Conflict analyst. Ex-Para. X is part bar brawl, part therapy. If you want to know what I really think, follow me on Substack. Co-host of @the_brink_ podcast.
United Kingdom
Joined January 2019
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I spent 16 years in the British Army, leaving the Parachute Regiment as a Major. I served three tours in Afghanistan, one attached to US Army Special Forces, as well as tours in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. I later taught military theory and leadership at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
Academically, I have an LLB in Law & Politics, an MA with Distinction in War Studies & Military History and an MSc with Distinction in Psychology. I also hold postgraduate qualifications in Leadership & Strategic Management and Higher Education, and I am now completing a PhD in War Studies examining what Ukraine and the post-7 October wars can tell us about the future of warfare.
Since leaving the Army, I have spent a great deal of time going to the wars I write about. I visited Gaza twice in 2024, went inside captured Hezbollah tunnels in Lebanon, visited the Ukrainian front lines, and in 2025 became the first neutral researcher invited to observe the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites. My research has produced substantial reports on casualty statistics, human shields, information warfare, humanitarian operations and the tactical lessons emerging from Gaza. You can find them at @HJS_Org
I make no apology for advertising to you that this is an unusually strong background for analysing contemporary conflict. There are not many conflict analysts who combine command experience in war, formal study of war, law and psychology, experience teaching future Army officers, think-tank research and repeated fieldwork inside the conflicts they analyse.
Those different disciplines also catch different mistakes. Military experience makes it harder to mistake a map arrow for a feasible operation. War Studies forces tactical events back into their political and strategic context. Psychology matters when propaganda, perception and behavioural manipulation have become part of the battlefield. Law matters when almost every contemporary campaign is simultaneously fought through international institutions, courts and competing claims about legitimacy. Fieldwork is the final check because people who actually fight wars have a habit of complicating theories developed by chairborne researchers from several thousand miles away.
That is what I try to bring to my Substack. I am less interested in telling readers who “won” yesterday than in working out what happened, why it happened, what the participants were trying to achieve, whether they possessed the means to achieve it, and what the consequences are likely to be. Tactical success, military effectiveness and strategic success are not synonyms. Much bad analysis begins by treating them as though they are.
I will get things wrong. Anyone analysing wars in real time will. The promise I can reasonably make is that I will go to the evidence, go to the people involved where I can, change my assessment when the evidence changes, and tell you what I think rather than what my supposed political tribe would prefer me to think.
There is an enormous quantity of geopolitical commentary available for free. I think the combination behind mine is genuinely unusual.
If that is the sort of conflict analysis you want to read, please check out: mrandrewfox.substack.com
Come join me live for discussion of what happens next with Iran
Trump’s Iran Dilemma: Can He Reopen the Strait of Hormuz? | Command and Control xitter.twitterapi.xyz/i/broadcasts/2gqkkpZVY…
The Death Bed by Siegfried Sassoon
He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.
Someone was holding water to his mouth.
He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped
Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.
Water—calm, sliding green above the weir;
Water—a sky-lit alley for his boat,
Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers
And shaken hues of summer: drifting down,
He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.
Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,
Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.
Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars
Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;
Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,
Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.
Rain—he could hear it rustling through the dark;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,
Gently and slowly washing life away.
He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain
Leaped like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore
His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
But someone was beside him; soon he lay
Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared.
Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
He's young; he hated war; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?
But death replied: “I choose him.” So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.
Last week I was in Israel, surrounded by joyous Jewish life. Today I stood at Auschwitz, where my Jewish friends prayed in the gas chambers for relatives murdered there.
I finally understand how the Holocaust became possible. And I am frightened by what I see around us.
“Never Again” is NOW.
mrandrewfox.substack.com/p/l…
Things that are not a genocide: 40-50k civilian collateral casualties in a just war.
Things that are a genocide: a death camp where a million Jews were gassed and incinerated.
Jews have contributed a fuck sight more to the UK than the cunts that are driving them out.
The frog boils slowly and we’re sleepwalking into 1938.
#Kristallnacht
> seize control by violence
> oppress and radicalise
> rake in billions in aid
> rape, mutilate and slaughter 1200 of your far more heavily armed neighbours
> abduct 251 of them
> hide amongst civilians
> get your ass kicked
> whine that neighbour isn’t doing more for your people
I had it from sources in both Kirya and Pentagon that bombing was meant to resume last week. Then the midterms happened. A TACO for the ages.
timesofisrael.com/liveblog_e…
The speaker is a Muslim cleric in Khan Younes who has broken with Hamas and offers a moment of clarity from a tent in Gaza. Thinking Gazans increasingly recognise that two generations of radicalisation destroyed their own territory, and the only way out of their tragic condition is de-radicalisation, coupled with Gaza's demilitarisation.
Welcome to the country we have allowed antisemitism to create. The opposite of what we all fought for.
For more than 100 years Jewish ex servicemen and women in Hackney have joined the communal Remembrance events.
The memorial was actually unveiled in 1921 by a Jewish Victoria Cross medal holder so holds a special place in the story of British Jewry.
This year was different because Hackney is now led by the Greens who echo the same Jew obsession as the Nazis.
As a small but respectful protest, the Jewish ex servicemen stayed away from the community wreath laying until the Mayor of Hackney and her keffiyeh sporting activist councillors left.
