The Evolution of the Art of War: From Sun Tzu to the Black Knight

The crucial date of October 7 is now approaching and with it the anniversary of the massacre carried out by the terrorists of Hamas a year ago. And in a year, the technical-tactical procedures adopted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Israeli security services have overturned the principles of the art of war formulated by Sun Tzu. The massive attacks conducted first in the Gaza Strip against Hamas and, subsequently also against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, have completely forgotten the idea that “Winning without fighting is the best thing”¹, as well as the one for which “Killing is not essential”². Certainly the bombings in the Strip have materialized in a Overkill, an inevitable yet undesirable consequence of a "necessary" operational choice, rather than a genocidal and merciless will (well, maybe it is a little merciless), as flaunted by the propaganda against Tel Aviv. The quotation marks on the term "necessary" are intended to highlight that the draconian choices adopted by the Israelis must necessarily take into account the communication strategies that characterize asymmetric enemies such as Hamas e Hezbollah (the latter no longer so so much asymmetric) who, through the aforementioned propaganda, feed the irrational emotionality of their target audience.

I have already discussed this aspect in an article of mine on Difesa Online³ and I want to reiterate it with the concept of "semiological guerrilla warfare" theorized by Umberto Eco, who stated that: “the battle for the survival of man as a responsible being in the Age of Communication is not won where communication starts, but where it arrives”⁴. In addition to the kinetic actions developed through terrorism, Hamas colonizes the collective imagination. It is a war that is asymmetric in all respects, made for weapons and for signs (a semi-war)⁵. It is a war also fought through the use cross-medial of the various platforms available, such as social-media like Facebook, Twitter, the channel Youtube, but also the radio Al Quds and the TV channel Al-Aqsa (these last two media with signal transmission capacity also in Israel). All these channels become echo chambers⁶ where the final recipient user receives, among many others, only the informative and media fragments “which confirm the ideological positions already acquired and with which it surrounds and nourishes itself.”⁷ Hamas propaganda, when effective, is believed not so much for the truth or plausibility of the message itself, but because it is directed towards a category of recipients (those on the other side of the channel), who already know, suspect or uncritically share what is being fed to them. It is a communication strategy in which troll e meme, truth, hoaxes and misinformation, work mainly targeting public opinion in Western countries and the Arab world, as well as components of the Israeli pacifist left.

Another form of this strategy fits into this strategy. infowar fought by Hamas, that conducted using "human shields". Beyond the victims, what remains is the message: Israel strikes civilian targets, causing innocent deaths and committing war crimes. Exactly the effect desired by HamasThe use of this tactic by the terrorist organization is a constantly applied case in the following areas:

• positioning of rocket launchers, artillery and mortar positions, close to densely populated areas, often near buildings protected by the Geneva Convention (schools, hospitals or mosques);
• positioning of military infrastructure, command centers, critical infrastructure, weapons depots, near or in proximity to civilian areas or important road junctions;
• protection of terrorist cells, safe havens, or injured or endangered men threatened by IDF targeted killings in proximity to civilian, residential, or commercial areas;
• use of civilians, in the event of conflict in the Strip, for intelligence tasks.

Such unscrupulous use of civilians entails for Hamas the opportunity to play the game with the IDF in a scenario where Hamas always wins (strategy win-win). Let's see why:

• if the use of Israeli military force produces an exponential increase in civilian casualties, Hamas can move the propaganda machine by activating the combined use of social media, TV and independent journalists, having good game in using the weapon of lawfare to accuse Israel of war crimes against innocent civilians. The most recent examples are offered by the many pro-Palestinian demonstrations and, above all, by the slogans uttered by many enlightened people among the participants;
• otherwise, if Israel weakens its strike force so as not to hit the civilian population, limiting as much as possible the strike, Hamas achieves the goal of neutralizing its effectiveness on its militants.

The practice of using human shields is not something that Hamas is quick to deny it. In a 2018 press conference, Khaled Meshaal (photo), the movement's political leader at the time, said the following: “If you [Israelis] are so crazy as to decide to enter Gaza, we will fight you. You will have to face not only hundreds of fighters, but also one and a half million people, driven by the desire to become martyrs.”⁸.

Another indicative confirmation of this orientation comes from a sentence pronounced by a Hamas spokesman Mushir Al-Masri in 2006, when the IDF gave advance warning of its intention to hit the home of one of the organization's leaders, Waal Rajub Al-Shakra's a Beit Lahiya. The Hamas spokesman said the following: “Citizens will continue to defend their pride and their homes, acting as human shields, until the enemy retreats.”⁹.

Finally, the statement of another Hamas spokesman, Sami al-Zuhari, dating back to July 2014, therefore pronounced in the hottest weeks of the Israeli invasion, also appears interesting: “The fact that the population is happy to sacrifice itself against Israeli aircraft in order to protect its homes, demonstrates the validity of this strategy. Hamas therefore calls on our people to apply this practice.” ¹⁰.

In the same article of mine cited above¹¹ I have briefly described the organization and technical-tactical procedures of Israel's main enemy, against which Tel Aviv has opened a second front: Hezbollah, born as a paramilitary organization and gradually transformed into a real armed force. On this basis I believe Hezbollah opponent “no longer so asymmetric” compared to the IDF. Hezbollah bases its military strength to a large extent on the large availability of rockets, which, according to estimates that are not very recent, varies between 40.000¹² and 120.000¹³. definitely a fair number, probably increased in the following years. The strategy of Hezbollah against Israel uses rockets as offensive weapons combined with light infantry and anti-tank units to defend their firing positions in southern Lebanon.¹⁴

Hezbollah It possesses a limited number of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, as well as thousands of anti-tank missiles¹⁵The group has no manned aircraft, tanks or armored vehicles in Lebanon and is unable to counter Israeli air supremacy.¹⁶The organization has built a large number of weapons depots, tunnels and bunkers in southern Lebanon and has an extensive intelligence apparatus.

