhood exists for Palestinians caused by the Nakba, the establishment of Israel, displacement, and the Palestinian defeat in 1948.

Most research has focused on how the victim-perpetrator dichotomy has contributed to the intractability of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, with both sides unable to break free from grievance politics and establish a conclusive peace. However, victimhood may also serve as a desirable status, sought after by actors in search of support on the world stage.

Israel and Hamas are both engaged in fierce narrative warfare. To seize the narrative, both sides highlight the plight of their own people whilst painting the opposition as perpetrators. Any humanitarian transgressions that they may commit are downplayed or denied. Successful control of the narrative can be used to bolster international support and justify policies that may otherwise be hard to swallow.

The terrorist attacks conducted by Hamas militants against Israeli civilians on 7 October have served as the casus belli for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to conduct military operations in Gaza. Approximately 1,400 Israelis were killed and 240 taken hostage by Hamas.

The longer the conflict in Gaza persists, the more space Israel will likely concede to Hamas on the narrative front. During previous Israeli campaigns in Gaza, such as those in 2012 and 2014, initial support for Israel quickly waned as international sympathies turned in favour of Palestinian civilians. A repeat of this trend is highly probable.

This places pressure on the IDF to conclude operations in Gaza as quickly as possible with minimum civilian casualties before international support erodes completely. Even key allies like the US cannot unreservedly maintain their support if the court of domestic public and global opinion turns against Israel.

Hamas stands to benefit the most from highly publicised civilian casualties in the conflict, since this will bolster global opposition to Israel. The group can effectively leverage social media to pin the blame on IDF personnel for civilian deaths. Mainstream media coverage and the work of NGOs to highlight the plight of civilians may also be leveraged in this regard.

Ultimately, both sides aspire to shape perceptions of the conflict held by third parties and will wield information as a weapon to achieve that objective. In contemporary international relations victimhood can be an advantageous status during a war, thus, Israel and Hamas will lock horns to convince the international community that they are the legitimately aggrieved party.

Hammes: Schmidt is right about Russia outproducing Ukraine in drones. But this does not translate directly to winning the conflict. I find it bizarre that some commentators essentially take the Russian side without critical comparison. This goes for commentators and in some cases political leaders. If you look at both Russian and Ukrainian sources, Ukraine continues to inflict three or four times as many casualties on attacking Russian forces: this is typically the case, an advantage to the defender.

With regards to UAS, both sides are training a lot of drone pilots. But as the war drags on, both Ukrainians and Russians are finding difficulty in recruiting for traditional combat arms. For instance, recent warehouse fires in Saint Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia reportedly stem from resistance to the forced roundup of conscripts for the war.

Hammes: Unmanned systems allow a country at very low cost to influence a conflict. With automated systems you can intervene regionally with lower human cost, and little risk of blowback. Turkey has done this successfully. What will be interesting is when the other side starts countering with their own UASs. As these systems proliferate, what is to keep cheap launch trucks and boats from approaching striking range of Turkey? When everyone has long-range precision strike capability, and every modern society has highly combustible, energy-dense targets embedded in their society, security concepts have to adapt. Not just medium powers, but insurgent groups have the ability increasingly to conduct this type of operation. The Houthis proved this with the attack on Saudi oil facilities. There are massive geopolitical implications when everyone can strike at long range.

The game of competitive adaption has been a mixed bag. At one level, UAS have greatly strengthened tactical defense. Yet with increased methods of long-range strike, at the operational level, offensive capabilities are strengthened. Perhaps also strategically, as we see Ukraine going hard against the Russian oil industry.

There is a need now for better command and control nodes to consolidate information from pervasive drone sensors and get it to commanders. We have entered the era of pervasive intelligence for targeting; everyone will be visible and targetable, so everyone will have to keep moving.

The Atlantic Council in Turkey, which is in charge of the Turkey program, aims to promote and strengthen transatlantic engagement with the region by providing a high-level forum and pursuing programming to address the most important issues on energy, economics, security, and defense.

The two priorities of competition and irregular warfare have become conflated with one another. In fact, the Joint Staff has renamed its Office of Irregular Warfare the Office of Irregular Warfare and Competition. These new priorities have led to much introspection on the inability of joint doctrine to address the totality of warfare. One issue derives from the conceptual limitations placed by current doctrine on warfare as a violent struggle. Such a definition fails to address the realities of current interstate competition, which often entails nonviolent means. Take unconventional warfare, for instance. Supporting the armed component of a resistance movement would certainly qualify as violence, but opposition to an oppressive government can come in many forms; assisting a resistance movement that is employing nonviolent protests can prove decisive. The mass movement that brought down the Berlin Wall, for example, accomplished far more than an armed conflict ever could have.

Irregular warfare within states actually occurs along a broad spectrum of conflict, depicted by the graph below. This resistance continuum includes nonviolent protest, illegal forms of protest, and escalating categories of violence ranging from rebellion to insurgency to full-scale belligerency. The United States, as an external actor, can either use foreign internal defense, stabilization, counterinsurgency, or counterterrorism to quell unrest in a partner nation, or it can utilize unconventional warfare to support resistance. Many of these may entail nonviolent measures, which require greater clarity in joint doctrine.

These novel approaches to warfare by the Chinese Communist Party and Russia (unrestricted and new generation) are only two categories in the ever-growing list of terms to describe modern interstate conflict, which includes gray-zone conflict, hybrid warfare, legal warfare, drug (or crime) warfare, cyberwarfare, economic warfare, trade warfare, religious warfare, proxy warfare, and many others. None of these terms fit nicely into the current joint taxonomy of concepts regarding war. The primary constraint remains that joint doctrine generally addresses military capabilities in terms of violent action (or support for violent action), while many of the evolving approaches to competition use nonviolent means. In the United States, the Department of Defense has played an increasingly influential role in security cooperation, but it is still playing catch up when it comes to the inclusion of nonviolent competition into doctrine.

Unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and stabilization all encompass a spectrum of irregular activities running from nonviolent to violent. By emphasizing violent aspects, the Department of Defense is overlooking some of the most effective means of competition. The recognized goal of irregular conflicts revolves around legitimacy and influence over relevant populations. People are influenced by violence and threats of violence, of course, but equally by factors including money, ideology, religion, and culture. Empowering women through education, for instance, can prove more effective in addressing irregular threats over the long term than killing insurgents. Employment opportunities for young adult males can act as a deterrent to recruitment by armed groups. Only by employing a comprehensive approach that includes nonviolent means can US efforts effectively stabilize a partner or destabilize an opponent.

Robert S. Burrell is a retired Marine, award-winning World War II historian, and PhD candidate at Warwick University. He currently teaches irregular warfare at METIS Solutions for Joint Special Operations University. The views stated in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Defense.

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