The reports are, as yet, unconfirmed, but Col Douglas Macgregor was confident enough in his sources to openly discuss a joint US-IDF recon force taking heavy losses in Gaza recently.
TUCKER CARLSON: How is the U.S. military, do you think, having spent your life in it leading troops in combat and at the Pentagon, positioned to respond to a war with Iran right now? Are we in a strong position or not, in your view?
DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: No I think we are not in a strong position, we are probably at the weakest point in our recent history. I think you’ve got to look at the realities of new weapons systems and new capabilities.
The United States Navy, if it is going to preserve its capability, is probably going to be compelled to operate somewhere North and West of Sicily. If it comes within closer range, it falls into this envelope where the Iranians can strike it. And as I said before, you have to assume the Russians will come into this. Once you move into the Eastern Mediterranean, you are vulnerable to the [Russian] Kinzhal [ballistic missiles] and other cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles that the Russians have.
This makes it very difficult to fly strikes in support of the Israeli Defense Force against Hezbollah because now you are flying a very long distance, you deliver your ordinance, and you have to land in Israel in order to refuel. Israel is going to be operating under a hail, if not a rainstorm, of missiles and rockets, making it very dangerous to do so. So our Naval power, while substantial, may not have the desired impact on the ground that we would like.
And finally, we have no real Army anymore, the Army is down to perhaps 450,000, and how much of that is ready to fight is open to debate. Much of it is sitting in Eastern Europe right now. We don’t have the means to rapidly ship a large force of 80-100,000 troops on the ground into the region, which means were are reliant on Special Forces. And right now 2,000 Marines and perhaps 2,000 Special Forces and special operations forces.
That’s not going to make much of a dent, and as we’ve seen quite recently in the last 24 hours or so, some of our Special Ops forces and Israeli Special Ops forces went into Gaza to reconnoiter, to plan for where they might want to go to free hostages and make an impact, and they were shot to pieces and took heavy losses, as I understand it. I think that is where we are headed and I don’t see that as a win for Israel in any way, shape, or form. And I certainly think it is very dangerous for us.
As I’ve tried to point out to a number of people, until Britain entered World War One, it was just another European war. Once Britain entered it, it became a global war.
When one considers that it took 14 months for 50,000 Russian shock troops supported by 330 tanks to take Bakhmut, a city of 16 square miles with a population of 72,000, the idea that it will only take three months for Israel to clear out Gaza, an urban zone of 141 square miles and a population of 2.3 million in addition to a similar number of active combatants (est. 30,000), is simply not credible, even without the threat of Hezbollah to the north.
It is also highly improbable that the Israeli public will accept the tens of thousands of dead Israeli soldiers such an invasion would likely require, particularly when the wartime Prime Minister’s son is too busy living it up in Miami to share the risks with the common people.
Whether Macgregor’s sources are correct or not, and there is no reason to believe they are not since it was previously announced that US forces were actively training the inexperienced IDF to engage in urban combat against entrenched opposition, he’s correct in observing that neither the US military nor the IDF appears to be capable of successfully fighting a full-scale ground war in the Middle East.
It’s neither 1967 nor 1991 anymore. And frankly, the current parallels between the US military and the pre-WWI British military should seriously concern any perceptive student of military history.
Haldane resolved to transform a British army optimized for irregular warfare—the suppression of rebellious tribes and peoples throughout Britain’s far-flung empire—into a far more lethal professional military establishment… After 1815, the British army’s leadership focused almost exclusively on battles with technologically backward, even primitive, non-European opponents. British colonial warfare was not a complex affair. In battles with tribal opponents at Ulundi, Kandahar, and Omdurman, the application of overwhelming firepower substituted for tactics and strategy.
MARGIN OF VICTORY, Col Douglas Macgregor, 2016
At this point, US strategists need to seriously ask themselves whether there is a risk that support for a Gaza invasion could become the USA’s Sicilian Expedition. The end of the US empire is rapidly approaching, so it’s only a matter of time before someone tests the assumption of US military supremacy.