The tactical strengths of Hezbollah are cover and concealment, direct fire and preparation of fighting positions, while their vulnerabilities include maneuver warfare, small arms combat and air defense. Although light infantry and anti-tank teams of Hezbollah are well considered¹⁷, Hezbollah overall it is "quantitatively and qualitatively" weaker than the IDF¹⁸.

That said, Iranian propaganda, supported by Russian propaganda that never fails to highlight Israel's "terrorist actions against defenseless civilians" acts in a capillary manner on a global level, to underline the constant "human rights violations" always perpetrated by Israel.

Inevitably, due to the critical issues arising from the undoubted propaganda capacity and superiority in the infowar of its adversaries, one wonders whether Israel has a counterpropaganda system capable of withstanding these challenges, a system as efficient as the military one.

The answer is no. And here, then, is the unconditional transition to combat procedures that are less attentive to the cognitive domain and decidedly more oriented towards striking in the physical one. Here is the metamorphosis of Sun Tzu's thought which transforms into the doctrine of the "Black Knight".

The targets have become mainly the command and control centers of adversary organizations and, in particular, the leaders at all levels who manage them. One could say that Israel has applied to the letter the theories enunciated by Air Force General Giulio Dohuet. The destruction of numerous civilian infrastructures in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, without going into too much detail about the so-called, undesirable, “collateral effects” (translated: killing of hundreds of civilians), has effectively decapitated the leadership of both Hamas both of Hezbollah.

But not only Gaza and Lebanon were among the targets of Israeli air raids. Let us remember that on April 1, 2024, in a RAID Mohammad Reza Zahedi, one of the senior commanders of the Iranian Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, was killed in a plane crash into the building housing the Iranian embassy in Damascus¹⁹; on July 31, 2024, Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed along with one of his companions, Wasim Abu Shaaban, in the building where he was staying in Tehran²⁰ and Haniyeh was killed just hours after a fighter jet killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah's most senior military commander in Lebanon, in the heart of Beirut.²¹

Then there was the ingenious "cyber-attack" carried out simultaneously with thousands of modified pagers with a small explosive charge inserted inside them and activated by sending a telephone number preset by the Mossad operators who worked on the complex operation. Let me immediately clear the field of misleading theories relating to a hypothetical overheating of the pager batteries, which would then have exploded. It is unlikely. It is unthinkable to overheat the batteries and bring them all to a possible explosion at the same time. And then Batteries don't explode. Furthermore, regardless of any ethical or moral considerations, the pinnacle of genius was the idea of ​​programming a short time delay between the ringing of the device and the triggering of the explosion, so that the wearer would bring it close to his face to read the number of the call, thus increasing its lethality.

Unfortunately, it also happened that someone did not have the “pager” with him, but had it passed to him by someone who was closest to the device and, as a result, became a victim. It can be assumed that the Israelis contemplated this hypothesis, but that, statistically, in the context of the cost-benefit ratio, they accepted the involvement of people outside the organization targeted by the operation, in the now consolidated, cold, case of “collateral damage”. For technical details, I refer you to the analysis made by an expert, Claudio Verzola, always on the pages of Difesa Online²².

The aspects that I would like to underline, however, are those relating to the indirect implications and, yet, no less impactful than the losses inflicted on the militiamen of Hezbollah on the physical level. If we start from the assumption that Hezbollah, for security reasons, had adopted the solution of having its militants communicate through the obsolete "pager" system, given the results, the paradoxical "boomerang effect" generated has a devastating psychological effect. It is likely that in the immediate future, the men of Hezbollah they don't even dare to turn the timer of the toaster and resort to even more ancestral systems, yet already adopted by illustrious predecessors, such as Osama bin Laden and Totò Riina: the famous "pizzini". It would not be surprising, at that point, if the Israeli services found a way to dip them in some kind of poison, as happens in the famous novel The Name of the Rose. Then there is the aspect related to logistical problems. Legend (because the operation is now legendary) says that these were old Japanese devices, transferred to Hungary to a fictitious company managed by the Mossad, modified there and reintroduced on the market for sale and distribution to the militiamen. It would be interesting to verify the veracity of this news, understanding whether it is true completely, only in part, or not at all and that theprocess it was totally different, but the result doesn't change: for Hezbollah & Co. it will be increasingly difficult to obtain technological material without a sense of mistrust and impending doom.

No time to recover from the shock immediately, that there was the "coup" of the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah and his general staff. I won't dwell on this episode. I'll just say that the Mossad,Safe or whoever for them, in their mission of Targeting Intelligence they will have made use of a solid network humint and some equipment imint to have confirmations on the movements of the targets. I want to think that, given the recent experience, the Hezbollah men did not use cell phones, walkie-talkie and the like, at least to inhibit the signt opponent. But, apparently, it wasn't enough.

Ultimately, with the recent Israeli operational choices we are witnessing the overcoming of all the philosophies underlying the political-military strategy.. We have spoken of Sun Tzu, but even von Clausewitz is relegated to a marginal role and the thought of the above mentioned Giulio Dohuet is simplified in a form that, in order to be understood in its deepest essence, imposes - and I repeat "requires" - to view the explanatory video of this doctrine at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lb5ZErTMZU