Here’s What People Get Wrong About Modern Warfare | John Spencer

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]Underground and urban warfare have become the decisive battlegrounds of modern warfare, yet for a long time, military doctrine has been built to avoid both, said John Spencer, a retired U.S. Army major and chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute.

He’s repeatedly embedded himself in active war zones, from Gaza to Ukraine, and personally walked through the nearly two-mile-long Hamas tunnel, wide enough to drive a truck through, that led from Gaza City right up to the Israel-Gaza border wall.

A leading expert on urban and underground warfare, he argues that subterranean warfare is spreading globally. He also argues that enemies of the West have deliberately weaponized the laws of war itself, using civilians as shields.

How can democratic nations defend themselves when non-state actors intentionally weaponize civilian deaths to create political leverage? How are manipulated statistics and social media disinformation warping the public’s understanding of modern-day battlefield realities? And what do we keep getting wrong about modern warfare?

Spencer is the author of the new book “Twenty Times I Almost Died: Life Lessons from the Edge of Survival.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

John Spencer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

John Spencer:

Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

You open your book, which is about all these ways that you almost died, among other things, and lessons from them, with a descent into a large tunnel with nobody attacking. Tell me a little bit about that experience and what it taught you, because I thought it was profound.

Mr. Spencer:

Sure. So it starts about 150 meters underground, deep in Gaza, actually. And you’re right. On the surface, it’s like, well, you weren’t really facing death, although sometimes people are facing danger; they just don’t know it. So there was a little bit of blissfulness from the people around me, as there were two IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers standing in front of us as we went into the opening of this tunnel. 

But I, knowing underground warfare life that I’ve studied, knew that what the soldiers were guarding was the abyss forward of us that they had not cleared, that went all the way back to enemy-held territory or Hamas-held territory. This is early in the Israel-Hamas war. I think it was December of 2023, so right after the October 7th attack. But what it taught me was, one, that it was a dangerous environment because of being in tunnels, just the air you’re breathing and the contaminants.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me a little bit about this tunnel. This was a very unusual one by your estimation.

Mr. Spencer:

Absolutely. It was one that the IDF found quickly after the attack that was an invasion tunnel that led right up to the Israel-Gaza border wall. It’s called the Erez Tunnel. It was almost two miles long. It went from 100 meters, really, from the wall all the way back to Gaza City. It was more like one of the tunnels I’ve been into, like in North Korea, the invasion tunnels they found there, where you could actually drive a truck through this one. 

So, just this massive tunnel. And I talk about in the chapter the investment that had to go into building this thing. It had lights, comm wire, of course, all the oxygen needed to not only breathe but to drive a truck down. And understanding underground warfare, I understood that every one of my stories is a lesson. And what really, really hit me on being in that tunnel with a few other people, actually, interesting people that didn’t know what they were signing up for, like Debra Messing from Will and Grace, who was there with us, was that some of these things you can’t understand. 

And that’s the story of all my war studies, unless you walk the ground. To really grasp the over 600 miles of tunnels that Hamas built, there were a lot of different ones, like the ones I was in that day or other days, some small, some large. That one was very unique in that it was meant to flow massive amounts of fighters and vehicles up to the border wall for an October 7th style invasion, although they didn’t use it in the October 7th attack.

Mr. Jekielek:

How is it that you became, I guess, one of the preeminent experts in tunnel warfare of all things?

Mr. Spencer:

Some of it is that nobody else is doing it. People consider me to be the world’s leading expert in urban warfare and then a leading scholar in underground warfare. It’s a really interesting, almost PhD student dream to be in a field that very few other people are pursuing. So, over a decade of studying urban warfare and underground warfare and writing books and articles about it, but also traveling the world doing it, it’s the scholarship that builds that expertise. And when we created the Modern War Institute at West Point, which I helped create, I started to really focus on that. 

Actually, I was in a Pentagon project where I was an advisor to a four-star general who told us, go look at something that we’re not thinking about. And it was urban warfare, and that was back in 2014. So I caught the bug, but also found that I’m an academic, I’m a war scholar by the very nature of it, to find something that nobody else is doing. So it’s really shocking when you dig into it, like where is the body of knowledge, the repository, the experts in both urban and underground, there are very few.

I, of course, love the study of it and the history of it. And really, it’s the present and the future. Even if you look at underground in Iran and the challenges of attacking Iranian sites, really around the world, even Russia, Ukraine, they’re going underground, building bigger and bigger underground because the surface is so dangerous. A decade ago, I started to study it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Is the reason there are so few people studying this that to actually do it on the ground, so to speak, is risky? Is that the reason, or why?

Mr. Spencer:

It’s a great question. Back in 2014, when we started studying it for the general, why isn’t there a center, a school, books?

Mr. Jekielek:

Because it seems like something that’s been on the rise massively, right? This urban and underground warfare.

Mr. Spencer:

Absolutely. I’ve found many reasons. Sometimes the enemy is ourselves. One of the reasons that there is no true, I think, greater body of experts is that militaries don’t want to fight in cities. Militaries don’t want to fight underground, so they avoid it. And actually, we used to write into our books to avoid and bypass all urban areas. And it makes sense. 

