 Those of you who are married to narcissists or in committed relationships with narcissists have already experienced urban warfare So maybe there's nothing new I can tell you but more seriously Israel has Invaded Gaza yesterday The forces are still there It is not clear whether this is the invasion that Israel has been promising or threatening with in the past three weeks but at any rate their forces inside Gaza and They're beginning to get involved in what is known as urban warfare How is urban warfare different to other types of fighting and what are the psychological implications of urban warfare? This is the topic of today's video and yes It is based on a few weeks of personal experience with urban warfare in the first few months of my three and a half years service in the Israeli Defense Forces So unfortunately, I'm bringing personal insight into this as well as many other studies analysis by military experts by army psychologists Trauma experts and so on so forth. I've distilled everything put everything together as I usually do and to give you as complete a picture of the aftermath psychological aftermath of fighting within dense human populations Door-to-door room-to-room house-to-house hand-to-hand face-to-face You and the other person and only one of you will come out alive My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignan self-love narcissism revisited I'm a former visiting professor of psychology in southern Federal University in Russia I'm currently a long-time member of the faculty of see ups commonwealth for international advanced professional studies Cambridge United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria Legalities aside Let us delve right into the urban landscape First don't try this at home with your significant other I'm going to describe the features the military features of Urban warfare and then I'm going to move on the second half of the video I'm going to move on to psychological knowledge and analysis of the psychological impacts of urban warfare on mostly the attacker the military That is initiating the urban warfare Now first of all the vast majority of armies in the world are not built for urban combat Most armies in the world Focus on what is known as combine combined arms maneuvers or combined ours arms maneuver warfare, which is the Air Force infantry tanks the Navy all acting together and creating an envelope a containing envelope mostly for infantry soldiers The aim of traditional conventional armies is to overwhelm an enemy by Concentrating speed and mass at critical points with an element of surprise so modern armies are highly mobile and They transfer forces Where the enemy does not anticipate and the idea is to break through defenses and flanks of the enemy and Somehow perhaps to surround the enemy at any rate to break the resistance of the enemy Now this has been going on since Alexander the Great and Napoleon and others So there's nothing new in any of this but this is doubly so with modern armies modern militaries that include heavy weight elements such as tanks or fighter planes and and so in cities All the above Means nothing all the above is actually a disadvantage The bigger the force that infiltrates the city the easier a target it becomes So cities force you to break down Into smaller and smaller and smaller units sometimes only two people and you have to move slowly through side streets This moving through a main thoroughfare through main street big street is Seriously flow is seriously wrong You move through side streets through gates shortcuts above roofs and And so on so forth in order to reach your destination and this cannot be done with 20,000 people So you naturally end up breaking up to tinier and tinier Units and you cannot with such a small force Overwhelming Defenders of a well your enemy. You can do this in a forest. You can do this in a desert You can do this in a field, but you can't do this in a built environment And the irony is the more buildings you destroy The more defenses you provide to your enemy Because rubble is optimal Ruins can be booby trapped and serve as concrete covers So you're creating an effect your enemy's defenses by bombing buildings from the air as Israel has been doing for three weeks now So you move in small units you're much more likely to end up in an ambush or a killing zone actually a well-prepared enemy Shannels your movement makes sure that you can move only along a certain axis or Conduit or a venue so that you end up where they want you to end up and then they kill you and Then they kill you again The enemy is hidden. You have to constantly guess Surprises are the only unsurprising thing surprises are the only guaranteed thing and It's very shocking. It's a constantly. It's a percussion. It's constantly shocking environment And it involves hand-to-hand combat face-to-face eye-to-eye You smell the sweat of the enemy. You're looking to their eyes their pupils dilating You see the veins in their necks pulsating It's very very intimate It's very intimate Some people even say erotically charged. It's a life-and-death dance Repeated over and over and over again until you die Because your chances to die in open warfare are much much higher than in open warfare The enemy is everywhere. It is underground. It is on the ground. It shoots at you from tops of buildings So this is a three-dimensional death envelope you're enveloped by death and destruction and You begin to develop the belief that you're doomed that there's no way out of this And so you begin to behave accordingly as We'll talk about it later Sometimes you become much less careful and cautious than you should be defined In your face Define death, you know It's a grind. Urban warfare is a grind. There's no clear end well-defined goals Mission success mission statement horizon It feels like it could last forever You start with an army starts usually with shaping shaping operations preparing the ground and Then open warfare follows in the form of invading the territory and invasion But all the advantages in open warfare accrue to the defender Open warfare is bloody It's slow It's complex That's why it's known in military jargon as the great equalizer it equalizes the poorly The poorly equipped poorly