SWORDS OF IRON: INSIDE THE MILITARY CAMPAIGN THAT CHANGED THE MIDDLE EAST

The attack carried out on October 7th, 2023, by the Palestinian armed group Ḥarakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya, generally known as Hamas, marked a turning point in the Middle East scenario. The military action conducted against the State of Israel, and configurable in some respects a rudimentary brigade-level multi-domain offensive operation, achieved a strategic, operational and tactical surprise, which caused the death of 1,163 people and the kidnapping of 255 individuals. Furthermore, it took over 72 hours for the Israeli Armed Forces (IDF), in conjunction with the internal security apparatus to neutralize the infiltrating Hamas’ cells. However, Tel Aviv regained the initiative immediately after the aggression, launching Operation Swords of Iron, designed mainly to neutralize Hamas, profoundly disarticulating its organization, degrading its military capabilities, and allowing the recovery of all the hostages. However, it soon expanded, also due to the malicious actions carried out against Israeli territory by the Lebanese Shiite paramilitary movement Hezbollah and the Yemeni armed group Ansar Allah, known as Houthis, to pursue the intent to re-establish Israel’s regional deterrence, destroying all perceived sources of threat.

To this end, the IDF planned and conducted an articulated series of coordinated military operations on multiple fronts: two main ones, which recorded significant and protracted air-land maneuvers with intense fighting, and three secondary ones, the subject of more limited and sporadic actions, mainly involving long-range targets. The former is represented by the Gaza Strip, the operational heart of Hamas, and Lebanon, a stronghold of Hezbollah, while the others concern the remaining state and non-state actors attributable to the so-called Axis of Resistance, an informal coalition whose strategic objective is to damage the State of Israel, considered illegitimate by its adherents. Specifically, these are represented not only by Hamas but also by Hezbollah and the Houthis, by the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Syrian Arab Republic, as well as by Iraqi Shiite militias.

The vast scale of operations necessitated a major deployment of forces by the IDF. Immediately after October 7th, 300,000 of the 465,000 1 available reservists were mobilized, integrating active-duty military personnel in all land, naval and air components. Swords of Iron, in its many articulations on different fronts, has constantly been characterized by a significant joint and multi-domain synergy, pursuing accurate synchrony in the realization of effects through the physical, virtual and cognitive dimensions. Informed by a detailed Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment (IPOE), based on the unprecedented combination of multi-source Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) capabilities with artificial intelligence (AI) enabled analysis systems, the operations significantly enhanced the long-range combat and attack potential expressed by the Israeli Air Force (IAF). This represented the pivot of kinetic activities in each of the fronts of Swords of Iron, demonstrating an extensive range of action, as well as an extremely significant rhythm and operational resilience functional both to disarticulate and degrade certain sources of threat and to operate in direct support of the ground maneuver (CAS – Close Air Support), helping to significantly limit losses among the soldiers of the Israeli Ground Forces (IGF). At the same time, the proximity of at least three of the fronts to Israeli territory also allowed a massive use of tube artillery by the IGF itself, which was widely employed in support of operations and against potential threats in the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon and Syria. The deconfliction of the airspace, in sectors that are already extremely compartmentalized, in particular between the operations of manned, fixed-wing and rotary- wing aircraft, indirect artillery fire and the ubiquitous multi-altitude activities conducted by aerial drones (UAVs – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) represented a specific challenge, all the more so since combined with the need to keep a multi-layered air defense architecture constantly active, including for protection against rockets, artillery ammunition and mortar shells (C-RAM – Counter-Rocket, Artillery and Mortar). Despite the high effectiveness achieved in this delicate coordination of trajectories and temporal segregations of the airspace, the IDF nevertheless reached peaks in the rate of UAVs shot down in friendly fire incidents close to 40%, highlighting in perspective the criticalities in the discrimination between threats and allied assets (IFF – Identification Friend or Foe) in airspace on an increasingly congested battlefield. Both in the Gaza Strip and in southern Lebanon, the IDF also demonstrated 2

significant capabilities in the conduct of combined arms maneuvers, especially with the widespread inclusion of advanced capabilities in combat engineering, which was decisive in degrading the underground arsenals of armed groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Net of the temporal overlap in the operations on the different fronts, the IDF tended to calibrate the intensity of their activities in each of them to selectively concentrate their combat power on only one adversary at a time, implementing a detailed long-term planning, which coordinated the generation of decisive conditions with the phasing of combat operations. This sequential strategic-operational approach was followed at the tactical-operational level by a systematic succession, in each theater, before a deep and rapid disarticulating action, conducted mainly by the IAF, often in concert with units of the IDF Special Operations Forces, followed by more protracted operations of degradation of the adversary’s military capabilities, but in a context of reduced threat to its own forces, consequent to the collapse of the enemy’s command and control (C2) hierarchies. However, each front had its specificities, deriving both from the characteristics of the operational environment broadly understood and from the specific objectives set as a premise in terms of disarticulation and degradation of each adversary, from which diversified lessons identified and learned therefore derive.