First, it was Hamas, and then Hezbollah. Now, Syria is threatening to undermine Israel with tunnels. In fact, a Syrian general claims that the Syrian Civil War has turned Syrian soldiers into “experts” at digging holes in the ground. …
In its seventy-five-year history, the Syrian military has rarely had a reputation for being expert in anything. But fighting the Islamic State, which has used underground fortifications extensively, has given the Syrian Arab Army—the official name of the Syrian ground forces—a bloody lesson in subterranean warfare. And not just Syrian government soldiers: American soldiers and U.S.-backed Syrian, Iraqi and Kurdish fighters have had immense difficulty rooting out ISIS from labyrinthine tunnel complexes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Subterranean passages enable ISIS fighters to avoid air strikes and artillery fire, escape encirclement, and allow them to pop out of the ground to spring ambushes.
National Interest
The airmen are considering their strategy against the molemen.
“They’ve gone underground to match our overmatch,” said retired Army Maj. John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Modern War Institute at West Point. …
For the Air Force, once the service has identified such a tunnel or other underground facility and figured out what’s inside, the question is what to do about it.
Air Force Times
It’s not always necessary to obliterate the entire structure, the way air forces approached such “hard and deeply-buried targets” during World War II, Baker said. Instead of sending an entire squadron to annihilate the area, the Air Force could use one precision-guided munition from one airplane to target a specific “effect” — take out one particular room or feature of a tunnel, and ruin the enemy’s ability to use it in the process.
Aircraft could also take out a power grid, a ventilation system that hundreds or thousands of troops need to breathe underground, or a communications system necessary for leaders’ command and control, rendering it effectively useless.