Gen. Mark Milley on Israel-Hamas war: Israel has every right to defend itself
In Washington, DC yesterday at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation National Security, I moderated a panel by Geopolitics in the role of artificial intelligence in warfare. I asked the former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General Mark Miley, about the politics of war, given the protests that we’re now seeing across college campuses. Israel has a right to defend itself. They were the one who was attacked brutally on the 7th of October 1200. People were slaughtered, not just killed in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered, beheaded, butchered, raped in front of their husbands. That it was stuff that was not even hair’s breath removed from what the Nazis did. And if you take the math and do 1200 and apply it to the United States, that’d be 50 to 100,000 people dead in a morning. Can you imagine what we would do? I mean, seriously, So Israel has every right to defend itself. War is a horrible thing. I had a lot of years in combat, been shot at, blown up the whole 9 yards, right? It’s a horrible, brutal, vicious thing. And and unfortunately because the character of war is going to be in dense urban areas, that the very conduct of war is going to have very high levels of collateral damage. There’s almost no way around it. But if there’s any morality at all, you need to get into it, achieve your political objectives, get it done, get it done fast. And get it over with just as a side comment, that was probably the most jarring piece of it because we talked a lot about the how lethal war in the future is going to be with artificial intelligence and technology. It’s actually in many ways going to make it possibly more lethal. And given that the expectation is that more combat is going to happen in cities in very dense areas that the kind of war we see in the next 2530 fifty years that the kind of damage and potentially collateral damage you think maybe technology could prevent that but. The the shifts in that. And so part of what he was talking about was this idea that politically you actually only have a very short amount of time. If there’s an attack on one end to retaliate because the moral pressures and political pressures become almost too great to bear. And so from a political standpoint, if you’re going to have the political calculus to go out and do something, you have to do it and do it very, very quickly. One is that it is indiscriminate. Watch 60 minutes, it looked like totally indiscriminate. On the other hand, I’ve heard that every possible thing that can be done. Computer wise, evacuation wise that Israel is going to great great lengths to try and and minimize civilian kids. So which is true? It just depends on on what what you’re reading. It may very well be somewhere in the middle.