Ok, Israel might actually be screwed

Twitter ^ | 10/8/2023 | CatGirl Kulak

[Drew68]

Artillery is 90% of all effective firepower. Airborne munitions can't cycle through endless tons of explosive the way arty can, and they cost vastly more.

If this is true and Israel has only 20% its arty stockpile, then Hamas isn't suiciding Gaza on pyre of defiance like people think. They timed this perfectly to lure Israel into writing cheques they can't cash in the hopes Israel will invade Gaza with infantry at which point they can grind them down endlessly with basically unending Arab volunteers in brutal urban warfare... where most of their technological advantage is gone and they won't have the most important 1/3rd of combined arms warfare.

This also would explain the brutality and the focus on taking as many civilian hostages as they can, since Israel can't just leave hundreds of Israeli civilians in Gaza and declare they aren't going to get them back... They're pretty much trapped fighting a ground war with what little artillery they have.

If the 300,000 rounds the US took from Israeli stockpiles to give to Ukraine corresponds to that 80% that Israel's supposedly down then they basically can't sustain combined armed warfare, since the 2014 Gaza war took 34,000 rounds of artillery alone.

Even if they have hundreds of thousands left, they can only use a fraction of them on Gaza since they need enough that they could fight a high intensity war with Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon if they intervene... let alone if Iran and Iraq start sending forces (US invasion handed Iraq to the Shia majority who align with Iran)

So even if they have another 300k artillery shells lying around, at most that'd be tens of thousand of available to actually use on Gaza without risk of being drowned by its rivalled arab neighbors in a multi-nation war.

That means the fighting to "open the gates of hell" or "wipe Gaza off the map" as some commentators are calling for will have to be done by air assets which can't realistically deliver the tonnage, and ground troops who would be dying at horrific ratios as urban settings negate most of the advantage of military tech.

Israel's active duty force only has 20ish thousand infantry in active force, even activating the 400k reserves you can only use a portion since there's the constant threat of a multinational war breaking out, Hezbollah in the north, and the entire west bank that could pop off...

So they have to punish Gaza, extract the hostages or their bodies, and achieve enough objectives to declare victory... against a population of 4 million! +Every radical fighter in the middle-east from Afghanistan to Aberdeen chomping at the bit to get in there... and they'll have to do it with... maybe 10k full time infantry? Maybe 20-30k counting the reservists?

In urban warfare? With limited artillery?

Hamas might actually have them...

They might have actually played their cards right to create the conditions for a Vietnam in the holy lands.

Remember Israel's active force of 169,000 is both genders and conscripts... You start losing a lot of people or start having to reassign 19 year old girls who never wanted to hold a rifle to infantry. that will grind down morale damned fast and tear open Israel's social divisions.. Not least between liberal secular jews who actually serve and the conservative orthodox who dodge the draft through "religious study."

[StAnDeliver]

"in the hopes Israel will invade Gaza with infantry at which point they can grind them down endlessly with basically unending Arab volunteers in brutal urban warfare... where most of their technological advantage is gone and they won't have the most important 1/3rd of combined arms warfare."

This is absurd, droop. So Palirats in their sewers will somehow command the higher ground against the near-entirety of the IDF blocking the exits. Uh huh.

Meanwhile, the lulu queens who handed out candy on Oct. 7 in Gaza City are simpering in their Russian/Egyptian concrete hi-rise waiting for so much as one IDF APC to simply rumble by below and shake the shitty rebar apart and bring the whole goddamn thing down on her Mooselime head.

What the hell is wrong with you, you Meatball-worshipping Ronlim troll?