trained defenders with a highly equipped highly trained attackers It equalizes because the defender knows the terrain much better than you do and So they can Counterattack in very very unexpected ways and there's always civilian collateral damage civilian casualties are absolutely inevitable Inevitable and that makes you the attacker the bad guy Even if you are fighting a terrorist organization such as Isis or Hamas, which is indistinguishable from Isis Even then you are the bad guy because you end up killing babies and Children and pregnant women and women who couldn't become pregnant had you not killed them. So you become the bad guy and There's no way to avoid this because terrorists fight from within Populated urban areas and they very frequently use the population the civilian population as Human shields they maintain their headquarters their warehouses their munition dumps their launching pads everything within Hospitals and mosques and schools and kindergartens and shopping malls. That's a fact That's a fact in Gaza as well Where major hospitals are actually the headquarters of Hamas operations? And so civilians are gonna die civilians are gonna die and The idea is to somehow push The defenders or the terrorists or whatever you want to call them somehow push them into a Demarcated location a boundary location and besieged them in these pockets But these seizures can last Like years remember Stalingrad they can last years So this engenders a siege mentality. It is like static trench warfare Only trench warfare is in open fields and this is trench warfare where even the trenches are invisible and shape-shifting So there's a siege mentality of both the attacker and the defender. They both feel under siege Like you don't take prisoners in open warfare Anyone moves you kill them you kill everyone in sight. Yes, I know This is a this is a crime of war. This is a crime against humanity and No military commander would admit to it and no military no army would admit to it But this is how it's done It's done this way because a prisoner with his hands up could be booby trapped a Child coming out of a tunnel could carry a Kalashnikov You don't play games You don't take chances. You don't speculate and second guess you shoot first. You ask questions later So this is total warfare And as a soldier you end up killing children. You end up killing women. You end up killing civilians Who are somehow allied with the defenders or the terrorists or whatever clearly allied with them? because they emerge with them or from their hiding places and This is devastating mentally devastating Even during the Holocaust there have been Nazi soldiers and Nazi commanders and very high-level commanders Who went bonkers who went insane? Having had to shoot civilian population on a regular basis Now most or modern urban warfare warfare is carried out at night It's a night operation because the attacker, which is usually a regular Conventional army has superiority of night vision technologies so Most of these attacks are at night the warfare is asymmetrical in terms of technology material supplies munition air cover and so on and This asymmetry is at its peak at night Where the attacking soldiers can see pretty well and the defending ones are blinded by the darkness All kinds of assets are used in modern urban warfare. I'm talking about drones I'm talking about robots and this renders the fighting impersonal Mechanical Automated robotic the assets are airborne Or they lead or they are involved in land warfare to clear rooms for example You would send the drone into the room send a robot into the room and blow them up if you see someone there, so It's all very kind of video game war is a video game When you blow up a building in a contested urban warfare zone, it's exactly like shooting someone in a video game And it dehumanizes it dehumanizes or objectifies the other person. They're no longer human beings They are just characters in a video game and we've seen this in the recordings released by WikiLeaks recordings of pilots American pilots and others fighting Bombing humans but treating them exactly as characters in video games now Even in urban warfare. There is a place for combined arms maneuvers infantry and commando units guide pilots Fighter pilots bombers navy and artillery as to where to direct the fire But this leads to a lot of friendly fire incidents and so in truth Fighters in urban warfare prefer not to They use air power and artillery and so on only very very rarely and Scarcely because they're terrified of their own of the own military. You're on your own in Urban warfare. You are all alone No one can help you No one has your back It's you and only you there's been an interview that I read with With Top Ukrainian commander Kevlu and he said that The heavily armed forces are followed by isolation forces refers to devastate destroy the whole area and then Next echelon next round next wave of army comes in And kind of cleans these are the cleaners the clean after and He said the assault echelon carries with it a double supply of hand grenades disposable gran granade launchers jet flame throwers anti-tank missiles man pads Combat medics in armored evacuation vehicles wait at a distance of visual communication Just in case they're needed He says never walk the streets Yards private buildings holes in fences and walls are the way to victory He said that everything should be close by the logistics the medical units the UAVs the Unmanned aerial vehicles their cruisers the drones and The commander of the force of the assault force should be in control of what these drones are doing as well as feeding bomber pilots and fighter pilots with Exact coordinates Pin-pointed coordinates in real time. So airplanes are always above head Waiting to attack and they usually do so within seconds Kevliuk mentioned something very important which leads us segues into the second part of this video, which is the psychology He says urban warfare is personal responsibility He says if you don't have something in battle if you miss something it's your fault Ballistic protection a first aid kit a tourniquet preferably to You must have these things When you pack your backpack says Kevliuk an extra pack of cartridges is