Does Hamas Practice Mission Command?
Does Hamas Practice Mission Command?
The War in Gaza 2023
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The offensive launched by Hamas on 7 October 2023 required an enormous amount of preparation. This was not just a matter of the importation, storage, and deployment of thousands of rockets, but also of the measures taken to ensure that scores of raiding parties were able to act without running into each other.
If I am not too badly mistaken, this effort rested upon an approach to command that, to borrow the words of General Mike Myatt of the American Marines, rested upon the twin pillars of “common vision” and “decentralized planning.” That is, I suspect that the Oberste Hamas Leitung gave every group, whether of rocketeers or commandos, a place to start, a target to hit, and a whole lot of carte blanche.
Among other things, this approach allowed both the raketchiki and the desantniki to eschew the use of electronic communications. This, in turn, made it far harder for the Israeli signals intelligence folks to notice changes in the pattern of traffic, let alone drop eaves on relevant conversations. (Something tells me that the Israeli custom of putting bombs in cell phones facilitated the enforcement of emissions control.)
In the absence of electrons, the Israeli security services have, no doubt, redoubled their efforts in the realm of human intelligence. However, in a city where everyone belongs to a tight-knit family, and every family nests within a network of kissing cousins, this is more easily said than done. Thus, rather than operating out of the equivalent of the famous house on Garibaldi Street, the Israelis have been obliged to recruit local agents.
Such traitors, in turn, would be hard pressed to evade the prying eyes of kith and kin, let alone the scrutiny of the local counter-spy services. Thus, if not already in the service of Hamas, they would quickly be turned into double-agents, feeding their Israeli handlers with stories that Hamas wanted the latter to believe. (Writing in Tablet magazine, Edward Luttwak recently argued that the aforementioned double-agents did double-duty for their true masters by reporting the locations of rockets belonging to a competing organization, Islamic Jihad.)
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