But as the world grew, as in population growth, urbanization, but also even asymmetric enemies, when you rise in your strength, somebody tries to find an asymmetric advantage. And a lot of the non-state actors like Hamas and others, move into urban areas and use the urban areas’ defensive nature, but also the civilian population to their advantage. 

So you just see it increasing around the world, but also even in places like Ukraine, where the Battle of Kyiv in the 1940s is the largest encirclement in military history, but it was a much smaller city than when Russia tried to attack it in 2022. It has grown. The nature of where the urban area is, it all changed. 

But really, the big reason, I mean, I have a lot of job security because no matter how many people I tell, from Congress to other militaries, is they just won’t dedicate people to studying and training for it, which is really weird if that’s where all the fighting is occurring. Even in, I mean, name the war, you’re probably going to mention a city as a battle we remember from World War II, Civil War, I mean, American Revolution, you name it. 

You’re going to talk about a city fight because that’s where the decisive battles are. But there’s a cultural aspect of people’s thoughts about war or even militaries. They plan for these big battles in the open, which does happen, like trench warfare going on in Ukraine and Russia. But those decisive battles are happening in the cities.

Mr. Jekielek:

I want to dig into this a little more because it is really quite astonishing, especially since these terror-type actors that use the civilian populations as kind of shields. They don’t care about them as much as, let’s say, the Western force, which has some kind of moral boundary there. I mean, is it true that this has become more and more prevalent? And is that the reason it’s happening more and more in cities, aside from just their expansion?

Mr. Spencer:

Yes, absolutely. I mean, even if we take the last 30 or 40 years, non-state actors like Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, others, using human shields. Although Hamas is a very unique version of a human sacrifice, as their goal is to actually get their people killed, according to them. And they need civilian deaths to achieve their political goals.

Mr. Jekielek:

When you say according to them, just spell that out for me. How come according to them?

Mr. Spencer:

The Hamas leadership, whether it was Haniyeh, Sinwar, or others, the ones that are giving the orders, have many public statements, and actually even recently, saying they need the blood of their people. Women, children, and the elderly are to achieve their goals. They said they not only want it; they need it to achieve this goal of theirs in the afterlife, martyrdom and everything. 

So it’s a really sick political strategy. I mean, we haven’t seen it. Even the Japanese, the Nazis, nobody, while they accepted civilian casualties, that wasn’t their strategy; it was to get their own population killed in order to achieve this political goal in the afterlife. So that’s why I say, in their words, because their public statements that anybody can reference show that they have this human sacrifice strategy, and of course, their actions, right? 

There are 600 miles of tunnels in Gaza, as one example. There are 2.2 million people there. All of them could fit in their tunnels with ease and escape the surface, what’s going on on the surface. But Hamas actually makes written and public statements saying these are not for the civilians and civilians are not allowed, and you don’t see a civilian trying to get into the underground.

Whereas, if I go to Ukraine, where I’ve been many times, as in, while we’re talking, the civilians go into the subways to seek refuge from the bombings that are happening on the surface. That’s a very unique thing. Why do people keep using a human shield strategy? It is because there are those that follow the law of armed conflict. 

There’s a history of this post-World War II, you know, forced Geneva Conventions, things that even all nations said, we won’t do this anymore. We won’t target civilians, which is one of the fundamentals of the law of war. Call lawfare, which is when a non-state actor or a state actor actually says, not only do I not care about the laws of war, I’m going to use them against that Western democracy that is following the laws. 

And that’s where you get Hamas occupying hospitals, schools, mosques, all of it, because they know that those are protected sites and that in order to strike them, there are special things that have to be done. That’s a war crime in and of itself, but it’s this reverse engineering of the rules of war, which I believe in actually, that these non-state actors have done in many locations. ISIS did it as well, and Al Qaeda. 

But there is a variation too of some of these non-state actors needing the population, like a Maoist fish in the sea to hide amongst the population. Then you get into counterinsurgency theory, which is, of course, some of my experiences in Iraq, and separating the people from the population. But most people don’t want to have it.

Mr. Jekielek:

The population, what do you mean?

Mr. Spencer:

So, if you’re engaged in urban combat, I mean, one of the goals is to, of course, one of the fundamentals of the law of war is don’t target civilians. Target the enemy. And there’s proportionality where there’s a collateral damage assessment. In a counterinsurgency, we have an insurgent within a population; it may be 10 per cent or one per cent of the population, like we faced in Iraq. 

The goal is that they’re relying on the population’s support to hide amongst the population. So, not only do you want to, of course, separate civilians and non-combatants from those that you’re targeting combatants. In order to win a counterinsurgency, you also have to separate the insurgent from the population that it relies on for support so that they start reporting on them. They don’t give them ammunition, refuge, all of these things.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, the other thing that strikes me, you know, where I want to get back into some of the amazing lessons you have in the book, but, you know, an increasing feature—there’s always been information war as part of warfare, obviously, right? Messaging and so forth. But it seems as technology has changed, as social media has risen, as the ability to kind of, I don’t know, create memes, viral memes around issues and things like that has increased, that seems to have become much more of a part of warfare. 

I don’t know if that’s actually accurate, but it seems to me like it has. And that somehow changes the dimensions about these decisions. Like if it’s a counterinsurgency, how do you use the civilian population if you are this non-state actor, even state actor in some cases, in the case of China or something like this? How does information warfare fit in here?