much better than a can of food Everyone should clearly identify their combat tasks They should know who is acting to the right and to the left of you They should know how to contact the commander the combat medic or the supper supper is a combat military engineer And this is the crucial element in urban warfare and the key to understanding The extreme psychological impacts of urban warfare. You are Absolutely responsible for what's happening to you. If there's no one to blame it's your fault 100% and No one has your back and no one supports you and you're on your own and it's life and death And it's hand-to-hand and it's nice to bet to belly and it's just that the way it is And you must survive at all costs. This of course creates post traumatic stress disorder in many veterans of urban warfare Anywhere between 10 and 40% depending on the severity of the battle. This is lifelong the PTSD is lifelong the sides in urban warfare are Nothing like what you see in regular battle Nothing the civilians the babies the slaughtered mothers the body parts the charred bodies the surprises the shocks the explosions the knives in the back your own people firing on you by mistake, I mean It is absolutely devastating and that's why very few soldiers can survive more Than a week or two or three in urban warfare and most urban warfare winds up in days or there is a kind of Rotation involved because the attrition rate is enormous You see this in urban warfare very often. There's no movement not a sensible movement and There's no way to define your accomplishments. It's like a bit of a frozen scene It's very surreal very nightmarish and Grew some death grew some forms of death by your constant companion the stench The vision the visuals they they are you you wake up to it go to sleep to it if you catch some sleep very few are able to sleep and And this becomes Your scenery this becomes your life. This becomes your environment and You don't hesitate to step on bodies To eat next to a decapitated head or a dead baby you get desensitized If the enemy becomes so many body parts totally dehumanized by the way There's the same effect in in the medical profession medical doctors often describe the same effect Especially in specific departments like emergency emergency rooms and I see you is and so You need to reduce the human form to an organ or a body part in order to survive simply to survive There's a constant sense of abandonment Constant set sense of isolation. Oh my god. I've lost my units or I'm stuck with only one body And he's wounded this constant sense of Wandering off and never being able to find your way back. It's very primordial It's like a tiny tiny infant in a shopping in a giant shopping mall having lost his or her mother There's extreme dependency on other people. So there's an external locus of control You feel that your life is determined from the outside. There's nothing much you can do about it The next explosion the next mine the next booby trap the next knife in the back the next attack The next terrorist the next defender the next whatever a freedom fighter with whatever you want to call them Where from up down under this room that rubble This child this woman what? You're constantly on on the alert. It's a it's a flight of fight response taken to extremes and This external locus of control is a form of surrender. You give up on your life in effect You move continue to move continue to go through the motions like a zombie And there's a lot of splitting going on the enemy becomes diabolical demonic worthy of extermination extinction and eradication Regardless of any human Considerations let alone legal or criminal considerations. I mean you just you just need to kill This thing out there that is no longer human in your eyes and Threatens your life on a constant basis because it is evil This of course provokes a lot plastic defenses In ability to take responsibility for what you've done because if you do the trauma will be all-consuming and Destroy you from the inside. So you denied wasn't my fault. I had to do it I had to do it to protect myself to protect my buddies to protect the country whatever So there are a lot of alloplastic defenses involved at some point. You simply give up on acting human And you defy you defy the defenders or the terrorists You defy the situation you defy your own commanders You challenge your fate and destiny to a duel say I'm going to do whatever the heck I want. I'm gonna act out. I'm gonna crazy make I'm gonna defy you I'm gonna in your face in your face challenge my own Mortality, let's see who wins this leads to behavior that is very Risky and often leads to death At the point where you say I no longer care see if I care I'm going just I'm gonna I'm going out there and I'm gonna shoot like crazy everywhere I'm gonna spray the whole compound. I don't care The minute you say I don't care you don't you're lost And there's a moral collapse attendant upon it You're no longer a moral agent or a moral person you act more like a Predator an animal All the veneer of civilization melts down dissipates and what's left is animal versus animal You look like an animal. You haven't you haven't showered in days You're caked with mud and sweat and blood You're terrified inside your eyes pierced through the mud cake mask and They are demented You look like a deranged escapee from a mental asylum and all you can think of is How to kill kill kill you become a killing machine And you develop magical thinking. There's all kinds of super superstitions talismans mascots Sentences you have to repeat to yourself a sequence of and this is a sequence of activities which will kind of Isolate you offend you or defend you from bad happenings. This is obsessed obsessive compulsive. These are obsessive compulsive rituals The only defense you are left with primitive Against the horror that you find yourself embedded in and perpetrating Perpetrating also bears a mental cost This ladies and gentlemen is urban warfare warfare Should Israel invade Gaza? Full-scale invasion This is what awaits Both the Israeli army and Hamas fighters None of them will be spared the agony of Fighting and then the agony of Recalling the fighting and the trauma that will never leave them for life