Exclusive: What Israel’s Underground War Can Teach Other Militaries
Few if any Western militaries are prepared for underground warfare: the kind of visceral, claustrophobic fight that’s reminiscent of Vietnam War tunnel rats and plays out year after year across the Middle East, according to a Jewish Institute for National Security of America report shared with Axios.
Why it matters: The lengthy document, littered with warnings, was co-authored by a man known as “Col. David,” an elite combat engineer who commanded Israel’s counter-tunnel and subterranean warfare operations after the Oct. 7 attack.
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What’s inside: The report lists five key takeaways from Israel’s experience. They include:
- Synchronizing above-ground and below-ground operations and viewing both fights as a “single, cohesive effort.”
- Updating military concepts, language and structure to treat subterra “not as a specialized issue, but one that impacts the entire conflict.”
- Monitoring and disrupting knowledge transfer and supply chains, even in peacetime.
Threat level: China, North Korea, Iran, terror groups and drug smugglers alike operate and exploit these underground warrens.
- They also share best practices.
- “We know there’s so much cooperation between them on so many different fronts,” Tobin said, “and this is one of them that often gets overlooked.”
The intrigue: A report published by the U.S. Army in 2025 concluded American forces “may not be able to avoid a subterranean fight in the future” and recommended studying the IDF’s successes and failures.
My thought bubble: Remember Northeast drone chaos?
- Among the problems then were slapdash policies, reporting chains and countermeasures. The same is true here.
The bottom line: “We’re at a political moment where we actually are risking losing access to some of those lessons that our frontline partner has learned,” Blaise Misztal, JINSA’s vice president for policy, told Axios.
- The report, he said, is “about raising the profile — or the alarm — on these subterranean threats” as well as “recognizing the hard-fought lessons that Israel has learned.”
Read the full article in Axios.