Mr. Spencer:

Absolutely. It’s in the book, too. Isn’t one of the reasons that I’ve had my character tested is when I was willing to go to war zones, report on what I was seeing against what would be the popular opinion? So, was I going to stand up for the truth? And many times I’ve had to take personal liability almost to say the things that matter, and I think we should live in that world. 

You’re right, though. Information warfare has always been a part of war. I mean, the reason we run marathons is because a guy was running back from a battle to explain what had happened. In even Roman times, the senators would hear how a battle’s going; you sack a general, that aspect’s always been there. 

But we live in a different world. In even some of the past wars, whether it was World War II, Korean War, whatever, had we had this  algorithm-driven social media instant access to the battlefields. I think wars might have gone differently. It’s present. So, that aspect of anybody fighting a war, especially in an urban area where there are all the cell phones, and we saw this in Gaza where Hamas would actually create content based on what was trending and try to use that towards the other aspect of information warfare: narrative warfare. 

So, who’s controlling the narrative between India and Pakistan, where what the world took from it is almost the opposite of what actually happened? That is a new nature of warfare that nations and populations have never had to deal with: instant, ubiquitous, but also algorithm-driven content to where, of course, war is hell. War is awful; it’s death and destruction. So, to get fed the brutality of war to every phone of a population, if it’s the United States, it’s our population, or others. 

And you’re right, China is developing the tools of information warfare in order to be able to do that, to influence a population. And it’s not new, right? Vietnam War, you can win every battle, but you can lose the war.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so this is, I thought back as I was thinking about this. I mean, some people would argue that Vietnam was lost on the information war. 

Mr. Spencer:

Absolutely. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And it’s astonishing, in a sense, right?

Mr. Spencer:

There are many reasons that we lost. It would be hard to achieve, whether it’s to stand up a nation, a legitimate nation. But Vietnam is what we call the Cronkite effect, right? So, the most trusted American journalist goes to Vietnam, happened to be during what was launched as the Tet Offensive, and comes back and says, there’s no way we can win this war. It was at the time, because he was trusted, it was a different opinion than what the government and the military were saying. 

The president said, if we lost Cronkite, we lost the war, and it was the start of that information warfare because all war is a contest of wills that includes the two militaries fighting the two governments, but also their population. So, especially in a democracy, if the population doesn’t believe that it’s a just war, that it’s a good reason to fight it, or that there’s a foreseeable way to achieve the stated goals, going back to ancient warfare, you won’t be able to continue the war. 

The layer that’s new, though, is that information warfare or in all the tools of social media, people are talking directly to the populations; a lie can spread around the world. And we’ve seen this in many cases in wars today where something happens, it spreads around the world as a lie on who did it, what, how many people died, if civilians died. And no matter what you do, you can’t put that back in the bottle. 

And people are convinced that that’s what’s happened, as much so as—and when I fought strongly against this—the entire ideals about a war and where somebody gets driven. In something about a single war every day, like the false claim of Israel creating genocide in Gaza, when it’s all—I’ve seen mountains of evidence to the opposite, literally fields of food and soldiers doing the opposite of genocide—but the world spreads it.

Mr. Jekielek:

When you say the opposite of science, do you mean like warning the civilian population that there’s going to be action or things of this nature? What do you mean by the opposite?

Mr. Spencer:

By the literal definition of genocide, it’s, you know, trying to destroy in whole or in part a group, a religious group, all of that, both by intention and by action. So, the opposite of genocide is your intent is the opposite of destroying the people. And that’s what I’ve seen in my now eight trips to Israel, seven into Gaza. Probably the only person outside the IDF that’s been into Gaza so much is that I’ve actually interviewed all the political leaders, all the generals, everything. 

Like, what are you trying to do here to answer the intent question? Destroy the people or are you trying to get to the hostages and destroy the enemy, which is not a, you know, killing the enemy in war is sometimes the goal. It’s not a war crime.  

The other part is the actions that you talked about. So if you can’t prove the intent is to destroy all of the people of, like in this case, Gaza, then people will look at the actions. Like in Russian Ukraine, Russia steals thousands of babies and gives them to Russian parents. That’s a genocidal act according to the Genocide Convention. You can prove it through actions. And what Israel has done to try to protect civilians, right? These are those things you just mentioned that, thanks to my war scholarship before October 7th, we have how do you prevent civilian casualties in war is a big field of study. 

We call it civilian harm mitigation measures. And Israel has implemented more of these civilian harm mitigation measures, things trying to prevent civilians from getting hurt, like evacuations, phone calls, flyers, all of that. But also, daily pauses to allow civilians to get out of harm’s way, giving out their maps, tracking civilians by their cell phones, not taking airstrikes. 

They’ve actually done more of these than any military has ever tried in war, but then are accused of targeting civilians when all of the evidence, real evidence, actually there are no cases of Israel targeting civilians. Of course, there have been civilians that have died going back to our conversation about Hamas’ strategy, but also collateral damage is unfortunate. But the law says you do everything you can to minimize it.

And from the genocide claim, if Israel’s intent has been stated by their political and military leaders, like we are targeting Hamas, and then all of their actions, to include putting their own soldiers at risk in order to give these notifications and take all these actions, it’s the opposite of genocide. And actually, which is something a lot of people who don’t know much about war don’t realize, what they’ve done has protracted the war.

