US special ops official lays out ‘strategic’ reason for Israel to better protect civilians

WASHINGTON — As Israel faces calls from activists, international bodies and the American president to better protect civilians in the Gaza conflict for humanitarian reasons, a key Pentagon official recently explained why it would benefit Jerusalem at a strategic level.

Chris Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SOL/IC), was quick to remind reporters at an Aug. 23 event that Israel lost more than 1,200 people in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. But, he said, “At the same time, how the Israelis are conducting the operation in Gaza — I think we’ve been very open — has concerned us at times.”

Maier said there have been “dozens” of conversations between US and Israeli military officials, from the “operational level” up to the level of the Secretary of Defense, about how Israeli forces are fighting, and “this civilian harm is always a feature of this, because we think it has big strategic implications.”

Maier did not dismiss the obligation to human rights, but suggested that from a geopolitical standpoint, photos of dead civilians and starving children in Gaza would make it more difficult for the US to support Israel and for Israel to build and protect other relationships, including with groups and governments already sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, if not Hamas’s tactics.

“How you conduct the military operations in Gaza really resonates with how the rest of the international community views US support for Israel, but also their own support to Israel,” he said at a Defense Writers Group event. “And on the flip side, what’s acceptable in support to Hamas. And so I think we continue to emphasize very much the principles of civilian harm.”

The death toll in Gaza is reportedly estimated at more than 40,000, including several thousand children. That has led to countries cutting off relations or military aid to Israel, as well as prompted major protests against Israel in the US, its closest ally. Israel has insisted it is doing all it can to protect civilians, who it says the US-designated terrorist group Hamas uses as human shields.

Maier said he recognized that Israel was fighting in perhaps the most complicated operational environment in modern military history — with many of its adversaries underground and amid a dense civilian population. (Earlier this month Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Hamas had embedded “itself within mosques, schools, hospitals, building a tunnel network underneath Gaza … that’s the size of New York City and goes multiple levels below the surface.”)

“I think that it’s particularly hard to ask the Israelis to use all the discretion in the world that would be, you know, ideal, understanding that they still have a military objective to remove Hamas from a number of places that they continue to operate,” Maier said. “So it’s hard to imagine a more complex environment for the application of some of the civilian harm principles.”

But it would be “foolish” to assume such an operational environment will never occur again, meaning there have to be lessons learned from the operation in terms of mitigating civilian harm. “We’re going to have to hold ourselves to applying the challenges of this environment to how we then build our warfighting capabilities informed by civilian harm principles,” he said.

America’s Own Efforts On Civilian Casualties

Maier’s recommendation to Israeli forces comes two years into the Pentagon’s own soul-searching on the subject. In August 2022, the Defense Department announced a new “Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan,” itself a response to American procedures that led to the deaths of innumerable civilians in years of fighting in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, including a high-profile August 2021 strike in Afghanistan that killed 10 noncombatants.

In an early echo of Maier’s comments, a 2022 letter from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin enclosed with the new policy [PDF] said, “The protection of civilians is a strategic priority as well as a moral imperative.”

“Our efforts to mitigate and respond to civilian harm directly reflect our values and also directly contribute to achieving mission success,” Austin wrote.

The action plan listed several directives for the American military beyond legal structures already in place, including “incorporat[ing] guidance for addressing civilian harm across the full spectrum of armed conflict into doctrine and operation plans so that we are prepared to mitigate and respond to civilian harm in any future fight.”

In his DWG talk, Maier provided an update on US efforts on civilian harm mitigation, saying it’s been going “fairly well.”

He noted that harm mitigation specialists have been peppered throughout the operational structure, including at combatant commands and the “intelligence enterprise.” They, too, are not only there for humanitarian purposes, but also to assess the broader, strategic implications of particular tactical actions: looking at “hey, if I do something over here, does that mean I’m going to complicate my strategic maneuver space in another place?”

“This isn’t about constraining our military in any way,” Maier said. “It’s about building in more expertise to understand the operating environment.”

The DoD has also embarked on establishing a new “data enterprise,” he said, to better collect information related to civilian harm mitigation, and has begun incorporating civilian harm principles into large-scale exercises, including with allies.

Overall, it’s become clear that a reassessment was needed, Maier said, in part because the envisioned next conflict, perhaps in the Indo-Pacific theater, will not be like the ones in which America has fought before.

“Probably gone are the days … in which our previous counterterrorism experience allowed us to look at individual targets for long periods of time and make decisions at a different tempo than today,” he said.

The need to potentially launch thousands of strikes an hour in such a large-scale conflict, he said, will require the Pentagon to lean on AI and automation — capabilities that “we talk about all the time on the targeting side and the operational side, but are going to have to be built in and back into that with a focus on civilian harm [mitigation].”

For an educational counterpoint to everything the Pentagon is trying to do, Maier said, just look to Moscow.

“As we were building the action plan, the Russian attack on Ukraine meant that you were watching, before our very eyes, what happens when you have what we often call the ‘Russian way of war,’ which is ‘be as brutal as one thinks is strategically important and have very little focus on the civilian environment — in fact use the civilian environment for brutal ends.'”

Kyiv has used evidence of Russian attacks against civilians to galvanize not only local resistance, but an outpouring of international support — key to Ukraine’s resistance against the much larger Russian military.

Maier called Russia’s stance “suboptimal, from a strategic perspective.”