Every technology innovation is supposed to make life easier, or at least more efficient. That may be the case, but there is no denying that concurrently, almost every innovation in technological history has been put to the use of one objective: warfare.
Airplanes, motors, artificial intelligence - even the first people to forge with steel instead of bronze or iron doubtless marveled at what fine swords and spears it would make. And due to technology, for decades, the democratic sphere of the world has been building their armies smarter.
American troops attacked Normandy and freed Europe with rifles, helmets and the shirts on their back; close to eighty years later, their descendants abandoned Afghanistan in shame with thousands of dollars apiece in tactical gear, armor, advanced firearms and drones.
That doesn’t track, does it? How could an army grow less effective as it becomes infinitely more advanced?
The answer is that effectivie warfare is not a function of the army's equipment, but the result of the will and heart within - and behind - those soldiers. In the Second World War, Western nations were fighting for their literal existence, to remain independent states instead of being ground under the boot of Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, or the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, politicians minced words into meaningless salad and served it to young Americans.
Now, look at the world’s reaction- the world’s outrage - to Israel’s war in Gaza, and its fight against the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. They cannot believe their eyes: shocked to the core by the sight of wounded civilians in an active warzone, or tanks driving in city streets. They cannot grasp that wars need to actually be fought, especially against the tendrils of Iran’s Islamic empire in Hamas and Hezbollah.
Perhaps the politicians of Israel have committed a breach of etiquette; they forgot to dress their war in meaningless cliches about nation-building or hearts and minds, phrases wrung dry of any weight by their terminal overuse.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, it was a brutal destruction of the fantasies about the modern, bloodless war. The future, as it turned out, was not now. Artillery barrages still level buildings, besieging a city until the defenders surrender is still easier than clearing each and every house, territory is still best captured and held not by ultra-advanced fighter jets but simply by filling it with a lot of soldiers.
Despite this shattering of the illusion of the bloodless, war-less war of the future - imagined ever since the first bomber planes, perhaps even the first artillery cannons - the world forums are still outraged that the IDF is fighting a war by fighting a war. Perhaps it’s a lingering image of Afghanistan and the failed War on Terror, brought home to these people who never ran from a rocket siren in their lives except in video games and movies, a world where terrorists all live, all the time, in isolated complexes far from civilization, and elite soldiers can launch- this is always the word - "operations" to assassinate them.
For decades, no country in the Euro-American democratic sphere has been in an existential war the way Israel is.
This reality of the war against Hamas is far out of line for the Western pundits and social media trend-setters. It means fighting a terrorist army entrenched in and under several cities, with any person among the seemingly civilian populace potentially an agent of theirs. This is not the Hollywood war against terrorism where you fly across an ocean, a sea and two continents, then depart from a forward operating base to eliminate a Taliban mastermind. This is Israel’s actual, real war on terrorism, taking ground in an enemy area that is too close to Israel for anyone in that beleagured country to allow those terrorists to continue to exist.
What the world envisioned was a war of cursors clicking, drones hovering, perhaps a handful of buildings raided in the dead of the night. This is not how a war is fought. The Americans had two decades to learn this and by all appearances failed to. This is an ungentlemanly war, fought without apologies or finesse, because the alternative is continuing to fight with precision and etiquette against an enemy whose most subtle tactic is stabbing a civilian, preferably in the back, to death for being an infidel. Less subtly, it is an enemy that rapes women, beheads babies, and kidnaps Holocaust survviors.
In every generation our enemies have sought with seldom-changing tactics to destroy us; lynch mobs, enslavement, death camps, ravaging of our towns and cities. The IDF has no reason to alter the strategy that has best served the Jewish people to defeat our enemies, from the streets of Shushan to distant Uganda: their destruction with every means we can muster.