Mr. Jekielek:

It can be brutal and involve a lot of death and also be the opposite of genocide. I think that term has started—it’s something that I’ve studied quite a bit as well, and I understand. Thank you for defining it so, I guess, officially, because it’s a more official definition than I’ve heard from most people. Of course, the war in Gaza was brutal. A lot of people did die, and they say, well, that’s genocide. But you’re saying something like that can still be the opposite of genocide, though it’s horrible, and of course, the Palestinian people have suffered greatly.

Mr. Spencer:

Absolutely. That’s why I’m fighting for not allowing the name. It’s a very important classification, right? We have war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Genocide being the ultimate, created after the Holocaust to define the worst human thing you could ever do, which is trying to eliminate an entire race, religion, you name it. I don’t want that word to just be synonymous with bad. Like, war is bad. War is hell. War is killing. It’s awful. But we can’t redefine a term trying to say, well, it’s really bad. 

Yes, it’s really bad for many reasons. And I could talk for a long time about why it is so bad in Gaza. Well, Hamas prepared the ground for 20 years. They are trying to get their civilians killed. Egypt wouldn’t allow the civilians out, which I’ve never seen in a war that I’ve ever studied, where one country could save thousands by just creating a humanitarian zone outside of the main combat area that the enemy doesn’t then use to its advantage.

But you’re right. Some people would just say, well, I mean really bad, like a number. And there are three types of lies in my work: lies, damn lies, and statistics. And I’ve had to try to fight against these. It’s a really good book, actually, that I read in my master’s degree that I never knew I’d need so much about statistics in war, like how many people died, how many civilians died. And this has been the very unique thing that I don’t want to continue to other wars where I can just say a number and then associate it with a term like genocide. 

Like, okay, 70,000 people have died in Gaza, according to the Hamas Gaza Health Ministry, so that means it’s genocide. And that’s what, as a war scholar, I don’t want to see happen because that’s almost a strategy for all those people that don’t want to adhere to the laws of armed conflict and say, well, if we just kill enough people, then everybody will be against it, and we’ll achieve our goals, which is not the goal of armed conflict either.

Mr. Jekielek:

And this is so, you know, it’s interesting how our conversation is developing, but this is something, you know, I struggle with personally because there is a lot of horror, you know, in war and so on and so forth. The point is, the moment it’s almost like the sharing of that has been democratized through social media. That’s not a problem. I think that’s actually a somewhat positive thing because, you know, in the past, a lot of this stuff could be done under a shroud of secrecy and so forth. 

You know, how many millions of people died in Soviet Russia and Communist China? It’s uncountable, but it’s massive and massive amounts because of that shroud of secrecy. But the flip side is that, like you said, a falsehood that seems very real can be unbelievably powerful in hitting the will of a country or a very powerful ally, right? How to solve these things, right, becomes a lot more difficult, I guess, is what I’m saying, because of the nature of it.

Mr. Spencer:

Yes, it gets into the double standard. There is, like you said, it’s great. I want people to understand what the rules of war are, because I believe in them, the laws of armed conflict, especially post-World War II, where awful things happened, so that war should be deterred. We don’t want war, but there are reasons why we do believe that war is just defending yourself, which I believe all wars are wars of choice. You can either choose to defend yourself like Ukraine did, and then Ukrainians stood up and said they didn’t want to be Russian, they didn’t want to be invaded, or even Israel after October 7th, saying, we’re going to defend our nation. It’s a choice. 

But there are rules because we don’t want anybody’s wars, the civilians being the brunt of wars. And that’s why not targeting civilians like Hamas did on October 7th is what we don’t want to see. In order to uphold that, then you have to take action to stop it, which is the danger here. I want people to understand, but we also live in this don’t trust anybody kind of post-COVID world where you have interpreters of war, what they’re seeing, whether it’s a video going, look, clearly those people were innocent. 

That spreads really rapidly because people want to believe certain things, or they trust podcasters or things interpreting the law of war, like about what’s legal, what’s not, combatant, who’s not? How do numbers work? That is the dangerous space again, going back to if you create a double standard for Israel in war, then it will be applied against the United States later for U.S. war.

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, I’m sure it will.

Mr. Spencer:

Yes. I haven’t studied this long enough. I’ve seen it already tried with the United States during the two battles of Fallujah in 2004, where international human rights activists were saying that we were committing war crimes. People were coming up with numbers of civilians that weren’t true. It was like a mini situation, and it actually had repercussions on the ground, but it didn’t stick as much because of, of course, the Israel kind of concept of everything they do is wrong, everything that they say is not true. Very few people actually have information; they just have access to these influencers and interpreters of war.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me about your background. How is it that you got to be doing the work that you do?

Mr. Spencer:

Sure. The book is just a bunch of stories that I ended up putting in, that did shape me because I’ve had an amazing career. I was, some people, whether it’s fortunate I almost died 20 times or unfortunate, I view it as fortunate. I joined the Army at 17, had a single mom with three kids, working three jobs. There wasn’t much for me after high school. I joined the military, had an amazing 25-year career from serving as a commander in Iraq twice to my education that I got in the military. 

And then towards the end of my career, as I transitioned into the Pentagon after working for that four-star general, I started studying urban warfare. But of course, in the military, you’ve got to move on to your next job. And I moved to West Point where I was teaching strategy and I created the Modern War Institute at West Point, which is a research center for wars.

