As a predictive forecaster, I often study the past to understand the present and future. I have spent plenty of time recently studying the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza. Of course, everyone seems to have an opinion.
One common strategy I have read about is called the Total War Strategy, and surprisingly, the place it was first used in modern warfare was during the American Civil War.
So as you read what follows simply replace the words “Civil War” with “Israel’s War Against Hamas”; “Sherman” or “Union Army” with the term IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), and also replace the word “Confederacy” or “noncombatants” with “Palestinians” or “Gaza-based Arab non-combatants”.
Let’ begin here…
What is an example of a total war strategy?
No matter how far and safe non-combatants saw themselves from the conflict, the Civil War always managed to find itself on the doorstep of countless helpless civilians.
No military action in a bloody Civil War was probably more controversial than Sherman’s March to the Sea. The rampaging soldiers’ path spanned 60 miles wide. They burned, pillaged, and destroyed everything in their path. Their behavior was explained away by General William. Tecumseh Sherman as waging “total war” against the enemy. The brutal, unprecedented destruction of enormous swaths of the South hastened the end of the War and helped to reelect Lincoln.
Sherman’s March to the Sea used scorch earth tactics, most notably the burning of Atlanta.
The City of Winchester changed hands more than a dozen times during the Civil War. The Valley Pike, the main road that ran down the center of the Shenandoah Valley, had played a prominent role in Jackson’s Valley campaign of 1862; and in subsequent years it figured prominently in the operations of Confederate General Jubal Early no less than it did in the operations of Federal Generals Franz Sigel, David Hunter, and Philip Sheridan. The battles at Cross Keys, Port Republic, New Market, Front Royal, Cedar Creek, and Kernstown were overshadowed only by the more than a dozen seesaw occupations of the city of Winchester, which straddled the pike.
During General Philip Sheridan’s Valley Campaign of 1864, the Union Army destroyed anything that would aid in the Confederate war effort. Regarding the Valley itself, General Grant’s order to Sheridan did not equivocate.
“It is desirable that nothing should be left to invite the enemy to return,” Sheridan ordered his troops. “Take all provisions, forage, and stock wanted for the use of your command. Such as cannot be consumed, destroy.” In the decisive battles of September and October 1864, Sheridan was able to deploy more cavalry than Jubal Early‘s entire army.
Thinking the CSA forces under Jubal Early were whipped, Sheridan turned his attention to the systematic destruction of the Shenandoah Valley. Sheridan was following the direct orders of the Union’s top general.
“Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can,” General Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan. “If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”
“The Burning” commenced and within a few days, Sheridan reported to Grant that his men had destroyed 2,000 barns filled with hay and wheat and more than 70 mills filled with flour and wheat, had slaughtered 3,000 sheep, and had driven off 4,000 cattle. Despite an enormous preponderance in numbers, Sheridan had a far easier time accomplishing the ‘barren waste’ element of his orders than he did in whipping the Confederates.
On April 2, General Robert E. Lee telegraphed the Confederate War Department that both Petersburg and Richmond would have to be abandoned. Confederate Jefferson Davis (D-Mississippi) gave an account, which describes the fall of Richmond — and the devastation attributed to the actions of the fleeing Confederate military. After a triumphant entry, Union soldiers struggled to put out the fires, but it is clear from accounts that the conflagration was far too widespread — and the damage was already far too extensive — for any effort to save much of the city.
“The miseries of our situation which would have been incalculable at best were inconceivably enhanced by the disastrous burning of the business portion of the city,” wrote Davis. “Nearly all the supplies of food were kept in the stores which were consumed by the fire and our poor people were almost totally dependent upon the mercy of the captors.”
Modern visitors to the Civil War battlefields have difficulty visualizing the extent of the destruction visited upon the farms and fields that have been carefully restored to represent their pre-encounter condition.
Veteran soldiers on both sides quickly learned to dig ad hoc entrenchments topped with so-called head logs or piles of fence rails for added protection from small arms fire.
The economic cost of the devastation wrought in these battles was almost incalculable and historians have been hard pressed to attach a specific dollar amount to the sufferings that it caused in rural America. Farmhouses, barns, and other outbuildings were blown up, burned, or left mere skeletons stripped of boards by the troops of both sides.
