PRESS RELEASE – New JINSA Report: Israel’s Wars Highlight Underground Domain U.S. Must Prepare For
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 20, 2026
Contact: Blake Johnson
bjohnson@jinsa.org
Washington, DC – The United States must urgently prepare for subterranean warfare as adversaries increasingly exploit underground networks to offset American military superiority, protect strategic assets, and threaten U.S. forces and homeland security, warns a new report released today by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). To do that, the United States should learn the hard-won lessons from Israel’s operations to counter Hamas’s tunnel threat in Gaza.
The Subterranean Front: Lessons for Defeating Underground Threats from a Commander on the Front Lines, co-authored by IDF Colonel David, the former commander of Israel’s elite Yahalom combat engineering special forces unit who led their counter-tunnel and subterranean warfare operations after October 7, and JINSA’s Yoni Tobin, provides an unprecedented window into Israel’s nearly three years of intensive operations against Hamas and Hezbollah tunnel networks. The report outlines how the United States and our allies can prepare for an increasingly consequential domain of modern warfare.
Subterranean warfare has evolved far beyond isolated tunnels. Hamas transformed Gaza’s underground into a sprawling, interconnected military system spanning hundreds of miles, with command-and-control centers, weapons production facilities, intelligence hubs, logistics networks, and hostage-holding sites. Hezbollah built sophisticated underground fortifications in southern Lebanon, while Iran has invested in deeply buried facilities to shield its missile, drone, and nuclear programs.
“This one-of-a-kind report, co-authored by the commander of Israel’s underground warfare special forces, is an example of how American forces can benefit directly from Israel’s hard-won operational expertise,” said JINSA President and CEO Michael Makovsky. “The threat is poorly understood but growing, from cross-border tunnels like the recently discovered 1,800-foot passage used by narcoterrorists to infiltrate the United States, to subterranean networks that pose a challenge to American forces abroad. The United States cannot afford to ignore it—or the lessons Israel has learned in confronting it.”
These threats extend well beyond the Middle East. China and North Korea have developed extensive underground military networks designed to protect strategic assets and sustain combat operations against the United States and our allies. Meanwhile, sophisticated tunnels along America’s southern border underscore the immediate homeland security implications: U.S. authorities have discovered at least 236 illicit cross-border tunnels entering the United States since 1990.
Just as Ukraine’s battlefield experience has accelerated advances in drone warfare, Israel’s sustained combat against Hamas and Hezbollah has produced hard-won lessons in detecting, mapping, and neutralizing sophisticated underground networks. The report argues that the United States should capitalize on this operational experience now, rather than wait for a future conflict to expose critical gaps in American readiness.
The report warns that, as with the advancements in drone warfare, it has never been easier for nefarious actors to procure commercially available equipment and expertise for tunnel construction through near-frictionless international networks.
To address these challenges, JINSA recommends that the United States:
- Make subterranean warfare a core military planning priority. Adapt U.S. doctrine, operational concepts, and training to prepare ground forces for sustained underground combat, rather than treating it as a niche engineering or special operations challenge.
- Integrate intelligence, technology, and operations. Establish dedicated subterranean intelligence-fusion capabilities that combine underground and aboveground intelligence, improve detection and mapping, and synchronize ground maneuver, engineering, electronic warfare, and precision strikes.
- Accelerate technology development and acquisition. Invest in advanced tunnel-detection and neutralization systems, robotics, and new approaches to holding deeply buried strategic targets at risk, including promising research into weapons that use shockwaves to penetrate hardened underground facilities.
- Strengthen U.S.-Israel defense cooperation. Expand joint research and development, intelligence sharing, training, and testing; explore a shared subterranean research and development center, a joint training center, and a dedicated joint operations center. Advance congressional initiatives, including Sections 1222 and 219 of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act, to deepen collaboration.
- Close gaps in U.S. border security. Improve Customs and Border Protection’s ability to fuse sensor data continuously, detect and map cross-border tunnels, and deploy effective detection and neutralization technologies. Disrupt the illicit supply chains, equipment transfers, and expertise that enable sophisticated underground networks to be built and sustained.
- Expand cooperation with U.S. allies and partners. Work with countries including South Korea and Taiwan on shared doctrine, standardized mapping, joint technology development, multinational training, and preparations for adversaries’ subterranean operations.
Israel itself, despite years of experience confronting underground threats, had to adapt rapidly to the scale and sophistication of the networks it encountered in Gaza and Lebanon. The United States should learn from those successes and setbacks before facing a comparable challenge.
The United States and Israel should lead a broader effort to ensure that American forces, law enforcement agencies, and allied militaries possess the doctrine, intelligence, and technology needed to detect, disrupt, and defeat adversaries operating underground.
###