That really points to like, how did you get into this business of more war after my military career than I did in my military career because my job is now to go into war zones, study them, and I’ve been, and this is many of the stories, in very near-death situations by the very nature of the knowledge that I’m pursuing, which I do believe that you have to go get.

And we actually don’t have war watchers anymore. We used to have them, just a long time ago. If you even think back to the American Civil War, the Germans were here, the French were here, the English were here, just observing the changing character of warfare, all of this, and for political reasons, we stopped doing it.

But after I finished my military career, I continued this war research as a war scholar. I also believe that continuing to study urban underground warfare is really important for our own country, and for anybody to understand and be able to stand up, whether it’s for a political leader or for the news. Just so you’re clear here, what people are saying about what is happening is not right, or what is the history of this operation, because then they start doing, you know, going back to those numbers, false statistics of what’s happening compared to anything else. 

That’s how I got into it. A great military career, and now a great post-career, writing books and articles about the war zones. And I have a bunch in the pipeline right now and really exciting research. As it kind of grows on itself, the more I study war, the more, unfortunately, there are more things to study.

Mr. Jekielek:

No, we were speaking earlier, and you were telling me you have a book coming soon about Azerbaijan and Armenia, about that conflict. It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently. I just had the ambassador from Armenia on, just talking about the impacts of this peace agreement and this corridor created for Armenia, well, for both, for everyone, but with Armenian great interest, right? 

But we don’t, there are so many of these conflicts that we don’t, like, how much do we really know about that? I mean, I followed Nagorno-Karabakh a little bit and what happened there, and Armenia has to deal with that reality. Can you just tell me a little bit about what you found there?

Mr. Spencer:

It was another one of these aha moments, I think, in studying wars and what we understand in the West of what’s happening; it actually isn’t the reality of what happened. So I became interested because there was, of course, a war over this region between Azerbaijan and Armenia called Karabakh. A long history is covered in the book. 

In the late 1990s, Armenia takes it. In 2020, though, during the COVID period, really, there’s this massive war that’s way undercover. And the only thing that the West kind of takes from it is that it’s a drone war. The new drones are the future of war. It’s what won the war, all of this. And now, having walked every battle of that war with almost every general on both sides, understanding what happened and what it was, it was a massive war over this region that ended, and now there’s a possibility for a very strong peace between the two countries in this region. 

The book that comes out in October actually will detail, unlike anything ever before, what happened in the 2020 war, but also there’s a 2023 kind of resolution of it, and how did Azerbaijan achieve a victory? Even in Armenia, if you talk to Armenians, they had a military victory, but it was actually linked to strategy and the thoughts about that region and its politics. This is a fascinating case study. But for me, as an outsider and war scholar, this aspect of the drones and how we got that wrong through open-source intelligence is puzzling.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just in a word, what is it that we’re going to learn? What was the reality? It wasn’t drones?

Mr. Spencer:

No, absolutely not. It was men and women on the ground, tanks breaching wire obstacles, and artillery. It was a combination, like we understand in the war, even in Ukraine, there isn’t one thing that wins a war. It’s actually those that have the coherence of capabilities, and having better equipment definitely helped in this war, especially for Azerbaijan. They had better equipment, but it was how they integrated everything on the battlefield—human decisions where the war could have been lost at a single moment, human decisions that led to a breakthrough or a city falling. 

At one point, they scaled 400 feet of cliffs to infiltrate the city that ended the 2020 war. That’s human thinking and surprise. All these enduring elements of war aren’t what the world took from it, which is, we just got to have these drones that the Azerbaijanis had.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. Yes, absolutely fascinating. I was thinking, the last I was hearing about the Russia-Ukraine war, of course, there’s a lot of drone innovation and drone warfare and so forth. It’s fascinating to kind of follow that. But really, it’s the sort of raw, traditional artillery that seems to be making the difference. Is that right? Like, it’s just the old stuff, right? Just bombs.

Mr. Spencer:

Yes, I think all warfare is a combination of the old and the new. It’s really when bad assumptions, which we could talk about whether it’s in Iran, Lebanon, or wherever, where you have these bad assumptions of the futurist or whoever imagines the future of war without the old. So, like in Ukraine, yes, we learned that artillery is really still important. Ground army, infantry, in order to take ground, hold ground, armor to breach, mobile protective firepower, all of it. 

Ukraine teaches you that all the things you thought you don’t need anymore, even with their amazing things they’ve done with drones and robotics, even ground vehicle robotics, aren’t the decisive elements that are going to win the war. It gives them advantages here and there, but it’s actually all the old stuff that you need as well, like artillery. 

We actually call it the vampire fallacy. General H.R. McMaster kind of coined what we call the vampire fallacy that’s present, going back to World War I. That if I just had this one piece of technology, I’ll win the war, and no soldiers will have to die, nobody will have to die, and that’s it. It’s a fallacy that people pursue. You need it all. 

And there are revolutions in military affairs where there is a cost, like the cost difference right now that we see with drones, right? Where if I can flood you with drones that are cheap to make—$10,000, $40,000—and you have to use an interceptor that’s $2 or $3 million, there’s that economics of war that’s present, that’s always been present as well, that you have to stay on top of. But it’s when nations get complacent and believe that they don’t need things that you find them wanting on the battlefield.