Farm fences everywhere disappeared in the smoke of a thousand nightly campfires. The loss of these alone has been estimated at several millions of dollars not to mention that their replacement placed a labor-intensive strain on a region of the country already stressed by a lack of white laborers and the removal of thousands of former slaves. Digging postholes, splitting fence rails, and fashioning gates is incredibly time consuming even when the appropriate wood and labor are available.
The battle damage to Spangler’s Barn at Gettysburg. Spanglers’ bank barn, a common feature of the farmland around Gettysburg and elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Every inch of the bank barn would be needed during the battle and afterward, with one doctor estimating that 500 wounded men were crammed onto both floors of the building at one point.
Other farms were the sites of more combat than the Spangler Farm, and some were literally destroyed. The Spangler house has been turned into a modern education center, and the property and buildings have an 1863 “feel.”
When the Spangler family returned, they found the property in complete ruin. Soldiers had cleared the home of food and bed clothes. One of the family’s best horses and all their cows were stolen. All of the fences had been torn down and the crops severely damaged. The house itself was partially damaged and, due to its use as a field hospital, the floorboards were soaked and stained with blood. Soldiers’ corpses and amputated limbs were buried across the property.
According to James M. Volo, “No matter how far and safe non-combatants saw themselves from the conflict, the Civil War always managed to find itself on the doorstep of countless helpless civilians. Estimates of the destruction range from $6.6 to 10.3 billion with the South bearing 60 percent of the total cost. On a per capita basis, the costs to the Northern population were roughly equal to one year’s income. The Southern burden was two and a half times that amount per man, woman, and child. Allocating the costs to each region produces a per capita burden of $670 in the South and $199 in the North. These estimates do not show the extent to which these expenses were spread out over a long period. In the North, consumption and economic activity had regained its prewar level by 1873, however in the South, they remained below its 1860 level to the end of the century. [1]
Source [1] See Ransom, Roger. Economics of the Civil War.
The Takeaway
So what do I predict is likely to happen in Gaza.
1. Israeli forces will stay in Gaza until any Israeli leaders think military threat to Israel is gone.
2. The world will complain and protest but they ultimately don’t really care. Hamas is a terrorist zero sum game Islamic organization, and no one wants them other than Iran. Even the Iranian government will waste no time or ink defending Hamas’s barbaric actions.
3. Israeli forces have already built a road through the middle of Gaza. The Israeli government will use that road as it sees fit.
4.The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah will not pick a fight here. If they were going to do so they would have done so already.
5. Once the fighting is over, billions of dollars of Saudi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Chinese, and even American money will flow into Gaza under Israeli (and secretly Egyptian Control) to rebuild the place. People will get rich here as they always do, and the people of Gaza will be free of Hamas, though they will still blame Israel for all the death and destruction.
Note this: Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, praises 'very valuable' potential of Gaza's 'waterfront property'
Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s former White House adviser and his son-in-law, praised the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property" in an interview dated Feb. 15, posted earlier this month on the YouTube channel of the Middle East Initiative, a program of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government
6. The Israeli government will completely control Gaza, but from a distance. The place will be run administratively by Non-Hamas, Non-P.A. Palestinians. There will be “democratic elections” but Hamas and Islamic Jihad candidates will be barred from running.
7. Much of the local economy will run on local business and money brought in by residents of Gaza who work in Israel.
8. Hamas will exist under a different name, as a type of Islamic Community organization. There will be plenty of Arab spies from Israel around, and as soon as these groups talk violence against Israel, they will be arrested, or eliminated.
The Takeaway
There will be no two-state solution. The Palestinian leaders (and Arab street) don’t want it without the “Right of Return” and if they got that Israel would cease to exist. It is all Zero-Sum and Israel gets no benefit from another Arab Muslim state on their border.
The world of Gaza will all be a bit like “Reconstruction” after the American Civil War.
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The devastation during Sherman's March must be much like the devastion in Gaza, as you describe here in your article. I can't even imagine how evil among cultures like this exists, and since the beginning of time! Never ending!