You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans.

I'm the founder of War in the Rocks.

In this episode I sat down with my old comrade John Amble, who now runs editorial at the Modern War Institute and helped me

start war in the rocks.

We spoke about urban warfare and the role of technology in warfare in the context of Hamas's horrific

attack on Israel and what seems to be the Israeli response against Gaza that is shaping up.

Enjoy the show.

So John, you've spent quite a few years looking at the issue of urban warfare

and particularly the challenges it might pose to the US military

in the future. But one of those cases that I know you looked very closely at is that of Israel.

We start by just talking about how you came across the topic both as a practitioner and a scholar and

your experience researching this in Israel particularly.

It's always been something that's interested in me.

My first deployment is an Army officer was to Baghdad in 2008. As a, you know, trained military intelligence officer, it was kind of a fundamentally unique environment to be in because what I learned as a lieutenant as an my officer was you're sort of doing all this work intelligence preparation of the battlefield or the the battle space you're doing military decision making mission, it's all sort of this.

It felt at the time a bit archaic battles on open ground and the inviolability of the

three-to-one offense to defense ratio as a planning consideration, like that and then I landed in

Iraq and we were in Baghdad and I spent 12 months never leaving the city

limits of Baghdad and it it struck me as a pretty unique sort of space to always be surrounded by buildings,

to always be on roadways, to have this density of infrastructure and people and both combatants

and non-combatants and important political symbols and religious symbols and all of this stuff is so

densely packed together that it creates a number of challenges for military forces

...