Learning at the Speed of Urban Warfare

In urban warfare, the enemy, terrain, population, and tactical problem can change faster than a military’s formal lessons-learned process. Armies cannot wait until a campaign ends to study what happened. They must identify what matters, verify it, and move that knowledge across the force while the fighting continues. In this episode, John Spencer is joined by Brigadier General Guy Hazoot, who served as chief learning officer for the Israel Defense Forces Ground Forces during the war against Hamas after October 7. The discussion examines how Israel's military built its learning system, distributed urgent lessons to forces inside Gaza, and adapted tactics for tunnels, booby-trapped buildings, combined arms operations, and Hamas’s shift to guerrilla warfare. It also explores the challenge of transferring lessons between Gaza and Lebanon and what the US Army would need to build a similar institutional learning capability.