Mr. Jekielek:

When you’re faced as a normal person with the battery of social media and news, and legitimate skepticism against government messaging from wherever, however much you may like a government or not, how do you actually figure out some semblance of reality?

Mr. Spencer:

Yes. I have young kids, and towards the end of my book, it’s really about a code that I created for how I lead my life, that I want my kids to lead by. But it’s a crisis in my work, especially of critical thinking, but it is in other fields as well. How do we know what we know? I talk a lot about in my book why I am facing danger so much. It’s because I truly believe you have to go there and see it. 

And in some places, even what I thought with all my study, and then I go there, and like, I didn’t know anything. There is a crisis of critical thinking that is being eroded by the fact that I can have any information I want right now, but it’s almost like digital literacy needs to be started in primary school. Like, well, how do you know what you’re seeing is the truth? And there is some.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because most people either don’t want to go because they don’t want to take the risk or can’t—a vast, vast majority, right? So they’re not going to have that opportunity.

Mr. Spencer:

Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:

I cut you off at digital literacy. So tell me about that because some people will even say, well, digital literacy, you’re just telling me I need to sort of condition myself to a particular type of propaganda, aren’t you, John?

Mr. Spencer:

I do this for myself because I love access to information. I consume information. Of course, we could get into what artificial intelligence does or doesn’t do for us. But in this world of not trusting any information, you almost have to become your own investigative journalist. As in, somebody’s telling you something. And I actually find that they’re telling you one thing, but they’re not connecting the dots for you. They say, look, believe what I’m saying is true. 

For me, it’s like the law of war, or like the genocide convention. The genocide convention is two pages long. Everybody can read it, but they just want somebody to tell them what it says.

In digital literacy, which is whatever the topic is, it isn’t that hard to find the information that makes an assertion and the evidence for an assertion true. And because of the research that I fell into, even when I was growing up in the military, it wasn’t my thing to do that. I had to learn, okay, what is research? What is evidence? If you have a hypothesis, then how do you prove that? 

And that’s the critical thinking that everybody can do now with access to information, but they want their trusted person to tell them what is true because they don’t have the time, whether it’s politics or war, to do that themselves. And in this day and age, it’s the emotion that people connect as well to their belief about something that you actually haven’t taken the time to connect the evidence to the assertion.

Mr. Jekielek:

To allow for the fact you might be wrong, to allow to.

Mr. Spencer:

That’s right. Or who you’re trusting, which I don’t know. I guess I’m more discerning than I just have one voice. I trust that person’s position daily on the news or whatever it is, that they’ve done the work. Because fact-checking, and I’m a writer too, I mean, for example, the New York Times putting a baby with cerebral palsy on the front page of the paper of record and saying that that’s because of malnutrition and starvation. 

When the person has a congenital disease, that’s the fact-checking, that is the critical thinking that we used to trust some people for. Now we’re trusting comedians or others to do that for us. And what I teach my kids is like, you can do that. What is it that you heard? Now do a little homework. It takes minutes to say, well, how do we know that’s true, whatever the topic is?

Mr. Jekielek:

I see, and so there’s because the information might be out there, it just might not be front and center.

Mr. Spencer:

That’s right, it’s not.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re saying often it is out there.

Mr. Spencer:

Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. Well, that’s kind of, I guess, what we do as a media, but I don’t know if everyone is going to be doing it.

Mr. Spencer:

I mean, this is the speed, which goes back to our question about wars. Because the traditional, trusted information sources are gone and more people get their information from X than any other source, there is that wanting to be the first to get out there. So in war, we always say, just so you know, the first report is always wrong. So in this age of wanting to get to the story quicker, wanting to get to that assertion quicker, it actually is more wrong than right because it’s the first report, because they want to be the first. 

Whether it’s true or not, they just want to be the first, which gets you to the sad state of affairs that we’re in and the need for every individual to have that critical thinking before they get emotional. Like, let me dig into it a little bit more. How do we know this? How new is this information, or things like that?

Mr. Jekielek:

What would you say is the reality that you discovered that was the most distant from what you thought you were going to see in a war zone?

Mr. Spencer:

That’s a tough one. I mean, I’ve studied everything from why the Russians failed to take Kyiv, which was a surprise to me, to the human factors that prevented it. To, of course, every visit to Gaza, the dystopian reality of how much effort the soldiers were making to protect civilians and being criticized around the world. Probably there’s nothing that compares to that, really, the scale of that, as in going to Israel, going into Gaza, watching IDF soldiers try to protect civilians while trying to get their hostages, and the entire world—I mean, umpteen countries around the world—saying that they’re not. 

I hope I never have to face anything like that again. That really is the opposite of reality, despite the evidence on the ground that everybody else has access to. Like some people say, well, we didn’t have access to go there, but everything from the number of, the amount of food that was going in, the vaccinations, the numbers—all of this stuff, everybody had the same access I did. 

Of course, I could validate because I was watching somebody do something that what they were doing in the state they were taking. But hopefully, I never have to face that again in my studies where the entire world is pushing every day the opposite of reality on the ground, even with access to the same information that gets revealed later, right? Like the IPC’s [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] famine in Gaza, it gets revealed later, but it’s too late. But the reality on the ground is…

Mr. Jekielek:

But just explain to me the reality of that situation because there might be people watching that don’t know. What do you mean by the famine?

