Yedioth’s Amit Segal describes the shirt of US Marine Lieutenant-General James Glynn, commander of Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command from June 2020 to May 2022, as crammed with 23 medals, from the Bronze Star to the Purple Heart. The shirts of US military officers are a jarring sight to Israelis, whose IDF Generals wear modest insignia marking the wars in which they participated, and on occasion their paratrooper’s wing, that’s it. The rest is mostly shirt.
Glynn, the war hero who fought on three continents, liberated Kuwait, and led US units in Iraq, was sent by President Joe Biden in mid-October, 2023, “to help the commanders of the IDF think about the difficult questions before them.”
Relying on his extensive experience in Iraq, Glynn arrived accompanied by two staff officers, to tell the Israelis their plan to invade Gaza didn’t stand a chance
Glynn met with Gantz, Eisenkot, Gallant, Halevi, and Netanyahu. His staff presented data and analyses, they told war stories, and their advice was that the goals of the war could not be achieved by ground maneuvers, which would be time-consuming and bloody. They predicted 20 IDF soldiers killed every day of the fighting. In reality, the casualties so far have not reached a tenth of that.
Combined with the prophecies of General Yitzhak Brik, who was also warning against entering Gaza, after a decade of his harsh criticism of the IDF, which had come true on October 7, the message of do not launch a massive ground attack found listening ears in the IDF’s war room.
The official US Department of Defense casualty count in Iraq is 4,431 total deaths. In Israel, on October 7, Hamas murderers killed 337 IDF soldiers. Since the start of the ground invasion, the IDF has lost 235 soldiers.
Hamas has not yet been defeated, but even now, nothing in modern warfare compares to what the IDF is doing in the Gaza Strip. It fights through a monstrous tunnel system and dismantles it piece by piece, eliminating and paralyzing half of the opposing fighting force, and capturing seemingly impregnable objectives. In the last brigade operation in the northern Gaza Strip, it took only an hour to reach the Shifa Hospital area from the border.
Foreign armies are showing enormous interest in the air-land-sea combined operations devised by the IDF – quite possibly, the US Marines do as well.
Both Netanyahu and Gantz noted last week that “there were those who warned us against entering Gaza,” but “Our fighters demonstrate extraordinary determination and breakthrough abilities in fighting against a terrorist army, that will be learned around the world.”
They were not exaggerating.
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