On Oct. 7, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched its most audacious attack on Israel, catching the country by surprise. Militants poured into Israeli towns, leaving horrific carnage in their wake as a barrage of thousands of missiles complemented the land assault. While the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) initially mounted a sluggish response, the conflict is now conflagrating further, with a death toll of thousands that is sure to rise with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow that Hamas will be “crushed.”
Hamas’s offensive powerfully demonstrates the impact and importance of irregular warfare. Based on the group’s success in bleeding Israel, the conflict highlights several key lessons on this type of warfare—and how to counter it.
Irregular warfare, like hybrid warfare, gray-zone competition, and other nebulous concepts, has a hazy definition. U.S. military strategists and planners have struggled to define irregular warfare and have adopted a multitude of meanings, resulting in a lack of strategic focus that has hampered Washington and its allies from adequately addressing the spectrum of irregular threats.