Mr. Spencer:

In 2024, one of the groups that would determine famine around the world. So, this is the problem with, like, who do you trust? Well, this institution said this; the UN said this. And you have to dig a little bit deeper, like, who in the UN and what’s their history of reporting? 

But early in 2024, the IPC did this study of nutrition in Gaza and had reported that there were nearing famine conditions because they changed their own metrics of the number of deaths related to starvation that would equate to famine. And now that same organization is providing the data that they had, showing that none of it was true. There weren’t cases of death by malnutrition and starvation that would equate to the famine marker. Again, words have meaning. 

And what we saw was actually they had changed the meaning of the word because everybody thought there were just awful things.And here’s just another piece of evidence; Despite the actual number, the amount of food that was going in, and the lack of deaths from malnutrition and starvation that were happening, actually, with the new data that comes out, of course, now it’s too late. 

A year later, the actual data provided from Gaza during a war had nutrition higher than other parts of the Middle East where there is no war. An amazing amount of reality when everybody could have gone and seen the amount of food that was going in and actually looked at the data, but that wasn’t—there was legitimacy put to a report saying this institution says there’s nearing famine, so all of it just needs to stop.

Mr. Jekielek:

When we talk about this, right, this is the challenge in these, and this isn’t, I think, you know, Israel-Gaza is one, is a very, very stark example, but that’s not to say that the idea was perfect or something like that, or everything about it is right, or even the strategy is correct, or any of all of this, right? It’s sort of the way these things are painted; it’s just, you know, it’s this one monolith vs. another.

Mr. Spencer:

Yes. Then they get to, because if you, yes, but then they get to the demonization that they’re trying to do something bad. So they take the information they have available, and then all the interpreters are saying, well, clearly they’re trying to kill civilians, to starve civilians. They’re trying to do that when the actual reality is the opposite. And like you said, thankfully, I had studied war before this, and I’m studying other war zones where what has actually happened on the ground is the opposite of what the West takes from it, and why I love my job.

Even in the four-day war between India and Pakistan last year, for some reason, the world believes that Pakistan knocked a bunch of Indian aircraft down, so they achieved this victory. And it just permeates across, especially English-speaking media, when the reality is almost the complete opposite of what happened during that four-day war.

Mr. Jekielek:

What is that opposite reality, just for the record?

Mr. Spencer:

Yes, for the record. So, another book that I am working on is a book on the war that happened between India and Pakistan in 2020 last year. It was four days. The Indians called it Operation Sindoor. The Western media focused on one aspect of the war: whether aircraft were knocked down or not. They didn’t focus on the fact that India, which had modernized its military, was able to strike any target it wanted across all of Pakistan and did so in a very constrained manner, achieving the political goal, which is basically an end to the actions that Pakistan was taking in attacking India. So it was literally one of the strongest cases of military dominance to achieve a political goal rapidly that you have in the modern era. 

But for some reason, the West just said, well, Pakistan really got them and knocked down some planes. One, that’s not the measure of war, but it’s really interesting what media or numbers will be fixated on when this is such a compelling case. Because in the opening days of this four-day war, India strikes nine terrorist camps, and not a single target is stopped from hitting those terrorist camps. And then, after Pakistan retaliates with a bunch of drones, like hundreds of drones and missiles, India then strikes 11 air bases and is able to strike all of them without any of them being stopped. Like, that’s military dominance.

Mr. Jekielek:

But that’s not the story that most people understand.

Mr. Spencer:

Which is that informational story.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s not the story I definitely understood at this moment, which is I’m going to have to go do my fact-checking now.

Mr. Spencer:

It’s crazy.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. Fascinating. What would you say was the moment when you were doing your research? I mean, you’re basically embedding yourself with military forces, like in many cases in live situations and other cases you’re going in after the fact. Is there an instance in your mind where you know it was—I mean, there are 20 times you almost died here—but what’s the example where you know you—has there been a time where you thought to yourself, maybe I’m spending, I have a little bit too much interest in being on the ground here because of an incident?

Mr. Spencer:

There have actually been a few, that’s why there are 20. Although, this is covering everything from one hour from bees, from killer bees.I’ve been with killer bees in Panama, from my own combat deployments to now. There have been a couple of times in my pursuits; I’ll give you two examples. Of course, going into Gaza was very dangerous, but I thought very important. 

And at one point, I went to where the U.S. pier used to be along the coast of Gaza through what’s called the Netzarim Corridor. I saw where the pier used to be, and I actually saw the field of aid that was waiting to be picked up, which is its own challenge.

On the drive back, about an hour after I had driven back into Israel, two soldiers died on the same road I was on, and I wasn’t able to go in another day. That was another realization of going into an active combat zone versus, like you said, like I did in Kyiv after the Russians had withdrawn. Although, I got a lot closer to Chernobyl than I ever wanted to get following the Russian withdrawal from Kyiv and how close it is to Kyiv. 

Another example, though, is when I went to study the Azerbaijan-Armenia war after 2020. I went in really rapidly after because, again, that war ended in a city fight. And I was alone traveling through a lot of checkpoints with a Russian checkpoint near me. And at one point, I thought, this is probably a bit too far, because I had no cell service. I was totally relying on my host to get me through this, through minefields and everything.That was a moment in the book where I thought, okay, note to self, this is a little bit too much in the pursuit of gaining the knowledge that I got from that, which was amazing.