A small but heartbreaking rebellion, as Hackney AJEX chair Martin Sugarman, who is speaking here, told me:
‘We did not want to be associated in any way, or be complicit with the scurrilous Jew hatred of the Greens, or in any way be seen to give them credibility in Hackney, we attended the usual ceremony, with our Local branch Standard bearer, outside the church at St Johns's - as we have done for the past 100 years or so with fellow veterans and families - but refused to lay our Star of David poppy wreath. Instead we gathered in our small multi-faith group after the Greens had marched away, and held our own private wreath laying with a short service in Hebrew and English, for all those who defended freedom and democracy.’
The last 9 months have been a propaganda masterpiece by the Iranian regime. They have focused on driving cracks between America and Israel, and combined this with economic pressure to make Western audiences feel that the war is not worth fighting.
mrandrewfox.substack.com/p/i…
2Lt Jon Bracho-Cooke
2Lt Jo Dyer
Maj Lex Roberts
Lt Paul Mervis
Capt Steve Healey
Cpl Mike Thacker
Capt Tom Jennings
Capt Rupert Bowers
And all those who gave their lives in service of their country.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.
Actually, the monstrous, Jew-hating, despicable horror show is correct, for the first time. Let hard shelter in, or accelerate the safe areas in the IDF-held part of Gaza.
Three generations of service pictured. Not pictured: the other four who preceded us. My great+ grandfathers also served in the War of 1812, the US Civil War, and the First World War.
Early signs that after the American people spoke with their votes, the Trump administration has decided to postpone the planned big air strike campaign and double down on the economic isolation.
Let’s see how this develops.
I’ve been playing around with May’s Hamas fatality lists today, because what else are Saturdays for?
Gaza’s recorded deaths are heavily concentrated among adult males. In the May 2026 dataset, which contains 72,835 deaths, men aged 18–45 account for 41.12% of those killed, whereas that age/gender group comprised 20.52% of the pre-war population. Their share of recorded deaths is almost exactly twice their population share.
Widening the bracket to males aged 15–45 produces much the same result. They represent 24.39% of the population and 45.68% of listed deaths: 33,268 fatalities against approximately the 17,762 deaths we would expect if deaths had followed the population’s age and sex distribution. Among men aged 25–34, the death share reaches 2.18 times the population benchmark; among those aged 35–45, it reaches 2.35 times.
The 14–18 age group also warrants examination because Hamas has a documented history of recruiting and training minors. The UN’s 2019 report verified the recruitment and use of a 17-year-old by Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades. Its following annual report recorded Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad camps exposing children as young as 14 to military activities. Hamas itself has publicised children’s military training through its Telegram channel, including instruction in firearms and guerrilla warfare. This evidence requires us to consider under-18 combatants within the casualty figures.
The list contains 5,551 males aged 14–18, against approximately 4,661 under the population-proportional benchmark, a difference of 19%. That disparity is considerably smaller than the adult-male concentration. Of course, it does not mean every teenage boy killed was a fighter, but we cannot pretend that Hamas’s recruitment of children has no bearing on the analysis.
Across all ages, the Gaza list is 69.96% male and 30.04% female.
In Gaza, Hamas’s conduct is central to that examination. In the Henry Jackson Society report I co-authored with @Aizenberg, Hamas’s Human Shield Strategy in Gaza, we documented military infrastructure embedded within civilian neighbourhoods, including tunnel entrances inside homes and weapons stored in residential buildings. The report also examines Hamas’s instructions to civilians to ignore evacuation warnings. These practices placed civilians around military objectives and exploited the restrictions their presence imposed on Israeli attacks. Any account of civilian deaths that removes Hamas’s battlefield organisation from the explanation discards a central cause of civilian exposure to harm.
Israel’s civilian protection measures also form part of the record. OCHA estimated that approximately 50,000 people moved south through an Israeli military corridor on 8 November 2023 alone. It recorded danger and shelling around the route, as well as the extension of the corridor’s operating hours while people continued to leave. This establishes that organised evacuation operated on a substantial scale. The IDF has also published footage of strikes being aborted when civilians appeared. This evidence cannot be omitted from any judgement about Israeli intent.
Even NAZA, a film constructed around allegations against Israel’s conduct, describes intelligence personnel identifying Hamas targets and calculating anticipated civilian casualties. Its most sensational claim, concerning approval for an attack anticipating 500 civilian deaths, comes without any corroborating evidence. The film provides neither a named target nor enough detail to verify its accounts of the alleged high-casualty strikes. Those allegations remain completely unsubstantiated.
A collateral damage estimate belongs within a military targeting process. In its detailed response to the film, the IDF explains that preliminary estimates precede operational review, during which commanders can change the weapon, timing or scope of an attack, require further precautions, or refuse approval. An Israeli targeting source told me 50% of planned strikes in Gaza were aborted due to civilian presence by July 2024. The IDF also distinguishes thresholds requiring senior authorisation from permission to inflict a specified number of civilian deaths. By proving the existence of those calculations, NAZA establishes that anticipated civilian harm was being assessed.
When considered alongside Hamas’s human shield strategy and the evidence of Israeli civilian protection measures, the casualty patterns do not indicate a genocidal campaign. The concentration of deaths among adult males is consistent with substantial combatant losses in a war fought through civilian neighbourhoods. Evacuation arrangements and decisions to withhold fire further undermine any claim of an intention to destroy Gaza’s population.