Mr. Jekielek:

Earlier in our conversation, you talked about, you know, believing in waging just war, you know, following rules. The landscape has changed. There are so many actors. Again, you can name, you know, communist China, you know, expressly figuring out how to leverage our kind of rules, the way our society works against us as a form of war fighting.

Mr. Spencer:

Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right? It’s sort of like throwing the rules out the window. Anything goes. The sanctity of human life is not enshrined at all, or there are no attempts to value that at all. Is it even possible to do just war? Do we have to, even if the enemy doesn’t? Doesn’t that put us at a disadvantage?I know these are topics people discuss, right? Absolutely. A lot. And I don’t even know what to think about it because it’s, to me personally, unimaginable to say, okay, yes, forget it, no standards because the enemy has no standards and otherwise we’ll lose. But does that mean we’re going to lose?

Mr. Spencer:

Yes, it’s a great question. I get it in various forms, having, again, argued. And what’s interesting is that, like we talked about the expertise of urban warfare, one of the reasons the military has avoided it is because it is the greatest place where there are going to be constraints on the use of military force, where you can’t do what you want. There are protected populations, protected sites, and people often ask me, well, do we need more laws of war? I actually don’t believe we do. 

I think we need a better understanding of what the laws of war mean. And there’s an echelon, like you said. Having studied the laws of war and taught military history, strategy, and laws of war for so long, I know what without the rules looks like. If you go back into ancient warfare, it’s gruesome, and I understand why the laws of war evolved because they’re constantly evolving, even outlawing biological and chemical weapons, things that are really important. They evolve, and how important they are, because I know what it looks like if you don’t have them. 

And after World War II, which is the greatest, the most awful human experience in our history, how important it was to come back together as nations, especially the great powers, and say, look, we’re going to evolve these to be even stronger because we never want what happened during World War II to happen again. 

I believe it’s still possible. There is accountability that has to happen. And it’s really bad when you have, you know, there are multi-international organizations like the UN Security Council that really matter. And when you have one of the voting veto members violating the laws of war, it becomes a problem.

Mr. Jekielek:

There are nuclear nonproliferation treaties, which major actors just simply say, yes, whatever, or we’re not supposed to be using biological weapons, but frankly, everybody’s developing biological weapons. I mean, as far as I can tell, people wonder what meaning this has. You can become despondent, but I guess I’m trying to understand, from things I’ve read from you, that you need this. You need these boundaries. But how do you face the fact that you have these enemies that seek to subvert you at best, if not destroy you at worst, that just don’t have those constraints at all?

Mr. Spencer:

Yes, it’s hard. And the law of war actually accounts for this. The law of war actually accounts for whether it’s an internationally armed conflict or a non-internationally armed conflict, whether it’s an intrawar or intrastate war. It tries to argue with, and this is the scholar of the laws of war. But the laws of war aren’t a suicide pact. They aren’t meant to handcuff every nation of the world and to outlaw war. 

War is not illegal; it is reserved for very special cases like self-defense, which is Article 51 of the UN Charter. All the great nations—I’m a realist, so I believe in nation-states, sovereign borders, and the laws of war. Even non-nuclear proliferation, like you said, there are nine nuclear-armed countries. I don’t want any more. I definitely don’t want a terrorist state that says it wants to destroy the United States to have one. 

This is the aspect of getting, especially those that don’t study war, quickly informed on what the rules are, but also what’s worth fighting for. And I believe non-nuclear proliferation is worth fighting for. I believe in freedom of navigation because I understand how much the United States economy and the global economy rely on freedom of navigation. I also know when we’ve gone to war about that in the past. But this is the debate that we get to have in democracies. 

Unfortunately, I deal in a space where there are a lot of people that are just anti-war, which is fine. War is horrible. But I’m not okay when people are anti-fact or even anti-common sense when trying to redefine words like many of the ones we talked about. I want informed populations, and I want war reserved for when it’s needed, but I also believe that there are cases where war is necessary, where military action is necessary. 

Of course, you use all forms of national power. And then I understand when the rules, whether it’s the global international order or the rules of war, are really important. And that’s why for us, we elect political leaders to fight for those things.

Mr. Jekielek:

Now, we could have a big, long discussion about deterrence next. That’s right. But I think we’re going to have to finish up. As much as I would love to talk to you for another hour, maybe a quick final thought as we finish up, and we’ll definitely have you back after your book comes out.

Mr. Spencer:

Sure. I firmly believe that the way that you prevent wars is to prepare for war, especially if you’re the only superpower in the world. I believe in strong nations and strong militaries that deter war because, just what you talked about, if you don’t deter war, if there are no consequences for any actions, then those that want more power, want more land, want more populations or resources will take it by force in violation of all the rules because nobody’s going to do anything about it. 

And now we believe we’re so handcuffed by our own rule set that we’ve just allowed it all the way down to what you talked about, which is, of course, China’s waging war against us, both economic warfare, information warfare, and intellectual property warfare. They’re doing it.

Mr. Jekielek:

And if we don’t do anything about it, they’ll win. John Spencer, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Spencer:

Thank you.

 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.